The apostle would have his brethren so to use this world, as not abusing
it; and for this reason, that “the fashion of this world passeth away.”
In the original the phrase runs: παράγει γὰρ τὸ ΣΧΗΜΑ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.
The expression is said by Grotius and others to be borrowed from the
theatre, and to refer to the scene-shifting of the stage. Life here below
has verily its histrionic aspects; the fashion of it passeth away much as
do the scene-painter’s creations, the stage-carpenter’s framework, the
spectacular effects and dissolving views, nay the very actors themselves.
For, all the world is in some sense a stage, and all the men and women
merely players—
“They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
Considering his own profession, the figure is one that must often have
crossed and occupied Shakspeare’s mind—at once so keenly observing and
so profoundly meditative. Not that he harps much upon it, so much as
might, perhaps, have been expected, in his plays. Still he does now and
then recur to the histrionic metaphor. And it is in his graver mood, not
his lighter, that he does so; in sober sadness, not with gibing glee. As
where Lear, in the extremity of his distraction, intent on preaching to
Gloster, takes for his text the wail of infancy, crying, the first time
that it smells the air: for
“When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”
Or again, as where Antonio, the care-fraught merchant of Venice, assured
by a friend that he is looking far from well, indeed “marvellously
changed,” and remonstrated with for not taking life more easily, replies:
“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.”
_Mundus universus exercet histrioniam_,—the saw is Petronius Arbiter’s.
There is an obverse reading, by some other old Eminent Hand: _Totum
mundum agit histrio_. If all the world’s a play, so again there’s not in
all the world a character the player won’t act. Lucretius had the stage
simile of life in his mind’s eye, when he said of those who hide certain
of their doings, _vitæ post-scenia celant_,—the _post-scenium_ being what
we call “behind the scenes,” where the actors dress and “make up” for
their parts. And what says a distich in the Greek Anthology:
“Σκηνὴ πᾶς ὁ βίος, καὶ παίγνιον· ἢ μάθε παίζειν,
Τὴν σπουδὴν μεταθεὶς, ἢ φέρε τὰς ὀδύνας.”
“Life is a stage, a play: so learn thy part,
All cares removed, or rend with grief thy heart.”
Sir Thomas Browne professes, in his large utterance and stately style:
“The world to me is but a dream or mock show, and we all therein but
pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations.” To the same
effect, though not in the same spirit, Wordsworth’s recluse avows himself
tired
“Of the ostentatious world a swelling stage
With empty actions and vain passions stuffed.”
When both Swift and Bolingbroke had closed the tenth lustre of their
years, his cynical lordship wrote from Brussels to the cynical dean,
that he thought it high time to determine how they should “play the
last act of the farce. Might not my life,” adds accomplished St. John,
“be entitled much more properly a what-d’ye-call-it than a farce? Some
comedy, a great deal of tragedy, and the whole interspersed with scenes
of Harlequin, Scaramouch, and Dr. Baloardo.” Accomplished St. John was
always, and to the last an accomplished actor. As for Dr. Swift, he
expanded the histrionic similitude of life into some eighteen stanzas on
the puppet show—which record how wit, “the life of man to represent, and
turn it all to ridicule, did once a puppet show invent, where the chief
actor is a fool”—and of which, perhaps, the gravest runs thus:
“This fleeting scene is but a stage
Where various images appear;
In different parts of youth and age,
Alike the prince and peasant share.”
Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza how like human life is to a play. One
takes the part of a ruffian, another of a liar, a third of a merchant,
a fourth of a soldier. This man is for the occasion the lover; that man
is the judicious friend. At last the play is ended. Each takes off the
clothes which belong to his part, and the players remain equal. So it is
in the comedy of this world, says Don Quixote. There are emperors and
popes, and all the characters that can be introduced into a play; but it
is played out, death takes away the outward trappings which made them
seem to differ, and they remain equal in the tomb.
Where, is the author of the Complaint’s complaining query, or querulous
plaint,
“Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene;
Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?”
It is a trite topic, indeed, with Dr. Young,—that of “Life’s gay stage,
one inch above the grave,” whereon those strut and fret their hour, that
shall soon be seen no more for ever. All, merely players.
“Each, in his turn, some tragic story tells,
With now and then a wretched farce between.”
Dr. Maginn takes note of the frequency with which Lucian compares life to
a theatrical procession, in which magnificent parts are assigned to some,
who pass before the eyes of the spectators clothed in costly garments,
and bedecked with glittering jewels; but, the moment the show is over,
are reduced to their original nothingness, no longer kings and heroes,
but poor players whose hour has been strutted out.
No wonder that the master Showman of Vanity Fair should pen an _envoi_
after this fashion:
“The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter’s bell:
A moment yet the actor stops,
And looks around, to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task;
And when he’s laughed and said his say,
He shows, as he removes the mask,
A face that’s anything but gay.”
Horace Walpole will be found iterating and reiterating in his letters
a favourite apophthegm of his—that the world is a comedy to those who
think, a tragedy to those who feel.
One might safely assume beforehand that a people of so histrionic a turn
as the French would make good use of the histrionic metaphor of life,
in their _belles lettres_, of whatever date. And in point of fact the
figure is a well-worked one in French literature. Now it is a Cardinal
de Retz, who, on being named coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of
Paris, describes himself as thereupon ceasing to be “in the pit, or
at best in the orchestra, playing and funning with the fiddles,” but
mounting thence to the stage itself. Indeed, a modern critic has remarked
that Retz is perpetually making use of these expressions and images of
_théâtre_ and _comédie_. He was an accomplished actor from first to
last—not above the line of low comedy now and then, and quite an adept in
the Cloak-and-Sword business. Now again it is his contemporary, Madame de
Motteville, who so frequently represents herself as an occupant of one of
the best boxes, intent on diverting herself with the _belle comédie_ that
was being played under her eyes. “Les cabinets des rois,” says Madame—who
ought to know—are theatres in which pieces of universal interest are for
ever being played: some simply comic; others decidedly tragical, though
so frequently occasioned by the merest trifles. So, again, Madame des
Ursins (the Princess Orsino), another _habituée_ behind the scenes, and
herself a star of the first magnitude in any working company, describes
the world as _une comédie où il y avait souvent de bien mauvais acteurs_.
Then, too, we have the Abbé Chaulieu, when dancing attendance on the
Duke of Vendôme, and assisting at all the fêtes and galas got up in
that prince’s honour, writing in a sort of apologetic strain to his
sister-in-law, that since all the world’s a stage, one must just be
content to don cap and bells with the rest[13]—for if all your men and
women are merely players, motley’s your only wear.
Of another _spirituel_, and very unspiritual, abbé of that period,
Choisy, it has been observed, that his life resembled a comedy, rife with
all that is most various and most improbable: his career of fourscore
years composed a complete masquerade; for
“this man in his time play’d many parts,”
and in each of them he seems to have acted with professional aptitude,
facility, and zest.
Such another actor, with a difference, was Voltaire. As Voltaire himself
said of the Duchess of Maine, “Elle aimera la comédie jusqu’au dernier
moment, et, quand elle sera malade, je vous conseille de lui administrer
quelque belle pièce,” etc., etc.,—so of the mocking philosopher of
Ferney, playing his many parts, it has been said, that he had a genius
for transformations, having always more than one _rôle_ to play in the
comedy of life—which diversity of _rôles_ jumped with his humour, and
just hit the mobile preferences of a man who so early in his existence
turned player. The life of Voltaire is a comedy, says Sainte-Beuve: his
correspondence with D’Alembert shows us the coulisses and background—and
lets us in to damaging and disenchanting revelations behind the scenes.
Elsewhere he may be seen to fret and strut his hour upon the stage,
carefully made up, and all in point device costume; but here we have him
in undress, and by dusty daylight, and off his guard.
_Tous les comédiens ne sont pas du théâtre_, is rightly reckoned one of
the prettiest _provérbes_ of M. Théodore Leclerc. In the Proverbe which
bears that pregnant title, a nephew incidentally tells his uncle, “Vous
qui êtes un homme du monde, vous appelez cela l’esprit du monde; moi qui
suis un comédien, j’appelle cela de la comédie. C’est toujours la même
chose, sous un nom différent.” The salon and the stage are on a level.
To be a real man of the world, is to be an actor of the first class.
M. Scribe puts the proverb as a practical epigram into the mouth of old
Michonnet, when trying to soothe and inspirit his pet pupil for the
stage: “Calme toi et étudie; ... il y a dans le monde de plus grands
comédiens que nous!”
Indeed, according to Chamfort, there is no choice in the matter; every
man, however wise and unsophisticated and open-hearted, must, sooner or
later, turn actor, on this great stage of fools. For, “la fortune et le
costume qui l’entourent font de la vie une représentation au milieu de
laquelle il faut qu’à la longue l’homme le plus honnête devienne comédien
malgré lui.” We are all actors and actresses, says one of Miss Eden’s
characters, and “none of us quite up to our parts, though we act all
day long.” Not that every one plays just the part he or she would have
chosen. The distribution of _rôles_ would seem often to make this a mad
world, my masters.
“Le monde, à mon avis, est comme un grand théâtre,
Où chacun en public, l’un par l’autre abusé,
Souvent à ce qu’il est, joue un rôle opposé.”
This, one might almost paraphrase in the words of John Webster’s wobegone
Duchess Mariana:
“I account this world a tedious theatre,
For I do play a part in’t ’gainst my will.”
By way of introducing his elaborate narrative of Darnley’s fate, Mr.
Froude tells us of Mary Stuart, that on the political stage she was “a
great actress. The ‘woman’ had a drama of her own going on behind the
scenes; the theatre caught fire; the mock heroics of the Catholic crusade
burnt into ashes; and a tremendous domestic tragedy was revealed before
the astonished eyes of Europe.” And later again, describing Mary’s
caressing wiles to beguile and tranquilise her doomed husband, on the
eve of the catastrophe, the same historian employs the same histrionic
figure: “Mary Stuart was an admirable actress; rarely, perhaps, on the
world’s stage has there been a more skilful player.” But the part, he
adds, was a difficult one; she had still some natural compunction; and
the performance was not quite perfect.
Most of our business is farce, writes old Montaigne: _Mundus universus
exercet histrioniam_ (which the old French essayist’s old English
translator renders, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players”). We must play our part well, he adds, but withal as the
part of a borrowed personage; we must not make a real essence of a mask
and outward appearance, etc. So it is one of Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries,”
“de vitâ humanâ,” that our whole life is like a play—wherein every man,
forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. In one of
his comedies, rare Ben makes a sham inn-keeper, taking his ease in his
own inn, and following his own fancies there, “imagine all the world’s a
play:—
“The state, and men’s affairs, all passages
Of life, to spring new scenes; come in, go out,
And shift, and vanish.... I have got
A seat to sit at ease here, in mine inn,
To see the comedy; and laugh, and chuck
At the variety and throng of humours
And dispositions, that come justling in
And out still, as they one drove hence another.”
For every man, in the play of this world, says pious Master Feltham, is
not only an actor, but is a spectator, too: “At the beginning (that is,
in his youth) it promises so much that he is loth to leave it; when it
grows towards the middle (the act of virility), then he sees the scenes
grow thick, and fill, and would gladly understand the end: but, when that
draws near, and he finds what it will be, he is then content to depart
and leave his room to others.”
Fielding’s philosopher asks if the actor is esteemed happier to whose lot
it falls to play the principal part, than he who plays the lowest? and
yet the drama may run twenty nights together, and so outlast our lives;
but at the best, says he, “life is only a little longer drama; and the
business of the great stage is consequently a little more serious than
that which is performed at the theatre-royal.”
“If the world be, indeed, as ’twas said, but a stage,
The dress only is changed ’twixt the acts of an age.
From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue
With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue
Of passionate antics that move through the play,
With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.”
An old Greek writer, speaking of Alexander of Pheræ, who reigned in
Thessaly only ten months, and then was slain, calls him, in derision of
his brief lease of power, a theatrical tyrant, a mere stage king, who, as
it were, walked on only to walk off again. But the palace of the Cæsars,
Plutarch remarks, received four emperors in a less space of time, one
entering, and another making his exit, as if to fret and strut each his
little hour upon the stage. How soon the stage directions, Enter Galba,
enter and exit Otho, enter and exit Vitellius, lapse in _Exeunt omnes_!
In Charles the Sixth’s ordinance, authorising the players of the
“Mysteries of the Passion” (towards the close of the fourteenth
century), that poor crazed monarch’ styles them his “loved and dear
co-mates.” And what could be juster? Michelet asks. “A hapless actor
himself, a poor player in the grand historic mystery, he went to see his
co-mates’—saints, angels, and devils, perform their miserable travestie
of the Passion. He was not only spectator; he was spectacle as well. His
people went to see in him the Passion of royalty.”
Players, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, Hazlitt calls
the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest
hypocrites, he says (and hypocrite, by the way, is classically a correct
name for them, though Hazlitt may not have remembered or meant it): their
life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness—it being the height of their
ambition to be “beside themselves:”—to-day kings, to-morrow beggars,
it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing: made up of
mimic laughter and tears, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes,
till their very thoughts are not their own. “They are, as it were,
train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity,
frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them.... The
stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part
left out: and indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to
hold all the rest.”
Sir Thomas Overbury had, two centuries before, written characteristically
to the same purport. “All men have beene of his occupation,” writes the
ill-starred knight of a good actor; “and indeed, what hee doth fainedly,
that doe others essentially: this day one plays a monarch, the next
a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a
parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian,” and so of divers
others.
“And why not players strut in courtiers’ clothes?
For these are actors, too, as well as those.”
Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):
“Even kings but play, and when their part is done,
Some other, worse or better, mount the throne.”
As we cannot be monarchs, says the Porpora of fiction, we are artists,
and have a kingdom of our own: we dress ourselves as kings and great men,
we ascend the stage, we seat ourselves upon a fictitious throne, we play
a farce, we are actors. The world, he continues, sees us, but understands
us not. “It is only when I am at the theatre that I see clearly our true
relations to society. The spirit of music unseals my eyes, and I see
behind the footlights a true court, real heroes, lofty inspirations;
while the wretched dolts who flaunt in the boxes upon velvet couches are
the real actors. In truth, the world is a comedy; and we must play our
parts in it with gravity and decorum, though conscious of the hollow
pageant which compasses us on every side.” And Godolphin pronounces life
to differ from the play only in this—that it has no plot, all being
vague, desultory, unconnected, till the curtain drops with the mystery
unsolved.
All this is in Mr. Carlyle’s vein—of the _Sartor Resartus_ date at least;
or as when he depicted the family vagaries of Mirabeaudom, which produced
“such astonishing comico-tragical French farces”—with the eight chaotic
volumes of family correspondence, wherein the various personages speak
their dialogue, unfold their farce-tragedy: “Seen or half seen, it is a
stage; as the whole world is. What with personages, what with destinies,
no stranger house-drama [than that of the Mirabeau family] was enacting
on the earth at that time.” The same figure Mr. Carlyle elsewhere applies
to our own revolution times, in the century before: “Such is the drama
of life, seen in Baillie of Kilwinning; a thing of multifarious tragic
and epic meanings, then as now. A many-voiced tragedy and epos, yet with
broad-based comic and grotesque accompaniments, done by actors _not_
in buskins;—ever replete with elements of guilt and remorse, of pity,
instruction, and fear.”
* * * * *
ACT WELL YOUR PART:—there all the _moral_ lies. Though the world _be_
histrionical, and most men live ironically, says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet
be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself.”
It has been sadly and severely said of the Emperor Augustus, who was
loved by no one, that if, at the moment of his death, he desired his
friends to dismiss him from this world by the common expression of
scenical applause (_vos plaudite!_), in that valedictory injunction he
expressed inadvertently the true value of his own long life, which, in
strict candour, may be pronounced one continued series of histrionic
efforts, and of excellent acting, adapted to selfish ends.
_L’honnête homme_, writes an epigrammatic thinker, _joue son rôle le
mieux qu’il peut sans songer à la galerie_.
Remember, says Epictetus, so to act your part upon this stage as to be
approved by the master, whether it be a short or a long one that he
has given you to perform. If he will have you to represent a beggar,
endeavour to act the beggar’s part well; and so, a cripple, a prince, or
a plebeian. It is your part to perform well what you represent: it is his
to choose what that shall be.
Thus spake the stoic philosopher. And how speaks the Christian divine?
As the merit of an actor, says Robert Hall, is not estimated by the
part which he performs, but solely by the truth and propriety of his
representation, and the peasant is often applauded where the monarch is
hissed; so when the great drama of life is concluded, He who allots its
scenes and determines its period will take an account of His servants,
and assign to each his due, in his own proper character.
Since the life of man is likened to a scene, “I had rather,” writes John
Milton, “that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons
only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic
deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices.”
And this, lest such a player have to echo, in spirit, if not to the
letter, the bitter conviction of blinded, blundering Leontes—_Io anche_—
“And I
Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave.”
The measure of a happy life, writes Lord Shaftesbury—he of the
“Characteristics”—is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer
or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat; but from the having once
lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully—or,
to print it as he wrote it, for the lovers of old books’ sake—“and made
our _Exit_ cheerfully, and as became us.”
It is well remarked by Archbishop Trench that we have forfeited the full
force of the statement, “God is no respecter of _persons_,” from the fact
that “person” does not mean for us now all that it once meant. “Person,”
from “persona,” the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by
natural transfer the part or _rôle_ in the play which each sustains, as
πρόσωπον is in Greek. “In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains
a ‘person;’ one that of a king, another that of a hind; one must play
Dives, another Lazarus. This ‘person’ God, for whom the question is
not _what_ ‘person’ each sustains, but _how_ he sustains it, does not
regard.”
_PHARAOH’S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE._
EXODUS vii.-x., _passim_.
His land of Egypt covered with frogs, Pharaoh was urgent with Moses and
Aaron to “intreat the Lord” for him, and with conciliatory proposals
in favour of the children of Israel. The plague of the frogs abated
accordingly, Pharaoh hardened his heart as soon as he saw that there was
respite. So with the plague of flies that came in grievous swarms into
the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants’ houses, and into all the
land of Egypt, so that the land was corrupted by reason of the flies;
again Pharaoh besought Hebrew intercession, and pledged himself to acts
of clemency; and again no sooner was the plague removed, than Pharaoh
hardened his heart at that time also, neither would he let the people go.
Plague after plague ensued—the murrain of beasts, the plague of boils
and blains, and the plague of hail and fire; and so grievous was the
last—smiting all that was in the field, both man and beast, as well as
every herb and tree—that Pharaoh once more importuned Moses and Aaron,
confessing his sins, imploring forgiveness, and promising amendment.
Once and again he was heard and answered. “And when Pharaoh saw that
the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more,
and hardened his heart ... neither would he let the children of Israel
go.” The plague of locusts, destroying all that the hail had left, made
him call for the Hebrew brothers again in hottest haste,—entreating
forgiveness “only this once,” and deliverance “from this death only.” But
the mighty west wind that swept away the ravagers had no sooner ceased to
blow, than the hardening process again set in, and the tyrant revelled as
of yore in his accustomed tyranny. How many more plagues might have been
added to the ten—decade upon decade—with the like result, each facile
amendment merging in a more and more facile relapse, it is superfluous to
guess.