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But we all fall back on the pantomime, as I have in this municipal affair. Nature has her farces, like the act of eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more brutal appetite. She keeps her stars and mountains for those who can appreciate something more subtly ridiculous." He turned to his equerry. "But, as I said 'eating, let us have a picnic like two nice little children.
His friend Boileau probably communicated to him his view of a correct mirth, of a grave and decorous laughter; and so Moliere determined, after the carnival of his farces, to accommodate himself occasionally to the spare diet of the regular taste, and to unite what in their own nature are irreconcileable, namely, dignity and drollery.
Rather we must see that they are not low farces; and see that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so. There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of a God and are happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not studied their labours in detail, but it seems that the chief mistake of Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch.
Their roads, truly one adulating Trajan in Versailles, and growing great by "Farces of the Fair;" the other battling for his existence against men and devils, Trajan and Company included have lain far apart. Which Friedrich, on such free-and-easy terms, had silently declined. "A meddlesome, forward kind of fellow; always getting into scrapes and brabbles!" thinks Friedrich.
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Girls ought to learn to laugh as well as boys. I'll ring for Braintop." He rang the bell, and bade Emilia be careful to remind him that he wanted Braintop's address; for Braintop was useful. It appeared that there were farces at several of the theatres.
"Then you would be disappointed." He laughed. "Well, you know what I mean something we could refer to as 'new and original' on the programme. What do you say? It will be a big chance for you, and I'm willing to risk it. I'm sure you can do it. People are beginning to talk about you." I had written a few farces, comediettas, and they had been successful.
This composition of farces must have reached down to the time at which the Greeks in and around Neapolis formed a circle enclosed within the Latin-speaking Campania; for one of these writers of farces, Blaesus of Capreae, bears even a Roman name and wrote a farce "Saturnus." It was probably merry enough in this form. In the -Phoenissae- of Novius, for instance, there was the line:
If that woman could not get the command, he was to know her incapable of submission. After besmutting the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that there was no intention to repent. Possibly she meant war. In which case a man must fly, or stand assailed by the most intolerable of vulgar farces; to be compared to a pelting of one on the stage.
This, too, is one reason, though certainly not the only one, why, with the death of Terence, the development of Latin comedy at once ceased. His successors are mere shadowy names. Any life that remained in the art took the channel of the farces which, for a hundred years more, retained a genuine popularity, but which never took rank as literature of serious value.