I was relieved from this fit of misanthropy, by getting into the shade of the barrier-wall, and by meeting a man, (a common French mechanic,) carrying a child in his arms, and the mother by its side, clapping her hands at it, smiling, and calling out ‘Mon petit ami!’ with unmingled and unwearied delight. There was the same over-animation in talking to the child as there would have been in talking to a dog or a parrot. But here it gave pleasure instead of pain, because our sympathies went along with it. I change my opinion of the French character fifty times a day, because, at every step, I wish to form a theory, which at the next step, is contradicted. The ground seems to me so uncertain—the tenure by which I hold my opinions so frail, that at last I grow ashamed of them altogether—of what I think right, as of what I think wrong.
To praise or to blame is perhaps equally an impertinence. While we are strangers to foreign manners and customs, we cannot be judges; it would take almost a life to understand the reasons and the differences; and by the time we can be supposed to do this, we become used to them, and in some sense parties concerned. The English are the fools of an hypothesis, as the Scotch are of a system. We must have an opinion—right or wrong; but, in that case, till we have the means of knowing whether it is right or wrong, it is as well to have a qualified one. We may at least keep our temper, and collect hints for self-correction; we may amuse ourselves in collecting materials for a decision that may never be passed, or will have little effect, even when it is, and may clear our eyesight from the motes and beams of prejudice by looking at things as they occur. Our opinions have no great influence on others; but the spirit in which we form them has a considerable one on our own happiness. It is of more importance to ourselves than to the French, what we think of them. It would be hard if a mental obliquity on their parts should ‘thrust us from a level consideration,’ or some hasty offence taken at the outset should shut up our eyes, our ears, and understandings for the rest of a journey, that we have commenced for no other purpose than to be spectators of a new and shifting scene, and to have our faculties alike open to impressions of all sorts.
What Englishman has not seen the Cemetery of Père la Chaise? What Englishman will undertake either to condemn or entirely approve it, unless he could enter completely into the minds of the French themselves? The approach to it (a little way out of Paris) is literally ‘garlanded with flowers.’ You imagine yourself in the neighbourhood of a wedding, a fair, or some holiday-festival. Women are sitting by the road-side or at their own doors, making chaplets of a sort of yellow flowers, which are gathered in the fields, baked, and will then last a French ‘Forever.’ They have taken ‘the lean abhorred monster,’ Death, and strewed him o’er and o’er with sweets; they have made the grave a garden, a flower-bed, where all Paris reposes, the rich and the poor, the mean and the mighty, gay and laughing, and putting on a fair outside as in their lifetime. Death here seems life’s playfellow, and grief and smiling content sit at one tomb together. Roses grow out of the clayey ground; there is the urn for tears, the slender cross for faith to twine round; the neat marble monument, the painted wreaths thrown upon it to freshen memory, and mark the hand of friendship. ‘No black and melancholic yew-trees’ darken the scene, and add a studied gloom to it—no ugly death’s heads or carved skeletons shock the sight. On the contrary, some pretty Ophelia, as general mourner, appears to have been playing her fancies over a nation’s bier, to have been scattering ‘pansies for thoughts, rue for remembrances.’ But is not the expression of grief, like hers, a little too fantastical and light-headed? Is it not too much like a childish game of Make-Believe? Or does it not imply a certain want of strength of mind, as well as depth of feeling, thus to tamper with the extremity of woe, and varnish over the most serious contemplation of mortality? True sorrow is manly and decent, not effeminate or theatrical. The tomb is not a baby-house for the imagination to hang its idle ornaments and mimic finery in. To meet sad thoughts, and overpower or allay them by other lofty and tender ones, is right; but to shun them altogether, to affect mirth in the midst of sighing, and divert the pangs of inward misfortune by something to catch the eye and tickle the sense, is what the English do not sympathize with. It is an advantage the French have over us. The fresh plants and trees that wave over our graves; the cold marble that contains our ashes; the secluded scene that collects the wandering thoughts; the innocent, natural flowers that spring up, unconscious of our loss—objects like these at once cherish and soften our regrets; but the petty daily offerings of condolence, the forced liveliness and the painted pride of the scene before us, are like galvanic attempts to recall the fleeting life—they neither flatter the dead nor become the living! One of the most heartless and flimsy extravagances of the New Eloise, is the attempt made to dress up the daughter of Madame d’Orbe like Julia, and set her in her place at the table after her death. Is not the burying-ground of the Père la Chaise tricked out and over-acted much on the same false principle, as if there were nothing sacred from impertinence and affectation? I will not pretend to determine; but to an English taste it is so. We see things too much, perhaps, on the dark side; they see them too much (if that is possible) on the bright. Here is the tomb of Abelard and Eloise—immortal monument, immortal as the human heart and poet’s verse can make it! But it is slight, fantastic, of the olden time, and seems to shrink from the glare of daylight, or as if it would like to totter back to the old walls of the Paraclete, and bury its quaint devices and its hallowed inscriptions in shadowy twilight. It is, however, an affecting sight, and many a votive garland is sprinkled over it. Here is the tomb of Ney, (the double traitor) worthy of his fate and of his executioner;—and of Massena and Kellerman. There are many others of great note, and some of the greatest names—Molière, Fontaine, De Lille. Chancellors and charbottiers lie mixed together, and announce themselves with equal pomp. These people have as good an opinion of themselves after death as before it. You see a bust with a wreath or crown round its head—a strange piece of masquerade—and other tombs with a print or miniature of the deceased hanging to them! Frequently a plain marble slab is laid down for the surviving relatives of the deceased, waiting its prey in expressive silence. This is making too free with death, and acknowledging a claim which requires no kind of light to be thrown upon it. We should visit the tombs of our friends with more soothing feelings, without marking out our own places beside them. But every French thought or sentiment must have an external emblem. The inscriptions are in general, however, simple and appropriate. I only remarked one to which any exception could be taken; it was a plain tribute of affection to some individual by his family, who professed to have ‘erected this modest monument to preserve his memory forever!’ What a singular idea of modesty and eternity! So the French, in the Catalogue of the Louvre, in 1803, after recounting the various transmigrations of the Apollo Belvidere in the last two thousand years (vain warnings of mutability!) observed, that it was at last placed in the Museum at Paris, ‘to remain there forever.’ Alas! it has been gone these ten years.
CHAPTER IX
Mademoiselle Mars (of whom so much has been said) quite comes up to my idea of an accomplished comic actress. I do not know that she does more than this, or imparts a feeling of excellence that we never had before, and are at a loss how to account for afterwards (as was the case with our Mrs. Jordan and Mrs. Siddons in opposite departments,) but she answers exactly to a preconception in the mind, and leaves nothing wanting to our wishes. I had seen nothing of the kind on our stage for many years, and my satisfaction was the greater, as I had often longed to see it. The last English actress who shone in genteel comedy was Miss Farren, and she was just leaving the stage when I first became acquainted with it. She was said to be a faint copy of Mrs. Abington—but I seem to see her yet, glittering in the verge of the horizon, fluttering, gay, and airy, the ‘elegant turn of her head,’ the nodding plume of feathers, the gloves and fan, the careless mien, the provoking indifference—we have had nothing like it since, for I cannot admit that Miss O’Neil had the Lady-Teazle air at all. Out of tragedy she was awkward and heavy. She could draw out a white, patient, pathetic pocket-handkerchief with great grace and simplicity; she had no notion of flirting a fan. The rule here is to do every thing without effort—
‘Flavia the least and slightest toy
Can with resistless art employ.’
This art is lost among us; the French still have it in very considerable perfection. Really, it is a fine thing to see Molière’s Misanthrope, at the Theatre Français, with Mademoiselle Mars as Celimène. I had already seen some very tolerable acting at the minor French Theatres, but I remained sceptical; I still had my English scruples hanging about me, nor could I get quite reconciled to the French manner. For mannerism is not excellence. It might be good, but I was not sure of it. Whatever one hesitates about in this way, is not the best. If a thing is first-rate, you see it at once, or the fault is yours. True genius will always get the better of our local prejudices, for it has already surmounted its own. For this reason, one becomes an immediate convert to the excellence of the French school of serious comedy. Their actors have lost little or nothing of their spirit, tact, or skill in embodying the wit and sense of their favourite authors. The most successful passages do not interfere with our admiration of the best samples of English acting, or run counter to our notions of propriety. That which we thought well done among ourselves, we here see as well or better done; that which we thought defective, avoided. The excellence or even superiority of the French over us only confirms the justness of our taste. If the actor might feel some jealousy, the critic can feel none. What Englishman does not read Molière with pleasure? Is it not a treat then to see him well acted? There is nothing to recall our national antipathies, and we are glad to part with such unpleasant guests.
The curtain is scarcely drawn up, when something of this effect is produced in the play I have mentioned, and the entrance of Mademoiselle Mars decides it. Her few first simple sentences—her ‘Mon Ami’ at her lover’s first ridiculous suggestion, the mingled surprise, displeasure, and tenderness in the tone—her little peering eyes, full of languor and archness of meaning—the peaked nose and thin compressed lips, opening into an intelligent, cordial smile—her self-possession—her slightest gesture—the ease and rapidity of her utterance, every word of which is perfectly distinct—the playful, wondering good-nature with which she humours the Misanthrope’s eccentricities throughout, and the finer tone of sense and feeling in which she rejects his final proposal, must stamp her a favourite with the English as well as with the French part of the audience. I cannot see why that should not be the case. She is all life and spirit. Would we be thought entirely without them? She has a thorough understanding and relish of her author’s text. So, we think, have we. She has character, expression, decision—they are the very things we pique ourselves upon. Ease, grace, propriety—we aspire to them, if we have them not. She is free from the simagrées, the unmeaning petulance and petty affectation that we reproach the French with, and has none of the awkwardness, insipidity, or vulgarity that we are so ready to quarrel with at home. It would be strange if the English did not admire her as much as they profess to do. I have seen but one book of travels in which she was abused, and that was written by a Scotchman! Mademoiselle Mars is neither handsome nor delicately formed. She has not the light airy grace, nor the evanescent fragility of appearance that distinguished Miss Farren, but more point and meaning, or more of the intellectual part of comedy.
She was admirably supported in Celimène. Monsieur Damas played the hero of the Misanthrope, and played it with a force and natural freedom which I had no conception of as belonging to the French stage. If they drawl out their tragic rhymes into an endless sing-song, they cut up their comic verses into mincemeat. The pauses, the emphasis, are left quite ad libitum, and are as sudden and varied as in the most familiar or passionate conversation. In Racine they are obliged to make an effort to get out of themselves, and are solemn and well-behaved; in Molière they are at home, and commit all sorts of extravagances with wonderful alacrity and effect. Heroes in comedy, pedants in tragedy, they are greatest on small occasions; and their most brilliant efforts arise out of the ground of common life. Monsieur Damas’s personification of the Misanthrope appeared to me masterly. He had apparently been chosen to fill the part for his ugliness; but he played the lover and the fanatic with remarkable skill, nature, good-breeding, and disordered passion. The rapidity, the vehemence of his utterance and gestures, the transitions from one feeling to another, the fond rapture, the despair, the rage, the sarcastic coolness, the dignified contempt, were much in the style of our most violent tragic representations, and such as we do not see in our serious comedy or in French tragedy. The way in which this philosophic madman gave a loose to the expression of his feelings, when he first suspects the fidelity of his mistress, when he quarrels with her, and when he is reconciled to her, was strikingly affecting. It was a regular furious scolding-bout, with the ordinary accompaniments of tears, screams, and hysterics. A comic actor with us would have made the part insipid and genteel; a tragic one with them pompous and affected. At Drury-lane, Mr. Powell would take the part. Our fine gentlemen are walking suits of clothes; their tragic performers are a professor’s gown and wig: the Misanthrope of Molière, as Monsieur Damas plays it, is a true orator and man of genius. If they pour the oil of decorum over the loftier waves of tragedy, their sentimental comedy is like a puddle in a storm. The whole was admirably cast, and ought to make the English ashamed of themselves, if they are not above attending to any thing that can give pleasure to themselves or other people. Arsinoe, the friend and rival of Celimène, was played by Madame ——, a ripe, full-blown beauty, a prude, the redundancies of whose person and passions are kept in due bounds by tight lacing and lessons of morality. Eliante was a Mademoiselle Menjaud, a very amiable-looking young person, and exactly fitted to be an élève in this School for Scandal. She smiled and blushed and lisped mischief in the prettiest manner imaginable. The man who comes to read his Sonnet to Alceste was inimitable. His teeth had an enamel, his lips a vermilion, his eyes a brilliancy, his smile a self-complacency, such as never met in poet or in peer, since Revolutions and Reviews came into fashion. He seemed to have been preserved in a glass-case for the last hundred and fifty years, and to have walked out of it in these degenerate days, dressed in brocade, in smiles and self-conceit, to give the world assurance of what a Frenchman was! Philinte was also one of those prosing confidants, with grim features, and profound gravity, that are to be found in all French plays, and who, by their patient attention to a speech of half an hour long, acquire an undoubted right to make one of equal length in return. When they were all drawn up in battle-array, in the scene near the beginning, which Sheridan has copied, it presented a very formidable aspect indeed, and the effect was an historical deception. You forgot you were sitting at a play at all, and fancied yourself transported to the court or age of Louis XIV.!—Blest period!—the triumph of folly and of France, when, instead of poring over systems of philosophy, the world lived in a round of impertinence—when to talk nonsense was wit, to listen to it politeness—when men thought of nothing but themselves, and turned their heads with dress instead of the affairs of Europe—when the smile of greatness was felicity, the smile of beauty Elysium—and when men drank the brimming nectar of self-applause, instead of waiting for the opinion of the reading public! Who would not fling himself back to this period of idle enchantment? But as we cannot, the best substitute for it is to see a comedy of Molière’s acted at the Theatre Français. The thing is there imitated to the life.