13. Spreading the News 20. Why Marry? 21. The Dover Road 23. Polly Preferred 26. L'Avare In each case exactly what is ridiculed? Is the ridicule fair? deserved? What characters, scenes, and passages make the satire most apparent? Is the satire obvious? subtle? Would it be quickly felt by an audience? Is it directed against universal human weaknesses or against those of a particular age, place, or type of people? Would the play, if presented before people who most need its lesson, actually benefit them? Discuss the permanent value of each play merely as satire. Exercise 35 The following plays attempt deliberately to teach a lesson: 1. Beyond Human Power 5. Michael and His Lost Angel 9: The Hour Glass 10. Outward Bound 11. Nice People 12. The Truth 13. The Famous Mrs. Fair 14. Thank You 15. The Fool 16. The Blue Bird In each case what is the lesson? To whom is it addressed? Is it a needed one? How does the play make it forceful? Does the dramatic effectiveness of the play suffer from the author's eagerness to preach his lesson? Does the lesson come out naturally and inevitably in the play or does the play seem to be made to fit the lesson? Which characters give most direct utterance to the lesson? What is the chief danger which confronts a dramatist writing this sort of play? Exercise 36 The following plays try to set in action for us certain universal human motives; that is, what happens in these plays is the result of conflicting human feelings and contacts which are universal: 1. Julius Cæsar 2. Romeo and Juliet 3. Macbeth 4. Hamlet 5. Othello 6. King Lear 7. Antony and Cleopatra 8. All for Love 9. Becket 10. Dear Brutus 11. What Every Woman Knows 14. Pelleas and Mélisande 15. Tartuffe 16. L'Avare 17. Paolo and Francesca 19. The Rising of the Moon 24. Milestones 25. Daddy's Gone a-Hunting 26. The Silver Box 27. The Pigeon 28. Loyalties 29. Trifles 30. Merton of the Movies 32. The Copperhead 33. Anna Christie 34. The Wild Duck 36. The First Year 37. The Trail of the Torch 38. The Tragedy of Nan 40. The Hairy Ape 43. The Enchanted Cottage 46. The Vale of Content What feelings struggle in each play? Explain wherein each is universal. Which plays seems to you likely to have the longest life because of depth, truth, universality of theme? Exercise 37 The following plays present a character study in dramatic form. Analyze the protagonist carefully, paying special attention to his motives, reactions, and development as the play progresses. By what special means does the author present the character? What attractions does the part offer to the actor? Is the characterization complete and human enough to be of permanent value? Would the play and its protagonist appeal to an audience? Does the part need to be acted to be fully appreciated? Is the character worth studying? CHAPTER VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE THE ESSAY In 1580 a retired French lawyer, Michel de Montaigne, published two volumes of short prose compositions about his own reactions to the world he lived in. Had he realized the influence on thought and on literature this book was to have, he would not, perhaps, have said in his preface: History of the essay Montaigne "Reader, loe here a well-meaning Booke. It doth at the first entrance forewarne thee . . . that I have proposed unto myselfe no other than a familiar and a private end: I have no respect or consideration at all, either to thy service, or to my glory. ... Had my intention beene to forestal and purchase the world's opinion and favour, I would surely have adorned myselfe more quaintly, or kept a more grave and solemn march. I desire therein to be delineated in mine owne genuine, simple and ordinairie fashion, without contention, art, or study; for it is myselfe I pourtray. My imperfections shall therein be read to the life, and my naturall forme discerned, so farr-forth as publick reverence hath permitted me. Thus gentle Reader myselfe am the groundworke of my booke: It is then no reason thou shouldest employ thy time about so frivolous and vaine a Subject. Therefore farewell." Montaigne called his two volumes Essais; and the great body of literature for which they were the chief inspiration we know, therefore, as essays. Montaigne's subject matter is, however, by no means "frivolous and vaine" for the author speculates about many matters, among them: Of Sadnesse or Sorrow Of the Institution and Education of Children How We Weepe and Laugh at One Selfe-Same Thing That A Man Ought Soberly to Meddle with Judging of Divine Laws That Our Intention Judgeth Our Actions That We Should Not Judge of Our Happiness until after Our Death That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Dye Here, then, we have a collection of fact, fancy, opinion, anecdote, legend, reflection, and all the accumulated odds and ends of a wise man's rich experience. Here, too, we have his own "imperfections and naturall forme" revealed frankly and intimately. Monsieur de Montaigne was a man of incisive mind, who, shrewdly observant of men, paused toward the close of his life to reflect ironically, skeptically, on what it had taught him. And the sum-total of his conclusions is a shrug of his shoulders with a non-committal "Que sais-je?" an oft-repeated "peradventure." For he lived in a skeptical disillusioned age and was influenced by it as we all must be by the age in which we live. His endless unanswered questions, his stress on the inconsistencies, the futilities, the follies of life make him, as Andrew Lang says, 66 a man's author, not a woman's; a tired man's, not a fresh man's. We all come to him late indeed, and rest in his panelled library." His essays do not attempt clean-cut organization or a coherent sequence of ideas. He often wanders far afield from his starting place, following the suggestion of related ideas; these ideas in turn suggest others and these again others, until the original thought is lost. Thus in one essay he strays from reflections on why we "say God helpe to those that sneese," through an analysis of his attitude toward fear, and through diverse subjects varying from seasickness to the extravagance of kings. But this discursiveness is part of Montaigne's personality.1 1 There is an interesting essay on Montaigne by Llewelyn Powys in Christopher Morley's Modern Essays, Second Series. |