Chapter LI: Appendix: I

(_See introductory note on p. 487_)

ON MODERN COMEDY

_To the EDITOR of the MORNING CHRONICLE._

SIR,—I believe it seldom happens that we confess ourselves to be in
the dark on any subject, till we are pretty well persuaded that no
one else is able to dispel the gloom in which we are involved.
Convinced, that where our own sagacity has failed, all further
search must be vain, we resign ourselves implicitly to all the
self-complacency of conscious ignorance, and are very little obliged
to any one, who comes to disturb our intellectual repose. Something
of this kind appears to have happened to your Correspondent on the
subject of the Drama. Indeed, Sir, I should have been very cautious
of attempting to remove the heap of doubts and difficulties which
seemed to oppress him, but that I thought so obvious a truth as the
connection between the manners of the age and comedy could not
startle ‘the plainest understanding;’ but the moment this obvious
truth is pointed out to him, he complains that he is ‘dazzled with
excess of light,’[79] and puts a ready moveable screen of common
places before him to keep it out. And then, Sir, I observe, that to
fortify himself in his scruples, and lest he should be forced to
give up his sceptical solution of sceptical doubts, he has
confounded characters with you, Sir, by a dextrous ventriloquism
puts his sentiments into your mouth, and has contrived to get the
balance into his own hands, and ‘smiles delighted with the eternal
poise.’[80]

After complimenting the writer of a former article, by saying that
‘_his_ powers have not languished in the dense atmosphere of logic
and criticism,’ (a compliment which I am ready to return with equal
sincerity), your Correspondent proceeds—‘We confess it did not occur
to us, that it is because so many excellent comedies have been
written that so few are written at present. To our plain
understanding, on the first statement of this circumstance, a
conclusion directly the reverse would have presented itself. We
should have been inclined to apply in this instance the analogy
which we find to hold in almost every other, that relative
perfection is only the result of repeated efforts, and that, as in
the case of an individual artist, till his powers are impaired by
age, every successive attempt is in general an improvement on the
preceding, so in the art itself what has once been well done,
usually leads to something better.’—On this passage I might observe,
first, that I am always apt to distrust these modest pretensions to
plain understanding. They signify nothing more than that an opinion
is contrary to our own, and that we will not take the trouble to
examine it. And besides, we all of us refine as much and as well as
we are able; only we are not willing that others should refine more
than we do. Secondly, Sir, the analogy to which your Correspondent
appeals in support of his hypothesis, that the arts are uniformly
progressive, totally fails; it applies to science, and not to art.

Farther, your Correspondent observes, ‘That the production of many
good comedies should render us more severe towards bad ones, and bad
poets more averse from exposing themselves, would appear much more
likely than that exactly the reverse of all this should happen. We
naturally expect from a landlord, who at the commencement of a
repast regales us with elegant wines, that he will not place homely
ale or insipid porter before us towards the end of it. It was
D’Alembert, we believe, who suggested as a great improvement in
modern literature, that all our books should be collected together
every fifty years, for the purpose of making a bonfire of them,’ &c.
All this may be very true, but I really do not see what it has to do
with the question.

‘For true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.’[81]

I am afraid he will think I am at cross-purposes with his theories,
but it is really because they appear to me at cross-purposes with
facts. For instance, the bad poets do not in the present case seem
very backward to expose themselves; but what is it that hinders the
good ones (rising like so many Phœnixes out of the ashes of their
predecessors) from claiming the admiration that is due to them?
Surely, if every succeeding writer improved upon the last, and ‘what
was once well done always led to something better,’ the managers
would not damp the rising flame. The progress of comedy among us
appears to have been just the reverse of what your Correspondent
would have anticipated; namely, from elegant wines to insipid
porter, and our critic (if I mistake him not), would make the matter
still worse by diluting this insipid stuff with water, in order that
it may become still more tasteless, and according to him, more
elegant and refined. Our elder comic writers provided choice wines,
strong liquors and rich viands of all kinds for the entertainment of
the public, while our author, seated at the full banquet, like
Christopher Sly at the Duke’s table, calls out incessantly for ‘a
pot of the smallest ale.’[82] As to the project of D’Alembert, I
have no great objection to it. Only I would propose as a compromise
that we should let our present stock remain on hand, and that
nothing but reviews and newspaper criticisms should be written for
the next fifty years, by which means I shall keep possession of
Jonson, Farquhar, Wycherley, Congreve, and Smollett, and in the mean
time your correspondent may take a surfeit of Mr. Tobin’s _Honey
Moon, The Duenna_ (for whom I have a great respect), and Madame de
Stael. I cannot, however, agree with him in the building up of his
chronological ladder of taste. Congreve did not improve upon
Wycherley, because he was not indebted to him, and Sheridan was
indebted to Congreve without improving upon him. Your Correspondent,
Sir, writes very well about these authors, but as if he had not read
them. As to the hardship of which he complains, that our fathers
should have laughed for themselves and for us too, it is but the
common course of nature. It is not a misfortune peculiar to
ourselves. Even Madame de Stael is forced to go a hundred and fifty
years back, for an author to insult the English with, on their want
of comic genius, and of the knowledge of those traits peculiar to
the refinements of French manners, but which _yet paint human nature
in every country_. I agree with your Correspondent in his first
letter, that though we cannot write good Comedies, we can assign
good reasons why they are not written; and I think we have, between
us, made out the reason of the present want of dramatic writers,
though I doubt if we should, both of us together, make even half a
Menander. But he will have all the advantages on his side, and be as
merry as he is wise. Why, after he has laughed folly out of
countenance, is he determined to laugh at her as much as ever, and
to make good sense or absurdity equally subservient to his spleen?
He is bent on laughing at all events—at every thing or nothing; and
if he does not find things ridiculous, he will make them so. The
fantastic resolution of _Biron_, ‘to laugh a twelvemonth in an
hospital,’[83] does not exceed the preposterous ambition of your
Correspondent, to extract the soul of mirth out of the schools of
philosophy. We cannot expect to reconcile opposite things. If he or
I were to put ourselves into the stage, to go from Salisbury to
London, I dare say we should not meet with the same number of odd
accidents or ludicrous distresses on the road, that befel _Parson
Adams_; but why, if we get into a common vehicle, and submit to the
conveniences of modern travelling, do we complain of the want of
adventures? Modern manners may be compared to a modern stage-coach:
our limbs may be a little cramped with the confinement, and we may
grow drowsy; but we arrive safe, without any very amusing or any
very sad accident, at out journey’s end. But your Correspondent sees
nothing in the progress of modern manners and characters but a
vague, abstract progression from grossness to refinement, marked on
a graduated scale of human perfectibility. This sweeping distinction
appears to him to explain satisfactorily the whole difference
between all sorts of manners, and all kinds and degrees of dramatic
excellence. These two words stand him instead of other ideas on the
texture of society, or the nature of the dramatic art. He is not,
however, quite consistent on this subject, for in one place he says,
that ‘the stock of folly in the world is in no danger of being
diminished,’ and in the next sentence, that there is a progression
in society, an age of grossness and an age of refinement, and he
only wonders that the progress of the stage does not keep pace with
it. Now the reason why I do not share his wonder is, that though I
think the quantity of dull, dry, serious, incorrigible folly in the
world is in no danger of being diminished, yet I think the stock of
lively, dramatic, entertaining, laughable folly is, and necessarily
must be, diminished by the progress of that _mechanical_ refinement
which consists in throwing our follies, as it were, into a common
stock, and moulding them in the same general form. Our peculiarities
have become insipid sameness; our eccentricity servile imitation;
our wit, wisdom at second-hand; our prejudices indifference; our
feelings not our own; our distinguishing characteristic the want of
all character. We are become a nation of authors and readers, and
even this distinction is confounded by the mediation of the
reviewers. We all follow the same profession, which is criticism,
each individual is every thing but himself, not one but all
mankind’s epitome, and the gradations of vice and virtue, of sense
and folly, of refinement and grossness of character, seem lost in a
kind of intellectual _hermaphroditism_. But on this _tabula rasa_,
according to your Correspondent, the most lively and sparkling hues
of comedy may be laid. His present reasoning gives a very different
turn to the question he at first proposed. He appears to have set
out with a theory of his own about the production of comic
excellence, in which it was entirely regulated by the state of the
market, and to have supposed that as long as authors continued to
write plays, and managers to accept them, that is, so long as the
thing answered in the way of trade, Comedy would go on pretty much
as it had hitherto done, to the end of the world. But finding that
this was not exactly the case, he takes his stand near the avenues
leading to the manager’s door, and happening to see a young man of
worth and talents, with great knowledge of the world, and of the
refinements of polished society, come out with his piece in his
hand, and a face of disappointment, he is no longer at a loss for
the secret of the decline of Comedy among us, and proceeds
cautiously to hint his discovery to the world. But it being
suggested to him that the change of manners, produced partly by the
stage itself, and the total disappearance of the characters which
before formed the very life and soul of Comedy, might have something
to do with the decline of the Stage, he will not hear a word of it,
but says, that this circumstance, so far from shewing why our modern
Comedies _are not so good_ as the old ones, proves that they _ought
to be better_; that the more we are become like one another, or like
nothing, the less distinction of character we have, the greater
discrimination must it require to bring it out; that the less
ridiculous our manners become, the more scope do they afford for art
and ingenuity in discovering our weak sides and shades of infirmity;
and that the greatest sameness and monotony must in the end produce
the most exquisite variety. For a plain man, this is very well. It
is on the same principle, that some writers have contended that
Scotland is more fertile than England, the excellence of the crop
being in proportion to the barrenness of the soil. What a pity it
is, that so ingenious a theory should not have the facts on its
side; and that the perfection of satire should not be found to keep
pace with the want of materials. It is rather too much to assume on
a mere hypothesis, that the present manners are equally favourable
to the production of the highest comic excellence, till they do
produce it. Even in France, where encouragement is given to the
noblest and most successful exertions of genius by the sure prospect
of profit to yourself or your descendants, every time your piece is
acted in any corner of the empire, to the latest posterity, we find
the best critics going back to the grossness and illiberality of the
age of Louis XIV. for the production of the best comedies; which is
rather extraordinary, considering the infinitely refined state of
manners in France, and the infinite encouragement given to dramatic
talent. But has it never occurred to your Correspondent, as a
solution of this difficulty, that there is a difference between
refinement and imbecility, between general knowledge and personal
elegance, between metaphysical subtlety and stage-effect? Does he
think all manners, all kinds of folly, and all shades of character
equally fit for dramatic representation? Does he not perceive that
there is a point where minuteness of distinction becomes laborious
foolery, and where the slenderness of the materials must baffle the
skill and destroy the exertions of the artist? He insists, indeed,
on pulling off the mask of folly, by some ingenious device, though
she has been stripped of it long ago; and forced to compose her
features into a decent appearance of gravity; and he next proceeds
to apply a microscope of a new construction, to detect the freckles
on her face and inequalities in her skin, in order to communicate
his amusing discoveries to the audience, as some philosophical
lecturer does the result of his chemical experiments on the
decomposition of substances to the admiring circle. There is no end
of this. Your Correspondent confesses that ‘we are drilled into a
sort of stupid decorum and apparent uniformity,’ but this he
converts into an advantage. His penetrating eye is infinitely
delighted with the picturesque appearance of so many imperceptible
deviations from a right line, and mathematical inclinations from the
perpendicular. The picture of the Flamborough Family, painted with
each an orange in his hand, must have been a masterpiece of nice
discrimination and graceful inflection. Upon this principle of going
to work the wrong way, and of making something out of nothing, we
must reverse all our rules of taste and common sense. No Comedy can
be perfect till the _dramatis personæ_ might be reversed without
creating much confusion: or the ingredients of character ought to be
so blended and poured repeatedly from one vessel into another that
the difference would be perceptible only to the finest palate. Thus,
if Molière had lived in the present day, he would not have drawn his
Avare, his Tartuffe and his Misanthrope with those strong touches
and violent contrasts which he has done, but with those delicate
traits which are common to human nature in general, that is, his
Miser without avarice, his Hypocrite without design, and his
Misanthrope without disgust at the vices of mankind. Or instead of
the heroines of his _School for Women_ (_Alithea_ and _Miss Peggy_,
which Wycherley has contrived to make the English understand) we
should have had two sentimental young ladies brought up much in the
same way, with nice shades of difference, which we should have been
hardly able to distinguish, subscribing to the same circulating
library, reading the same novels and poems, one preferring Gertrude
of Wyoming to The Lady of the Lake, and the other The Lady of the
Lake to Gertrude of Wyoming, differing in their opinions on points
of taste or systems of mineralogy, and delivering dissertations on
the arts with Corinna of Italy.

Considering the difficulty of the task which by our author’s own
account is thus imposed upon modern writers, may we not suppose this
very difficulty to have operated to deter them from the pursuit of
dramatic excellence. But I suspect that your Correspondent has taken
up his complaint of the deficiency of refined Comedy too hastily,
and that he need not despair of finding some modelled upon his
favourite principles. Guided by his theory he should have sought
them out in their remote obscurity, and have obtruded them on the
public eye. He might have formed a new era of criticism, and have
claimed the same merit as Voltaire, when he discovered that the
English had one good Tragedy, Cato. Your Correspondent, availing
himself of the idea that frivolity, taste, and elegance are the
same, might have shewn how much superior _The Heiress_ of Burgoyne
was to _The Confederacy_, or _The Way of the World_, and _The Basil_
of _Miss Bailey_, to _Romeo and Juliet_. He would have found ample
scope in the blooming desert for endless discoveries—of beauties of
the most shadowy kind, of fancies ‘wan that hang the pensive
head,’[84] of evanescent smiles, and sighs that breathe not, of
delicacy that shrinks from the touch, and feebleness that scarce
supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of all thought, and an
artificial dearth of sense, spirit, wit and character! I can assure
your Correspondent, there has been no want of Comedies to his taste;
but the taste of the public was not so far advanced. It was found
necessary to appeal to something more palpable: and so, in this
interval of want of characters in real life, the actors amuse
themselves with taking off one another.

But your Correspondent will have it that there are different degrees
of refinement in wit and pleasantry, and he seems to suppose that
the best of our old Comedies are no better than the coarse jests of
a set of country clowns—a sort of _comedies bourgeoises_, compared
with the admirable productions which might and ought to be written.
Even our modern dramatists, he suspects, are not so familiar with
high life as they ought to be. ‘They have not seen the Court, and if
they have not seen the Court their manner must be damnable.’[85]
Leaving him to settle this last point with the poetical Lords and
Ladies of the present day, I am afraid he has himself fallen into
the very error he complains of, and would degrade genteel Comedy
from a high Court Lady into a literary prostitute. What does he mean
by refinement? Does he find none in _Millamant_, and her morning
dreams, in _Sir Roger de Coverly_ and his widow? Did not Congreve,
Wycherley, and Suckling approach tolerably near ‘the ring of mimic
Statesmen, and their merry King?’[86] Does he suppose that their
fine ladies were mere rustics, because they did not compose
metaphysical treatises, or their fine gentlemen inexperienced tyros,
because they had not been initiated into the infinitely refined
society of Paris and of Baron Grimm? Is there no distinction between
an Angelica, and a Miss Prue, a Valentine, a Tattle, and a Ben?
Where in the annals of modern literature will he find anything more
refined, more deliberate, more abstracted in vice than the Nobleman
in Amelia? Are not the compliments which Pope paid to his
friends,[87] to St. John, Murray, and Cornbury, equal in taste and
elegance to those which passed between the French philosophers and
their patrons?—Are there no traits in Sterne?—Is not Richardson
minute enough?—Must we part with Sophia Western and Clarissa for the
loves of the plants and the triangles?—The beauty of these writers
in general was, that they gave every kind and gradation of
character, and they did this, because their portraits were taken
from life. They were true to nature, full of meaning, perfectly
understood and executed in every part. Their coarseness was not mere
vulgarity, their refinement was not a mere negation of precision.
They refined _upon_ characters, instead of refining them _away_.
Their refinement consisted in working out the parts, not in leaving
a vague outline. They painted human nature as it was, and as they
saw it with individual character and circumstances, not human nature
in general, abstracted from time, place and circumstance. Strength
and refinement are so far from being incompatible, that they assist
each other, as the hardest bodies admit of the finest touches and
the brightest polish. But there are some minds that never understand
any thing, but by a negation of its opposite. There is a strength
without refinement, which is grossness, as there is a refinement
without strength or effect, which is insipidity. Neither are
grossness and refinement of manners inconsistent with each other in
the same period. The grossness of one class adds to the refinement
of another, by circumscribing it, by rendering the feeling more
pointed and exquisite, by irritating our self-love, &c. There can be
no great refinement of character where there is no distinction of
persons. The character of a gentleman is a _relative term_. The
diffusion of knowledge, of artificial and intellectual equality,
tends to level this distinction, and to confound that nice
perception and high sense of honour, which arises from
conspicuousness of situation, and a perpetual attention to personal
propriety and the claims of personal respect. Your Correspondent, I
think, mistakes refinement of individual character for general
knowledge and intellectual subtlety, with which it has little more
to do than with the dexterity of a rope-dancer or juggler. The age
of chivalry is gone with the improvements in the art of war, which
superseded personal courage, and the character of a gentleman must
disappear with those refinements in intellect which render the
advantages of rank and situation common almost to any one. The
bag-wig and sword followed the helmet and the spear, when these
outward insignia no longer implied a real superiority, and were a
distinction without a difference. Even the grossness of a state of
mixed and various manners receives a degree of refinement from
contrast and opposition, by being defined and implicated with
circumstances. The _Upholsterer_ in _The Tatler_ is not a mere
vulgar politician. His intense feeling of interest and curiosity
about what does not at all concern him, displays itself in the
smallest things, assumes the most eccentric forms, and the
peculiarity of his absurdity masks itself under various shifts and
evasions, which the same folly, when it becomes epidemic and
universal as it has since done, would not have occasion to resort
to. In general it is only in a state of mere barbarism or
indiscriminate refinement that we are to look for extreme grossness
or complete insipidity. Our modern dramatists indeed have happily
contrived to unite both extremes. _Omne tulit punctum._[88] On a
soft ground of sentiment they have daubed in the gross absurdities
of modern manners void of character, have blended metaphysical
waiting maids with jockey noblemen, and the humours of the four in
hand club, and fill up the piece by some vile and illiberal
caricature of particular individuals known on the town.

To return once more to your Correspondent, who condemns all this as
much as I do. He is for refining Comedy into a pure intellectual
abstraction, the shadow of a shade. Will he forgive me if I suggest,
as an addition to his theory, that the drama in general might be
constructed on the same abstruse and philosophical principles. As he
imagines that the finest Comedies may be formed without individual
character, so the deepest Tragedies might be composed without real
passion. The slightest and most ridiculous distresses might be
improved by the help of art and metaphysical aid, into the most
affecting scenes. A young man might naturally be introduced as the
hero of a philosophic drama, who had lost the gold medal for a prize
poem; or a young lady, whose verses had been severely criticized in
the reviews. Nothing could come amiss to this rage for speculative
refinement; or the actors might be supposed to come forward, not in
any character, but as a sort of Chorus, reciting speeches on the
general miseries of human life, or reading alternately a passage out
of Seneca’s Morals or Voltaire’s Candide. This might by some be
thought a great improvement on English Tragedy, or even on the
French.

In fact, Sir, the whole of our author’s reasoning proceeds on a
total misconception of the nature of the Drama itself. It confounds
philosophy with poetry, laboured analysis with intuitive perception,
general truth with individual observation. He makes the comic muse a
dealer in riddles, and an expounder of hieroglyphics, and a taste
for dramatic excellence, a species of the second sight. He would
have the Drama to be the most remote, and it is the most substantial
and real of all things. It represents not only looks, but motion and
speech. The painter gives only the former, looks without action or
speech, and the mere writer only the latter, words without looks or
action. Its business and its use is to express the thoughts and
character in the most striking and instantaneous manner, in the
manner most like reality. It conveys them in all their truth and
subtlety, but in all their force and with all possible effect. It
brings them into action, obtrudes them on the sight, embodies them
in habits, in gestures, in dress, in circumstances, and in speech.
It renders every thing overt and ostensible, and presents human
nature not in its elementary principles or by general reflections,
but exhibits its essential quality in all their variety of
combination, and furnishes subjects for perpetual reflection.

But the instant we begin to refine and generalise beyond a certain
point, we are reduced to abstraction, and compelled to see things,
not as individuals, or as connected with action and circumstances,
but as universal truths, applicable in a degree to all things, and
in their extent to none, which therefore it would be absurd to
predicate of individuals, or to represent to the senses. The habit,
too, of detaching these abstract species and fragments of nature,
destroys the power of combining them in complex characters, in every
degree of force and variety. The concrete and the abstract cannot
co-exist in the same mind. We accordingly find, that to genuine
comedy succeed satire and novels, the one dealing in general
character and description, and the other making out particulars by
the assistance of narrative and comment. Afterwards come traits, and
collections of anecdotes, bon mots, topics, and quotations, &c.
which are applicable to any one, and are just as good told of one
person as another. Thus the trio in the Memoirs of M. Grimm,
attributed to three celebrated characters, on the death of a fourth,
might have the names reversed, and would lose nothing of its effect.
In general these traits, which are so much admired, are a sort of
systematic libels on human nature, which make up, by their malice
and _acuteness_, for their want of wit and sense.

I have already taken notice of the quotation from Madame de Stael,
with which your Correspondent concludes. I can only oppose to it the
authority of Sterne and Sir Richard Steele, who thought that the
excellence of the English in comedy was in a great measure owing to
the originality and variety of character among them [See Sentimental
Journey, and Tatler, No. .][89] With respect to that extreme
refinement of taste which the fair Author arrogates to the French,
they are neither entirely without it, nor have they so much as they
think. The two most refined things in the world are the story of the
Falcon in Boccacio, and the character of Griselda in Chaucer, of
neither of which the French would have the smallest conception,
because they do not depend on traits, or minute circumstances, or
turns of expression, but in infinite simplicity and truth, and an
everlasting sentiment. We might retort upon Mad. de Stael what she
sometimes says in her own defence, That we understand all in other
writers that is worth understanding. As to Moliere, he is quite out
of the present question; he lived long before the era of French
philosophy and refinement, and is besides almost an English author,
quite a _barbare_, in all in which he excels. He was unquestionably
one of the greatest comic geniuses that ever lived, a man of
infinite wit, gaiety, and invention, full of life and laughter, the
very soul of mirth and whim. But it cannot be denied, that his plays
are in general mere farces, without real nature or refined
character, totally void of probability. They could not be carried on
a moment without a perfect collusion between the parties, to wink at
impossibilities, by contradicting and acting in defiance of all
common sense. For instance, take the _Medecin malgre lui_, in which
a common wood-cutter voluntarily takes upon himself, and supports
through a long play, the character of a learned physician, without
exciting the least suspicion, but which is, notwithstanding the
absurdity of the plot, one of the most laughable and truly comic
things that can be imagined. The rest of his lighter pieces are of
the same description—mere gratuitous fictions and exaggerations of
nature. As to his serious Comedies, as the _Tartuffe_ and
_Misanthrope_, nothing can be more objectionable, and the chief
objection to them is that nothing is more hard than to read them
through. They have all the improbability and extravagance of the
rest, united with all the tedious common-place prosing of French
declamation. What can exceed the absurdity of the _Misanthrope_, who
leaves his mistress after every proof of her attachment and
constancy, merely because she will not submit to the _technical
formality_ of going to live with him in a desert? The characters
which she gives of her friends in the beginning of the play are very
admirable satires, but not Comedy. The same remarks apply in a
greater degree to the _Tartuffe_. The long speeches and reasonings
in this Play may be very good logic, or rhetoric, or philosophy, or
any thing but Comedy. They are dull pompous casuistry. The
improbability is monstrous. This play is indeed invaluable, as a
lasting monument of the credulity of the French to all verbal
professions of virtue or wisdom, and its existence can only be
accounted for from that astonishing and tyrannical predominance
which words exercise over things in the mind of every Frenchman.

In short, Sir, I conceive, that neither M. de Stael nor your
Correspondent has hit upon the true theory of refinement. To suppose
that we can go on refining for ever with vivacity and effect,
embodying vague abstractions, and particularising flimsy
generalities,—‘shewing the very body of the age, its form and
pressure,’[90] though it has neither form nor pressure left,—seems
to me the height of speculative absurdity. That undefined ‘frivolous
space,’ beyond which Madame de Stael regards as ‘the region of taste
and elegance,’ is, indeed, nothing but the very Limbo of Vanity, the
land of chiromancy and occult conceit, and paradise of fools, where,
according to your correspondent,

‘None yet, but store hereafter from the earth
Shall, like aerial vapours, upward rise
Of all things transitory and vain.’[91]

I am, Sir, your humble servant, H.