THE STAGE.
There is at first something incredible in the account given by some
thinkers of Diderot, as the greatest genius of the eighteenth century;
and perhaps an adjustment of such nice degrees of comparison among the
high men of the world is at no time very profitable. What is intended by
these thoroughgoing panegyrists is that Diderot placed himself at the
point of view whence, more comprehensively than was possible from any
other, he discerned the long course and the many bearings, the complex
faces and the large ramifications, of the huge movement of his day. He
seized the great transition at every point, and grasped all the threads
that were to be inwoven into the pattern of the new time.
Diderot is in a thousand respects one of the most unsatisfactory of men
and of writers. Yet it is hard to deny that to whatever quarter he
turned, he caught the rising illumination and was shone upon by the
spirit of the coming day. It was no copious and overflowing radiance,
but they were the beams of the dawn. Hence, what he has to say, and we
shall soon see how much he said, about the two great arts of painting
and the drama, though it is fragmentary, though it is insufficient, yet
points, as all the rest of his thoughts pointed, along the lines that
the best minds of the western world have since traversed. He would, in
the old metaphysical language, have called the direction of it a turning
to Nature, but if we translate this into more positive terms, just as we
have said that the Encyclopædia was a glorification of pacific industry
and of civil justice, so we may say that his whole theory of the drama
was a glorification of private virtues and domestic life. And the
definite rise of civil justice and industry over feudal privilege and a
life of war, and again the elevation of domestic virtue into the place
formerly held by patriotic devotion, are the two great sides of a single
movement.[248] It is quite true that Diderot and the French of that day
had only a glimpse of the promised land in art and poetry. The whole
moral energy of the generation after Diderot was drawn inevitably into
the strong current of social action. The freshly kindled torch of
dramatic art passed for nearly half a century to the country of Lessing
and Goethe.
There is in the use of a certain kind of abstract language this
inconvenience, that the reader may suppose us to be imputing to Diderot
a deliberate and systematic survey of the whole movement of his time,
and a calculated resolution to further it, now in this way and now in
that. It is not necessary to suppose that the movement as a whole was
always present to him. Diderot's mind was constantly feeling for
explanations; it was never a passive recipient. The drama excited this
alert interest just as everything else excited it. He thought about
that, as about everything else, originally, that is to say, sincerely
and in the spirit of reality.[249] Whoever turns with a clear eye and
proper intellectual capacity in search of the real bearings of what he
is about, is sure to find out the strong currents of the time, even
though he may never consciously throw them into their most general and
abstract expression.
Since Aristotle, said Lessing, no more philosophical mind than Diderot's
has treated of the theatre. Lessing himself translated Diderot's two
plays, and the Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and repeatedly said that
without the impulse of Diderot's principles and illustrations his own
taste would have taken a different direction. As a dramatist, the author
of _Miss Sara Sampson_, of _Emilia Galotti_, and above all that noble
dramatic poem, _Nathan the Wise_, could hardly have owed much to the
author of such poor stuff as _The Natural Son_ and _The Father of the
Family_. Lessing had some dramatic fire, invention, spontaneous
elevation; he had a certain measure, though not a very large one, of
poetic impulse. Diderot had nothing of all these, but he had the eye of
the philosophic critic.
Any one who reads Lessing's dramatic criticisms will see that he did
not at all overrate his obligations to his French contemporary.[250] It
has been replied to the absurd taunt about the French inventing nothing,
that at least Descartes invented German philosophy. Still more true is
it that Diderot invented German criticism.
Diderot's thoughts on the stage, besides his completed plays, and a
number of fragmentary scenes, are contained principally in the Paradox
on the Player, a short treatise on Dramatic Poetry, and three dialogues
appended to _The Natural Son_. On the plays a very few words will
suffice. _The Natural Son_ must, by me at least, be pronounced one of
the most vapid performances in dramatic history. Even Lessing, unwilling
as he was to say a word against a writer who had taught him so much, is
too good a critic not to recognise monotony in the characters, stiffness
and affectation in the dialogue, and a pedantic ring in the sentences of
new-fangled philosophy.[251] Even in the three critical dialogues that
Diderot added to the play, Lessing cannot help discerning the mixture of
superficiality with an almost pompous pretension. Rosenkranz, it is
true, finds the play rich in fine sentences, in scenes full of effect,
in which Diderot's moral enthusiasm expresses itself with impetuous
eloquence. But even he admits that the hero's servant is not so far
wrong when he cries, "_Il semble que le bon sens se soit enfui de cette
maison_," and adds that the whole atmosphere of the piece is sickly with
conscious virtue.[252] For ourselves we are ready for once even to
sympathise with Palissot, the hack-writer of the reactionary parties,
when he says that _The Natural Son_ had neither invention, nor style,
nor characters, nor any other single unit of a truly dramatic work. The
reader who seeks to realise the nullity of the _genre sérieux_ in
Diderot's hands, should turn from _The Natural Son_ to Goldoni's play of
_The True Friend_, from which Diderot borrowed the structure of his
play, following it as narrowly as possible to the end of the third act.
Seldom has transfusion turned a sparkling draught into anything so flat
and vapid. In spite of the applause of the philosophic _claque_, led by
Grimm,[253] posterity has ratified the coldness with which it was
received by contemporaries. _The Natural Son_ was written in 1757, but
it was not until 1771 that the directors of the French Comedy could be
induced to place it on the stage. The actors detested their task, and as
we can very well believe, went sulkily through parts which they had not
even taken the trouble to master.[254] The public felt as little
interest in the piece as the actors had done, and after a single
representation, the play was put aside.
Ill-natured critics compared Diderot's play with Rousseau's opera; they
insisted that _The Natural Son_ and _The Village Conjuror_ were a
couple of monuments of the presumptuous incompetence of the encyclopædic
cabal. The failure of _The Natural Son_ as a drama came after it had
enjoyed considerable success as a piece of literature, for it had been
fourteen years in print. We can only suppose that this success was the
fruit of an unflinching partisanship.
It is a curious illustration of the strength of the current passion for
moral maxims in season and out of season, that one scene which to the
scoffers of that day seemed, as it cannot but seem to everybody to-day,
a climax of absurdity and unbecomingness, was hailed by the party as
most admirable, for no other reason than that it contained a number of
high moralising saws. Constance, a young widow and a model of reason,
takes upon herself to combat the resolution of Dorval not to marry,
after he has led her to suppose that he has a passion for her, and after
a marriage between them has been arranged. "No," he cries, "a man of my
character is not such a husband as befits Constance." Constance begs him
to reassure himself; tells him that he is mistaken; to enjoy
tranquillity, a man must have the approval of his own heart, and perhaps
that of other men, and he can have neither unless he remains at his
post; it is only the wicked who can bear isolation; a tender soul cannot
view the general system of sensible beings without a strong desire that
they should be happy. Dorval, who cuts an extremely sorry figure in
such a scene, exclaims, "Ah, but children! Dorval would have children!
When I think that we are thrown from our very birth into a chaos of
prejudices, extravagances, vices, and miseries, the idea makes me
shudder!"--"Dorval, you are beset by phantoms, and no wonder. The
history of life is so little known, while the appearance of evil in the
universe is so glaring.... Dorval, your daughters will be modest and
good; your sons noble and high-minded; all your children will be
charming.... There is no fear that a cruel soul should ever grow in my
bosom from stock of yours."[255]
We can hardly wonder that players were disgusted, or critics moved to
wicked jests. The counterpart to the scene in which Constance persuades
Dorval that they would be very happy in one case, is the scene in which
Dorval persuades Rosalie that they would be very unhappy in another
case. The situations in themselves may command our approval morally, but
they certainly do not attract our sympathies dramatically. That a woman
should demonstrate to a man in fine sententious language the expediency
of marrying her, is not inconsistent with good sense, but it is
displeasing. When a man tells a woman that, though love draws in one
way, duty draws in the other, we may admire his prudence, but we are
glad when so delicate a business comes to an end. In _The Natural Son_
the latter scene, though very long, is the less disagreeable of the
two. And just as in Diderot's most wordy and tiresome pages we generally
find some one phrase, some epithet, some turn of a sentence whose
freshness or strength or daring reveals a genius, so in this scene we
find a few lines whose energy reminds us that we are not after all in
the hands of some obscure playwright, whose works ought long ago to have
been eaten by moths or burnt by fire. Those lines are a warning against
the temptation so familiar in every age since Paris was a guest in the
halls of Menelaus, to take that fatal resolve, All for love and the
world well lost. "To do wrong," says Dorval, "is to condemn ourselves to
live and to find our pleasure with wrong-doers; it is to pass an
uncertain and troubled life in one long and never-ending lie; to have to
praise with a blush the virtue that we flung behind us; to hear from the
lips of others harsh words for our own action; to seek a little calm in
sophistical systems, that the breath of a single good man scatters to
the winds; to shut ourselves for ever out from the spring of true joys,
the only joys that are virtuous, austere, sublime; and to give ourselves
up, simply as a way of escape from ourselves, to the weariness of those
frivolous diversions in which the day flows away in self-oblivion, and
our life glides slowly from us and loses itself in waste."[256] A very
old story, no doubt; but natural, true, and in its place.
What adds to the flatness of the play is a device which Diderot
introduced on a deliberately adopted principle; we mean the elaborate
setting out of the acting directions. Every movement, every gesture,
every silent pause is written down, and we have the impression less of a
play than of some strangely bald romance. In the versified declamation
which then reigned on the French stage, nothing was left to natural
action, nothing was told by change of position, by movement without
speech, or in short by any means other than discourse. Diderot,
repudiating the conventions of dramatic art, and consulting nature or
reality, saw that there are many scenes in life in which it is more
natural to the personages of the scene to move than to speak, in which
indeed motion is natural, and speech is altogether unnatural. If this be
so in real life, he said, it should be so on the stage, because nothing
passes in the world which may not pass also in the theatre; and as
pantomime, or expression of emotion, feeling, purpose, otherwise than by
speech, has so much to do in life, the dramatist should make abundant
use of pantomime in composing stage-plays. Nor should he trust to the
actor's invention and spontaneous sense of appropriateness. He ought to
write down the pantomime whenever it adds energy or clearness to the
dialogue; when it binds the parts of the dialogue together; when it
consists in a delicate play that is not easily divined; and almost
always he ought to write it down in the opening of a scene. If any one
is inclined to regard this as superfluous, let him try the experiment of
composing a play, and then writing the pantomime, or "business," for
it; he will soon see what follies he commits.[257]
Whatever we may think of the practice of writing the action as well as
the words for the player, nobody would now dispute the wisdom of what
Diderot says as to the part that pantomime fills in the highest kind of
dramatic representation. We must agree with his repeated laments over
the indigence, for purposes of full and adequate expression, of every
language that ever has existed or ever can exist.[258] "My dear master,"
he wrote to Voltaire on the occasion of a performance of _Tancred_, "if
you could have seen Clairon passing across the stage, her knees bending
under her, her eyes closed, her arms falling stiff by her side as if
they were dead; if you heard the cry that she uttered when she perceives
Tancred, you would remain more convinced than ever that silence and
pantomime have sometimes a pathos that all the resources of speech can
never approach."[259] If we wonder that he should have thought it worth
while to lay so much emphasis on what seems so obvious, we have to
remember that it did not seem at all obvious to people who were
accustomed to the substitution of a mannered and symmetrical declamation
for the energetic variety and manifold exuberance of passion and
judgment in the daily lives of men.
We have already seen that even when he wrote the Letter on the Deaf and
Dumb, Diderot's mind was exercised about gesture as a supplement to
discourse. In that Letter he had told a curious story of a bizarre
experiment that he was in the habit of making at the theatre. He used to
go to the highest seats in the house, thrust his fingers into his ears,
and then, to the astonishment of his neighbours, watch the performance
with the sharpest interest. As a constant playgoer, he knew the words of
the plays by heart, and what he sought was to isolate the gesture of the
performers, and to enjoy and criticise that by itself. He kept his ears
tightly stopped, so long as the action and play went well with the words
as he remembered them, and he only listened when some discord in gesture
made him suppose that he had lost his place. The people around him were
more and more amazed as they saw him, notwithstanding his stopped ears,
shed copious tears in the pathetic passages. "They could not refrain
from hazarding questions, to which I answered coldly, 'that everybody
had his own way of listening, and that my way was to stop my ears, so as
to understand better'--laughing within myself at the talk to which my
oddity gave rise, and still more so at the simplicity of some young
people who also put their fingers into their ears to hear after my
fashion, and were quite astonished that the plan did not succeed."[260]
This was an odd and whimsical way of acting on a conviction which lay
deep in Diderot's mind, namely, that language is a very poor,
misleading, and utterly inadequate instrument for representing what it
professes, and what we stupidly suppose it, to represent. Rousseau had
expressed the same kind of feeling when he said that definitions might
be good things, if only we did not employ words in making them.
A curious circumstance is worth mentioning in connection with the Three
Dialogues appended to _The Natural Son_. Diderot informs his readers
that the incidents of _The Natural Son_ had actually occurred in real
life, and that he knew the personages. In the Dialogues it is assumed
that the play had been written by the hero himself, and the hero is the
chief speaker. Not a word is said from which the reader would guess that
Diderot had borrowed the substance of his plot and some of its least
insipid scenes from Goldoni. We can hardly wonder that he was charged
with plagiarism. Yet it was not deliberate, we may be sure. When Diderot
was strongly seized by an idea, outer circumstances were as if they did
not exist. He was swept up into the clouds. "Diderot is a good and
worthy man," wrote Madame Geoffrin to the King of Poland, "but he has
such a bad head, and he is so curiously organised, that he neither sees
nor hears what he does see and hear, as the thing really is; he is
always like a man who is dreaming, and who thinks all that he has
dreamed quite real."[261]
_The Father of the Family_, written in 1758, and first acted in 1761,
is very superior to _The Natural Son_; it even enjoyed a certain
popularity. In Germany it became an established favourite, and in Italy
it was only less popular than a piece of Goldoni's. The French were not
quite so easy to please. In 1761 its reception was undoubtedly
favourable, and it ran for more than a week. In 1769 it was reproduced,
and, according to Diderot's own account, with enthusiasm. "There was a
frightful crowd," he says, "and people hardly remember such a success. I
was surprised at it myself. My friends are at the height of exultation.
My daughter came home intoxicated with wonder and delight." Even Madame
Diderot at length grew ashamed at having to confess that she had not
seen her husband's triumph, and throwing aside her horror of the stage,
was as deeply moved as every one else.[262]
Notwithstanding this satisfactory degree of success, and though it was
performed as late as 1835, the play never struck root in France. It is
indeed a play without any real quality or distinction. "Diderot, in his
plays," said Madame de Staël, "put the affectation of nature in the
place of the affectation of convention."[263] The effect is still more
disagreeable in the first kind of affectation than the second. _The
Father of the Family_ is made more endurable than _The Natural Son_ by a
certain rapidity and fire in the action, and a certain vigour in the
characters of the impetuous son (Saint Albin) and the malignant
brother-in-law (the Commander). But the dialogue is poor, and the Father
of the Family himself is as woolly and mawkish a figure as is usually
made out of benevolent intentions and weak purpose combined. The woes of
the heavy father of the stage, where there is no true pathos, but only a
sentimental version of it, find us very callous. The language has none
of that exquisite grace and flexibility which makes a good French comedy
of own day, a piece by Augier, Sandeau, Feuillet, Sardou, so delightful.
Diderot was right in urging that there is no reason why a play should be
in verse; but then the prose of a play ought to have a point, elegance,
and highly-wrought perfection, which shall fill us with a sense of art,
though not the art of the poet. Diderot not only did not write comedy in
such a style; but he does not even so much as show consciousness that
any difference exists between one kind of prose and another. The blurred
phrases and clipped sentences of what Diderot would have called Nature,
that is to say of real life, are intolerable on the stage. Even he felt
this, for his characters, though their dialogue is without wit or
finish, are still dull and tame of speech, in a different way from that
in which the people whom we may meet are dull and tame. There is an art
of a kind, though of an extremely vapid kind.
Again, though he may be right in contending that there is a serious kind
of comedy as distinct from that gay comedy which is neighbour to
farce--of this we shall see more presently--yet he is certainly wrong
in believing that we can willingly endure five acts of serious comedy
without a single relieving passage of humour. Contrast of character,
where all the characters are realistic and common, is not enough. We
crave contrast in the dramatic point of view. We seek occasional change
of key. That serious comedy should move a sympathetic tear is reasonable
enough; but it is hard to find that it grudges us a single smile. The
result of Diderot's method is that the spectator or the reader speedily
feels that what he has before him substitutes for dramatic fulness and
variety the flat monotony of a homily or a tract. It would be hard to
show that there is no true comedy without laughter--Terence's _Hecyra_,
for instance--but Diderot certainly overlooked what Lessing and most
other critics saw so clearly, that laughter rightly stirred is one of
the most powerful agencies in directing the moral sympathies of the
audience,--the very end that Diderot most anxiously sought.
It is mere waste of time to bestow serious criticism on Diderot's two
plays, or on the various sketches, outlines, and fragments of scenes
with which he amused his very slight dramatic faculty. If we wish to
study the masterpieces of French comedy in the eighteenth century, we
shall promptly shut up the volumes of Diderot, and turn to the ease and
soft gracefulness of Marivaux's _Game of Love and Chance_, to the
forcible and concentrated sententiousness of Piron's _Métromanie_, to
the salt and racy flavour of Le Sage's _Turcaret_. Gresset, again, and
Destouches wrote at least two comedies that were really fit for the
stage, and may be read with pleasure to-day. Neither of these
compliments can fairly be paid to _The Natural Son_ and _The Father of
the Family_. Diderot's plays ought to be looked upon merely as sketchy
illustrations of a favourite theory; as the rough drawings on the black
board with which a professor of the fine arts may accompany a lecture on
oil painting.
One radical part of Diderot's dramatic doctrine is wholly condemned by
modern criticism; and it is the part which his plays were especially
designed to enforce. "It is always," he says, "virtue and virtuous
people that a man ought to have in view when he writes. Oh, what good
would men gain, if all the arts of imitation proposed one common object,
and were one day to unite with the laws in making us love virtue and
hate vice. It is for the philosopher to address himself to the poet, the
painter, the musician, and to cry to them with all his might: _O men of
genius, to what end has heaven endowed you with gifts_? If they listen
to him, speedily will the images of debauch cease to cover the walls of
our palaces; our vices will cease to be the organs of crime; and taste
and manners will gain. Can we believe that the action of two old blind
people, man and wife, as they sought one another in their aged days, and
with tears of tenderness clasped one another's hands and exchanged
caresses on the brink of the grave, so to say--that this would not
demand the same talent, and would not interest me far more than the
spectacle of the violent pleasures with which their senses in all the
first freshness of youth were once made drunk?"[264]
The emphasising moralists of Diderot's school never understood that
virtue may be made attractive, without pulling the reader or the
spectator by the sleeve, and urgently shouting in his ear how attractive
virtue is. When _The Heart of Midlothian_ appeared (1818), a lady wrote
about it as follows: "Of late days, especially since it has been the
fashion to write moral and even religious novels, one might almost say
of the wise good heroines what a lively girl once said of her
well-meaning aunt--'On my word she is enough to make anybody wicked.'
Had this very story been conducted by a common hand, Effie would have
attracted all our concern and sympathy, Jeanie only cold approbation.
Whereas Jeanie, without youth, beauty, genius, warm passions, or any
other novel perfection, is here our object from beginning to end. This
is 'enlisting the affections in the cause of virtue' ten times more than
ever Richardson did; for whose male and female pedants, all excelling as
they are, I never could care half as much as I found myself inclined to
do for Jeanie before I finished the first volume."[265]
In other words, you must win us by kindling our sympathy, not by
formally commanding our moral approval. To kindle sympathy your
personage must be interesting; must touch our pity or wonder or
energetic fellow-feeling or sense of moral loveliness, which is a very
different thing from touching our mere sense of the distinctions between
right and wrong. Direct homily excites no sympathy with the homilist.
Deep pensive meditations on the moral puzzles of the world are not at
all like didactic discourse. But the Father of the Family was exactly
fulfilling Diderot's notion of dramatic purpose and utility when he
talked to his daughter in such a strain as this: "Marriage, my daughter,
is a vocation imposed by nature.... He who counts on bliss without alloy
knows neither the life of man nor the designs of heaven. If marriage
exposes us to cruel pain, it is also the source of the sweetest
pleasures. Where are the examples of pure and heartfelt interest, of
real tenderness, of inmost confidence, of daily help of griefs divided,
of tears mingled, if they be not in marriage? What is there in the world
that the good man prefers to his wife? What is there in the world that a
father loves more dearly than his children? O sacred bond, if I think of
thee, my whole soul is warmed and elevated!"[266]
But these virtuous ejaculations do not warm and elevate us. In such a
case words count for nothing. It is actual presentation of beautiful
character, and not talk about it, that touches the spectator. It is the
association of interesting action with character, that moves us and
inspires such better moods as may be within our compass. Diderot, like
many other people before and since, sought to make the stage the great
moral teacher. That it may become so, is possible. It will not be by
imitating the methods of that colossal type of histrionic failure, the
church-pulpit. Exhortation in set speeches always has been, and always
will be, the feeblest bulwark against the boiling floods of passion that
helpless virtue ever invented, and it matters not at all whether the
hortatory speeches are placed on the lips of Mr. Talkative, the son of
Saywell, or of some tearful dummy labelled the Father of the Family.[267]
Yet one is half ashamed to use hard words about Diderot. He was so
modest about his work, so simple and unpretending, so wholly without
restless and fretting ambitions, and so generous in his judgment of
others. He made his own dramatic experiment, he thought little enough of
it; and he was wholly above the hateful vice of sourly disparaging
competitors, whether dead or living. He knew that he was himself no
master, but he was manly enough to admire anybody who was nearer to
mastery. He was full of unaffected delight at Sedaine's busy and
pleasing little comedy, _The Philosopher without knowing it_; it was so
simple without being stiff, so eloquent without the shadow of effort or
rhetoric. After seeing it, Diderot ran off to the author to embrace him,
with many tears of joyful sympathy and gratitude. Sedaine, like Lillo,
the author of Diderot's favourite play of _George Barn__well_, was a
plain tradesman, and the success of his libretti for comic operas had
not spoiled him. He could find no more expansive words for his excited
admirer than "_Ah, Monsieur Diderot, que vous étes beau_!"[268] Diderot
was just as sensible of the originality and Aristophanic gaiety of
Collé's brilliant play, _Truth in Wine_, though Collé detested the
philosophic school from Voltaire downwards, and left behind him a
bitterly contemptuous account of _The Natural Son_.[269]
Of all comic writers, however, the author of the _Andria_ and the
_Heautontimorumenos_ was Diderot's favourite. The half dozen pages upon
Terence, which he threw off while the printer's boy waited in the
passage (1762), are one of the most easy, flowing, and delightful of his
fragments; there is such appreciation of Terence's suavity and tact, of
his just and fine judgment, of his discrimination and character. He
admits that Terence had no verve; for that he commends the young poet to
Molière or Aristophanes, but as verve was exactly the quality most
wanting to Diderot himself, he easily forgave its absence in Terence,
and thought it amply replaced by his moderation, his truth, and his fine
taste. Colman is praised for translating Terence, for here, says
Diderot, is the lesson of which Colman's countrymen stand most in need.
The English comic writers have more verve than taste. "Vanbrugh,
Wycherley, Congreve, and some others have painted vices and foibles
with vigour; it is not either invention or warmth or gaiety or force
that is wanting to their pencil, but rather that unity in the drawing,
that precision in the stroke, that truth in colouring, which distinguish
portrait from caricature. Especially are they wanting in the art of
discerning and seizing those _naïf_, simple, and yet singular movements
of character, which always please and astonish, and render the imitation
at once true and piquant."[270] Criticism has really nothing to add to
these few lines, and if Diderot in his last years read _The School for
Scandal_, or _The Rivals_, he would have found no reason to alter his
judgment.
One English play had the honour of being translated by Diderot; this
was _The Gamester_, not _The Gamester_ of Shirley nor of Garrick, but
of Edward Moore (1753). It is a good example of the bourgeois tragedy
or domestic drama, which Diderot was so eager to see introduced on to
the French stage. The infatuation of Beverley, the tears and virtue of
Mrs. Beverley, the prudence of Charlotte and the sage devotion of her
lover, the sympathetic remorse of Bates, and even the desperation of
Stukely, made up a picture of domestic misery and moral sentiment with
which Diderot was sure to fall in love. Lillo's _George Barnwell_, with
its direct and urgent moral, was a still greater favourite, and Diderot
compared the scene between Maria and Barnwell in prison to the despair
of the _Philocletes_ of Sophocles, as the hero is heard shrieking at
the mouth of his cavern;[271] just as a more modern critic has thought
Lillo's other play, _The Fatal Curiosity_, worthy of comparison with
the _Oedipus Tyrannus_.
Diderot's feeling for Shakespeare seems to have been what we might have
anticipated from the whole cast of his temperament. One of the scenes
which delighted him most was that moment of awe, when Lady Macbeth
silently advances down the stage with her eyes closed, and imitates the
action of washing her hands, as wondering that "the old man should have
so much blood in him." "I know nothing," he exclaims, "so pathetic in
discourse as that woman's silence and the movement of her hands. What an
image of remorse!"[272]
It was not to be expected that Diderot should indulge in those
undiscriminating superlatives about Shakespeare which are common in
Shakespeare's country. But he knew enough about him to feel that he was
dealing with a giant. "I will not compare Shakespeare," he said, "to the
Belvedere Apollo, nor to the Gladiator, nor to Antinous"--he had
compared Terence to the Medicean Venus--"but to the Saint Christopher of
Notre Dame, an unshapely colossus, rudely carven, but between whose legs
we could all pass without our brows touching him."[273] Not very
satisfactory recognition perhaps; but the Saint Christopher is better
than Voltaire's drunken savage.
It is not every dramatist who treats the art of acting as seriously as
the art of composition. The great author of _Wilhelm Meister_ is the
most remarkable exception to this rule, and Lessing is only second to
him. It is hardly possible for a man to be a great dramatist, and it is
simply impossible for a man to be a great critic of the drama, who has
not seriously studied the rules, aims, and conditions of stage
representation. Hazlitt, for instance, has written some admirable pages
about the poetry, the imaginative conception, the language, of
Shakespeare's plays, but we find his limit when he says that King Lear
is so noble a play that he cannot bear to see it acted. As if a play
could be fully judged without reference to the conditions of the very
object with which it was written. A play is to be criticised as a play,
not merely as a poem. The whole structure of a piece depends on the fact
that it is to be acted; its striking moments must be great dramatic, not
merely beautiful poetic, moments. They must have the intensity of pitch
by which the effect of action exceeds the effect of narrative. This
intensity is made almost infinitely variable with the variations in the
actor's mastery of his art.
Diderot, who threw so penetrating a glance into every subject that he
touched, even if it were no more than a glance, has left a number of
excellent remarks on histrionics. The key to them all is his everlasting
watchword: _Watch nature, follow her simple, and spontaneous leading_.
The Paradox on the Player is one of the very few of Diderot's pieces of
which we can say that, besides containing vigorous thought, it has real
finish in point of literary form. There is not the flat tone, the heavy
stroke, the loose shamble, that give a certain stamp of commonness to so
many of his most elaborate discussions. In the Paradox the thoughts seem
to fall with rapidity and precision into their right places; they are
direct; they are not overloaded with qualifications; their clear
delivery is not choked by a throng of asides and casual ejaculations.
Usually Diderot writes as if he were loath to let the sentence go, and
to allow the paragraph to come to an end. Here he lays down his
proposition, and without rambling passes on to the next. The effort is
not kept up quite to the close, for the last half dozen pages have the
ordinary clumsy mannerism of their author.
What is the Paradox? That a player of the first rank must have much
judgment, self-possession, and penetration, _but no sensibility_. An
actor with nothing but sense and judgment is apt to be cold; but an
actor with nothing but verve and sensibility is crazy. It is a certain
temperament of good sense and warmth combined, that makes the sublime
player.[274] Why should he differ from the poet, the painter, the
orator, the musician? It is not in the fury of the first impulse that
characteristic strokes occur to any of these men; it is in moments when
they are tranquil and cool, and such strokes come by an unexpected
inspiration.[275] It is for coolness to temper the delirium of
enthusiasm. It is not the violent man who is beside himself that
disposes of us; that is an advantage reserved for the man who possesses
himself. The great poets, the great actors, and perhaps generally all
the great imitators of nature, whatever they may be, are gifted with a
fine imagination, a great judgment, a subtle tact, a sure taste, but
they are creatures of the smallest sensibility. They are equally well
fitted for too many things; they are too busy in looking, in
recognising, and in imitating, to be violently affected within
themselves. Sensibility is hardly the quality of a great genius. He will
have justice; but he will practise it without reaping all the sweetness
of it. It is not his heart, but his head, that does it all. Well, then,
what I insist upon, says Diderot, is that it is extreme sensibility that
makes mediocre actors; it is mediocre sensibility that makes bad actors;
and it is the absolute want of sensibility that prepares actors who
shall be sublime.[276]
This is worked out with great clearness and decision, and some of the
illustrations to which he resorts to lighten the dialogue are amusing
enough. Perhaps the most interesting to us English is his account of
Garrick, whose acquaintance he made towards the year 1765. He says that
he saw Garrick pass his head between two folding doors, and in the space
of a few seconds, his face went successively from mad joy to moderate
joy, from that to tranquillity, from tranquillity to surprise, from
surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to gloom, from gloom to
utter dejection, from dejection to fear, from fear to horror, from
horror to despair, and then reascend from this lowest degree to the
point whence he had started.[277]
Of course his soul felt none of these emotions. "If you asked this
famous man, who by himself was as well worth a journey to England to
see, as all the wonders of Rome are worth a journey to Italy, if you
asked him, I say, for the scene of _The Little Baker's Boy_, he played
it; if you asked him the next minute for the scene from _Hamlet_, he
played that too for you, equally ready to sob over the fall of his pies,
and to follow the path of the dagger in the air."[278]
Apart from the central proposition, Diderot makes a number of excellent
observations which show his critical faculty at its best. As, for
example, in answering the question, what is the truth of the stage? Is
it to show things exactly as they are in nature? By no means. The true
in that sense would only be the common. The really true is the
conformity of action, speech, countenance, voice, movement, gesture,
with an ideal model imagined by the poet, and often exaggerated by the
player. And the marvel is that this model influences not only the tone,
but the whole carriage and gait. Again, what is the aim of multiplied
rehearsals? To establish a balance among the different talents of the
actors. The supreme excellence of one actor does not recompense you for
the mediocrity of the others, which is brought by that very superiority
into disagreeable prominence. Again, accent is easier to imitate than
movement, but movements are what strike us most violently. Hence a law
to which there is no exception, namely, under pain of being cold, to
make your denouement an action and not a narrative.[279]
One of the strongest satires on the reigning dramatic style, Diderot
found in the need that the actor had of the mirror. The fewer gestures,
he said, the better; frequent gesticulation impairs energy and destroys
nobleness. It is the countenance, the eyes, it is the whole body that
ought to move, and not the arms.[280] There is no maxim more forgotten
by poets than that which says that great passions are mute. It depends
on the player to produce a greater effect by silence than the poet can
produce by all his fine speeches.[281] Above all, the player is to study
tranquil scenes, for it is these that are the most truly difficult. He
commends a young actress to play every morning, by way of orisons, the
scene of Athalie with Joas; to say for evensong some scenes of Agrippina
with Nero; and for Benedicite the first scene of Phædra with her
confidante. Especially there is to be little emphasis--a warning
grievously needed by ninety-nine English speakers out of a hundred--for
emphasis is hardly ever natural; it is only a forced imitation of
nature.[282]
Diderot had perceived very early that the complacency with which his
countrymen regarded the national theatre was extravagant. He would not
allow a comparison between the conventional classic of the French stage
and the works of the Greek stage. He insisted in the case of the Greeks
that their subjects are noble, well chosen, and interesting; that the
action seems to develop itself spontaneously; that their dialogue is
simple and very close to what is natural; that the dénouements are not
forced; that the interest is not divided nor the action overloaded with
episodes. In the French classic he found none of these merits. He found
none of that truth which is the only secret of pleasing and touching us;
none of that simple and natural movement which is the only path to
perfect and unbroken illusion. The dialogue is all emphasis, wit,
glitter; all a thousand leagues away from nature. Instead of
artificially giving to their characters _esprit_ at every point, poets
ought to place them in such situations as will give it to them. Where in
the world did men and women ever speak as we declaim? Why should princes
and kings walk differently from any man who walks well? Did they then
gesticulate like raving madmen? Do princesses when they speak utter
sharp hissings?
People believe us to have brought tragedy to a high degree of
perfection. It is not so. Of all kinds of literature it is the most
imperfect.[283]
The ideas which appeared thus incongruously in the tales of 1748
reappeared in the direct essays on the drama in 1757 and 1758. We have
left nothing undone, he said, to corrupt dramatic style. We have
preserved from the ancients that emphasis of versification which was so
well fitted to languages of strong quantity and marked accent, to vast
theatres, to a declamation that had an instrumental accompaniment; and
then we have given up simplicity of plot and dialogue, and all truth of
situation.[284] La Motte nearly fifty years before had attacked the
pseudo-classic drama. He had inveighed against the unities, against long
monologues, against the device of confidants, and against verse. His
assault, in which he had the powerful aid of Fontenelle, was part of
that battle between Moderns and Ancients with which the literary
activity of the century had opened. The brilliant success of the
tragedies of Voltaire had restored the lustre of the conventional drama,
though Voltaire infused an element of the romantic under the severity of
the old forms. But the drama had become even less like Sophocles and
Euripides in _Zaïre_ than in _Phédre_ or _Iphigénie_. Voltaire intended
to constitute the French drama into an independent form. He expected to
be told that he was not like Sophocles, and he did not abstain from some
singularly free railing against Euripides. The Greek pieces often
smacked too much of the tone of the fair to satisfy him; they were too
familiar and colloquial for a taste that had been made fastidious by the
court-pieces of Lewis XIV. Diderot was kept free from such deplorable
criticism as this by feeling that the Greek drama was true to the
sentiment of the age that gave it birth, and that the French drama, if
not in the hands of Racine, still even in the hands of Voltaire, and
much more in the hands of such men as Lagrange-Chancel and the elder
Crébillon, was true to no sentiment save one purely literary,
artificial, and barren. He insists on the hopelessness of the stage,
unless men prepared themselves at every part for a grand return to
nature. We have seen what is his counsel to the actor. He preaches in
the same key to the scene-painter and the maker of costumes.
Scene-painting ought to be more rigorously true than any other kind of
picture. Let there be no distraction, no extraneous suggestion, to
interfere with the impression intended by the poet. Have you a salon to
represent? Let it be that of a man of taste and no more: no ostentation
and no gilding, unless the situation expressly demands the contrary.
In the dresses the same rule holds good. Under robes that are overladen
with gold lace, I only see a rich man; what I want to see is a man.
Pretty and simple draperies of severe tints are what we need, not a
mass of tinsel and embroidery. "A courageous actress has just got rid of
her panier, and nobody has found her any the worse for it. Ah, if she
only dared one day to show herself on the stage with all the nobility
and simplicity of adjustment that her characters demand; nay, in the
disorder into which she would be thrown by an event so terrible as the
death of a husband, the loss of a son, and the other catastrophes of the
tragic stage, what would become, round her dishevelled figure, of all
those powdered, curled, frizzled, tricked-out creatures? Sooner or later
they must put themselves in unison. O nature, nature! We can never
resist her."[285]
From all this we turn, for a few moments only, and not too cheerfully,
to the Serbonian bog of dramatic rules and the metaphysics of the
theatre. There is no subject in literature, not even the interpretation
of the Apocalypse, which has given birth to such pedantic, dismal, and
futile discussion. The immense controversy, carried on in books,
pamphlets, sheets and flying articles, mostly German, as to what it was
that Aristotle really meant by the famous words in the sixth chapter of
the _Poetics_, about tragedy accomplishing the purification of our moods
of pity and sympathetic fear, is one of the disgraces of human
intelligence, a grotesque monument of sterility. The great tap-root of
fallacy has been and remains the incessant imputation of ethical or
social purpose to the dramatist, and the demand of direct and combined
ethical or social effect from the drama. There is no critic, from the
great Aristotle downwards, who has steered quite clear of these evil
shallows; Diderot, as we have seen, least of all. But Diderot disarms
the impatience which narrower critics kindle, by this magnificent
concession, coming at the close of all: "Especially remember that _there
is no general principle;_ I do not know a single one of those that I
have indicated which a man of genius cannot infringe with success."[286]
Here we listen to the voice of the genuine Diderot; and if this be
granted, we need not give more than a passing attention to the rules
that have gone before--about the danger of borrowing in the same
composition the shades both of the comic and of the tragic styles; about
movement being injurious to dignity, and of the importance therefore of
not making the principal personage the _machinist_ of the piece; about
the inexpediency of episodic personages--and so forth. The only remark
worth making on these propositions is that, whatever their value may be,
Diderot at any rate, like a true philosopher, generalised from the facts
of nature and art. He did not follow the too common critical method of
reading one's own ideas into a work of art, and then taking them back
again in the more imposing form of inevitable deductions from the work
itself.
What Diderot conceived himself really to have done, was to have sketched
and constituted a new species in the great dramatic kingdom. Every one
knows, he said, that there is tragedy and that there is comedy, but we
have to learn that there is room in nature and the art of the stage for
a third division, namely, the _genre sérieux_, a kind of comedy that has
for its object virtue and the duties of man. Why should the writer of
comedy confine his work to what is vicious or ridiculous in men? Why
should not the duties of men furnish the dramatist with as ample
material as their vices? Surely in the _genre honnête et sérieux_ the
subject is as important as in gay comedy. The characters are as varied
and as original. The passions are all the more energetic as the interest
will be greater. The style will be graver, loftier, more forcible, more
susceptible of what we call sentiment, a quality without which no style
ever yet spoke to the heart. The ridiculous will not be absent, for the
madness of actions and speeches, when they are suggested by the
misunderstanding of interests or by the transport of passion, is the
truly ridiculous thing in men and in life.[287]
Besides his own two pieces, Diderot would probably have pointed to
Terence as the author coming nearest to the _genre sérieux_. If Goethe's
bad play of _Stella_ had retained the close as he originally wrote it,
with the bigamous Fernando in the last scene rejoicing over the devoted
agreement of the two ladies and his daughter to live with him in happy
unity, that would perhaps have been a comedy of the _genre sérieux_,
with the duties of man gracefully adapted to circumstances.
The theory of the _genre sérieux_ has not led to the formation of any
school of writers adopting it and working it out, or to the production
of any masterpiece that has held its ground, as has happened in tragedy,
comedy, and farce. Beaumarchais, who at last achieved such a dazzling
and portentous success by one dramatic masterpiece, began his career as
a playwright by following the vein of _The Father of the Family;_ but
_The Marriage of Figaro_, though not without strong traces of Diderotian
sentiment in pungent application, yet is in its structure and
composition less French than Spanish. It is quite true, as Rosenkranz
says, that the prevailing taste on the French stage in our own times
favours above all else bourgeois romantic comedy, written in prose.[288]
But the strength of the romantic element in them would have been as
little satisfactory to Diderot's love of realistic moralising as the
conventional tragedy of the court of Lewis XIV. The Fable of most of
them turns on adultery, and this is not within the method of the _genre
sérieux_ as expounded by Diderot. Perhaps half a dozen comedies, such,
for instance, as _The Ideas of Madame Aubray,_ by M. Dumas, are of the
_genre sérieux_, but certainly there are not enough of such comedies to
constitute a genuine Diderotian school in France. There is no need
therefore to say more about the theory than this, namely, that though
the drama is an imitative art, yet besides imitation its effects demand
illusion. What, cries Diderot, you do not conceive the effect that would
be produced on you by a real scene, with real dresses, with speech in
true proportion to the action, with the actions themselves simple, with
the very dangers that have made you tremble for your parents, for your
friends, for yourselves? No, we answer: reproduction of reality does not
move us as a powerful work of imagination moves us. "We may as well
urge," said Burke, "that stones, sand, clay, and metals lie in a certain
manner in the earth, as a reason for building with these materials and
in that manner, as for writing according to the accidental disposition
of characters in Nature."[289] Common dangers do not excite us; it is
the presentation of danger in some uncommon form, in some new
combination, in some fresh play of motive and passion, that quickens
that sympathetic fear and pity which it is the end of a play to produce.
And if this be so, there is another thing to be said. If we are to be
deliberately steeped in the atmosphere of Duty, illusion is out of
place. The constant presence of that severe and overpowering figure,
"Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," checks the native wildness of
imagination, restricts the exuberance of fancy, and sets a rigorous
limit to invention. Diderot used to admit that the _genre sérieux_ could
never take its right place until it had been handled by a man of high
dramatic genius. The cause why this condition has never come to pass is
simply that its whole structure and its regulations repel the faculties
of dramatic genius.
Besides the perfection of the _genre sérieux_, Diderot insisted that the
following tasks were also to be achieved before the stage could be said
to have attained the full glory of the other arts. First, a domestic or
bourgeois tragedy must be created. Second, the conditions of men, their
callings and situations, the types of classes, in short, must be
substituted for mere individual characters. Third, a real tragedy must
be introduced upon the lyric theatre. Finally, the dance must be brought
within the forms of a true poem.
The only remark to be made upon this scheme touches the second article
of it. To urge the substitution of types of classes for individual
character was the very surest means that could have been devised for
bringing back the conventional forms of the pseudo-classic drama. The
very mark of that drama was that it introduced types instead of
vigorously stamped personalities. What would be gained by driving the
typical king off the stage, only to make room for the generalisation of
a shopkeeper? This was not the path that led to romanticism, to André
Chenier, to De Vigny, to Lamartine, to Victor Hugo. Théophile Gautier
has told us that the fiery chiefs of the romantic school who suddenly
conquered France at the close of the Restoration, divided the whole
world into _flamboyant_ and _drab_. In the literature of the past they
counted Voltaire one of the Drab, and Diderot a Flamboyant.[290] If it
be not too presumptuous in a foreigner to dissent, we cannot but think
that they were mistaken. Nothing could be farther removed at every part
from Diderot's dramatic scheme, than _Faust_ or _Götz von Berlichingen_
or _Hernani_.
The truth is that it was impossible for an effective antagonism to the
classic school to rise in the mind of an Encyclopædist, for the reason
that the Encyclopædists hated and ignored what they called the Dark
Ages. Yet it was exactly the Dark Ages from which the great romantic
revival drew its very life-breath. "In the eighteenth century," it has
been said, "it was really the reminiscence of the classic spirit which
was awakened in the newer life of Europe, and made prominent."[291] This
is true in a certain historic sense of Rousseau's politics, and perhaps
of Voltaire's rationalism. In spite of the vein of mysticism which
occasionally shows in him, it is true in some degree of Diderot himself,
if by classicism we mean the tendency to make man the centre of the
universe. Classicism treats man as worthy and great, living his life
among cold and neutral forces. This is the very opposite of the
sinfulness, imperfection, and nothingness habitually imputed to man, and
the hourly presence of a whole hierarchy of busy supernatural agents
placed about man by the Middle Ages. Yet we cannot but see that Diderot
was feeling for dramatic forms and subjects that would have been as
little classic as romantic. He failed in the search. There is one play
and only one of his epoch that is not classic, and is not romantic, but
speaks independently the truest and best mind of the eighteenth century
itself, in its own form and language. That play is _Nathan the Wise_.