Mimesis (63 page)

Here, as in many of his other plays, Molière is much less concerned with character types, he is much more intent upon rendering the individual reality, than the majority of the moralists of his century. He did not present “the miser” but a perfectly specific coughing old monomaniac; not “the misanthropist” but a young man of the best society, an unyielding fanatic of sincerity, who is steeped in his own opinions, sits in judgment upon the world, and finds it unworthy of himself; not “the hypochondriac” but a wealthy, extremely robust,
healthy, and choleric family tyrant who keeps forgetting his role of invalid. And yet no one can help feeling that Molière fits perfectly into his moralizing and typifying century, for he seeks the individually real only for the sake of its ridiculousness, and to him ridiculousness means deviation from the normal and customary. For him too a character taken seriously would be “typical.” He wants stage effects; his genius is livelier and requires freer play. The short-winded and finicky technique of La Bruyère, who builds up the abstractly moral type from a mass of traits and anecdotes, is unsuited to the stage; for the stage requires striking effects and greater homogeneity in the realm of the concrete and individual than in that of the abstract and typical. But the moralistic attitude is essentially the same.

Another and no less informative criticism leveled at Molière is to be found in some celebrated lines from Boileau’s
Art poétique
(3, 391-405):

(Study the Court and know the City; both are always fertile in models. It is thus that Molière, shedding luster on his works, would perhaps have borne away the prize of his art if, less inclined toward the people, he had not, in his learned portrayals, often made his faces grimace, had not forsaken the pleasing and subtle for buffoonery, and shamelessly allied Terence with Tabarin. In the absurd sack in which Scapin cloaks himself, I do not recognize the author of the
Misanthrope
. Comedy, enemy of sighs and tears, does not admit tragic woes into its verses; but its use is not
to go to a public square and delight the populace with foul and vulgar witticisms. Its actors must trifle nobly …)

In its way this criticism is entirely justified; and since Boileau after all was a great admirer of Molière it turned out to be rather mild and reserved. For the farcical gestures, expressions, and stage tricks occur not only in the farces proper (which include the
Fourberies de Scapin
cited by Boileau), they also make their way into the comedy of society. In
Tartuffe
for instance we have an effect of straight farce in the trio scene Orgon-Dorine-Marianne (2, 2) where Orgon gets himself into position to box Dorine’s ears if she interrupts him again; and the same is even more true of the scene where both Orgon and Tartuffe go down on their knees (3, 6). Even
le Misanthrope
, which Boileau referred to as the model of a comedy of society, and which in fact is the comedy of Molière’s which is most uniformly attuned to the key of polite social usage, contains a short farcical scene: the appearance of Alceste’s servant Dubois (4, 4). Molière never renounced the effects which his mastery of the technique of the farce put within his reach, and perhaps his most inspired ideas are those which enabled him to work such originally quite mechanical clownish situations into the very essence and significance of his conflicts. The aim,
de faire rire les honnêtes gens sans personnages ridicules
, which had been the ambition of the French comic theater ever since Corneille’s first comedies, never made Molière a stylistic purist. Anyone who has seen good performances of his plays, or has imagination enough to visualize them on the stage as he reads, knows that grotesquely farcical effects are scattered all through them, even in the comedies of society, even in
le Misanthrope
. Actors with verve and an eye for the stage everywhere find opportunity to exploit and indeed to improvise such possibilities. Molière himself, who was an outstanding comedian, missed no chance in his acting to carry a point to grotesque exaggeration. To be sure, the farcical effects are by no means limited to characters representing the lower classes, although that is all Boileau has in mind. Those whom Molière makes the subjects of such
lazzi
include persons from all classes, and in the controversy over the
École des femmes
he specifically prides himself on having introduced the
marquis ridicule
and indeed with having assigned to him the part which had previously been the prerogative of the clownish figure of the comic servant:

Le marquis aujourd’hui est le plaisant de la comédie; et comme, dans toutes les comédies anciennes, on voit toujours un valet bouffon
qui fait rire les auditeurs, de même, dans toutes nos pièces de maintenant, il faut toujours un marquis ridicule qui divertisse la compagnie. (
L’Impromptu de Versailles
, scene 1.)

(Today the marquis is the droll of comedy; and as, in all the old comedies, we always find a buffoon of a valet who makes the audience laugh, so, in all our plays nowadays, there must always be an absurd marquis to divert the company.)

This is clearly an aggressive exaggeration born of the polemic mood of the moment, but it does reveal Molière’s intent—which he put into actual practice—of carrying everyone’s ridiculous traits to grotesque extremes, without limiting himself to comic types from the lower classes. Boileau in his criticism, on the other hand, calls for a strict tripartite distinction of stylistic levels inspired by antique models. He recognizes first the elevated, sublime style of tragedy; then the intermediate style of the comedy of society, which must treat of
honnêtes gens
and be intended for
honnêtes gens
and in which the actors
badinent noblement
; and finally the low style of popular farce, in whose action and language
le bouffon
prevails and for which Boileau has the most profound contempt if only because of its
mots sales et bas
which are the delight of the mob. He chides Molière—very mildly as we have seen—for having mixed the intermediate with the low style.

What especially interests us in this criticism of Boileau’s is the conception of the people that is reflected in it. It is apparent that Boileau cannot imagine any popular types except the grotesque and comic, at least not as subjects worthy of artistic representation. In the seventeenth century,
la cour et la ville
signifies roughly what we should call the educated or simply the public. It consisted of the court nobility, the sphere whose center was the king (
la cour
) and the Parisian higher bourgeoisie (
la ville
), which in many cases already belonged to the nobility of office (
noblesse de robe
) or was attempting to enter it through the purchase of offices. This is the social stratum to which Boileau himself and the great majority of the leading minds of the century belonged.
La cour et la ville
is the most commonly used expression for the leading circles of the nation immediately before and during the reign of Louis XIV; in particular, it is the most commonly used designation for those to whom literary works were addressed, and not only in the present passage, but also, for example, in discussions of good usage in matters of language, it is very frequently employed in contrast with
le peuple. La cour et la ville
, says Boileau, are to be studied
by those who wish to cultivate the intermediate style, the level of the comedy of society; and they must avoid the
bouffon
, the grimaces of the people. It seems that Boileau cannot conceive of any other pictures of the people and its life. And here we clearly discern the limits of his opposition to Molière, just as we did above the limits of the opposition between Molière and La Bruyère. To be sure Molière used farcical effects even in his fashionable comedies, he even caricatured with grotesquely farcical exaggeration personages representing educated society; but he too knew the people only as
personnages ridicules
.

One can see in Molière’s art the greatest measure of realism which could still please in the fully developed classical literature of the France of Louis XIV. Molière staked out the limits of what was possible at the time. He did not conform completely to the prevailing trend toward psychological types; yet with him too the peculiar and characteristic is always ridiculous and extravagant. He did not avoid the farcical and the grotesque, yet with him too any real representation of the life of the popular classes, even in such a spirit of aristocratic contempt as Shakespeare’s, is as completely out of the question as it is with Boileau. All his chambermaids and servingmen, his peasants and peasants’ wives, even his merchants, lawyers, physicians, and apothecaries, are merely comic adjuncts; and it is only within the frame of an upper bourgeois or aristocratic household that servants—especially women—at times represent the voice of down-to-earth common sense. But their functions are always concerned with their masters’ problems, never with those of their own lives. Not the slightest trace of politics, of social or economic criticism, or of an analysis of the political, social, and economic bases of life is to be found. Molière’s criticism is entirely moralistic; that is to say, it accepts the prevailing structure of society, takes for granted its justification, permanence, and general validity, and castigates the excesses occurring within its limits as ridiculous. In this respect he actually falls behind La Bruyère, whose representational talent is more restricted but who is much more serious and ethical; who likewise refrains from criticizing the structure of society; but who, writing as he did toward the end of the century when the royal sun had lost some of its brilliance, grew aware of this limitation of the literary art and even expressed his awareness in some passages of his work—all the more strikingly since one senses that more is left unsaid than is actually stated.
Un homme né Chrétien et François
—he writes toward the end of his chapter,
Des ouvrages de l’esprit—se
trouve contraint dans la satire; les grands sujets lui sont défendus
… (a man born a Christian and a Frenchman is under a constraint in satire; the great subjects are forbidden him). And in this context I should also like to quote the well-known and strangely arresting passage on the peasantry, which occurs in the chapter
De l’homme
(section 128 in the
Grands Écrivains
edition):

L’on voit certains animaux farouches, des mâles et des femelles, répandus par la campagne, noirs, livides et tout brûlés du soleil, attachés à la terre qu’ils fouillent et qu’ils remuent avec une opiniâtreté invincible; ils ont comme une voix articulée, et quand ils se lèvent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine, et en effet ils sont des hommes. Ils se retirent la nuit dans des tanières, où ils vivent de pain noir, d’eau et de racines; ils épargnent aux autres hommes la peine de semer, de labourer et de recueillir pour vivre, et méritent ainsi de ne pas manquer de ce pain qu’ils ont semé.

(One sees certain ferocious animals, male and female, scattered over the countryside, black, livid, and burned by the sun, bound to the soil which they dig and turn over with unconquerable stubbornness; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they stand up they exhibit a human face, and in fact they are men. They retire at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots; they spare other men the toil of sowing, tilling, and harvesting in order to live, and thus deserve not to be without the bread which they have sown.)

Although this important passage is clearly of its century through its moralizing emphasis, it yet would seem to stand alone in the belles-lettres of the time. Thoughts of this kind occur to Molière as little as they do to Boileau, and the one would be no less reluctant than the other to put them into words. They exceed the limits of what Boileau calls
l’agréable et le fin
; but not because they are great themes,
de grands sujets
(for according to the views of the times they were nothing of the sort) but because their concrete and serious treatment would attribute to an everyday contemporary subject greater weight than is aesthetically its due. The satirist and the moralist in general are not really excluded from treating great subjects. La Bruyère himself wrote chapters dealing with the monarch, the state, man, free thought; for this reason critics have tried to see in the above passage (
un homme né Chrétien et François
) no basic awareness of the limits
of this manner of writing but only a discreet criticism of his friend and patron Boileau, an interpretation which deserves attention and is not difficult to defend, but which I nevertheless consider one-sided. On the basis of what we know about La Bruyère’s nature and temperament, which was by no means revolutionary but at least more deeply critical and inclined to go to the root of the problems of society than was the wont of his time, I prefer to assume that he was also thinking of himself and of the general political and aesthetic situation; a situation which did permit him to treat great subjects, but only up to a point where he reaches a wall which may not be passed (
il les entame parfois et se détourne ensuite
…). He could deal with them only in elevated moralizing generalities. Treating their concrete contemporary structure with complete freedom remained inadmissible for both political and aesthetic reasons, and political reasons and aesthetic reasons are interrelated.