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Our comic prints do an infinity of harm by their caricatures firstly, the caricatures are not true, for the crime in Ireland is not greater than that in England; and, secondly, they exasperate the people on both sides of the Channel, and they do no good. "It is ill to laugh and scoff at a question which affects our existence."
That part was easy. I have written a great deal for the comic papers, and acrobatic nonsense of that sort comes almost without an effort on my part. With equal ease I got Osborne to Newport how, I do not recollect. It is just possible that I took him through from New York without a train, by the mere say-so of my pen.
I fancy it might be found to be at the root of a good many comic suggestions, especially in the coarser forms of the comic, in which the transformation of a person into a thing seems to be taking place before our eyes. But there are other and more subtle methods in use, among poets, for instance, which perhaps unconsciously lead to the same end.
The thoughts are sometimes great, and sometimes tender; the versification is easy and gay. There is doubtless some advantage in the shortness of the lines, which there is little temptation to load with expletive epithets. The dialogue seems commonly better than the songs. The two comic characters of Sir Trusty and Grideline, though of no great value, are yet such as the poet intended.
We might multiply these illustrations indefinitely, but we have probably said enough to show anyone that the field open to our comic writer is very much more restricted than that in which his European rival labors.
Meanwhile he read L'Humeur, which he found on the table before him. But L'Humeur is not really very funny. It has only one joke, only one type of comic picture: a woman incompletely dressed. Was that, Henry speculated, really funny? It happens, after all, to nearly all women at least every morning and every evening.
And when you shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide provinces of human sorrow and joy.
"Fergus," said she, looking at him with an expression of character still more comic, but yet sufficiently subdued to prevent O'Driscol from observing it, "is not that paragraph very complimentary to papa?" Fergus, who at once reciprocated the comic glance alluded to, replied rather significantly, "It is certainly very gratifying to him, Catherine."
Davilow felt her ears tingle when Gwendolen, suddenly throwing herself into the attitude of drawing her bow, said with a look of comic enjoyment "How I pity all the other girls at the Archery Meeting all thinking of Mr. Grandcourt! And they have not a shadow of a chance." Mrs.
Villemessant and Buloz, who will do all they can to be disagreeable to me. Villemessant reproaches me for not "having been killed by the Prussians." All that is nauseous! And you beg me not to notice human folly, and to deprive myself of the pleasure of depicting it! But the comic is the only consolation of virtue.
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