The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for
renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having such
a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, they
know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere followed the
Horatian precept, to observe the manners of his age and give his
characters the colour befitting them at the time. He did not paint in
raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central purpose of
the play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising and softening
the object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot, Duke de
Montausier, {3} for the study of the Misanthrope, and, according to St.
Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as to make
it permanently human. Concede that it is natural for human creatures to
live in society, and Alceste is an imperishable mark of one, though he is
drawn in light outline, without any forcible human colouring. Our
English school has not clearly imagined society; and of the mind hovering
above congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing. The critics
who praise it for its downrightness, and for bringing the situations home
to us, as they admiringly say, cannot but disapprove of Moliere's comedy,
which appeals to the individual mind to perceive and participate in the
social. We have splendid tragedies, we have the most beautiful of poetic
plays, and we have literary comedies passingly pleasant to read, and
occasionally to see acted. By literary comedies, I mean comedies of
classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedy
through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that
have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or
otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and
Fletcher. Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type,
'with fat capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic,
as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real
animation. Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the audience of a