Laughs That Won’t Go Away

Another reason to beware of mixing heart with laughs

The One Goal

Francisque Sarcey in his ‘Treatise on the Theater’ or Essai d’une Esthétique de Théâtre (a series of columns he wrote in the summer of 1876) was adamant that tragedy and comedy do not mix in the theater. Thus if a playwright’s aim was pity, fear, or tears, let him not seek to inspire laughs except briefly; if his aim was laughter, let him not try for pathos unless it be pleasant and sweet, such as the (assuredly temporary) parting of lovers. In his columns, Sarcey admitted of several exceptions, which had the effect of diluting his position to the notion that a play ought not be equally balanced between tears and laughs. All the same, when it came to comedy, he was strongly of the opinion that a wise playmaker would follow Molière’s example and go for laughs from the rising of the curtain to its final falling.

My Own Addition

Sarcey wrote from first principles, and the columns he left us in this series can only serve as the general introduction of the much-longer work he would have given us had he treated the matter seriously. Instead he merely filled in the weeks between new plays of any note, in the summer doldrums of the year 1867, with this columns, and as soon as new plays opened in September he was back on his regular beat reviewing. This is most unfortunate, since it means Sarcey never got round to detailing the specific observations he had made, such as ‘les scènes à faire,’ and other more technical matters, which are so specific that they would have filled the later heart and end of whatever tome he might have produced.

This note of mine may have been something Sarcey had noted; it is possible that the comedies of Sarcey’s time were not so parodic, satiric, or postmodern that the notion would have occurred to him. It certainly would have occurred to him had he written in 1976 or later.

The idea is this:

When a talesman gets his audience to laughing, it is hard to get them to take anything seriously.

This of course implies that the way the talesman has got his audience to laughing, is laughing at the situation before them, and not with the characters (at least not with most of them).

Once he has won his audience to that point, should the talesman then present them with any serious matter whatsoever, which he himself takes seriously, as do the characters themselves, the audience will not take them seriously. Not at first. At first we will be looking for the moment when the tenderness, the grief, will be undermined by a pratfall, something that robs the characters of their dignity. In short we won’t know how to take it … what’s this, something serious and heartfelt? Nah, must be just a setup for a fart, belch, stumble, or fraud.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 3, 2008)

Sarcey - Treatise on the Theater - Notes by Brander Matthews

Francisque Sarcey (1827–1899) was a graduate of the Ecole Normale, having as classmates, Taine, Edmont About and Prévost-Paradol. In his ‘Souvenirs de Jeunesse’ (1844), of which there is a translation in English, he has left an amusing account of his student years. Upon his graduation he was duly appointed as a professor of French literature in one of the smaller cities of France. Those were the most dismal and depressing days of the Second Empire; and Sarcey’s frankness in expressing his liberal opinions rendered it certain that he could not hope for promotion. In 1858 Edmond About persuaded him to drop teaching for journalism,—just as Jules Lemaitre was to do a quarter of a century later.

At first Sarcey was a journalistic free lance, writing in all the periodicals, daily or weekly, which he could persuade to accept his articles and writing on all sorts of subjects, literary and linguistic, social and political. It was only after several years of this miscellaneous newspaper hackwork, that he began to specialize as a theatrical reviewer; and he attracted little attention until 1867 when he was appointed dramatic critic of the Temps, then as now the most reputable and the most dignified of Parisian dailies. Thereafter for forty-two years he contributed to the Temps every Sunday afternoon a dramatic criticism, which came speedily to possess an indisputable authority.

In 1878 he began a series of studies of the actors and actresses of the Comédie-Française and of the other important theaters of Paris,—‘Comédiens et Comédiennes.’ He continued to contribute to various newspapers articles on topics of contemporary interest, social and political. He became a frequent lecturer; and in his ‘Souvenirs d’Age Mur’ (1892), also translated into English, he analized with his characteristic acuteness the principles of public speaking. He refused regretfully an invitation to become a member of the French Academy, fearing that he would not be free to express his opinions frankly and fully. He declined also the cross of the Legion of Honor; and he declared that all he wanted upon his tombstone was the record that he had been both “Professor and Journalist.”

At the beginning of the first volume of ‘Quarante Ans de Théâtre,’ the editor printed a selection from the many warmly appreciative articles which appeared in the French press immediately after Sarcey’s death in 1899. Noteworthy among these were the tributes of Jules Claretie, Jules Lemaitre and Emile Faguet. Jules Lemaitre had earlier publisht in the second volume of his ‘Contemporains’ a characteristically clever study of Sarcey. The article by Henry James, (to which reference is made in the Introduction) is entitled the ‘Théâtre Français’; and it is included in his volume on ‘French Poets and Novelists’ (1878).

The essential point of Sarcey’s attempt to formulate a theory of the theater is that all the laws of the drama are the result of the fact that every play is intended to be performed before an audience, and that therefore the desires, the opinions, and the prejudices of the spectators must always be taken into account. No one has declared this undeniable truth so completely as Sarcey. Yet other French critics have set forth similar views. In his lectures on the ‘Epochs of the French Theater’ Ferdinand Brunetière pointed out that altho men of letters in France between 1550 and 1600 were trying to write plays, there were then no professional actors, no regular theater, and therefore no public before which plays could be performed:—“Now a play does not begin to exist as a play except before the footlights, by virtue of the collaboration and of the complicity of the public, without which a play never has been, and never can be, anything more than a mere literary exercise.”

In Jules Lemaitre’s ‘Corneille et la Poétique d’Aristote’ there is an account of the vain struggles of Corneille against the rigors of the classicist code which the Italian critics had elaborated from their misreading of Aristotle; and Lemaitre quoted Corneille’s plea for permission to employ a neutral ground, not specifically anywhere, in which all the characters of a tragedy might be supposed to meet. Corneille defined this as a “theatrical fiction,” akin to the legal fictions accepted by lawyers; and Lemaitre commented that the theatrical fictions which Corneille askt the privilege of using are simply what we now know as the conventions of the drama:—

“If the characters of tragedy speak in verse,—that is a convention. If they meet every time they have something to say to one another,—that is a convention. If they talk aloud when they are alone,—that is a convention. If the poet develops under our eyes a single action, altho there are are none in real life not tangled up with a host of others,—that is a convention. He who seeks to abolish conventions can only change them. The alleged Rules of the unity of Time and the unity of Place had for their purpose, as Corneille admits, to suppress certain conventions, which were, however, easily acceptable; and then, to obey these Rules, Corneille invents conventions of his own, far less simple and far more difficult to accept,” (pp. 67–68).

In the preface to his ‘Etrangère,’ the younger Dumas with his customary incisiveness lends his support to Sarcey, altho without mentioning him:—“In all the arts there is a share, larger or smaller but indispensable, which must be left to convention. Sculpture lacks color; painting lacks relief; and they are rarely, either the one or the other, of the dimensions of the object they represent. The more richly you bestow on a statue the colors of life. . . . Nature is the basis, the means of art, it is not the aim of art. . . . Whether he wields the mallet, the pen or the brush, the artist really merits the name only when he can give a soul to the things of matter and a form to the things of the soul, when, in a word, he idealizes the real he sees and realizes the ideal he feels.”

B. M.

The Ink on Cromwell’s Face

There are more reasons than one to include a scene; sometimes buffoonery adds to horror.

Sarcey on the Mixing of Laughs and Tears

In his treatise on drama or Essai d’une Esthétique de Théâtre Francisque Sarcey wrote that he considered it a mistake to mix comedy and tragedy within a single play. This had been a matter of some controversy in the French theater in the 1900s, ever since Hugo and the Romantics broke that and other conventions of the classical French drama.

Sarcey’s comments have been posted here in both the original French (transcribed from an image-pdf available online of Sarcey’s collection of writings, Quarante Ans du Théâtre which was published in 1900) and in Brander Matthews’s 1916 translation (transcribed from the image-pdf edition at Google Books). In this essay, Sarcey mentions Victor Hugo’s Preface to his play Cromwell on mixing one particular bit of clowning, which Hugo claimed to be an historical fact. Here are the relevant passages from Sarcey, who disputes the opinion that ‘since comedy and tragedy mix in real life, it is appropriate to mix them on stage’ —

C’est cette vue fort simple que Victor Hugo, en son admirable préface de Cromwell, a développée dans ce style tout plein d’images qui lui est propre. Je préfère citer ce morceau éblouissant:

«Dans le drame, tel qu’on peut sinon l’exécuter, du moins le concevoir, tout s’enchaîne et se déduit ainsi que dans la réalité…

«Ainsi Cromwell dira: J’ai le parlement dans mon sac et le roi dans ma poche ou de la main qui signe l’arrêt de mort de Charles I^er, barbouillera d’encre le visage d’un régicide, qui le lui rendra en riant. Ainsi César dans le char de triomphe, aura peur de verser, car les hommes de génie, si grands qu’ils soient, ont toujours en eux leur bête qui parodie leur intelligence. C’est par là qu’ils touchent à l’humanité et c’est par là qu’ils sont dramatiques.

«Du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a qu’un pas, disait Napoléon quand il fut convaincu d’être homme, et cet éclair d’une âme de feu qui s’entr’ouvre illumine à fois l’art et l’histoire, ce cri d’angoisse est le résumé du drame de la vie.»

Voilà de superbe éloquence. Mais les grands poètes ne sont pas toujours des philosophes très exacts. La question est mal posée. Il ne s’agit pas du tout de savoir si dans la vie, le bouffon se mêle au terrible, en d’autres termes, si la trame des événements humains fournit, à ceux qui en sont ou les témoins ou les acteurs, de quoi rire et pleurer tour à tour, c’est là une vérité qui n’est pas contestable et qui n’a jamais été contestée.

Les données du problème sont tout autres.

Douze cents personnes sont réunie dans une même salle et forment un public de théâtre. Ces douze cents personnes sont-elles aptes à passer aisément des larmes au rire et du rire aux larmes? Est-on maître de transporter ce public d’une impression à l’autre, et ne risque-t-on pas de les affaiblir toutes les deux par ce contraste subit?

Par exemple, pour se renfermer dans les traits historiques que cite Victor Hugo, il ne s’agit pas du tout de savoir si Cromwell, après avoir signé l’arrêt de mort de Charles I^er, a ou n’a pas barbouillé d’encre le visage d’un de ses collègues; si cette plaisanterie grossière, a ou n’a pas excité un rire épais dans l’assemblée. Le fait est authentique; on ne saurait donc le contester. Ce qu’on demande (en art dramatique au moins); c’est uniquement si le fait jeté tel quel sur la scène a chance de plaire à douze cents personnes réunies.

Ces douze cents personnes sont tout occupées de la mort de Charles I^er, sur laquelle on a cherché à les apitoyer. Elles versent des larmes de sympathie et de tendresse. On leur met tout à coup, sous les yeux, un acte de bouffonnerie burlesque, en alléguant que, dans la réalité, le grotesque se mêle sans art au tragique. Riront-ils? et s’ils rient, éprouveront-ils une satisfaction véritable? ce rire ne leur gâtera-t-il pas la douleur à laquelle ils avaient plaisir à s’abandonner?

And in the translation by Brander Matthews —

It is this very simple view that Victor Hugo sets forth in his admirable preface to ‘Cromwell’ in that highly imaginative style which is so characteristic of him. I prefer to quote this brilliant passage:

“In drama, as one may conceive it, even tho he is unable to write it, everything is linkt together and everything follows in sequence as in real life…

Thus Cromwell will say: ‘I have Parliament in my bag and the king in my pocket,’ or with the hand which signs the death warrant of Charles I. he will smear with ink the face of a regicide who does the same to him laughingly. Thus Caesar in the triumphal chariot is afraid of upsetting; for men of genius however great they may be have in them an imp which parodies their intelligence. It is by this quality that they link themselves with humanity and it is by this that they are dramatic.

‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is only one step,’ said Napoleon when he was convicted of being human, and this flash from a fiery soul laid bare illumines at once art and history, this cry of anguish is the summing up of drama and of life.”

That is superb eloquence. But the great poets are not always very exact thinkers. The question is badly put. We are not at all concerned to know whether in real life the ludicrous is mingled with the terrible; in other words, whether the course of human events furnishes by turns to those who are either spectators or participants food for laughter and for tears. That is the one truth which no one questions and which has never been questioned. But the point at issue is altogether different. Twelve hundred persons are gathered together in the same room and form an audience. Are these twelve hundred persons likely to pass easily from tears to laughter and from laughter to tears? Is the playwright capable of transporting the audience from the one impression to the other? And does he not run the risk of enfeebling both impressions by this sudden contrast?

For example, to confine ourselves to the historic incidents cited by Victor Hugo, it does not at all concern us to know whether Cromwell after having signed the death warrant of Charles I. did or did not smear with ink the face of one of his colleags; whether this coarse pleasantry did or did not give rise to a coarse laugh in the assembly. The fact is authentic; we do not attempt to question it. The only thing we ask (in dramatic art, at least) is whether the fact, if placed on the stage just as it happened, is likely to please the twelve hundred persons in the audience.

These twelve hundred persons are entirely occupied with the death of Charles I. concerning which the author has sought to stir their pity. They are shedding tears of sympathy and tenderness. Suddenly the author places before them an act of broad buffoonery, alleging that in reality the grotesque mingles artlessly with the tragic. Do they laugh? And if they laugh do they experience a genuine satisfaction? Does not this laughter spoil the grief to which they found pleasure in abandoning themselves?

Contrasts Emphasize

It is not my task here to put words in the mouth of the great M. Hugo. Nor do I wish to argue against M. Sarcey on terms other than those he chose. All I want to do is to use this example to look deeper into the matter of why and how a talesman might justify including in his tale the ink on Cromwell’s face.

First (to stick to the topic of comedy vs. tragedy) we must say that opposites, in building stark contrast, can redouble each other’s effects. If Hugo gets his audience to laugh at the ink on Cromwell’s face, and then feel guilty about it, he turns them into accomplices in the regicide, and deepens their grief and horror at the unfortunate king’s fate. They may well feel more pity for the king, if they feel they have taken part in acceding to his execution.

Laughter is not all One

Then there is the matter of what sort of laughter the scene evokes — and what sort of laughter it paints. It can be a wholesome belly-laugh, which indeed is the only kind of laugh that Sarcey seems to indicate. But it could also be a nervous laughter, both on the part of the audience and the characters. It could be the clowning serves as a distraction both to the audience and to Parliament, away from the act they contemplate, and have authorized. Not all laughter is wholesome, and not all laughter comes from mirth. Sometimes we laugh because we can no longer bear the tension of something terrible.

Character and Distance

There is also another matter, for if we the audience fail to find the clowning funny, we then remove our sympathies with the clowns. Humor often joins us with the humorist; if he makes us laugh, he brings us to his side. But if he fails, he ‘dies’ on stage. And any audience that does not find the ink on Cromwell’s face to be funny, will at once step apart from him, and look upon him, his partner, and the whole Parliament, from the outside, and disapprovingly.

Character and Buffoonery

Now let’s go back to M. Hugo’s assertion that the scene is historically accurate, that it actually took place. M. Sarcey does not dispute this; I myself have no idea one way or the other. But let us say that it is true. Then we have something that bears intently upon the character of Cromwell. If Hugo in his play wanted to show who Cromwell really was (that ambition is at odds with everything Hugo stood for as a poet, but it would bear upon what many historical talesmen seek to achieve) then this ‘crowning’ act of his career, this pivotal point in British history, the execution of Charles I, must be examined as one of the keys to who Cromwell (or at least Hugo’s idea of Cromwell) really was.

Very well: M. Hugo finds in his research this odd and jarring note: upon signing the king’s death-warrant, Cromwell and his aide daub each other’s faces with the ink from the warrant, and both laugh. The image is striking, and would certainly strike M. Hugo, for Hugo adored contrasts; pitching the sublime against the ridiculous was in some ways the essence of Romanticism and Hugo’s art. Hugo would not be able to get the image out of his head; he then would not be able to resist including it in his play. For Hugo, the ink on Cromwell’s face somehow touches on the very nerve of Cromwell’s character. What sort of man is it, who could indulge in this bit of buffoonery at such a moment, and then heartily laugh at the result? This is who M. Hugo’s Cromwell is. This is what M. Hugo’s Protestants were; such is the character of these men in this time.

Clowns and the Art of Seduction

Finally, we look at the martial strategies of the talesman. Here we regard the talesman as the puppet-master and us the audience are his puppets. M. Hugo paints us a scene that will frighten us, make us uneasy. (We must remember that the French theatergoers of the 1900s bore the execution of their own monarch in the Revolution as almost current events; the Revolution split France into two camps that waged war for over a century, the Right that stuck to kings, church, and authoritarian rule by the elites, and the Left that clamored for equal rights for all, civil government, and even communism. M. Hugo surely would have written his Cromwell both as historical piece and with an eye toward his own country’s past. In the same way his audience would have been moved to recall the death of the unfortunate Louis alongside that of the unfortunate Charles.)

What can M. Hugo the talesman do to relieve us of our unquiet, to make us hate Cromwell a little bit less? He can make Cromwell laugh, at a bit of foolery such as any boy would love. He can make us all laugh with him.

The laugh is the clown’s sure path to the boudoir of his sought-after lady love.

It is also his path into the hearts of his audience.

One Scene Many Uses

I have spoken out of both sides of my mouth here. I have said the scene is useful because it makes us laugh; I have said it is useful because it leaves us cold. I have said it wins us to Cromwell’s side; I have said it sets us apart from him and makes us dislike and mistrust him more.

Well, which is it?

That depends upon the talesman. No talesman but the highest genius could hope to win both opposite effects at once; it may be doubted whether even the highest genius could do it. But a master talesman could pick one or the other, and use that to his purpose, depending on his aims for the tale as a whole.

So we can say that, while setting aside M. Hugo’s argument that ‘because it happened, I must include it’ as weak, and agreeing with M. Sarcey that it is the effect that plays in the house that matters to the 1200 souls who have bought the night’s tickets, we can all the same state that there are several legitimate and forceful uses the ink on Cromwell’s face could be put to, and any one of them demands its inclusion.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, April 24, 2008)

Of Paint and Plays

The three elements the talesman must work

Sarcey and the Stage

Francisque Sarcey was the drama critique in Paris for 40 years, from 1859–1899. I have been transcribing his Essai d’une Esthétique de Théâtre from his originally-published newspaper columns which appeared in 1876, and from Brander Matthews’s abridged translation which appeared in book form in 1916.

In preparing to discuss the theater, Sarcey makes analogy with painting:

Au lieu qu’on cherche toujours à la façon des théologiens, les lois d’un art dans la contemplations de je ne sais quel beau idéal, qui serait une émanation de la divinité, ou dans l’étude de ce qu’on appelle l’âme humaine, nous nous plaçons sur le terrain des faits sensibles.

Le peintre prend un morceau de bois ou un lambeau de toile, pour y représenter la vie humaine. C’est une surface plane, n’est-ce pas? Voilà un fait sûr, indéniable. Nous partons de là.

Eh bien, regardons de même pour l’art dramatique, s’il n’y a pas un fait aussi certain que peut l’être celui-là dans la peinture et qui soit également pour lui une condition absolue d’existence et de développement. Si nous le trouvons, nous en pourrons tirer logiquement des conséquences de cet œil; les autres son changeantes, puisqu’elles ne sont commandées que par des accidents de l’organe.

—And here is how Brander Matthews translates it (he takes the third paragraph from a later part of the treatise):

“The first question to be settled then is that of the conditions, material or moral, in which resides necessarily and inevitably the art of which we speak. As it is impossible to separate the art from these conditions, as it lives only thru and by them, as it is not a subtle inspiration wafted from heaven or emanating from the depths of the human mind, but something wholly concrete and definite which, like all living things, cannot exist except in the environment to which it is adapted, we are moved naturally to analize this environment to which the art has accommodated its life, from which it has sprung, so to speak, by a series of successive developments, and of which it will always retain the impress. The painter takes a bit of wood or a scrap of canvas on which to represent life. It is a plane surface, is it not? Here is a fact, sure, undeniable. We will set out from there.

“In the same way let us inquire concerning dramatic art if there is not also a fact which corresponds to this fact in painting and which is in like manner the indispensable condition of its existence and development. If we find this fact we shall be able to draw logically some conclusions as incontestable as the fact itself; and we shall discover afterwards the proof of these conclusions in the history of the art.

“Now, in regard to the theater there is one fact which cannot fail to strike the least attentive; it is the presence of an audience. The word play carries with it the idea of an audience. We cannot conceive of a play without an audience.”

I have some additions to Sarcey’s analogy which I hope will shed more light on it.

Paint

First let’s go back to painting. The board or canvas is not enough; the painter also has need of pigments and some means of applying the pigments to the board or canvas — brush, knife, stylus, thumb, sponge, or something else. A third element comes into play, which is the eye of the viewer. Seurat used the science of optics to construct his great pointillist masterpieces (so Sarcey was also a bit naïve when he said that the chemist had nothing to teach the gardener), so that the individual dots of pigment would be mixed within the eye of the viewer to make an impression of color more vibrant than if the eye merely received passively a flat expanse of one hue.

So in painting, the painter must deal with the canvas, the pigments and his tools, with the aim of pleasing the eye of his viewers.

Plays

In a like way, the playwright deals with the stage (or some such area set apart for the actors to exist), an area given over by imagination to the world of the play, separate from the ‘real’ world in which the audience sits. This is like the painter’s the board or canvas. He also has his actors, the props and backdrops of the stage, and the costumes the actors wear. These are like the pigments and tools the painter uses to apply the pigments to the canvas. And finally there is the eyes and ears of his audience, in which, let us say, the sights and sounds of what happens onstage are blended into a pattern the audience understands as a tale unfolding before them.

So in plays, the playwright must deal with the stage and the actors, with the aim of pleasing the eyes and ears of his audience.

(Note that the ‘playwright’ is rarely the sole talesman of a play, and that the whole company also partake of talesmanship, in the way the scenes are painted and designed, the props arranged, the costumes designed and fitted, and the actors move and speak their lines. All this is usually now under the command of the stage director or manager. I hope in simplifying all the company to the single ‘playwright’ I do not fall into the same mistake I find in Sarcey.)

Consequences

The result of this emendation of Sarcey’s fait aussi certain is to expand our understanding of what the playwright (and the painter) do in his task.

Because the play will be performed, the playwright must take care to write his lines with an eye to how they will sound when spoken aloud by the actors, within the imagined space of the stage. Because the play will be performed, the playwright must be aware of how the actors will move about the stage when they are reacting to other actors’ lines, and how the actors will be dressed, and what the scenery will look like, and what props are available, and so on. All these items — scenery, props, furniture, costumes, actors — the playwright must arrange and move through his tale always with the audience in mind, and how all this will look and sound to the audience.

Words

In the same way, the talesman who is a writer, and uses only words to be read to tell his tale, must be aware of these three general elements of his art: first the page upon which the words will be displayed, and its layout, its texture, its colors, and any other decorations or parts of the physical design; second the words which the writer proposes to print upon this page; third how those words on those pages will affect the reader through his senses and the way he apprehends the tale.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, April 21, 2008)

Beginning Sarcey

Starting today, I will be posting Francisque Sarcey's 'A Treatise on the Theater' both as translated and abridged by H. H. Hughes in 1916, and as contained in the collection of Sarcey's reviews and essays, ‘Quarante Ans de Théâtre: Feuilletons’ The original French I found online only in a pdf edition, page by page. I’ve transcribed it, and I hope I have caught all the errors in my transcription. The English I found via Google books in a pdf form, so I’ve had to transcribe that as well. Bilingual readers will note just how much Hughes cut and changed from Sarcey’s original (though it is possible that Sarcey collected the newspaper columns in book form, and in so doing changed them somewhat — in other words, Hughes may have been dealing with the Treatise in a different form than the only one I have been able to find. I may try my hand at translating the original Sarcey columns myself, if there is enough difference to warrant the attempt.