{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-book-page-js","path":"/chesterton-the-defendant/12/","result":{"data":{"mdx":{"id":"3cc53208-e6bf-5806-8f08-5dcbe95ee7d9","body":"var _excluded = [\"components\"];\n\nfunction _extends() { _extends = Object.assign || function (target) { for (var i = 1; i < arguments.length; i++) { var source = arguments[i]; for (var key in source) { if (Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.call(source, key)) { target[key] = source[key]; } } } return target; }; return _extends.apply(this, arguments); }\n\nfunction _objectWithoutProperties(source, excluded) { if (source == null) return {}; var target = _objectWithoutPropertiesLoose(source, excluded); var key, i; if (Object.getOwnPropertySymbols) { var sourceSymbolKeys = Object.getOwnPropertySymbols(source); for (i = 0; i < sourceSymbolKeys.length; i++) { key = sourceSymbolKeys[i]; if (excluded.indexOf(key) >= 0) continue; if (!Object.prototype.propertyIsEnumerable.call(source, key)) continue; target[key] = source[key]; } } return target; }\n\nfunction _objectWithoutPropertiesLoose(source, excluded) { if (source == null) return {}; var target = {}; var sourceKeys = Object.keys(source); var key, i; for (i = 0; i < sourceKeys.length; i++) { key = sourceKeys[i]; if (excluded.indexOf(key) >= 0) continue; target[key] = source[key]; } return target; }\n\n/* @jsxRuntime classic */\n\n/* @jsx mdx */\nvar _frontmatter = {\n  \"author\": \"G.K. Chesterton\",\n  \"bookTitle\": \"The Defendant (essays)\",\n  \"isBook\": false,\n  \"numSections\": 18,\n  \"tags\": [\"a\"],\n  \"templateKey\": \"book-page\",\n  \"title\": \"A Defence Of Farce\"\n};\nvar layoutProps = {\n  _frontmatter: _frontmatter\n};\nvar MDXLayout = \"wrapper\";\nreturn function MDXContent(_ref) {\n  var components = _ref.components,\n      props = _objectWithoutProperties(_ref, _excluded);\n\n  return mdx(MDXLayout, _extends({}, layoutProps, props, {\n    components: components,\n    mdxType: \"MDXLayout\"\n  }), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 0,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as \\u2018degenerating into farce\\u2019; it would be fair criticism to speak of it \\u2018changing into farce\\u2019; but as for degenerating into farce, we might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a story is spoken of as \\u2018melodramatic,\\u2019 and the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as \\u2018pantomimic\\u2019 or \\u2018sensational\\u2019 is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. \\u2018This stuff is fit for a detective story,\\u2019 is often said, as who should say, \\u2018This stuff is fit for an epic.\\u2019\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 1,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification, there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of \\u2018jarring atoms,\\u2019 a prolonged mental torture of irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this article. We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If people had spoken of \\u2018sonnets\\u2019 with the same accent with which they speak of \\u2018music-hall songs,\\u2019 a sonnet would have been a thing so fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics were only fit for children and nursemaids, \\u2018Paradise Lost\\u2019 might have been an average pantomime: It might have been called \\u2018Harlequin Satan, or How Adam \\u2019Ad \\u2019em.\\u2019 For who would trouble to bring to perfection a work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write \\u2018Othello\\u2019 if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, \\u2018Mr. Shakespeare is fit for something better than writing tragedies\\u2019?\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 2,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art, glorified by Aristophanes and Moli\\xE8re, have sunk into such contempt may be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have all the comedy emotions of \\u2018Much Ado about Nothing\\u2019 or \\u2018Northanger Abbey,\\u2019 but if their actual conversation were reported, it would possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or P\\xE8re Goriot, but if he comes into literature he must do something besides sit by the fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them. And these emotions are to an incredible extent crushed out by the modern insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the dominant element of life; but this is true only in a very special sense. If pain were for one single instant literally the dominant element in life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bedpost by the morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it is our reason for existing, and a very feminine reason; it mingles with every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and artistic ambition is the form called \\u2018farce\\u2019\\u2014or its wilder shape in pantomime. To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear tree began to grow apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck into Pimlico, is lost. Someday, perhaps, when the present narrow phase of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to regulate one\\u2019s life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 3,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little knickknacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the \\u2018Frogs\\u2019 as on the wisdom of the \\u2018Republic.\\u2019 It is all a mean shame of joy. When we come out from a performance of the \\u2018Midsummer Night\\u2019s Dream\\u2019 we feel as near to the stars as when we come out from \\u2018King Lear.\\u2019 For the joy of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than wisdom, their love is stronger than death.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 4,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool\\u2019s cap without the bells!\"));\n}\n;\nMDXContent.isMDXComponent = true;","fields":{"slug":"/chesterton-the-defendant/12/"},"frontmatter":{"isBook":false,"title":"A Defence Of Farce","bookTitle":"The Defendant (essays)","numSections":18,"tags":["a"],"author":"G.K. Chesterton"}}},"pageContext":{"id":"3cc53208-e6bf-5806-8f08-5dcbe95ee7d9"}},"staticQueryHashes":["4080856488"]}