by Paul Hazard
Be that as it may, le Lutrin (the Lectern) did make us laugh when we were schoolboys, and had nothing much else to feed upon. It made all Europe laugh, when Europe was two hundred years younger than it is today. But that was a Europe that had not lost its enthusiasms; a classical Europe, a gentleman’s Europe. We may say that it appealed to the flower of Europe as a whole, since there was hardly a country in which this amusing skit of M. Boileau’s, that prince of satirists, was not admired, translated and copied. Samuel Garth, one of London’s leading physicians, established a reputation as a poet merely by borrowing the theme, turning the Lectern into a Dispensary, canons into doctors, and choristers into apothecaries, complete with syringes, pestles and mortars.
Muse, raconte-moi les débats salutaires
Des médecins de Londre et des apothicaires
Contre le genre humain si longtemps réunis:
Quel Dieu, pour nous sauver, les rendit ennemis?
Comment laissèrent-ils respirer leurs malades,
Pour frapper à grands coups sur leurs chers camarades?
Comment changèrent-ils leur coiffure en armet,
La seringue en canon, la pilule en boulet?
Ils connurent la gloire: acharnés l’un sur l’autre,
Ils prodiguaient leur vie et nous laissaient la nôtre . . . [2]
So, take a line or two from Milton, and then flop suddenly into the ludicrous:
Sing, Heavenly Muse,
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme,
A shilling . . . [3]
Having thus set the tone, chant, in pseudo-heroic verse, the blissful state of the man who owns a shilling, a splendid new shilling, gleaming, glittering. He fears no more the pallid face of poverty; he can go into a tavern, call for a pot of foaming ale and oysters of the very best; never allowing melancholy to show its ugly shape; chasing it away, when it looks as if it had come to stay, with a facetious turn of the tongue—is this the comic spirit? It looked as if it was, for the Tatler declared that the finest English parody in verse was The Splendid Shilling, by John Philips.
Then there is Pope, who sits down at his writing-desk and with consummate skill composes his Rape of the Lock. He prides himself on striking out quite a new line, even as Boileau prided himself on producing a work which had no counterpart in French. No heroi-comic work is complete without its “machines”, that being the term invented by the cognoscenti for the gods and goddesses who superintend the action. The supernatural is all a matter of machinery. This being so, it occurred to him to replace the angels and demons, who were a little tired of being so long in harness, with sylphs, gnomes and salamanders. These were all borrowed from the occultists, for there was not the least need to be shy of borrowing; the difficulty was to find someone new to borrow from. Then he bethought him of a new device; supposing he brought in things not generally regarded as suitable for poetic treatment, like a game of cards, shall we say? What a feather in his cap! To subdue recalcitrant material to his purpose—therein lies the artist’s crowning triumph. A noble lord very much in love snips off a tress from a fair lady’s head. The lady is sore indignant. Whereupon there is a terrific commotion among the men and among the goblins. The flimsy web of an ancient poem, a few flowerets cunningly embroidered on it, a quantum sufficit of verbal wit, and the interplay of dazzling colours—is this comedy? Is this the genuine article?
More sonorous, if nothing more, was the laughter of Italy. In that Tuscan countryside, the Muse was more at her ease, more light-hearted. She did not stand on ceremony:
Non è figlia del Sol la Musa mia,
Nè ha cetra d’oro o d’ebano contesta
E rozza villanella, e si trastulla
Cantando in aria . . . [4]
This is not to say that she, too, was not bent on caricaturing the heroic tales of bygone days; but she did it with a care-free, happy-go-lucky sort of air. If she found herself in a quandary, like those ants that came upon plaster or flour—they knew not which—in their path, she thought it a joke, and treated it as such:
Ma canta per istar allegramente,
E acciò che si rallegri ancor chi l’ode;
Nè sa, nè bada a regole niente . . . [5]
No qualms about her; no die-away vapourings; no swelling phrases about shining honour; no more chivalry. Instead of doughty knights, she gives us country bumpkins, lewd fellows, toss-pots—
E Rinaldo ed Orlando in compagnia
S’ubbriacano ben bene all’osteria . . . [6]
This Muse, so sportive, and at times so coarse, mocked at all such old-fashioned paraphernalia as magic, enchantment, knightly cavalcades, pursuits, ambushes, duels, haunted inns, prisons, heroic deaths. She took one tale after another, mocking, burlesqueing, never heeding where she was going, with no definite end in view, but trying all the time to show how easy it is to laugh and to make the world laugh with you, and be hanged to prigs and pedants!
The Italian actors of the Commedia dell’arte were expelled from Paris in 1697; they were too daring, too brilliant, too gay. Their theatre was closed down. However, Regnard was there still, and everybody liked Regnard. Paris folk were not a dismal set, and they were quite content with the most threadbare plots, the same old tales—impersonations, recognitions, “surprises” you could see coming a mile off, old stock-characters trotted out again, usurers fleecing wealthy heirs, widows cheated of their money, domineering matriarchs, love-lorn damsels, youthful rakes; and a whole crowd of lacqueys and serving-wenches to help carry on the game. Now, by some miracle, or, it may be, by reason of his exuberant vitality, his dexterity, his unfailing dash, his instinct for dramatic situations and effective dialogue, his irrepressible good humour, Regnard contrived to construct, out of this well-worn material, comedies that had all the air of novelty. What could run more easily than his Distrait, in which the wool-gathering Leander who loses one of his boots on the road, who sets out for Picardy by way of Rouen, who dips his finger into a boiled egg and chews it till he draws blood, who blunders into someone else’s bedroom, who dashes his watch to the ground, who makes love to the girl he detests, and abuses the girl he adores, who, after countless similar exploits, forgets on his wedding-night that he has been married at all—what could be more familiar than all this sort of thing? What could have done duty more often? What, in a way, could be more trite, more hackneyed? The whole thing is just one of La Bruyère’s “Characters”, spun out to fill up five acts. Well, have it so if you like. All the same, you come under the spell of the thing; you roar with laughter, just like the children, every time someone goes and puts his foot in it.
Now and again, we have a scene, sometimes a whole play, that has a touch of sadness about it, though not the deeper sadness of Molière, for there is nothing very profound in his psychology. Nevertheless, Regnard is not blind to the foibles and faults of his fellow-men. He knows the influence that money wields over a society that is beginning to disintegrate; he makes no bones about portraying broken-down, unhealthy, epileptic, paralytic, diseased, asthmatic, dropsical old men, with a single tooth left in their head which will drop out the next time they cough, but who cast lecherous eyes on any specimen of fresh young womanhood they happen to see. There is something definitely macabre about Le Légataire Universel. No matter; it is not the gloomy side of the thing that strikes the eye, but its gaiety. The characters only come to provide us with a little temporary diversion, and to make a few sparks fly. They are nimble and sprightly, they frisk and frolic, for they have convinced themselves once and for all that every ill can be cured with a modicum of folly. When the play is over; when the envious and the miserly have got what they deserve, when the Crispins and the Lisettes have been duly pardoned and absolved, when the lovers have been wedded, when the actors make their bow, and the curtain comes down, the spectator will bring but one thought away with him from the evening’s entertainment:
Il faut bien que je rie
De tout ce que je vois tous les jours de la vie. . . .[7]
Something
new in the way of accompaniment, brought in on the quiet, secretly running counter to the dominant. Toland was not much given to laughter; nor was Collins. As for Fontenelle, you could barely get a smile out of him, and that rather a faint and ironic one. Jean Le Clerc was grave, and Jurieu tragic. Bossuet in his old age had grown austere; woe unto you that laugh, for ye shall shed tears. Fénelon considered that laughter had something indecorous about it. Louis XIV, now in the sere and yellow, laughed no more. But these people were not all the world; there were others. . . .
And now, like the Diable Boiteux, let us go and take a peep at some other houses. We will say goodbye to the jesters, the tosspots, the crooks, the scallywags and all that happy-go-lucky crew. And the merry and bright ones—of those too we will take our leave. We will now turn our attention to the sentimental, emotional people for whom melancholy and despair are the breath of life. Let us consider those mortals who look on reason, on the intellect, as an inhuman thing. What we have to do is to find out, not whether man ever gave up shedding tears here below, but when it came to be thought that he could decently shed them in public.
Here, now, we have the stage in a theatre. One hero, wearing a plumed helmet, a grandiloquent, pompous personage, is unburdening to another hero, no less an antique Roman in appearance, all the sorrows of his tender heart:
SERVILIUS.
Mais quand je songe, hélas! que l’état où je suis
Va bientôt exposer aux plus mortels ennuis
Une jeune beauté, dont la foi, la constance,
Ne peut trop exiger de ma reconnaissance,
Je perds à cet objet toute ma fermeté.
Eh! pardonne, de grâce àcette lâcheté,
Qui, me faisant prévoir tant d’affreuses alarmes
Dans ton sein généreux me fait verser des larmes.
What is this? Tears? A gallant knight, in armour dight, blubbering like a booby on the stage? His interlocutor is moved to rage much rather than to pity:
MANLIUS.
Des larmes! Ah! plutôt, par tes vaillantes mains,
Soient noyés dans leur sang ces perfides Romains.
Des larmes! Jusque-là la douleur te possède![8]
The audience are puzzled. They would like to know for what mysterious reason it is no disgrace to laugh as much as you want to on the stage, but very definitely a disgrace to weep there.[9]
In this room Pierre Bayle is inditing a letter to his brother Jacob; their mother has recently died. He agrees that it is permissible to shed tears on such an occasion:
“I quite understand your floods of tears, and I see nothing amiss in your urging me to let mine flow unstintingly. We should turn a deaf ear to the Stoics. The tears we shed when our hearts are wrung by the trials heaven lays upon us will not be unrequited. Wherefore we should pray for a tender rather than a stern and rock-like heart. God will turn our tears and mourning into blessings.”
But here Bayle seems to hesitate, to hedge, a little. We may weep, yes; but we must not keep on weeping.
“In saying that, however”, he goes on, “I don’t at all approve of the sort of temperament you refer to when you say in so many words that you are so soft-hearted that you cannot see or think of anything at all distressing without being moved to a terrible flood of tears. Such weakness ill becomes a man; it would be hardly excusable in a woman. Whatever trials life may hold in store for us, men should never forget that they are men.”
But was that a little unkind, the least bit wounding? Again he modifies his statement. If his brother must weep, then let him weep.
“But just as, while recognizing the grounds of your own excessive grief, I nevertheless cannot feel any sympathy with this great and universal fund of tenderness of yours, I am far from wishing to animadvert on the tears which you have shed and are still shedding. One may give way to one’s feelings thus unrestrainedly without detriment to the strength of mind which should mark our sex; and, since the mightiest heroes and the greatest saints have shed them, tears should not be looked on as a womanish display of weakness.”[10]
A woman’s tears . . . Here, in this handsome, middle-class residence, one of the weaker sex is writing a love-letter, and weeping as she writes. In her young days she had fallen in love with the Baron de Breteuil whom she believed to be the handsomest man in all the world. Plunged in despair when she discovered that he was not free to marry, she fled one day from her father’s house, intending to betake herself to a nunnery. She was pursued and overtaken. In order to bring her to her senses, she was compelled to marry against her will; Anne de Bellinzani became the wife of President Ferrand. But the lady met the Baron again. She surrendered to him in a tempest of passionate ecstasy. Hence these letters of hers, some of the most beautiful ever penned by a woman in love, throbbing with the whole gamut of emotions: joy in a love which the world knows not of, a love all the more precious because it is secret; sadness, because her love cannot expand freely and triumphantly; anger at the obstacles which accumulate little by little in her path; a tenderness that is almost maternal in its tone; outbursts of passionate love; disgust at the thought of quitting her lover and returning to a husband whom her flesh abhors; insight— “Yes, my dear one, you love me, and I worship you”. . . ; disesteem, which, however, does not kill her love: “I have lost the good opinion of my people, I have turned my own home into a hell, and all for a lover who only deserves my hate. But, God knows, my crowning misery is that hate him I cannot. I despise him, I shrink from him, but I cannot hate him.” This woman, thus born for love, exhibits some of the traits that were to be the pride of the heroines of romance a century and a half later on. She deems that a cheerful temperament is apt to be too volatile; that sadness adds a deeper tenderness to love; she is the unhappiest of women; melancholy has marked her for its own; from her childhood upwards, Love has looked on her as its destined victim, doomed to endure its torments. She weeps in torrents.[11]
Society was disintegrating, it is true. Slowly but surely the contagion of luxury was gaining ground. Luxury must have money, must have it quickly, and plenty of it. So speculation, lotteries, the tontine, card-playing became the order of the day. Turcaret dates back to 1709, and Turcaret the ex-footman, now a bloated millionaire, thinks money will buy anything, good manners, wit, the female heart. True, Lesage shows him bemocked, taken in, reduced to beggary in the end, and that is the moral which Frontin, the manservant, draws from it all, as he talks things over with Lisette, the maid. Life is a rum go, we bleed some pretty lady or other; the pretty lady bleeds a business man; the business man takes it out of another business man and it’s all like a jolly old game of battledore and shuttlecock played by crooks and swindlers. In Dancourt’s comedies, which are little mirrors of the age, with some engaging facets, the most hypocritical, corrupt, tuft-hunting, money-grubbing characters are the women.
Of course it is also true that women were encouraged to take up philosophy and science. Now, it is Lord Halifax that urges them on; now Fontenelle. Some there were who said that it was high time that women kicked over the traces. They had been slaves long enough, and men, taking a mean advantage of their own strength, had framed the laws so as to keep them slaves, assigning them the meanest and most trivial occupations. Custom had ratified the injustice, education had increased it. It was time the whole thing was changed. Women ought to be on an equality with men; it was only just and reasonable that they should be. They should be educated on the same lines and fulfil the same duties. They should be magistrates, teachers, and so on. Even the Army, nay, the Church itself, should be open to them. Boileau, who is mindful of les Femmes Savantes, is not at all of this opinion; the wanton, the flirt, the female gambler, the bluestocking, the fly-by-night, all come in for the rough side of his tongue. He has some ironical things to say about the blessedness of the married state. Whereupon, Perrault at once springs to arms to defend the sex. Boileau, he says, is old-fashioned, out of date; he satirizes women simply because Horace and Juvenal did, and he thinks he’s got to say “
ditto” to everything the Ancients said. But the Moderns know better; they know that life is very different now from what it used to be. Three cheers for the women! An Italian philosopher, Paolo Mattia Doria, chimes in, showing that “in pretty well everything that matters most, women are not a whit inferior to men.”
All that is true enough, no doubt. People who have kept their eyes open, report that young girls are throwing off all restraint, forgetting their manners and rapidly becoming a scandal; that grown women are brazen, grasping and selfish. But let some great love affair come along, one whose course is anything but smooth, and, in a flash, passion will blaze forth and reassert its rights with heart-rending appeals and choking sobs; a sort of call to a new era, an era now close at hand, whose dominant, whose one and only note is—passion!
How cunningly that “sensibility”, which some people wanted to banish altogether from the world, managed to find its way in. And now from England a signal was seen. It was an actor, Colley Cibber, who gave it. He had divined what the age was secretly longing for. Enough of those licentious plays! Enough of those lordly debauchees strutting and swaggering up and down the stage! Jeremy Collier was right; it was high time that English drama was recalled to a sense of decency and moral rectitude. Thus did morals link arms with feeling.
Now take the case of the faithless husband who has deserted his wife and gone off to roam the world. Having, as he confesses, wasted all his substance on old wine and young women, he returns to England without a penny to bless himself with, but just as heartless a rogue as ever. Not to put too much of a strain on our powers of invention, let us call the gentleman Loveless. But now, on the other side, behold Amanda, his wife, a perfect model. She has never ceased to dote on that rascally husband of hers, poor soul, and has made up her mind to win him back again. How will she set to work? A curtain lecture? Not on your life! The very thing to choke him off again. No; sentiment, the appeal to the heart, that’s the thing. She will appeal to his feelings; she will make him feel sorry for being so cruel to her. He still has a spark of affection for her; she will kindle it into flame. And more than that, she’ll see that he has a good time. Well, the upshot is that Loveless realizes what a wicked brute he has been and becomes the meekest of penitents: “Oh thou hast rouz’d me from my deep Lethargy of Vice! For hitherto my Soul has been enslav’d to loose Desires, to vain deluding Follies, and shadows of substantial bliss: but now I wake with joy to find my Rapture Real.— Thus let me kneel and pay my thanks to her whose conquering Virtue has at last subdu’d me. Here will I fix, thus prostrate sigh my shame, and wash my Crimes in never ceasing tears of Penitence.” Evidently this gentleman has graduated in the School for Sentiment.