Complete Works of Samuel Johnson

by Samuel Johnson

  Upon this incontestable principle, which supposes a beauty, universal and absolute, and a beauty, likewise, relative and particular, which are mingled through one work in very different proportions, it is easy to give an account of the contrary judgments passed on Aristophanes. If we consider him only with respect to the beauties, which, though they do not please us, delighted the Athenians, we shall condemn him at once, though even this sort of beauty may, sometimes, have its original in universal beauty carried to extravagance. Instead of commending him for being able to give merriment to the most refined nation of those days, we shall proceed to place that people, with all their atticism, in the rank of savages, whom we take upon us to degrade, because they have no other qualifications but innocence, and plain understanding. But have not we, likewise, amidst our more polished manners, beauties merely fashionable, which make part of our writings as of the writings of former times; beauties of which our self-love now makes us fond, but which, perhaps, will disgust our grandsons? Let us be more equitable; let us leave this relative beauty to its real value, more or less, in every age: or, if we must pass judgment upon it, let us say that these touches in Aristophanes, Menander, and Molière, were well struck off in their own time; but that, comparing them with true beauty, that part of Aristophanes was a colouring too strong, that of Menander was too weak, and that of Molière was a peculiar varnish, formed of one and the other, which, without being an imitation, is itself inimitable, yet depending upon time, which will efface it, by degrees, as our notions, which are every day changing, shall receive a sensible alteration. Much of this has already happened since the time of Molière, who, if he was now to come again, must take a new road.

  With respect to unalterable beauties, of which comedy admits much fewer than tragedy, when they are the subject of our consideration, we must not, too easily, set Aristophanes and Plautus below Menander and Terence. We may properly hesitate with Boileau, whether we shall prefer the French comedy to the Greek and Latin. Let us only give, like him, the great rule for pleasing in all ages, and the key by which all the difficulties in passing judgment may be opened. This rule and this key are nothing else but the ultimate design of the comedy.

  Etudiez la cour, et connoissez la ville:

  L’une et l’autre est toujours en modèles fertile.

  C’est par-là que Molière illustrant ses écrits

  Peut-être de son art eût remporté le prix,

  Si, moins ami du peuple en ses doctes peintures,

  Il n’eut point fait souvent grimacer ses figures,

  Quitté pour le bouffon l’agréable et le fin,

  Et sans honte à Térence allié Tabarin.

  In truth, Aristophanes and Plautus united buffoonery and delicacy, in a greater degree than Molière; and for this they may be blamed. That which then pleased at Athens, and at Rome, was a transitory beauty, which had not sufficient foundation in truth, and, therefore, the taste changed. But, if we condemn those ages for this, what age shall we spare? Let us refer every thing to permanent and universal taste, and we shall find in Aristophanes at least as much to commend as censure.

  12. TRAGEDY MORE UNIFORM THAN COMEDY.

  But before we go on to his works, it may be allowed to make some reflections upon tragedy and comedy. Tragedy, though different, according to the difference of times and writers, is uniform in its nature, being founded upon the passions, which never change. With comedy it is otherwise. Whatever difference there is between Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; between Corneille and Racine; between the French and the Greeks; it will not be found sufficient to constitute more than one species of tragedy.

  The works of those great masters are, in some respects, like the seanymphs, of whom Ovid says, “That their faces were not the same, yet so much alike, that they might be known to be sisters;”

  — facies non omnibus una, Nec diversa tamen, qualem decet esse sororum.

  The reason is, that the same passions give action and animation to them all. With respect to the comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus, Menander and Terence, Molière and his imitators, if we compare them one with another, we shall find something of a family likeness, but much less strongly marked, on account of the different appearance which ridicule and pleasantry take from the different manners of every age. They will not pass for sisters, but for very distant relations. The Muse of Aristophanes and Plautus, to speak of her with justice, is a bacchanal at least, whose malignant tongue is dipped in gall, or in poison dangerous as that of the aspick or viper; but whose bursts of malice, and sallies of wit, often give a blow where it is not expected. The Muse of Terence, and, consequently, of Menander, is an artless and unpainted beauty, of easy gaiety, whose features are rather delicate than striking, rather soft than strong, rather plain and modest than great and haughty, but always perfectly natural:

  Ce n’est pas un portrait, une image semblable:

  C’est un fils, un amant, un père véritable.

  The Muse of Molière is not always plainly dressed, but takes airs of quality, and rises above her original condition, so as to attire herself gracefully in magnificent apparel. In her manners she mingles elegance with foolery, force with delicacy and grandeur, or even haughtiness with plainness and modesty. If, sometimes, to please the people, she gives a loose to farce, it is only the gay folly of a moment, from which she immediately returns, and which lasts no longer than a slight intoxication. The first might be painted encircled with little satyrs, some grossly foolish, the others delicate, but all extremely licentious and malignant; monkeys always ready to laugh in your face, and to point out to indiscriminate ridicule, the good and the bad. The second may be shown encircled with geniuses full of softness and of candour, taught to please by nature alone, and whose honeyed dialect is so much the more insinuating, as there is no temptation to distrust it. The last must be accompanied with the delicate laughter of the court, and that of the city somewhat more coarse, and neither the one nor the other can be separated from her. The Muse of Aristophanes and of Plautus can never be denied the honour of sprightliness, animation, and invention; nor that of Menander and Terence the praise of nature and of delicacy; to that of Molière must be allowed the happy secret of uniting all the piquancy of the former, with a peculiar art which they did not know. Of these three sorts of merit, let us show to each the justice that is due, let us, in each, separate the pure and the true, from the false gold, without approving or condemning either the one or the other, in the gross. If we must pronounce, in general, upon the taste of their writings, we must indisputably allow that Menander, Terence and Molière, will give most pleasure to a decent audience, and, consequently, that they approach nearer to the true beauty, and have less mixture of beauties purely relative, than Plautus and Aristophanes.

  If we distinguish comedy by its subjects, we shall find three sorts among the Greeks, and as many among the Latins, all differently dressed; if we distinguish it by ages and authors, we shall again find three sorts; and we shall find three sorts, a third time, if we regard more closely the subject. As the ultimate and general rules of all these sorts of comedy are the same, it will, perhaps, be agreeable to our purpose to sketch them out, before we give a full display of the last class. I can do nothing better, on this occasion, than transcribe the twenty-fifth reflection of Rapin upon poetry in particular.

  13. GENERAL RULES OF COMEDY.

  “Comedy,” says he, “is a representation of common life: its end is to show the faults of particular characters on the stage, to correct the disorder of the people by the fear of ridicule. Thus ridicule is the essential part of a comedy. Ridicule may be in words, or in things; it may be decent, or grotesque. To find what is ridiculous in every thing, is the gift merely of nature; for all the actions of life have their bright, and their dark sides; something serious, and something merry. But Aristotle, who has given rules for drawing tears, has given none for raising laughter; for this is merely the work of nature, and must proceed from genius, with very little help from art or matter
. The Spaniards have a turn to find the ridicule in things, much more than we; and the Italians, who are natural comedians, have a better turn for expressing it; their language is more proper for it than ours, by an air of drollery which it can put on, and of which ours may become capable, when it shall be brought nearer to perfection. In short, that agreeable turn, that gaiety, which yet maintains the delicacy of its character, without falling into dulness or into buffoonery; that elegant raillery, which is the flower of fine wit, is the qualification which comedy requires. We must, however, remember that the true artificial ridicule, which is required on the theatre, must be only a transcript of the ridicule which nature affords. Comedy is naturally written, when, being on the theatre, a man can fancy himself in a private family, or a particular part of the town, and meets with nothing but what he really meets with in the world; for it is no real comedy in which a man does not see his own picture, and find his own manners, and those of the people among whom he lives. Menander succeeded only by this art among the Greeks: and the Romans, when they sat at Terence’s comedies, imagined themselves in a private party; for they found nothing there which they had not been used to find in common company. The great art of comedy is to adhere to nature, without deviation; to have general sentiments and expressions, which all the world can understand; for the writer must keep it always in his mind, that the coarsest touches after nature will please more, than the most delicate, with which nature is inconsistent. However, low and mean words should never be allowed upon the stage, if they are not supported with some kind of wit. Proverbs and vulgar smartnesses can never be suffered, unless they have something in them of nature and pleasantry. This is the universal principle of comedy; whatever is represented, in this manner must please, and nothing can ever please without it. It is by application to the study of nature alone, that we arrive at probability, which is the only infallible guide to theatrical success: without this probability, every thing is defective, and that which has it, is beautiful; he that follows this, can never go wrong; and the most common faults of comedy proceed from the neglect of propriety, and the precipitation of incidents. Care must, likewise, be taken, that the hints, made use of to introduce the incidents, are not too strong, that the spectator may enjoy the pleasure of finding out their meaning; but commonly the weak place in our comedy is the untying of the plot, in which we almost always fail, on account of the difficulty which there is in disentangling of what has been perplexed. To perplex an intrigue is easy; the imagination does it by itself; but it must be disentangled merely by the judgment, and is, therefore, seldom done happily; and he that reflects a very little, will find, that most comedies are faulty by an unnatural catastrophe. It remains to be examined, whether comedy will allow pictures larger than the life, that this strength of the strokes may make a deeper impression upon the mind of the spectators; that is, if a poet may make a covetous man more covetous, and a peevish man more impertinent, and more troublesome than he really is. To which I answer, that this was the practice of Plautus, whose aim was to please the people, but that Terence, who wrote for gentlemen, confined himself within the compass of nature, and represented vice without addition or aggravation. However, these extravagant characters, such as the Citizen turned gentleman, and the Hypochrondriac patient of Molière, have lately succeeded at court, where delicacy is carried so far; but every thing, even to provincial interludes, is well received, if it has but merriment, for we had rather laugh than admire. These are the most important rules of comedy.

  14. THREE SORTS OF COMEDY.

  These rules, indeed, are common to the three kinds which I have in my mind; but it is necessary to distinguish each from the rest, which may be done by diversity of matter, which always makes some diversity of management. The old and middle comedy simply represented real adventures: in the same way some passages of history and of fable might form a class of comedies, which should resemble it without having its faults; such is the Amphitryon. How many moral tales, how many adventures, ancient and modern; how many little fables of Aesop, of Phaedrus, of Fontaine, or some other ancient poet, would make pretty exhibitions, if they were all made use of as materials by skilful hands? And have we not seen some like Timon the man hater, that have been successful in this way? This sort chiefly regards the Italians. The ancient exhibition, called a satire, because the satyrs played their part in it, of which we have no other instance than the Cyclops of Euripides, has, without doubt, given occasion to the pastoral comedies, for which we are chiefly indebted to Italy, and which are there more cultivated than in France. It is, however, a kind of exhibition that would have its charms, if it was touched with elegance and without meanness: it is the pastoral put into action. To conclude, the new comedy, invented by Menander, has produced the comedy, properly so called in our times. This is that which has for its subject general pictures of common life, and feigned names and adventures, whether of the court or of the city. This third kind is incontestably the most noble, and has received the strongest sanction from custom. It is, likewise, the most difficult to perform, because it is merely the work of invention, in which the poet has no help from real passages or persons, which the tragick poet always makes use of. Who knows but, by deep thinking, another kind of comedy may be invented, wholly different from the three which I have mentioned? such is the fruitfulness of comedy. But its course is already too wide for the discovery of new fields to be wished; and on ground where we are already so apt to stumble, nothing is so dangerous as novelty imperfectly understood. This is the rock on which men have often split, in every kind of pursuit; to go no further, in that of grammar and language, it is better to endeavour after novelty, in the manner of expressing common things, than to hunt for ideas out of the way, in which many a man loses himself. The ill success of that odd composition, tragick comedy, a monster wholly unknown to antiquity, sufficiently shows the danger of novelty in attempts like these.

  15. WHETHER TRAGEDY OR COMEDY BE THE HARDER TO WRITE.

  To finish the parallel of the two dramas, a question may be revived equally common and important, which has been oftener proposed than well decided: it is, whether comedy or tragedy be most easy or difficult to be well executed. I shall not have the temerity to determine, positively, a question which so many great geniuses have been afraid to decide; but, if it be allowed to every literary man to give his reason for and against a mere work of genius, considered without respect to its good or bad tendency, I shall, in a few words, give my opinion, drawn from the nature of the two works, and the qualifications they demand. Horace proposes a question nearly of the same kind: “It has been inquired, whether a good poem be the work of art or nature? for my part, I do not see much to be done by art without genius, nor by genius without knowledge. The one is necessary to the other, and the success depends upon their cooperation.” If we should endeavour to accommodate matters in imitation of this decision of Horace, it were easy to say, at once, that supposing two geniuses equal, one tragick and the other comick, supposing the art, likewise, equal in each, one would be as easy or difficult as the other; but this, though satisfactory in the simple question put by Horace, will not be sufficient here. Nobody can doubt but genius and industry contribute their part to every thing valuable, and particularly to good poetry. But if genius and study were to be weighed one against the other, in order to discover which must contribute most to a good work, the question would become more curious, and, perhaps, very difficult of solution. Indeed, though nature must have a great part of the expanse of poetry, yet no poetry lasts long that is not very correct: the balance, therefore, seems to incline in favour of correction. For is it not known that Virgil, with less genius than Ovid, is yet valued more by men of exquisite judgment; or, without going so far, Boileau, the Horace of our time, who composed with so much labour, and asked Molière where he found his rhyme so easily, has said; “If I write four words, I shall blot out three:” has not Boileau, by his polished lines, retouched and retouched a thousand times, gained the preference above the works
of the same Molière, which are so natural, and produced, by so fruitful a genius! Horace was of that opinion, for when he is teaching the writers of his age the art of poetry, he tells them, in plain terms, that Rome would excel in writing as in arms, if the poets were not afraid of the labour, patience, and time required to polish their pieces. He thought every poem was bad that had not been brought ten times back to the anvil, and required that a work should be kept nine years, as a child is nine months in the womb of its mother, to restrain that natural impatience which combines with sloth and self-love to disguise faults: so certain is it that correction is the touchstone of writing.

  The question proposed comes back to the comparison which I have been making between genius and correction, since we are now engaged in inquiring, whether there is more or less difficulty in writing tragedy or comedy: for, as we must compare nature and study one with another, since they must both concur, more or less, to make a poet; so if we will compare the labours of two different minds in different kinds of writing, we must, with regard to the authors, compare the force of genius, and, with respect to the composition, the difficulties of the task.

  The genius of the tragick and comick writer will be easily allowed to be remote from each other. Every performance, be what it will, requires a turn of mind which a man cannot confer upon himself; it is purely the gift of nature, which determines those who have it to pursue, almost in spite of themselves, the taste which predominates in their minds. Pascal found in his childhood, that he was a mathematician; and Vandyke, that he was born a painter. Sometimes this internal direction of the mind does not make such evident discoveries of itself; but it is rare to find Corneilles, who have lived long without knowing that they were poets. Corneille, having once got some notion of his powers, tried a long time, on all sides, to know what particular direction he should take. He had first made an attempt in comedy, in an age when it was yet so gross in France, that it could give no pleasure to polite persons. Melite was so well received, when he dressed her out, that she gave rise to a new species of comedy and comedians.