“You,” he says to the justice of the peace, “pay attention to your tribunal! Your boy brings his geese into your great hall, and they come quacking between the legs of the plaintiffs.... And your audience-chamber looks like—the Devil knows what! a horsewhip in the midst of briefs! and the assessor, who always exhales an odor as though he had just come out of a distillery!” But the most serious part of the matter is the rumors of corruption. “A trifle,” replies the justice: “a few grey-hounds as presents.” And he immediately returns allusion for allusion: “Ah! I did not say that if some one had presented me with a five-hundred-ruble shuba, and a shawl for my wife”—The mayor interrupts warmly, with that tone of hypocrisy so common to the Russian tchinovnik, “That’s all right! Do you know why you take presents of dogs? It’s because you don’t believe in God. You never go to church. I at least have some religion: Fridays I go to mass. But you—Ah! I know you well. When you begin to descant on the way the world was made, your hair stands up on your head.
“And you,” he says to the principal of the college,—“you watch over your professors. Their actions are suspicious; there is one who so far forgets himself in his chair as to put his fingers behind his cravat, and to scratch his chin: it is not necessary to teach the young habits of independence.” The postmaster remains. The mayor urges him to open a few letters, so as to assure himself that there are no denunciations. “You need not teach me my trade,” replies the postmaster: “I have nothing else to do.” In fact, it is his daily amusement: he could not do without this reading. Some letters are as well composed as the Moscow journals. He has at this very moment in his pocket a young lieutenant’s letter,—reminiscences of a ball, an elegant description. The mayor begs him to hold back every petition of complaint. “There’s nothing to fear any other way. It would be a different thing if this were generally the custom; but it’s just a little family affair, the way we do it.”
Two loungers of the place,[17] two self-important bustlers, in their eager rivalry of tittle-tattle and gossip, run up all out of breath, and, after a great deal of desultory talk, are delivered of the great news. He has come, the government tchinovnik, the revizor; he saw them eating salmon at the hotel; he cast a terrible look at their plates. “Akh! God in heaven,” cries the mayor; “have pity upon us, miserable offenders!”
And here follows a general confession, a recapitulation of the most recent sins of moment: an under-officer’s wife whipped, prisoners deprived of their rations, wine-shops established in open defiance of the law, the streets not swept. “How old is he? He’s a young man; then there’s more hope than with an old devil. Quick! orders, measures; and let us get ahead of him. My hat! my sword! but the sword is ruined.
“That cursed hatter! He sees that the mayor has an old sword, and does not send him a new one. What a pack of villains! Akh! my fine fellows! I am perfectly sure they have their complaints all ready, and that they will rise up right out of the cobble-stones. Let everybody take hold of the street. The Devil take the street! Fetch me a broom, I say, and have the street cleaned in front of the hotel; and let it be well done.—Listen! Take care there, you! I know you well. You put on a saintly look, and yet you hide the silver spoons in your boots. You look out! Don’t you dare to stir me up! What kind of a job did you concoct at the tailor’s? He gave you two arshins of cloth to make you a uniform, and you gobbled up the whole piece. Attention! You steal too much for your rank.”
That phrase has taken its place among the popular proverbs in Russia, and our Molière has not many more pointed. Exactly as in Molière, the situation is spun out and renewed with a liveliness which suffers no loss of force. On the mayor’s lips, command follows command; ideas crowd upon one another; words get tripped up; exclamations of fury, of terror, fly out; the note of hypocrisy mingles with his main characteristic, the violence of which forces its way to the surface under false appearances. And this inward trouble is rendered visible, as it were, by stage tricks, not free from vulgarity, but extremely amusing. “You have the hat-box in your hand: here is your hat.” All this forms a rude, rough, but new and irresistible element of comedy.
The personage who thus sets a whole city by the ears is a poor devil, himself in a peck of trouble. Kléstakof has left Petersburg, where he is a small official, in order to spend his vacation in the province. On the way he has gambled, has emptied his pockets, and he is waiting for his father to send him a fresh supply of funds to pay travelling expenses and the landlord’s bill. We learn all these details from his valet Osip. He it is who, in his description of the situation, gives us the key to his master’s character. “One day he lives like a lord, the next he perishes with starvation. But we must have carriages. Every day he sends me to get theatre-tickets. This lasts a week, and then he tells me to bring him his new suit of clothes from the nail. A suit costs him a hundred and fifty rubles. He spends twenty rubles for a waistcoat. I won’t answer for the trousers: it’s impossible to tell what that amounts to. And the wherefore of all this? the wherefore? I will tell you. He does not attend to his business; he goes for a walk on the Preshpektive (the Nevsky Prospekt). He plays his game. Akh! if the old gentleman knew all this business, he would not bother his head whether his son held a place in government: he would take off his shirt, and give him such a drubbing as would warm him up for a week.”
In this comedy of “The Revizor,” the valet Osip fills a comic rôle quite like that of the fool in Shakspeare, or the gracioso in the Spanish comedy. The Russian buffoon, however, is a clown rather than a joker. He does not enliven the scene with jests: he makes the spectator split his sides by his artless blunders. This smacks of farce, and may seem overdone. But exaggeration in this way is not in the power of every one. It is the splendid fault of Aristophanes, and even of Molière. Let us remember what Fénelon, La Bruyère, and Rousseau said of it. And after all, in spite of the famous definition, is it not the greatest triumph of the comic poet to make the fastidious laugh, and especially smile? An excellent actor of our own time defined the great comedian as one who has only to show his grimace at the opening of a door, to make the whole public shout with laughter. Are not the author and the actor of genius told by the same characteristic? Have not both of them the secret of this grimace?
To return to the analysis of the piece: Kléstakof scolds his valet because he no longer dares to report the traveller’s complaints at the office. The landlord treats this stranger as a man who does not pay his bills. After many negotiations he permits him to have some dish-water as apology for soup, and some burned sole-leather in place of the roast. Amid the vociferations wrung from him by such an outrage, Kléstakof beholds Osip returning to announce a call from the mayor. He imagines that the official has come in order to put him in arrest, with which he was threatened only a few moments since; and he endeavors immediately to exonerate himself in the mayor’s eyes. His explanations, enigmatical for the still more anxious visitor, clear only for the reader or the audience, have no other effect than to increase the terror of the high functionary, who thinks that he is in the presence of a crafty inspector-general. In the incoherent remarks, full of ingenuous confessions, which the little tchinovnik makes to him, the mayor hears only certain portentous words,—the prison, the minister. He is only half re-assured when the conversation offers him a chance to proffer some money and insist on its acceptance.
Kléstakof finally blurts out how matters really stand. “I am here, and I have not a kopek.” The mayor sees in this avowal only a further illustration of cunning. He immediately offers his services. The stranger borrows two hundred rubles of him. “Take it,” he says eagerly; “don’t trouble to count it, it isn’t worth while:” and instead of two hundred rubles, he slips four hundred into his hand. And now behold our two sharpers delighted to find themselves so easily in agreement. Kléstakof suspects that there is some misunderstanding, but he takes pains not to say a word which may bring about an explanation. The mayor thinks that he can detect, under Kléstakof’s ambiguous actions, an immensely profound plan. “He wants his incognito respected. Two can play that game. Let us make believe not know who he is.” While the traveller’s baggage is transported to a place more worthy of him,—that is, to the mayor’s own dwelling,—they drive off in a drozhsky to visit the college and the hospital. They hastily turn their backs on the prison, which offers not the slightest attraction for Kléstakof. “What’s the good of seeing the prison? It would be much better to give our attention to institutions of beneficence!”