not been broken, and the position of the characters has not been
changed; their places have continued the same; their ardor is not
less energetic; time has not acted upon them; it counts for
nothing in the feelings with which they inspire us; it finds
them, and us with them, in the same disposition of soul; and thus
the two periods are brought together by that unity of impression
which makes us say, when thinking of an event which occurred long
ago, but the traces of which are still fresh in our memory, "It
seems as though it had happened only yesterday."
{138}
In fact, what care we about the time which elapses between the
actions with which Macbeth fills up his career of crime? When he
commands the murder of Banquo the assassination of Duncan is
still present to our eyes, and seems as though it had been
committed only yesterday; and when Macbeth determines upon the
massacre of Macduff's family, we fancy we see him still pale from
the apparition of Banquo's ghost. None of his actions has
terminated without necessitating the action which follows it;
they announce and involve each other, thus forcing the
imagination to go forward, full of trouble and sad expectation.
Macbeth, who, after having killed Duncan, is urged, by the very
terror which he feels at his crime, to kill the chamberlains, to
whom he intends to attribute the murder, does not permit us to
doubt the facility with which he will commit new crimes whenever
occasion requires. The witches, who, at the opening of the play,
have taken possession of his destiny, do not allow us to hope
that they will grant any respite to the ambition and the
necessities of his crimes. Thus all the threads are laid open to
our eyes from the beginning; we follow, we anticipate the course
of events; we stint no haste to arrive at that which our
imagination devours beforehand; intervals vanish with the
succession of the ideas which should occupy them; one succession
alone is distinctly marked in our mind, and that is, the
succession of the events which compose the absorbing spectacle
which sweeps us onward in its rapidity. In our view, they are as
closely connected in time as they are intimately linked together
in thought; and any duration that may separate them is a duration
as empty and unperceived as that of sleep--as all those epochs in
which the soul is manifested by no sensible symptom of its
existence. What, in our mind, is the connection of the hours in
comparison with this train of ideas? and what poet, subjecting
himself to unity of time, would deem it sufficient to establish,
between the different parts of his work, that powerful bond of
union which can result only from unity of impression? So true is
it that this alone is the object, whereas the others are only the
means.
{139}
These means may, undoubtedly, sometimes have their efficiency;
the rapidity of a great action executed, or a great event
accomplished, within the space of a few hours, fills the
imagination, and animates the soul with a movement to which it
yields with ardor. But few actions really permit so sudden an
action; few events are composed of parts so exactly connected in
time and space; and, without alluding to the improbabilities
which are consequent upon their forced cohesion, the surprises
which result from it very often disturb the unity of impression,
which is the rigorous condition of dramatic illusion. Zaire,
passing suddenly from her devoted love for Orosmane to entire
submission to the faith and will of Lusignan, has some difficulty
in restoring to us, in her new position, as much illusion as she
has made us lose by so abrupt a change. Voltaire sought his
effects in the contrast of perfectly happy love with love in
despair; a powerful means, it is true, but less powerful,
perhaps, than the preoccupation of a constant and unchanging
position, which develops itself only to redouble the feeling
which it has at first inspired. When we have thoroughly
established ourselves in an affection, it is far from prudent to
attempt to move us in favor of an opposite affection. Corneille
has not shown us Rodrigue and Chimène together before the quarrel
between their fathers; he felt so little desire to impress us
with the idea of their happiness, that Chimène, when told of it,
can not believe it, and disturbs by her presentiments the too
delightful position of which the poet is exceedingly careful not
to put us in possession, lest we should afterward find it too
difficult to sacrifice it to that duty which will soon command us
to leave it.
{140}
In the same manner we have become associated with the feelings of
Polyeucte, and have trembled for him before becoming aware of the
love of Pauline for Sévère; if our first interest had been
attached to this love, perhaps it would have been difficult for
us afterward to feel much for Polyeucte, whose presence would be
importunate. Thus, when Zaire has awakened our emotion as a
lover, we are inclined to think that she abandons the position in
which she has placed us rather too easily, in order to fulfill
her duty as a daughter and a Christian. The philosophical
indifference which Voltaire has imparted to her in the first
scene, in order to facilitate her subsequent conversion, renders
still more improbable the devotedness with which she so quickly
enters upon a duty so recently discovered. If, on the other hand,
at the outset, Voltaire had described her to us as troubled with
scruples, and disquieted with regard to her happiness, fear would
have prepared us beforehand to comprehend in all its extent, at
its first appearance, the misfortune which threatens her, and to
see her yield to it with that abandonment which is improbable
because it is too sudden.
The employment of sudden changes of fortune, by which it is
attempted to disguise, beneath a great alteration in
circumstances, the too sudden transitions which the rule of unity
in point of time may impose, frequently renders the
inconveniences of this rule more striking, by depriving it of the
means of making preparation for the different impressions which
it accumulates within too limited a space. It is, on the
contrary, by a single impression that Shakspeare, at least in his
finest compositions, takes possession at the very outset, of our
thought, and, by means of our thought, of space also.
{141}
Beyond the magic circle which he has traced, he leaves nothing
sufficiently powerful to interfere with the effect of the only
unity of which he has need. Change of fortune may exist in
reference to the persons of the drama, but never to the
spectator. Before we are informed of Othello's happiness, we know
that Iago is preparing to destroy it; the Ghost which is to
devote the life of Hamlet to the punishment of a crime, appears
on the stage before he does; and before we have seen Macbeth
virtuous, the utterance of his name by the Witches tells us that
he is destined to become guilty. In the same manner, in
"Athalie," the whole idea of the drama is displayed, in the first
scene, in the character and promises of the high-priest; the
impression is begun, and it will continue and increase always in
the same direction. Thus, who could say that an interval of eight
days, interposed, if necessary, between the promises of Joad and
their performance, would have broken the unity of impression
which results from the invariable constancy of his plans?
To constancy of character, feelings, and resolutions exclusively
belongs that moral unity which, braving time and distance,
includes all the parts of an event in a compact action, in which
the gaps of material unity are no longer perceptible. A violently
excited passion could not aim at such an effect; it has its
momentary storms, the course of which, being subject to external
and variable causes, must in a short time reach its term. As soon
as jealousy has seized upon the heart of Othello, if any interval
separated that moment from the time which witnesses the death of
Desdemona, the unity would be broken; nothing would attest to us
the link which must unite the first transports of the Moor to his
final resolution; the action must therefore hasten rapidly
forward, and must hurry him onward to his destruction, which a
day's reflection would perhaps prevent him from consummating.
{142}
In the same manner, the simple description of events, unless the
presence of a great individual character should, by dominating
over them, impress upon them its own unity, will make us feel the
want of the material unities; and the efforts which Shakspeare
has made, in his historical dramas, to approximate to them, or to
disguise their absence, are a new homage paid to that moral unity
which is sufficient for every thing when the poet possesses it,
and which nothing can replace when he has it not. In "Hamlet" and
"Macbeth," Shakspeare, inattentive to the course of time, allows
it to pass unnoticed. In his historical plays, on the other hand,
he conceals and dissembles its lapse by all the artifices that
can deceive us in reference to its duration; the scenes follow
and announce each other in such a way, that an interval of
several years seems to be included within a few weeks, or even a
few days. All the probabilities are sacrificed to this theatrical
unity, which time would break too easily between events which are
not linked together by a uniform principle. The scene in which
Richard II. learns from Aumerle the departure of Bolingbroke into
exile, is that in which he announces that he is himself about to
go to Ireland; and it is not yet thoroughly known at court
whether he has actually embarked on this voyage, when the news is
received of the disembarkation of Bolingbroke, returning with an
army, under the pretext of asserting his rights to the succession
of his father, who has died in the interval, but, in reality, to
take possession of the crown; in which attempt he has almost
succeeded before Richard, cast by a tempest upon the coasts of
England, can have been informed of his arrival. And we are told
at the end of the play, which, dating from the banishment of
Bolingbroke, can not have lasted more than fifteen days, that
Mowbray, who was exiled at the same time, has made several
journeys to the Holy Land during the interval, and is at last
dead in Italy.
{143}
These monstrous extravagances would assuredly not be numbered
among the proofs of Shakspeare's genius, if they did not attest
the empire assumed over him by the great dramatic thought to
which he sacrificed all beside. Whether in his historical plays,
he multiplies improbabilities and impossibilities in order to
conceal the flight of time, or whether, in his finest tragedies,
he allows it to pass without the slightest notice, he invariably
pursues and attempts to maintain unity of impression, the great
source of dramatic effect. We may see in "Macbeth," the true type
of his system, with what art he overcomes the difficulties which
arise from it, and links together in the soul of the spectator
the chain of places and times which is constantly being broken in
reality. Macbeth, when resolved on the destruction of Macduff,
whom he fears, learns that he has taken flight into England; and
he leaves the stage, announcing his intention to surprise his
castle, and to put to death his wife, his children, and all who
bear his name. The next scene opens in Macduff's castle, by a
conversation between Lady Macduff and her relative, Rosse, who
has come to inform her of her husband's departure, and to express
his fears for her own safety. The two scenes, thus closely
connected in thought, seem to be so in time also; distance has
disappeared; and who would think of pointing out, as an interval
of which some recount should be given, the leagues which separate
Macduff's castle from Macbeth's palace, and the time that would
be required to traverse them.
{144}
We have entered without effort into this new part of the
position; it follows its course; the assassins appear; the
massacre commences. We pass into England; we behold the arrival
of Macduff in that country; the terrible events of which he is
ignorant fill up, for us, the interval which must separate his
departure from his arrival. Rosse appears some time after him,
and informs him of his misfortune. Both describe to Malcolm the
desolation of Scotland, and the general hatred which Macbeth has
incurred. The army which is destined to overthrow the tyrant is
collected together, and the order for departure is given. But,
while the army is on its road, the poet recalls our imagination
toward Macbeth; with him we prepare for the approach of the
troops, whose march is effected without any thing occurring to
inform us of its duration, or to lead us to make inquiries about
it. Scarcely ever, in Shakspeare, do the personages of the drama
arrive immediately in the place for which they have set out; so
abrupt a conjunction would be contrary to the natural order of
the succession of ideas. We have seen Richard II. set out for the
castle of John of Gaunt; it is therefore in John of Gaunt's
castle that we await the arrival of Richard, whose journey has
taken place without our mind being able to complain of not having
been consulted with regard to the time which it occupied. In the
same manner, between two events evidently separated by an
interval long enough for us not to like to see it disappear
without taking some part in it, Shakspeare interposes a scene
which may belong with equal propriety to either the first or the
second epoch, and he makes us pass from one to the other without
shocking us by its intimate connection with the scene which
immediately precedes or follows it. Thus, in "King Lear," between
the time when Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters, and
the moment when Goneril, already tired of her father's presence,
determines to get rid of him, the scenes at Gloster's castle, and
the commencement of Edmund's intrigue, are interposed.
{145}
Guided by that instinct which is the science of genius, the poet
knows that our imagination will traverse without effort both time
and space with him, if he spares those moral improbabilities
which could alone arrest its progress. With this view, he
sometimes accumulates material unlikelihoods, and sometimes
exhausts the ingenuity of his art; but, ever attentive to the
object at which he aims, he can reduce to unity of action those
artifices and preparatory means which he employs to remove every
thing that could interfere with the dramatic illusion, and to
dispose freely of our thought.
Unity of action, being indispensable to unity of impression,
could not escape Shakspeare's notice. But how, it may be asked,
could he maintain it in the midst of so many events of so
changeful and complicated a nature--in that immense field which
includes so many places, so many years, all conditions of
society, and the development of so many positions? Shakspeare
succeeded in maintaining it, nevertheless: in "Macbeth,"
"Hamlet," "Richard III.," and "Romeo and Juliet," the action,
though vast, does not cease to be one, rapid and complete. This
is because the poet has seized upon its fundamental condition,
which consists in placing the centre of interest where he finds
the centre of action. The character which gives movement to the
drama is also the one upon which the moral agitation of the
spectator is bestowed. Duplicity of action, or at least of
interest, has been urged against Racine's tragedy of
"Andromaque," and the charge is not without foundation; it is not
that all the parts of the action do not work together toward the
same end, but the interest is divided, and the centre of action
is uncertain.
{146}
If Shakspeare had had to treat of such a subject, which, it must
be said, is not in great conformity to the nature of his genius,
he would have made Andromache the centre of the action as well as
of the interest. Maternal love would have pervaded the entire
drama, displaying its courage as well as its fears, its strength
as well as its sorrows. Shakspeare, indeed, would not have
hesitated to introduce the child upon the stage, as Racine
subsequently did in "Athalie," when he had grown more bold. All
the emotions of the spectator would have been directed toward a
single point: we should have beheld Andromache, with greater
activity, trying other means to save Astyanax than "the tears of
her mother," and constantly riveting upon her son and herself an
attention which Racine has too often diverted to the means of
action which he was constrained to derive from the vicissitudes
of the destiny of Hermione. According to the system imposed upon
our dramatic poets in the seventeenth century, Hermione should be
the centre of the action; and so, in fact, she is. Upon a stage
which daily became more subject to the authority of the ladies
and of the court, love seemed destined to take the place of the
fatality of the ancients: a blind power, as inflexible as
fatality, and, like it, leading its victims toward an object
defined from the very outset, love became the fixed point around
which all things should revolve. In "Andromaque," love makes
Hermione a simple personage, swayed by her passion, referring to
it every thing that occurs beneath her view, and careful to bring
events into subjection to herself, in order to make them serve
and satisfy her affection. Hermione alone directs and gives
movement to the drama; Andromaque only appears to suffer the
agony of a position as powerless as it is painful.
{147}
Such an idea may admit of admirable developments of the passive
affections of the heart; but it does not constitute a tragic
action; and in those developments which do not lead immediately
to action, our interest runs the risk of wandering astray, and
returns afterward with difficulty into the only direction in
which it can be maintained.
When, on the contrary, the centre of action and the centre of
interest are identical--when the attention of the spectator has
been fixed upon the hero of the drama, at once active and
unchanging, whose character, though it remains ever the same,
will lead to incessant changes in his destiny--then the events in
agitation around such a man strike us only by their relation to
him, and the impression which we receive from them assumes the
color which he has himself imparted to them. Richard III.
proceeds from plot to plot; every new success redoubles the
terror with which we are inspired at the outset by his infernal
genius; the pity which each one of his victims successively
awakes, becomes merged in the feelings of hate which accumulate
upon their persecutor; none of these particular feelings diverts
our impressions to its own advantage; they are directed
incessantly, and always with increasing vigor, toward the author
of so many crimes; and thus Richard, the centre of action, is at
the same time the centre of interest also; for dramatic interest
is not only the unquiet pity which we feel for misfortune, or the
passionate affection with which we are inspired by virtue; it is
also hatred, the thirst for vengeance, the invocation of Heaven's
justice upon the malefactor, as well as the prayer for the
salvation of the innocent. All strong feelings, capable of
exciting the human soul, can draw us in their train, and inspire
us with passionate interest, they have no need to promise us
happiness, or to gain our attachment by tenderness: we can also
raise ourselves to that sublime contempt for life which makes men
heroes and martyrs, and to that noble indignation beneath which
tyrants succumb.
{148}
Every element may enter into an action, thus reduced to one sole
centre, from which emanate, and to which are related, all the
events of the drama, and all the impressions of the spectator.
Every thing that moves the heart of man, every thing that
agitates his life, may combine to produce dramatic interest,
provided that, being directed toward the same point, and marked
with the same impress, the most various facts present themselves
only as satellites of the principal fact, the brilliancy and
power of which they serve to augment. Nothing will appear
trivial, insignificant, or puerile, if it imparts greater
vitality to the predominant position, or greater depth to the
general feeling. Grief is sometimes redoubled by the aspect of
gayety; in the midst of danger, a joke may increase our courage.
Nothing is foreign to the impression but that which destroys it;
it nourishes itself, and gains greater power from every thing
that can mingle with it. The prattle of young Arthur with Hubert
becomes heart-rending from the idea of the horrible barbarity
which Hubert is about to practice upon him. We are filled with
emotion by the sight of Lady Macduff lovingly amused by the witty
sallies of her little son, while at her door are the assassins
who have come to massacre that son, and her other children, and
afterward herself. Who, but for these circumstances, would take a
deep interest in this scene of maternal childishness? But, if
this scene were omitted, should we hate Macbeth as much as we
ought to do for this new crime?
{149}
In "Hamlet," not only is the scene of the grave-diggers connected
with the general idea of the piece by the kind of meditations
which it inspires, but--and we know it--it is Ophelia's grave
which they are digging in Hamlet's presence; and to Ophelia will
relate, when he is informed of this circumstance, all the
impressions which have been kindled in his soul by the sight of
those hideous and despised bones, and the indifference which is
felt for the mortal remains of those who were once beautiful and
powerful, honored or beloved. No detail of these mournful
preparations is lost to the feeling which they occasion; the
coarse insensibility of the men devoted to the habits of such a
trade, their songs and jokes, all have their effect; and the
forms and means of comedy thus enter, without effort, into
tragedy, the impressions of which are never more keen than when
we see them about to fall upon a man who is already their
unwitting subject, and who is amusing himself in presence of the
misfortune of which he is unaware.
Without this use of the comic, and without this intervention of
the inferior classes, how many dramatic effects, which contribute
powerfully to the general effect, would become impossible!
Accommodate to the taste of the pleasantry of our age the scene
with Macbeth's porter, and there is no one who will not shudder
at the thought of the discovery that will follow this exhibition
of jovial buffoonery, and of the spectacle of carnage still
concealed beneath these remnants of the intoxication of a
festival.
{150}
If Hamlet were the first brought into connection with his
father's ghost, what preparation and explanations would be
indispensable to place us in the state of mind in which a prince,
a man belonging to the highest class of society, must be in order
to believe in a ghost! But the phantom appears first to soldiers,
men of simple a kind, who are more ready to be alarmed than
astonished at it; and they relate the story to one another in the
night-watch:
"Last night of all,
When yond' same star, that's westward from the pole,
Had made his course t' illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus, and myself,
The bell then beating one--
Marcellus.
Peace! break thee off: look, where it comes again!"
The effect of terror is produced, and we believe in the spectre
before Hamlet has ever heard it mentioned.