Mimesis (64 page)

With Molière contemporary political allusions are extremely rare, and when they do occur they are intimated as discreetly as an impropriety, as something to be mentioned with caution or, better, paraphrased. In
Tartuffe
Orgon had apparently sided with the court during the insurrection of the Fronde:

Nos troubles l’avaient mis sur le pied d’homme sage,
Et pour servir son prince, il montra du courage … (1, 2).

(Our troubles brought him out in the character of a sensible man, and, to serve his prince, he showed courage …)

It is no less discreetly intimated that he nevertheless received and concealed the personal documents of an acquaintance who had been compromised and was forced to flee. An equally discreet treatment is given to everything to do with professional and economic matters. We observed before that in Molière (as everywhere else in the literature of the time) not only peasants and other characters from the lowest classes but also merchants, lawyers, physicians, and apothecaries appear exclusively as comic adjuncts. This is connected with the fact that the social ideal of the time required the most general development and attitude possible from the
honnête homme
. The trend was away from any kind of specialization, even that of the poet or the scholar. Anyone who wanted to be socially unexceptionable must not allow the economic basis of his life to be conspicuous, nor his professional specialty if he had one. Failing that, he was considered pedantic, extravagant, and ridiculous. Only such abilities could be shown as might also
pass as an elegant dilettantism and which contributed to easy and pleasant social intercourse. As a result—if we may interpolate this observation here—even difficult and important things were sometimes rendered in an exemplarily simple, elegant, and unpedantic way, and French, as we know, developed a linguistic expression of incomparable clarity and general validity. But professional specialization thus came to be socially and aesthetically impossible; only in the category of the grotesque could it appear as the subject of literary imitation. In this the tradition of the farce certainly played a part, but this is still not enough to explain why the grotesque conception of the professional man was maintained so generally and consistently in the new genre of the elegant social comedy in the intermediate style.

Let us try the opposite tack. Not a few of Molière’s comedies have an upper bourgeois setting, for example
l’Avare, le Bourgeois gentilhomme, les Femmes savantes, le Malade imaginaire
. The people in all these households are well-to-do, but no one ever mentions any sort of professional work or productive economic activity. We are not even told how Harpagon, the miser, came by his money (perhaps he inherited it); and the only business transaction mentioned, the usurious loan, is grotesque, timelessly generalized, and furthermore not productive but the investment of a
rentier
. Of none of these middle-class people do we learn what they do for a living; apparently they are all
rentiers
. In only one instance is the origin of a man’s fortune referred to: in
le Bourgeois gentilhomme
, where Mme Jourdain reminds her husband:
Descendons-nous tous deux que de bonne bourgeoisie? … Et votre père n’était-il pas marchand aussi bien que le mien? …
And with reference to her daughter she says:
… ses deux grands-pères vendaient du drap auprès de la porte Saint-Innocent
. But these bits of information only serve to bring out her husband’s grotesque foolishness more strongly. M. Jourdain is an uneducated parvenu who fails to understand the social ideal of his age and attempts to engineer his social rise by unsuitable means. Instead of trying to become an educated
honnête homme
of the upper bourgeoisie, he commits the gravest social error that could be committed at the time: he pretends to be what he is not, a nobleman,
un gentilhomme
. This comes out very clearly when we think of his intended son-in-law, Cléonte, whom Molière contrasts with M. Jourdain as the model of an
honnête homme
of bourgeois background. When Cléonte asks to marry Jourdain’s daughter, Jourdain asks him if he is a
gentilhomme
, and gets the following reply:

Monsieur, la plupart des gens, sur cette question, n’hésitent pas beaucoup; on tranche le mot aisément. Ce nom ne fait aucun scrupule à prendre, et l’usage aujourd’hui semble en autoriser le vol. Pour moi, je vous l’avoue, j’ai les sentiments, sur cette matière, un peu plus délicats. Je trouve que toute imposture est indigne d’un honnête homme, et qu’il y a de la lâcheté à déguiser ce que le ciel nous a fait naître, à se parer au monde d’un titre dérobé, à se vouloir donner pour ce qu’on n’est pas. Je suis né de parents, sans doute, qui ont tenu des charges honorables; je me suis acquis, dans les armes, l’honneur de six ans de service, et je me trouve assez de bien pour tenir dans le monde un rang assez passable; mais, avec tout cela, je ne veux point me donner un nom où d’autres, en ma place, croiraient pouvoir prétendre; et je vous dirai franchement que je ne suis point gentilhomme.

(Sir, on this subject most people show little hesitation; they do not boggle over the word. Taking the name causes no qualms, and custom today seems to authorize the theft of it. For my part, I will admit to you, my feelings in the matter are a little more scrupulous. I consider that any imposture is unworthy of an honorable man, and that there is cowardice in concealing what Heaven made us by our birth, in parading a filched title before society, in trying to make oneself out to be what one is not. I was born, certainly, of a family which has held honorable offices; I gained, in the army, the honor of six years of service, and I have fortune enough to hold a rather passable rank in society; but, with all that, I do not wish to give myself a designation to which others, in my place, would think they could lay claim; and I shall tell you frankly that I am not of gentle birth.)

Such, then, is the picture of a class-conscious young bourgeois, an
honnête homme
, who knows his place in society. The desire to push themselves into the nobility which afflicts parvenus like M. Jourdain (parvenus whose wealth goes back only two generations and whose fathers were still cloth-mongers) is something which Cléonte is as far from feeling as he is from condoning. But he is equally far from the people and a concrete profession. Not a word to tell us that his family’s name is respected in the silk industry or among wine merchants, for example. Rather
ils ont tenu des charges honorables
, which means that they bought themselves offices through which they rose to membership
in the intermediate estate of the robe. He himself was an army officer for six years and is wealthy enough
pour tenir dans le monde un rang assez passable
. There is no economic-mindedness, no idea of a productive bourgeoisie, in this young man. On the contrary, he turns away from such things. To him his bourgeoisie is simply
un rang qu’on tient dans le monde
, just as his nobility is to a young nobleman. Like his ancestors and relatives he will buy or inherit a
charge honorable
. (These last observations are taken almost verbatim from my earlier essay,
La cour et la ville
, last published in my
Vier Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der französischen Bildung
, Bern, 1951, pp. 46-48. I shall make further use of it elsewhere in this chapter.)

As we have seen, Molière does not hesitate to employ farcical elements in his comedies of society, but he consistently avoids any realistic concretizing, or even any penetrating criticism, of the political and economic aspects of the milieu in which his characters move. He is far more inclined to admit the grotesque into the intermediate level of style than the serious and basic reality of economic and political life. His realism, insofar as it has a serious and problematic side, is limited to the psychological and moral realm. To see this with the greatest clarity one should call to mind the description of the accumulation of Grandet’s fortune which Honoré de Balzac gives at the beginning of his novel
Eugénie Grandet
, a description into which all of French history from 1789 to the Restoration is interwoven, and compare it with the absolute generality and ahistoricity of Harpagon’s economic situation. Nor should it be objected that Molière had no room within the limits of a comedy for a description like Balzac’s. Even on the stage it would have been possible to show, instead of Harpagon, a contemporary merchant or revenue farmer conducting his business. But this sort of thing does not appear until after the classical period, in Dancourt for instance or in Lesage, and even then without serious problems rooted in contemporary economy.

The observations on the limitations of realism which we have presented so far are entirely concerned with the intermediate style of comedy and satire. The limitations are much stricter in the realm of the elevated style, in tragedy. In that realm the separation of the tragic from the occurrences of everyday and human-creatural life was carried out in such a radical way as never before, not even during the period whose style served as the model, that is, Greco-Roman antiquity. At least Corneille was at times still aware of how much further the taste of his time went in this direction than the antique tradition demanded.
Neither the everyday aspects of its actions nor the creatural characteristics of its personages are allowed to appear on the French tragic stage. A type of tragic personage unknown to antiquity develops. To convey a concrete understanding of this type, I shall assemble a few characteristic stylistic effects. They are taken from Racine’s tragedies
Bérénice
and
Esther
. But similar ones are to be found all through the tragic drama of the time, though not in so perfected a form as in Racine.

At the beginning of
Bérénice
we are taken to a room in the Emperor’s palace:

(The pomp of these chambers, I well see, Arsaces, is new to your eyes. This sumptuous and solitary room is often the repository of Titus’s secrets. It is here that he sometimes hides from his court. …)

In keeping with this is the Emperor’s manner of expressing himself when he wants to be alone:
Paulin, qu’on vous laisse avec moi
(2, 1); or
Que l’on me laisse
(4, 3); or when he wishes to speak to someone:

Titus
A-t-on vu de ma part le roi de Comagène?

Sait-il que je l’attends?

Paulin
…

De vos ordres, seigneur, j’ai dit qu’on l’avertisse.

Titus
Il suffit … (2, 1).

(
Titus
: Has the King of Commagene been given my message? Does he know that I am awaiting him:
Paulinus
: … I said that he was to be informed of your orders.
Titus
: Enough.)

When Titus charges King Antiochus to accompany Queen Bérénice on her journey, we get this:

(You, whom friendship alone binds to her steps, Prince, forsake her not in her unhappiness: let the East see you arrive in her train; let it be a triumph, not a flight; let so fair a friendship have eternal bonds; let my name ever be in your conversations. To make your States closer to one another, the Euphrates shall bound her empire and yours. I know that the Senate, full of your name, will confirm this gift with a common voice. I join Cilicia to your Commagene. …)

From Antiochus’ words I quote:

(Here Titus overwhelms me with the weight of his greatness: everything vanishes in Rome beside his splendor: but, though the East is full of his memory, there Berenice will see traces of my glory.)

The representation of the king in the prologue to
Esther
is too long to be quoted here, and the description of the search for a queen and the king’s choice, which Esther gives in the first scene, can only be illustrated by a few samples:

(From India to the Hellespont his slaves ran: the daughters of Egypt, summoned, appeared at Susa; even those of Parthia and unconquered Scythia intrigued there for the scepter offered to beauty.)

And later:

(For long he observed me in a somber silence; and Heaven, which caused the scale to tip for me, no doubt during that time acted upon his heart. At last, with eyes in which gentleness reigned, “Be queen,” he said. …)

What Racine made of the scene where Esther appears unsummoned before the King is remembered by every reader: