|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 36
To Monsieur de Molie're, Valet de Chambre du Roi.
Monsieur,--With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the great
Molie're! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his comb!) at
the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your dwelling among
the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his titles, has now none so
proud as that of the friend of Molie're--you found your dominions small,
humble, and distracted; you raised them to the dignity of an empire: what
Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for French comedy; and the ba'ton of
Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim.
For the King the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more
magnificent conquest you overcame the Channel. If England vanquished your
country's arms, it was through you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and
restored the dynasty of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever
since Dryden borrowed 'L'Etourdi,' our tardy apish nation has lived (in
matters theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you lived,
taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English
playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests
into the urban page of Molie're. Now they are diversely occupied; and it is
their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to
the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain. But still, as has ever been our wont since
Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your successes--still we pilfer the
plays of France, and take our _bien_, as you said in your lordly manner,
wherever we can find it. We are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely,
to be sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has not first been 'cut out'
from the countrymen of Molie're. Why this should be, and what 'tenebriferous
star' (as Paracelsus, your companion in the 'Dialogues des Morts,' would have
believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but certainly
our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you. Without you, neither
Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor 'a wilderness of monkeys' like Scarron, could ever
have given Comedy to France and restored her to Europe.
While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and
beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that we
must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with daily and
nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you 'let no musty _bouquin_
escape you' (so your enemies declared), it was to some purpose that you
laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from
those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we turn from Regnard and
Beaumarchais, from Sheridan: and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron and
Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations. 'Creations' one may well
say, for you anticipated Nature herself: you gave us, before she did, in
Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a lacquey; in a _mot_ of Don
Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and the watchword of Comte,
_l'amour de l'humanite'_.
Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour; and
where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular
civilisalion? With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and generous, a
heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life endurable (we cannot
doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope, or warning from Religion.
Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed
that the only help was in voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to
hazard all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to
pretend to see what you found invisible.
In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and Jansenists of
your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of their rivals (as each
of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived that you were girding at his
neighbour), you all the while were mocking every credulous excess of Faith. In
the sermons preached to Agne's we surely hear your private laughter; in the
arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen
to the eternal self-defence of superstition. Thus, desolate of belief, you
sought for the permanent element of life--precisely where Pascal recognised
all that was most fleeting and unsubstantial--in _divertissement_; in the
pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer
of the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard
our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note
comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain
in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a
heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to leave them sometimes, in a
sense, superior to their tormentors. Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George
Dandin, and the rest--our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M.
de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures.
Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and defeat
Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you did not mean
that they should win it. They go off with laughter, and their victim with a
grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth, behold an actor in an
unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your sympathy is not wholly with
the dogs that are having their day; you can throw a bone or a crust to the dog
that has had his, and has been taught that it is over and ended. Yourself not
unlearned in shame, in jealousy, in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how
could the poor player and the husband of Ce'lime'ne be untaught in that
experience?), you never sided quite heartily, as other comedians have done,
with young prosperity and rank and power.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|