ends by forbidding the whisper, and makes him reply by signs. He is also rich, an uncle, and he ill-treats his nephew Sir Dauphine Eugenie, a man of wit, but who lacks money. We anticipate all the tortures which poor Morose is to suffer. Sir Dauphine finds him a supposed silent woman, the beautiful Epicone. Morose, enchanted by her brief replies and her voice, which he can hardly hear, marries her to play his nephew a trick. It is his nephew who has played him a trick. As soon as she is married, Epicone speaks, scolds, aigues as loud and as long as a dozen women:-"Why, did you think you had married a statue? or a motion only? one of the French puppets, with the eyes turn'd with a wire? or some innocent out of the hospital, that would stand with her hands thus, and a plaise mouth, and look upon you?"* She orders the servants to speak louder; she opens the doors wide to her friends. They arrive in shoals, offering their noisy congratulations to Morose. Five or six women's tongues overwhelm him all at once with compliments, questions, advice, remonstrances. A friend of Sir Dauphine comes with a band of music, who play all together, suddenly, with their whole force. Morose says, "O, a plot, a plot, a plot, a plot, upon me! This day I shall be their anvil to work on, they will grate me asunder. 'Tis worse than the noise of a saw." t A procession of servants is seen coming, with dishes in their hands; it is the racket of a tavern which Sir Dauphine is bringing to his uncle. The guests clash the glasses, shout, drink healths; they have with them a drum and trumpets which make great noise. Morose flees to the top of the house, puts "a whole nest of night-caps" on his head and stuffs up his ears. Captain Otter cries, Sound, Tritons o' the Thames! Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero." "Villains, murderers, sons of the earth and traitors," cries Morose from above, "what do you there?" The racket increases. Then the captain, somewhat "jovial," maligns his wife, who falls upon him and gives him a good beating. Blows, cries, music, laughter, resound like thunder. It is the poetry * Epicane, iii. 2. 1 Ibid. ? of uproar. Here is a subject to shake coarse nerves, and to make the mighty chests of the companions of Drake and Essex shake with uncontro!!able laughter. "Rogues, hell-hounds, Stentors! ... They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen throats!" Morose casts himself on his tormentors with his long sword, breaks the instruments, drives away the musicians, disperses the guests amidst an inexpressible uproar, gnashing his teeth, looking haggard Afterwards they pronounce him mad, and discuss his madness before him.* The disease in Greek is called μavía, in Latin insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica that is, egressio, when a man ex melancholico evadit fanaticus. . But he may be but phreneticus yet, mistress and phrenetis is only delirium, or so.' They talk of the books which he must read aloud to cure him. They add by way of consolation, that his wife talks in her sleep, "and snores like a porpoise." "Oredeem me, fate; redeem me, fate!" cries the poor man.t "For how many causes may a man be divorc'd, nephew?" Sir Dauphine chooses two knaves, and disguises them, one as a priest, the other as a lawyer, who launch at his head Latin terms of civil and canon law, explain to Morose the twelve cases of nullity, jingle in his ears one after another the most barbarous words in their obscure vocabulary, wrangle, and make between them as much noise as a couple of bells in a belfry. Following their advice he declares himself impo tent. The wedding-guests propose to toss him in a blanket; others demand an immediate inspection. Fall after fall, shame after shame; nothing serves him; his wife declares that she ccnsents to " take him with all his faults. The lawyer proposes another legal method; Morose shall obtain a divorce by proving that his wife is faithless. Two boasting knights, who are present, declare that they have been her lovers. Morose, in raptures, throws himself at their knees, and embraces them. Epicone weeps, and Morose seems to be delivered. Suddenly the lawyer decides that the plan is of no avail, the infidelity having been com *Compare M. de Poarceaugnac in Molière. 1 Epicane iv. 4 2. and moralist, not enough of a mimic and an actor. But he is loftier from another side, for he is a poet; almost all writers, prose-authors, preachers even, were so at the time we speak of. Fancy abounded, as well as the perception of colors and forms, the need and wont of enjoying through the im son's pieces, the Staple of News, Cyn thia's Revels, are fanciful and allegorica comedies like those of Aristophanes He there dallies with the real, anc beyond the real, with characters who mitted before the marriage. "O, this | vention; he is too n uch of a writer is worst of all worst worsts that hell could have devis'd! marry a whore, and so much noise!" There is Morose then, declared impotent and a deceived husband, at his own request, in the eyes of the whole world, and moreover married forever. Sir Dauphine comes in like a clever rascal, and as a succoring deity. "Allow me but five hun-agination and the eyes. Many of Jondred during life, uncle," and I free you. Morose signs the deed of gift with alacrity; and his nephew shows him that Epicone is a boy in disguise.* Add to this enchanting farce the funny parts of the two accomplished and gal-are but theatrical masks, abstractions lant knights who, after having boasted of their bravery, receive gratefully, and before the ladies, flips and kicks. † Never was coarse physical laughter more adroitly produced. In this broad coarse gayety, this excess of noisy transport, you recognize the stout roysterer, the stalwart drinker who swallowed hogsheads of Canary, and made the windows of the Mermaid shake with his bursts of humor. V. Jonson did not go beyond this; he was not a philosopher like Molière, able to grasp and dramatize the crisis of human life, education, marriage, sickness, the chief characters of his country and century, the courtier, the tradesman, the hypocrite, the man of the world. He remained on a lower level, in the comedy of plot,§ the painting of the grotesque, the representation of too transient subjects of ridicule, too general vices.** If at times, as in the Alchemist, he has succeeded by the perfection of plot and the vigor of satire, he has miscarried more frequently by the ponderousness of his work and the lack of comic lightness. The critic in am mars the artist; his literary calculations strip him of spontaneous in 66 personified, buffooneries, decorations, dances, music, pretty laughing whims of a picturesque and sentimental imagination. Thus, in Cynthia's Revels, three children come on pleading possession of the cloke" of black velvet, which an actor usually wore when he spoke the prologue. They draw lots for it; one of the losers, in revenge, tells the audience beforehand the incidents of the piece. The others interrupt him at every sentence, put their hands on his, mouth, and taking the cloak one after the other, begin to criticise the spectators and authors. This child's play, these gestures and loud voices, this little amusing dispute, divert the public from their serious thoughts, and prepare them for the oddities which they are to look upon. We are in Greece, in the valley of Gargaphie, where Diana has proclaimed "a solemn revels." Mercury and Cupid have come down, and begin by quarrelling; the latter says: My light feather-heel'd coz, what are you any more than my uncle Jove's pander? a lacquey that runs on errands for him. and can whisper a light message to a loose wench with some round volu bility? . . One that sweeps the gods drinking-room every morning, and sets the cushions in order again, which they threw cne at another's head over night?"† They are good-tempered gods. Echo, awoke by Mercury, weeps for the "to beauteous boy Narcissus: " "That trophy of self-love, and spoil of na By Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant. Witness thy youth's dear sweets, here spent untasted, Like a fair taper, with his own flame And with thy water let this curse remain, The courtiers and ladies drink thereof, Asotus, wishes to become a man of the court and of fashionable manners; he takes for his master Amorphus, a learned traveller, expert in gallantry, who, to believe himself, is "An essence so sublimated and refined by uavel... able... to speak the mere ext.action of language; one that. .. was your first that ever enrich'd his country with the true laws of the duello; whose optics have drunk the spirit of beauty in some eight-score and eighteen princes' courts, where I have resided, and been there fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five ladies, all nobly if not princely descended,. in all so happy, as even admiration herself doth seem to fasten her kisses upon me." + "O vanity, How are thy painted beauties doated on, Rais'd on their toes, to catch thy airy forms, That buy the merry madness of one hour, With the long irksomeness of following time!" vices, appear two symbo.. cal masques, To complete the overthrow of the representing the contrary v.rtues. They pass gravely before the spectators, in splendid array, and the noble verses exchanged by the goddess and her companions raise the mind to the lofty regions of serene morality, whither the poet desires to carry us : 66 Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair, Space to breathe, how short soever." ↑ Asotus learns at this good school Helicon. Two by two they go off the language of the court, fortifies him- singing a palinode, whilst the chorus self like other people with quibbles, sings the supplication "Good Mercury learned oaths, and metaphors; he fires defend us." Is it an opera or a comoff in succession supersubtle tirades, edy? It is a lyrical comedy; and it and duly imitates the grimaces and we do not discover in it the airy lighttortuous style of his masters. Then, ness of Aristophanes, at least we enwhen he has drunk the water of the counter, as in the Birds and the Frogs, fountain, becoming suddenly pert and the contrasts and medleys of poetic inrash, he proposes to all comers a tour-vention, which through caricature and nament of "court compliment." This odd tournament is held before the ladies; it comprises four jousts, and at each the trumpets sound. The combatants perform in succession the BARE ACCOST; "the BETTER "the SOLEMN GARD;" 99 ADDRESS ; and "the PERFECT CLOSE." In this grave buffoonery the courtiers are beatThe severe Crites, the moralist of the play, copies their language, and pierces them with their own weapons. Already, with grand declamation, he had rebuked them thus: en. Cynthia's Revels, i. 1. + Ibid. v. 2. RE ↑ Ibid. ode, the real and the impossible, the present and the past, sent forth to the four quarters of the globe, simultaneously unites all kinds of incompatibili ties, and culls all flowers. Jonson went further than this, and entered the domain of pure poetry. He wrote delicate, voluptuous, charm. ing love poems, worthy of the ancient idyllic muse. § Above all, he was the great, the inexhaus.ible inventor of Masques, a kind of masquerades, ballets, poetic choruses, in which all the ↑ Ibid. v. 3 * Ibid. i. I. Ibid. last scene. مو Miscellaneou magnificence and the imagination of the English Renaissance is displayed. The Greek gods, and all the ancient Olympus, the allegorical personages whom the artists of the time delineate in their pictures; the antique heroes of popular legends; all worlds, the actual, the abstract, the divine, the human, the ancient, the modern, are searched by his hands, brought on the itage to furnish costumes, harmonious groups, emblems, songs, whatever can excite, intoxicate the artistic sense. The élite, moreover, of the kingdom is there on the stage. They are not mountebanks moving about in borrowed clothes, clumsily worn, for which they are still in debt to the tailor; they are ladies of the court, great lords, the queen, in all the splendor of their rank and pride, with real diamonds, bent on displaying their riches, so that the whole splendor of the national life is concentrated in the opera which they enact, like jewels in a casket What dresses! what profusion of splendors! what medley of strange characters, gypsies, witches, gods, heroes, pontiffs, gnomes, fantastic beings! How many metamorphoses, jousts, dances, marriage songs! What variety of scenery, architecture, floating isles, triumphal arches, symbolic spheres! Gold glitters; jewels flash; purple absorbs the lustre-lights in its costly folds; streams of light shine upon the crumpled silks; diamond necklaces, darting flame, clasp the bare bosoms of the ladies; strings of pearls a displayed, loop after loop, upon the silver-sown brocaded dresses; gold embroidery, weaving whimsical arabesques, depicts upon their dresses flowers, fruits, and figures, setting picture within picture. The teps of the throne bear groups of Cupids, each with a torch in his hand.* On either side the fountains cast up plumes of pearls; musicians, in purple and scarlet, laurel-crowned, make harmony in the bowers. The trains of masques cross, commingling their groups; "the one half in orange-tawny and silver, the other in sea-green and silver. The bodies and short skirts (were of) white and gold to both." Such pageants Jonson wrote year after year, almost to the end of his Masque of Beauty. life, true feasts for the eyes, like the processions of Titian Even when he grew to be old, his imagination, like that of Titian, remained abundant and fresh. Though forsaken, lying gasping on his bed, feeling the approach of death, in his supreme bitterness he dia not lose his faculties, but wrote The Sad Shepherd, the most graceful and pas toral of his pieces. Consider that this beautiful dream arose in a sick-cham ber, amidst medicine bottles, physic, doctors, with a nurse at his side, amidst the anxieties of poverty and the choking-fits of a dropsy! He is transported to a green forest, in the days of Robin Hood, amidst the gay chase and the great barking greyhounds. There are the malicious fairies, who like Oberon and Titania, lead men to flounder in mishaps. There are opensouled lovers, who like Daphne and Chloe, taste with awe the painful sweetness of the first kiss. There lived Earine, whom the stream has "suck'd in," whom her lover, in his madness, will not cease to lament: "Earine, Who had her very being, and her name With the first knots or buddings of the spring, Born with the primrose or the violet, Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smil'd, Leap'd out, and made their solemn conjura. tion To last but while she liv'd!" "But she, as chaste as was her name, Earine, Died undeflower'd: and now her weet soul naissance, like some vast oak to which | and health come to us as a momentary all the forest ways converge. I will treat of Shakspeare by himself. In order to take him in completely, we must have a wide and open space. And yet how shall we comprehend aim? how lay bare his inner constitution? Lofty words, eulogies, are all used in vain; he needs no praise, but comprehension merely; and he can only be comprehended by the aid of science. As the complicated revolutions of the heavenly bodies become intelligible only by use of a superior calculus, as the delicate transformations of vegetation and life need for their explanation the intervention of the most difficult chemical formulas, so the great works of art can be interpreted only by the most advanced psychological systems; and we need the loftiest of all these to attain to Shakspeare's level to the level of his age and his work, of his genius and of his art. After all practical experience and accumulated observations of the soul, we find as the result that wisdom and knowledge are in man only effects and fortuities. Man has no permanent and distinct force to secure truth to his intelligence, and common sense to his conduct. On the contrary, he is naturally unreasonable and deceived. The parts of his inner mechanism are like the wheels of clock-work, which go of themselves, blindly, carried away by impulse and weight, and which yet sometimes, by virtue of a certain unison, end by indicating the hour. This final intelligent motion is not natural, but fortuitous; not spontaneous, but forced; not innate, but acquired. The clock did not always go regularly; on the contrary, it had to be regulated little by little, with much difficulty. Its regularity is not ensured; it may go wrong at any time. Its regularity 's not complete; it only approximately marks the time. The mechanical force of each piece is always ready to drag all the rest from their proper action, and to disarrange the whole agree ment. So ideas, once in the mind, pull each their own way blindly and separately, and their imperfect agreemert threatens confusion every momert. Strictly speaking, man is mad, as ne body is ill, by nature; reason re success, a lucky accident.* If we for get this, it is because we are now regulated, dulled, deadened, and because our internal motion has become gradually, by friction and reparation, half harmonized with the motion of things. But this is only a semblance; and the dangerous primitive forces main untamed and independent under the order which seems to restrain them. Let a great danger arise, a revolution take place, they will break out and explode, almost as terribly as in earlier times. For an idea is not a mere inner ma k, employed to desig nate one aspect of things, inert, al ways ready to fall into order with other similar ones, so as to make an exact whole. However it may be reduced and disciplined, it still retains a sensible tinge which shows its likeness to an hallucination; a degree of individual persistence which shows its likeness to a monomania; a network of singular affinities which shows its likeness to the ravings of delirium. Being such, it is beyond question the rudiment of a nightmare, a habit, an absurdity. Let it become once developed in its entirety, as its tendency leads it, and you will find that it is essentially an active and complete im age, a vision drawing along with it a train of dreams and sensations, which increases of itself, suddenly, by a sort of rank and absorbing growth, and which ends by possessing, shaking, exhausting the whole man. After this, another, perhaps entirely opposite, and so on successively: there is nothing else in man, no free and distinct power; he is in himself but the process of these headlong impulses and swarming im aginations: civilization has mutilated, attenuated, but not destroyed them; shocks, collisions, transports, some times at long intervals a sort of tran sient partial equilibrium: this is his real life, the life of a lunatic, who now and then simulates reason, but who is in reality "such stuff as dreams are *This idea may be expanded psychologically: external perception memory, are real hallu cinations, etc. Th's the analytical aspect: under another aspect reason and health are the natural goals. † See Spinoza and Dugald Stewart: Con ception in its natural state is belief. |