Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 56-9387

Copyright ©, 1956, by Wylie Sypher

All Rights Reserved

The translation of Bergson’s Laughter in this Anchor edition is used by arrangement with the Presses Universitaires de France.

Typography by Joseph P. Ascherl

eISBN: 978-0-307-83077-7

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction—Wylie Sypher

AN ESSAY ON COMEDY—George Meredith

LAUGHTER—Henri Bergson

I. The Comic in General

The Comic Element in Forms and Movements

Expansive Force of the Comic

II. The Comic Element in Situations and the Comic Element in Words

III. The Comic in Character

Appendix: THE MEANINGS OF COMEDY—Wylie Sypher

I. Our New Sense of the Comic

II. The Ancient Rites of Comedy

III. The Guises of the Comic Hero

IV. The Social Meanings of Comedy

Notes

Bibliographical Note

INTRODUCTION

Everyone who has read Marcel Proust’s novels, especially The Past Recaptured, knows something of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, for Proust fulfilled in art several of the notions of time and intuition and memory Bergson developed in his influential books like Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution, and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, all of them accepting vitalism instead of mechanism as the explanation of human experience. Bergson had begun as a mathematician before he read deeply in Herbert Spencer, then finally emerged as the most celebrated modern philosopher of intuition. At Bergson’s death in 1941 Paul Valéry paid national tribute to the Frenchman who, like Pascal, made reason poetic and believed that intuition, not logic, attains the absolute. Bergson’s volatile and difficult ideas are more accessible in his essay on Laughter (1900) than in his philosophic works, famous as they are. This essay began to take form as early as 1884 in his academic lecture on Le Rire: de quoi rit-on? pourquoi rit-on?

Just seven years previously, in February, 1877, the English novelist George Meredith had, somewhat nervously, read to the London Institution a paper on The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit [An Essay on Comedy]. As lecturer, of course, Meredith could hardly compete with Bergson, who as appointee at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Collège de France drew overflowing, indeed reverential, crowds to hear his quietly spoken attacks on materialism and mechanism in modern thought. Yet Meredith’s essay has become one of the classic documents on comedy. As novelist, Meredith has never enjoyed great popularity, perhaps because of his mannered prose. Admittedly, however, his glittering Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist are among the most spirited, artfully paced social satires in British fiction, and something of the rarity of style and substance in these novels reappears in The Idea of Comedy. Thus, as is the case with Bergson, we can more easily approach Meredith through this little essay than through most of his major works.

The relation between Bergson’s essay on comedy and Meredith’s is not simply chronological: essentially both were reacting against the coarse logic, the machinery, of the nineteenth century, against everything cut-and-dried. Bergson believed that life is a vital impulse, an élan vital, not to be understood by the reason alone. For him, life is instinct, and the real meanings of experience must be sought along the fringe of intuitions surrounding every clear idea. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion he claims that morality itself springs from intuition, not reason, and that the letter kills the spirit. This theme is carried over into the essay on Laughter, for he sees the comical as something mechanical encrusted on the living—movement without life. The absurdity of logical systems was already proved in Meredith’s Richard Feverel (1859), in which Sir Austin tries to rear his son on the high scientific principle that Sin is an alien element in our blood. The inevitable and human outcome is that the System seems to triumph—just when it is about to fall. Sir Austin sees Richard destroy himself and his wife, along with the logical System: Richard was no longer the Richard of his creation: his pride and his joy: but simply a human being with the rest. So Sir Austin concludes: It is useless to base any System on a human being.

Meredith’s essay needs to be supplemented by the Prelude he wrote to The Egoist (1879), which rephrases his theory of comedy and serves as a half-poetic comment on Bergson’s views also. Here, like Bergson, he finds comedy a cure for the malady of sameness, our modern malady, especially the sameness that drove us in a body to Science the other day for an antidote. But science can tell us little of human life, simply because we have little to learn of apes; like Bergson, Meredith rejects the naïve nineteenth-century faith in laws of evolution. To cure our sameness, we must learn to be alive, to be quick in the soul, and there should be diversity in the companion-throbs of your pulses. Comedy teaches us to look at life exactly as it is, undulled by scientific theories. Comedy banishes monstrous monotonousness. It teaches us to be responsive, to be honest, to interrogate ourselves and correct our pretentiousness. So the comic spirit is born of our united social intelligence, which shows us our individual countenances, and thus keeps us alive. The comic spirit is the ultimate civilizer in a dull, insensitive world. She watches our vanity, our sentimentalism, with a birch rod; she strips us of our affectations. In Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honorable laughter.

Bergson would heartily agree, however his views may differ in detail. For both writers are really concerned with one kind of comedy—a kind that above all others was needed in the nineteenth century—comedy of manners. And they both read into comedy of manners new social meanings.

This should not surprise us, since all the great writers of the nineteenth century—Stendhal and Thoreau, Mill and Dostoevsky, Arnold and Flaubert—sooner or later found themselves facing a cultural crisis in the middle-class: how to guard the person himself from his society. One cannot read Bergson’s essay without remembering what Marx said in 1848: that the middle class has deprived man of his individuality and made him an appendage to the machine. Bergson, like Meredith, saw this very danger and remarked that regulating life as a matter of business routine is more widespread than might be imagined. This mechanization (the word is Bergson’s) is the quintessence of pedantry, which is nothing else than art pretending to outdo nature. Bergson spent all his philosophy protesting against the mechanical, seeking to discern in us the individuality that escapes our ken, attempting to protect what is inward and spontaneous from what is automatic. To Bergson laughter is an exposure of our ready-made gestures and values, and the comic figure is one who is not a man but, instead, a clockwork apparatus leading the special kind of life a puppet seems to have—the malady of sameness, Meredith called it.

Bergson finds, also, that our mechanical behavior is one result of the division of labor (here let us invoke Adam Smith, not Marx). In his closing pages Bergson presents us with the modern comic type—the professional man who acts with rigidity. He thinks with the automatism of his business code; he has the egoism of the expert, the inhumanity of those who dwell inside the small societies formed on the surface of Society at large. This comic figure is identified by his professional callousness, his inelasticity—which is a mode of pride. The automatic responses of this egoist make him appear, when we look at him attentively, like a ready-made product standardized for the market. The motor-efficiencies of the specialist (and we are now all specialists) give him the aspect of one who is absent-minded, or who is insensitive, incapable of authentic personality. He lives by formulas, not by animation, and his behavior is a series of repetitions. But life should be a negation of repetition. So we laugh at him. Society holds over him the threat of correction whenever he proves himself unadaptable. Here Bergson could have relied upon Darwin’s theory that in the course of biological evolution the unadaptable perish. However, Bergson would be less sympathetic to Darwin than to someone like John Ruskin, who said the same thing about the ready-made personalities of the nineteenth-century: No such thing as a Man, exclaimed Ruskin in Fors Clavigera, "but only a Mechanism … you feel yourself to be only a machine … and necessarily recognize only major machinery as regulating you."

In his other works Bergson proposed again and again that the meaning of human life is known only by intuition, wrought only in the private existence of the soul. Life is a vitality, a spontaneous, changing, personal response to each situation in which we find ourselves. We cannot even define our deepest experiences by reason, but live them in a special psychological field Bergson called duration to distinguish it from clock-time, which measures our history only from the outside. What is alive lives by inward discoveries and intensities, not in the external world regulated by clock and calendar. What is alive is not mechanical. What is mechanical suffers a death of the heart. Bergson’s comic figure of man lives in the world outside, in the field of vocation and specialized reaction. And thus, said Browning in a poem, we half-men struggle. To Browning’s lurid eye the effort of these half-men was not comedy but melodrama. But Bergson sees us half-men as playing the comedy of modern life—for Bergson is really writing about comedy, not merely laughter.

His idea of comedy is but one aspect, then, of his larger philosophy of vitalism, and we can explain why his theory of the comic is very precise and, unlike the British appetite for humor, somewhat narrow. To Bergson’s notion, a comic impasse occurs wherever a human being ceases to behave like a human being—that is, whenever he resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of working automatically, but is incapable of living. The instant this automatic figure (who makes gestures but who cannot act of his own personal will) appears under the glare of our intelligence, he looks ridiculous, particularly when he is caught at an intersection of events where his automatic response is seen to be inadequate. Then he is isolated, in all his mechanical idiocy, facing unexpected demands; and we behold him as if he were set, like a type displayed, on a stage where he forfeits our sympathy. Comedy requires, for Bergson as it does for Stendhal, an insensitivity on the part of the beholder—an anesthesia of the heart, which numbs our pity and allows us to examine, unsociably, someone who suddenly looks like a puppet. Together with other Frenchmen, Bergson looks backward to the bright theatre of Molière; but he finds his modern comic hero in the hollow man who is insulated by the confines of his business, speaking only the jargon of his enterprise, which he takes—seriously—as a substitute for living.

This sort of limitation or (what indeed it is) vanity is the point where, Bergson says, comic art touches life itself; and the spectacle of such vanity suggests that the automatic response is a vice, like a curvature in the soul. Yet in closing Bergson makes the disconcerting statement that there is a difference between comedy and art, notably tragic art. Comedy oscillates between art and life because it looks at life from outside, and because laughter is an undulation on only the surface of existence. Bergson mentions, but refuses to consider further, the pessimism which becomes the more pronounced as the laugher more closely analyzes his laughter. Tragedy, he says, is a heightened vision of life because it represents, as comedy cannot, the full life-history of a soul. Comedy is a game that imitates life; but only with the gestures of types, not living beings. The automatic gesture can, however, reveal vice in all its nakedness.

This brings us to Meredith’s opinion that our vanities, pompousness, and kindred follies are the special sins chastened by the comic spirit in any cultivated society of men and women. For Meredith, too, comedy is a game; yet even if it is played in the narrow field of the drawing room, it is art. Meredith assigns to comedy richer values than does Bergson. Meredith demands no anesthesia of the heart, perhaps because he writes in the margins of that broad tradition of British humor, tolerant, outgoing, tinged by pathos since the days of Chaucer. Meredith is able to take the-world-as-it-is more genially than Bergson: And to love Comedy, he insists, you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good. Meredith can warmly understand the plight of a Misanthrope like Molière’s Alceste. It is not unexpected that Meredith should, like Bergson, turn to Molière to find the quintessence of comedy; but it is curious that Meredith should seem to appreciate Molière more cordially than Bergson. Is it because Meredith does not isolate Molière’s characters from life and compassion, and because he feels that there are shadows of tragedy in the laugh of a great humorist? He knows that laughter is a complicated reaction, and that comedy can refine a human dilemma to a degree of pain. Meredith’s comic spirit can regard man’s failings over a wider range than mere mechanical absurdities. Meredith dares turn the eye of comedy inward upon vanities that are not exposed to the public. Too derisive a laughter spoils his comic effect. He is very sensitive to the intimate comedy we are playing alone, inside our vulnerable selves.

Thus Meredith finds in Molière a luminous sanity that is nothing less than a standard of morality: Molière has the wit of wisdom, throwing fresh light everywhere. Meredith explains that the life of comedy is in the idea—and the idea is a vision of how ridiculously we behave when we are uncivilized; that is, when we are not sane. Whenever we are self-deceived, overblown, blinded by our pedantries, we deserve the scourge of the satirist or the grave verdict of the moralist. But Meredith’s comic spirit is able to chasten us without rancor or sanctimony, for under the laugh this spirit exacts from us there is a taste of ashes—the ashes of humility, a pessimistic concession that mortals are apt to be fools in all sorts of ways, and we too, but for the grace of God. To Meredith’s way of thinking, your talent for comedy is measured by your being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes. So the kindliness is not chilled; for when that happens, we have slipped into the harsh grip of satire.

Yet comedy passes moral judgments, since our vanities are barbarous. Witness Meredith’s rebuke to Sir Willoughby Patterne in The Egoist. This glossy hero always assumed he had but to choose among the ladies aspiring to be Lady Patterne. But Sir Willoughby finds, to his affliction, that Clara Middleton disengages herself, and he can save the mere shell of his prestige only by exerting desperate pressure upon Laetitia Dale to accept him. The fate of the inordinate Sir Willoughby shows how comedy reduces imposing figures. Here Meredith is at one with Bergson, who thinks that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity. We master this egoism by a watchful sanity that is morality in gay disguise. The censure passed by the comic spirit is civilized because it spares us the bitter craving to strike heavy blows. Meredith’s comic faun is a sunlit creature who bids us love, and passionately love, so long as we do not deceive ourselves by pretending to feel what we do not feel; one foot’s length of pretence, and the lover’s foot is caught in a trap. The malice of this faun is honorable because it is generous, granting the laughter no exemption from the folly of the victim at whom he laughs. The joy of Meredith’s comedy is thoughtful; its mirth is not noisy—a finely tempered smile, perhaps.

For all this, Meredith really gives us only slight, scattered remarks compared with Bergson, whose idea of comedy grows with the subtle but inevitable logic of living things into an intricate and poetic definition. The truth is that the two essays should be read together: since if Meredith does not have this logical finesse, he has the high-spirited affections that are congenial to the very temper of comedy. Meredith seems to find comedy more touchingly inherent in life than Bergson, who for all his wisdom imposes a silence on our pity. Meredith’s laughter is somewhat more charitable and subdued by modesty. Neither Meredith nor any true Englishman could grant Bergson that the comic appeals to the intelligence pure and simple. In fact, Bergson goes on to warn, Laughter is incompatible with emotion. Depict some fault, however trifling, in such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the mischief is done, it is impossible for us to laugh. Nevertheless Bergson and Meredith are in deep agreement. Both, inclined to think of comedy as being comedy of manners, would have the comedian shun what is gross. Both take comedy as a game played in society. Both use it as a discipline of the self.

Bergson says that comedy can make us human and natural in the midst of mechanical societies. And Meredith implies that comedy can enlighten us and redeem us from our worst stupidity—the original sin of pride, or complacency. Both, in sum, believe that comedy is a premise to civilization. That is why these two essays, each in its own imaginative way, prove that comedy is not only a social game, but art.

WYLIE SYPHER

AN ESSAY ON COMEDY

*

George Meredith

AN ESSAY ON COMEDY

Good comedies are such rare productions that, notwithstanding the wealth of our literature in the comic element, it would not occupy us long to run over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shall propose, very reputable comedies will be found unworthy of their station, like the ladies of Arthur’s Court when they were reduced to the ordeal of the mantle.

There are plain reasons why the comic poet is not a frequent apparition, and why the great comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current, and the perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity.

Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter demands, more than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift in the comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a startling exhibition of the dyer’s hand, if he is without it. People are ready to surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides; all except the head—and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle to penetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him. The necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count him during centuries in the singular number.

‘C’est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens,’ Molière says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot be overestimated.

Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.

We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call ‘agelasts’; that is to say, non-laughers—men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which, if you prick them, do not bleed. The old gray boulder-stone, that has finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily to be set rolling up again as these men laughing. No collision of circumstances in our mortal career strikes a light for them. It is but one step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the , the laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike as an objection in morality.

We have another class of men who are pleased to consider themselves antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term ‘hypergelasts’; the excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that may be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put together that a wink will shake them.

C’est n’estimer rien qu’estimer tout le monde;

and to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the comic of comedy.

Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laughters would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian; for though the stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of comedy will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other will think that the speaking of it seriously brings us into violent contrast with the subject.

Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honored of the Muses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expression of the little civilization of men. The light of Athene over the head of Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek tragedy. But comedy rolled in shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charles was the patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which began similarly as a combative performance, under a license to deride and outrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian beyond the Aristophanic example—worse, inasmuch as a cynical licentiousness is more abominable than frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges, from the quality of some of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and women who sat through an Athenian comic play, that they could have had small delicacy in other affairs, when they had so little in their choice of entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for the regulated license of plain-speaking proper to the festival of the god, and claimed by the comic poet as his inalienable right, or for the fact that it was a festival in a season of license, in a city accustomed to give ear to the boldest utterance of both sides of a case. However that may be, there can be no question that the men and women who sat through the acting of Wycherley’s Country Wife were past blushing. Our tenacity of national impressions has caused the word ‘theatre’ since then to prod the Puritan nervous system like a satanic instrument; just as one has known anti-papists for whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke, as though they had a later recollection of the place than the lowing herds. Hereditary Puritanism regarding the stage is met, to this day, in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It has subsided altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it is an error to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to forget that it had once good reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.

We shall find ourselves about where