There are a score of other little plays like the 'Broken Bridge,'
adroitly adjusted to the caliber of the juvenile mind. In a British
collection may be found a piece representing a succession of appalling
episodes supposed to take place in a 'Haunted House,' and in a French
manual for the use of youthful amateurs may be discovered a rudimentary
version of Moliere's 'Imaginary Invalid,' to be performed by silhouettes
with articulated limbs. Here again we perceive the inaccuracy of the
term "shadow-pantomime," since the most of the figures are not
articulated, and, being motionless, they are deprived of the freedom of
gesture which is the essential element of true pantomime. Moreover, they
are all made to take part in various dialogs, and this again is a
negation of the fundamental principle of pantomime, which ought to be
wordless. Here the French term "Chinese shadows" is more exact and less
limiting than the English "shadow-pantomime." It is perhaps a pity that
the old-fashioned term "gallanty-show," has not won a wider acceptance
in English.
The little pieces due to Seraphin and his humble followers in France and
in England, devised to amuse children only, were simple enough in plot,
and yet they were sufficient to suggest to admirers of this unpretending
form of theatrical art plays of a more imposing proportion. M. Paul
Eudel, the art critic, has published an amply illustrated volume in
which he collected the fairy-pieces, and the more spectacular melodramas
composed by his grandfather in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century, in the dark days that preceded Waterloo. And in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century, in the dark days that preceded Sedan,
M. Lemercier de Neuville, relinquishing for a while the Punch and Judy
puppets which he called _Pupazzi_, and which he had exhibited in a
succession of gentle caricatures of Parisian personalities with a mildly
Aristophanic flavor of contemporary satire, turned to the familiar
Chinese shadows of his childhood and devised what he called his _Pupazzi
noirs_, animated shadows. He also has issued a collection of these
little pieces with a full explanation of the method of performance and
with half a hundred illustrations, revealing all the secrets of
maneuvering the little figures. Indeed, Lemercier de Neuville's manual
is the most ample which has yet appeared; and it is the most interesting
in that he was at once his own playwright, his own designer of figures,
and his own performer.
[Illustration: The return from the Bois de Boulogne
Four shadow pictures by Caran d'Ache]
[Illustration: The ballet
From a shadow picture by Lemercier de Neuville]
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of Hachette & Co., Paris_
A regiment of French soldiers
From a shadow picture by R. de La Neziere]
As the grandfather of M. Eudel had been more ambitious than Seraphin, so
Lemercier de Neuville was more ambitious than the elder Eudel. And yet
his procedure was precisely that of his predecessors, and he did not in
any way modify the principles of the art. All he did was to elaborate
the performance by the use of more scenery, of more spectacular effects,
and of more numerous characters. He introduced a company of Spanish
dancers, for example, and he did not hesitate to throw on his screen the
sable and serrated profile of a long line of ballet dancers. He followed
Eudel in arranging a procession of animals, rivaling a circus parade,
many of them being articulated so that they could make the appropriate
movements of their jaws and their paws. And he paid special attention to
his silhouette caricatures of contemporary celebrities, Zola for one,
and Sarah-Bernhardt for another.
Then the Franco-Russian draftsman, who called himself Caran d'Ache, made
a new departure and started the art of the shadow-pantomime in a new
career. He called his figures "French shadows," _ombres francaises_, and
he surrendered the privilege of articulating his figures so that they
could move. At least, he refrained from this except on rare occasions,
preferring the effect of immobility and relying mainly upon a new
principle not before employed by any of his predecessors. He made a
specialty of long lines and of large masses of troops, not all on the
same plane, but presented in perspective. He chose also to forgo the aid
of speech and his figures were silent, except when some officer called
out a word of command, or when a company of Cossacks rode past singing
one of the wailing lyrics of the Caucasus as melancholy as the steppes.
One of the most attractive items on his program was a representation of
the return of vehicles and equestrians from the Bois de Boulogne in the
afternoon. Some of the figures were merely characteristic types sharply
seized and outlined with all the artist's masterly draftsmanship, and
some of them were well-known personages easily recognizable by his
Parisian spectators--Lesseps on horseback, for example, and Rochefort in
an open cab. These successive figures were simply pushed across the
screen one after another, each of them as motionless as a statue, the
men fixed in one attitude, and the legs of the horses retaining always
the same position. This absence of animal movement was, of course, a
violation from the facts of life, like that which permits the painter to
depict a breaking wave or a sculptor to model a running boy at a single
moment of the movement. Yet this artistic conversion was immediately
acceptable since the spectator received a simplified impression and
his attention was not distracted by the inevitable jerkiness of the
limbs of the men and the beasts.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of E. Flammarion, Paris_
The Sphinx I: Pharaoh passing in triumph
From a shadow picture by Amedee Vignola]
Caran d'Ache's masterpiece, however--and it may honestly be styled a
masterpiece--was not the 'Return from the Bois de Boulogne' but his
'Epopee,' his epic evocation of the grand army of Napoleon. Single
figures like the Little Corporal on horseback, and like Murat and others
of the Emperor's staff, he projected with a fidelity and a veracity of
accent worthy of Detaille or even Meissonier. Yet fine as these single
figures might be, they were only what had been attempted by earlier
exponents of the art--even if they were more impressive than had been
achieved by any one of his predecessors. These single figures were
necessarily presented all on the same plane, and the startling and
successful innovation of the Franco-Russian draftsmanship was his
skilful use of perspective, a device which had not occurred to any of
those in whose footsteps he was following, even Lemercier de Neuville
having presented his ballet dancers in a flat row. What Caran d'Ache did
was to bring before us company after company of the Old Guard, and troop
after troop of cuirassiers, their profiles diminishing in height as
the figures receded from the eye. He thus attained to an effect of
solidity and even of immensity, far beyond anything ever before achieved
by any earlier exhibitor of shadows. He succeeded in suggesting space,
and of maneuvering before the astonished eyes of the entranced
spectators a vast mass of men under arms, marching forward resolutely in
serried ranks to victory or to death.
The late Jules Lemaitre, the most open-minded of French dramatic
critics, and the most hospitable in his attitude toward the minor
manifestations of theatric art, has recorded that this Napoleonic epic
of Caran d'Ache communicated to him not only an emotion of actual
grandeur, but also the thrill of war itself. He declared that "by the
exactness of the perspective preserved in his long files of soldiers,
Caran d'Ache gives us the illusion of number and of a number immense and
indefinite. And by the automatic movement which sets all his troops in
action at once, he gives us the illusion of a single soul, of a communal
thought animating innumerable bodies--and thereby he evokes in us the
impression of measureless power.... His silent poem, with its sliding
profiles is, I think, the only epic in all French literature." And those
who are familiar with the other French efforts to attain to lyric
largeness, and who have had also the unforgetable felicity of beholding
Caran d'Ache's marvelous projection of the Napoleonic legend, will be
prepared to admit that Lemaitre did not overstate the case.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of E. Flammarion, Paris_
The Sphinx II: Moses leading his people out of Egypt
From a shadow picture by Amedee Vignola]