gi-comedy (and
Shakespeare is always a writer of tragi-comedy) there is indeed
character, but we notice that it is in the moments of comedy that
character is defined, in Hamlet's gaiety let us say; while amid the
great moments, when Timon orders his tomb, when Hamlet cries to Horatio
'absent thee from felicity awhile,' when Anthony names 'Of many thousand
kisses the poor last,' all is lyricism, unmixed passion, 'the integrity
of fire.' Nor does character ever attain to complete definition in these
lamps ready for the taper, no matter how circumstantial and gradual the
opening of events, as it does in Falstaff who has no passionate purpose
to fulfill, or as it does in Henry the Fifth whose poetry, never touched
by lyric heat, is oratorical; nor when the tragic reverie is at its
height do we say, 'How well that man is realised, I should know him were
I to meet him in the street,' for it is always ourselves that we see
upon the stage, and should it be a tragedy of love we renew, it may be,
some loyalty of our youth, and go from the theatre with our eyes dim for
an old love's sake.

I think it was while rehearsing a translation of _Les Fourberies de
Scapin_ in Dublin, and noticing how passionless it all was, that I saw
what should have been plain from the first line I had written, that
tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that
separate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes comedy keeps
house. But I was not certain of the site (one always doubts when one
knows no testimony but one's own); till somebody told me of a certain
letter of Congreve's. He describes the external and superficial
expressions of 'humour' on which farce is founded and then defines
'humour' itself, the foundation of comedy as a 'singular and unavoidable
way of doing anything peculiar to one man only, by which his speech and
actions are distinguished from all other men,' and adds to it that
'passions are too powerful in the sex to let humour have its course,' or
as I would rather put it, that you can find but little of what we call
character in unspoiled youth, whatever be the sex, for as he indeed
shows in another sentence, it grows with time like the ash of a burning
stick, and strengthens towards middle life till there is little else at
seventy years.

Since then I have discovered an antagonism between all the old art and
our new art of comedy and understand why I hated at nineteen years
Thackeray's novels and the new Fr