Nero's sagum, with its splendid flower-work after the antique, his hat of tyrannical fashion, his battle-axe, the eagles embroidered on the drapery which covered his tribunal, the laurel crowns which begirt the brows of his Moorish guards, the cornucopiae, the vases of gold and silver which they carried, all indicate a tendency toward historical costume. This is also seen in the robes of the seventy-two disciples approaching the ancient manner—the caps of the high priests, Josephus and Abiachar, made according to the Jewish manner—the dagger of Polemius, king of Armenia, the golden handle of which was prepared after the antique—the robe, fashioned after the Hebrew manner, which was worn by the young Jew whom we saw singing at the marriage of Pelagia and Denis. But apart from these examples and some others which are found here and there in the pompous catalogue of the actors of Bruges, everybody used great liberty and much fancifulness in the choice of habiliments. Each person took the most beautiful things he could lay hands on. The cortege of Nero closed, as we have seen, by cavaliers dressed after their own pleasure. The marechal of Migdeus, king of Greater Ynde, and his valet, had taffeta clothes while bearing on their shoulders bars of iron and mallets. The lord of Quantilly, author of the relation from which we have derived our details, after having spoken of a group of eighteen or twenty persons blind, halt, demoniac, lepers and vagabonds, confesses that they were too well clad to accord with their condition.
Thus far we have concerned ourselves with the history of the mysteries and their representation; we shall now proceed to a critical retrospect of the subject.
The trilogy of the "Mystery of the Passion" and the "Triumphant Mystery of the Acts of the Apostles," deserve an important place in the history of French dramatic art, not only because they characterize the epoch of which they were the two chief works, but also because they have an intimate and an essential connection with the tragic masterpieces of the eighteenth century—a connection also which has been little noticed. We propose to consider the literary value and the influence of those two plays, commencing with an estimate of the mise en scène and the spectacle whose fairy-like pomp and immense popularity we have just taken in view.
The dramatic writers and the managers of the "mysteries" were well aware that to move the multitude the eye is of greater power than the ear. We have seen that they directed all their energies to the marvels of stage effect. But they did not listen to the precept of the poet, a precept founded on the very nature of art, which enjoins that only those things should be interwoven into the composition which can be witnessed without incredulity and without disgust. If the devils intervene, they must be introduced with their bat-shaped wings ever moving, and fire issuing from their nostrils, their mouth, and their ears, while they held in their hands [{589}] fiery distaffs shaped like serpents; that Cerberus, porter of hell, should have on his helmet three heads emitting flame, and that the keys he carried in his hand should seem to have just issued from a furnace, they sparkled so; that the long and hideous breasts of Proserpine should drip incessantly with blood, and with jets of fire at intervals; that Lucifer should have a casque vomiting forth flames unceasingly, and should hold in his grasp handfuls of vipers which moved in fiery twists. It was then everywhere fire, and, above all, real fire—for the contemporary authority who furnishes us with the details is particular to tell us, two several times, that there were people employed to feed this fire.
The fire thus carried about by the devils in all their goings and comings, and ever bursting from the mouth of hell when opened, became naturally the occasion of numerous accidents. We have an example of this nature which might have been tragical, but by good luck was only ludicrous, in the performance of the "Mystery of St. Martin" at Seurre, in 1496. At the commencement of the spectacle, which lasted three days, and opened with a scene of diablerie, the man who held the rôle of Satan having wished, says an official report of this epoch, to ascend to earth, caught fire in his nether garments, and was severely burnt. But he was so suddenly rescued and reclothed, that, without any one being aware of the accident, he went through with his part and then retired to his house. The affair had occurred in the morning between seven and eight o'clock. When he returned at one in the afternoon, the interval allowed, according to usage, for the audience to dine in being now over, he addressed to Lucifer, who was the cause of his misadventure, four impromptu verses that the public applauded exceedingly, but their grossness prevents our reproducing them.
These material imitations of physical nature and these exaggerations of the spectacle appear everywhere. When they wished, for example, to represent a martyr, it was necessary that the victim should be visibly tortured. We have even, in the representation of the "Mystery of the Acts of the Apostles," St. Barnabas disappearing adroitly and leaving his counterfeit presentment in the hands of the executioner, who binds it upon a wheel and sets it revolving over a burning brazier before the eyes of the spectators. When St. Paul was decapitated, it was requisite that his head, as it fell to the ground, should leap three times, and that at each bound, in accordance with the tradition, a fountain should gush forth. When they represented the crucifixion of our Lord, and the despair of Judas, it was necessary that the Saviour of the world should be seen nailed to the cross for the space of three hours, and that the traitor be hung miserably from a tree. On the performance of the "Mystery of the Passion" before the people of Lorraine in 1437, God, according to a chronicler of the time, was impersonated by "Sir Nicole don Neuf-Chastel, who was curé of St. Victor at Metz, and would have nearly died on the cross, had he not been succored; and another priest had to be put in his place to perfect the representation of the crucifixion. The next day the said curé, after having reposed, played the resurrection and bore his part superbly. Another priest, who was called Messire Jehan de Nicey, and who was chaplain of Metrange, acted Judas, and was almost killed by hanging, for his heart failed him, and he was right speedily cut down."
The taste of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for these materialistic representations was such that for the scenic features of the longer mysteries they contented themselves sometimes with a simple pantomime. Indeed, on September 8, 1424, at the solemn entry of the Duke of Bedford, the English Regent of France, the children of Paris, to adopt the expression of Sauval, played the Mystery of the Old and New Testament without [{590}] speech or sign, as if they had been images carved on a frieze.
The infancy of art, which appeared everywhere at this epoch in the representation of the "Mysteries," was especially visible in their style and in their composition. A rapid examination of its literary faults will suffice to show that the French drama of the middle ages, progressive, if not as regards its truthfulness, at least in the pomp of its spectacle, was in rapid decline in respect to poetry.
The first and gravest literary fault of this drama in its decadence—that which includes all the others—is the absence of all that makes the soul and life of the drama—of everything which distinguishes it most essentially from history. There is neither plot, nor peripetia, nor characters, nor passions. In the thirteenth century, Ruteboeuf, in the Miracle of Theophilus, bestows on his hero a passionate nature, and develops the action not by events in their ordinary sequence, but by the stormy struggles of the heart and the agitations of conscience. One principal personage is put upon the stage, and a single incident carries the play rapidly forward to a unique denouement. Jean Bodel, in the "Play of St. Nicholas," less skilled than his contemporaries in making his intrigue keep step to the movements of passion, consoled himself with laying violent hands on the legend, to which he gives an entirely new form. In the fourteenth century we find no longer, it is true, in the anonymous authors of the "Miracles of Notre Dame" either that creating power, or those passionate intrigues, or that simple and rapid movement, but at least we meet with some true pathos in certain scenes, and in a great number of monologues there are pronounced and well-sustained characters in the female parts, especially while the dramatic interest concentrates on one person. Open the two most celebrated works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the "Mystery of the Passion" of the two Jehan Michels, and the "Triumphant Mystery of the Acts of the Apostles" of the brothers Greban—there is nothing more than a pure and simple mise en scène of history or of legend, unrolling itself slowly as the events arrive in their chronological order. There is no unity either of time or of place, as in the past; nor is there unity of action. Personal interest has ceased; the passions have ceased; vigorous characterizations have ceased. Everybody speaks frigidly from one end of the piece to the other, and for forty days, and one can scarcely find throughout the plays a terse or impassioned line. There is no progression in the movement; no advance in intrigue; no fresh complication; the tiresome dramatist jogs along without troubling himself about denouement.
This drama, which has no longer a dramatic art save in its dialogue and its spectacle—is it then absolutely without poetry? Some critics seem to have thought so, since they dwelt only on its absurdities and its literary poverty. And it must be avowed that puerility, triviality, indecency even, so dominate there, that it is easy, when approaching it, to give one's self over to a universal disgust. Others, recognizing its poverty as a whole, have found some redeeming features. Of this number are M. Onesime Le Roy, whose patriotic admiration of the Artesian works has perhaps led him too far, and M. Douhaire, who has better controlled his enthusiasm. M. Douhaire is, in our opinion, the critic who was not only the first to study, but has also most clearly comprehended the religious beauties of the later mediaeval "mysteries." "We appeal," he says in 1840, in his lectures on the History of Christian Poetry,—"we appeal to the memory and the emotions of the reader. Who is there that does not recall with the most ineffable sentiments of joy those graceful scenes of the gospel of the Nativity of our Lady, the interior of the house of Joachim, his retirement among the shepherds, the triumphal song of St. Ann after the birth of Mary, the life of the [{591}] Virgin in the temple? Who has not present in his memory the grand pictures of the Gospel of Nicodemus, the conversations of the patriarchs in limbo, the descent of Jesus Christ into hell, the silent apparition of Charinus and Leucius in the Sanhedrim, the terrible portrayal of the last days of Pilate, and that personification of the Jew in Ahasuerus whose grandeur surpasses the loftiest conceptions of profane poetry? But it is not alone for its depth, it is also for its form, or at least for the arrangement and effect of its combinations, that our mysteries are remarkable. Doubtless in respect to theatrical art they are more than defective. They have indeed, to speak truly, no art at all. The events are not co-ordinated with a preconceived idea, and distributed in a manner to lead forward to a catastrophe or to a final peripetia. The order of facts is habitually that of time. They are historic dialogues and nothing more. But as in history the divine and the human, the supernatural and the real, are almost always blended together, the composers of the 'mysteries' have diligently worked out this interrelation. Aided by the construction of their theatres, which permitted them to move many scenes, they combined these actions in a manner to elicit extraordinary effects, unfolding simultaneously to the eye of the spectator heaven, earth, hell. They initiated him into the secret of life, showed to him the mysterious warfare of souls, and by this spectacle made his spirit pass through terrors that any other drama would be powerless to produce."