Part 2

What do we find in the comedies of the great Molière? the sacred institution of marriage--as the catechism and the newspapers call it--scoffed at and ridiculed in every scene.

The husband is old, ugly, and peevish; he wears his wig awry; his coat is out of fashion; he has a bill-headed cane, a nose smeared with snuff, short legs, and a paunch as fat as a budget.--He stammers, says nothing but foolish things, and does as many as he says; he sees nothing, he hears nothing; his wife is kissed before his face, and he has no idea what is going on; that state of things lasts until he is well and duly proved a cuckold in his own eyes and in the eyes of the whole audience, who are mightily edified and applaud in a way to bring the walls down.

They who applaud the loudest are they who are the most married.

In Molière, marriage is named George Dandin or Sganarelle.

Adultery is Damis or Clitandre; there is no name sweet and charming enough for it.

The adulterer is always young, handsome, well-made, and a marquis at the very least. He enters from the wings humming the very latest waltz; he takes one or two steps on the stage with the most deliberate, all-conquering air imaginable; he scratches his ear with the pink nail of his deftly spread little finger; he combs his lovely fair hair with his tortoise-shell comb, and arranges his ruffles, which are of great volume. His doublet and his hose are almost covered with bows and knots of ribbon; his neckband is from the best maker; his gloves smell sweeter than balsam and civet; his plumes cost a louis apiece.

How his eye sparkles and his cheek glows! how smiling his mouth! how white his teeth! how soft and well cared for his hand!

He speaks, naught issues from his lips save poesy, perfumed gallantries in the most refined style and with the most charming manner; he has read the latest novels and knows all about poetry, he is brave, and quick to draw his sword, he scatters gold with lavish hand.--And so Angélique, Agnès, Isabelle, can hardly refrain from leaping on his neck, well-bred and great ladies though they be; and so the husband is regularly betrayed in the fifth act, and is very lucky that he was not in the first.

That is how marriage is treated by Molière, one of the loftiest and most serious geniuses who ever lived.--Do you think there is anything stronger in the suits of _Indiana_ and of _Valentine_?

Paternity is even less respected, if that be possible. Witness Orgon, Géronte, and all the rest of them.

How they are robbed by their sons, cheated by their valets! How their avarice, their obstinacy, their idiocy are laid bare, without mercy for their age!--What practical jokes! what mystifications.--How they are taken by the shoulder and pushed out of life, poor old fellows, who take a long time to die and refuse to give up their money! how much is said about the immortality of parents! what arguments against heredity, and how much more convincing they are than all this Saint-Simonian declamation!

A father is an ogre, an Argus, a jailer, a tyrant, something that at the best is good for nothing but to delay a marriage for three acts until the final reconciliation.--A father is the ridiculous husband perfected.--A son is never ridiculous in Molière; for Molière, like all authors at all possible epochs, paid his court to the young generation at the expense of the old.

And what of the Scapins, with their striped cloaks _à la Napolitaine_, their caps tilted over their ears, their plumes sweeping the layers of air,--are not they very pious, very chaste individuals, most worthy of canonization?--The galleys are filled with honest folk who have not done the fourth part of what they do. The knavery of Trialph is paltry knavery compared with theirs. And the Lisettes, the Martons, _tudieu_! what hussies!--The girls of the street are far from being as sharp, as quick at prurient retort as they. How well they understand how to deliver a note! what good watch they keep during assignations!--On my word, they are invaluable girls, serviceable and shrewd advisers.

It is a charming company that walks and fidgets through those comedies and imbroglios.--Duped guardians, cuckold husbands, lewd maids, keen-witted valets, young ladies mad with love, dissolute sons, adulterous wives; are not these quite as bad as the melancholy young beaux and poor, weak women, oppressed and impassioned, of the dramas and novels of the writers in vogue to-day?

And yet the denouements, minus the final blow of the dagger, minus the regulation cup of poison, are as happy as the time-honored ending of a fairy tale, and everybody, even the husband, is perfectly satisfied. In Molière, virtue is always in disgrace, always being pummelled; it is virtue that wears horns and turns her back to Mascarille; morality barely shows its face once at the end of the play, in the somewhat commonplace person of the gendarme Loyal.

All this that we have said is not intended to knock a chip off Molière's pedestal; we are not mad enough to attempt to shake that bronze colossus with our weak arms; we desired simply to show the pious _feuilletonistes_, who are terrified by recent works and by those of the romantic school, that the old classics, whom they urge us every day to read and imitate, far surpass them in looseness and immorality.

To Molière we might easily add Marivaux and La Fontaine, those two strongly-contrasted exponents of the French mind, and Regnier and Rabelais and Marot, and many others. But it is not our purpose in this place to prepare, from the standpoint of morality, a course in literature for the benefit of the virgin minds of the _feuilleton_.

It seems to me that we should not raise such a hubbub for so small a matter. Luckily we are not living in the days of the fair Eve, and we cannot, in good conscience, be as primitive and patriarchal as people were in the days of the ark. We are not little girls preparing for our first communion; and when we play crambo, we do not answer _cream-pie_. We are passably knowing in our innocence, and our virginity has been on the town for a long while; those are things that one does not have twice, and, whatever we may do, we cannot recover them, for there is nothing in the world that runs faster than a fleeing virginity and a vanishing illusion.

After all, perhaps there is no great harm in that, and knowledge of everything is preferable to ignorance of everything. That is a question that I leave for those who know more than I, to discuss. The fact remains that the world has passed the age when one can feign modesty and chastity, and I consider it too old a greybeard to play the child and the virgin without making itself ridiculous.

Since its marriage to civilization, society has lost the right to be artless and bashful. There are certain blushes that are all right for the bridal bed, but can serve no further purpose the next day; for the young wife thinks no more of the maiden, it may be, or if she does think of her, it is a most improper thing and gravely endangers her husband's reputation.

When I chance to read one of the fine sermons that have taken the place of literary criticism in the public sheets, I sometimes feel great remorse and dire apprehension, having on my conscience some paltry equivocal stories, a little too highly spiced, such as a young man of spirit and animation may have to reproach himself for.

Beside these Bossuets of the Café de Paris, these Bourdaloues of the balcony at the Opéra, these Catos at so much a line, who berate the present age in such fine fashion, I esteem myself the most infamous villain that ever marred the face of the earth; and yet, God knows, the list of my sins, capital as well as venial, with the usual blank spaces and leads, would barely, even in the hands of the most skilful publisher, make one or two octavo volumes a day, which is a small matter for one who does not claim to be bound for paradise in the other world and to win the Monthyon prize or be rose-maiden in this.

And then, when I think that I have met under the table, and elsewhere, too, a considerable number of these dragons of virtue, I return to a better opinion of myself, and I consider that, whatever faults I may have, they have another which is, in my eyes, the greatest and worst of all:--I refer to hypocrisy.

By looking carefully one might perhaps find another little vice to add; but this is so hideous that I really hardly dare to name it. Come nearer and I will breathe its name into your ear:--it is envy.

Envy, and nothing else.

It is envy that crawls and wriggles through all these paternal homilies; however careful it may be to hide itself, you can see its flat little viper's head from time to time gleaming above the metaphors and rhetorical figures; you surprise it licking with its forked tongue its lips blue with venom, you hear it hissing softly in the shadow of an insidious epithet.

I am well aware that it is insufferably conceited to say that any one envies you, and that a dandy who boasts of a conquest is almost as nauseating.--I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies or envious detractors; that is a piece of good fortune that is not given to everybody, and I probably shall not enjoy it for a long time; so I will speak freely and without reservation as one who is perfectly disinterested in the matter.

An unquestionable fact, and easy of demonstration to those who may doubt it, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet--of him who does nothing to him who does something--of the drone to the bee--of the gelding to the stallion.

You do not become a critic until the fact is established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. Before descending to the pitiful rôle of watching cloaks and counting strokes like a billiard-marker or a tennis-court attendant, you have long courted the Muse, you have tried to seduce her; but you have not sufficient vigor for that; your breath has failed you and you have fallen back, pale and broken-winded, to the foot of the sacred mountain.

I can conceive that antipathy. It is painful to see another take his seat at the banquet to which you are not invited and lie with the woman who would have none of you. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch who is compelled to assist at the delights of the Great Turk.

He is admitted to the most secret recesses of the Oda; he escorts the sultanas to the bath; he sees their lovely bodies gleaming in the silvery water of the great reservoirs, shedding streams of pearls and smoother than agate; the most hidden charms are disclosed to him unveiled. No one is embarrassed by his presence.--He is a eunuch.--The sultan caresses his favorite before him and kisses her on her pomegranate mouth.--In very truth his is a terribly false position and he must be sadly embarrassed to keep himself in countenance.

It is the same with the critic who sees the poet walking in the garden of poesy with its nine fair odalisques, and disporting himself indolently in the shade of tall green laurels. It is very hard for him not to pick up stones in the road to throw at him and wound him over the wall, if he is skilful enough to do it.

The critic who has produced nothing of his own is a coward; he is like an abbé paying court to a layman's wife: the layman cannot pay him back in his own coin or fight with him.

I think that an account of the different methods of depreciating any sort of work, resorted to during the last month, would be at least as interesting as the story of Tiglath-Pileser, or of Gemmagog, who invented peaked shoes.

There would be enough matter to fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but we will have pity on the reader and confine ourselves to a few lines--a favor for which we demand more than everlasting gratitude.--In a very remote age, lost in the darkness of time--it was fully three weeks ago--the romance of the Middle Ages flourished principally in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in high esteem; _coiffures à la Hennin_ were not despised and party-colored trousers were thought well of; the dagger was priceless; the peaked shoe was adored as a fetich.--There was nothing but ogive windows, turrets, colonnettes, stained glass, cathedrals, and fortified châteaux;--the characters were all _damoiselles_ and _damoiseaux_, pages and varlets, beggars and swash-bucklers, gallant knights and ferocious castellans;--all of which were more innocent certainly than innocent games, and did absolutely no harm to anybody.

The critic did not wait for the second romance before beginning his work of depreciation: as soon as the first appeared, he enveloped himself in his robe of camel's hair, and sprinkled a bushel of ashes on his head; then, in his loud, wailing voice, he began to cry:

"More Middle Ages, nothing but the Middle Ages! who will deliver me from the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages which are not the Middle Ages?--Paste-board and terra-cotta Middle Ages, which have nothing of the Middle Ages save the name!--Oh! these iron barons, in their iron armor, with iron hearts in their iron breasts! Oh! the cathedrals with their rose-work always in bloom and their stained glass in flower, with their lace-work of granite, with their open-work trefoils, their toothed gables, their chasubles of stone embroidered like a bride's veil, with their tapers, their psalms, their glittering priests, with their people on their knees, their rumbling organ, and their angels soaring aloft and flapping their wings under the arches!--how they have spoiled my Middle Ages, my refined, brightly-colored Middle Ages!--how they have blotted it from sight under a layer of coarse plaster!--what discordant colors!--Ah! ignorant daubers, who fancy you have created an effect by splashing red upon blue, white upon black, and green upon yellow, you have seen only the outer shell of the Middle Ages, you have not divined the true meaning of the Middle Ages, the blood does not circulate beneath the skin in which you have clothed your phantoms, there is no heart in your steel corselets, there are no legs in your tricot trousers, no stomach or breast behind your emblazoned skirts; they are clothes that have the shape of men and that is all.--So, down with the Middle Ages as they are presented to us by the _fabricators_"--the great word is out, the _fabricators_!--"The Middle Ages meet no need of the present day, we must have something else."

And the public, seeing how the _feuilletonistes_ snarled at the Middle Ages, was seized with an ardent passion for the Middle Ages, which they claim to have killed at a single blow. The Middle Ages invaded everything, assisted by the obstruction of the newspapers:--dramas, melodramas, novels, tales, poetry--there were even Middle-Age vaudevilles, and Momus recited feudal mummeries.

Beside the romance of the Middle Ages flourished the carrion romance, a very pleasing variety, which nervous _petites-maîtresses_ and blasé cooks consumed in great numbers.

The _feuilletonistes_ speedily came flocking to the stench, like crows to the carrion, and they tore with the beaks of their pens and inhumanly put to death that poor species of novel, which asked nothing more than to be allowed to prosper and putrefy in peace on the greasy shelves of the book-stalls. What did they not say? what did they not write?--Literature of the morgue or the galleys, an executioner's nightmare, hallucination of a drunken butcher, or a convict-keeper with the jail-fever! They benignly gave us to understand that the authors were assassins and vampires, that they had contracted the vicious habit of killing their fathers and mothers, that they drank blood from human skulls, that they used the bones of the legs for forks and cut their bread with a guillotine.

And yet they knew better than any one, from having frequently breakfasted with them, that the authors of those charming slaughters were excellent young men of family, very easy-going and in the best society, white-gloved and fashionably near-sighted,--with a decided preference for beefsteak over human cutlets, and more accustomed to drink Bordeaux wine than the blood of young girls or new-born children.--From having seen and touched their manuscripts, they knew perfectly well that they were written with ink of great virtue upon English paper, and not with blood from the guillotine upon the skin of a Christian flayed alive.

But whatever they might say or do, the age was after carrion, and the charnel-house suited them better than the boudoir; the reader would bite at no hook that was not baited with a little body already turning blue.--A state of things easily conceived; put a rose at the end of your line and the spiders will have time to spin their webs in the crook of your elbow before you catch the tiniest minnow; put on a worm or a piece of rank cheese, and carp, barbel, perch, eels, will all leap three feet out of water to snap at it.--Men are not so different from fish as people generally seem to believe.

One would have said that the newspaper men had become Quakers, Brahmins, or Pythagoreans, or bulls, they had been suddenly seized with such a horror of red and of blood.--Never had they been known to be in such a soft and melting mood;--it was cream and buttermilk.--They admitted the existence of only two colors, sky-blue and apple-green. Pink was only tolerated, and if the public would have allowed them to do as they chose, they would have led it to the banks of the Lignon to feed on spinach beside the sheep of Amaryllis. They had changed their black frock-coats for the dove-colored jacket of Celadon or Silvander, and surrounded their goose-feathers with clusters of roses and ribbons after the style of a shepherd's crook. They let their hair float in the wind like a child's, and had made themselves virgins according to the recipe of Marion Delorme, and about as successfully as she.

They applied to literature the article in the Decalogue:

_Thou shalt not kill._

The least little dramatic murder was no longer permissible, and the fifth act had become an impossibility.

They considered the poniard extravagant, poison monstrous, the axe horrible beyond words. They would have liked dramatic heroes to live to the age of Melchisedec; and yet it has been a recognized fact, from time immemorial, that the object of every tragedy is to have a poor devil of a great man, who cannot help himself, murdered in the last act, just as the object of every comedy is to join in matrimony two idiots of _jeunes premiers_ of about sixty years each.

It was about this time that I threw into the fire--after having taken a duplicate, as almost always happens--two superb and magnificent Middle-Age dramas, one in verse, the other in prose, in which the heroes were quartered and boiled on the stage, which would have been very entertaining and decidedly unusual.

To conform to their ideas, I have since composed an antique tragedy in five acts called _Héliogabale_, the hero of which throws himself into the privy, an extremely novel situation and one that has the merit of introducing a bit of scenery not yet seen on the stage.--I have also written a modern drama, very much superior to _Antoni,--Arthur,_ or _L'Homme Fatal,_ where the providential idea arrives in the shape of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after committing various rapes, and that, combined with his remorse, brings on a frightful attack of indigestion of which he dies.--A moral ending, if ever there was one, which proves that _God is just_, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded.

As for the monstrosity species, you know how they have dealt with that, how they have abused Han d'Islande the cannibal, Habibrah the obi, Quasimodo the bell-ringer, and Triboulet, who is only a hunch-back--all that family so strangely swarming--all those gigantic deformities whom my dear neighbor sends crawling and leaping through the virgin forests and the cathedrals of his romances. Neither the great strokes _à la_ Michael Angelo, nor the curiosities worthy of Callot, nor the effects of light and shade after the fashion of Goya, could find favor before them; they sent him back to his odes when he wrote novels, to his novels when he wrote dramas: the ordinary tactics of journalists who always praise what you have done at the expense of what you are doing. A fortunate man, however, is he who is acknowledged to be superior, even by the _feuilletonistes_, in all his works,--except, of course, the particular one with whom they are dealing,--and who need only write a theological treatise or a manual of cooking to have his plays admired.

Concerning the romance of the heart, the ardent, impassioned romance, whose father is Werther the German, and its mother Manon Lescaut the French-woman, we had a few words to say, at the beginning of this preface, of the moral scurf that has fastened itself upon it in desperation, on the pretext of religion and good morals. The critical louse is like the body-louse that deserts the dead body for the living. From the corpse of the Middle Ages the critics have passed on to the living body of this age, whose skin is tough and hard and might well break their teeth.

We think, notwithstanding a deep respect for the modern apostles, that the authors of these so-called immoral novels, without being so thoroughly married as the virtuous journalist, generally have a mother, and that several of them have sisters and are provided with an abundance of female relations; but their mothers and sisters do not read novels, even immoral novels; they sew and embroider and look after the house-keeping.--Their stockings, as Monsieur Planard would say, are--entirely white: you can look at them on their legs--they are not _blue_, and excellent Chrysale, who hated learned women so, would suggest them as models to the skilled Philaminte.

As for these gentlemen's _wives_, as they have so many of them, however spotless their husbands may be, it seems to my simple mind that there are certain things they ought to know.--Indeed, it may well be that their husbands have never shown them anything. In that case I understand that they are bent upon keeping them in that useful state of blessed ignorance. God is great and Mohammed is his prophet!--Women are inquisitive creatures; may Heaven and morality grant that they gratify their curiosity in a more legitimate way than that adopted by their grandmother Eve, and do not go putting questions to the serpent!

As for their daughters, if they have been at boarding-school, I fail to see what they can learn from these books.

It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he describes an orgy, or a debauchee because he narrates a debauch, as to claim that a man is virtuous because he has written a book on morals; we see the contrary every day. It is the character that speaks, not the author; his hero may be an atheist, that does not mean that he is an atheist; he represents brigands as acting and talking like brigands, but that does not make him a brigand. On that theory we should have to guillotine Shakespeare, Corneille, and all the writers of tragedy; they have committed more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche; we have not done it, however, and, indeed, I do not believe that we shall do it for a long time to come, however virtuous and moral criticism may become. It is one of the manias of these little shallow-brained scribblers always to substitute the author for the work, and to resort to personalities, in order to give some paltry scandalous interest to their miserable rhapsodies, which they are well aware that nobody would read if they contained only their individual opinions.