Lamb himself has told us what attitude a man should bring to the appreciation of this comedy. He is to regard these “sports of a witty fancy” as “a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland”. His moral feelings are left at home with his morning suit. He goes to the play in order “to escape from the pressure of reality”. For him the figures that pursue one another across the stage have no moral substance, and are proper subjects neither for approval nor for disapproval. In other words, Lamb tells us that the comedy of Congreve and his school is to be taken as a pure show, holding no relations to the real, everyday world. This view has been spurned by Macaulay, in a well-known Essay, as subversive of morals. To him, the comedy of the Restoration is a thing that is inherently anti-moral in spirit and intention; and he proceeds to pound it with weighty invectives. The argument would have been relevant if the question had been a practical one of this kind: shall we put this comedy on the stage to-day for our boys and girls to see it? As against Lamb’s plea it seems to me to be a curious case of missing the point. When, for example, Macaulay complains that in these comedies the husbands are treated {373} as objects of contempt and aversion, whereas the gallants are decked out with all the graces, he might have remembered the old _Contes_ and bethought him that this was an elementary condition of the artificial world, which is created solely for amusement. His answer to Lamb, that recollections of morality do steal now and then into this fantastic world, does not touch the latter’s main contention, and only shows (so far as it is just) that the creators were not perfect architects, and tried to combine incompatible styles. The moral order is still in the background, dimly perceived, even here: the fun of the thing is at bottom, as Lamb says, a sense of momentary escape from rules which we know cannot be set aside in the real world. But this idea of an escape implies that what we fly from must not be dragged into the show. Our study of comedy and of the sources of laughter has prepared us to accept Lamb’s view. The comic spectacle appeals to the man in the play-mood. When there, he may see the fun of the turbulent world of Aristophanes and not be troubled by the thought of the undesirability of its realisation. Even when he is entertained by a play of Molière he does not take the background quite seriously, waxing indignant, say, in sympathy with Harpagon’s ill-used son, or with M. Jourdain’s ill-used wife. The least swerving from the point of view of comedy, a turn of the mental “eye-glass,” would spoil all. He would begin, with Rousseau, to protest against presenting so good a man as Alceste in a ludicrous light. The Restoration comedy appeals to the same playful mood simplified by the temporary inhibition of all outside tendencies.