In the comedy of the Elizabethans, Ben Jonson and Massinger, it is easy to trace this influence, disguised though {362} it is sometimes by that of classical comedy. In Jonson’s “Every Man in his own Humour,” said to be the first important comedy of character in our literature, the source of entertainment is laid, not in a merry plot, but in the presentation of a variety of characters which display themselves in odd fashions and novelties of conduct. It may be roughly true, as Taine says, with Molière present to his imagination, that the method pursued is to take an abstract quality and put together all the actions to which it gives rise.[303] In other words, the object-lesson of the morality is still too near, and the dramatist has not learned how to make his comic characters move and grow under the spectator’s eye. Yet, if we compare Bobadil with a braggart of Plautus, we may see that real progress has been made in the comic grasp and manipulation of character. In the comedies of Shakespeare a superficial reader might, so far as drawing of purely comic characters is concerned, suppose himself to be moving backwards. The glowing air of romance, the removal of the scene from the workaday world, the partial abandonment to the moods of poetry and dream-delight, all this would seem to exclude the setting up of well-defined figures fitted to entertain the mood of a gay contemplation. The supposition would not be utterly wrong. The “mixture of tones,” which comes into the poet’s comedies as well as into his tragedies, does undoubtedly tend to limit the portrayal of purely comic traits.[304] The romantic background cannot, like the fixed arrangements of homely society, throw the follies and perversities of the figures into sharp relief. Think for a moment how different æsthetic significance and value {363} would have attached to the figure of the melancholy Jaques, if it had been encountered, not in the solitary forest, but in one of Molière’s orderly homes. The mixture of tones introduces a softening, transforming influence which affects our attitude towards the queer figures themselves. Benedick and the other men who are gently brought to reason by schooling women have in their very perversity something amiable. Even Malvolio and the other figures, whose folly is exposed with something of the unsparing extravagance of an older comedy, catch a saving ray from the warm glow which is diffused over their world. We laugh heartily; yet the pre-dominant sentiment of the play moves us at the same time towards tender condonation.