Tulit, quos Harpagones vocare soleo.”
I do not know where Moliere received the hint of the denouement of his piece. The conclusion of the Aulularia, as already mentioned, is not extant, but it could not have been so improbable and inartificial as the discovery of Valere and Marianne for the children of Thomas D’Alburci, who, under the name of Anselme, had courted the miser’s daughter.
Shadwell, Fielding, and Goldoni, enjoyed the advantage of studying Moliere’s Harpagon for their delineations of Goldingham, Lovegold, and Ottavio. In the miser of Shadwell there is much indecency indeed of his own invention, and some disgusting representations of city vulgarity and vice; but still he is hardly entitled to the praise of so much originality as he claims in his impudent preface.—“The foundation of this play,” says he, “I took from one of Moliere’s, called L’Avare, but that having too few persons, and too little action for an English theatre, I added to both so much, that I may call more than half of this play my own; and I think I may say, without vanity, that Moliere’s part of it has not suffered in my hands. Nor did I ever know a French comedy made use of by the worst of our poets that was not bettered by them. It is not barrenness of art or invention makes us borrow from the French, but laziness; and this was the occasion of my making use of L’Avare.”
Fielding’s Miser, the only one of his comedies which does him credit, is a much more agreeable play than Shadwell’s. The earlier scenes are a close imitation of Moliere, but the concluding ones are somewhat different, and the denouement is perhaps improved. Mariana is in a great measure a new character, and those of the servants are rendered more prominent and important than in the French original.
The miser Ottavio, in Goldoni’s Vero Amico, is entirely copied from Plautus and Moliere. In the Italian play, however, the character is in a great measure episodical, and the principal plot, which gives its title to the piece, and corresponds with that of Diderot’s Fils Naturel, has been invented by the Italian dramatist.
On the whole, Moliere has succeeded best in rendering the passion of avarice hateful: Plautus and Goldoni have only made it ridiculous. The profound and poetical avarice of Jaques possesses something plaintive in its tone, which almost excites our sympathy, and never our laughter; he is represented as a worshipper of gold, somewhat as an old Persian might be of the sun, and he does not raise our contempt by the absurdities of domestic economy. But Harpagon is thoroughly detestable, and is in fact detested by his neighbours, domestics, and children. All these dramatists are accused of having exhibited rather an allegorical representation of avarice, than the living likeness of a human Being influenced by that odious propensity. “Plautus,” says Hurd, “and also Moliere, offended in this, that for the picture of the avaricious man they presented us with a fantastic unpleasing draught of the passion of avarice—I call it a fantastic draught, because it hath no archetype in nature, and it is farther an unpleasing one; from being the delineation of a simple passion, unmixed, it wants
‘The lights and shades, whose well accorded strife
Gives all the strength and colour of our life.’”
This may in general be true, as there are certainly few unmingled passions; but I suspect that avarice so completely engrosses the soul, that a simple and unmixed delineation of it is not remote from nature. “The Euclio of Plautus,” says King, in his Anecdotes, “the Avare of Moliere, and Miser of Shadwell, have been all exceeded by persons who have existed within my own knowledge[236].”
Bacchides:—is so called from two sisters of the name of Bacchis, who are the courtezans in this play. In a prologue, which is supposed to be spoken by Silenus, mounted on an ass, it is said to be taken from a Greek comedy by Philemon. This information, however, cannot be implicitly relied on, as the prologue was not written in the time of Plautus, and is [pg 117]evidently an addition of a comparatively recent date. Some indeed have supposed that it was prefixed by Petrarch; but at all events the following lines could not have been anterior to the conquest of Greece by the Romans:—