strange if, in this age, liberty, like the light, should penetrate
everywhere except to the one place where freedom is most natural--the
domain of thought. Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic
systems. Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the facade
of art. There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, there are
no other rules than the general laws of nature, which soar above
the whole field of art, and the special rules which result from the
conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition. The
former are of the essence, eternal, and do not change; the latter
are variable, external, and are used but once. The former are the
framework that supports the house; the latter the scaffolding which
is used in building it, and which is made anew for each building. In a
word, the former are the flesh and bones, the latter the clothing, of
the drama. But these rules are not written in the treatises on poetry.
Richelet has no idea of their existence. Genius, which divines rather
than learns, devises for each work the general rules from the general
plan of things, the special rules from the separate _ensemble_ of the
subject treated; not after the manner of the chemist, who lights the
fire under his furnace, heats his crucible, analyzes and destroys; but
after the manner of the bee, which flies on its golden wings, lights
on each flower and extracts its honey, leaving it as brilliant and
fragrant as before.
The poet--let us insist on this point--should take counsel therefore
only of nature, truth, and inspiration which is itself both truth and
nature. "Quando he," says Lope de Vega,
"Quando he de escrivir una comedia,
Encierro los preceptos con seis llaves."
To secure these precepts "six keys" are none too many, in very
truth. Let the poet beware especially of copying anything
whatsoever--Shakespeare no more than Molière, Schiller no more than
Corneille. If genuine talent could abdicate its own nature in this
matter, and thus lay aside its original personality, to transform
itself into another, it would lose everything by playing this role of
its own double. It is as if a god should turn valet. We must draw our
inspiration from the original sources. It is the same sap, distributed
through the soil, that produces all the trees of the forest, so
different in bearing power, in fruit, in foliage. It is the same
nature that fertilizes and nourishes the most diverse geniuses. The
poet is a tree that may be blown about by all winds and watered by
every fall of dew; and bears his works as his fruit, as the _fablier_
of old bore his fables. Why attach one's self to a master, or graft
one's self upon a model? It were better to be a bramble or a thistle,
fed by the same earth as the cedar and the palm, than the fungus
or the lichen of those noble trees. The bramble lives, the fungus
vegetates. Moreover, however great the cedar and the palm may be,
it is not with the sap one sucks from them that one can become great
one's self. A giant's parasite will be at best a dwarf. The oak,
colossus that it is, can produce and sustain nothing more than the
mistletoe.
Let there be no misunderstanding: if some of our poets have succeeded
in being great, even when copying, it is because, while forming
themselves on the antique model, they have often listened to the
voice of nature and to their own genius--it is because they have been
themselves in some one respect. Their branches became entangled in
those of the near-by tree, but their roots were buried deep in the
soil of art. They were the ivy, not the mistletoe. Then came imitators
of the second rank, who, having neither roots in the earth, nor genius
in their souls, had to confine themselves to imitation. As Charles
Nodier says: "After the school of Athens, the school of Alexandria."
Then there was a deluge of mediocrity; then there came a swarm of
those treatises on poetry, so annoying to true talent, so convenient
for mediocrity. We were told that everything was done, and God was
forbidden to create more Molières or Corneilles. Memory was put
in place of imagination. Imagination itself was subjected to
hard-and-fast rules, and aphorisms were made about it: "To imagine,"
says La Harpe, with his naive assurance, "is in substance to remember,
that is all."
But nature! Nature and truth!--And here, in order to prove that, far
from demolishing art, the new ideas aim only to reconstruct it
more firmly and on a better foundation, let us try to point out the
impassable limit which in our opinion, separates reality according to
art from reality according to nature. It is careless to confuse them
as some ill-informed partisans of _romanticism_ do. Truth in art
cannot possibly be, as several writers have claimed, _absolute_
reality. Art cannot produce the thing itself. Let us imagine, for
example, one of those unreflecting promoters of absolute nature, of
nature viewed apart from art, at the performance of a romantic play,
say _Le Cid_. "What's that?" he will ask at the first word. "The Cid
speaks in verse? It isn't _natural_ to speak in verse."--"How would
you have him speak, pray?"--"In prose." Very good. A moment later,
"How's this!" he will continue, if he is consistent; "the Cid is
speaking French!"--"Well?"--"Nature demands that he speak his own
language; he can't speak anything but Spanish."
We shall fail entirely to understand, but again--very good. You
imagine that this is all? By no means: before the tenth sentence in
Castilian, he is certain to rise and ask if the Cid who is speaking is
the real Cid, in flesh and blood. By what right does the actor, whose
name is Pierre or Jacques, take the name of the Cid? That is _false_.
There is no reason why he should not go on to demand that the sun
should be substituted for the footlights, _real_ trees and _real_
houses for those deceitful wings. For, once started on that road,
logic has you by the collar, and you cannot stop.
We must admit, therefore, or confess ourselves ridiculous, that the
domains of art and of nature are entirely distinct. Nature and art are
two things--were it not so, one or the other would not exist. Art, in
addition to its idealistic side, has a terrestrial, material side. Let
it do what it will, it is shut in between grammar and prosody, between
Vaugelas and Richelet. For its most capricious creations, it has
formulas, methods of execution, a complete apparatus to set in motion.
For genius there are delicate instruments, for mediocrity, tools.
It seems to us that someone has already said that the drama is a
mirror wherein nature is reflected. But if it be an ordinary mirror,
a smooth and polished surface, it will give only a dull image of
objects, with no relief-faithful, but colourless; everyone knows
that colour and light are lost in a simple reflection. The drama,
therefore, must be a concentrating mirror, which, instead of
weakening, concentrates and condenses the coloured rays, which makes
of a mere gleam a light, and of a light a flame. Then only is the
drama acknowledged by art.
The stage is an optical point. Everything that exists in the world--in
history, in life, in man--should be and can be reflected therein,
but under the magic wand of art. Art turns the leaves of the ages,
of nature, studies chronicles, strives to reproduce actual facts
(especially in respect to manners and peculiarities, which are much
less exposed to doubt and contradiction than are concrete facts),
restores what the chroniclers have lopped off, harmonises what they
have collected, divines and supplies their omissions, fills their gaps
with imaginary scenes which have the colour of the time, groups what
they have left scattered about, sets in motion anew the threads of
Providence which work the human marionettes, clothes the whole with a
form at once poetical and natural, and imparts to it that vitality of
truth and brilliancy which gives birth to illusion, that prestige of
reality which arouses the enthusiasm of the spectator, and of the poet
first of all, for the poet is sincere. Thus the aim of art is almost
divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if
it is writing poetry.
It is a grand and beautiful sight to see this broad development of a
drama wherein art powerfully seconds nature; of a drama wherein the
plot moves on to the conclusion with a firm and unembarrassed step,
without diffuseness and without undue compression; of a drama, in
short, wherein the poet abundantly fulfills the multifold object
of art, which is to open to the spectator a double prospect, to
illuminate at the same time the interior and the exterior of mankind:
the exterior by their speech and their acts, the interior, by asides
and monologues; to bring together, in a word, in the same picture, the
drama of life and the drama of conscience.
It will readily be imagined that, for a work of this kind, if the poet
must _choose_ (and he must), he should choose, not the _beautiful_,
but the _characteristic_. Not that it is advisable to "make local
colour," as they say to-day; that is, to add as an afterthought a few
discordant touches here and there to a work that is at best utterly
conventional and false. The local colour should not be on the surface
of the drama, but in its substance, in the very heart of the work,
whence it spreads of itself, naturally, evenly, and, so to speak, into
every corner of the drama, as the sap ascends from the root to the
tree's topmost leaf. The drama should be thoroughly impregnated with
this colour of the time, which should be, in some sort, in the air,
so that one detects it only on entering the theatre, and that on going
forth one finds one's self in a different period and atmosphere. It
requires some study, some labour, to attain this end; so much the
better. It is well that the avenues of art should be obstructed by
those brambles from which everybody recoils except those of
powerful will. Besides, it is this very study, fostered by an ardent
inspiration, which will ensure the drama against a vice that
kills it--the _commonplace_. To be commonplace is the failing of
short-sighted, short-breathed poets. In this tableau of the stage,
each figure must be held down to its most prominent, most individual,
most precisely defined characteristic. Even the vulgar and the trivial
should have an accent of their own. Like God, the true poet is present
in every part of his work at once. Genius resembles the die which
stamps the king's effigy on copper and golden coins alike.
We do not hesitate--and this will demonstrate once more to honest men
how far we are from seeking to discredit the art--we do not hesitate
to consider verse as one of the means best adapted to protect the
drama from the scourge we have just mentioned, as one of the most
powerful dams against the irruption of the commonplace, which, like
democracy, is always flowing between full banks in men's minds. And at
this point we beg the younger literary generation, already so rich
in men and in works, to allow us to point out an error into which it
seems to have fallen--an error too fully justified, indeed, by the
extraordinary aberrations of the old school. The new century is at
that growing age at which one can readily set one's self right.
There has appeared of late, like a penultimate branching-out of the
old classical trunk, or, better still, like one of those excrescences,
those polypi, which decrepitude develops, and which are a sign of
decomposition much more than a proof of life--there has appeared a
strange school of dramatic poetry. This school seems to us to have had
for its master and its fountain-head the poet who marks the transition
from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the man of wearisome
description and periphrases--that Delille who, they say, toward
the close of his life, boasted, after the fashion of the Homeric
catalogues, of having _made_ twelve camels, four dogs, three
horses, including Job's, six tigers, two cats, a chess-board, a
backgammon-board, a checker-board, a billiard-table, several winters,
many summers, a multitude of springs, fifty sunsets, and so many
daybreaks that he had lost count of them.
Now, Delille went into tragedy. He is the father (he, and not Racine,
God save the mark!) of an alleged school of refinement and taste which
flourished until recently. Tragedy is not to this school what it was
to Will Shakespeare, say, a source of emotions of every sort, but a
convenient frame for the solution of a multitude of petty descriptive
problems which it propounds as it goes along. This muse, far from
spurning, as the true French classic school does, the trivial and
degrading things of life, eagerly seeks them out and brings them
together. The grotesque, shunned as undesirable company by the tragedy
of Louis the Fourteenth's day, cannot pass unnoticed before her.
_It must be described_, that is to say, ennobled. A scene in the
guard-house, a popular uprising, the fish-market, the galleys, the
wine-shop, the _poule au pot_ of Henri Quatre, are treasure-trove in
her eyes. She seizes upon this canaille, washes it clean, and sews her
tinsel and spangles over its villainies; _purpureus assuitur pannus_.
Her object seems to be to deliver patents of nobility to all these
_roturiers_ of the drama; and each of these patents under the great
seal is a speech.
This muse, as may be imagined, is of a rare prudery. Wonted as she
is to the caresses of periphrasis, plain-speaking, if she should
occasionally be exposed to it, would horrify her. It does not accord
with her dignity to speak naturally. She _underlines_ old Corneille
for his blunt way of speaking, as in,--
"_A heap of men_ ruined by debt and crimes."
"Chimène, _who'd have thought it_? Rodrigue, _who'd have said
it_?"
"When their Flaminius _haggled with_ Hannibal."
"Oh! do not _embroil_ me with the Republic."
She still has her "Tout beau, monsieur!" on her heart. And it
needed many "seigneurs" and "madames" to procure forgiveness for our
admirable Racine for his monosyllabic "dogs!" and for so brutally
bestowing Claudius in Agrippina's bed.
This Melpomene, as she is called, would shudder at the thought of
touching a chronicle. She leaves to the costumer the duty of learning
the period of the dramas she writes. In her eyes history is bad form
and bad taste. How, for example, can one tolerate kings and queens
who swear? They must be elevated from mere regal dignity to tragic
dignity. It was in a promotion of this sort that she exalted Henri IV.
It was thus that the people's king, purified by M. Legouvé, found
his "ventre-saint-gris" ignominiously banished from his mouth by
two sentences, and that he was reduced, like the girl in the old
_fabliau_, to the necessity of letting fall from those royal lips only
pearls and sapphires and rubies: the apotheosis of falsity, in very
truth.
The fact is that nothing is so commonplace as this conventional
refinement and nobility. Nothing original, no imagination,
no invention in this style; simply what one has seen
everywhere--rhetoric, bombast, commonplaces, flowers of college
eloquence, poetry after the style of Latin verses. The poets of this
school are eloquent after the manner of stage princes and princesses,
always sure of finding in the costumer's labelled cases, cloaks and
pinchbeck crowns, which have no other disadvantage than that of having
been used by everybody. If these poets never turn the leaves of the
Bible, it is not because they have not a bulky book of their own, the
_Dictionnaire de rimes_. That is the source of their poetry--_fontes
aquarum_.
It will be seen that, in all this, nature and truth get along as best
they can. It would be great good luck if any remnants of either should
survive in this cataclysm of false art, false style, false poetry.
This is what has caused the errors of several of our distinguished
reformers. Disgusted by the stiffness, the ostentation, the _pomposo_,
of this alleged dramatic poetry, they have concluded that the elements
of our poetic language were incompatible with the natural and the
true. The Alexandrine had wearied them so often, that they condemned
it without giving it a hearing, so to speak, and decided, a little
hastily, perhaps, that the drama should be written in prose.
They were mistaken. If in fact the false is predominant in the style
as well as in the action of certain French tragedies, it is not the
verses that should be held responsible therefore, but the versifiers.
It was needful to condemn, not the form employed, but those who
employed it: the workmen, not the tool.
To convince one's self how few obstacles the nature of our poetry
places in the way of the free expression of all that is true, we
should study our verse, not in Racine, perhaps, but often in Corneille
and always in Molière. Racine, a divine poet, is elegiac, lyric, epic;
Molière is dramatic. It is time to deal sternly with the criticisms
heaped upon that admirable style by the wretched taste of the last
century, and to proclaim aloud that Molière occupies the topmost
pinnacle of our drama, not only as a poet, but also as a writer.
_Palmas vere habet iste duas_.
In his work the verse surrounds the idea, becomes of its very essence,
compresses and develops it at once, imparts to it a more slender, more
definite, more complete form, and gives us, in some sort, an extract
thereof. Verse is the optical form of thought. That is why it is
especially adapted to the perspective of the stage. Constructed in a
certain way, it communicates its relief to things which, but for it,
would be considered insignificant and trivial. It makes the tissue of
style finer and firmer. It is the knot which stays the thread. It is
the girdle which holds up the garment and gives it all its folds. What
could nature and the true lose, then, by entering into verse? We ask
the question of our prose-writers themselves--what do they lose
in Molière's poetry? Does wine--we beg pardon for another trivial
illustration--does wine cease to be wine when it is bottled?
If we were entitled to say what, in our opinion, the style of dramatic
poetry should be, we would declare for a free, outspoken, sincere
verse, which dares say everything without prudery, express its meaning
without seeking for words; which passes naturally from comedy to
tragedy, from the sublime to the grotesque; by turns practical and
poetical, both artistic and inspired, profound and impulsive, of
wide range and true; verse which is apt opportunely to displace the
caesura, in order to disguise the monotony of Alexandrines; more
inclined to the _enjambement_ that lengthens the line, than to the
inversion of phrases that confuses the sense; faithful to rhyme, that
enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of
our metre; verse that is inexhaustible in the verity of its turns
of thought, unfathomable in its secrets of composition and of grace;
assuming, like Proteus, a thousand forms without changing its type and
character; avoiding long speeches; taking delight in dialogue; always
hiding behind the characters of the drama; intent, before everything,
on being in its place, and when it falls to its lot to be _beautiful_,
being so only by chance, as it were, in spite of itself and
unconsciously; lyric, epic, dramatic, at need; capable of running
through the whole gamut of poetry, of skipping from high notes to
low, from the most exalted to the most trivial ideas, from the most
extravagant to the most solemn, from the most superficial to the most
abstract, without ever passing beyond the limits of a spoken scene; in
a word, such verse as a man would write whom a fairy had endowed with
Corneille's mind and Molière's brain. It seems to us that such verse
would be _as fine as prose_.
There would be nothing in common between poetry of this sort and that
of which we made a _post mortem_ examination just now. The distinction
will be easy to point out if a certain man of talent, to whom the
author of this book is under personal obligation, will allow us to
borrow his clever phrase: the other poetry was descriptive, this would
be picturesque.
Let us repeat, verse on the stage should lay aside all self-love, all
exigence, all coquetry. It is simply a form, and a form which should
admit everything, which has no laws to impose on the drama, but on the
contrary should receive everything from it, to be transmitted to the
spectator--French, Latin, texts of laws, royal oaths, popular phrases,
comedy, tragedy, laughter, tears, prose and poetry. Woe to the poet
whose verse does not speak out! But this form is a form of bronze
which encases the thought in its metre beneath which the drama is
indestructible, which engraves it more deeply on the actor's mind,
warns him of what he omits and of what he adds, prevents him from
changing his role, from substituting himself for the author, makes
each word sacred, and causes what the poet has said to remain vivid
a long while in the hearer's memory. The idea, when steeped in verse,
suddenly assumes a more incisive, more brilliant quality.
One feels that prose, which is necessarily more timid, obliged to wean
the drama from anything like epic or lyric poetry, reduced to dialogue
and to matter-of-fact, is a long way from possessing these resources.
It has much narrower wings. And then, too, it is much more easy of
access; mediocrity is at its ease in prose; and for the sake of a few
works of distinction such as have appeared of late, the art would very
soon be overloaded with abortions and embryos. Another faction of
the reformers incline to drama written in both prose and verse, as
Shakespeare composed it. This method has its advantages. There might,
however, be some incongruity in the transitions from one form to the
other; and when a tissue is homogeneous it is much stouter. However,
whether the drama should be written in prose is only a secondary
question. The rank of a work is certain to be fixed, not according to
its form, but according to its intrinsic value. In questions of this
sort, there is only one solution. There is but one weight that can
turn the scale in the balance of art--that is genius.