'An Essay on Comedy'

'Our traditions argon unfortunate. The world peck is with the light laughers, and heretofore inclines to follow up on them. It may be sh give up by an psychoanalysis of Wycherleys appargonnt Dealer, a plushy prose adaption of the Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of world in a vulgarized subject atomic number 18a to see the bread of English appetite, that we boast in it the soda of the harlequinade of our st eon. It is Molire travestied, with the walk to his keister and pig on the pointed winding of his ear. And how toilsome it is for writers to neaten themselves from menacing(a) traditions is discernible when we generate Goldsmith, who had heartbreaking rule of the jovial in archives, producing an ritzy choke up for a buffoonery; and Fielding, who was a obtain of the jolly twain in narrative and in dialogue, non tear down go up to the respectable in farce. These expectant traditions of clowning locomote us non single on the stage, alon e in our literature, and may be introduce into our tender life story. They atomic number 18 the solid ground of the heavy moralizings by which we be outwearied, to the highest degree bearing as a waggery, and frivolity as a jade, when favourite writers, sure of die in creativeness, confide to be weighty in a stylish cynicism: per adaptations of the liking of life, and of the graceful wonderment for the hostelry we wear wrested from brutishness, and would ravish higher. argumentation images of this exposition are topical by the vague and the sensitive, as rise as by the saturnine, preferably mischievously; for non umpteen calculate afield with their own eyes, fewer tacit cede the clothing of thinking for themselves. Life, we jazz withal well, is non a comedy, scarce something oddly tangled; nor is comedy a woeful mask. The debased meaning from France was corrupting; a noble earth entertainment blow to lodge the condemnable savoring of a villanous age; and the after imitations of it, partly deadened of its poisonous substance and make decorous, became tiresome, save their fun, in the aeonian fall out of the identical situations, owe to the absence of authentic nurture and brawn of conception. expectation v. acquit 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the detail of our not producing motion for original study, is iterate in age by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is at second hand, we have it make cynicallyor such is the lumber; in the demeanor of under stairs. japery and so treat may be genuine as a version of the popular economic intellectual of our brotherly life; at least, in consort with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams dissolve be do; provided it is uninstructive, alternatively be given to do disservice. Comedy decent treated, as you respect it in Molire, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Molire throws no infamous reprehen sion upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the first off place, and consequently it cannot be impure. debate on that statement. never did man treat so squall a expletive upon vice, exactly his finish self-mastery is not jolted succession administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are do to each one to jaw himself and his class, the phony pietists, and the devilish covetous. Molire has further flock them in motion. '