the capital was anything but satisfactory. There were in 1658 five
theatres in Paris: One at the Hôtel de Bourgogne; one at the Marais; one
under the patronage of Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston, Duke of
Orléans; a Spanish company; and an Italian company at the Petit Bourbon,
under the managership of Torelli. It was with the first and last of
these that Molière came chiefly into conflict; and it is probable that
the other three were of no great account, at all events as competitors
for the favor of the general public. Torelli soon found that the
newcomer commanded his hundreds where he himself could only count by
scores, and he gave up the Petit Bourbon to Molière in 1659.
Molière's company called themselves "Comédiens de Monsieur"; and after
Torelli had left them full possession of the Petit Bourbon, their
greatest rivals in public favor were the company at the Hôtel de
Bourgogne, who played Corneille, Scudéry, Scarron, and other authors of
less note. In 1659 Molière took the town by storm with his _Précieuses
Ridicules_, a satire in one act on the exaggerations of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet. This was followed in the succeeding year by _Sganarelle ou
le Cocu Imaginaire_; in the beginning of 1661 appeared _Don Garcie de
Navarre_, a heroic piece in five acts, intended to delineate the evils
of passionate jealousy; and in the same year were produced _L'École des
Maris_, a satire on unreasonable jealousy, and _Les Fâcheux_, a court
sketch of several kinds of bores; in 1662 _L'École des Femmes_--an
attempt to show the danger of bringing girls up in too strict a
manner--with its sequel, the _Critique de l'École des Femmes_, in the
year after.
Boursault, an amiable man but a mediocre playwright, envious of
Molière's growing fame, wrote for the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which eagerly
accepted, if it did not bespeak, his piece, _Le Portrait du Peintre ou
la Contrecritique de l'École des Femmes_, in which he attempted to bring
his brother-author into ridicule; but Molière took ample revenge in his
_Impromptu de Versailles_, in which he soundly lashed his rivals, though
it may be mentioned to his honor that it was never printed during his
lifetime. In 1664 he wrote the _Mariage Forcé_, a one-act piece with
eight _entrées de ballet_, specially designed for court representation,
in which the King himself was pleased to dance, and, a month or two
later, the _Princesse d'Elide_, a cumbrous and comparatively inferior
production, done in great haste at the command of Louis XIV, who had
determined upon an eight-days' festival in honor of Louise de la
Vallière.
It was during these festivities that for the first time was represented
the first three acts of Molière's masterpiece, _Tartuffe ou
l'Imposteur_, a play well worthy of the best and most legitimate subject
which satire can have to deal with. Nothing can be fairer or more
appropriate than that the art which consists in feigning a
representation of real life on the stage should take, as the butt of its
ridicule and the object of its skill, the man whose whole life and
character are engaged in feigning the possession of virtue and seeming
to be that which he is not. The earliest satirists and dramatists have
seized on the topic with avidity; and to go no further out of our way
than Molière's predecessors in France, we may mention the authors of the
romance of _Reynard the Fox_, Ruteboeuf; Jean de Meung, the author of
the _Farce des Brus_, Regnier, Scarron, even Pascal.
Very various, no doubt, are the hypocritical types encountered in the
works of these and other satirists; but all must necessarily have a
certain amount of family likeness, and many a hereditary trait is
recognized as common to at least two, if not to all, of the race.
"Molière gives us the hypocrite by nature, the man who would be a
canting scoundrel even if it did not 'pay'; who cannot help being so;
who is a human being, and therefore not perfect; who is a man, and thus
sensually inclined; who employs certain means to subdue his passions and
to become a 'whited sepulchre,' but who gives way all the more to them
when he imagines that he can do so with impunity." Tartuffe, who ought
to be bound to Orgon by the strongest ties of gratitude, allows the son
to be turned out of the house by his father, because the latter will not
believe the accusations brought against the hypocrite--tries to seduce
his benefactor's wife, to marry his daughter by a first marriage; and
finally, after having obtained all his dupe's property, betrays him to
the king as a criminal against the state. The _dénouement_ of the play
is that Tartuffe himself is led to prison, and that vice is for the
nonce punished on the stage as it deserves to be.
_Tartuffe_ made many enemies for Molière, especially among the clergy,
who were not afraid of being twitted with their too ready application to
themselves of the moral of the play. It was prohibited in 1664; and some
zealous clergymen even went so far as to write treatises which they
hoped would counteract the effects of the dramatist's works. For their
own sakes we may hope that they did not succeed. The King was not strong
enough to withstand the influence of the clergy, and did not venture at
once to remove the interdict. The relaxation did not take place until
five years later. But it was at this time that Louis XIV bestowed on
Molière's company the name of "Comédiens du Roi"; and the troop was
subsidied by a yearly pension of seven thousand livres.
_Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre_, a piece in which a nobleman--who is a
libertine as well as a sceptic and a hypocrite--is brought upon the
stage, was first acted in February, 1665, and raised such an outcry that
it was also forbidden to be played. In spite of failing health and
serious depression of spirits, Molière continued to produce play after
play; and some of his best and most admired were the fruits of his most
unhappy moments.
Early in 1662 he had married Armande Béjart, the youngest sister of
Madeleine Béjart, who was about twenty years younger than her husband.
It was apparently a marriage of mutual affection, but it can hardly be
said to have been a fortunate one for either. Armande loved admiration
from whatever source, and indulged in pleasures which her husband could
not share. The breach between them gradually widened, and it was not
till 1671 that their friends brought about a better understanding
between them. Meanwhile, in September, 1665, appeared _L'Amour Médecin_,
a comedy in three acts, in which a lover appears disguised as a
physician, to cure the object of his love, pretends to be dumb, and in
which Molière makes his first serious attack against the doctors.
It was acted only a few times when the theatre had to be closed on
account of the author's illness; and the death of Anne of Austria, in
the spring of 1666, delayed its reopening until June of that year. It
was then that the _Misanthrope_ was introduced to the public--a play
which has been ranked as high in comedy as _Athalie_ is ranked in French
tragedy. The circumstances under which it was written were such as might
almost warrant us in calling it a tragedy; for the great satirist, who
had spent his life in copying the eccentricities of others, had now
employed the season of his illness to commit to paper a drama in which
he was himself the principal actor. The misanthrope Alceste loves the
coquette Célimène, almost against his will; and we can imagine the
feelings with which Molière himself took the _rôle_ of Alceste to his
wife's Célimène.
In 1669 the King, growing more independent of his advisers, sanctioned
the production of _Tartuffe_; but this strengthening of his repertory
did not prevent Molière producing _Monsieur de Pourceaudnac_, a farcical
comedy in three acts, in which there is a masterly and not exaggerated
sketch of a consultation of doctors in Molière's time; and, in 1670, the
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, in which the folly of aping noblemen is
delineated, as well as the _Amants Magnifiques_, a comedy-ballet for the
particular behoof of the court. In 1671 he combined with Corneille and
Quinault in the production of _Psyche_, a tragedy-ballet, and wrote, or
rather, perhaps, remodelled from among his earlier efforts, the
_Fourberies de Scapin_ and the _Comtesse d'Escarbagnas_.
His two last works were among the highest and happiest creations of his
genius--the _Femmes Savantes_, a sort of sequel to the _Précieuses
Ridicules_, though of a more general application--and the _Malade
Imaginaire_. In the latter, he insisted on playing the part of Argan
upon the first representation, February 10, 1673; but it was the
crowning act of his energetic mind. He became ill during the fourth
representation of the play, and died that same evening, February 17th,
exactly one year after Madeleine Béjart, with whom, seven-and-twenty
years ago, he had set out from Paris with little more ambition than that
of earning a livelihood by the pursuit of a congenial career.
Molière placed upon the stage nearly all human passions which lend
themselves to comedy or farce. Sordid avarice, lavish prodigality,
shameless vice, womanly resignation, artless coquetry, greed for money,
downright hypocrisy, would-be gentility, self-sufficient vanity,
fashionable swindling, misanthropy, heartlessness, plain common-sense,
knowledge of the world, coarse jealousy, irresolution, impudence, pride
of birth, egotism, self-conceit, pusillanimity, ingenuity, roguery,
affectations, homeliness, thoughtlessness, pedantry, arrogance, and many
more faults and vices, find their representatives. The language which
they employ is always natural to them, and is neither too gross nor
over-refined. His verse has none of the stiffness of the ordinary French
rhyme, and becomes in his hands, as well as his prose, a delightful
medium for sparkling sallies, bitter sarcasms, and well-sustained and
sprightly conversations.
And how remarkable and delicate is the nuance between his different
characters, though they may represent the same profession or an
identical personage. None of his doctors are alike; his male and female
scholars are all dissimilar. Mascarille is not Gros-Réné, Scapin is not
Sbrigani, Don Juan is not Dorante, Alceste is not Philinte, Isabelle is
not Agnes, Sganarelle is not always the same, Ariste is not Béralde nor
Chrysalde; while even his servants, Nicole, Dorine, Martine, Marotte,
Toinette, Claudine, and Lisette; his boobies, such as Alain and Lubin,
and his intriguants in petticoats, such as Nérine, Lucette, Frosine,
vary in character, expression, and conduct. They exemplify the saying,
"Like master, like man."
A remarkable characteristic of Molière is that he does not exaggerate;
his fools are never overwitty, his buffoons too grotesque, his men of
wit too anxious to display their smartness, nor his fine gentlemen too
fond of immodest and ribald talk. His satire is always kept within
bounds, his repartees are never out of place, his plots are but seldom
intricate, and the moral of his plays is not obtruded, but follows as a
natural consequence of the whole. He rarely rises to those lofty realms
of poetry where Shakespeare so often soars, for he wrote not idealistic,
but character, comedies; which is, perhaps, the reason that some of his
would-be admirers consider him rather commonplace. His claim to
distinction is based only on strong common-sense, good manners, sound
morality, real wit, true humor, a great, facile, and accurate command of
language, and a photographic delineation of nature.
It cannot be denied that there is little action in his plays, but there
is a great deal of natural conversation; his personages show that he was
a most attentive observer of men, even at court, where a certain varnish
of overrefinement conceals nearly all individual features. He generally
makes vice appear in its most ridiculous aspect, in order to let his
audience laugh and despise it; his aim is to correct the follies of the
age by exposing them to ridicule.
CROMWELL'S RULE IN ENGLAND
THE RESTORATION
A.D. 1660
THOMAS CARLYLE JOHN R. GREEN SAMUEL PEPYS
Brief as was the duration of the Protectorate under Oliver
Cromwell, it was one of the most extraordinary periods in
English history. It is now commonly admitted that Cromwell was
England's greatest ruler. After his first appearance in
Charles' third parliament (1628), at the age of twenty-nine,
Cromwell returned to the obscurity of his Huntingdon home. Not
until he entered the Long Parliament (1640) did he really begin
his marvellous career.
However variously judged by his contemporaries and by later
generations, Cromwell's part in the world's affairs was of
unquestioned magnitude. The very greatness of his career, the
power and extent of his influence, and the combination of
various elements in his character have made adequate judgment
of him difficult, and general agreement concerning him wellnigh
impossible. But that he was, at all events, "the most typical
Englishman of his time" is now generally acknowledged.
In the three views here presented, Cromwell's character and
career and the Restoration are set forth from quite different
points of view. Carlyle shows us in Cromwell one of his most
admired heroes; Green gives us the modern historian's
dispassionate conclusions; while the contemporary narrative of
the old diarist, Pepys, preserves the personal observations of
a participator in the scenes which he describes. Charles II had
spent years in exile on the Continent. He was finally
proclaimed King of England at Westminster, May 8, 1660. Pepys
describes his convoy from Holland to Dover, and his reception
by the people who had invited him to return to his country and
his throne.
THOMAS CARLYLE
We have had many civil-wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses,
wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough which are not very memorable. But
that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no one of
the others. Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on the other
side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section once more of
that great universal war which alone makes-up the true History of the
World,--the war of Belief against Unbelief!
The struggle of men intent on the real essence of things, against men
intent on the semblances and forms of things. The Puritans, to many,
seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms; but it were
more just to call them haters of _untrue_ Forms. I hope we know how to
respect Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems to me to have
been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest; an unfortunate Pedant rather
than anything worse. His "Dreams" and superstitions, at which they laugh
so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like a
College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion
is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed
suddenly, with that unalterable, luckless notion of his, at the head not
of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex,
deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old
decent regulations; nay, that their salvation will lie in extending and
improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence
toward his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of prudence,
no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians;
that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I
said. He would have it the world was a College of that kind, and the
world _was not_ that. Alas! was not his doom stern enough? Whatever
wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged on him?
It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally
clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the only
habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I
praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity--praising only the spirit
which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe themselves in
forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue
unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which
_grow_ round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond
to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good; forms which
are consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on
this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest
solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.
There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the
commonest meeting of men, a person making what we call "set speeches,"
is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies
you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a
thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter of
vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is),
about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling,
knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, and preferred
formless silence to any utterance there possible--what should we say of
a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way of
upholsterer-mummery? Such a man--let him depart swiftly, if he love
himself! You have lost your only son; are mute, struck down, without
even tears: an importunate man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral
Games for him in the manner of the Greeks!
Such mummery is not only not to be accepted--it is hateful, unendurable.
It is what the old Prophets called "Idolatry," worshipping of hollow
_shows_; what all earnest men do and will reject. We can partly
understand what these poor Puritans meant. Laud dedicating that St.
Catherine Creed's Church in the manner we have it described, with his
multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it
is rather the rigorous formal _Pedant_, intent on his "College-rules,"
than the earnest Prophet, intent on the essence of the matter!
Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;--we
have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood
preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand.
Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into the earnest _souls_ of
men: is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The
nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance,
however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with _due_ semblance
by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all.
Given the living _man_, there will be found _clothes_ for him; he will
find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is
both clothes and man--!--We cannot "fight the French" by
three-hundred-thousand red uniforms; there must be _men_ in the inside
of them! Semblance, I assert, must actually _not_ divorce itself from
Reality. If Semblance do--why, then there must be men found to rebel
against Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms at
war here, in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the
world. They went to fierce battle over England in that age; and
fought-out their confused controversy to a certain length, with many
results for all of us.
In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or
themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second
and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what
the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be
any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters,
and the age they ushered-in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on
gibbets--like the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless
went on accomplishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of
it on what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We have our
_Habeas-Corpus_, our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment,
wide as the world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will
become, what we call _free_ men;--men with their life grounded on
reality and justice, not on tradition, which has become unjust and a
chimera! This in part, and much besides this, was the work of the
Puritans.
And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character of
the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after
another, taken _down_ from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them are
now, in these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay
Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes;
political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what
makes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate
these men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find their apologists
somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One
Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang
yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither
saint nor sinner will acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability,
infinite talent, courage, and so forth; but he betrayed the Cause.
Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical
_Tartuffe_; turning all that noble Struggle for constitutional Liberty
into a sorry farce played for his own benefit: this and worse is the
character they give of Cromwell. And then there come contrasts with
Washington and others; above all, with these noble Pyms and Hampdens,
whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined into a futility and
deformity.
From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been
incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man
whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish
men; but if we will consider it, they are but _figures_ for us,
unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have
existed at all. A superficial, unbelieving generation only, with no eye
but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notions
of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a _conscience_ in it,
the essence of all _real_ souls, great or small? No, we cannot figure
Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study him and his
career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is no evidence of
it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of calumny this man
has been subject to, after being represented as the very prince of
liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some cunning
counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood
brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by
him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking
Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof!--Let us
leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They
are not portraits of the man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the
joint product of hatred and darkness.
Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very
different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier
obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all
betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous
melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness _too_ deep for
him. Of those stories of "Spectres;" of the white Spectre in broad
daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound
to believe much--probably no more than of the other black Spectre, or
Devil in person, to whom the Officer _saw_ him sell himself before
Worcester Fight!
But the mournful, over-sensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his
young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician
told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at
midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near
dying, and "had fancies about the Town-cross." These things are
significant. Such an excitable, deep-feeling nature, in that rugged
stubborn strength of his, is not the symptom of falsehood; it is the
symptom and promise of quite other than falsehood!