# Littell's Living Age/Volume 133/Issue 1718/Italian, Spanish, and German Comedy

From The New Quarterly Magazine.
ITALIAN, SPANISH, AND GERMAN COMEDY.
Italian comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found in Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli's "Mandragola." The Frate Timoteo of this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment. Native Italian comedy did not advance beyond the state of satire, and the priests were the principal objects of it. Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries, cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian gallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the decadence of the republic with a French pencil, and was an Italian scribe in style. The Spanish stage is richer in such comedies as that which furnished the idea of the "Menteur" to Corneille. But you must force yourself to believe that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie upon lie. There is no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity. Spanish comedy is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons, in quick movement, as of marionnettes. The comedy might be performed by a troop of the corps de ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an animated shuffle of feet. It is, in fact, something other than the true idea of comedy. Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, as the Portuguese call it, affaimados of one another, famine-stricken; and all the tragic elements are on the stage. Don Juan is a comic character that sends souls flying: nor does the humor of the breaking of a dozen women's hearts conciliate the comic muse with the drawing of blood. German attempts at comedy remind one vividly of Heine's image of his country in the dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand at it, with a sobering effect upon readers. The intention to produce the reverse effect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poor old Pyrenean bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and his left, consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter gives the best edition of the German comic in the contrast of Siebenkäs with his Lenette. A light of the comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the splendid figure of the man, but no more. The German literary laugh, like the timid awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous — never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque, or grim, or gross, like the peculiar humors of their little earth-men. Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to; sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here and there a Volkslied or Märschen shows a national aptitude for stout animal laughter; and we see that the literature is built on it, which is hopeful so far; but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy of the broad grin, that seems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and reaches its perfection in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers at the corners of the mouth, one must have aid of "the good Rhine wine," and be of German blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness of the comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of comedy, and the poor voice allowed to women in German domestic life will account for the absence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land.