There must be a philosophy of clowns. I would rather find it than look
up their history, which is “older than any history that is written in
any book,” though the respectable compilers of Encyclopædias (I feel
sure without looking) must often have written it in their books. I
have, however, been reading Croce’s history of Pulcinella, because that
is history written by a philosopher. It is also a work of formidable
erudition, disproving, among other things, the theory of the learned
Dieterich that he was a survival from the stage of ancient Rome. No, he
seems to have been invented by one Silvio Fiorillo, a Neapolitan actor
who flourished “negli ultimi decenni del Cinquecento e nei primi del
Seicento”—in fact, was a contemporary of an English actor, one William
Shakespeare. Pulcinella, you know (transmogrified, and spoiled, for us
as Punch), was a sort of clown, and it is interesting to learn that he
was invented by an actor all out of his own head. But I for one should be
vastly more interested to know who invented Grock. For Grock also is a
sort of clown. Yet no; one must distinguish. There are clowns and there
is Grock. For Grock happens to be an artist, and the artist is always
an individual. After all, as an individual artist, he must have invented
himself.
It was a remarkably happy invention. You may see that for yourselves
at the Coliseum, generally, though true clown-lovers follow it about
all over the map wherever it is to be seen. Victor Hugo (and the theme
would not have been unworthy of that lyre) would have described it in
a series of antitheses. It is genial and _macabre_, owlishly stupid
and Macchiavellianly astute, platypode and feather-light, cacophonous
and divinely musical. Grock’s first act is a practical antithesis. A
strange creature with a very high and very bald cranium (you think of
what Fitzgerald said of James Spedding’s: “No wonder no hair can grow
at such an altitude”) and in very baggy breeches waddles in with an
enormous portmanteau—which proves to contain a fiddle no larger than
your hand. The creature looks more simian than human, but is graciously
affable—another Sir Oran Haut-ton, in fact, with fiddle substituted for
Sir Oran’s flute and French horn.
But Sir Oran was dumb, whereas Grock has a voice which reverberates
along the orchestra and seems almost to lift the roof. He uses it to
counterfeit the deep notes of an imaginary double bass, which he balances
himself on a chair to play, and he uses it to roar with contemptuous
surprise at being asked if he can play the piano. But it is good-humoured
contempt. Grock is an accommodating monster, and at a mere hint from
the violinist waddles off to change into evening clothes. In them he
looks like a grotesque beetle. Then his antics at the piano! His chair
being too far from the keyboard he makes great efforts to push the piano
nearer. When it is pointed out that it would be easier to move the chair
he beams with delight at the cleverness of the idea and expresses it in
a peculiarly bland roar. Then he slides, in apparent absence of mind,
all over the piano-case and, on finally deciding to play a tune, does it
with his feet. Thereafter he thrusts his feet through the seat of the
chair and proceeds to give a performance of extraordinary brilliance on
the concertina.... But I am in despair, because I see that these tricks,
which in action send one into convulsions of laughter, are not ludicrous,
are not to be realized at all in narrative. It is the old difficulty
of transposing the comic from three dimensions into two—and when the
comic becomes the grotesque, and that extreme form of the grotesque
which constitutes the clownesque, then the difficulty becomes sheer
impossibility.
Why does this queer combination of anthropoid appearance, unearthly
noises, physical agility, and musical talent—so flat in description—make
one laugh so immoderately in actual presentation? Well, there is, first,
the old idea of the parturient mountains and the ridiculous mouse. Of
the many theories of the comic (all, according to Jean Paul Richter,
themselves comic) the best known perhaps is the theory of suddenly
relaxed strain. Your psychic energies have been strained (say by Grock’s
huge portmanteau), and are suddenly in excess and let loose by an
inadequate sequel (the tiny fiddle). Then there is the old theory of
Aristotle, that the comic is ugliness without pain. That will account
for your laughter at Grock’s grotesque appearance, his baggy breeches,
his beetle-like dress clothes, his hideous mouth giving utterance to
harmless sentiments. Again, there is the pleasure arising from the
discovery that an apparent idiot has wholly unexpected superiorities,
acrobatic skill, and virtuosity in musical execution. But “not such a
fool as he looks” is the class-badge of clowns in general. There is
something still unexplained in the attraction of Grock. One can only call
it his individuality—his benign, bland outlook on a cosmos of which he
seems modestly to possess the secret hidden from ourselves. One comes in
the end to the old helpless explanation of any individual artist. Grock
pleases because he is Grock.
And now I think one can begin to see why literature (or if you think
that too pretentious a word, say letterpress) fails to do justice to
clowns. Other comic personages have their verbal jokes, which can be
quoted in evidence, but the clown (certainly the clown of the Grock
type) is a joke confined to appearance and action. His effects, too,
are all of the simplest and broadest—the obvious things (obvious when
he has invented them) which are the most difficult of all to translate
into prose. You see, I have been driven to depend on general epithets
like grotesque, bland, _macabre_, which fit the man too loosely (like
ready-made clothes cut to fit innumerable men) to give you his exact
measure. My only consolation is that I have failed with the best. Grock,
with all his erudition, all his nicety of analysis, has failed to realize
Pulcinella for me. And that is where clowns may enjoy a secret, malign
pleasure; they proudly confront a universe which delights in them but
cannot describe them. A critic may say to an acrobat, for instance:—“I
cannot swing on your trapeze, but I can understand you, while you cannot
understand me.” But Grock seems to understand everything (he could do no
less, with that noble forehead), probably even critics, while they, poor
souls, can only struggle helplessly with their inadequate adjectives, and
give him up. But if he condescended to criticism, be sure he would not
struggle helplessly. He would blandly thrust his feet through the seat
of his chair, and then write his criticism with them. And (Grock is a
Frenchman) it would be better than Sainte-Beuve.