whether he write in prose or verse, is correctness. Not a mere
superficial correctness, the merit or defect of the descriptive
school, which makes Lhomond and Restaut the two wings of its Pegasus;
but that intimate, deep-rooted, deliberate correctness, which is
permeated with the genius of a language, which has sounded its roots
and searched its etymology; always unfettered, because it is sure
of its footing, and always more in harmony with the logic of the
language. Our Lady Grammar leads the one in leading-strings; the other
holds grammar in leash. It can venture anything, can create or invent
its style; it has a right to do so. For, whatever certain men may have
said who did not think what they were saying, and among whom we must
place, notably, him who writes these lines, the French tongue is not
_fixed_ and never will be. A language does not become fixed. The human
intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement,
and languages with it. Things are made so. When the body changes, how
could the coat not change? The French of the nineteenth century can no
more be the French of the eighteenth, than that is the French of the
seventeenth, or than the French of the seventeenth is that of the
sixteenth. Montaigne's language is not Rabelais's, Pascal's is
not Montaigne's, Montesquieu's is not Pascal's. Each of the four
languages, taken by itself, is admirable because it is original. Every
age has its own ideas; it must have also words adapted to those ideas.
Languages are like the sea, they move to and fro incessantly. At
certain times they leave one shore of the world of thought and
overflow another. All that their waves thus abandon dries up and
vanishes. It is in this wise that ideas vanish, that words disappear.
It is the same with human tongues as with everything. Each age adds
and takes away something. What can be done? It is the decree of fate.
In vain, therefore, should we seek to petrify the mobile physiognomy
of our idiom in a fixed form. In vain do our literary Joshuas cry out
to the language to stand still; languages and the sun do not stand
still. The day when they become _fixed_, they are dead.--That is why
the French of a certain contemporary school is a dead language.
Such are, substantially, but without the more elaborate development
which would make the evidence in their favour more complete, the
_present_ ideas of the author of this book concerning the drama. He is
far, however, from presuming to put forth his first dramatic essay as
an emanation of these ideas, which, on the contrary, are themselves,
it may be, simply results of its execution. It would be very
convenient for him, no doubt, and very clever, to rest his book on his
preface, and to defend each by the other. He prefers less cleverness
and more frankness. He proposes, therefore, to be the first to point
out the extreme tenuity of the thread connecting this preface with his
drama. His first plan, dictated by his laziness, was to give the work
to the public entirely unattended _el demonio sin las cuernas_, as
Yriarte said It was only after he had duly brought it to a close, that
at the solicitations of a few friends, blinded by their friendship, no
doubt, he determined to reckon with himself in a preface--to draw, so
to speak, a map of the poetic voyage he had made, to take account of
the acquisitions, good or bad, that he had brought home, and of the
new aspects in which the domain of art had presented itself to his
mind. Someone will take advantage of this admission, doubtless to
repeat the reproach already uttered by a critic in Germany, that
he has written "a treatise in defence of his poetry." What does it
matter? In the first place he was much more inclined to demolish
treatises on poetry than to write them. And then, would it not he
better always to write treatises based on a poem, than to write poems
based on a treatise? But no, we repeat that he has neither the talent
to create nor the presumption to put forth systems "Systems," cleverly
said Voltaire, "are like rats which pass through twenty holes, only to
find at last two or three which will not let them through." It would
have been, therefore, to undertake a useless task and one much beyond
his strength. What he has pleaded, on the contrary, is the freedom of
art against the despotism of systems, codes and rules It is his habit
to follow at all risks whatever he takes for his inspiration, and to
change moulds as often as he changes metals. Dogmatism in the arts is
what he shuns before everything. God forbid that he should aspire to
be numbered among those men, be they romanticists or classicists, who
compose _works according to their own systems_, who condemn themselves
to have but one form in their minds, to be forever _proving_
something, to follow other laws than those of their temperaments and
then natures. The artificial work of these men, however talented they
may be, has no existence so far as art is concerned. It is a theory,
not poetry.
Having attempted, in all that has gone before, to point out what, in
our opinion, was the origin of the drama, what its character is, and
what its style should he, the time has come to descend from these
exalted general considerations upon the art to the particular case
which has led us to put them forth. It remains for us to discourse to
the reader of our work, of this _Cromwell_; and as it is not a subject
in which we take pleasure, we will say very little about it in very
few words.
Oliver Cromwell is one of those historical characters who are at once
very famous and very little known. Most of his biographers--and among
them there are some who are themselves historical--have left that
colossal figure incomplete. It would seem that they dared not assemble
all the characteristic features of that strange and gigantic prototype
of the religious reformation, of the political revolution of England.
Almost all of them have confined themselves to reproducing on a
larger scale the simple and ominous profile drawn by Bossuet from
his Catholic and monarchical standpoint, from his episcopal pulpit
supported by the throne of Louis XIV.
Like everybody else, the author of this book went no further than
that. The name of Oliver Cromwell suggested to him simply the bare
conception of a fanatical regicide and a great captain. Only on
prowling among the chronicles of the times, which he did with delight,
and on looking through the English memoirs of the seventeenth century,
was he surprised to find that a wholly new Cromwell was gradually
exposed to his gaze. It was no longer simply Bossuet's Cromwell the
soldier, Cromwell the politician; it was a complex, heterogenous,
multiple being, made up of all sorts of contraries--a mixture of much
that was evil and much that was good, of genius and pettiness; a sort
of Tiberius-Dandin, the tyrant of Europe and the plaything of his
family; an old regicide, who delighted to humiliate the ambassadors
of all the kings of Europe, and was tormented by his young royalist
daughter; austere and gloomy in his manners, yet keeping four court
jesters about him; given to the composition of wretched verses; sober,
simple, frugal, yet a stickler for etiquette; a rough soldier and a
crafty politician; skilled in theological disputation and very fond
of it; a dull, diffuse, obscure orator, but clever in speaking the
language of anybody whom he wished to influence; a hypocrite and a
fanatic; a visionary swayed by phantoms of his childhood, believing
in astrologers and banishing them; suspicious to excess, always
threatening, rarely sanguinary; a strict observer of Puritan rules,
and solemnly wasting several hours a day in buffoonery; abrupt and
contemptuous with his intimates, caressing with the secretaries whom
he feared, holding his remorse at bay with sophistry, paltering with
his conscience, inexhaustible in adroitness, in tricks, in resources;
mastering his imagination by his intelligence; grotesque and sublime;
in a word, one of those men who are "square at the base," as they
were described by Napoleon, himself their chief, in his mathematically
exact and poetically figurative language.
He who writes these lines, in presence of this rare and impressive
_ensemble_, felt that Bossuet's impassioned sketch was no longer
sufficient for him. He began to walk about that lofty figure, and he
was seized by a powerful temptation to depict the giant in all his
aspects. It was a rich soil. Beside the man of war and the statesman,
it remained to draw the theologian, the pedant, the wretched poet,
the seer of visions, the buffoon, the father, the husband, the human
Proteus--in a word, the twofold Cromwell, _homo et vir_.
There is one period of his life, especially, in which this strange
personality exhibits itself in all its forms. It is not as one might
think at first blush, the period of the trial of Charles I, instinct
as that is with depressing and terrible interest; but it is the moment
when the ambitious mortal boldly attempted to pluck the fruit of that
monarch's death; it is the moment when Cromwell, having attained what
would have been to any other man the zenith of fortune--master of
England, whose innumerable factions knelt silently at his feet; master
of Scotland, of which he had made a satrapy, and of Ireland, which he
had turned into a prison; master of Europe through his diplomacy and
his fleets--seeks to fulfil the dream of his earliest childhood, the
last ambition of his life; to make himself king. History never had a
more impressive lesson in a more impressive drama. First of all, the
Protector arranges to be urged to assume the crown: the august farce
begins by addresses from municipalities, from counties; then there
comes an act of Parliament. Cromwell, the anonymous author of the
play, pretends to be displeased; we see him put out a hand toward the
sceptre, then draw it back; by a devious path he draws near the throne
from which he has swept the legitimate dynasty. At last he makes up
his mind, suddenly; by his command Westminster is decked with flags,
the dais is built, the crown is ordered from the jewelers, the day is
appointed for the ceremony.--Strange dénouement! On that very day,
in presence of the populace, the troops, the House of Commons, in
the great hall of Westminster, on that dais from which he expected
to descend as king, suddenly, as if aroused by a shock, he seems to
awaken at the sight of the crown, asks if he is dreaming, and what the
meaning is of all this regal pomp, and in a speech that lasts three
hours declines the kingly title.
Was it because his spies had warned him of two conspiracies formed
by Cavaliers and Puritans in concert, which were intended, taking
advantage of this misstep, to break out on the same day? Was it
an inward revolution caused by the silence or the murmurs of the
populace, discomposed to see their regicide ascend the throne? Or was
it simply the sagacity of genius, the instinct of a far-seeing, albeit
unbridled ambition, which realizes how one step forward changes a
man's position and attitude, and which dares not expose its plebeian
structure to the wind of unpopularity? Was it all these at once?
This is a question which no contemporaneous document answers
satisfactorily. So much the better: the poet's liberty is the more
complete, and the drama is the gainer by the latitude which history
affords it. It will be seen that here the latitude is ample and
unique; this is, in truth, the decisive hour, the turning-point in
Cromwell's life. It is the moment when his chimera escapes from
him, when the present kills the future, when, to use an expressive
colloquialism, his destiny _misses fire_. All of Cromwell is at stake
in the comedy being played between England and himself.
Such then is the man and such the period of which we have tried to
give an idea in this book.
The author has allowed himself to be seduced by the childlike
diversion of touching the keys of that great harpsichord.
Unquestionably, more skillful hands might have evoked a thrilling
and profound melody--not of those which simply caress the ear--but of
those intimate harmonies which stir the whole man to the depths of his
being, as if each key of the key-board were connected with a fibre
of the heart. He has surrendered to the desire to depict all those
fanaticisms, all those superstitions--maladies to which religion is
subject at certain epochs; to the longing to "make playthings of all
these men," as Hamlet says. To set in array about and below Cromwell,
himself the centre and pivot of that court, of that people, of that
little world, which attracts all to his cause and inspires all with
his vigour, that twofold conspiracy devised by two factions which
detest each other, but join hands to overthrow the man who blocks
their path, but which unite simply without blending; and that Puritan
faction, of divers minds, fanatical, gloomy, unselfish, choosing
for leader the most insignificant of men for such a great part, the
egotistical and cowardly Lambert; and the faction of the Cavaliers,
featherheaded, merry, unscrupulous, reckless, devoted, led by the
man who, aside from his devotion to the cause, was least fitted to
represent it, the stern and upright Ormond; and those ambassadors,
so humble and fawning before the soldier of fortune; and the court
itself, an extraordinary mixture of upstarts and great nobles
vying with one another in baseness; and the four jesters whom the
contemptuous neglect of history permitted me to invent; and Cromwell's
family, each member of which is as a thorn in his flesh; and Thurloe,
the Protector's Achates; and the Jewish rabbi, Israel Ben-Manasseh,
spy, usurer, and astrologer, vile on two sides, sublime on the third;
and Rochester, the unique Rochester, absurd and clever, refined and
crapulous, always cursing, always in love, and always tipsy, as he
himself boasted to Bishop Burnet--wretched poet and gallant gentleman,
vicious and ingenuous, staking his head and indifferent whether
he wins the game provided it amuses him--in a word, capable of
everything, of ruse and recklessness, calculation and folly, villainy
and generosity; and the morose Carr, of whom history describes but
one trait, albeit a most characteristic and suggestive one; and those
other fanatics, of all ranks and varieties: Harrison, the thieving
fanatic; Barebones the shopkeeping fanatic; Syndercomb, the bravo;
Garland the tearful and pious assassin; gallant Colonel Overton,
intelligent but a little declamatory; the austere and unbending
Ludlow, who left his ashes and his epitaph at Lausanne; and lastly,
"Milton and a few other men of mind," as we read in a pamphlet of 1675
(_Cromwell the Politician_), which reminds one of "a certain Dante" of
the Italian chronicle.
We omit many less important characters, of each of whom, however, the
actual life is known, and each of whom has his marked individuality,
and all of whom contributed to the fascination which this vast
historical scene exerted upon the author's imagination. From that
scene he constructed this drama. He moulded it in verse, because he
preferred to do so. One will discover on reading it how little
thought he gave to his work while writing this preface--with what
disinterestedness, for instance, he contended against the dogma of the
unities. His drama does not leave London; it begins on June 25, 1657,
at three in the morning, and ends on the 26th at noon. Observe that he
has almost followed the classic formula, as the professors of poetry
lay it down to-day. They need not, however, thank him for it. With the
permission of history, not of Aristotle, the author constructed his
drama thus; and because, when the interest is the same, he prefers a
compact subject to a widely diffused one.
It is evident that, in its present proportions, this drama could not
be given at one of our theatrical performances. It is too long. The
reader will perhaps comprehend, none the less, that every part of it
was written for the stage. It was on approaching his subject to study
it that the author recognized, or thought that he recognized, the
impossibility of procuring the performance of a faithful reproduction
of it on our stage, in the exceptional position it now occupies,
between the academic Charybdis and the administrative Scylla, between
the literary juries and the political censorship. He was required
to choose: either the wheedling, tricky, false tragedy, which may be
acted, or the audaciously true drama, which is prohibited. The first
was not worth the trouble of writing, so he preferred to attempt
the second. That is why, hopeless of ever being put on the stage,
he abandoned himself, freely and submissively, to the whims of
composition, to the pleasure of painting with a freer hand, to the
developments which his subject demanded, and which, even if they keep
his drama off the stage, have at all events the advantage of making it
almost complete from the historical standpoint. However, the reading
committees are an obstacle of the second class only. If it should
happen that the dramatic censorship, realizing how far this harmless,
conscientious and accurate picture of Cromwell and his time is removed
from our own age, should sanction its production on the stage, in that
case, but only in that case, the author might perhaps extract from
this drama a play which would venture to show itself on the boards,
and would be hissed.
Until then he will continue to hold aloof from the theatre. And even
then he will leave his cherished and tranquil retirement soon enough,
for the agitation and excitement of this new world. God grant that he
may never repent of having exposed the unspotted obscurity of his name
and his person to the shoals, the squalls and tempests of the pit,
and above all (for what does a mere failure matter?) to the wretched
bickerings of the wings; of having entered that shifting, foggy,
stormy atmosphere, where ignorance dogmatises, where envy hisses,
where cabals cringe and crawl, where the probity of talent has so
often been misrepresented, where the noble innocence of genius is
sometimes so out of place, where mediocrity triumphs in lowering to
its level the superiority which obscures it, where one finds so many
small men for a single great one, so many nobodies for one Talma, so
many myrmidons for one Achilles! This sketch will seem ill-tempered
perhaps, and far from flattering; but does it not fully mark out the
distance that separates our stage, the abode of intrigues and uproar,
from the solemn serenity of the ancient stage?
Whatever may happen, he feels bound to warn in advance that small
number of persons whom such a production might attract, that a play
made up of excerpts from _Cromwell_ would occupy no less time then is
ordinarily occupied by a theatrical performance. It is difficult for
a _romantic_ theatre to maintain itself otherwise. Surely, if people
desire something different from the tragedies in which one or two
characters, abstract types of a purely metaphysical idea, stalk
solemnly about on a narrow stage occupied only by a few confidents,
colourless reflections of the heroes, employed to fill the gaps in a
simple, unified, single-stringed plot; if that sort of thing has
grown tiresome, a whole evening is not too much time to devote to
delineating with some fullness a man among men, a whole critical
period: the one, with his peculiar temperament, his genius which
adapts itself thereto, his beliefs which dominate them both, his
passions which throw out of gear his temperament, his genius and his
beliefs, his tastes which give colour to his passions, his habits
which regulate his tastes and muzzle his passions, and with the
innumerable procession of men of every sort whom these various
elements keep in constant commotion about him; the other, with
its manners, its laws, its fashions, its wit, its attainments, its
superstitions, its events, and its people, whom all these first causes
in turn mould like soft wax. It is needless to say that such a picture
will be of huge proportions. Instead of one personality, like that
with which the abstract drama of the old school is content, there will
be twenty, forty, fifty,--who knows how many?--of every size and of
every degree of importance. There will be a crowd of characters in the
drama. Would it not be niggardly to assign it two hours only, and
give up the rest of the performance to opera-comique or farce? to cut
Shakespeare for Bobèche?--And do not imagine that, if the plot is well
adjusted, the multitude of characters set in motion will cause fatigue
to the spectator or confusion in the drama. Shakespeare, abounding in
petty details, is at the same time, and for that very reason, imposing
by the grandeur of the _ensemble._ It is the oak which casts a most
extensive shadow with its myriads of slender leaves.
Let us hope that people in France will ere long become accustomed to
devote a whole evening to a single play. In England and Germany there
are plays that last six hours. The Greeks, about whom we hear so much,
the Greeks--and after the fashion of Scudéri we will cite at
this point the classicist Dacier, in the seventh chapter of his
_Poetics_--the Greeks sometimes went so far as to have twelve or
sixteen plays acted in a single day. Among a people who are fond of
spectacles the attention is more lively than is commonly believed
The _Mariage de Figaro_, the connecting link of Beaumarchais's
great trilogy, occupies the whole evening, and who was ever bored or
fatigued by it Beaumarchais was worthy to venture on the first step
toward that goal of modern art at which it will be impossible to
arrive in two hours, that profound, insatiable interest which results
from a vast, lifelike and multiform plot. "But," someone will say,
"this performance, consisting of a single play, would be monotonous,
would seem terribly long"--Not so. On the contrary it would lose
its present monotony and tediousness. For what is done now? The
spectator's entertainment is divided into two or three sharply defined
parts. At first he is given two hours of serious enjoyment, then one
hour of hilarious enjoyment, these, with the hour of entr' actes,
which we do not include in the enjoyment make four hours What would
the romantic drama do? It would mingle and blend artistically these
two kinds of enjoyment. It would lead the audience constantly from
sobriety to laughter, from mirthful excitement to heart breaking
emotion, "from grave to gay, from pleasant to severe." For, as we have
already proved, the drama is the grotesque in conjunction with the
sublime, the soul within the body, it is tragedy beneath comedy. Do
you not see that, by affording you repose from one impression by means
of another, by sharpening the tragic upon the comic, the merry upon
the terrible, and at need calling in the charms of the opera,
these performances, while presenting but one play, would be worth a
multitude of others? The romantic stage would make a piquant, savoury,
diversified dish of that which, on the classic stage, is a drug
divided into two pills.
The author has soon come to the end of what he had to say to the
reader. He has no idea how the critics will greet this drama and
these thoughts, summarily set forth, stripped of their corollaries and
ramifications, put together _currente calamo_, and in haste to have
done with them. Doubtless they will appear to "the disciples of
La Harpe" most impudent and strange. But if perchance, naked and
undeveloped as they are, they should have the power to start upon
the road of truth this public whose education is so far advanced,
and whose minds so many notable writings, of criticism or of original
thought, books or newspapers, have already matured for art, let the
public follow that impulsion, caring naught whether it comes from a
man unknown, from a voice with no authority, from a work of little
merit. It is a copper bell which summons the people to the true temple
and the true God.
There is to-day the old literary régime as well as the old political
régime. The last century still weighs upon the present one at almost
every point. It is notably oppressive in the matter of criticism. For
instance, you find living men who repeat to you this definition of
taste let fall by Voltaire: "Taste in poetry is no different from what
it is in women's clothes." Taste, then, is coquetry. Remarkable words,
which depict marvellously the painted, _moucheté_, powdered poetry
of the eighteenth century--that literature in paniers, pompons and
falbalas. They give an admirable résumé of an age with which the
loftiest geniuses could not come in contact without becoming petty, in
one respect or another; of an age when Montesquieu was able and apt
to produce _Le Temple de Gnide_, Voltaire _Le Temple du Goût_,
Jean-Jacques _Le Devin du Village_.