Must we then say that because he rarely allows us to look on folly and vice in the pure attitude of amused observation, Shakespeare is no comic poet? It does not greatly matter how we answer the question so long as we reflect that in the world he has here created for us, at once beautiful and touched with a tender melancholy, and yet charged with the electric current of mirth, we possess something quite as delightful as the well-defined comic scenes of a Molière. Now and again, moreover, where the rosy warmth of romance gives place to the colder light of realities, as in “The Merry Wives” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” we see how keen an eye our poet could turn to the comic possibilities of character. Nor must we forget how great a contribution he made to comic character-drawing in his dialogue, where the man and the woman, at once attracted and repelled, use their witty tongues with excellent effect, and where woman, though now and then chastised, has a large part assigned her in curing man of his follies and developing what is best in him. {364} For the comedy of character, in its highest and purest form, we are told, and rightly told, to go to Molière. In his world, not only is the uproarious, dust-raising mirth of classic comedy silenced, but the fun of extravagant plot with its disguises and errors, though not absent, is kept within measure. It is the familiar domestic world, into which we can readily transport ourselves. It is peopled for the most part with the sober and sensible. Upon this orderly scene is brought one or more of the great typical representatives of human folly. In some cases it is an old entertaining figure revived, the exacting and anxious miser, for example, or the voluble braggart. But the comic idea also incarnates itself in a rich variety of new forms, such as the _faux dévot_ and his victim, the critic of society who turns a sour face on its conventions, the wrong-headed educator of woman, the ready-tongued quack, the crazy pedant and the others. Nor is the enlargement of the gallery of portraits the only or the chief advance in the comedy of Molière. The fineness of the drawing is what fixes the eye. All trace of the old rigid abstractions has disappeared. Typical they all remain, as is their function: yet they are individualised in a way that satisfies all the conditions of the art.[305]