Chapter XVI: Part 16

"Resolved," says Ludlow, "to put all upon it, he went down to the breach; and calling out a fresh reserve of Colonel Ewer's men, he put himself at their head, and with the word 'our Lord God,' led them up again with courage and resolution, though they met with a hot dispute." Thus encouraged to recover their loss, they got ground of the enemy, forced him to quit his intrenchments, and poured into the town. There many retreated to the Millmount, a place very strong and difficult of access; "exceedingly high and strongly palisaded." This place commanded the whole town: thither Sir Arthur Ashton and other important officers had betaken themselves. But the storming party burst in, and were ordered by Cromwell to put them all to the sword. The rest of the garrison fled over the bridge to the northern side of the town; but the Ironsides followed them hotly, both horse and foot, and drove them into St. Peter's Church and the towers of the ramparts.

St. Peter's Church was set on fire by Cromwell's order. He writes to the speaker: "Indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town: and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men." Next day the other towers were summoned, and the work of slaughter was renewed for two days, until the entire garrison was annihilated. It was unquestionably a massacre. "That night they put to the sword about two thousand men." In St. Peter's Church "near a thousand of them were put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety." "Their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously." "I do not think we lost a hundred men upon the place." Such are a few passages from Cromwell's own despatches.

The slaughter was indeed prodigious. The general writes: "I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives." "The enemy were about three thousand strong in the town." "I do not believe, neither do I hear, that any officer escaped with his life, save only one lieutenant." He subsequently gives a detailed list of the slain, amounting to about three thousand. Hugh Peters, the chaplain, reports as follows:

"Sir, the truth is, Drogheda is taken, three thousand five hundred fifty-two of the enemy slain, and sixty-four of ours. Ashton the governor, killed, none spared." It is also certain that quarter was refused. "I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town." It is expressly told us that all officers and all priests taken were killed. From the days of Clarendon it has been repeated by historians that men, women, and children were indiscriminately slaughtered, and there is evidence of an eye-witness to that effect; but this is not believed to have been done by the order, or even with the knowledge, of the general. The Royalist accounts insist that quarter was promised at first; and that the butchery of men in cold blood was carried on for days. Here again the act must have been exceptional and without authority.

To Cromwell himself this fearful slaughter was a signal triumph of the truth. "It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors." "This hath been a marvellous great mercy." "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future. Which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." "It was set upon some of our hearts, That a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the Spirit of God." In the same sense it was received by Parliament and council of state, by some of the noblest spirits of their age.

Ludlow says simply that this "extraordinary severity was used to discourage others from making opposition." It had always been the policy of Cromwell in battle to inflict a crushing defeat; at Marston, at Naseby, and at Preston he had "taken execution of the enemy" for hours and over miles of country. At Basing and elsewhere, after a summons and a storm, he had slaughtered hundreds without mercy. And such was the law of war in that age, practised on both sides without hesitation. But the item of numbers and of time tells very heavily here. The killing of hundreds in hot blood differs from the massacre of thousands during days.

There was no such act in the whole civil war as the massacre--prolonged for days--of three thousand men enclosed in walls entirely at the mercy of their captors, to say nothing of the promiscuous slaughter of priests, if not of women and unarmed men.

In England such a deed could not have been done; and not in Ireland, but that they were Catholics fighting in defence of their faith. The fact that the garrison were Catholics, fighting on Irish soil, placed them, to the Puritan Englishman, out of the pale. No admiration for Cromwell, for his genius, courage, and earnestness--no sympathy with the cause that he upheld in England--can blind us to the truth, that the lurid light of this great crime burns still after centuries across the history of England and of Ireland; that it is one of those damning charges which the Puritan theology has yet to answer at the bar of humanity.

The tremendous blow at Drogheda struck terror into Ormonde's forces. Dundalk and Trim were abandoned in haste. O'Neil swore a great oath that as Cromwell had stormed Drogheda, if he should storm hell he should take it. One fort after another yielded; and in a fortnight from the taking of Drogheda Cromwell was master of the country north of Dublin. Marching from Dublin south, on September 23d, his army took forts in Wicklow, Arklow, and Enniscorthy; and on October 1st the general encamped before Wexford, an important seaport at the southeastern corner of the island. The town was strong, with a rampart fifteen feet thick, a garrison of over two thousand men, one hundred cannon, and in the harbor two ships armed with fifty-four guns.

Cromwell summoned the governor to surrender, not obscurely threatening him with the fate of Drogheda. "It will clearly appear," he said, "where the guilt will lie if innocent persons should come to suffer with the nocent." His terms were quarter and prison to the officers, quarter and freedom to the soldiers, protection from plunder to the town. These terms were refused, and both sides continued the fight. Suddenly, some breaches being made in the castle, the captain surrendered it, and by a surprise the whole army of the Commonwealth poured into the town. The townsmen took part in the defence; and townsmen and garrison together were forced into the market-place.

There, as at Drogheda, a promiscuous massacre ensued. Upward of two thousand were slain, and with them not a few of the citizens; and the town was delivered over to pillage. It is asserted by the Catholic writers that a body of women, who had taken refuge round the cross, were deliberately slaughtered, and that a general massacre took place without regard to sex or age. Priests were killed at once, and in the sack and pillage undoubtedly some noncombatants, it may be some women and children. But these things were incidents of such a storm, and were not done by design or order of the general. This is his own story:

"While I was preparing of it; studying to preserve the Town from plunder, that it might be of the more use to you and your Army--the Captain, who was one of the Commissioners, being fairly treated, yielded up the Castle to us. Upon the top of which our men no sooner appeared, but the Enemy quitted the Walls of the Town; which our men perceiving, ran violently upon the Town with their ladders, and stormed it. And when they were come into the market-place, the Enemy making a stiff resistance, our forces brake them; and then put all to the sword that came in their way. Two boatfuls of the Enemy attempting to escape, being overprest with numbers, sank; whereby were drowned near three hundred of them. I believe, in all, there was lost of the Enemy not many less than Two-thousand; and I believe not Twenty of yours from first to last of the Siege. And indeed it hath, not without cause, been deeply set upon our hearts, That, we intending better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the Town might be of more use to you and your Army, yet God would not have it so; but by an unexpected providence, in His righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them; causing them to become a prey to the Soldier--who in their piracies had made preys of so many families, and now with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they have exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants!

"This Town is now so in your power, that of the former inhabitants, I believe scarce one in twenty can challenge any property in their houses. Most of them are run away, and many of them killed in this service. And it were to be wished that an honest people would come and plant here."

The blow that had desolated Drogheda and Wexford did not need to be repeated. Ross was taken; the Munster garrisons--Cork, Kinsale, and others--joined the Commonwealth. And within three months of Cromwell's march from Dublin, the whole of the towns on the eastern and southern sides of Ireland, except Waterford and some others, were reduced to the Parliament. Waterford resisted them; a wet winter set in; and with the wet, dysentery and fever. Cromwell fell ill; many officers sickened; General Jones died. "What England lost hereby is above me to speak," wrote the general. "I am sure I lost a noble friend and companion in labors. You see how God mingles out the cup to us. Indeed we are at this time a crazy company: yet we live in His sight; and shall work the time that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in peace."

After a short rest, on January 29th Cromwell was again in the field. He passed into the heart of the island--into Kilkenny and Tipperary; Clogheen, Castletown, Fethard, Callan, Cashel, Cahir, Kilkenny, Carrick, were taken after a short defence; and Clonmel at last surrendered after a desperate attempt at storm, which cost Cromwell, it is said, two thousand men. This was his last great fight in Ireland. He had now crushed opposition in the whole east and south of the island; the north had returned to the Protestant cause; Waterford fell soon after; and except Limerick, Galway, and a few fortresses, the Parliament's forces were masters of the island. Cromwell had been nine months in Ireland, and at no time possessed an army of more than fifteen thousand men. Within that time he had taken a score of strong places, and in a series of bloody encounters had dispersed or annihilated armies of far greater number than his own. An official summons to England had been sent in January; and it was not till the end of May that he actually obeyed it.

As Cromwell's practice in warfare in Ireland differed somewhat from what he observed elsewhere, and as from that day to this it has been the subject of furious invective, a few words thereon are plainly needed. Cromwell had gone to Ireland, at imminent risk to his cause, to recover it to the Parliament in the shortest possible time, and with a relatively small army. He had gone there first to punish, as was believed, a wholesale massacre and a social revolution, to restore the Irish soil to England, and to replace the Protestant ascendency. In the view of the Commonwealth government, the mass was by law a crime, Catholic priests were legally outlaws, and all who resisted the Parliament were constructively guilty of murder and rebellion. Such were the accepted axioms of the whole Puritan party, and of Cromwell as much as any man.

In such a war he held that where a place was stormed after summons, all in arms might justly be put to the sword, though no longer capable of resistance, and though they amounted to thousands. "They," he writes, "refusing conditions seasonably offered, were all put to the sword." Repeatedly he shot all officers who surrendered at discretion. Officers who had once served the Parliament he hanged. Priests, taken alive, were hanged. "As for your clergymen, as you call them," wrote Oliver to the governor of Kilkenny, "in case you agree for a surrender, they shall march away safely; but if they fall otherwise into my hands, I believe they know what to expect from me." At Gowran the castle surrendered. "The next day the colonel, the major, and the rest of the commission officers were shot to death. In the same castle also he took a popish priest, who was chaplain to the Catholics in this regiment; who was caused to be hanged."

The Bishop of Ross, marching to save Clonmel with five thousand men, was defeated by Broghill, captured, and hanged in sight of his own men. The Bishop of Clogher was routed by Coote and Venables and shared the same fate. "All their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously," Cromwell wrote at Drogheda--as the Catholic martyrologies assert, with torture. Peaceable inhabitants were not to be molested. But all who had taken part in or supported the rebellion of 1641 were liable to justice.

For soldiers he found a new career. By a stroke of profound policy he encouraged foreign embassies to enlist Irish volunteers, giving them a free pass abroad. And thus it is said some forty thousand Irishmen ultimately passed into the service of foreign sovereigns. With great energy and skill the Lord-Lieutenant set about the reorganization of government in Ireland. A leading feature of this was the Cromwellian settlement afterward carried out under the Protectorate, by which immense tracts of land in the provinces of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were allotted to English settlers, and the landowners of Irish birth removed into Connaught.

Cromwell has left on record his own principles of action in the famous declaration which he issued in January in reply to the Irish bishops:

"Ireland," he says, "was once united to England. Englishmen had inheritances and leases which they had purchased: and they lived peaceably. You broke this Union. You, unprovoked, put the English to the most unheard-of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex or age) that ever the sun beheld. It is a fig-leaf of pretence that they fight for their king: really it is for men guilty of blood--_helium prelaticum et religiosum_--as you say. You are a part of Anti-Christ, whose kingdom the Scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood, yea, in the blood of the saints.

"You quote my own words at Ross," he says, "that where the Parliament of England have power, the exercise of the mass will not be allowed of; and you say that this is a design to extirpate the Catholic religion. I cannot extirpate what has never been rooted. These are my intentions. I shall not, where I have power, suffer the exercise of the mass. Nor shall I suffer any Papists, where I find them seducing the people, or by overt act violating the laws. As for the people, what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach."

But as to the charge of massacre, destruction, or banishment he says: "Give us an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed or banished; concerning the massacre or the destruction of whom justice hath not been done, or endeavored to be done."

This very pointed and daring challenge could hardly have been publicly made by such a man as Cromwell, if, to his knowledge, a slaughter of women and unarmed men had occurred. On the other hand, it is certain that priests and others had been killed in cold blood; and a general who delivers over a city to pillage, and forbids quarter, can hardly say where outrage and massacre will cease. As to banishment, the "Cromwellian settlement" was necessarily based on the banishment of those whom the settlers displaced.

With regard to the policy of confiscation and resettlement, Cromwell warmly justifies it. It is the just way of meeting rebellion, he says. You have forfeited your estates, and it is just to raise money by escheating your lands. But apart from the land forfeited, which is but a part of the account, if ever men were engaged in a just and righteous cause it was this, he asserts:

"We are come to ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed; and to endeavor to bring to an account--by the presence and blessing of the Almighty, in whom alone is our hope and strength--all who, by appearing in arms, seek to justify the same. We come to break the power of lawless Rebels, who having cast off the Authority of England, live as enemies to Human Society; whose principles, the world hath experience, are, To destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them. We come, by the assistance of God, to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English Liberty in a Nation where we have an undoubted right to do it;--wherein the people of Ireland (if they listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all benefits; to use liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms."

Such was the basis of the famous "Cromwellian settlement"--by far the most thorough act in the long history of the conquest of Ireland; by far the most wholesale effort to impose on Ireland the Protestant faith and English ascendency. Wholesale and thorough, but not enough for its purpose. It failed like all the others; did more, perhaps, than any other to bind Ireland to the Catholic Church, and to alienate Irishmen from the English rule. On the Irish race it has left undying memories and a legend of tyranny which is summed up in the peasants' saying of the "Curse of Cromwell."

Cromwell, not worse than the Puritans and English of his age, but nobler and more just, must yet for generations to come bear the weight of the legendary "curse." He was the incarnation of Puritan passion, the instrument of English ambition; the official authority by whom the whole work was carried out, the one man ultimately responsible for the rest; and it is thus that on him lies chiefly the weight of this secular national quarrel.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde, was now head of the Irish Royalists.--ED.

MOLIÈRE CREATES MODERN COMEDY

A.D. 1659

HENRI VAN LAUN

The seventeenth century was the period of a very remarkable
literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to
mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of
the century, which has been called the Augustan age of France,
the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in
the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it
owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to
the training of the decades previous to 1650, and especially to
the enthusiastic patronage of that great statesman Richelieu.
Were a Frenchman seeking for a single event, a single date to
mark the most striking moment of this literary era, he would
probably select the foundation of the French Academy by
Richelieu, in 1635. Or perhaps he might turn to the production
of Corneille's most famous tragedy, _Le Cid_, in 1633. Neither
of these events, however, has quite what we would recognize as
a world-wide significance. The Academy has done much for
France, but it has always remained a French academy, and the
forty "immortal" Frenchmen who constitute its membership have
not always owed their election solely to literary eminence.
Neither have Corneille's tragedies been accepted as models by
the world at large.

But under Corneille's influence the French stage developed from
a state of buffoonery and wooden imitation of the ancients to a
state where a greater artist than Corneille gave it really
world-wide prominence. Molière is not only the most celebrated
of French actor-managers; he is the greatest of all
character-comedy writers, the teacher of all future
generations, and the satiric scourge of his own. When in 1659
his comedy _Les précieuses Ridicules_ took Paris by storm, it
did more than make a reformation of the manners of its own. It
taught the world what true comedy should be, and it sent
ringing through the universe forever a mighty trumpet-note
against hypocrisy and folly.

The drama attained its highest excellence and repute in the age of Louis XIV, and we should not be making a very hazardous assertion if we were to say that the literature of that epoch in France attained its height of glory in the drama. No French dramatist has excelled Molière, Corneille, and Racine; no group of authors in the seventeenth century were more brilliant, more powerful, more originative. When we turn our eyes upon the stage for which these three wrote, we find ourselves in the full splendor of the Augustan age, in all its refinement and culture, its luxury and elegance, its strength of wit and justness of expression, its social polish and gorgeous display.

Great as was the advance made by the audience of Jodelle upon the audience of the "moralities" and "sotties," the advance of the court and society under the Valois was equally great. The Grand Monarque, listening to a masterpiece of Corneille, Molière, or Racine, surrounded by his brilliant circle of lords and ladies, represented an almost incalculable development of ceremonious culture, in idea, in apparel, and in general surroundings, since the day when, about a hundred years before, while the blossom of the Renaissance was barely expanded, the popinjay King Henry II looked on at the first crude sketch of a French classical play. Stage, scenery, appointments, audience, critic, music, actors, and authors, all now bore witness to and adorned, as they were in fact the most elaborate product of, an Augustan age.

Paris up to this time had had little opportunity of knowing what true comedy was. It had had farces in abundance, not only of home growth, but imported, and from Italy in particular. When Molière came before the public with his homogeneous and well-trained company, and his repertory of excellent character-sketches and comic situations, the prevailing sentiment was expressed by a member of the audience which listened to the first production of his _Précieuses Ridicules_: "Courage, Molière; this is genuine comedy!"

France had long been waiting for genuine comedy; waiting rather by an instinctive requirement of the national genius, and with an aptitude to appreciate the highest comic art as soon as it might be manifested, than with any definite conception of the exact thing that was lacking on the stage. The French nature was precisely fitted to produce and to enjoy the loftiest style of character-comedy, but no modern literature had hitherto exhibited that which Molière was to provide. The author of the _Précieuses Ridicules_ and _Tartuffe_ was essentially the outcome of his age, the dramatist of drawing-room life, whose genius enabled him to web the foibles of the salon with elegant phraseology, and scenic effect with admirable poetic expression; and the contrast between his lofty and conscientious work and the puerilities and license of the Spanish and Italian models was as marked as it was readily recognized.

Yet it was no easy matter to acclimatize in France even the high style of comedy introduced by Molière, and he had to inter-mix it with a good many farces to make it go down. For twelve long years, leading the life of a strolling player, Molière observed and studied character; and when at last he thought himself safe from opposition, under the powerful patronage of Louis XIV, the Church, the University, the Sorbonne, and the bigotry of the statesmen--once more united as in the age of Francis I--conspired to cast stumbling-blocks in the way of literary freedom. It was the authorities of the Church which, shocked and jealous at the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of _Tartuffe_, brought the veto of the King to bear against the company of the Palais Royal; and though Molière believed that his private intercession had obtained the removal of this veto, his enemies were bold and powerful enough during the absence of Louis, on the further representation of the play, to prevent its production a second time. Molière was able to cope with his adversaries; yet it is a noteworthy fact that the decree of excommunication passed against comedians in France was not absolutely rescinded until the present century.

We do not forget that Corneille wrote comedies before Molière; and indeed there is no doubt that the younger of the two dramatists owed something, even in comedy, to the older. Molière began by adapting from and imitating the Italian and Spanish comedy-writers, upon whom many of his first farces were founded, and it is not at all unlikely that he even remodelled some of the earlier sotties. It was perhaps due to Corneille's influence as much as to anything else that his genius at last discovered its true level. He confessed to Boileau his great indebtedness to _Le Menteur_. "When it was first performed," he says, "I had already a wish to write, but was in doubt as to what it should be. My ideas were still confused, but this piece determined them. In short, but for the appearance of _Le Menteur_, though I should no doubt have written comedies of intrigue, like _L'Etourdi_, or _Le Dépit Amoureux_, I should perhaps never have written the _Misanthrope_." Eliminate the generosity from this confession, and no doubt the truth remains that Molière did form his best style of comedy upon the master of French tragedy.

Jean Baptiste Poquelin, who subsequently assumed the name of Molière, was born in the year that François de Sales died, one year after the birth of La Fontaine, four years before the birth of his friend Chapelle and of Madame de Sévigné. When _Le Cid_ was first performed he was fourteen years old, and twenty-two at the time of the first representation of _Le Menteur_. The son of a _valet-de-chambre tapissier_ of Louis XIII, he succeeded in due course to the emoluments and honors, such as they were, of his father; but he had early conceived a passion for the stage, and in 1643 he attached himself to the Illustre Théâtre of Madeleine Béjart, a woman four years his senior. With her were already associated her brother Joseph, her sister Geneviève, about two years younger than Molière, and eight others, most of whom had dropped out of the company before its final settlement in Paris.

For a year or two the Illustre Théâtre tempted fortune in the capital without success, and in 1646 they commenced a tour through the provinces which was destined to continue for twelve years. The debts which they had incurred weighed upon them during the whole of this time, and principally upon Molière, who was once imprisoned and several times arrested at the suit of the company's creditors. No doubt these latter had discovered that the young actor had friends who would rescue him from durance, which was done on several occasions, but as late as 1660 we read of Molière's discharging probably the last of the debts for which at this period he made himself responsible.

The plays first acted by Molière and his friends were, of course, the farces then most in vogue; among others the comedies of Scarron and the yet inferior productions of Denis Beys and Desfontaines. The former had written a ridiculous piece called _L'Hôpital des Fous_. The latter was the author of _Eurymédon ou l'Illustre Pirate, l'Illustre Comédien ou le Martyre de Saint-Genes_, and of several other inflated pieces. It would be difficult to fix the exact date at which Molière's earliest plays were produced, but it is probable that he began to write for his company as soon as he had enlisted in it. He seems, like Shakespeare, to have, in part at least, adapted the plays of others; but in 1653, if not earlier, he had produced _L'Etourdi_, and in 1656 _Le Dépit Amoureux_.

The Illustre Théâtre is heard of at Nantes, Limoges, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Narbonne, and Lyons, where Molière produced his first serious attempt at high comedy in verse, _L'Etourdi_. In 1653 they played by invitation at the country seat of the Prince de Conti, the schoolfellow of Molière. Three years later they played the _Dépit Amoureux_ at Béziers during the meeting in that town of the Parliament of Languedoc. At Grenoble, in 1658, the painter Mignard, with other of his admirers, persuaded him to take his company--for he was joint manager with Madeleine Béjart--to Paris; and this he did, after a concluding trip to Rouen. In Paris they began by playing before Philippe, Duke of Anjou, the brother of Louis XIV, who took them under his protection and introduced them to the court.

At this time the company was considerably stronger, as well as richer, than when it left Paris. There were now four ladies, Madeleine Béjart, Geneviève Béjart, Duparc, and Debrie; the two brothers Béjart--the youngest, Louis, had joined at Lyons--Duparc, Debrie, Dufresne, and Croisac making, with Molière himself, eleven persons. It may be concluded that their tour, or, at all events, that part of it which dated from Lyons, had been very successful; for we find that Joseph Béjart, who died early in 1659, left behind him a fortune of twenty-four thousand golden crowns. So at least we are told by the physician Guy-Patin in a letter dated May 27, 1659; and he adds, "Is it not enough to make one believe that Peru is no longer in America, but in Paris?"

The condition of the drama in Paris at the time when Molière returned to the capital was anything but satisfactory. There were in 1658 five theatres in Paris: One at the Hôtel de Bourgogne; one at the Marais; one under the patronage of Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston, Duke of Orléans; a Spanish company; and an Italian company at the Petit Bourbon, under the managership of Torelli. It was with the first and last of these that Molière came chiefly into conflict; and it is probable that the other three were of no great account, at all events as competitors for the favor of the general public. Torelli soon found that the newcomer commanded his hundreds where he himself could only count by scores, and he gave up the Petit Bourbon to Molière in 1659.

Molière's company called themselves "Comédiens de Monsieur"; and after Torelli had left them full possession of the Petit Bourbon, their greatest rivals in public favor were the company at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, who played Corneille, Scudéry, Scarron, and other authors of less note. In 1659 Molière took the town by storm with his _Précieuses Ridicules_, a satire in one act on the exaggerations of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. This was followed in the succeeding year by _Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imaginaire_; in the beginning of 1661 appeared _Don Garcie de Navarre_, a heroic piece in five acts, intended to delineate the evils of passionate jealousy; and in the same year were produced _L'École des Maris_, a satire on unreasonable jealousy, and _Les Fâcheux_, a court sketch of several kinds of bores; in 1662 _L'École des Femmes_--an attempt to show the danger of bringing girls up in too strict a manner--with its sequel, the _Critique de l'École des Femmes_, in the year after.

Boursault, an amiable man but a mediocre playwright, envious of Molière's growing fame, wrote for the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which eagerly accepted, if it did not bespeak, his piece, _Le Portrait du Peintre ou la Contrecritique de l'École des Femmes_, in which he attempted to bring his brother-author into ridicule; but Molière took ample revenge in his _Impromptu de Versailles_, in which he soundly lashed his rivals, though it may be mentioned to his honor that it was never printed during his lifetime. In 1664 he wrote the _Mariage Forcé_, a one-act piece with eight _entrées de ballet_, specially designed for court representation, in which the King himself was pleased to dance, and, a month or two later, the _Princesse d'Elide_, a cumbrous and comparatively inferior production, done in great haste at the command of Louis XIV, who had determined upon an eight-days' festival in honor of Louise de la Vallière.

It was during these festivities that for the first time was represented the first three acts of Molière's masterpiece, _Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur_, a play well worthy of the best and most legitimate subject which satire can have to deal with. Nothing can be fairer or more appropriate than that the art which consists in feigning a representation of real life on the stage should take, as the butt of its ridicule and the object of its skill, the man whose whole life and character are engaged in feigning the possession of virtue and seeming to be that which he is not. The earliest satirists and dramatists have seized on the topic with avidity; and to go no further out of our way than Molière's predecessors in France, we may mention the authors of the romance of _Reynard the Fox_, Ruteboeuf; Jean de Meung, the author of the _Farce des Brus_, Regnier, Scarron, even Pascal.

Very various, no doubt, are the hypocritical types encountered in the works of these and other satirists; but all must necessarily have a certain amount of family likeness, and many a hereditary trait is recognized as common to at least two, if not to all, of the race. "Molière gives us the hypocrite by nature, the man who would be a canting scoundrel even if it did not 'pay'; who cannot help being so; who is a human being, and therefore not perfect; who is a man, and thus sensually inclined; who employs certain means to subdue his passions and to become a 'whited sepulchre,' but who gives way all the more to them when he imagines that he can do so with impunity." Tartuffe, who ought to be bound to Orgon by the strongest ties of gratitude, allows the son to be turned out of the house by his father, because the latter will not believe the accusations brought against the hypocrite--tries to seduce his benefactor's wife, to marry his daughter by a first marriage; and finally, after having obtained all his dupe's property, betrays him to the king as a criminal against the state. The _dénouement_ of the play is that Tartuffe himself is led to prison, and that vice is for the nonce punished on the stage as it deserves to be.

_Tartuffe_ made many enemies for Molière, especially among the clergy, who were not afraid of being twitted with their too ready application to themselves of the moral of the play. It was prohibited in 1664; and some zealous clergymen even went so far as to write treatises which they hoped would counteract the effects of the dramatist's works. For their own sakes we may hope that they did not succeed. The King was not strong enough to withstand the influence of the clergy, and did not venture at once to remove the interdict. The relaxation did not take place until five years later. But it was at this time that Louis XIV bestowed on Molière's company the name of "Comédiens du Roi"; and the troop was subsidied by a yearly pension of seven thousand livres.

_Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre_, a piece in which a nobleman--who is a libertine as well as a sceptic and a hypocrite--is brought upon the stage, was first acted in February, 1665, and raised such an outcry that it was also forbidden to be played. In spite of failing health and serious depression of spirits, Molière continued to produce play after play; and some of his best and most admired were the fruits of his most unhappy moments.

Early in 1662 he had married Armande Béjart, the youngest sister of Madeleine Béjart, who was about twenty years younger than her husband. It was apparently a marriage of mutual affection, but it can hardly be said to have been a fortunate one for either. Armande loved admiration from whatever source, and indulged in pleasures which her husband could not share. The breach between them gradually widened, and it was not till 1671 that their friends brought about a better understanding between them. Meanwhile, in September, 1665, appeared _L'Amour Médecin_, a comedy in three acts, in which a lover appears disguised as a physician, to cure the object of his love, pretends to be dumb, and in which Molière makes his first serious attack against the doctors.

It was acted only a few times when the theatre had to be closed on account of the author's illness; and the death of Anne of Austria, in the spring of 1666, delayed its reopening until June of that year. It was then that the _Misanthrope_ was introduced to the public--a play which has been ranked as high in comedy as _Athalie_ is ranked in French tragedy. The circumstances under which it was written were such as might almost warrant us in calling it a tragedy; for the great satirist, who had spent his life in copying the eccentricities of others, had now employed the season of his illness to commit to paper a drama in which he was himself the principal actor. The misanthrope Alceste loves the coquette Célimène, almost against his will; and we can imagine the feelings with which Molière himself took the _rôle_ of Alceste to his wife's Célimène.

In 1669 the King, growing more independent of his advisers, sanctioned the production of _Tartuffe_; but this strengthening of his repertory did not prevent Molière producing _Monsieur de Pourceaudnac_, a farcical comedy in three acts, in which there is a masterly and not exaggerated sketch of a consultation of doctors in Molière's time; and, in 1670, the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, in which the folly of aping noblemen is delineated, as well as the _Amants Magnifiques_, a comedy-ballet for the particular behoof of the court. In 1671 he combined with Corneille and Quinault in the production of _Psyche_, a tragedy-ballet, and wrote, or rather, perhaps, remodelled from among his earlier efforts, the _Fourberies de Scapin_ and the _Comtesse d'Escarbagnas_.

His two last works were among the highest and happiest creations of his genius--the _Femmes Savantes_, a sort of sequel to the _Précieuses Ridicules_, though of a more general application--and the _Malade Imaginaire_. In the latter, he insisted on playing the part of Argan upon the first representation, February 10, 1673; but it was the crowning act of his energetic mind. He became ill during the fourth representation of the play, and died that same evening, February 17th, exactly one year after Madeleine Béjart, with whom, seven-and-twenty years ago, he had set out from Paris with little more ambition than that of earning a livelihood by the pursuit of a congenial career.

Molière placed upon the stage nearly all human passions which lend themselves to comedy or farce. Sordid avarice, lavish prodigality, shameless vice, womanly resignation, artless coquetry, greed for money, downright hypocrisy, would-be gentility, self-sufficient vanity, fashionable swindling, misanthropy, heartlessness, plain common-sense, knowledge of the world, coarse jealousy, irresolution, impudence, pride of birth, egotism, self-conceit, pusillanimity, ingenuity, roguery, affectations, homeliness, thoughtlessness, pedantry, arrogance, and many more faults and vices, find their representatives. The language which they employ is always natural to them, and is neither too gross nor over-refined. His verse has none of the stiffness of the ordinary French rhyme, and becomes in his hands, as well as his prose, a delightful medium for sparkling sallies, bitter sarcasms, and well-sustained and sprightly conversations.

And how remarkable and delicate is the nuance between his different characters, though they may represent the same profession or an identical personage. None of his doctors are alike; his male and female scholars are all dissimilar. Mascarille is not Gros-Réné, Scapin is not Sbrigani, Don Juan is not Dorante, Alceste is not Philinte, Isabelle is not Agnes, Sganarelle is not always the same, Ariste is not Béralde nor Chrysalde; while even his servants, Nicole, Dorine, Martine, Marotte, Toinette, Claudine, and Lisette; his boobies, such as Alain and Lubin, and his intriguants in petticoats, such as Nérine, Lucette, Frosine, vary in character, expression, and conduct. They exemplify the saying, "Like master, like man."

A remarkable characteristic of Molière is that he does not exaggerate; his fools are never overwitty, his buffoons too grotesque, his men of wit too anxious to display their smartness, nor his fine gentlemen too fond of immodest and ribald talk. His satire is always kept within bounds, his repartees are never out of place, his plots are but seldom intricate, and the moral of his plays is not obtruded, but follows as a natural consequence of the whole. He rarely rises to those lofty realms of poetry where Shakespeare so often soars, for he wrote not idealistic, but character, comedies; which is, perhaps, the reason that some of his would-be admirers consider him rather commonplace. His claim to distinction is based only on strong common-sense, good manners, sound morality, real wit, true humor, a great, facile, and accurate command of language, and a photographic delineation of nature.

It cannot be denied that there is little action in his plays, but there is a great deal of natural conversation; his personages show that he was a most attentive observer of men, even at court, where a certain varnish of overrefinement conceals nearly all individual features. He generally makes vice appear in its most ridiculous aspect, in order to let his audience laugh and despise it; his aim is to correct the follies of the age by exposing them to ridicule.

CROMWELL'S RULE IN ENGLAND

THE RESTORATION

A.D. 1660

THOMAS CARLYLE JOHN R. GREEN SAMUEL PEPYS

Brief as was the duration of the Protectorate under Oliver
Cromwell, it was one of the most extraordinary periods in
English history. It is now commonly admitted that Cromwell was
England's greatest ruler. After his first appearance in
Charles' third parliament (1628), at the age of twenty-nine,
Cromwell returned to the obscurity of his Huntingdon home. Not
until he entered the Long Parliament (1640) did he really begin
his marvellous career.

However variously judged by his contemporaries and by later
generations, Cromwell's part in the world's affairs was of
unquestioned magnitude. The very greatness of his career, the
power and extent of his influence, and the combination of
various elements in his character have made adequate judgment
of him difficult, and general agreement concerning him wellnigh
impossible. But that he was, at all events, "the most typical
Englishman of his time" is now generally acknowledged.

In the three views here presented, Cromwell's character and
career and the Restoration are set forth from quite different
points of view. Carlyle shows us in Cromwell one of his most
admired heroes; Green gives us the modern historian's
dispassionate conclusions; while the contemporary narrative of
the old diarist, Pepys, preserves the personal observations of
a participator in the scenes which he describes. Charles II had
spent years in exile on the Continent. He was finally
proclaimed King of England at Westminster, May 8, 1660. Pepys
describes his convoy from Holland to Dover, and his reception
by the people who had invited him to return to his country and
his throne.

THOMAS CARLYLE

We have had many civil-wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses, wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough which are not very memorable. But that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no one of the others. Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on the other side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section once more of that great universal war which alone makes-up the true History of the World,--the war of Belief against Unbelief!

The struggle of men intent on the real essence of things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. The Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms; but it were more just to call them haters of _untrue_ Forms. I hope we know how to respect Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest; an unfortunate Pedant rather than anything worse. His "Dreams" and superstitions, at which they laugh so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable, luckless notion of his, at the head not of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex, deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations; nay, that their salvation will lie in extending and improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence toward his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians; that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a College of that kind, and the world _was not_ that. Alas! was not his doom stern enough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged on him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the only habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity--praising only the spirit which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe themselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which _grow_ round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good; forms which are consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the commonest meeting of men, a person making what we call "set speeches," is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling, knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any utterance there possible--what should we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man--let him depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks!

Such mummery is not only not to be accepted--it is hateful, unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called "Idolatry," worshipping of hollow _shows_; what all earnest men do and will reject. We can partly understand what these poor Puritans meant. Laud dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church in the manner we have it described, with his multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal _Pedant_, intent on his "College-rules," than the earnest Prophet, intent on the essence of the matter!

Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;--we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into the earnest _souls_ of men: is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with _due_ semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living _man_, there will be found _clothes_ for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is both clothes and man--!--We cannot "fight the French" by three-hundred-thousand red uniforms; there must be _men_ in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must actually _not_ divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do--why, then there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to fierce battle over England in that age; and fought-out their confused controversy to a certain length, with many results for all of us.

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered-in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on gibbets--like the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We have our _Habeas-Corpus_, our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call _free_ men;--men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not on tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part, and much besides this, was the work of the Puritans.

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after another, taken _down_ from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them are now, in these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes; political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what makes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate these men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth; but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical _Tartuffe_; turning all that noble Struggle for constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his own benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell. And then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined into a futility and deformity.

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish men; but if we will consider it, they are but _figures_ for us, unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have existed at all. A superficial, unbelieving generation only, with no eye but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notions of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a _conscience_ in it, the essence of all _real_ souls, great or small? No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study him and his career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is no evidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as the very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof!--Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness.