There is more in the muzzle than one would think. It is a safeguard against the spread of the hydrophobia of literature, so prevalent in our own times, and requiring all the bullets of cold-blooded critics to keep it in check. Evils other than the unnatural howlings and riot of modern tragedy are caused by liberty. There is an unearthing of old bones, which are scraped, polished, and displayed as the product of that modern genius the nineteenth-century dramatist, who with tragic instinct consigns the memory of their real owners to eternal death and oblivion.
The tendency of some grovelling dogs thus to become resurrectionists is too well known to require further comment at my hands. Death to those who before us said what we will to say, “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!”
Little by little the plot expanded. When the pugs had revealed all their masters’ secrets and hidden thoughts, the masters themselves appeared, and in their turn gave us the paraphrase of what had preceded, together with the culmination of their passions. If you only knew how many odious persons I beheld. Imagine two old foxes in mourning for their tails: these with a couple of superannuated wolves, recumbent, and gazing vacantly around; a pair of badly-licked dancing bears, waltzing to soft music; weasels with frayed ears and gloved hands, made up a staff of threadbare comedians, all professing their loves and passions on the stage. Yet I am told that outside the theatre door they would tear each other’s eyes out for a leg of mutton or horse’s ham. But I had for the moment forgotten that the secrets of public life should be carefully walled around, so I dutifully returned to my analysis, in, I own, a roundabout sort of way. The language was not very intelligible. It was all about the sorrows of unfortunate Queen Zemire and her lover Azor. You have no notion of the singular and unaccountable stuff crowded into this hybrid composition.
The beautiful Zemire is a Queen of Spain, descended from a noble stock, counting among her ancestors a jolly dog named Cæsar.
In the back-kitchen of the castle, and in the noble rôle of turnspit, a mangey animal, but withal a worthy fellow, named Azor, turned the queen’s spit (while Queen Zemire had turned his head). He says—
“Belle Zemire, O vous, blanche comme l’hermine,
O mon bel ange à l’œil si doux
Quand donc à fin prendrez-vous
En pitié mon amour, au fond de la cuisine,” &c. &c.
These verses, improvised by the pale light of the lamp, were found admirable. The friends of the poet exclaimed, “Ah! sublime! They are perfumed with the profoundest sentiment!” In vain the linguists—curs, griffins, and boars—sought to criticise. “Why,” said they, “should kitchen and cookery in a high-class composition be mixed up with flowers and sentiment? What was there in a turnspit and its associations—the devouring appetite of the queen, &c.—to fan the flame of passion?” These expressions, let fall at random, nearly cost them their seats.