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Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books written by Charles W. Eliot

C >> Charles W. Eliot >> Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books




Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type,
introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything
modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed.
This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy.

And we beg leave to dwell upon this point; for we have now indicated
the significant feature, the fundamental difference which, in our
opinion, separates modern from ancient art, the present form from
the defunct form; or, to use less definite but more popular terms,
_romantic_ literature from _classical_ literature.

"At last!" exclaim the people who for some time past _have seen what
we were coming at_, "at last we have you--you are caught in the act.
So then you put forward the ugly as a type for imitation, you make the
_grotesque_ an element of art. But the graces; but good taste! Don't
you know that art should correct nature? that we must _ennoble_ art?
that we must _select_? Did the ancients ever exhibit the ugly or the
grotesque? Did they ever mingle comedy and tragedy? The example of
the ancients, gentlemen! And Aristotle, too, and Boileau, and La Haipe
Upon my word!"

These arguments are sound, doubtless, and, above all, of extraordinary
novelty. But it is not our place to reply to them. We are constructing
no system here--God protect us from systems! We are stating a fact. We
are a his torian, not a critic. Whether the fact is agreeable or not
matters little, it is a fact. Let us resume, therefore, and try
to prove that it is of the fruitful union of the grotesque and the
sublime types that modern genius is born--so complex, so diverse in
its forms, so inexhaustible in its creations, and therein directly
opposed to the uniform simplicity of the genius of the ancients, let
us show that that is the point from which we must set out to establish
the real and radical difference between the two forms of literature.

Not that it is strictly true that comedy and the grotesque were
entirely unknown to the ancients. In fact, such a thing would be
impossible. Nothing grows without a root, the germ of the second epoch
always exists in the first. In the Iliad Thersites and Vulcan furnish
comedy, one to the mortals, the other to the gods. There is too much
nature and originality in the Greek tragedy for there not to be an
occasional touch of comedy in it. For example, to cite only what we
happen to recall, the scene between Menelaus and the portress of the
palace. _(Helen_, Act I), and the scene of the Phrygian _(Orestes,_
Act IV) The Tritons, the Satyrs, the Cyclops are grotesque, Polyphemus
is a terrifying, Silenus a farcical grotesque.

But one feels that this part of the art is still in its infancy. The
epic, which at this period imposes its form on everything, the epic
weighs heavily upon it and stifles it. The ancient grotesque is timid
and forever trying to keep out of sight. It is plain that it is not
on familiar ground, because it is not in its natural surroundings. It
conceals itself as much as it can. The Satyrs, the Tritons, and the
Sirens are hardly abnormal in form. The Fates and the Harpies are
hideous in their attributes rather than in feature; the Furies are
beautiful, and are called _Eumenides_, that is to say, _gentle,
beneficent_. There is a veil of grandeur or of divinity over other
grotesques. Polyphemus is a giant, Midas a king, Silenus a god.

Thus comedy is almost imperceptible in the great epic _ensemble_
of ancient times. What is the barrow of Thespis beside the Olympian
chariots? What are Aristophanes and Plautus, beside the Homeric
colossi, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides? Homer bears them along with
him, as Hercules bore the pygmies, hidden in his lion's skin!

In the idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an
enormous part. It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the
abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque.
It fastens upon religion a thousand original superstitions, upon
poetry a thousand picturesque fancies. It is the grotesque which
scatters lavishly, in air, water, earth, fire, those myriads of
intermediary creatures which we find all alive in the popular
traditions of the Middle Ages; it is the grotesque which impels the
ghastly antics of the witches' revels, which gives Satan his horns,
his cloven foot and his bat's wings. It is the grotesque, still the
grotesque, which now casts into the Christian hell the frightful faces
which the severe genius of Dante and Milton will evoke, and again
peoples it with those laughter-moving figures amid which Callot, the
burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself. If it passes from the
world of imagination to the real world, it unfolds an inexhaustible
supply of parodies of mankind. Creations of its fantasy are the
Scaramouches, Crispins and Harlequins, grinning silhouettes of man,
types altogether unknown to serious-minded antiquity, although they
originated in classic Italy. It is the grotesque, lastly, which,
colouring the same drama with the fancies of the North and of the
South in turn, exhibits Sganarelle capering about Don Juan and
Mephistopheles crawling about Faust.

And how free and open it is in its bearing! how boldly it brings
into relief all the strange forms which the preceding age had timidly
wrapped in swaddling-clothes! Ancient poetry, compelled to provide
the lame Vulcan with companions, tried to disguise their deformity by
distributing it, so to speak, upon gigantic proportions. Modern genius
retains this myth of the supernatural smiths, but gives it an entirely
different character and one which makes it even more striking; it
changes the giants to dwarfs and makes gnomes of the Cyclops. With
like originality, it substitutes for the somewhat commonplace Lernaean
hydra all the local dragons of our national legends--the gargoyle of
Rouen, the _gra-ouilli_ of Metz, the _chair sallee_ of Troyes, the
_dree_ of Montlhery, the _tarasque_ of Tarascon--monsters of forms so
diverse, whose outlandish names are an additional attribute. All these
creations draw from their own nature that energetic and significant
expression before which antiquity seems sometimes to have recoiled.
Certain it is that the Greek Eumenides are much less horrible, and
consequently less _true_, than the witches in _Macbeth_. Pluto is not
the devil.

In our opinion a most novel book might be written upon the employment
of the grotesque in the arts. One might point out the powerful
effects the moderns have obtained from that fruitful type, upon which
narrow-minded criticism continues to wage war even in our own day.
It may be that we shall be led by our subject to call attention in
passing to some features of this vast picture. We will simply say here
that, as a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in
our view, the richest source that nature can offer art. Rubens so
understood it, doubtless, when it pleased him to introduce the hideous
features of a court dwarf amid his exhibitions of royal magnificence,
coronations and splendid ceremonial. The universal beauty which the
ancients solemnly laid upon everything, is not without monotony; the
same impression repeated again and again may prove fatiguing at last.
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a
little rest from everything, even the beautiful. On the other
hand, the grotesque seems to be a halting-place, a mean term, a
starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a
fresher and keener perception. The salamander gives relief to the
water-sprite; the gnome heightens the charm of the sylph.

And it would be true also to say that contact with the abnormal
has imparted to the modern sublime a something purer, grander, more
sublime, in short, than the beautiful of the ancients; and that is as
it should be. When art is consistent with itself, it guides everything
more surely to its goal. If the Homeric Elysium is a long, long way
from the ethereal charm, the angelic pleasureableness of Milton's
Paradise, it is because under Eden there is a hell far more terrible
than the heathen Tartarus. Do you think that Francesca da Rimini and
Beatrice would be so enchanting in a poet who should not confine us in
the Tower of Hunger and compel us to share Ugolino's revolting repast?
Dante would have less charm, if he had less power. Have the fleshly
naiads, the muscular Tritons, the wanton Zephyrs, the diaphanous
transparency of our water-sprites and sylphs? Is it not because the
modern imagination does not fear to picture the ghastly forms of
vampires, ogres, ghouls, snake-charmers and jinns prowling about
graveyards, that it can give to its fairies that incorporeal shape,
that purity of essence, of which the heathen nymphs fall so far short?
The antique Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has
imparted to Jean Goujon's faces that weird, tender, ethereal delicacy?
What has given them that unfamiliar suggestion of life and grandeur,
if not the proximity of the rough and powerful sculptures of the
Middle Ages?

If the thread of our argument has not been broken in the reader's mind
by these necessary digressions--- which in truth, might be developed
much further--he has realized, doubtless, how powerfully the
grotesque--that germ of comedy, fostered by the modern muse--grew in
extent and importance as soon as it was transplanted to a soil more
propitious than paganism and the Epic. In truth, in the new poetry,
while the sublime represents the soul as it is, purified by Christian
morality, the grotesque plays the part of the human beast. The former
type, delivered of all impure alloy, has as its attributes all the
charms, all the graces, all the beauties; it must be able some day
to create Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia. The latter assumes all the
absurdities, all the infirmities, all the blemishes. In this partition
of mankind and of creation, to it fall the passions, vices, crimes;
it is sensuous, fawning, greedy, miserly, false, incoherent,
hypocritical; it is, in turn, Iago, Tartuffe, Basile, Polonius,
Harpagon, Bartholo, Falstaff, Scapin, Figaro. The beautiful has but
one type, the ugly has a thousand. The fact is that the beautiful,
humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect
in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our
make-up. Thus the _ensemble_ that it offers us is always complete, but
restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is
a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony,
not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents
itself to us in new but incomplete aspects.

It is interesting to study the first appearance and the progress
of the grotesque in modern times. At first, it is an invasion, an
irruption, an overflow, as of a torrent that has burst its banks. It
rushes through the expiring Latin literature, imparts some coloring to
Persius, Petronius and Juvenal, and leaves behind it the _Golden Ass_
of Apuleius. Thence it diffuses itself through the imaginations of the
new nations that are remodelling Europe. It abounds in the work of
the fabulists, the chroniclers, the romancists. We see it make its way
from the South to the North. It disports itself in the dreams of the
Teutonic nations, and at the same time vivifies with its breath
the admirable Spanish _romanceros_, a veritable Iliad of the age of
chivalry. For example, it is the grotesque which describes thus,
in the _Roman de la Rose_, an august ceremonial, the election of a
king:--

"A long-shanked knave they chose, I wis,
Of all their men the boniest."

More especially it imposes its characteristic qualities upon that
wonderful architecture which, in the Middle Ages, takes the place of
all the arts. It affixes its mark on the facades of cathedrals, frames
its hells and purgatories in the ogive arches of great doorways,
portrays them in brilliant hues on window-glass, exhibits its
monsters, its bull-dogs, its imps about capitals, along friezes, on
the edges of roofs. It flaunts itself in numberless shapes on the
wooden facades of houses, on the stone facades of chateaux, on the
marble facades of palaces. From the arts it makes its way into the
national manners, and while it stirs applause from the people for the
_graciosos_ of comedy, it gives to the kings court-jesters. Later,
in the age of etiquette, it will show us Scarron on the very edge of
Louis the Fourteenth's bed. Meanwhile it decorates coats of-arms, and
draws upon knight, shields the symbolic hieroglyphs of feudalism.
From the manners, it makes its way into the laws, numberless strange
customs at test its passage through the institutions of the Middle
Ages. Just as it represented Thespis, smeared with wine-lees, leaping
in her tomb it dances with the _Basoche_ on the famous marble table
which served at the same time as a stage for the popular farces and
for the royal banquets. Finally, having made its way into the arts,
the manners, and the laws, it enters even the Church. In every
Catholic city we see it organizing some one of those curious
ceremonies, those strange processions, wherein religion is attended by
all varieties of superstition--the sublime attended by all the forms
of the grotesque. To paint it in one stroke, so great is its vigour,
its energy, its creative sap, at the dawn of letters, that it casts,
at the outset, upon the threshold of modern poetry, three burlesque
Homers: Ariosto in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Rabelais in France.

It would be mere surplusage to dwell further upon the influence of
the grotesque in the third civilization. Every thing tends to show its
close creative alliance with the beautiful in the so called "romantic"
period. Even among the simplest popular legends there are none which
do not somewhere, with an admirable instinct, solve this mystery of
modern art. Antiquity could not have produced _Beauty and the Beast_.

It is true that at the period at which we have arrived the
predominance of the grotesque over the sublime in literature is
clearly indicated. But it is a spasm of reaction, an eager thirst for
novelty, which is but temporary, it is an initial wave which gradually
recedes. The type of the beautiful will soon resume its rights and its
role, which is not to exclude the other principle, but to prevail over
it. It is time that the grotesque should be content with a corner
of the picture in Murillo's loyal frescoes, in the sacred pages of
Veronese, content to be introduced in two marvellous _Last Judgments_,
in which art will take a just pride, in the scene of fascination and
horror with which Michelangelo will embellish the Vatican, in those
awe-inspiring represervations of the fall of man which Rubens will
throw upon the arches of the Cathedral of Antwerp. The time has come
when the balance between the two principles is to be established. A
man, a poet-king, _poeta soverano_, as Dante calls Homer, is about
to adjust everything. The two rival genii combine their flames, and
thence issues Shakespeare.

We have now reached the poetic culmination of modern times.
Shakespeare is the drama; and the drama, which with the same breath
moulds the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the absurd,
tragedy and comedy--the drama is the distinguishing characteristic of
the third epoch of poetry, of the literature of the present day.

Thus, to sum up hurriedly the facts that we have noted thus far,
poetry has three periods, each of which corresponds to an epoch of
civilization: the ode, the epic, and the drama. Primitive times are
lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings
of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity to history, the drama depicts
life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingenuousness, of
the second, simplicity, of the third, truth. The rhapsodists mark the
transition from the lyric to the epic poets, as do the romancists that
from the lyric to the dramatic poets. Historians appear in the second
period, chroniclers and critics in the third. The characters of
the ode are colossi--Adam, Cain, Noah; those of the epic are
giants--Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of the drama are men--Hamlet,
Macbeth, Othello. The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the
grandiose, the drama upon the real. Lastly, this threefold poetry
flows from three great sources--The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.

Such then--and we confine ourselves herein to noting a single
result--such are the diverse aspects of thought in the different
epochs of mankind and of civilization. Such are its three faces, in
youth, in manhood, in old age. Whether one examines one literature by
itself or all literatures _en masse,_ one will always reach the same
result: the lyric poets before the epic poets, the epic poets before
the dramatic poets. In France, Malherbe before Chapelain, Chapelain
before Corneille; in ancient Greece, Orpheus before Homer, Homer
before AEschylus; in the first of all books, _Genesis_ before _Kings,
Kings_ before _Job_; or to come back to that monumental scale of all
ages of poetry, which we ran over a moment since, The Bible before the
_Iliad_, the _Iliad_ before Shakespeare.

In a word, civilization begins by singing of its dreams, then narrates
its doings, and, lastly, sets about describing what it thinks. It is,
let us say in passing, because of this last, that the drama, combining
the most opposed qualities, may be at the same time full of profundity
and full of relief, philosophical and picturesque.

It would be logical to add here that everything in nature and in
life passes through these three phases, the lyric, the epic, and the
dramatic, because everything is born, acts, and dies. If it were not
absurd to confound the fantastic conceits of the imagination with the
stern deductions of the reasoning faculty, a poet might say that the
rising of the sun, for example, is a hymn, noon-day a brilliant epic,
and sunset a gloomy drama wherein day and night, life and death,
contend for mastery. But that would be poetry--folly, perhaps--- and
_what does it prove_?

Let us hold to the facts marshalled above; let us supplement them,
too, by an important observation, namely that we have in no wise
pretended to assign exclusive limits to the three epochs of poetry,
but simply to set forth their predominant characteristics. The Bible,
that divine lyric monument, contains in germ, as we suggested a moment
ago, an epic and a drama--_-Kings_ and _Job_. In the Homeric poems
one is conscious of a clinging reminiscence of lyric poetry and of a
beginning of dramatic poetry. Ode and drama meet in the epic. There is
a touch of all in each; but in each there exists a generative element
to which all the other elements give place, and which imposes its own
character upon the whole.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only
in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and
epitomizes both. Surely, he who said: "The French have not the epic
brain," said a true and clever thing; if he had said, "The moderns,"
the clever remark would have been profound. It is beyond question,
however, that there is epic genius in that marvellous _Athalie,_ so
exalted and so simple in its sublimity that the royal century was
unable to comprehend it. It is certain, too, that the series of
Shakespeare's chronicle dramas presents a grand epic aspect. But it is
lyric poetry above all that befits the drama; it never embarrasses
it, adapts itself to all its caprices, disports itself in all forms,
sometimes sublime as in Ariel, sometimes grotesque as in Caliban. Our
era being above all else dramatic, is for that very reason eminently
lyric. There is more than one connection between the beginning and the
end; the sunset has some features of the sunrise; the old man becomes
a child once more. But this second childhood is not like the first;
it is as melancholy as the other is joyous. It is the same with lyric
poetry. Dazzling, dreamy, at the dawn of civilization it reappears,
solemn and pensive, at its decline. The Bible opens joyously with
_Genesis_ and comes to a close with the threatening _Apocalypse_. The
modern ode is still inspired, but is no longer ignorant. It meditates
more than it scrutinizes; its musing is melancholy. We see, by its
painful labour, that the muse has taken the drama for her mate.

To make clear by a metaphor the ideas that we have ventured to put
forth, we will compare early lyric poetry to a placid lake which
reflects the clouds and stars; the epic is the stream which flows from
the lake, and rushes on, reflecting its banks, forests, fields and
cities, until it throws itself into the ocean of the drama. Like the
lake, the drama reflects the sky; like the stream, it reflects its
banks; but it alone has tempests and measureless depths.

The drama, then, is the goal to which everything in modern poetry
leads. _Paradise Lost_ is a drama before it is an epic. As we know, it
first presented itself to the poet's imagination in the first of these
forms, and as a drama it always remains in the reader's memory, so
prominent is the old dramatic framework still beneath Milton's epic
structure! When Dante had finished his terrible _Inferno_, when he had
closed its doors and nought remained save to give his work a name, the
unerring instinct of his genius showed him that that multiform poem
was an emanation of the drama, not of the epic; and on the front
of that gigantic monument, he wrote with his pen of bronze: _Divina
Commedia._

Thus we see that the only two poets of modern times who are of
Shakespeare's stature follow him in unity of design They coincide with
him in imparting a dramatic tinge to all our poetry, like him, they
blend the grotesque with the sublime, and, far from standing
by themselves in the great literary _ensemble_ that rests upon
Shakespeare, Dante and Milton are, in some sort, the two supporting
abutments of the edifice of which he is the central pillar, the
buttresses of the arch of which he is the keystone.

Permit us, at this point, to recur to certain ideas already suggested,
which, however, it is necessary to emphasize. We have arrived, and now
we must set out again.

On the day when Christianity said to man "Thou art twofold, thou art
made up of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, one carnal,
the other ethereal, one enslaved by appetites, cravings and passions,
the other borne aloft on the wings of enthusiasm and reverie--in a
word, the one always stooping toward the earth, its mother, the other
always darting up toward heaven, its fatherland"--on that day the
drama was created. Is it in truth, anything other than that contrast
of every day, that struggle of every moment, between two opposing
principles which are ever face to face in life, and which dispute
possession of man from the cradle to the tomb?

The poetry born of Christianity, the poetry of our time, is,
therefore, the drama, the real results from the wholly natural
combination of two types, the sublime and the grotesque, which meet
in the drama, as they meet in life and in creation. For true poetry,
complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is
time to say aloud--and it is here above all that exceptions prove the
rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

On taking one's stand at this point of view, to pass judgment on
our petty conventional rules, to disentangle all those scholastic
labyrinths, to solve all those trivial problems which the critics of
the last two centuries have laboriously built up about the art, one is
struck by the promptitude with which the question of the modern stage
is made clear and distinct. The drama has but to take a step to
break all the spider's webs with which the militia of Lilliput have
attempted to fetter its sleep.

And so, let addle-pated pedants (one does not exclude the other) claim
that the deformed, the ugly, the grotesque should never be imitated
in art; one replies that the grotesque is comedy, and that comedy
apparently makes a part of art. Tartuffe is not handsome, Pourceaugnac
is not noble, but Pourceaugnac and Tartuffe are admirable flashes of
art.

If, driven back from this entrenchment to their second line of
custom-houses, they renew their prohibition of the grotesque coupled
with the sublime, of comedy melted into tragedy, we prove to them
that, in the poetry of Christian nations, the first of these two types
represents the human beast, the second the soul. These two stalks of
art, if we prevent their branches from mingling, if we persistently
separate them, will produce by way of fruit, on the one hand abstract
vices and absurdities, on the other, abstract crime, heroism and
virtue. The two types, thus isolated and left to themselves, will go
each its own way, leaving the real between them, at the left hand of
one, at the right hand of the other. Whence it follows that after
all these abstractions there will remain something to represent--man;
after these tragedies and comedies, something to create--the drama.