Part 12

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.

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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.

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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.

Nor is this all; the intervention of the inferior classes furnishes Shakspeare with another means of effect, which would be impracticable in any other system. The poet who can take his actors from all ranks of society, and place them in all positions, may also bring every thing into action--that is to say, may remain constantly dramatic. In "Julius Caesar," the scene opens with a living picture of popular movements and feelings; what explanation or conversation could make us so well acquainted with the nature of the seductive influence exercised by the Dictator over the Romans, of the kind of danger to which liberty is exposed, and of the error, as well as the peril, of the republicans who hope to restore liberty by the death of Caesar? When Macbeth determines to get rid of Banquo, he has not to inform us of his project in the person of a confidant, or to receive an account of the execution of the deed in order to make us aware of it: he sends for the assassins and converses with them; we witness the artifices by which a tyrant renders the passions and misfortunes of man subservient to his designs; and we afterward see the murderers lie in wait for their victim, strike the fatal blow, and return, with blood-stained hands, to demand their reward. Banquo can then appear to us; the real presence of crime has produced all its effect, and we reject none of the terrors which accompany it.

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When we desire to produce man upon the stage in all the energy of his nature, it is not too much to summon to our aid man as a whole, and to exhibit him under all the forms and in all the positions of which his existence admits. Such a representation is not merely more complete and striking, but it is also more truthful and accurate. We deceive the mind with regard to an event, if we present to it merely one salient part adorned with the colors of truth, while the other part is rejected and effaced in a conversation or a narrative. Thence results a false impression which, in more than one instance, has injured the effect of the finest works. "Athalie," that masterpiece of our drama, still finds us imbued with a certain prejudice against Joad and in favor of Athalie, whom we do not hate sufficiently to rejoice in her destruction, and whom we do not fear enough to approve the artifice which draws her into the snare. And yet Athalie has not only massacred her son's children, in order that she might reign in their stead; but she is a foreigner, maintained on the throne by foreign troops; the enemy of the God adored by her people, she insults and braves Him by the presence and pomp of a foreign worship, while the national religion, stripped of its power and honors, and clung to with fear and trembling by only "a small number of zealous worshipers," daily expects to fall a victim to the hatred of Mathan, the insolent despotism of the queen, and the avidity of her base courtiers. Here is, indeed, an exhibition of tyranny and misfortune; here is matter enough to drive the people to revolt, and to lead to conspiracies among the last defenders of their liberties. {152} And all these facts are related in the speeches of Joad, of Abner, of Mathan, and even of Athalie herself. But they are displayed in speeches only; all that we behold in action is Joad conspiring with the means which his enemy still leaves at his disposal, and the imposing grandeur of the character of Athalie. The conspiracy is under our eyes; but we have only heard of tyranny. If the action had revealed to us the evils which oppression involves; if we had beheld Joad excited and stimulated to revolt by the cries of the unhappy victims of the vexations of the foreigner; if the patriotic and religious indignation of the people against a power "lavish of the blood of the defenseless," had given legitimacy to Joad's conduct in our eyes--the action, when thus completed, would leave no uncertainty in our minds; and "Athalie" would perhaps present to us the ideal of dramatic poetry, at least, according to our conception of it at the present time.