YALE ALUMNI WEEKLY
201
THE LITERATURE LECTURES.
[Continued from 196th page.]
in Rome until the time of Pompey, the
history of Roman literature opens with
the rise of comedy about 250 B.C. The
Italian of the early days was very light-
hearted and lived-a life full of merri-
ment; the later development of life and
literature was toward the sober and
utilitarian, until we have come to re-
gard the Roman as essentially serious.
The beginnings of Latin comedy were
of the merest farce, made up of im-
provisations and satirical mimicry; the
play—if so it might be called—was quite
formless, and was often used, as by
Nevius, for political purposes. For-
eigners or slaves were the only actors,
and music filled up much of the per-
formance,
But presently the need of better form
was felt; for, though the laws of the
drama have usually been based on
tragedy, comedy also has its laws. The
whole work of art must focus, and have
unity. Unity was unknown to the
Italian farce, and must be sought from
the Greeks, the world’s masters in form.
The Greek plots, taken in by way of
Southern Italy, were often greatly
modified by the Roman playwrights,
who even went so far as to combine
two of them in a single play for the
sake of greater confusion and more fun;
but a strong element remained, and the
Italian comedy is properly Graeco-
Roman. Greece was already decadent,
and her sons were fast degenerating
into semi-oriental tricksters; Rome
was still in vigorous youth, and these
plays are a portrayal, for her amuse-
ment, of debased types of Greek charac-
ter.. These stage-types were largely
fixed when Plautus received them; the
central motive of the play is usually fur-
nished by a sum of money, of which
an old man is to be defrauded, in the
interest of a younger one; this calls
forth all the trickery of which the play
is made up. |
The realm of comedy is wit and
humor; and here Plautus—a thoroughly
practical playwright, who had very
likely himself been an actor—was a
master: his plays are always amusing.
Much of the fun is of the nature of
practical jokes; but, reprehend these
as we may, a love for them seems to be
inherent in human nature. It is the
cleverness of the trick rather than the
pain it gives, that causes us pleasure;
and the old man’s loss is seldom final.
Terence is a greater character-artist
than Plautus; but amusement, not fine
delineation of character, was the object
sought. Plautus, the pure humorist, un-
like the satirist or reformer, occupies
an impartial standpoint, seeing all things
equally ina comic light. The greatness
of his art is shown in this, that, though
it is far easier to grasp the serious side
of others’ lives than the light, and though
humor is notoriously elusive, Plautus
can make us laugh heartily at the Ro-
mans of those remote days. In his time,
the Italian language was still homoge-
neous; it was not yet subdivided into
the two grades—literary, and colloquial
or vulgar—which were so sharply dis-
tinguished at a later date. His lan-
guage is that which all the people used
all the time; it is perfectly suited to
dialogue, because it was formed in
dialogue; it is a purely natural product,
crisp, racy, often prolix, full of slang,
but infinitely flexible; and in the hands
of a master of language like Plautus
it was the ideal vehicle of comic
expression.
The speaker concluded by saying that
all forms of art have their root in the
unconscious, simple needs and condi-
tions of life. Tragedy and comedy
existed potentially in the love of mimi-
cry, of song, and of the choral dance.
The change to conscious art is a grad-
tial and continuous one, but in all such
progress there is one point at which
impulse becomes art. This point,, for
Latin comedy, was marked by the rise
of Plautus and Terence.
COMEDY IN ITS FRENCH FORM.
Professor Luquiens took up ‘Comedy
in its French Form—Moliére’”’ He
attributed the extravagant praise which
the French lavish on Moliére to the fact
that he was the founder and master of
a peculiarly national art; he is a
national spokesman. His service was,
to have raised comedy to respectability.
in spite of the tremendous authority of
the classic French tragedy, which.
noble as it was, could never be natural
or spontaneous.
The speaker proceeded to give an
entertaining account of Moliére’s life,
laying stress on his wonderful energy
and fertility and on the wide range of
his experience, which furnished the
material for his plays. His comedies
are all restricted to the lighter phases
of life; there is no place for feeling, for
this had been preémpted by tragedy as
its exclusive right: Before his time
French comedy was comic, but not
literary; it was a sort of hodge-podge
- of the Latin comedy, with its simple
plot and typical characters, of the Span-
ish play of intrigue, and of the Italian
pantomime. Moliére rationalized com-
edy, which now became logical, or-
ganic, developing and ripening from a
germ within. It became didactic, with
a clear moral—and so national, for
every Frenchman has his thesis.
Descartes had said, Cogito, ergo sum;
Moliére, following his thought, created
the comedy of character—of thinking
individuals. Movement, again, is a
sign of life—and the lecturer compared
Moliére’s lively scenes with the tragic
stage and its ‘squad of four men and
a corporal, of whom only two speak.’
Except for the Olympus of Versailles,
and the criminal classes, the whole of
seventeenth century French life appears
in the plays of Moliére; there was no
~ class of society with which he was not
familiar; none which he does not
present to us in living colors.
Poetry was closed to him; the trag-
edians claimed that as their own, but
he had another resource; if he might
not attract men to the good, by show-
ing the true beauty of goodness, he
could at least try to laugh men out of
their follies. His work is inconsistent,
and not perhaps really moral or ethical;
social philosophy, not ethics, underlies
his plays. His thesis was: common
sense, not:coercion, should rule life.
His plays are a subtle but persistent
appeal against authority, convention,
pedantry, and hypocrisy, in aJl stages of
society; his blow seems light, but his
blow and our minds go beyond the
petty object at which he aims, to the
great institution which peeps from be-
hind it.
In summing up Moliére’s character,
the speaker said that, though he has won-
derful powers of observation, is a great
artist in the portrayal of character, has
seen and pictured French life with mar-
velous clearness and truth, and is most
admirable for his long fight against
shams, he must ever be acknowledged
inferior to a Shakespeare, a Goethe, or
a Corneille; the true poet, the singer
of the ideal, belongs to a sphere far
above even the keenest of observers.
PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF LITERATURE.
Professor Ladd, in opening his lecture
on ‘The Philosophical Basis of Litera-
ture,’ said that all great poets are great
philosophers; philosophy supplies the
poet with ideas, and helps literature
to understand itself. The philosophical
basis of literature is ‘man’s power to ex-
press ideas of value, in lanSuage whose
form commends itself to the cultivated
esthetic mind as suited to such expres-
sion.’ The three aspects of this defini-
tion were considered separately.
First, the power of language. This is
man’s supreme and distinctive means of
expression. Language has nio inde-
pendent being, but comes into existence
only as it flows from and into the souls
of living men.
Second, the power of appreciating
form, which again is a special endow-
ment of man. We seek to enhance the
value of a product by using great care
in the selection of its form; and we are
more pleased with a good thing if its
form is good. Literature differs vitally
from mere language in the attention
bestowed upon its form. Balance,
breadth, rhythm are essential to literary
art. The laws of literary form are as
eternal, unchangeable, and yet infinitely
variable, as the laws of human life.
Thought or feeling which have been
experienced must be expressed in lan-
guage fitted to them; the final law of
literary form is one of adaptation.
[Continued on 202d page.]
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