Some Thoughts on the Dramatic Arts
There is an impression
I have felt about Horace that I wish to share with you, not
because of
a liking for paradox but through simple sincerity. It is
understood amongst scholars of a certain rank that local colour
is totally missing in XVIIth century tragedy. On this both
classicists and romanticists agree; the only difference is that
one says so much the better and the other so much the worse. Well, it
seems to me that nothing could be more Roman than Horace. I
have
neither the time not the pretension to explain it to you at great
length: but observe, please, the thoroughly Roman character of
the old Horace. First of all, he sacrifices everything to the
interests of Rome, which, by the way, is also common to the young
Horace. Now, is he sufficiently pater familias, this old
warrior? Do we really think he has the right of life and death
over his children?
Is he sufficiently terrible and sufficiently
Roman when he "testifies to the gods the supreme
powers", that he is going to kill his son who has fled? I
have been told that Saint-Marc Girardin has observed this
character of pater familias. So, I have an authority.
Finally, do you not find that, the consciousness of the greatness
of the life eternal does not vibrate in these virile and solid
verses as much as the love of Rome? Do you not think that Horace
must have had as much Romanism as the Aeneid, so that we
cannot
but laugh, (not with Paul Mounet) on hearing an actor declaim:
"The gods promised this glory to our Aeneid".
One scruple stops me in the end. Perhaps I am mistaken. Because I
was going to give you in conclusion, as a supremely
Roman character, that of Valère. You know that d'Aubigné did
not like his long speech for the defence in act 5, long refuted:
he wanted a duel. Corneille responded that a Frenchman would
fight but a Roman would debate and argue! So that the local
colour in Corneille (I do not need to say that it is totally
moral, totally interior, totally in character) is reasoned,
foreseen, intentional. But I tell myself: this Roman
characteristic of defence council, this genius of advocacy, is
that of Corneille's. Rodrigue is a barrister, as is Chimène, Don
Diègue and Géronte as well, and all the rest. Well then I am
wrong. What I took for local colour is nothing but an
inexplicable atavism, and if Corneille gives his heroes the soul
that we identify with the ancient Romans, it is because that soul
is his own, at the same time both sublime and subtle, born of
heroism and reason, the soul of a patriotic soldier and a patient
barrister. Nevertheless, it is again the only one with local
colour. After so many contradictions I dare not make any further
conclusion...
Marcel Proust
Le Lundi, 5 December 1887.