Modern times have abounded with what may be called fashionable literature. Tragedies were some years ago as fashionable as comedies are at this day;[[29]] Thomson, Mallet, Francis, Hill, applied their genius to a department in which they lost it all. Declamation and rant, and over-refined language, were preferred to the fable, the manners, and to nature—and these now sleep on our shelves! Then too we had a family of paupers in the parish of poetry, in "Imitations of Spenser." Not many years ago, Churchill was the occasion of deluging the town with political poems in quarto.—These again were succeeded by narrative poems, in the ballad measure, from all sizes of poets.—The Castle of Otranto was the father of that marvellous, which once over-stocked the circulating library and closed with Mrs. Radcliffe.—Lord Byron has been the father of hundreds of graceless sons!—Travels and voyages have long been a class of literature so fashionable, that we begin to prepare for, or to dread, the arrival of certain persons from the Continent!
Different times, then, are regulated by different tastes. What makes a strong impression on the public at one time, ceases to interest it at another; an author who sacrifices to the prevailing humours of his day has but little chance of being esteemed by posterity; and every age of modern literature might, perhaps, admit of a new classification, by dividing it into its periods of fashionable literature.
THE PANTOMIMICAL CHARACTERS.
Il est des gens de qui l'esprit guindé
Sous un front jamais déridé
Ne souffre, n'approuve, et n'estime
Que le pompeux, et le sublime;
Pour moi j'ose poser en fait
Qu'en de certains momens l'esprit le plus parfait
Peut aimer sans rougir jusqu'aux marionettes;
Et qu'il est des tems et des lieux,
Où le grave, et le sérieux,
Ne valent pas d'agréables sornettes.
Peau d'Ane.
People there are who never smile;
Their foreheads still unsmooth'd the while,
Some lambent flame of mirth will play,
That wins the easy heart away;
Such only choose in prose or rhyme
A bristling pomp,—they call sublime!
I blush not to like Harlequin,
Would he but talk,—and all his kin.
Yes, there are times, and there are places,
When flams and old wives' tales are worth the Graces.
Cervantes, in the person of his hero, has confessed the delight he received from amusements which disturb the gravity of some, who are apt, however, to be more entertained by them than they choose to acknowledge. Don Quixote thus dismisses a troop of merry strollers—"Andad con Dios, buena gente, y hazad vuestra fiesta, porque desde muchacho fui aficionado a la Carátula, y en mi mocedad se ne ivan los ojos tras la Farándula." In a literal version the passage may run thus:—"Go, good people, God be with you, and keep your merry making! for from childhood I was in love with the Carátula, and in my youth my eyes would lose themselves amidst the Farándula." According to Pineda, La Carátula is an actor masked, and La Farándula is a kind of farce.[[30]]
Even the studious Bayle, wrapping himself in his cloak, and hurrying to the market-place to Punchinello, would laugh when the fellow had humour in him, as was usually the case; and I believe the pleasure some still find in pantomimes, to the annoyance of their gravity, is a very natural one, and only wants a little more understanding in the actors and the spectators.[[31]]
The truth is, that here our Harlequin and all his lifeless family are condemned to perpetual silence. They came to us from the genial hilarity of the Italian theatre, and were all the grotesque children of wit, and whim, and satire. Why is this burlesque race here privileged to cost so much, to do so little, and to repeat that little so often? Our own pantomime may, indeed, boast of two inventions of its own growth: we have turned Harlequin into a magician, and this produces the surprise of sudden changes of scenery, whose splendour and curious correctness have rarely been equalled: while in the metamorphosis of the scene, a certain sort of wit to the eye, "mechanic wit," as it has been termed, has originated; as when a surgeon's shop is turned into a laundry, with the inscription "Mangling done here;" or counsellors at the bar changed into fish-women.