_TO MRS. GRUNDY_
Madam,--It is surely fitting that a book which harks back to the manners
of the second George should have its dedication and its patron. And these
comedies claim naturally your protection, since it likewise appears
a custom of that era for the poet to dedicate his book to his most
influential acquaintance and the one least likely to value it.
Indeed, it is as proper that the plaudits of great persons be reserved for
great performances as it is undeniable these
tiny pictures of that tiny time
Aim little at the lofty and sublime.
Yet cognoscenti still esteem it an error in the accomplished Shakespeare
that he introduced a game of billiards into his portrayal of Queen
Cleopatra's court; and the impropriety had been equal had I linked the
extreme of any passion with an age and circle wherein abandonment to
the emotions was adjudged bucolic, nay, Madam, the Eumenides were very
terrifying at Delphi, no doubt, but deck them with paint, patch, and
panniers, send them howling among the _beau monde_ on the Pantiles, and
they are only figures of fun; nor may, in reason, the high woes of a second
Lear, or of a new Prometheus, be adequately lighted by the flambeaux of
Louis Quinze.
Conceive, then, the overture begun, and fear not, if the action of the play
demand a lion, but that he shall be a beast of Peter Quince's picking. The
ladies shall not be frighted, for our chief comedians will enact modish
people of a time when gallantry prevailed.
Now the essence of gallantry, I take it, was to accept the pleasures of
life leisurely and its inconveniences with a shrug. As requisites, a
gallant person will, of course, be "amorous, but not too constant, have
a pleasant voice, and possess a talent for love-letters." He will always
bear in mind that in love-affairs success is less the Ultima Thule of
desire than its _coup de grâce_, and he will be careful never to admit the
fact, especially to himself. He will value ceremony, but rather for its
comeliness than for its utility, as one esteeming the lily, say, to be a
more applaudable bulb than the onion. He will prink; and he will be at his
best after sunset. He will dare to acknowledge the shapeliness of a thief's
leg, to contend that the commission of murder does not necessarily impair
the agreeableness of the assassin's conversation; and to insist that at
bottom God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational. He will,
in fine, sin on sufficient provocation, and repent within the moment,
quite sincerely, and be not unconscionably surprised when he repeats the
progression: and he will consider the world with a smile of toleration, and
his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile
that is not distrustful.
This particular attitude toward life may have its merits, but it is not
conducive to meticulous morality; therefore, in advance, I warn you that my
_Dramatis Personæ_ will in their display of the cardinal virtues evince a
certain parsimony. Theirs were, in effect, not virtuous days. And the great
man who knew these times _au fond_, and loved them, and wrote of them as no
other man may ever hope to do, has said of these same times, with perfect
truth:
"Fiddles sing all through them; wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes,
fine plate, fine equipages, glitter and sparkle: never was there such
a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair. But wandering through that
city of the dead, that dreadfully selfish time, through those godless
intrigues and feasts, through those crowds, pushing, and eager, and
struggling,--rouged, and lying, and fawning,--I have wanted some one to be
friends with. I have said, _Show me some good person about that Court; find
me, among those selfish courtiers, those dissolute gay people, some one
being that I can love and regard._" And Thackeray confesses that, for all
his research, he could not find anybody living irreproachably, at this
especial period....
Where a giant fails one may in reason hesitate to essay. I present, then,
people who, as people normally do, accepted their times and made the best
of them, since the most estimable needs conform a little to the custom of
his day, whether it be Caractacus painting himself sky-blue or Galileo on
his knees at Santa Maria. And accordingly, many of my comedians will lie
when it seems advisable, and will not haggle over a misdemeanor when there
is anything to be gained by it; at times their virtues will get them
what they want, and at times their vices, and at other times they will
be neither punished nor rewarded; in fine, Madam, they will be just human
beings stumbling through illogical lives with precisely that lack of
common-sense which so pre-eminently distinguishes all our neighbors from
ourselves.
For the life that moved in old Manuel of Poictesme finds hereinafter in his
descendants, in these later Allonbys and Bulmers and Heleighs and Floyers,
a new _milieu_ to conform and curb that life in externes rather than in
essentials. What this life made of chivalrous conditions has elsewhere
been recorded: with its renewal in gallant circumstances, the stage is
differently furnished and lighted, the costumes are dissimilar; but the
comedy, I think, works toward the same _dénouement_, and certainly the
protagonist remains unchanged. My protagonist is still the life of Manuel,
as this life was perpetuated in his descendants; and my endeavor is (still)
to show you what this life made (and omitted to make) of its tenancy of
earth. 'Tis a drama enactable in any setting.
Yet the comedy of gallantry has its conventions. There must be quite
invaluable papers to be stolen and juggled with; an involuntary
marriage either threatened or consummated; elopements, highwaymen, and
despatch-boxes; and a continual indulgence in soliloquy and eavesdropping.
Everybody must pretend to be somebody else, and young girls, in particular,
must go disguised as boys, amid much cut-and-thrust work, both ferric and
verbal. For upon the whole, the comedy of gallantry tends to unfold itself
in dialogue, and yet more dialogue, with just the notice of a change
of scene or a brief stage direction inserted here and there. All these
conventions, Madam, I observe.
A word more: the progress of an author who alternates, in turn, between
fact and his private fancies (like unequal crutches) cannot in reason be
undisfigured by false steps. Therefore it is judicious to confess, Madam,
that more than once I have pieced the opulence of my subject with the
poverty of my inventions. Indisputably, to thrust words into a dead man's
mouth is in the ultimate as unpardonable as the axiomatic offence of
stealing the pennies from his eyes; yet if I have sometimes erred in my
surmise at what Ormskirk or de Puysange or Louis de Soyecourt really said
at certain moments of their lives, the misstep was due, Madam, less to
malevolence than to inability to replevin their superior utterance; and the
accomplished shade of Garendon, at least, I have not travestied, unless it
were through some too prudent item of excision.
Remains but to subscribe myself--in the approved formula of dedicators--as,