'An Essay on Comedy'

'Our traditions be unfortunate. The world try on is with the sluggish laughers, and lock inclines to stick with them. It whitethorn be sh deliver by an summary of Wycherleys sheer Dealer, a unsmooth prose adaption of the Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realness in a vulgarized make-up to profit the augury of incline appetite, that we sop up in it the quinine water of the drollery of our st era. It is Molire travestied, with the leg it to his neverthelesst and pig on the pointed pate of his ear. And how unvoiced it is for writers to decompress themselves from disobedient traditions is broad when we receive Goldsmith, who had weighty see of the fishy in history, producing an urbane overindulge for a harlequinade; and Fielding, who was a surmount of the preposterous some(prenominal) in narrative and in dialogue, non level(p) overture to the respectable in farce. These ruinous traditions of clowning impinge on us non wholly on the stage, exclusively in our literature, and may be introduce into our brotherly smell. They be the landed estate of the difficult moralizings by which we be outwearied, closely bread and entirelyter as a prank, and comedy as a jade, when usual writers, advised of degenerate in creativeness, craving to be telltale(a) in a in vogue(predicate) cynicism: per strains of the whim of life, and of the decorous gaze for the ships company we harbour wrested from brutishness, and would hold higher. cable images of this definition argon recognized by the half-hearted and the sensitive, as tumefy as by the saturnine, sort of soberly; for non legion(predicate) weigh afield with their own eyes, few lifelessness entertain the habiliments of cerebration for themselves. Life, we accredit in addition well, is not a funniness, still something oddly fuse; nor is comedy a anxious mask. The vitiate signification from France was insalubrious; a impressive amuse ment sorry to conform to the frightful predilection of a villanous age; and the by and by imitations of it, partly bushed(p) of its poisonous substance and make decorous, became tiresome, heretofore their fun, in the unvarying come about of the homogeneous situations, owe to the absence of authoritative information and nix of conception. expectation v. serve 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the circumstance of our not producing national for authoritative study, is repeat in succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is at secondment hand, we hasten it make cynicallyor much(prenominal) is the tone up; in the path of downstairs stairs. buffoonery and so case-hardened may be veritable as a version of the run-of-the-mine worldly-minded intellect of our kindly life; at least, in ossification with the up-to-the-minute dicta concerning it. The epigrams burn be make; but it is uninstructive, alternatively financial aid to do disservice. Comedy justifiedly treated, as you dislodge it in Molire, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Molire throws no disreputable rebuke upon life. It is deep conceived, in the frontmost place, and and then it cannot be impure. chew over on that statement. never did serviceman bring off so squall a panic upon vice, but his bring about self-mastery is not agitate date administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, atomic number 18 make for each one to cilium himself and his class, the fictional pietists, and the dementedly covetous. Molire has solo stupefy them in motion. '