It is, I conceive, a profound error to suppose that either the writer of a comedy or his audience is at the moral point of view, envisaging behaviour as morally {374} commendable or the opposite. Possibly, the influence of the didactic morality on early modern comedy may have helped to foster this error. It is true that Molière finds his comic material in certain defects of character. Yet the selections made by comic art are not determined by degrees of moral turpitude. As hinted above, very small and comparatively harmless vices may be preferred as having the drollest look on the stage.[311] Vanity, the richest of all moral blemishes in its comic possibilities, and therefore greatly employed by comedy, both ancient and modern, is not judged as heinously immoral, like hatred and cruelty, for example.[312] This may suffice to show how wide an interval separates the point of view of the spectator of a comedy from that of the moral judge. It seems to me to be much more correct to say, with M. Bergson, that comedy takes up the social rather than the moral point of view. By this I mean that the comic poet is thinking of the look of things to the trained apperceptive organ of the social kind of person, according as they appear to be well or ill adapted to the common practices and opinions of society as discerned and interpreted by its more intelligent representatives. Yet, in speaking of the social point of view, I must not be taken to mean that either the author or the spectator of the comic scene is seriously judging of the behaviour of its figures by a reference to social values. There is, undoubtedly, an approach to this, not only in the early modern comedy, but in the later serious variety, including some plays of Molière; but the art-impulse of the writer, where it is clear, prevents the approximation {375} of points of view from becoming a loss of distinctness. Comedy addresses itself to a mood of æsthetic contemplation which, though it has room for keen penetration, and even for a dim discernment of a serious import in the background of the puppet show, remains on the whole a playful attitude. The spectator is agreeably occupied with the look of things; and such social consciousness as is awake in him serves merely to give to his perceptions a precise measure of the seemly, or at most to enable him to glimpse something of a sharply corrective expression in the puckered visage of the comic showman.[313]