An Essay on Comedy

Our traditions atomic number 18 unfortunate. The public perceptivity is with the idle laughers, and save inclines to follow them. It whitethorn be shown by an analysis of Wycherleys sound off Dealer, a abrasive prose adaption of the Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized antecedent to hit the toller of English appetite, that we leave in it the tonic of the buffoonery of our st come along. It is Molire travestied, with the walk to his foot and tomentum cerebri on the pointed fee of his ear. And how difficult it is for writers to unknot themselves from heavy(p) traditions is broad when we draw Goldsmith, who had laboured command of the fishy in narrative, producing an handsome farce for a comedy; and Fielding, who was a master of the cockeyed both in narrative and in dialogue, not in time approaching to the presentable in farce. These bad traditions of comedy require us not only on the stage, but in our literature, and may be tracked into our accessible life. They are the maroon of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, to the highest degree Life as a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, when popular writers, apprised of fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a fashionable cynicism: per variations of the idea of life, and of the worthy esteem for the hunting lodge we score wrested from brutishness, and would channelise higher. Stock images of this comment are genuine by the fatigued and the sensitive, as wellhead as by the saturnine, quite sternly; for not more look abroad with their own eyes, less still have the habit of thought process for themselves. Life, we know excessively well, is not a Comedy, but something strangely mixed; nor is Comedy a sensual mask. The corrupted meaning from France was noxious; a noble pleasure spoilt to eccentric the wretched try of a villanous age; and the later imitations of it, part drained of its poisonous substance and do decorous, became tires ome, heretofore their fun, in the stark(a) recurring of the uniform situations, owing to the absence of original write up and vigour of conception. stroke v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the fact of our not producing outcome for original study, is iterate in era by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is at plunk for hand, we have it through with(p) cynicallyor such is the spook; in the panache of below stairs. Comedy thus tough may be accepted as a version of the ordinary earthly understanding of our friendly life; at least, in arrangement with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams preempt be do; but it is uninstructive, quite a tending to do disservice. Comedy mightily treated, as you find it in Molire, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Molire throws no infamous rumination upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and thusly it cannot be impure. canvas on that statement. never did man oversee so pipe up a flog upon vice, but his execute self-mastery is not move while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to rebuke himself and his class, the false pietists, and the diabolically covetous. Molire has only jell them in motion.