706
PARTISAN REVIEW
To put it otherwise, the Socratic comedy is the Meredithian
comedy introverted upon itself, a refining of comedy by pain and
doubt. The comic faun, who preys upon folly and pretension
in
every disguise, is himself bit-abased by his own ignorance, stricken to
piety by necessities he does not understand and insights he does not
command. This is the deeper humanization of comedy that Meredith
assigned to the humorist; usually the nineteenth-century comic stage
was narrow and occupied by cultivated men and women whose
laughter was more polite and impersonal than the Socratic laughter.
The charity issuing from the disdain of the Meredithian faun is
luminous- more detached, perhaps, than the inquisition of Socrates;
but its province is the drawing room, not the human condition. The
Meredithian comedy is not a civilizer upon ultimate occasions. It
does not issue within the shadow of the tr.agic setting-upon the
Areopagus, or in the cell of those condemned to drink the hemlock.
In the Socratic drama the finely tempered malice of the faun is de–
flected into the pathos of the clown--or the saint--or into the grim
resignations of tragedy. The Meredithian spirit cannot easily descend
from his sunlit advantage into the humilities of prayer and sacrifice;
he is not quite equal to the more severe necessities of civilization–
not to the expiation of impiety or, possibly, the sudden resolution
to kill Claudio who has ravaged, in his own exquisite and irresponsible
way, the good name of Hero.
III
The cultivated society of
Much Ado,
like the cultivated society
of Athens, is always breeding the tragic occasion. Messina is one of
the giddy communities Meredith named semi-barbaric. It is not the
light-hearted Illyria-world of
Twelfth Night,
which lies within those
narrower "social" bounds of the Meredithian scene. There, in Illyria,
the loves of Viola and Orsino, Sebastian and Olivia, are instant and
lyric, and the designated comic prey is Malvolio the pretender, the
bombastical, the allowed fool and puritan, the fantastically self-de–
ceived. Maria is the faun whose license is to gull this cross-gartered,
yellow-stockinged pomposity into a nayword. The running-down of
Olivia's steward is an honorable sport if one accepts social ranks as
pre-ordained and hallowed. Malvolio's offense is unforgivable, the
ambition to behave as if he did not belong within the caste of stewards.