faun-colored bands; little slender trees wave in the middle distance
their sparse foliage of the color of dried rose-leaves; the background,
instead of swimming in azure vapor, is of the most beautiful
apple-green, and spiral columns of golden smoke float up-ward here and
there. A stray beam catches upon the pediment of a ruined temple or the
spire of a tower.--Cities full of steeples, pyramids, domes, arches,
and balustrades are perched on hillsides and reflected in crystal
lakes; tall trees with great leaves, cut deep on the edges by fairy
scissors, entwine their trunks and branches inextricably to form the
wings. The clouds in the sky pile up above their heads like snow-balls,
you see the eyes of dwarfs and gnomes shining through their interstices
and their tortuous roots bury themselves in the ground like the fingers
of a giant hand. The woodpecker taps rhythmically on them with its
beak of horn, and emerald-green lizards warm themselves in the sun on
the moss about their feet.
The mushroom watches the play with his hat on his head, like the
insolent rascal he is: the delicate violet stands on the tips of its
tiny toes between two wisps of grass, and opens its blue eyes wide to
see the hero pass. The bullfinch and the linnet swing on the ends of
twigs to prompt the actors in their parts.
Amid the tall grass, the purple thistles and the burdocks with velvet
leaves, brooks made by the tears of stags at bay wander like silver
snakes; here and there anemones gleam on the turf like drops of blood
and marguerites swell with pride, their heads laden with wreaths of
pearls like veritable duchesses.
The characters are of no time and no country; they come and go no one
knows how or why; they neither eat nor drink, they live nowhere and
have no trade; they possess neither estates nor houses nor consols;
sometimes they carry under their arms a little casket full of diamonds
as large as pigeons' eggs; when they walk they do not brush a single
drop of dew from the petals of the flowers or raise a single atom of
dust from the roads.
Their clothes are the most fantastic and extravagant clothes
imaginable. Pointed, steeple-shaped hats with brims as broad as a
Chinese parasol and plumes of inordinate length taken from the tail
of the bird of paradise and the phoenix: striped capes of brilliant
colors, velvet and brocade doublets, showing their lining of satin or
cloth of silver through their gold-laced slashes; full short-clothes,
swelling like balloons; scarlet stockings with embroidered clocks,
shoes with high heels and broad rosettes; fragile swords, point up,
hilt down, all covered with cords and ribands;--so much for the men.
The women are no less curiously apparelled.--The drawings of Della
Bella and Romain de Hooge may serve to indicate the general character
of their attire; dresses of heavy, undulating stuffs, with broad
folds which change color like the breasts of pigeons, and display all
the varying hues of the iris, ample sleeves from which other sleeves
issue, ruffs of open-slashed lace that rise higher than the heads for
which they serve as frames, corsages covered with bows and embroidery,
brooches,--strange trinkets, tufts of heron's feathers, necklaces of
huge pearls, peacock's tail fans with mirrors in the centre, little
slippers and pattens, wreaths of artificial flowers, spangles, striped
gauze, paint, patches and everything that can add zest and piquancy to
a stage costume.
It is a style that is not precisely English or German or French
or Turkish or Spanish or Tartar, although it partakes a little of
them all and has taken from each country, its most graceful and
characteristic features.--Actors thus arrayed can say whatever they
choose without offending one's ideas of probability. The fancy can run
in all directions, style uncoil its variegated rings at its pleasure,
like a snake warming itself in the sun; the most exotic conceits open
fearlessly their strangely-shaped calyxes and spread their perfume of
amber and musk around.--There is nothing to offer any obstacle, either
places or names or costumes.
How fascinating and entertaining what they say! Fine actors that they
are, they do not strut about, like our howlers of melodrama, twisting
their mouths and forcing the eyes out of their heads to deliver their
tirades with effect;--at all events they haven't the appearance of
workmen at a task, of oxen harnessed to the plot and in a hurry to have
done with it; they are not plastered with chalk and rouge half an inch
thick; they don't wear tin daggers and keep in reserve under their
waistcoats a pig's bladder filled with chicken's blood; they don't drag
the same oil-spotted rag about through whole acts.
They speak without hurry, without shrieking, like people of good
breeding who attach no great importance to what they are doing; the
lover makes his declaration to his sweetheart in the most nonchalant
manner imaginable; as he speaks he taps his thigh with the ends of
his gloved fingers or adjusts the leg of his trousers. The lady
carelessly shakes the dew from her bouquet and jokes with her maid;
the lover cares but little about touching his cruel enslaver's heart:
his principal business is to let fall bunches of pearls from his mouth
and clusters of roses, and to sow poetic precious stones like a true
prodigal;--often he effaces himself altogether and allows the author to
pay court to his mistress for him. Jealousy is not one of his defects
and his disposition is most accommodating. With his eyes raised toward
the sky, and the frieze of the theatre, he waits patiently for the poet
to finish saying what passed through his mind, before resuming his rôle
and returning to his knees.
The whole plot is tangled and untangled with admirable indifference;
effects have no cause and causes have no effect: the brightest
character is he who says the greatest number of foolish things; the
greatest fool says the brightest things; the maidens make speeches
that would make harlots blush; harlots declaim moral maxims. The most
incredible adventures follow one another in rapid succession and are
never explained; the noble father arrives post-haste from China in a
little bamboo junk to identify a little kidnapped girl; the gods and
fairies do nothing but ascend and descend in their machines. The plot
plunges into the sea under the topaz dome of the waves and walks on
the bottom of the ocean, through the forests of coral and madrepore,
or rises skyward on the wings of the skylark or the griffin.--The
dialogue is shared by all; the lion contributes to it with an _oh! oh_!
in a vigorous roar; the wall speaks through its fissures and every
one is at liberty to interrupt the most amusing scene provided that
he has an epigram, a rebus or a pun to interject: Bottom's ass's head
is as welcome among them as Ariel's blond locks;--the author's wit is
displayed in every conceivable form; and all the contradictions are
like so many facets, as it were, which reflect its different aspects,
adding the colors of the prism thereto.
This apparent pell-mell and confusion are found, when all is said, to
render real life more accurately under their fantastic guise than the
most painstaking drama of manners.--Every man embodies all humanity in
himself, and by writing what comes into his head, he succeeds better
than by copying outside objects by means of a magnifying-glass.
O what a fine family!--romantic young lovers, wandering damsels,
accommodating ladies' maids, sarcastic clowns, valets and innocent
peasants, free-and-easy kings, whose names are unknown to the
historian, and the kingdom of the geographer; parti-colored clowns with
miraculous capers and biting repartees; oh! ye, who give free speech
to caprice through your smiling mouths, I love you and adore you above
all the world!--Perdita, Rosalind, Celia, Pandarus, Parolles, Silvio,
Leander and the rest, all the charming types, so false and yet so true,
who rise above vulgar reality on the bespangled wings of folly, and in
whom the poet personifies his joy, his melancholy, his love and his
most secret dreams under the most frivolous and most unconventional
appearances.
There is one play, written for the fairies and properly to be played by
moonlight, that delights me more than any other in the repertory of
this theatre;--it is such a vagabond, wandering play, with such a vague
plot and such strange characters, that the author himself, not knowing
what title to give it, called it _Comme il vous plaira_,[1] an elastic
name, which answers all purposes.
While reading that strange play, you seem to be transported into
an unfamiliar world of which you have nevertheless some vague
reminiscence; you are not sure whether you are dead or alive, awake
or dreaming; gracious faces smile sweetly upon you and toss you an
affable greeting as they pass; you feel strangely moved and disturbed
at sight of them as if you should suddenly meet your ideal at an angle
in the road, or the forgotten phantom of your first mistress should
rise suddenly before you. Springs bubble up from the ground, murmuring
half-stifled plaints; the wind stirs the foliage of the venerable trees
over the exiled duke's head with compassionate sighs; and when the
melancholy Jaques confides his philosophic lamentations to the stream,
with the leaves of the willow, it seems to you that you yourself are
speaking and that the most secret and most obscure thoughts of your
heart come forth into the light.
O youthful son of the gallant Sir Rowland de Bois, so maltreated by
fate! I cannot help being jealous of you; you still have a faithful
servant, honest Adam, whose old age is still green under his snow-white
locks.--You are banished, but not until you have at least struggled and
triumphed; your wicked brother takes all your property from you, but
Rosalind gives you the chain from her neck; you are poor, but you are
beloved; you leave your country, but your persecutor's daughter follows
you beyond the sea.
The dark forest of Arden opens wide its great arms of foliage to
welcome and conceal you; the kindly forest heaps up its silkiest moss
in the depths of its grottoes for your bed; it bends its leafy arches
over your brow to protect you from the rain and sun; it pities you
with the tears of its springs and the sighs of its bleating fawns
and deer; its rocks afford convenient desks on which to write your
amorous epistles; it lends you the brambles from its bushes with which
to attach them, and orders the satiny bark of its aspens to yield to
the point of your stiletto when you wish to carve Rosalind's initials
thereon.
If only I could have, like you, young Orlando, a vast cool forest to
which to retire and live alone in my sorrow, and if, at a turning
in a path, I could meet her whom I seek, recognizable, although
disguised!--But, alas! the world of the soul has no verdant Arden, and
only in the garden of poesy do the capricious little wild-flowers bloom
whose perfumes make one oblivious of everything. In vain do we shed
tears, they do not form those lovely silvery cascades; in vain do we
sigh, no obliging echo takes the trouble to send back our lamentations
embellished with imperfect rhymes and gay conceits.--In vain do we
hang sonnets to the sharp points of all the brambles, Rosalind never
picks them off, and we carve amorous ciphers on the bark of trees
gratuitously.
Birds of heaven, lend me each a feather, swallow and eagle,
humming-bird and roc, that I may make of them a pair of wings to soar
aloft and swiftly through unknown regions, where I shall find nothing
to recall to my mind the city of the living, where I can forget that I
am myself and live a strange, new life, farther than America, farther
than Africa, farther than Asia, farther than the farthest island in
the world, through the ocean of ice, beyond the pole where the Aurora
Borealis flickers, in the impalpable kingdom to which the divine
creations of poets and the types of supreme beauty take flight.
How can one endure the ordinary conversation at clubs and salons when
one has heard you speak, sparkling Mercutio, whose every sentence
bursts in a shower of gold and silver, like a pyrotechnic bomb beneath
a star-studded sky? Pale Desdemona, what pleasure, think you, one can
take in any earthly music, after the ballad of the Willow? What women
do not seem ugly beside your Venuses, ye ancient sculptors, poets who
wrote strophes in marble?
Ah! despite the fierce embrace with which I have sought to enlace the
material world in default of the other, I feel that my birth was a
mistake, that life was not made for me and that it spurns me; I can
no longer take part in anything; whatever road I follow, I go astray;
the smooth avenue, the stony path, alike lead me to the abyss. If I
attempt to take my flight, the air condenses around me and I am caught,
with out-stretched wings, unable to close them.--I can neither walk
nor fly; the sky attracts me when I am on the earth, the earth when I
am in the sky; aloft, the north wind pulls out my feathers; below, the
stones wound my feet. My soles are too tender to walk on the broken
glass of reality; the spread of my wings is too narrow to enable me to
soar above earthly things, and to rise from circle to circle to the
deep azure of mysticism, to the inaccessible summits of everlasting
love; I am the most wretched hippogriff, the most miserable collection
of heterogeneous odds and ends that has ever existed since the ocean
first loved the moon and women deceived men: the monstrous Chimera put
to death by Bellerophon, with his maiden's head, his lion's claws, his
goat's body and his dragon's tail, was an animal of a simple make-up
beside me.
In my frail breast the violet-strewn reveries of the modest maiden and
the insensate ardor of courtesans on a debauch live side by side; my
desires go about like lions, sharpening their claws in the dark and
seeking something to devour; my thoughts, more restless and uneasy
than goats, cling to the most dangerous peaks; my hatred, swollen with
poison, twists its scaly folds into inextricable knots, and crawls
along in ruts and ravines.
My soul is a strange country, in appearance flourishing and splendid,
but more reeking with fetid, deleterious miasmas than Batavia itself;
the faintest sunbeam on the slime causes reptiles and venomous insects
to breed;--the great yellow tulips, the _nagassaris_ and _angsoka_
with their gorgeous flowers conceal the heaps of disgusting carrion.
The amorous rose opens her scarlet lips in a smile and discloses her
tiny dew-drop teeth to the gallant nightingales who sing sonnets and
madrigals to her: nothing can be more charming; but it is a hundred to
one that a dropsical toad is crawling along on her clumsy feet in the
grass at the foot of the bush, whitening his path with his slaver.
There are springs clearer and more transparent than the purest diamond;
but it would be better for you to drink the stagnant water of the swamp
under its cloak of rotting shrubs and drowned dogs than to dip your cup
in that basin.--A serpent lies hidden at the bottom, and twists and
turns with frightful rapidity, disgorging his venom.
You have planted wheat; your crop is asphodel, henbane, tares and pale
hemlock with twigs covered with verdigris. Instead of the root you set
out, you are surprised to see the hairy, twisted limbs of the black
mandragora coming up out of the earth.
If you leave a memory there and go to take it up again some time
after, you will find it more covered with moss and more swarming with
palmer-worms and vile insects than a stone laid on the damp floor of a
cavern.
Do not try to pass through its dark forests; they are more impassable
than the virgin forests of America and the jungles of Java; creepers
strong as cables run from tree to tree; all the paths are obstructed
by bristling plants as sharp as lance-heads; the very turf is covered
with a stinging down like that of the nettle. From the arches of the
foliage, gigantic bats of the vampire species hang by their nails;
beetles of enormous size wave their horns threateningly, and thrash the
air with their four-footed wings; monstrous, fantastic beasts, like
those we see in nightmares, come clumsily forward, crushing the reeds
before them. There are troops of elephants, who crush flies in the
wrinkles of their flabby skin and rub their sides against the rocks and
trees, rhinoceroses with their rough, uneven hides, hippopotami with
their swollen snouts bristling with hair, who knead the mud and the
débris of the forest with their huge feet.
In the clearings, where the sun insinuates a luminous beam like a wedge
of gold through the damp atmosphere, you will always find, on the spot
where you propose to sit, a family of tigers lying at their ease,
sniffing the air, winking their sea-green eyes, and polishing their
velvet coats with their blood-red, papilæ-covered tongues; or else it
is a tangled knot of boas, half asleep, digesting the last bull they
have devoured.
Be suspicious of everything; grass, fruit, water, air, shade, sunlight,
all are deadly.
Close your ears to the chattering of the little paroquets with golden
beaks and emerald necks, that fly down from the trees and perch on
your finger, with fluttering wings; for the little paroquets with the
emerald necks will end by gently pecking your eyes out with their
pretty golden beaks, just as you bend to kiss them.--So it is.
The world will have none of me; it spurns me like a spectre escaped
from the tombs; I am almost as pale as one; my blood refuses to believe
that I am alive and will not tinge my flesh; it crawls sluggishly
through my veins like stagnant water in obstructed canals.--My heart
beats for none of those things that make men's hearts beat.--My sorrows
and my joys are not those of my fellow-creatures.--I have fiercely
desired what no one desires; I have disdained what others wildly long
for.--I have loved women who did not love me, and I have been loved
when I would have liked to be hated; always too soon or too late, too
much or too little, too far or not far enough; never just what was
needed; either I have not arrived or I have gone beyond.--I have thrown
my life out of the window, or I have concentrated it too exclusively
upon a single point, and from the restless activity of the busybody I
have passed to the deathlike somnolence of the _teriaki_ or the Stylite
on his pillar.
What I do seems always to be done in a dream; my actions seem rather
the result of somnambulism than of free will; there is something
within me, which I feel vaguely at a great depth, which makes me act
without my own initiative, and always outside of ordinary laws; the
simple and natural side of things is never revealed to me until after
all the others, and I lay hold first of all that is eccentric and
unusual; however straight the line, I will soon make it more winding
and tortuous than a serpent; contours, unless they are marked in the
most precise way, become confused and distorted. Faces take on a
supernatural expression and gaze at me with awe-inspiring eyes.
Thus, by virtue of a sort of instinctive reaction, I have always clung
desperately to matter, to the exterior outline of things, and I have
awarded a great share of my esteem to the plastic in art.--I understand
a statue perfectly, I do not understand a man; where life begins, I
stop and recoil in dismay as if I had seen the head of Medusa. The
phenomenon of life causes me an astonishment from which I cannot
recover.--I shall make an excellent corpse, I doubt not, for I am an
extremely poor living man, and the meaning of my existence escapes me
completely. The sound of my voice surprises me beyond measure, and I am
tempted sometimes to take it for somebody else's voice. When I choose
to put out my arm and my arm obeys me, it seems to me a most prodigious
thing, and I fall into the most profound stupefaction.
By way of compensation, Silvio, I perfectly understand the
unintelligible; the most extravagant _motifs_ seem perfectly natural
to me and I enter into them with extraordinary facility. I readily
find the sequel of the most capricious and most incomprehensible
nightmare.--That is why the class of plays I described to you just now
pleases me above all others.
Théodore and Rosette and I have great discussions on this subject:
Rosette has but little relish for my system, she is for _true_ truth;
Théodore would give the poet more latitude, and would not exclude
conventional, optical truth.--For my part, I maintain that the field
must be left absolutely free for the author and that the imagination
must hold sovereign sway.
Many of the guests based their arguments on the ground that plays
of this sort were as a general rule outside of the ordinary stage
conditions and could not be acted; I answered that that was true in one
sense and false in another, just like everything else that people say,
and that their ideas as to the possibilities and impossibilities of the
stage seemed to me to lack exactness and to be based upon prejudices
rather than arguments; and I said among other things that the play of
_As You Like It_ was certainly capable of being performed, especially
for society people who were not accustomed to other parts.
That suggested the idea of acting it. The season is drawing on and all
other forms of amusement are exhausted; we are weary of hunting, of
riding and boating parties; the chances of boston, varied though they
be, are not exciting enough to fill up the evening, and the proposition
was received with universal enthusiasm.
A young man who knows how to paint offered his services to paint the
scenery; he is working at it now with much zeal, and in a few days it
will be finished.--The stage is erected in the orangery, which is
the largest apartment in the chateau, and I think everything will go
off well. I am to play _Orlando_; Rosette was to be the _Rosalind_,
as it was proper that she should be; as my mistress and the mistress
of the house, the rôle was hers as of right; but she has refused to
masquerade as a man, through some whim most extraordinary for her, for
prudery certainly is not one of her faults. If I had not been sure of
the contrary, I should have thought that her legs are not well formed.
Actually not one of the ladies in the party would consent to seem less
scrupulous than Rosette, and the play was very near falling through;
but Théodore, who was to take the part of the melancholy _Jaques_,
offered to take her place, inasmuch as _Rosalind_ is a man, almost
all the time, except in the first act, when she is a woman, and with
a little paint, a pair of corsets and a dress, he could carry out the
deception well enough, having no beard as yet and being very slender in
figure.
We are now learning our parts and it is a curious thing to see us.--In
every solitary nook in the park you are sure of finding some one, with
a roll of paper in his hand, mumbling to himself, looking up at the
sky, then suddenly lowering his eyes, and making the same gesture
seven or eight times. Any one who didn't know that we were going to
give a play would certainly take us for inmates of a lunatic asylum, or
poets--which is almost a pleonasm.
I think we shall soon know our parts well enough to have a
rehearsal.--I expect something very interesting. Perhaps I am wrong.--I
was afraid for a moment that our actors, instead of acting by
inspiration, would strive to reproduce the gestures and intonation of
some fashionable comedian; but luckily they have not followed the stage
closely enough to make that mistake, and it is to be hoped that, amid
the natural awkwardness of people who have never stood on the boards,
they will show some precious gleams of nature and a charming _naïveté_
that the most consummate talent cannot equal.