Produced by Jim Tinsley
A Comedy in Narrative
by GEORGE MEREDITH
Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and itdeals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women,where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, noviolent crashes, to make the correctness of the representationconvincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses;nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eyeto raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routingof incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for anumber of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusivepursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts thespirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not athought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see.But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels.
Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book onearth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title isthe Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. Sofull of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which thegenerations have written ever since they took to writing, that to beprofitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression.
Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who canstudiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretchfrom the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds ofleagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catchingbreath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge ofthe Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers theheart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we managefinally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitarymajestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge wewant will not be more present with us than it was when the chaptershung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our greatlord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of thatwithin!
In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists aredifficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), theinward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to giveus those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh tothe very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceivehim to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientioustranscription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible,is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and thatprolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from anundrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. Wehave the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in abody to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tiredpedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Scienceintroduced us to our o'er-hoary ancestry—them in the Oriental posture;whereupon we set up a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon forestnigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease washanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it foreand aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all wegot from Science.
Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may beleft. The chief consideration for us is, what parti