Kitabı oku: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 346, August, 1844», sayfa 16

M. GIRARDIN

A word, before we speak of the lectures of M. Saint-Marc Girardin, on a topic which stands at the threshold of dramatic criticism. What is the nature of that imitation of life at which the drama aims, and of that illusion which it creates?

Before the time of Dr Johnson, the learned world were accustomed to insist upon the observance of the unities, on the ground that they were necessary to uphold the illusion of the theatre. The doctor, in his preface to Shakspeare, demolished this argument, by showing that the illusion they were declared so necessary to support, does not, in fact, exist. No man really believes that the stage before him is Rome, or that he is a contemporary of the Caesars. To insist, therefore, upon the unities of time and place, is to sacrifice to a grave make-belief the nobler ends of the drama—the development of character and passion. "The objection," says Dr Johnson, "arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes that, when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium."

If the delusion of the theatre, we will add, should, at certain moments, reach such a point that we may be said to believe ourselves transported to the place represented on the stage, this, not being a continuous delusion, cannot be disturbed by the mere changing of the scene; it will not the less take place at the promontory of Actium, because we had felt it, five minutes before, in the city of Alexandria.

Since the appearance of the celebrated preface to Shakspeare, it has been the habit of critics to speak, not of a delusion, but of an imitation, which is felt to be an imitation, and which pleases us in great part by this perceived resemblance to an original. "It will be asked," continues Dr Johnson, "how the drama moves, if it is not credited? It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited wherever it moves, as a just picture of a real original—as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed."⁵⁹ * * * The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more. Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.

This appears to us a very indifferent account of the matter. In the far greater number of instances, we can never have formed any conception of an original of which the actor and the scene are supposed to present us a picture. Who that witnesses the play of Venice Preserved, has formed any other image of Jaffier or Pierre than what the actors are presenting to him, or may already, on some previous occasion, have presented to him? Even when the characters are strictly historical, the imagination is little better provided. The spectator does not refer to any faint conception in his own mind of a Brutus, or a Mark Antony, and then derive his pleasure from watching how closely the mimic representation imitates the original. Very often the scene must present something entirely new to the imagination, and yet the pleasure is not diminished on this account. A simple man, who has never seen the interior of a palace, never looked on royalty, never beheld even a veritable courtier, feels no embarrassment when he is suddenly called to witness the pomps and miseries of "imperial tragedy."

The imitation of the drama is not that of any specific original; it is a mimic scene, having human nature for its type. It has a life of its own, constructed from the materials which the records and observations of real life have supplied. In order to move us, it needs no reference to any recognised original. It is there in virtue of the vesture of humanity in which it is clothed, and makes its appeal at once and directly.

It is usual to speak of all the fine arts as imitative arts. The term is not always applicable, and, when most applicable, requires explanation. What does the poetry of sentiment imitate? What does a song imitate? How can the term be applied to all that class of poetry where the writer pours out his own reflections and feelings? The poetry of Wordsworth or of Burns can no more be said to be imitative, than the conversation of the same men, when, in their hours of intimate intercourse, the one may have given expression to his philanthropy, and the other to his friendship. But where the term is most applicable, it requires to be used guardedly. Even in painting and sculpture, the artist does not imitate the object in its totality—does not strive to make an approximation to a fac-simile—but he selects certain qualities of the object for his imitation. The painter confines himself to colour and outline; the sculptor abstracts the form, and give it us in the marble.

Accordingly, when we stand before a statue, we do not think of a man, and then of the statue as the imitation of this original; but the statue is itself clothed with some of the qualities of the human being, which give to the cold marble that half-life which we feel the moment we look upon it. In the same manner, when the dramatist puts his characters on the stage, they are not imitations of any definite originals, but they are invested with certain accidents and attributes of humanity, which give them at once the interest we feel in them, and set them living and moving in their own mimic world.

And this mimic world is capable of creating an illusion—not such as Dr Johnson combated—but of a kind he does not appear to have taken into account. The doctor is triumphant when he denies the existence of that theatrical delusion presupposed as a ground for the unities. We do not, as soon as the curtain rises, believe ourselves transported to Rome, nor do we take the actor upon his word, and believe him to be Caesar the moment he proclaims his imperial dignity. The illusion of the theatre springs directly from the passion with which we are infected, not from the outward pomp and circumstance of the stage. These, even on the most ignorant of spectators, produce barely the sentiment of wonder and surprise, never a belief in their reality. The real illusion of the drama begins, so to speak, not at the beginning, but at the end; it is the last result, the result of the last vivid word which sprung from the lips of the actor; and it diffuses a momentary reality over all that stage apparatus, animate and inanimate, which was there only as a preparation for that vivid word of the poet.

When the curtain rises, we see very plainly—quite unmistakeably—the boarded stage before us. It may fill with men and women most gorgeously attired, and these may proceed to declare their rank and condition, and the peculiar dangers which environ them, and still there is nothing better before us than the boarded stage and the talking actor. But, by and by, the word of passion is uttered, and the heart beats, and the wooden stage is seen no more, and the actor is forgotten in his griefs or his anger, and the fictitious position is a real life, and the pomp and circumstance of the scene, if not believed in, are no longer questioned. We are not perhaps at Rome, nor is that Mark Antony—for we never knew Mark Antony to recognise him—but this mimic world has assumed an independent life and reality of its own. When, indeed, the passion subsides, and the eloquence of the poet is mute, things revert to their matter-of-fact condition, the actor is again there, and the boards of the stage again become visible.

To the passage we last quoted from Dr Johnson, some other objections suggest themselves; but, as we have not quoted it in a polemical spirit, but merely to illustrate our own position, we have no wish to enter upon them. One remark only we will make, and that because it admits of a general application. Dr Johnson describes the sympathy we feel at the theatre, as the result of a reference to what our own personal feelings would be in the situation we see represented on the stage. The auditor represents to himself "what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed." We do not think that, in order to sympathize with what takes place on the stage, or in real life, there is any necessity for this circuitous proceeding. We do not detect in ourselves this constant reference to our own personality, and, least of all, in those moments when we are most moved. It is enough that there be a vivid conception of any passion, for this passion to become for a moment our own. If this reference to our probable feelings, in such or such a position, were necessary, how is it that we men sympathize so promptly and so keenly in the distresses of the heroine? We certainly do not, for instance, set to work to imagine ourselves women and mothers—which would be a difficult exercise of the imagination—before we feel the grief of Constance for the loss of her child. In short, we at once assume to ourselves the passions of another; we do not wait, as it were, to try them on; to make experiment how we, with all our dispositions, natural and acquired, should feel in the supposed predicament.

It is far from our intention to give a full and methodical account of the lectures of M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the perusal of which led us to a reconsideration of some of our critical principles. They are far above mediocrity, distinguished by strong sense and vivid expression. Their principal feature is the just and animated protest they contain against the literary taste of the present day in France; a taste for the perverted, the horrible, the monstrous; a taste that welcomes Victor Hugo with outstretched arms, and retains but a frigid recollection of Racine. With this literary taste is intimately connected an unhealthy and feverish condition of the moral sentiments, against which the lecturer directs his most eloquent attacks; so that his book may be commended for its sound ethical as well as critical instruction. The circumstance that the lectures were delivered before the University of Paris, renders this strain of remark still more appropriate and useful.

Such a strain of remark, based as it is upon general principles, cannot be useless in our own country; although we do not suspect that the same perverted taste which meets its reproof in these lectures is common amongst us. Were we called upon to describe the malady under which our countrymen labour in respect to literary taste, we should describe it as a state of torpor and lethargy, rather than of virulent disease. It is indifference, more than any morbid taste, which an imaginative work would have to struggle against in this country. There is little necessity here to guard the public against any species of literary enthusiasm; certain writers of very dubious merit may be extensively read, but they are not esteemed. It is only necessary to listen to the conversation that goes on around us, to be convinced that the extensive circulation of a book has ceased to be a decisive proof even of its popularity. We seem too idle, or too busy, to give attention to a thoughtful literature which is not at the same time professional—and we have too much good sense amongst us to admire the sort of clever trash we are contented to read and to talk about. For something in leisure hours must be read. A book must be had, if only as a companion for the sofa, if only to place in the hand, as we place the ottoman under our feet, to steady and complete our repose.

We will at once introduce a striking quotation from the author before us, which has immediate reference to the Lucrèce Borgia of Victor Hugo. To those who have not read the play it is only necessary to observe, in order to understand what follows, that Victor Hugo, with that violent effort after a moral novelty which distinguishes him, has chosen to represent the infamous Lucretia Borgia as under the influence of maternal love, while in all other respects she fully sustains her odious and infernal reputation.

The author wished, he tells us in his preface, to retrieve the moral deformity of Lucretia Borgia by the beauty of the maternal sentiment; he wished, according to his own energetic expression, 'to place the mother in the monster.' Here let us make a distinction. I admire the tenderness which the most ferocious animals have for their offspring, and when the dying lioness covers her young with her wounded and bleeding body, I admire and am moved. But a woman who is a mother ought, in her tenderness to her children, to have more intelligence, more of elevation of thought, than the lioness. Instinct is not enough; there must be a sentiment, a sentiment which does not exclude, but perfects and purifies the instinct. Thus, when in Florence, a mother cast herself in desperation before the lion who had taken her child, and the lion, astonished at her despair, or perhaps comprehending it, replaced the infant at her feet, it was instinct which impelled the mother, and it was probably instinct in the lion which responded to her. But good instincts, whatever admirable actions they may occasionally produce, are but the germ and commencement of human virtues; they are indeed radically distinguished from human virtue by this, that, of themselves, however strong, they are sterile: a good instinct dwells by the side of a bad without effort to reform or to purify it, and equally without danger of being itself perverted. One virtue only in a vicious character might convert it entirely to virtue, as one vice only in a virtuous might lead it to utter depravation. But an instinct, however good, supports without disquietude the neighbourhood of evil, and it is thus that, in Lucretia Borgia, the mother and the monster are placed side by side, without affecting, without combating each other. Now there is nothing less natural, and nothing less dramatic than this mutual toleration. Characters wherein good and evil are mixed together, are dramatic, only because the conflict of opposite sentiments which takes place in the mind, is brought before the view of the spectator. But where, in Lucretia, is the struggle between good and evil? At what moment does the maternal virtue enlighten and purify this soul lost in darkness? When does this transfiguration take place, so marvellous and yet so natural? * * *

It is singular, and marks the change which has taken place in our moral notions. Formerly poets gave to their personages one only vice or passion, taking care in other respects to render them virtuous, in order that they should be worthy of interest; at the present day, our poets give their personages I know not how many passions and vices, with one only virtue as a counterpoise. And this virtue, weak and solitary, is by no means charged with the task of purifying the corrupted mind in which it has by chance been preserved. It carefully respects the independence of those vices which permit it to dwell with them. Neither is it commissioned to inspire an interest in the spectator; because it is vice which now inspires all our interest, thanks to a certain noble and proud bearing which has been assigned to it, and which has been imitated from the heroes of Lord Byron.

M. Girardin, it will have been remarked from the above extract, is disposed to reproach our Lord Byron as the source from which some of his countrymen have drawn their dark inspiration. This may be true. But without defending our Byron from charges to which he is manifestly exposed, let us say thus much for him, that in his poetry he was still too much a classic not to be a worshipper of the beautiful; that he did not court for itself the monstrous, the ugly; his mind did not willingly associate with what was revolting in outward form or human passion. If there was any thing Satanic, as some were pleased to express it, in his poetry, he was not, at all events, of the hobgoblin or demoniac school. It was the Satan of Milton, with its ruined beauty and clouded dignity, that had taken possession of his imagination. He delighted to depict the pride, the love, the generosity, of hearts at war with man, and not on too good terms with heaven; but still it was their pride, their love, their generosity, that occupied his imagination. They are bad men; he takes care to tell us so himself; but he has not the heart to make them act otherwise than as noble fellows while they are under his guidance. The Corsair, from his very name and profession, is a declared criminal; but this once said, the poet occupies himself and his reader with nothing but what is generous and heroic in Conrad. Byron had no disposition, had a certain antipathy, to paint the virtuous man; but it was a virtue, nevertheless, that attracted his pencil. He felt it necessary, as a preliminary condition, to remove his hero from the category of good men; but this being fairly done, he resigned himself to the natural bent for what is good and great. A Borgia, whether male or female, in all its native deformity, was not the subject to allure him.

Nowhere is the rebuke of M. Girardin of certain of his contemporaries, more dignified, or more justly merited, than where, discoursing on the manner in which the moderns have delineated paternal love, he reproves that exaggeration and falsification which has represented the father describing the affection he bears to his daughter in a style of language devoted to another species of love. Nothing can be more odious and offensive than to transgress, even in language, the bounds between the two affections, and to put into the mouth of a parent, as Victor Hugo and Balzac have done, a style appropriate to the lover speaking of his mistress. But we will not quote these passages from M. Girardin, because they will require long quotations in order to justify the censure contained in them. At the close of the lecture upon paternal love, we find the following general remarks on the composition of a modern French drama; and the slightest acquaintance with this drama will enable the reader to appreciate their justice and analytic accuracy:—

Formerly a dramatic character was an assemblage of qualities good and bad, which, on the one hand, were in conflict amongst themselves, and, on the other, were subjected to some superior law of religion, of honour, or of patriotism. This twofold struggle constituted the interest of the person brought upon the scene, and this superior law, which he strove to accomplish, constituted the morality of his character. According to the incidents of the piece, each passion might take the ascendant, none being represented as irresistible; and the moral law which predominated over the drama, did not prevent this play of the passions—it being visibly suspended during the whole piece over the heads of the personages, and receiving its fulfilment only at the close. In the present day dramatic characters are composed differently. Instead of representing the whole of the character, and the struggle between its good and evil passions, one only passion is selected, which is made violent, irresistible, fatal, the absolute mistress of all the others; that is to say, a part is taken instead of the whole. At the same time the moral law which, in the ancient drama, (i.e. the drama of Racine and Corneille,) sustained also a struggle against the passions—this law which those even avowed who transgressed it, which had always its place in the piece, whether through virtue or remorse—this law also disappears before the ascendency of the sovereign passion. No counterpoise of any kind, whether on the side of rival passions or on the side of duty. What remains, then, to struggle against this arbitrary passion? Nothing but chance—circumstance—the hazard of events. And thus it is that, in the modern drama, the interest resides rather in the strange complication of events than in the shock of opposite passions. The poet has only the power of chance, a power sovereignly capricious, to contend against the passion he has chosen to represent. And thus it is that the modern drama has something also of arbitrary and fantastic. Incidents and theatrical effects are accumulated, but the incidents do not spring from the natural movement of the passions brought upon the stage; they have no longer their cause in the characters of the drama; they issue from the fancy of the poet, who, feeling the necessity of arousing his spectators from time to time, complicates the action after a strange fashion, and aims always at surprise.

M. Girardin has a lecture upon suicides, in which he attacks that sentimentality—a mixture, in reality, of weakness and impatience—which in modern literature, and in modern life, often conducts to suicide. The following passage will be acknowledged to be eloquent, and even poetic, unless our translation of it shall have entirely obscured its beauty. After having described the proud and philosophical suicides of ancient Rome, he adds:—

There is another species of suicide more in credit in our days, which is rather occasioned by the weakness and impatience of men than by the violence of their passions, or the eccentricity of their philosophies. This species of suicide is so much the peculiar malady of our times, that we are tempted to think that men are now for the first time infected by it. But no; there exists a literature which has already expressed this our state of restlessness and disquietude, which has described men consuming with melancholy in the midst of riotous joys, and seeking suicide rather as the natural termination of their career than the remedy of their evils. It is the literature of the fathers of the church.

I find amongst the homilies of St Chrysostom a certain Stagyra who was possessed by a demon. To be possessed by a demon is certainly not a malady of our times; but yet we do not wander from our theme. For the demon of Stagyra—it is melancholy, despondency, or, in the much more powerful expression of the Greek, it is athumia—exhaustion of all energy, all vitality of the soul. This is the demon of Stagyra. He is one of those sick and agitated souls who think they belong to the selected portion of mankind, because they want the energy of the vulgar; who contrive for themselves pleasures and afflictions apart from the rest of the world, and who (last trait of weakness and impatience) at once despise and envy the simplicity and the calm of those whom they call little souls. Stagyra, in order to deliver his spirit from its disquietudes, had entered into a monastery; but neither there did he find the peace and lightness of heart which he craved; for man finds at first, in solitude, that only which he brings to it. Stagyra complains to the saint—and the complaint is curious, for it indicates the knowledge of a cure for the evils which torment him, and shows that Stagyra, like many other patients, had neither resolution to support his disease, nor to accept its remedy. 'You complain,' says St Chrysostom, 'that while you, with all your fasts, and vigils, and monastic austerities, have failed to appease your disquietudes, others who, like yourself, had been tormented by the demon of melancholy, while living in the midst of idle pleasures and luxurious indulgence, have found a remedy in marriage, and felt themselves cured the moment they became fathers.' A sentence this full of sound instruction. It is not, then, because life is devoid of pleasure, that men are the prey of melancholy. That demon pierced, it is true, like a gnawing worm, through all the luxuries of the Roman world; there was no resource against it, either in beautiful slaves, or Ionian dances, or magnificent repasts, or the combats of gladiators, or Milesian tales, or the voluptuous pictures which garnish the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Athumia poisoned all, and the demon possessed the voluptuary in the midst even of the debauch. But if, fatigued with these alternate pleasures and disgusts, he adopted regular and simple manners, married and had had children, then, as if by enchantment the demon quitted him. No more despondency, no more bitterness. The spirit of the possessed was revived, refreshed, renewed by the caresses of his children. There is no demon, not even the demon of melancholy, which dares to encounter the presence of a little child. There is in the innocent fresh breathing of these creatures, something mortal to evil spirits, and a cradled infant in the house is sure talisman against all demoniac possession.

What is it, in fact, which man requires, in order to escape from this athumia, this exhaustion of the heart? Hope—a future. He must have a faith in the future. This is the nourishment of his soul; without it he cannot live, he despairs and dies. Well, the very charm of children, that which has ranked them, from of old, amongst the blessings of God, is this, that they form the future of every family— that they sustain in every house that sentiment by which the soul of man lives. Children represent the future, and in a form the most joyous and attractive. It is this which constitutes their irresistible fascination—it is this which sheds around their little heads that light of happiness and joy which reflects itself on the countenances of the parents—which warms the heart—which gives to the poor the force to labour, and to the miserable the force to live. Blessed be infancy, which chases the demon!—Blessed be infancy, which keeps alive in each family the sentiment of hope, indispensable to run as the air and the light!

Amongst the faults of his contemporaries, M. Girardin remarks a disposition to materialize the expression of passion, depicting it constantly by violent physical distortions; and also, a tendency to carry that expression to the extremity of rage, where, as he finely observes, all distinction between the various passions is lost, and man deserts his rational nature.

According to the ancient classic imagination, when passion becomes excessive, the man disappears; and this, he adds, is the foundation of what we call the philosophy of the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

In the course of this censure he makes use of a common-place expression, which, we think, includes a common-place error, and therefore we pause for a moment to take notice of it. "It is the pretension of modern art," he tells us, "to say all. What then is left to the imagination of the public? It is often well to trust to the spectator to complete the idea of the poet or the statuary."

This is a mode of expression frequently made use of. Even Lessing has sanctioned it, when in his Laocoon, he speaks of "the highest expression leaving nothing to the imagination."

The leaving something to the imagination can mean this only, that the expression of the artist is suggestive, and kindles thought, and in fact conveys more than is found in its literal interpretation. Now, whatever is highest in art, and especially in poetry, is pre-eminently suggestive; and the highest expression does in fact leave most, or, in other words, suggest most, to the imagination. M. Girardin, in common with many others, speaks of this suggestive quality, the characteristic of the highest form of art, as if it were the result of a voluntary surrender of something by the poet to the reader, as if it were an act of moderation on his part. Surely the poet does not proceed on the principle of saying half, and permitting us to say the other half—out of compliment, perhaps, to our understanding, and as a little bribe to our vanity. The more vivid and powerful his expressions, the more must he leave, or rather the more must he give, indirectly as well as directly, to the imagination of the reader. He will sometimes even bestow what he himself never possessed. The great poet, in pouring out his feelings, must always give something less and something more than was in him at the time.

It has been the fashion to illustrate the principle of leaving something to the imagination, by the ancient picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, where we are told that Agamemnon, the father, was painted hiding his face in his robe. The expression of grief and horror had been given in the countenance of the other bystanders, and it was left to the imagination to divine what passion would have been seen depicted on the face of Agamemnon if that robe had been torn aside. Lessing, and after him M. Girardin, have indeed given a different account of the intention of the painter. The Greek artist, say they, sedulously avoided that distortion of features through excessive grief, which was incompatible with beauty of form. They would tone down the expression, as Lessing argues that the sculptor did in the features of Laocoon, until it became consistent with the lines of beauty. Timanthes, therefore, finding that, in order to render with fidelity the expression of Agamemnon, he must admit such a distortion of the features as would violate the rule, chose rather to veil the countenance. But we would suggest that something else must have weighed with the artist; for if it was an acknowledged principle of Greek art rather to sacrifice a portion of the passion, so to speak, than to admit a distortion of the features, why should Timanthes have felt any scruple, in this instance, in modifying the expression of the father's countenance in obedience to a known rule of art? Why should he have thought himself obliged to resort to the expedient of concealing the face?