The balance is really adjusted in quite another way. Two new characters are brought in, one of whom, Marceline, a vieille fille, designs to marry Figaro, but presently finds out that she is his long-lost mother! The other is Chérubin, who saves the play, to my thinking, just as surely as Polly Peachum saves The Beggar’s Opera. Chérubin—“création exquise et enchanteresse,” says Sainte-Beuve—is the making of the Mariage, partly because he keys it down to its proper pitch, which is that of children playing grown-ups, and partly because he is truly observed and poetically presented. I don’t see how the adage, “Si jeunesse savait,” could be more tenderly exploited. All his scenes are good—the first with Suzanne, in which the young scamp, after betraying his occupation with three love affairs at once, snatches his mistress’s hair-ribbon and dodges behind tables and chairs while the maid pursues him; the second, with the Countess, where she is dressing him as a girl, and discovers her ribbon staunching a cut in his arm: in each of these scenes the delicious distress of his complaint is painted with a subtlety and sensibility combined which are first-rate art. Delicate provocation can go no further, or had better not. Beaumarchais’ triumph is that he knows that, and does not add a touch in excess. The final touch is that the Countess, instead of feigning a desire for the restoration of the ribbon (which she did very badly), now really does desire, and obtains it. Enough said: there is no more. “Tu sais trop bien, méchante, que je n’ose pas oser,” says the youth to Suzanne. That is his trouble, and a real one it is.
The imbroglio in this play is a thing of nightmare. “Que diable est-ce qu’on trompe ici?” The answer is the audience. Everybody deceives everybody, twice over and all the time. It surprises, if you like, by “a fine excess.” It is not surprising, anyhow, that the last act was too much for Sainte-Beuve, has been too much for Mr. Rivers, and is too much for me. I do not, simply, know what is happening, but I do know that none of it is very funny. Compare it with Sganarelle, and you will see. In that little masterpiece you have four characters: Lélie and Clélie, the lovers, Sganarelle the jealous husband, and Sganarelle’s wife. Clélie lets drop Lélie’s portrait in the street, Sganarelle’s wife picks it up, and is caught by Sganarelle admiring it. Presently, when Clélie faints, and is picked up by Sganarelle, it is his wife’s turn to be jealous. Then Lélie, overcome by his feelings, is pitied by Madame Sganarelle and helped into her house. The fat is in the fire. Madame Sganarelle flies at Clélie for carrying on with her husband; Lélie believes that Sganarelle has married Clélie. Sganarelle pursues Lélie with a sword, and when he is confronted, pretends that he brought it out because the weather looked threatening. It is a complete cat’s cradle of a play, and as easily untied. The action is swift, the intrigue is easy to follow, the appositions are really comic. But who believes that Almaviva seriously wants Suzanne, or that Figaro has really promised Marceline, or that the Countess really loves Chérubin? The lack of plausibility causes the Mariage to turn unwillingly, like a mangle. It took four hours and a half to play: I can hardly believe that Figaro’s inordinate soliloquy in the last act survived the first night. Figaro himself is overweight; Marceline is a very bad shot. She has at first a good Polly-and-Lucy slanging match with Suzanne; but in the discovery scene she grows serious—very serious, and rightly serious, no doubt, in any other play but this. But to suspend all the gallantries in progress for the sake of her diatribes upon gallantry, to shake the head over them, to say “True,” and “Too true”—and then immediately to resume gallantries, has the effect of exhibiting neither gallantry nor the reprobation of it as serious; and as something in a play must be taken seriously, the Comédie Française, rightly deciding in favour of gallantry, cut out the whole scene; and it is so marked in my edition of Beaumarchais. It would have been a pleasant toil for Edward FitzGerald, who loved such work, to hew and shape this comedy. It has fine moments, but wants both the speed and the gaiety of the Barbier. Mozart gave it them—we owe to Beaumarchais the most delightful opera in the world.
Mr. Rivers translates the two plays freely, but I don’t think very successfully. I have said already that Beaumarchais is not a good writer—too diffuse at one time, too terse at others—but no doubt he is very difficult. Literal translation is useless. “Miss” is not a translation of “Mademoiselle.” “Mistress,” or “Young Lady” would be better—and so on. You cannot get the points sharply enough unless you translate ideas as well as idiom; and to do that you must take a wide cast. Rhetoric is rhetoric in whatever language you cast it. It has its own rules. Dialogue is another matter. There come in the familiarities, secrets of the toilette, secrets of the bower. How are these things to be done? I don’t know; but if Andrew Lang could not be natural with the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, it is no shame to Mr. Rivers to have failed with Beaumarchais.
If he desired to try his hand I wonder why he omitted one of his liveliest and wittiest sallies—the letter which he addressed to The Morning Chronicle in 1776, on one of his confidential visits to London. It is too long to give entire, but I must have a shot at pieces of it:
“Mr. Editor,” he says, “I am a stranger, a Frenchman and the soul of honour. If this will not completely inform you who I am, it will at least tell you, in more senses than one, who I am not; and in times likes these, that is not without its importance in London.
“The day before yesterday at the Pantheon, after the concert and during the dancing which ensued, I found at my feet a lady’s cloak of black taffetas, turned back with the same and edged with lace. I do not know to whom it belongs; I have never seen, even at the Pantheon, the person who wore it; all my inquiries since the discovery have taught me nothing about her. I beg of you then, Mr. Editor, to announce in your journal the discovery of the cloak, in order that I may punctually return it to her who may lay claim to it.
“That there may be no possible mistake in the matter, I have the honour to give you notice that the loser, upon the day in question, had a head-dress of rose-coloured feathers. She had, I believe, diamond ear-rings; but of that I am not so positive as of the remainder of my description. She is tall and of elegant appearance; her hair is a flaxen blonde, her skin dazzlingly white. She has a fine and graceful neck, a striking shape, and the prettiest foot in the world. I observe that she is very young, very lively and inattentive, that she carries herself easily, and has a marked taste for dancing.”
He then proceeds to deduce all these charming properties from the taffetas cloak—some from a single hair which he finds in the hood, some from minute particles of fluff and fur; others, more carefully, from measurements; others, again, from the position in which the cloak was lying—all of which led him to conclude infallibly that “the young lady was the most alert beauty of England, Scotland and Ireland, and if I do not add, of America, it is because of late they have become uncommonly alert in that particular country.” Sherlock Holmes!
“If I had pushed my inquiries,” he concludes, “it is possible that I might have learned from her cloak what was her quality and rank. But when one has concluded that a woman is young and handsome, has one not in fact learned all that one needs to learn? That at any rate was the opinion held in my time in many good towns in France, and even in certain villages, such as Marly, Versailles, etc.
“Do not then be surprised, Mr. Editor, if a Frenchman who all his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces, the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as light as Atalanta’s own.”
He has done it with the unfailing humour and neatness which carried him in and out of the lawcourts, took him to prison and enlarged him again. And he was then only forty-four, and had another twenty years before him. Impudence and good humour. The first was his shield and buckler—triple brass. The other enabled him to support it in all companies without offence. When at long last his suit with La Blache was ended, and in his favour, the Comte not only restored the estate without a murmur, but gave him a fine portrait of the testator. Beaumarchais may have been a bad lot; but he was evidently a good sort.