UNBRIDLED DESIRES
Louis XIV, the “grand monarch,” ascended the throne of France in the
year 1643, while Cromwell’s “Ironsides” were fighting their king, and
only six years before they cut off his head. A greater difference
between two kingdoms could scarcely be imagined; and this difference is
completely reflected in French and English art.
All the life of France was centered at the court. The monarch who was
“the State” withdrew himself from Paris, and built a magnificent
play-ground at Versailles; aqueducts were constructed, a barren waste
was turned into a pleasure-park, whole forests of trees being moved and
replanted. Great palaces arose; the architects and landscape gardeners,
the sculptors and painters poured out their treasures, to make this
most wonderful garden of delight.
All over the land was a ruined peasantry; misery, starvation and
ignorance, freedom crushed, justice flaunted, superstition and despotism
enthroned. A nation was taxed bare to make the beauty and glory and
luxury of this court. You might see the “grand monarch,” with a huge
powdered periwig on top of his head, in a costume of crimson and white
brocaded with gold, advancing with solemn steps upon red-heeled shoes,
and wielding a golden snuff-box covered with jewels. About him flock the
courtiers, great nobles and ecclesiastics, now deprived both of their
powers and their duties, and with nothing to do but dance attendance at
court. Here also are the swarms of fine ladies, trained in the arts of
seduction. In the morning the court rides forth in enormous hunting
parties, pursuing stags imported from all over Europe. They spend the
afternoons and evenings in feasting, gaming, gossiping, intriguing.
And here, of course, come the artists; poets and painters, dramatists
and musicians, dancing masters and jugglers and makers of ballets and
masques. The king who said, “I am the State,” might equally have said,
“I am Art.” He and his court constituted audience and critics; either
you pleased them, or as an artist you were dead.
It is interesting to note that the famous artists of that time all came
from the middle classes. The great gentlemen scorned to work at art, as
at anything else; they paid others to work for them. They were exacting
paymasters, having high standards of perfection in technique, and the
middle-class Ogis slaved diligently to polish and refine and beautify
their productions.
War was far off from this splendid court, an echo of trouble in another
world; so the sternness and sublimity of Corneille went out of fashion.
Love was no longer a temptation and a weakness, but the delight and
glory of the “great world.” The source of human impulse was located in
what the poets of those days called “the heart”--though we, by surgical
investigations, have ascertained that it is located below the diaphragm.
There came a new dramatist to thrill this amorous company. His name was
Jean Racine, and he also came from the middle classes. His genius
brought him instant success; he wrote an ode to the king, was awarded a
pension of six hundred livres, and became an assiduous and successful
courtier. He is, like Raphael, the perfect type of the ruling-class
artist; fitting exactly to his age, with no ideals below it and none
above it. His works represent perfection of technique, the ideal harmony
of content and form, the Art of Beauty as it had not been seen upon the
stage since the time of Sophocles.
Until late in Racine’s life religion is purely formal in his work; his
plays deal with the princely world. Society is fixed, and its forms
ordained; nobody is rising and displacing anybody else, hence there can
be no social drama. You play your part “in that state of life to which
it has pleased God to call you”; and tragedy happens when somebody takes
away from you the sexual gratification you crave. Everything has become
personal; we are concerned with the jealousies, the fears, the loves and
hates of aristocratic individuals. The heroes and heroines abandon
themselves to their passions, they pour out floods of exquisite emotion.
The scene is laid in “an apartment in a palace,” and murder, suicide,
insanity and despair lurk just outside the door.
They do not come upon the stage, because the classical tradition ordains
that violent actions happen off the stage, and people rush on and tell
us about them. We get the echoes of horror in the eyes and the voices of
these people. It is curious to compare Racine’s tragedies with those of
Shakespeare, which jump you about among a score or two of places all
over the earth, and bring on swarms of characters from every social
class. In Racine, not merely are the lower classes excluded from the
stage, the lower classes are excluded from existence. Three or four
noble ladies and gentlemen stand in a room, and come and go, and make
speeches to one another in marvelously polished rhymed couplets. They
address long soliloquies to the air, they address imaginary beings, the
heavenly powers of Christian mythology and Roman and Greek and Turkish
and Celtic mythology; they call earth and sea and sky to witness the
infinite wickedness and cruelty of their not being able to have what
they want.
This is the height and perfection of art, according to the most
fastidious and exacting of French standards. And is it propaganda? I do
not see how anyone capable of putting two thoughts together can
question the fact. Here are the gods of a new hierarchy, princes and
potentates, absorbing to themselves by divine right all the treasures of
civilization. Here they are exhibited in all their splendor, one of the
world’s greatest poets devoting his technical skill to glorifying and
exalting them. Storms of thrilling emotion are poured forth, and the
crowds go mad with excitement. So ideals are created and standards set,
which govern, not merely the art life, but the social and political and
business life of the whole of society.
The poet himself lived this life of elegant egotistical passion; he was
jealous and quarrelsome, and he followed the custom of the painters in
using his mistresses as models for his female types. One of his
tragedies became the cause of a ferocious court quarrel; a duchess hired
another playwright and produced a rival play on the same theme, and
hired a claque to applaud his play, and to hiss Racine’s. This
apparently frightened the poet; he lost his joy in the courtier life,
became sick, and in orthodox Catholic fashion retired into mysticism,
and wrote a play of religion, as unwholesome and remote from reality as
his worldly plays.
The most famous of his tragedies is “Phedre,” which tells about the wife
of an Athenian king, who conceives an adulterous passion for her
step-son, and when the youth repels her advances, accuses him falsely to
his father, and brings about his death; after which, in a transport of
shame, she poisons herself. For two centuries and a half this portrayal
of unbridled desire has been the test of genius upon the French stage;
eight generations of actresses have exhausted their skill in portraying
it to eight generations of elegant ladies and gentlemen, living lives of
the same unbridled desire.
In our time the great Phedre was Sarah Bernhardt, the “divine Sarah,” as
she was known to the leisure-class critics of my boyhood. Upon the stage
she exhibited the unbridled desires of an ancient Greek queen, and in
real life she exhibited the unbridled desires of a modern stage queen; a
woman who never felt a social emotion, but squandered the treasure of
various royal and plutocratic and literary lovers, who likewise had
never felt a social emotion. We are privileged now to read the extremely
stupid love-letters which King Edward of England wrote to her, and
learn what sums of money be paid to her, and what dignified court
gentlemen he sent to make his assignations with her. We read also about
her passion for Sardou, leisure-class playwright of her time, who
created a host of splendid prostitutes and lustful queens, to enable
this leisure-class divinity to sweep her audiences into ecstasy.
We today, possessing means of exploring the subconscious mind,
understand these unbridled desires as symptoms of infantilism. Here are
babies, still reaching out for the moon, and shrieking because they
cannot have it; here are spoiled children, flattered by servants and
fawned upon by slaves, indulged and petted, never adjusting themselves
to the realities of life, but growing up to make heroes and heroines of
tragedy. We no longer consider these creations sublime; we call them
psychopaths, and the art which portrays them we call a bore.
As economists we have explored the social causes of such raging
egotisms, and also the social consequences. The plutocracy is not the
only class which has unbridled desires; the proletariat has its share,
and if one class is permitted to gratify them, and to flaunt them before
the world, the only possible consequence is a revolution of blind and
bloody revenge. Queen Phedre, frenzied and horror-smitten, saw hell
looming hideous before her staring eyes; but she saw no hell compared
with what Racine’s audience might have seen, had they been able to look
forward a hundred years in French history, and to watch the starved and
brutalized mob of Paris dancing the “Carmagnole” in the streets, while
the guillotine rolled into its bloody basket the heads of the
great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those splendid, unbridled
ladies and gentlemen who made up the “grand monarch’s” splendid,
unbridled court.