is it that of Aristophanes, or of the Latin poets. Among the
Greeks, and in France, in modern times, comedy was the offspring
of a free but attentive observation of the real world, and its
object was to bring its features on the stage. The distinction
between the tragic and the comic styles is met with almost in the
cradle of dramatic art, and their separation has always become
more distinctly marked during the course of their progress. The
principle of this distinction is contained in the very nature of
things. The destiny and nature of man, his passions and affairs,
characters and events--all things within and around us--have
their serious and their amusing sides, and may be considered and
described under either of these points of view. This two-fold
aspect of man and the world has opened to dramatic poetry two
careers naturally distinct; but in dividing its powers to
traverse them both, art has neither separated itself from
realities, nor ceased to observe and reproduce them.
{72}
Whether Aristophanes attacks, with the most fantastic liberty of
imagination, the vices or follies of the Athenians; or whether
Molière depicts the absurdities of credulity and avarice, of
jealousy and pedantry, and ridicules the frivolity of courts, the
vanity of citizens, and even the affectation of virtues, it
matters little that there is a difference between the subjects in
the delineation of which the two poets have employed their
powers; it matters little that one brought public life and the
whole nation on the stage, while the other merely described
incidents of private life, the interior arrangements of families,
and the nonsensicality of individual characters; this difference
in the materials of comedy arises from the difference of time,
place, and state of civilization. But in both Aristophanes and
Molière realities always constitute the substance of the picture.
The manners and ideas of their times, the vices and follies of
their fellow-citizens--in a word, the nature and life of man--are
always the stimulus and nutriment of their poetic vein.
Comedy thus takes its origin in the world which surrounds the
poet, and is connected, much more closely than tragedy, with
external and real facts.
The Greeks, whose mind and civilization followed so regular a
course in their development, did not combine the two kinds of
composition, and the distinction which separates them in nature
was maintained without effort in art. Simplicity prevailed among
this people; society was not abandoned by them to a state of
conflict and incoherence; and their destiny did not pass away in
protracted obscurity, in the midst of contrasts, and a prey to
dark and deep uneasiness. They grew and shone in their land just
as the sun rose and pursued its course through the skies which
overshadowed them. National perils, intestine discord, and civil
wars agitated the life of a man in those days, without disturbing
his imagination, and without opposing or deranging the natural
and easy course of his thoughts.
{73}
The reflex influence of this general harmony was diffused over
literature and the arts. Styles of composition spontaneously
became distinguished from each other, according to the principles
upon which they depended and the impressions which they aspired
to produce. The sculptor chiseled, isolated statues or innumerous
groups, and did not aim at composing violent scenes or vast
pictures out of blocks of marble. Æschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides undertook to excite the people by the narration of the
mighty destinies of heroes and of kings. Cratinus and
Aristophanes aimed at diverting them by the representation of the
absurdities of their contemporaries or of their own follies.
These natural classifications corresponded with the entire system
of social order, with the state of the minds of the age, and with
the instincts of public taste--which would have been shocked at
their violation, which desired to yield itself without
uncertainty or participation to a single impression or a single
pleasure, and which would have rejected all those unnatural
mixtures and uncongenial combinations to which their attention
had never been called or their judgment accustomed. Thus every
art and every style received its free and isolated development
within the limits of its proper mission. Thus tragedy and comedy
shared man and the world between them, each taking a different
domain in the region of realities, and coming by turns to offer
to the serious or mirthful consideration of a people who
invariably insisted upon simplicity and harmony, the poetic
effects which their skill could derive from the materials placed
in their hands.
{74}
In our modern world, all things have borne another character.
Order, regularity, natural and easy development, seem to have
been banished from it. Immense interests, admirable ideas,
sublime sentiments, have been thrown, as it were, pell-mell with
brutal passions, coarse necessities, and vulgar habits.
Obscurity, agitation, and disturbance have reigned in minds as
well as in states. Nations have been formed, not of freemen and
slaves, but of a confused mixture of diverse, complicated
classes, ever engaged in conflict and labor; a violent chaos,
which civilization, after long-continued efforts, has not yet
succeeded in reducing to complete harmony. Social conditions,
separated by power, but united in a common barbarism of manners;
the germ of loftiest moral truths fermenting in the midst of
absurd ignorance; great virtues applied in opposition to all
reason; shameful vices maintained and defended with hauteur; an
indocile honor, ignorant of the simplest delicacies of honesty;
boundless servility, accompanied by measureless pride; in fine,
the incoherent assemblage of all that human nature and destiny
contain of that which is great and little, noble and trivial,
serious and puerile, strong and wretched--this is what man and
society have been in our Europe; this is the spectacle which has
appeared on the theatre of the world.
In such a state of mind and things, how was it possible for a
clear distinction and simple classification of styles and arts to
be effected? How could tragedy and comedy have presented and
formed themselves isolatedly in literature, when, in reality,
they were incessantly in contact, entwined in the same facts, and
intermingled in the same actions, so thoroughly, that it was
sometimes difficult to discern the moment of passage from one to
the other. Neither the rational principle, nor the delicate
feeling which separate them, could attain any development in
minds which were incapacitated from apprehending them by the
disorder and rapidity of different or opposite impressions.
{75}
Was it proposed to bring upon the stage the habitual occurrences
of ordinary life? Taste was as easily satisfied as manners. Those
religious performances which were the origin of the European
theatre, had not escaped this admixture. Christianity is a
popular religion; into the abyss of terrestrial miseries, its
divine founder came in search of men, to draw them to himself;
its early history is a history of poor, sick, and feeble men; it
existed at first for a long while in obscurity, and afterward in
the midst of persecutions, despised and proscribed by turns, and
exposed to all the vicissitudes and efforts of a humble and
violent destiny. Uncultivated imaginations easily seized upon the
triviality which might be intermingled with the incidents of this
history; the Gospel, the acts of martyrs, and the lives of
saints, would have struck them much less powerfully if they had
seen only their tragic aspect or their rational truths. The first
Mysteries brought simultaneously upon the stage the emotions of
religious terror and tenderness, and the buffooneries of vulgar
comicality; and thus, in the very cradle of dramatic poetry,
tragedy and comedy contracted that alliance which was inevitably
forced upon them by the general condition of nations and of
minds.
In France, however, this alliance was speedily broken off. From
causes which are connected with the entire history of our
civilization, the French people have always taken extreme
pleasure in drollery. Of this, our literature has from time to
time given evidence. This craving for gayety, and for gayety
without alloy, early supplied the inferior classes of our
countrymen with their comic farces, into which nothing was
admitted that had not a tendency to excite laughter.
{76}
In the infancy of the art, comedy in France may very possibly
have invaded the domain of tragedy, but tragedy had no right to
the field which comedy had reserved to itself; and in the
_piteous_ Moralities and _pompous_ Tragedies which
princes caused to be represented in their palaces, and rectors in
their colleges, the trivially comic element long retained a place
which was inexorably refused to the tragic element in the
buffooneries with which the people were amused. We may therefore
affirm that in France comedy, in an imperfect but distinct form,
was created before tragedy. At a later period, the rigorous
separation of classes, the absence of popular institutions, the
regular action of the supreme power, the establishment of a more
exact and uniform system of public order than existed in any
other country, the habits and influence of the court, and a
variety of other causes, disposed the popular mind to maintain
that strict distinction between the two styles which was ordained
by the classical authorities, who held undisputed sway over our
drama. Then arose among us true and great comedy, as conceived by
Molière; and as it was in accordance with our manners, as well as
with the rules of the art, to strike out a new path--as, while
adapting itself to the precepts of antiquity, it did not fail to
derive its subjects and coloring from the facts and personages of
the surrounding world, our comedy suddenly rose to a pitch of
perfection which, in my opinion, has never been attained by any
other country in any other age. To place himself in the interior
of families, and thereby to gain the immense advantage of a
variety of ideas and conditions, which extends the domain of art
without injuring the simplicity of the effects which it produces;
to find in man passions sufficiently strong, and caprices
sufficiently powerful to sway his whole destiny, and yet to limit
their influence to the suggestion of those errors which may make
man ridiculous, without ever touching upon those which would
render him miserable;
{77}
to describe an individual as laboring under that excess of
preoccupation which, diverting him from all other thoughts,
abandons him entirely to the guidance of the idea which possesses
him, and yet to throw in his way only those interests which are
sufficiently frivolous to enable him to compromise them without
danger; to depict, in "Tartuffe," the threatening knavery of the
hypocrite, and the dangerous imbecility of the dupe, in such a
manner as merely to divert the spectator, without incurring any
of the odious consequences of such a position; to give a comic
character, in the "Misanthrope," to those feelings which do most
honor to the human race, by condemning them to confinement within
the dimensions of the existence of a courtier; and thus to reach
the amusing by means of the serious; to extract food for mirth
from the inmost recesses of human nature, and incessantly to
maintain the character of comedy while bordering upon the
confines of tragedy--this is what Molière has done, this is the
difficult and original style which he bestowed upon France; and
France alone, in my opinion, could have given dramatic art this
tendency, and Molière.
Nothing of this kind took place among the English. The asylum of
German manners, as well as of German liberties, England pursued,
without obstacle, the irregular, but natural course of the
civilization which such elements could not fail to engender. It
retained their disorder as well as their energy, and, until the
middle of the seventeenth century, its literature, as well as its
institutions, was the sincere expression of these qualities. When
the English drama attempted to reproduce the poetic image of the
world, tragedy and comedy were not separated.
{78}
The predominance of the popular taste sometimes carried tragic
representations to a pitch of atrocity which was unknown in
France, even in the rudest essays of dramatic art; and the
influence of the clergy, by purging the comic stage of that
excessive immorality which it exhibited elsewhere, also deprived
it of that malicious and sustained gayety which constitutes the
essence of true comedy. The habits of mind which were entertained
among the people by the minstrels and their ballads, allowed the
introduction, even into those compositions which were most
exclusively devoted to mirthfulness, of some touches of those
emotions which comedy in France can never admit with out losing
its name, and becoming melodrama. Among truly national works, the
only thoroughly comic play which the English stage possessed
before the time of Shakspeare, "Gammer Grurton's Needle," was
composed for a college, and modeled in accordance with the
classic rules. The vague titles given to dramatic works, such as
_play, interlude, history,_ or even _ballad_, scarcely
ever indicate any distinction of style. Thus, between that which
was called _tragedy_ and that which was sometimes named
_comedy_, the only essential difference consisted in the
_denouement_, according to the principles laid down in the
fifteenth century by the monk Lydgate, who "defines a comedy to
begin with complaint and to end with gladness, whereas tragedy
begins in prosperity and ends in adversity."
Thus, at the advent of Shakspeare, the nature and destiny of man,
which constitute the materials of dramatic poetry, were not
divided or classified into different branches of art. When art
desired to introduce them on the stage, it accepted them in their
entirety, with all the mixtures and contrasts which they present
to observation; nor was the public taste inclined to complain of
this.
{79}
The comic portion of human realities had a right to take its
place wherever its presence was demanded or permitted by truth;
and such was the character of civilization, that tragedy, by
admitting the comic element, did not derogate from truth in the
slightest degree. In such a condition of the stage and of the
public mind, what could be the state of comedy, properly so
called? How could it be permitted to claim to bear a particular
name, and to form a distinct style? It succeeded in this attempt
by boldly leaving those realities in which its natural domain was
neither respected nor acknowledged; it did not limit its efforts
to the delineation of settled manners or of consistent
characters; it did not propose to itself to represent men and
things under a ridiculous but truthful aspect; but it became a
fantastic and romantic work, the refuge of those amusing
improbabilities which, in its idleness or folly, the imagination
delights to connect together by a slight thread, in order to form
from them combinations capable of affording diversion or
interest, without calling for the judgment of the reason.
Graceful pictures, surprises, the curiosity which attaches to the
progress of an intrigue, mistakes, quid-pro-quos, all the
witticisms of parody and travestie, formed the substance of this
inconsequent diversion. The conformation of the Spanish plays, a
taste for which was beginning to prevail in England, supplied
these gambols of the imagination with abundant frame-works and
alluring models. Next to their chronicles and ballads,
collections of French or Italian tales, together with the
romances of chivalry, formed the favorite reading of the people.
Is it strange that so productive a mine and so easy a style
should first have attracted the attention of Shakspeare? Can we
feel astonished that his young and brilliant imagination hastened
to wander at will among such subjects, free from the yoke of
probabilities, and excused from seeking after serious and
vigorous combinations?
{80}
The great poet, whose mind and hand proceeded, it is said, with
such equal rapidity that his manuscript scarcely contained a
single erasure, doubtless yielded with delight to those
unrestrained gambols in which he could display without labor his
rich and varied faculties. He could put any thing he pleased into
his comedies, and he has, in fact, put every thing into them,
with the exception of one thing which was incompatible with such
a system, namely, the ensemble which, making every part concur
toward the same end, reveals at every step the depth of the plan
and the grandeur of the work. It would be difficult to find in
Shakspeare's tragedies a single conception, position, act, or
passion, or degree of vice or virtue, which may not also be met
with in some one of his comedies; but that which in his tragedies
is carefully thought out, fruitful in result, and intimately
connected with the series of causes and effects, is in his
comedies only just indicated, and offered to our sight for a
moment to dazzle us with a passing gleam, and soon to disappear
in a new combination. In "Measure for Measure," Angelo, the
unworthy governor of Vienna, after having condemned Claudio to
death for the crime of having seduced a young girl whom he
intended to marry, himself attempts to seduce Isabella, the
sister of Claudio, by promising her brother's pardon as a
recompense for her own dishonor; and when, by Isabella's address
in substituting another girl in her place, he thinks he has
received the price of his infamous bargain, he gives orders to
hasten Claudio's execution. Is not this tragedy? Such a fact
might well be placed in the life of Richard the Third, and no
crime of Macbeth's presents this excess of wickedness.
{81}
But in "Macbeth" and "Richard III.," crime produces the tragic
effect which belongs to it, because it bears the impress of
probability, and because real forms and colors attest its
presence: we can discern the place which it occupies in the heart
of which it has taken possession: we know how it gained
admission, what it has conquered, and what remains for it to
subjugate: we behold it incorporating itself by degrees into the
unhappy being whom it has subdued: we see it living, walking, and
breathing with a man who lives, walks, and breathes, and thus
communicates to it his character, his own individuality. In
Angelo, crime is only a vague abstraction, connected _en
passant_ with a proper name, with no other motive than the
necessity of making that person commit a certain action which
shall produce a certain position, from which the poet intends to
derive certain effects. Angelo is not presented to us at the
outset either as a rascal or as a hypocrite; on the contrary, he
is a man of exaggeratedly severe virtue. But the progress of the
poem requires that he should become criminal, and criminal he
becomes; when his crime is committed, he will repent of it as
soon as the poet pleases, and will find himself able to resume
without effort the natural course of his life, which had been
interrupted only for a moment.
Thus, in Shakspeare's comedy, the whole of human life passes
before the eyes of the spectator, reduced to a sort of
phantasmagoria--a brilliant and uncertain reflection of the
realities portrayed in his tragedy. Just when the truth seems on
the point of allowing itself to be caught, the image grows pale,
and vanishes; its part is played, and it disappears. In the
"Winter's Tale," Leontes is as jealous, sanguinary, and
unmerciful as Othello; but his jealousy, born suddenly, from a
mere caprice, at the moment when it is necessary that the plot
should thicken, loses its fury and suspicion as suddenly, as soon
as the action has reached the point at which it becomes requisite
to change the situation.
{82}
In "Cymbeline"--which, notwithstanding its title, ought to be
numbered among the comedies, as the piece is conceived in entire
accordance with the same system--Iachimo's conduct is just as
knavish and perverse as that of Iago in "Othello;" but his
character does not explain his conduct, or, to speak more
correctly, he has no character; and, always ready to cast off the
rascal's cloak, in which the poet has enveloped him, as soon as
the plot reaches its term, and the confession of the secret,
which he alone can reveal, becomes necessary to terminate the
misunderstanding between Posthumus and Imogen, which he alone has
caused, he does not even wait to be asked, but, by a spontaneous
avowal, deserves to be included in that general amnesty which
should form the conclusion of every comedy.
I might multiply these examples to infinity; they abound not only
in Shakspeare's early comedies, but also in those which succeeded
the composition of his best tragedies. In all, we should find
characters as unstable as passions, and resolutions as changeful
as characters. Do not expect to find probability, or
consecutiveness, or profound study of man and society; the poet
cares little for these things, and invites you to follow his
example. To interest by the development of positions, to divert
by variety of pictures, and to charm by the poetic richness of
details--this is what he aims at; these are the pleasures which
he offers. There is no interdependence, no concatenation of
events and ideas; vices, virtues, inclinations, intentions, all
become changed and transformed at every step. Even absurdity does
not always continue to characterize the individual whom it
distinguishes at the outset.
{83}
In "Cymbeline," the imbecile Cloton becomes almost proud and
noble when opposing the independence of a British prince to the
threats of a Roman ambassador; and in "Measure for Measure,"
Elbow the constable, whose nonsensicalities furnish the diversion
of one scene, speaks almost like a man of sense when, in a
subsequent scene, another person is appointed to enliven the
dialogue. Thus negligent and truant is the flight of the poet
through these capricious compositions! Thus fugitive are the
light creations with which he has animated them!
But, then, what gracefulness and rapidity of movement, what
variety of forms and effects, what brilliancy of wit,
imagination, and poetry--all employed to make us forget the
monotony of their romantic frame-work! Doubtless, this is not
comedy as we conceive it, and as Molière wrote it; but who but
Shakspeare could have diffused such treasures over so frivolous
and fantastic a style of comedy? The legends and tales upon which
his plays are founded have given birth, both before and after
him, to thousands of dramatic works which are now plunged in
well-merited oblivion. A king of Sicily, jealous, without knowing
why, of a king of Bohemia, determines to put his wife to death,
and to expose his daughter; this child, left to perish on the
_shore_ of Bohemia, but saved by a shepherd from her cruel
fate, becomes, after sixteen years have elapsed, a marvelous
beauty, and is beloved by the heir to the crown. After all the
obstacles naturally opposed to their union, arrives the ordinary
_denouement_ of explanations and recognitions. This story
truly combines all the most common and least probable features of
the romances, tales, and pastorals of the time.
{84}
But Shakspeare takes it, and the absurd fable that opens the
"Winter's Tale" becomes interesting by the brutal truthfulness of
the jealous transports of Leontes, the amiable character of
little Mamillius, the patient virtue of Hermione, and the
generous inflexibility of Paulina; and, in the second part, the
rural festival, with its gayety and joyous incidents, and, amid
the rustic scene, the charming figure of Perdita, combining with
the modesty of an humble shepherdess the moral elegance of the
superior classes, assuredly present the most piquant and graceful
picture that truth could furnish to poetry. What particular charm
is there in the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, and the
hackneyed incident of two pairs of lovers rendered unhappy by one
another? It is only a worn-out combination, destitute alike of
interest and truth. Yet Shakspeare has made of it his "Midsummer
Night's Dream;" and in the midst of the dull intrigue, he
introduces Oberon with his elves and fairies, who live upon
flowers, run upon the blades of grass, dance in the rays of the
moon, play with the light of the morning, and fly away,
"following darkness like a team," as soon as Aurora's first
doubtful rays begin to glimmer in the sky. Their employments,
pleasures, and tricks occupy the scene, participate in all its
incidents, and entwine in the same action the mournful destinies
of the four lovers and the grotesque performances of a troop of
artisans; and after having fled away at the approach of the sun,
when Night once more enshrouds earth in her sombre mantle, they
will resume possession of that fantastic world into which we have
been transported by this amazing and brilliant extravaganza.
In truth, it would be acting very rigorously toward ourselves,
and very ungratefully toward genius, to refuse to follow it
somewhat blindly when it invites us to a scene of such
attraction. Are originality, simplicity, gayety, and gracefulness
so common that we shall treat them severely because they are
lavished on a slight foundation of but little value?
{85}
Is it nothing to enjoy the divine charm of poetry amid the
improbabilities, or, if you will, the absurdities of romance?
Have we, then, lost the happy power of lending ourselves
complacently to its caprices? and do we not possess sufficient
vivacity of imagination and youthfulness of feeling to enjoy so
delightful a pleasure under whatever form it may be offered to
us?