Classic French Course in English Part 10

ARM. In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.

BeL. One promenades through them with rapture.

PHIL. One treads on fine things only.

ARM. They are little lanes all strewn with roses.

TRISS. Then, the sonnet seems to you--

PHIL. Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more beautiful.

BeL. (_to_ HENRIETTE). What! my niece, you listen to what has been read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!

HEN. We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a wit does not depend on our will.

TRISS. My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.

HEN. No. I do not listen.

PHIL. Ah! Let us hear the epigram.

But our readers, we think, will consent to spare the epigram. They will relish, however, a fragment taken from a subsequent part of the same protracted scene. The conversation has made the transition from literary criticism to philosophy, in Moliere's time a fashionable study rendered such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents the limitations imposed upon her s.e.x:--

ARM. It is insulting our s.e.x too grossly to limit our intelligence to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of the beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.

BeL. We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely proclaim our emanc.i.p.ation.

TRISS. Every one knows my respect for the fairer s.e.x, and that, if I render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the splendor of their intellect.

PHIL. And our s.e.x does you justice in this respect: but we will show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women also have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned meetings--regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite what elsewhere is kept apart, join n.o.ble language to deep learning, reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all questions proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.

TRISS. For order, I prefer peripateticism.

PHIL. For abstractions, I love platonism.

ARM. Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.

BeL. I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.

TRISS. I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.

ARM. I like his vortices.

PHIL. And I, his falling worlds.

ARM. I long to see our a.s.sembly opened, and to distinguish ourselves by some great discovery.

TRISS. Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature has hidden few things from you.

PHIL. For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.

BeL. I have not, I believe, as yet quite distinguished men, but I have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.

ARM. In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar, history, verse, ethics, and politics.

PHIL. I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was formerly the admiration of great geniuses: but I give the preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their founder.

"Les Precieuses Ridicules" is an earlier and lighter treatment of the same theme. The object of ridicule in both these pieces was a lapsed and degenerate form of what originally was a thing worthy of respect, and even of praise. At the Hotel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the standards which the ladies of that circle enforced. Their mutual communication was all conducted in a peculiar style of language, the natural deterioration of which was into a kind of euphuism, such as English readers will remember to have seen exemplified in Walter Scott's Sir Piercie Shafton. These ladies called each other, with demonstrative fondness, "Ma precieuse." Hence at last the term _precieuse_ as a designation of ridicule. Madame de Sevigne was a _precieuse_. But she, with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a _precieuse ridicule_. Moliere himself, thrifty master of policy that he was, took pains to explain that he did not satirize the real thing, but only the affectation.

"Tartuffe, or the Impostor," is perhaps the most celebrated of all Moliere's plays. Scarcely comedy, scarcely tragedy, it partakes of both characters. Like tragedy, serious in purpose, it has a happy ending like comedy. Pity and terror are absent; or, if not quite absent, these sentiments are present raised only to a pitch distinctly below the tragic. Indignation is the chief pa.s.sion excited, or detestation, perhaps, rather than indignation. This feeling is provided at last with its full satisfaction in the condign punishment visited on the impostor.

The original "Tartuffe," like the most of Moliere's comedies, is written in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading student of Moliere sufficiently feel how much is lost when the form is lost which the creations of this great genius took, in their native French, under his own master hand. A satisfactory metrical rendering is out of the question. The sense, at least, if not the incommunicable spirit, of the original is very well given in Mr. C. H. Wall's version, which we use.

The story of "Tartuffe" is briefly this: Tartuffe, the hero, is a pure villain. He mixes no adulteration of good in his composition. He is hypocrisy itself, the strictly genuine article. Tartuffe has completely imposed upon one Orgon, a man of wealth and standing. Orgon, with his wife, and with his mother, in fact, believes in him absolutely. These people have received the canting rascal into their house, and are about to bestow upon him their daughter in marriage. The following scene from act first shows the skill with which Moliere could exhibit, in a few strokes of bold exaggeration, the infatuation of Orgon's regard for Tartuffe. Orgon has been absent from home. He returns, and meets Cleante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not answering a question just addressed to him:--

ORGON (_to_ CLeANTE). Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly allow me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (_To_ DORINE, _a maid-servant_.) Has every thing gone on well these last two days? What has happened? How is everybody?

DOR. The day before yesterday our mistress was very feverish from morning to night, and suffered from a most extraordinary headache.

ORG. And Tartuffe?

DOR. Tartuffe! He is wonderfully well, stout and fat, with blooming cheeks and ruddy lips.

ORG. Poor man!

DOR. In the evening she felt very faint, and the pain in her head was so great that she could not touch any thing at supper.

ORG. And Tartuffe?

DOR. He ate his supper by himself before her, and very devoutly devoured a brace of partridges, and half a leg of mutton hashed.

ORG. Poor man!

DOR. She spent the whole of the night without getting one wink of sleep: she was very feverish, and we had to sit up with her until the morning.

ORG. And Tartuffe?

DOR. Overcome by a pleasant sleepiness, he pa.s.sed from the table to his room, and got at once into his warmed bed, where he slept comfortably till the next morning.

ORG. Poor man!

DOR. At last yielding to our persuasions, she consented to be bled, and immediately felt relieved.

ORG. And Tartuffe?

DOR. He took heart right valiantly, and fortifying his soul against all evils, to make up for the blood which our lady had lost, drank at breakfast four large b.u.mpers of wine.

ORG. Poor man!