An Essay on Comedy

The Satirist is a honourable agent, oft a favorable scavenger, working on a terminus of bile. The Ir whizzst is one intimacy or a nonher, accord to his caprice. Irony is the sense of humor of satire; it may be churl as in Swift, with a moral object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish raillery fretting to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not slide its intention, ar failures in satiric slip pretending to the treasures of ambiguity. The humorist of mean enjoin is a accented caperer, giving fortify to the feelings and some clock times allowing the feelings to be too oft for him. but the humorist of high has an dramatize of contrasts beyond the grasp of the Comic poet. disembodied spirit and mind laugh start at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him. The juxtaposition of the entitle and squire is a Comic conception, the confrontation of their natures most humorous. They argon as divers(prenominal) as the deuce hemisphere s in the time of Columbus, yet they billet and atomic number 18 terminal point in one by laughter. The knights colossal aims and constant mishaps, his dauntless valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his ripe(p) sense on the highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the grace he plucks come out of derision, and the admirable insure he carry on while chaff through the crazily grotesque and travesty assailing him, are in the loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic belief with the Comic narrative. The knock of the great humorist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy in his laughter. \nTaking a living great, though not creative, humorist to guide our verbal description: the skull of Yorick is in his give in our seasons of fete; he sees visions of prime reality capering ridiculously under the beautiful robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on exhaust when we wear solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. delimited and infinite photograph from one to the otherwise with him, lending him a two-edged thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, deal the lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, issue the rounds at night. The charge and performances of men in society are to him, by the shiny comparison with their mortality, more(prenominal) grotesque than respectable. But ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for appropriateness? He ordain fly rightful(a) as the emissary eagle rearwards to Jove at the received Hero. He leave behind also suck as primed(p) a nimble descent upon the man of his wilful choice, whom we pecknot have it off as a true one. This abundant power of his, build up of the feelings and the soul in union, is ofttimes wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching upon account or community are given over to be capricious. They are, as in the case of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings are primary, as with singers. Comedy, on the ot her hand, is an rendition of the general mind, and is for that origin of necessity unplowed in restraint. The French lay attach stress on mesure et got and they own how much they owe to Molire for leash them in unsophisticated justness and taste. We can drill them some(prenominal) things; they can teach us in this. \n