HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE VOLUMES ISSUED I THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS LUCRETIUS, DANTE, AND GOETHE BY GEORGE SANTAYANA II CHIVALRY IN ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAUCER, MALORY, AND SHAKESPEARE BY WILLIAM HENRY SCHOFIELD III THE COMEDIES OF HOLBERG BY OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL, JR. HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDED BY THE GENERAL EDITOR WILLIAM HENRY SCHOFIELD PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY III THE COMEDIES OF HOLBERG HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE VOLUME III THE COMEDIES OF HOLBERG BY OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL, Jr. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1914 COPYRIGHT, 1914., DY HARVARD UNIVERSITY D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON, U.S.A. PREFACE THIS volume is the fruit of investigations begun while I was a student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Harvard University, and continued while I was a Sheldon Fellow of Har- vard in Copenhagen, Paris, and Oxford. I am indebted for information and counsel to many professors in the University of Copenhagen, and to other Danish scholars, most of all, however, to Dr. Georg Brandes and Dr.Vilhelm Andersen, whose writings on Holberg are of peculiar value and whose conversation I found particularly stimu- lating during my residence in Denmark. Mr. Carl Petersen, Under- Librarian of the Royal Library in Copenhagen, who is now publishing a definitive edition of Holberg 's works, also gave me the be- nefit of his expert knowledge on various points, and I profited by definite suggestions from Mr. Alfred Glahn, Second Master of the Academy at Sor0, and Professor Verner Dahlerup. My colleague. Professor Karl Young, has helped me by his acute criticism of the book throughout, and my former teacher. Professor Kittredge, in spite of the enormous demands upon his time, has read it most carefully in proof, to my great advantage. vi PREFACE Professor C. H. C. Wright has also kindly read the proofs. To Professor Schofield I am under the heavi- est obligations. He first suggested to me the sub- ject of the work, and during the entire progress of my researches never wearied in his interest. Early, he indicated many fruitful lines of enquiry, and ensured for me the aid of Scandinavian scholars. Recently, he has scrutinized the whole manuscript and various proofs of the volume with very gen- erous attention. Only he can appreciate how large a part he has played in bringing it into being in its present form. O. J.C, JR. Madison^ December 3, 1913 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Page 3 Holberg's comedies reflect his cosmopolitan interests and supply valuable material for a study in comparative literature : Examina- tion of his sources a means of appraising his originality : Main in- fluences exerted on him by Moliere, tlie coTmnedia deW arte, and English satire. HOLBERG'S LIFE Page 9 Family, environment, and life in Bergen : Study at the University of Copenhagen : Journeys to Holland, England, and Germany : ' ' Ex- traordinary " Professor : Trip to Rome -via Paris : Its influence upon Oliver Goldsmith: Eifect of travel upon Holberg: Introduction to International Laiv : Professor of Metaphysics : Andreas H0yer and Holberg's first satires : Peder Paars : Enmities made by work: Danish drama in Copenhagen : Holberg writes comedies : Dramatic material in Peder Paars: Rapid composition of plays, 1721-24: Plan for investigating uni\'ersity a threat to Holberg : Attempt to have plays presented in Paris : First Aiitobiografihical E/iistle not an apology : Dramatic company obtains a royal pension : Fire of 1 728 and accession of Christian VI end dramatic performances : Holberg written out : Professor of History : Literary production during the reign of Christian VI : History of Denmark ; 0/iuscula Latina ; De- scrifition of Bergen : JViels Klim ; published in Leipzig ; its great success : History of the Jeivish Peofile : Moral Reflections : After 1746 his plays again performed : Connection with new company not close : Opening of the Royal Theatre : New comedies composed : Six of inferior merit : Made a baron : Disposition of his estate : Death. HOLBERG'S PLAYS Page 63 The four types'of comedy which he composed : £ras?nus Monta- nus a typical domestic comedy of character : Jefifie fiaa Bjerget analyzed: The Ele\>enth of June as an example of his comedies of intrigue : Each of his comedies of manners individual: His indebt- viii CONTENTS edness to one early Danish play : Inspiration drawn largely from abroad. HOLBERG AND MOLIERE Page 91 Moliere Holberg's greatest source of inspiration : Domestic come- dies of both aUke ; in composition of the family ; in comic hero's relation to the family : Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and The Elev- enth of June : Comic decoration of the two authors similar : Le Malade Imaginaire and The Busy Man: Likenesses in bits of incidental comedy : LegreUe's conception of Holberg one-sided : Holberg's spirit original: Characters founded on those of Moli&re become Danish : Moliere' s artifices become in Holberg devices for illuminating character: Holberg satirizes manners, not morals: Undramatic essays on manners : Holberg's realism uncompromis- ing. HOLBERG AND THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE Page 139 History of Italian comedians in Paris : Gherardi's collection : Dia- logue in French: Stereotyped nature of the plot : Holberg's similar plots: Henrich and Arlequin; their disguises; their lazzi: Spirit of physical farce in Holberg's plays: Henrich's originality: PerniUe and Colombine : Pierrot and Arv : The latter becomes a Danish chore boy : Leander and Leonora and amoroso and amoroso : Comic details borrowed from Gherardi : The Funeral of Danish Comedy and Le De/iart des Comediens : Ulysses von Ithacia most completely saturated with Italian spirit. HOLBERG AND FRENCH LITERATURE OTHER THAN MOLIERE Page 199 Characters in Holberg which belong to old French comic traditions : Le Grondeur and Don Ranudo : Christmas F.ve and Colin-Mail- lard : Influence of Boursault ; of Legrand : TTie Fickle-minded Wo- man and Destouches's L^ Irresolu: The Lying-in Chamber and Recueil General des Coquets de V Accouchee: Invisible Lovers and Scarron's Roman Comique. CONTENTS ix HOLBERG AND ENGLISH LITERATURE Page 235 Holberg's account of his stay in England in his autobiography : Reasons for unsatisfactory nature of the narrative : Proof of his admiration for EngHsh life and thought: Holberg and non-jurors: Hearne and Dr. Hickes: Jeppe of the Hill and Christopher Sly: Holberg and Ben Jonson : His opportunities for knowing the work of Jonson : Similarity of spirit of the two men : Holberg and Far- quhar: The Political TznA^r founded on The Political Upholsterer: Erasmus Montanus and an essay in The Tatler : Holberg and Addi- son: Both often satirize the same foibles : Both urbane in their ridi- cule: Holberg's sojourn in England formative. HOLBERG'S RELATIONS TO GERMAN AND LATIN LITERATURE Page 289 Holberg knew little German literature : Four Satires of Laurem- berg ; their influence : The Political Tinker shows knowledge of con- ditions in Hamburg: The Parish of Saint James in Ufiroar : Hor- ribilicribrifax and Jacob von Tyboe : Ulysses von Ithacia a satire of Haufit- und Staatsactionen and German opera: Holberg admired Plautus : The Mostellaria and A Ghost in the House : The Pseudo- lus andJJiedrich, the Terror of Mankind : Pyrgopolinices, Thraso, and Jacob von Tyboe : Holberg merely transcribed Plautus. HOLBERG'S GENIUS Page 315 None of Holberg's forbears in literature Scandinavian : His literary sense realistic : His conception of character picturesque i-ather than profound : Tends to become photographic : Vulgar facts symbols of universally interesting situations : Holberg's place permanent in the literature of the world. BIBLIOGRAPHY Page 323 NOTES Page 357 INTRODUCTION Wherever a reference mark occure in the text, a note will be found at the end of the book INTRODUCTION THOUGH Ludvig Holberg has been variously called the father of Danish history, Danish philosophy, Danish drama, and the Danish national theatre, it is as the father of Danish comedy that he is most frequently exalted. His comedies are to-day the most popular of any presented in Copenhagen. Even now, so long after their original production, they af- fect the sentiments of the youth of Denmark in much the same way that Schiller's tragedies affect the sen- timents of the youth of Germany. Since Holberg's comedies are felt by the Danes to be distinctively national, they have peculiar interest for students of Northern civilization. In addition, however, they merit careful examination by all literary historians because of their close relationship with other Eu- ropean writings of a similar sort. The works of few men afford such ample material for an instructive study in comparative literature. Danish drama, when Holberg began to write, had no traditions. The circumstances of his life gave him unusual opportunities to become familiar with for- eign productions, and he wisely sought models for his new ventures abroad. His youth and early man- hood were spent in almost incessant travel. He vis- 4 INTRODUCTION ited Holland, France, Germany, and Italy, besides spending two years in England. His occupations, moreover, in these various countries were not merely those of a special student : he possessed always the varied interests of a keen man of the world. Even as a professor in the University of Copenhagen, he taught successively metaphysics, Latin, and history, and finally became Treasurer of the Corporation. As a scholar, he produced works on international law, finance, and history. As a man of letters, he wrote satires, biographies, and moral essays, as well as plays. As a citizen, he helped to found the National Theatre, built up a large private fortune, was made a baron, and bequeathed his whole estate to the support of a national academy. Of all Holberg's literary work, his comedies reflect best his cosmopolitan interests. The object of this volume is to consider these comedies in relation to their sources, and to show thereby how the author's distinctive dramatic qualities developed through his imitation of foreign models. Numerous as the books on Holberg have been, no study with such a purpose has previously been made. Those who have hitherto treated his relation to comic tradition have adopted one of two critical methods. Either, like Legrelle, they have examined his indebtedness to one source INTRODUCTION 5 only, and have therefore overemphasized the im- portance of a single influence; or, like Olaf Skavlan, they have been content to give lists, more or less complete, of his mere comic devices, without draw- ing inferences from the similarities they indicate, and without discussing larger phases of dramatic construction. In the following study I shall aim to make a consideration of sources the means of ap- praising and describing impartially Holberg's origi- nality. The influences which did most to determine Hol- berg's conception of comedy were those of Moliere, of the commedia deW arte (in the form which it as- sumed in Gherardi's collection of plays, produced in the late seventeenth century), and of certain kinds of English comedy and satire. I shall try to show that Holberg learned from Moliere many of his methods for the grouping and exposition of character ; that he derived from the commedia deW arte much of the comedy incidental to his plots, together with the fig- ures that served as vehicles for it ; and that he allowed English comedy and satire to determine, in large mea- sure, the scope and the temper of his own. I shall point out, moreover, for the sake of completeness, the considerably less important suggestions that he ob- tained from French literature other than Moliere, 6 INTRODUCTION from Latin comedy, and from his slight acquaint- ance with German literature. The combination of these various elements into a unified and original product could have been accom- plished only by a man of profound originality as well as large cosmopolitan interests. Holberg gained his broad intelligence by steadily doing his utmost to become an intellectual citizen of Europe as a whole. Any thorough treatment, then, of the manner in which he adapted foreign literary ideas to his own purposes must be preceded by a record of the events of his Hfe. HOLBERG'S LIFE CHAPTER I HOLBERG'S LIFE I THOUGH destined to be the first to give na- tional literary consciousness to Denmark, Hol- berg was a native of Norway. He was born in Ber- gen, on the third of December, 1684. Yet Bergen in the seventeenth century was not typically Norwe- gian. It was one of the four historic trading stations of the Hanseatic League, and had a highly organ- ized, self-sujfficing colony of German commercial agents.* Merchants of many other nationalities also assembled there to procure whatever part of the trade these Germans could not monopolize, and, when they became permanent residents of the city, often married Norwegian women, so that in Hol- berg's time few children of his birthplace could assert that all four of their grandparents were of Scandinavian stock. The spirit of Bergen in the latter part of the sev- enteenth century had become distinctly cosmopoli- tan. The sons of prosperous tradesmen went abroad, usually both to Holland and to England, where in- tellectual life was more enlightened and stimulating than at home. Perhaps as a result of this situation, the inhabitants seem to have been more eager and 10 HOLBERG'S LIFE alert than those either of the rest of Norway or of Denmark . * Ludvig Holberg ^^'as the twelfth and youngest child of gifted parents. His mother, Karen Lem, was a granddaughter of Bishop Ludvig Munthe, and a woman of keen intelligence. His father w as an army officer, w^ho had risen from a mere private to the rank of first lieutenant, an achievement by no means easy or usual in those days, when almost all Norwe- gian regiments were officered by Germans. What is more, he had seen much of the world. He had served in the armies of Malta and Venice, and had taken an extensive journey through Italy on foot. He died when Ludvig was but two years old, leaving his family with a comfortable inheritance, which was, however, almost completely lost by fire in 1686. As a boy, Holberg went first to the German gram- mar school in Bergen and afterwards to the Latin school there. Danish must have seemed to him fit only for colloquial use. The great fire that swept the town in 1702 destroyed the Latin school and com- pelled him to go to the University of Copenhagen a year earlier than he had intended. In spite of one long interruption, he finished his course at the end of two years, and took his final examinations in the spring of 1704. Thecourse of study at the university could hardly have been congenial to him. Instruc- tion in philosophy, the principal subject, was given HOLBERG'S LIFE 11 by means of the old scholastic methods, and students held serious, formal debates on questions like these : Could a human being by a natural process turn into a pillar of salt?" "Did Jesus, a child of God, cry at all during his infancy? " Such pedantic dis- cussions, the solemn futility of which Holberg was later to parody, seemed to him, even then, ridicu- lous. It is small wonder, then, that he barely passed his so-called "philosophical" examination.* In the- ology he obtained honours; but his intellectual en- thusiasm seems to have been aroused mainly by work in the modern languages, especially EngHsh, French, and Italian, which he studied by himself during his years at the university. After Holberg had taken his degree, he returned to Bergen, where for several months he acted as tutor to the children of a bishop, Niels Smidt. This eccle- siastic had travelled widely in his youth, and had kept a journal of his expeditions. Holberg read the book with avidity, and it fanned the flame of his desire to see the world. Accordingly, he turned what possessions he had into money, and, with but sixty rigsdaler (about $90) in his pocket, took ship for Amsterdam. Although he must have spent nearly a year in the Netherlands, he tells us nothing of his stay there except a few humorous anecdotes to illus- trate his poverty. On his return to Norway, he set- tled in Christiansand, where an acquaintance of his. 12 HOLBERG'S LIFE named Christian Brix, introduced him to the lead- ing people of the place. He spent the following win- ter (1705-06) in teaching French, English, and Dutch. Then, for the only time in his life, he seems to have enjoyed the companionship of young women of his own age.* The next spring he went to Eng- land, where he spent over two years, partly in Oxford and partly in London, steeping himself in new thought. From England Holberg sailed to Copenhagen, where he soon obtained a position as travelling com- panion to a boy of a prominent Danish family. He took his young ward to Dresden, established him there, and then journeyed alone to Leipzig, at that time the undisputed intellectual centre of Germany. From there he went to Halle, intent on seeing the philosopher Thomasius. Though the latter, he says, would talk of nothing but the weather, the two must have had many interests in common even at that time, for Thomasius's influence upon Hol- berg' s early work was greater than that of any other man. Soon after Holberg' s return from this his third journey abroad, in the spring of 1709, he obtained a small stipend in a foundation for students called Borch's College. Whileliving there, in 1711, he pub- lished his first bit of historical writing. An Introduc- tion to European History. He says that he collected HOLBERG'S LIFE 13 the materials for this work in the Bodleian , although he makes haste to add that his book is litde more than a transcription of Puffendorf's similar treatise.* In 1713, he published the first volume of an Appen- dix to Universal History^ which he planned to be a complete description of all the governments in the civiHzed world, as they existed in his time. The work was to consist of five volumes, but only the first was printed, because in 1714 the young author was appointed an ' ' extraordinary ' ' professor in the Uni- versity of Copenhagen. This appointment, he says, was the king's re- cognition of a history of the reigns of Christian IV and Frederik III {An Introduction to the History of Denmark in Previous Centuries)^ which Holberg had sent him in manuscript. In spite of Holberg's dili- gent work in historical scholarship during the five years that he was a member of Borch's College, he was accused of indolence, largely because he neg- lected the usual scholastic disputations and decla- mations, f In academic circles it was declared scan- dalous that a man apparently ignorant of the meth- ods of scholastic logic and philosophia instrumenta- lis should have received a university appointment. "But," declares the defendant," the fact remains that I am a professor ; and those who have other standards than the nonsensical jargon of the school- men by which to measure literary qualifications. 14 HOLBERG'S LIFE have thought me capable of discharging effectively the duties of my office," Holberg's position as extraordinary professor merely gave him the right to the first vacancy that might occur in the faculty. It did not in itself entitle him to a salary. But through the good offices of a privy councillor, Ivar Rosencrantz, he was granted a special stipend of one hundred rigsdaler ($150) a year for four years, during which time he was to become what we should call a travelling fellow of the university. In the spring of 1714, therefore, Hol- berg left Copenhagen for his fourth journey abroad. He was at this time thirty years old and a man of no little reputation as an historian. He went first to Amsterdam, then to Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels. At Brussels, however, he became so much alarmed at the amount of his travelling expenses that he decided to walk the rest of the way to Paris. He arrived in Paris some time in the late autumn, and stayed there almost a year. What his serious occupations and vital interests were during this inevitably important winter, we can only guess. In- deed, our one source of information about all of Hol- berg's early life is the whimsical first Autobiograph- ical Epistle, in which, as we shall see presently, his object was to tell what was amusing rather than what was significant. We know, however, that he took lodgings first in the Faubourg St. Germain, 'HOLBERG'S LIFE 15 where he lived in what he calls "philosophical se- clusion." He knew no one but his landlord, so that he thirsted like a Tantalus for society. Under such circumstances he must have spent some time at the theatres, about which he says nothing ; and much time in the libraries, about which he tells us next to nothing.* After several months in Paris, he moved into a part of the city much frequented by Irish Catholics. His knowledge of England gave him a natural acquaintance with them, which helped to keep fresh the interest in English literature that he had already gained. Early in August, Holberg left Paris for Rome. Travelling partly by boat and partly on foot, he made his way slowly to Marseilles, where he took ship for Genoa. On board ship he contracted a malarial fever, which increased in severity until it threatened his life. In Genoa he lodged at a wretched inn, where he stayed two or three weeks, extremely ill, and completely at the mercy of a venal innkeeper. Evidently he can have seen but Htde of the city; yet the judgement he passes on its residents is interest- ing, if only because it betrays the author's high admiration for English gentlemen . ' ' The common people of Genoa," he says, "are faithless and men- dacious to an almost incredible degree, but the patri- cians are probably as free from all vulgar vices as the English nobility." 16 HOLBERG'S LIFE After a few weeks, Holberg's fever subsided enough to allow him to continue his journey to Rome. He went by sea, and had the excitement of a threat- ened attack by Algerian pirates. His fever continued to harass him during the six months he lived in Rome, so that his account of his stay there is meagre and unimportant. He was able, however, to learn something about Italian comedy. He says that at Christmas time Rome was filled with companies of comedians and pantomimists. One of these troupes of actors happened to be quartered in his hotel, and he not only became acquainted with them, but also saw them present their one play, a kind of variant, he says, of Moliere's Le Medecin malgre liii. Thus we have positive evidence of Holberg's early ac- quaintance with the commed'ia deW arte in its native and most popular form. He may besides have seen other plays given by other companies. About the end of February, 1716, Holberg deter- mined to escape the perils of a sea -journey by return- ing to Paris overland. He walked from Rome to Flor- ence in fourteen days, and, finding that the constant exercise improved his health, he continued on foot over the Alps and through Savoy and Dauphin e, until he reached Lyons. Thence he intended to pro- ceed by boat, but after he had bought his ticket, a group of fellow travellers induced him to join them in an evening of revelry. Holberg was so drunk when HOLBERG'S LIFE 17 he left these chance companions that the next morn- ing he could not take the boat. He had no money to buy a second ticket, and was forced to walk to Paris, where he spent a month in a vain effort to get rid of his fever. The vexatious malaria did not leave him until he reached Amsterdam, on his way back to Copenhagen, in the early autumn of 1716. His two years abroad must have been filled with new and vivid impressions of books, plays, man- ners, and men ; yet in his capricious chronicle he gives but the barest hints of the importance of these years in broadening his outlook upon life, and in establishing his cosmopolitan point of view. Another fact regarding Holberg's journey maybe mentioned here. Oliver Goldsmith's tramp through Europe, which lasted from February, 1755, to Feb- ruary, 1756, was probably suggested by his hearing of Holberg's similar undertaking. Goldsmith went to Leyden in April, 1754, only three months after the death of Holberg, about whom there was at this time much talk in Holland. The meagre information about the Danish dramatist which Goldsmith gives in his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) is just the sort that he would have obtained in chance conversations." Polite learning in Denmark," he asserts, "rose and fell with the late famous Baron Holberg," and the whole paragraph on Denmark is devoted to him ; but more than half of 18 HOLBERG'S LIFE it concerns his prolonged tramp. "Without money, recommendations or friends," says Goldsmith, "he undertook to set out on his travels and made the tour of Europe on foot. A good voice and a trifling skill in music were the only finances he had to support an undertaking so extensive ; so he travelled by day, and at night sung at the doors of peasants' houses to get himself a lodging. In this manner, while yet very young, Holberg passed through France, Germany, and Holland; and, coming over to England, took up his residence for two years in the University of Oxford. Here he subsisted by teaching French and music, and wrote his Universal History ^ his earliest but worst performance." Goldsmith then sketches vaguely in a few sentences the literary and material success of Holberg' s later life. This account is particularly interesting for the erroneous statements about Holberg that it contains, because through them we can see how completely Goldsmith had come to regard Holberg's journey as a pattern and prototype of his own. Holberg, for example, did not sing and play at the doors of peas- ants' houses to get himself a lodging at night, but Goldsmith did. If information similar to what we find in his Inquiry had come to Goldsmith in 1754-55, when he was in Leyden, nothing further would have been needed to send the unpractical and impressionable young Irishman off on his year of^ HOLBERG'S LIFE 19 vagrancy. Goldsmith's journey seems to be the sole direct influence of Holberg on any English man of letters, and it is not strictly literary. Still, an inspira- tion that led to the composition of the Traveller^ and produced circumstances that helped to free its au- thor from insularity in his critical attitude, deserves an important place in Goldsmith's biography. Superficially considered, Holberg's life up to this time seems almost aimless. He appears to have be- come confirmed in habits of improvident travel. He apparently wandered whither his caprice directed. Yet none of his movements during these early years was thoughtlessly or carelessly made. They were all intended to satisfy his insatiable intellectual curi- osity. He went abroad to read in foreign libraries and to study with foreign scholars ; he stayed abroad to observe life in all its phases and to reflect upon what he saw. Without these experiences Holberg might possibly have become the able scholar and historian that he later was ; he could scarcely have developed the brilliant talent for satire which he devoted to ridiculing the provincial manners of Denmark. II The two years that Holberg had spent abroad had brought no vacancy in the faculty of the university. Though now thirty-two, he was still compelled to 20 HOLBERG'S LIFE live on his miserable stipend and wait as patiently as he could for the death of some professor. Yet poverty did not destroy his zeal for scholarship. He continued his historical studies, and published be- fore the end of a year an Introduction to International Law, a work composed according to the theories of Grotius and Puffendorf, who, together with Tho- masius, were his avowed models. In December, 1717, Holberg succeeded Johan Frederik Wandalin as Professor of Metaphysics in the university. Fate could hardly have been more playful. One who all his life was to be an untiring opponent of the pedantry of mediaeval logic was forced to begin his career as a professor by teaching the very subject which was most dominated by for- malism. Holberg saw the humour of the situation, and the ceremonious laudation of metaphysics which tradition required him to give at his induction into office was marked by sententious irony. His address so shocked and angered his colleagues that they immediately became antagonistic to him, and were more than ready, when they saw themselves ridi- culed later in satires like Peder Paars, to oppose him openly. For the moment, however, their potential hostility interfered little with his rapid advance- ment. In 1719 he became Professor of Latin, and in the following year a member of the University Council. HOLBERG'S LIFE 21 Holberg now occupied himself with undertakings more exciting than historical research and academic lectures. It is no mere chance that his work in pure literature began at this particular time. The death of Charles XII of Sweden, in 1718, had brought to all Denmark a deep feeling of relief. The country had emerged victorious from a war that had lasted ten years, and, led by King Frederik IV, was eager to express some of its new self-consciousness. Hol- berg merely obeyed a national impulse, though in his own peculiar way, when he began to write the vigorous, almost insolent, satires that immediately involved him in the first of those disputes which, in one form or another, engrossed him during the following eight years. The immediate cause of Holberg' s first satire was a short history of Denmark, written by Andreas H0yer,* a young scholar from Slesvig. This work, although intended as a text-book for Danish stu- dents, was written in German and contained much to irritate a loyal Dane. But, besides patriotic in- dignation, Holberg felt personal resentment, because the author in his preface had spoken contemptu- ously of all previous Danish historians. Holberg cast his defence in the form of an academic Latin dis- sertation, which he pretended had been written by a well-known character in the university, a sixty- year-old student, Poul Rytter, noted for his incorrigi- 22 HOLBERG'S LIFE ble drunkenness. The satire attributed to this good- for-nothing is suitably coarse; yet now and then it shows flashes of that sly, mordant humour for which Holberg later became famous. He evidently found the composition of this pamphlet congenial employ- ment. No sooner was it finished than he attacked another work of H0yer with the same controversial ardour. Under a new pseudonym, Olaus Petri Nor- vegus, he ridiculed a Latin dissertation in which H0yer had tried to show that marriage between par- ents and children was not contrary to the laws of God or nature. Neither of these works has much literary value, yet both are important to remember, because they made a dangerous enemy of H0yer, and also showed Holberg the nature of his distinctive literary power. In the autumn of 1719, Holberg published, under the pseudonym Hans Mikkelsen, the first book of a mock-heroic poem which describes the adven- tures of a certain Peder Paars and his company, who are shipwrecked on the little island of Anholt, so-called, says the author, "because it holds on to ships." In form Peder Paars is a parody on the classical epic, particularly the Aeneid; but this con- ventional form is simply the vehicle for bitter satire on Danish life as Holberg knew it. The unmistak- able popular delight with which the poem was re- ceived by no means drowned the storm of protest HOLBERG'S LIFE 23 that arose. The clergy saw themselves satirized in the ignorant, cheating priest of Anholt; the gov- ernment officers in the grasping, equally ignorant bailiff; and the professors at the university, with most reason, in the pedants who disputed angrily over the exact position of the wound which Venus received in the Trojan war. Among the many who were enraged. Professor Hans Gram and Frederik Rostgaard prepared to defend themselves with great- est zeal. Gram, an exceptionally brilliant historical investigator, took up the cudgels for the dignity of his profession. Rostgaard, one of the most influ- ential of Holberg's contemporaries, fought for his own honour. He had traxelled and studied much abroad, had married the half-sister of Anna Sophia Reventlow, later the queen of Frederik IV, and had recently been made Keeper of the Privy Seal. He owned Anholt, where Holberg had represented people as living in the deepest ignorance and de- pravity, and felt, therefore, that the satire was a serious reflection on himself. Gram and Rostgaard joined in writing a vigorous protest against the work and sent it to the king. The satire- deserved to be condemned, they said, first, because it contained a libellous description of the excellent inhabitants of Anholt; and, secondly, because it contained "un- seemly and very derisive expressions directed against the Royal University, the Rector Magnificus, the 24 HOLBERG'S LIFE Bishop, and the professors, and, what is much more serious, against our Christian religion and God's Holy Word." For these reasons, they begged that the book be burned by the common hangman, and that the anonymous author, whom they probably knew to be Holberg, be sought out and fittingly punished. The complaint was referred to the king's council, which had the good sense to decide that the publication was not an affair of enough public importance to justify royal interference. The king promptly approved the verdict. He, as well as his councillors, had a saving sense of humour. This decision, and Holberg's immediate elevation to the position of Professor of Eloquence, evidently gave him new boldness, and established his inde- pendence, for he immediately brought out the sec- ond and third books of his satire. Before the end of the year, he added a fourth book and published a complete edition of the poem. The success of the finished satire was instantaneous and remarkable. Holberg states, with pardonable pride, that within a year and a half three editions were exhausted. No previous book in the Danish language had ever attained like popularity. This, of course, increased the bitterness of adverse critics, who became so vehement that, before the end of 1719, Holberg thought best to defend himself in two documents. The first was a dialogue in verse, called ^ Criticism HOLBERG'S LIFE 25 of ^^ Paars;'''' the second, a prose criticism, called Just Justesen\s Idea of Peder Paars's History. The latter is full of sly, good-natured satire, quite unlike the bludgeoning humour oS. Peder Paars . "Why ! " the writer says in effect, "the author of this poem, for the very purpose of freeing his work from any suspicion of personal satire, chose for the scene of his action the obscure and remote island of Anholt ; and for the time the beginning of the previous cen- tury. Among various disagreeable inhabitants of that island, he described an ignorant and covetous priest. Now I ask every sensible man if an author who describes a wicked and ignorant priest of Anholt of more than a hundred years ago can with fairness be accused of impiety. Are not those who accuse the author really more to be blamed than he ? " When the controversy over Peder Paars had somewhat subsided, Holberg published five more satires on miscellaneous subjects. The first was printed separately and anonymously, but in 1722 all five appeared together under the following title : Hans M'lkkelseri' s Four Satires^ with Two Prefaces; together with Zille Hansen' s Defence of the Female Sex. The first satire, an imitation of Boileau's eighth, reveals the author musing whether he ought to laugh or cry over the world and man's life in it. He answers, of course, that laughter is more philo- sophical and more amusing than weeping. The sec- 26 HOLBERG'S LIFE ond dwells on the contradictions which exist in every man's character. It emphasizes the fact that the singer Tigellius, whom Horace ridicules for his fickle- ness of mind, is just like everyone else in the world. The third satire is a defence of Peder Paars, prac- tically identical with that in the criticism published two years before. The fourth, in which "the poet advises his old friend Jens Larsen not to marry," is an imitation and special application of the sixth satire of Juvenal. The fifth, in defence of women, purports to be written by a certain Zille Hansen,* and contains a serious assertion that women are excluded from educational advantages and from the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, not by any law of nature, but by the arbitrary pro- scription of man, Holberg declares that these successful satires made him very unpopular in certain circles. His fellow professors, he says, became hostile to him, and many individual citizens regarded with dread and aversion one who could attack with such bit- terness the follies and vices of mankind. Wearied, apparently, of a sort of writing which brought him only hatred, he returned with relief to his historical studies. At first he spent much time on ^ Description of Denmark and Norway^ a large volume, which was not to be published until 1729. He also prepared a second edition of his European History of 171 1, in HOLBERG'S LIFE 27 which he brought the narrative down to 1720. Mean- while, conditions in Copenhagen were making for the establishment of that Danish theatre to which Holberg was to be the greatest contributor. The establishment of Danish drama in Copen- hagen was the result of a chance cooperation of three very different men, Rene Montaigu, Etienne Capion, and Ludvig Holberg. Montaigu had been summoned from France as early as 1704, to serv^e as manager for a company of actors which was pre- senting French plays at the court of Frederik IV. This company continued to play at the Danish court until the plague broke out in Copenhagen in 1710. Its repertory consisted principally of comedies by Moliere, Dancourt, and Legrand; of farces from Gherardi's Theatre Italien; and of certain trage- dies of Corneille and Racine. The plague put an end to all dramatic performances, but in 1715 the company began a second engagement, which did not terminate until September, 1721, when the king made a contract with Reinhard Kayser, the director and composer of a German opera company in Ham- burg, according to which he was to pay him six thousand rigsdaler a year for the support of his company. He could hardly afford more than this sum for royal amusements, so that he dismissed all his French actors except Montaigu, whose pension he continued. Etienne Capion, who was to be Mon- 28 HOLBERG'S LIFE taigu's fellow promoter, had come to Copenhagen many years before as a member of a French troupe. The company had gone to pieces, and since 1703 Capion had been a wine merchant in the Danish capital. The failure of Montaigu's venture gave Capion what seemed a rare opportunity to establish a successful theatrical company of his own. He ob- tained a royal patent giving him the sole right to produce comedy in Copenhagen, and on January 20, 1722, opened a theatre for the production of French comedies. "In the meantime," writes Hol- berg,"it had occurred to certain men, in emula- tion of other nations, to encourage the establishment of native drama in Denmark." Of these by far the most influential was Frederik Rostgaard. He had, to be sure, inveighed rather stupidly against Peder Paars^ but he was a genuinely cultivated man, eager to enlarge the intellectual life of his country. Rene Montaigu seemed to him the one person likely to organize with success a company of Danish actors ; and, through Rostgaard's influence, Montaigu, by royal patent, was given permission to bring out plays in Danish, provided they were produced under the patent already granted to Capion. In compliance with this requirement, Capion and Montaigu joined forces. The really important task which confronted the promoters of the enterprise was to find an author HOLBERG'S LIFE 29 who could furnish the company with original Danish plays. No theatre can thrive on translations exclu- sively, and Denmark at this time had absolutely no drama in the vernacular which would have inter- ested an eighteenth -century audience. Danish mira- cle-plays and mysteries and Latin school dramas of course existed ; but they were all obviously unavail- able. Rostgaard, although he had been a bitter op- ponent of Peder Paars, was broad-minded and keen enough to see that the author of that work had not only created the spirit, but also had discovered the subject-matter of native comedy. He therefore sug- gested that Holberg should write for the newly or- ganized company. Holberg responded with apparent enthusiasm. Indeed, he wrote comedies so rapidly and with so much zest during the next few years that we are tempted to believe that he may have composed at least a rough draft of some of them before. In one of the prefaces to his satires, pub- lished in 1722, he had compared his Peder Paars^ in the nature of its ridicule, to the comedies of Moliere and Ben Jonson. In the second preface to the same collection he declared that he saw in the faults of mankind much material from which fine comedies might be made. As soon as Holberg observed the dramatic possibilities in the figures and situations of his satires, he found it easy to create actual drama out of these elements. One fact, at least, is clear: 30 HOLBERG'S LIFE much of the material of his earlier comedies has a potential existence in PederPaars. Important figures in the plays (like Per Deacon, Gert Westphaler, and Niels Corporal) appear there in person, with their most distinctive traits of character and amusing mannerisms. Other famous dramatic figures may be seen in the satire as mere sketches. Martha, the intriguing servant of the bailiiFs daughter, is a per- fect prototype of Pernille; and the village satirist possesses a nature and a problem which belong, only in a greater degree, to Philemon in The For- tunate Shipwreck. The situations and comic devices, no less than the characters of Peder Paars^ recur in the comedies. For example, the famous "Collegium Politicum ' ' of The Political Tinker in fully devel- oped form, even to the interruption of the shrew- ish wife, is a part of the earlier satire. One may say without exaggeration that hundreds of such simi- larities exist between Peder Paars and the plays. It is not surprising, then, that Holberg, who had already realized the dramatic value of these charac- ters and situations, eagerly accepted the proposal to write for the new company. He must have found his work immensely stimu- lating, for, even though the burden of invention was lessened by his revamping of old material, he wrote with almost incredible swiftness. When Montaigu's company opened its theatre on August 23, 1722, HOLBERG'S LIFE 31 with a Danish translation of Moliere's UAvare^ Holberg presented it with five of his best works : The Political Tinker^ The Fickle-minded Woman ^ Gert Westphalei\ Jean de France^ and JeppeoftheHill. During the year 1722 the company gave all of these plays, besides Z/'^L'arc', translations of Moliere's Z)o// Juan and Le Malade Imaginaire, and Boursault's Esope a la Ville. During the next two years, Hol- berg continued to work indefatigably for the com- pany . W ith the exception of Joachim Richard Pauli's The Blind Man with Sight^ his were the only suc- cessful Danish comedies which the company could procure. In 1723 The Eleventh of J une 2ivA The Lying-in Chamber wore presented for the first time; and in 1724 The Arabian Powder^ Christmas Eve^ Masquerades^ Jacob von Tybo^ Ulysses von Ithacia^ The Journey to the Spnng^ Melampe^ and Without Head or Tail. The first Danish company consisted of eleven members, three of whom were women. All the men, except Frederik Pilloi, the first Jean de France, were students. The most famous were Uls0e, the first Hermann von Bremen, and Henrik Wegner, after whom Holberg named his famous roguish servant. The employment of students was a constant source of friction between Holberg and the other members of the University Council, a court which undertook to try those students who became actors. The case 32 HOLBERG'S LIFE of Jens H0berg, which occupied the Council from March to June, 1723, was typical. Although he held a scholarship in Walkendorf College, he had become a member of the new company. After months of de- liberation, the Council warned him that he must give up the stage if he expected to keep his scholarship, and only by an appeal to the king was he able to have the decision reversed. This discussion in the Council widened the breach between Holberg and his colleagues. They looked upon him as more than any other responsible for perversion of the youth of the university and for destruction of collegiate dis- cipline. Plots were probably already being formed to deprive him of his academic dignities, but not for two years did they seriously threaten his position. Meanwhile, he began to publish his comedies. In the summer of 1723 appeared the first volume of Hans Mikkelsen's Danish Theatre. To this vol- ume ^vas prefaced Just Justeseii' s Rejlections upon Comedy^ an essay in which Holberg defends the part he had taken in building up the new Danish theatre. From the nature of the defence, we can easily see what charges were being persistently made against him. He answers with a vigorous affirmative the following questions : " Is it consistent with the posi- tion and character of scholars to write comedies ? ' ' and "Is it becoming and proper for the children of respectable people to take part in theatrical per- HOLBERG'S LIFE 33 formances ? " In March, 1724, the second volume of Holberg's Theatre appeared, and a year later the third volume. These three volumes include all the plays he had written up to that time, except The Busy Mail, Erasmus Montanus^ Witchcraft^ and Don Ranudo. Besides the enmities which Holberg had aroused at the university during these years, he quite gratui- tously gained the hatred of Christian Lassen Ty- chonius, a priest in Viborg, who, in spite of a great reputation for learning, was really a complete pedant. We should expect him, therefore, to have been fair game for Holberg's ridicule, but for the boldness and directness of it we are by no means prepared. The stupid pedant who now appears asStygotius in Jacob von 7y(^o, Holberg originally called Tychonius. The priest was indignant at this public insult, and im- mediately protested to the king. Holberg ridiculed his protest in a poem. The Jutland Feud. Tycho- nius's anger was not of the sort, however, to be ap- peased by ridicule. In M0inchen, Deikmann, and Hans Gram, the priest had friends at court, through whom he evidently tried to take vengeance. At any rate, an investigation of university affairs which they undertook soon after seemed partially directed against Holberg. These three, together with Andreas H0yer, in 1725, devised a plan for the ostensible purpose of 34 HOLBERG'S LIFE increasing the efficiency of the university. Bishop Deikmann, his son-in-law Chancellor Rasch, Lin- trup the king's chaplain, and Andreas H0yer were to be the members of a commission,* which was to be given very comprehensive powers. It was to ascertain, amongst other things, whether professors did their express duty by holding both public and private disputations, and whether professors were qualified to teach their subjects. If the commission discovered that any one of the young professors had not properly established himself by a disputation, or by some other proof of his academic fitness, it was to compel such a delinquent to comply with that excellent rule at once. Finally, if it discovered among the professors any man practically incapacitated through sickness, multiplicity of offices, or native inefficency, it was to recommend his removal. The commission intended to present this plan to Queen Anna Sophia for her approval, along with a letter of recommendation written by M0inchen on Febru- ary 28, 1725. If Holberg had known of this scheme, he might reasonably have felt that it was a threat to his aca- demic position. The members of the commission, dominated as they were by H0yer, he might have expected to be hostile to him. Moreover, he might have imagined that some of the lines of enquiry were directed particularly against him. The prejudiced HOLBERG'S LIFE 35 jury might have pronounced him guilty on three of the four counts. Although Erasmus Montanus was not yet published, in Peder Paars he had pointedly ridiculed the folly of academic disputations. As Pro- fessor of Rhetoric, he had been severely criticised by certain of his own students for his failure to teach Cicero in the conventional way. A young pedant named Lutken had complained to Lintrup, one of the members of the investigating commission, of Holberg's methods of teaching. "He would do us the greatest service," he writes, "if he would only keep still and not give us his wretched talk." Finally, Holberg might have been adjudged inca- pacitated for effective teaching, both because of his delicate health and because of his pernicious activ- ity in writing comedies. In June, 1725, Holberg left Copenhagen to take the baths at Aix, tired out, he says, by his dramatic labours. He could hardly have had any notion at this time of the schemes of the hostile clique, so that the journey cannot be regarded as a flight from dreaded persecution. Nor was it a bona Jide trip in search of health and rest. Instead of going to Aix, he made directly for Paris, where he spent the greater part of the next two months. He seems to have gone there in the hope of getting some of his plays presented on the French stage. The interna- tional reputation which such performances would 36 HOLBERG'S LIFE give him was a natural object of desire. He himself translated two of his comedies into French, and sent one of them, The Political Tinker^ to Riccoboni, dit Lelio, the director of the Italian Theatre. Riccoboni pronounced the play tutta meravigliosa^ but gave as a reason for not presenting it the curious excuse that he feared it would be regarded as a satire on Fleury. Holberg also sought to obtain a standing as a French man of letters by cultivating critics like Montfaucon, Hardouin, and Castel; and by frequenting places like the Cafe des Beaux Esprits, where Lamotte presided. While he was attempting to realize these literary ambitions, he heard that enemies at home were plotting against him.* These individuals may have been merely certain of his colleagues at the university, who naturally objected to his long ab- sence from his work, or they may have been mem- bers of the investigating commission, whose scheme first became known toHolberg's friends in Copen- hagen in the spring of 1726. Whoever they were, he thought it necessary to hurry back to meet their attacks. He arrived in Copenhagen some time in April, 1726, and then, or soon after, it seems clear, he began the composition of his extremely impor- tant first Autobiographical Epistle. Although this letter has given rise to endless con- troversy, the following facts about it are undisputed. It is dated Copenhagen, December 31, 1727, and * HOLBERG'S LIFE 37 was surely published before April 3, 1728.* It pur- ports to be addressed to a vir perillustris^ who, as a short Latin statement prefaced to the book asserts, published it without the author's knowledge and consent. These few facts have been variously interpreted until the fancy of ingenious critics has obscured the simple nature of the autobiography.']* It is exactly what it seems to be, a whimsical narrative of Hol- berg's early life. It is not an apology for his dra- matic activities, for the simple reason that there is nothing apologetic about the letter. He slighted the formative years of his travel and study abroad, not because he wished to emphasize his services to the university, but because those years did not seem of profound significance. Two hundred years after the events of his remarkable youth, we are naturally eager to know much more about them than he tells us; but Holberg wrote for his contemporaries, not for us. He had, moreover, a wholesome sense of humour, which prevented him from regarding his early life with the seriousness of a romantic poet. At the age of forty-two he naturally looked back upon his youth with amusement, and wrote of it whimsically. He slighted it, notwith crafty intention, but from a natural disinclination to bore his readers with a minute account of unimportant matters. The consensus of modern opinion on this subject 38 HOLBERG'S LIFE seems to be, furthermore, that Holberg's pretence that the letter was originally a private communi- cation to a distinguished man was simply a literary device. The author, from the beginning, intended the epistle for the public, and merely pretended that it was addressed to a nobleman the better to arouse general interest. Whether Holberg's first Latin Epistle is his apology for his life or merely an en- tertaining narrative, whether it is addressed to some great noble or to the general public, plainly the au- thor records in it amusing rather than significant facts. And although it is almost the only source of our information about him, it is by no means a com- plete statement. It must continually be corrected and extended by documentary evidence or by well- founded inference. After Holberg's return from abroad, in 1726, the Danish company continued to present his old plays, as well as to produce each year a number of new ones from those he had given to Montaigu in 1723. Of these the most important to a historian of the theatre in Copenhagen is The Funeral of Danish Comedy. This drama was written to be presented on February 25, 1727, the day on which Montaigu 's company expected to give its final public perform- ance. The organization seemed hopelessly bank- rupt. During the first year of its existence, it had gained nothing but the fitful and languid interest HOLBERG'S LIFE 39 of the public. The theatre held only about four hun- dred and fifty spectators, so that the troupe in the days of its greatest popularity never counted on box receipts of more than two hundred rigsdaler (about $320). After the first year the receipts of the even- ing often amounted to a paltry eight rigsdaler (about $13), and not infrequently the actors were com- pelled to tell the score of faithful spectators who had gathered that they could not afford to present the play for so small an audience. This lack of public interest, far from crushing Montaigu, merely made him redouble his efforts to obtain what he had always ardently desired, a royal subsidy. The time was fa- vourable for urging the matter, because the royal palace in Copenhagen, which since 1724 had been undergoing extensive repairs, had recently been completely restored. In this renovated palace was a private theatre, in which the king would naturally wish to have theatrical performances. Montaigu was so far successful in his appeal to the king that, in February, 1728, he obtained for his company an annual royal subvention of fifteen hundred rigsdaler (about $2400). In the spring of 1 728, therefore, the company, no longer dependent on the support of a fickle public, began to play again under the proud title of Royal Actors. The novelties which it offered during this spring were largely plays of the commedia deW arte 40 HOLBERG'S LIFE translated from Gherardi's Theatre Italien. The actors, of course, urged Holberg to write new com- edies for them; but he refused, because, as he says in his autobiography, he was thoroughly tired of the controversies in which his plays continually in- volved him. Yet this desire for peace did not pre- vent either his revising some of his old comedies for new presentation, or his giving the company a few others, which he had composed before 1723. Some of these plays the company certainly intended to present in the autumn of 1728, when its first com- plete season under royal protection was to begin. All the plans of Montaigu were upset, however, by the terrible fire that swept Copenhagen from October 20 to October 23. The theatre building itself was not destroyed, but the city was so im- poverished that all forms of public amusement were for the moment impossible. Furthermore, the pietists, to whose doctrines the Crown Prince was a devout adherent, saw in the fire a divine punish- ment for the wickedness of Copenhagen ; and the most obvious and impudent form of this wicked- ness they believed to be the drama. The king was enough influenced by the fanatics to discontinue his royal grant to the Danish comedians, and before conditions in the city were sufficiently improved to warrant his resumption of the subsidy, he died, on October 12, 1730. His successor, Christian VI, was HOLBERG'S LIFE 41 a confirmed pietist, so that with his accession all hope of resuming dramatic performances in Copen- hagen disappeared. The members of Montaigu's company scattered, and the building was sold at auction in 1733. During the entire reign of Chris- tian VI there were no licensed dramatic perform- ances in the Danish capital. Although it is customary to speak of Holberg's dramatic development as almost tragically inter- rupted by these events, the plain facts seem to show that before this time he was written out. Almost all of his comedies were the result of one sudden im- pulse to expression. Since 1723 he had composed scarcely more than three ; yet Montaigu's company had been playing almost continually five years after that time. If Holberg had felt the slightest desire to write comedies during these five years, he would more than once have foimd conditions in the theatre favourable for the production of his new plays. In 1728, for example, Montaigu's company, assured of the royal pension, bade fair to become a perma- nent national institution. Yet under these very stim- ulating circumstances, Holberg did nothing but re- vise some of his old work. There is no reason for sup- posing that only the ban on theatrical performances kept him from creating new and brilliant comedy. Holberg never subsequently devoted his best in- tellectual effort to the composition of drama. The 42 HOLBERG'S LIFE plays which immortalize him were written with great rapidity within the limits of one decade, most of them, indeed, between 1721 and 1726. Obviously, he could not have composed with so great ease un- less his youth of apparently aimless vagrancy had established an unusually keen and original critical attitude. When he returned to Copenhagen to stay, after spending the greater part of ten years in the intellectual centres of Europe, provincial Danish life seemed immediately ridiculous. To write comedy he had but to compose what he saw. But when the life about him became utterly familiar again, its incongruities disappeared; and, as his professional duties grew absorbing, his interests became less those of a satirist and more those of a productive scholar. Ill In the preface to a slight satire published as early as 1726, Holberg makes the significant statement that this poem is without doubt his last work of pure Hterature. "For," he says facetiously, "hu- morous writers are like cats ; both turn the exag- gerated playfulness which nature gives them in their youth into an equally exaggerated gravity in later life." Like a cat, he has grown serious-minded and a little indolent, so that he no longer feels the im- pulse to comic writing. His next work, therefore, is HOLBERG'S LIFE 43 a serious study of a contemporary social problem. It is a defence of the Danish East India Company against charges of mismanagement brought by Ger- man critics. For this work he received the public thanks of the Copenhagen stock exchange. In the same year, 1728, he published new editions both of his Introduction to European History and of his Prin- ciples of International Laxv^ after which he began to collect materials for his first important historical volume, A Description of Denmark and Norway. The great fire of October, 1728, destroyed his house, and with it all his valuable historical papers, but the moment he could find a new residence he set to work again with so much energy that in the following year he was able to publish the book as originally planned. The range and quality of these works, produced during the years when he might well have been writing comedy, prove that Holberg had not, as he insinuates, grown slothful, but that he had merely grown tired of being funny. Holberg was chosen to pronounce at the univer- sity the funeral oration over King Frederik IV. This duty was probably foisted upon him because the faculties considered it a particularly difficult one. Christian VI disapproved so strongly of much of his father's life that few men thought any one could praise the dead king openly without seeming to crit- icise his living successor. Holberg performed his 44 HOLBERG'S LIFE delicate task, however, with dignity, candour, and some eloquence. The passage in which he praises the king's attitude toward his own literary activity is of particular interest to us. " We talked," he says, "as in a free state. We joked, we satirized, we disputed with each other in jest, fearlessly, be- cause the king never was offended at any freedom of speech or at thoughtless words." The satirist is here gratefully acknow ledging in public the favours which the dead king had more than once shown him and his work. During 1 730, the year of Christian VI's accession to the throne, Holberg was made Professor of His- tory in the university. In the ridicule and contempt which have always been heaped upon the pietistic king for his inopportune antagonism to the young Danish drama, it is often forgotten that he was an eager and enthusiastic patron of scholarship. The new professor of history quite naturally, therefore, during Christian VI's reign, devoted himself almost exclusively to historical research . In 1 73 1 , to be sure, as a sort of farewell to the stage, he published a complete edition of his twenty -five comedies, in- cluding all that he had written up to that time, with the exception of Don Ranudo. During the suc- ceeding years, however, he wrote mainly histori- cal works. From 1732 to 1735 he occupied himself with his History of Denmark from the earliest times HOLBERG'S LIFE 45 through the reign of Frederik III, a work which Holberg in later life was disposed to consider as his best. On it his present reputation as an histo- rian undoubtedly rests. In 1733 appeared (in Latin) a Synopsis of the History of the JForld and a Text- book of Geography ; in 1734, a revised edition of his Introduction to Intej'national Law.ln 1735, a second Autobiographical Epistle and five books of Latin epigrams were published in a book called Opus- culaLatina. This second epistle, which narrates the events of Holberg 's life from 1726 to 1735, is an entirely different sort of document from the first. It contains neither apologies for his life, nor amusing but irrelevant digressions. It is a brief, straightfor- ward narrative of facts, written by a man palpably satisfied with his secure position in the world. In 1737, Holberg became treasurer of the univer- sity, — a curious metamorphosis, hehimself admits, that of a philosopher into a financier. The office was well paid, and Holberg justified his acceptance of such a position by saying that after forty years of scholarly labour, he thought he had a right to rest in comfort. His election to this position proves that the industrious historian and the clever author of comedy was generally recognized to have business ability and hard common sense. Holberg was neither a dreamer nor a retired scholar. As a man of affairs, no less than as a satirist, he levelled his eyes contin- 46 HOLBERG'S LIFE ually at his fellows ; he applied his criticism frankly to their practical occupations. For many months after his new appointment he devoted himself exclu- sively to his account-books. Yet, as he himself says, a taste for writing is as difficult to overcome as a taste for whiskey, so that in the end his routine work proved a positive stimulus. He wrote with the great- est eagerness and with the best results in the months when he was most occupied with auditing and pay- ing bills. His production during the next few years continued as great as ever before. ^ Description of Bergen., the Famous Monvegian Commercial City., a short but important historical account of his native place; two large volumes, a General History of the Church., and a Comparative History of the Achieve- ments of Various Great Heroes and Famous Men (which, like Plutarch's Lives., is a collection of com- parative biographies arranged in pairs) were pub- lished in consecutive years. For the last work Hol- berg chose chiefly Asiatic and Indian heroes, whose romantic names in themselves provoked an eager curiosity in the reading public. He compared, for example, Oran Zeb with Saladin, Montezuma with Atapaliba, Cingeskan with Tamburlaine. Many of the personages might easily have stepped from the heroic plays of John Dryden, and appealed to the same kind of romantic interest as the Englishman's dramas. The work enjoyed great popularity, not HOLBERG'S LIFE 47 only in Denmark, but also in Germany, Holland, and Sweden. In 1741, Holberg published at Leipzig (probably with the idea of evading the censor in Copenhagen) the first Latin version of his JViels Klirn^ s Subter- ranean Journey. This work, written years before, the author asserts he had never intended to publish, because he dreaded, at his age, the attacks of those morose critics — the pietists, of course — who re- garded all facetious writing as an offence to God. A bookseller, however, persuaded him, against his better judgement, to sell the manuscript. Holberg realized that the work would be fiercely assailed. It is an account of a series of visits which Niels Klim pays to a number of strange nations situated within the hollow of the earth ; and, like Robinson Crusoe^ its partial prototype, contains much pointed satire directed against the customs of contemporary society. The success of Niels Klim was enormous. Be- fore a Danish translation had been made, French, Dutch, and German versions appeared ; it was later translated into Swedish, and is one of the few of Holberg' s works which have been put into English. * When the Danish version was published, in 1742, it was greeted with the disapproval which Holberg had expected. It was roundly attacked, and its tend- ency misrepresented ; but Holberg, whose position 48 HOLBERG'S LIFE at the university was then secure, was not for the moment drawn into the controversy. He defended the work, however, in his third Autobiographical Epistle, written in 1743, where he asserts bitterly that he will never be persuaded to attempt satirical writing again. Holberg at sixty was not only more eager for peace than at thirty -five, when he wrote Peeler Paars^ but he had come to realize the futility of any attempt to introduce the urbane humanism of the eighteenth century into Denmark, — at least so long as a religious bigot occupied the Danish throne. Holberg clearly indicated in another way his de- spair of gaining a hearing for his satires at home. In this year, 1746, he managed to have twenty- six of his comedies translated into French by one G. Fursmann, who lived in Copenhagen. Five of them, thus put into French, were printed in a volume called Le Theatre Danoispar Mr. Louis Holberg. To this volume Holberg contributed a preface, in which he asserts vigorously the superiority of Moliere's plays and of his own to those sentimental comedies then in favour both in France and in Denmark. It was hardly to be expected, however, that a public which had lost interest in Moliere could be argued into accepting Holberg. The first volume of the Theatre Da?iois, in fact, sold so poorly that no sec- ond one was printed. HOLBERG'S LIFE 49 After this disappointing literary venture, Hol- berg turned back to historical writing with a kind of grim determination. Having nothing under way, he chose, rather arbitrarily, to compose a history of the Jews from the earliest times to the eighteenth century. The work, undertaken and carried out as an illustration of that spirit of religious tolerance for which he persistently pleaded, was published in two large quarto volumes under the title of The His- tory of the Jewish People. In 1743, he published a second volume of Opuscula Latina^ a new collection of Latin epigrams, and his third Autobiographical Epistle. Besides the straightforward narrative of his life, the last document contains an essay, written with a little of an old man's diffuseness, about his own character, his favourite books, and the dura- ble satisfactions of his life. In somewhat the same tone of benevolent wisdom is a collection of so-called Moral Reflections, which he published in the fol- lowing year. These short essays are based on texts taken from his Latin epigrams, and are half-serious, half-humorous. They range in subject from a sin- cere plea for religious tolerance to a half-jocose warn- ing to a young girl not to marry an officer. In 1745, a German version of Don Ranudo ap- peared at Leipzig, and later in the same year a Danish edition at Copenhagen. The only plausible reason for Holberg's keeping this play out of print 50 HOLBERG'S LIFE so long is that he had never been satisfied with the form in which he had written it.* Even the edition of 1745 was published by accident. The author's manuscript was lent to a friend, from whom it fell into the hands of a printer ; and he, without asking the author's leave, printed the play. Don Jiafiudowas thus the only one of Holberg's comedies to be printed singly during his lifetime. It was, furthermore, the first to have his name upon a Danish tide-page. In the same year he published his Comparative Histories of Various Heroines and Famous Women^ a companion piece to his Comparative Histories of Various Heroes. It was written to prove the justice of his belief that women are worthy both of higher education and political enfranchisement. This the- ory he mentions briefly in his preface, because, as he justly says, his ideas on the subject were already well known. He had set them forth at length in his Nille Hansen'' s Apology for Women., in parts of Niels Klim^ and particularly in his introduction to the lives of Zenobia and Catherine Alexiewna, which he had already included in his Histories of Heroes. IV Early in August, 1746, the morose Christian VI died, and with him disappeared the obscurantist devotional life of the court. Frederik V, the twenty- three-year-old Crown Prince, who became king on HOLBERG'S LIFE 51 August 6, 1746, was known to be quite as intelli- gent and devoted a patron of art as Frederik IV had been. Almost immediately after the coronation, Carl August Thielo, the German court organist under Christian VI, applied for the privilege of giv- ing plays in Copenhagen again. In his petition he professed a desire to present comedy "according to the plan which has been established by Ludvig Holberg in his Danish comedies, which have been formerly produced here. "When, therefore, we find his patent granting him the right to proceed ' ' ac- cording to the plan which previously our beloved Ludvig Holberg has established," we must not infer that Holberg had formulated a detailed plan for the management of the new theatre. The patent merely intended to suggest vaguely that Holberg 's comedies were to be the criterion by which produc- tions at the new theatre were to be judged. The reorganized company contained one mem- ber of Montaigu's original troupe, Pilloi, and he undertook the instruction of new actors. Holberg, although he seems to have agreed to advise the com- pany about its repertory,* had no official connec- tion with it. On May 3, 1747,t the company began to play in a small building called Berg's House, in Laedergade. The drama was Holberg 's Political Tinker. Of the fifty performances given in this little theatre, by far the greater number were pre- 52 HOLBERG'S LIFE sentations of Holberg's comedies. Besides all the old favourites, the company produced three completely new plays, H oiwurable Ambition^ Erasmus Montanus^ and Invisible Ijadies. In the latter part of the year, the king gave the company a piece of land very near the site of the present Royal Theatre on Kon- gens Nytorv. A building called the Tar House, then standing on the land, was used as the company's theatre from December, 1747, until the following June. As soon as the company received recognition and support from the government, its direction was put into the hands of a committee, composed of Pilloi the actor, a royal councillor, and two prosperous mer- chants. Strangely enough, Holberg was not made a member of the board of directors. If his connection with the company had been as close as many of his biographers assert, he would undoubtedly have been chosen to that office. So long as the company occu- pied the Tar House, it continued to give Holberg's plays the most prominent place in its repertory. Yet it played scarcely fewer of the translations of Moliere and Regnard. Early in the year 1748, Julius von Quoten, an enterprising manager, set up a rival theatre in Stor Kongensgade. He started with a novel and ambi- tious plan, proposing to give four performances each week, two in German and two in Danish, and to bring out many new plays. But he found the public HOLBERG'S LIFE 53 had so strong a preference for Holberg's works that he was compelled, not only to give these frequently in Danish, but also to present them on his German days in Detharding's translations. Von Quoten's enterprise, in spite of his willingness to humour the taste of the public, was short-lived. In May, 1748, he rented his building to the Royal Actors, who used it as a temporary theatre while their new struc- ture on Kongens Nytorv was being built. The Royal Actors at this time played Holberg less and less. Translations of Moliere, Regnard, and Destouches enjoyed for the moment a much greater popularity. Of the forty pieces given in Berg's House from June to December, only four were by Holberg. On December 18, 1748, the new theatre was dedicated with appropriate ceremony. Plays were of course given, but none of Holberg's. Besides a prologue composed especially for the occasion, the bill was made up of Regnard 's Le Joueur and La- font's Trois Freres Rivaux .T\\G management doubt- less thought that because these plays were written in verse in the original, they suited better the dig- nity of the occasion. Holberg must have felt some chagrin in seeing the National Theatre, which he had done more than anyone else to create, dedicated without so much as a mention of his comedies. He beheved, with some justice, that the first board of directors disliked his work, and he criticised again 54 HOLBERG'S LIFE and again their selection of plays, and particularly their ruining the taste of the public with repeated productions of Destouches. Holberg's own taste in drama seems to have been distinctly limited. By drama he really meant comedy, and comedy of but one sort. Tragedy seemed to him affected and bom- bastic. He thought that romantic plays were written more for the eye than for the ear, and were irregu- lar in form and trifling in substance ; that pointless physical farce and horse-play ought to disgust all sensible men ; and that comedies of mere dialogue, like those of Destouches, did not possess enough action to illustrate and establish dramatic characters. Besides his own comedies, he seems to havelikedfew save those of Moliere and one or two of Regnard. After January, 1750, two vacancies on the board of directors were filled by men with whom Holberg soon grew to be on the best of terms. In the spring of 1751, under their direction, Holberg's new play, Plutus, was produced. According to the author, it was received with great enthusiasm by both young and old, who agreed in pronouncing it one of his best works. Its success stimulated Holberg again to eager and rapid composition. In the latter part of 1750, he wrote Sganarelle's Journey to the Philoso- phical Land., The Ghost in the House., A Philosopher in his Chun Estimation, and The Republic. The first of these plays was produced in the Royal Theatre HOLBERG'S LIFE 55 on December 1, 1751, and the second on Novem- ber 3, 1752. The production of The Ghost in the House ^ in which there were no women, led certain of the author's friends to ask him to write a compan- ion piece, in which no men should appear. His reply was The Bndegrooni' s Metamorphosis^ a comedy in- tended as an after-piece to The Ghost in the House. The play was never presented in this way. In fact, it was not acted at all until the year 1883. A Phi- losopher in his Own Estimation and The Republic were played first in 1754, shortly after Holberg's death. During the years immediately preceding, Witchcraft^ Don Ranudo^ and The Fortunate Ship- wreck were given their first production. In the six comedies of Holberg's old age we miss that spirited criticism of his contemporaries which is the life of his earlier work. He has become con- sciously and often heavily moral. He seems to be purposely running counter to the French taste of the time, which, imported into Copenhagen, made audiences there delight above all in Destouches. The plays, moreover, are either imitative or the result of indirect observation of life. The Ghost in the House is little but a translation from Plautus ; Sganarelle'' s Journey is a dramatic treatment of a part of Niels Klim ; and The Republic is a satire on project-makers, whom he had already much more humorously ridiculed in The Political Tinker. In- 56 HOLBERG'S LIFE teresting as these comedies may be as evidence of the dramatist's intellectual interests in later life, they are of little importance as works of art. The last years of Holberg's Hfe were spent in peace and affluence. Since 1740 he had owned a country estate at Tersl0segaard. From that date until his death he spent his summers in the stately house which has recently been made into a national museum. There he did all in his power to make the lot of his own peasants as different as possible from that of his famous character, poor Jeppe of the Hill. Holberg, who had always thought his plays of value chiefly because they were "moral comedies," con- sidered his life as of most value when he was per- forming unselfishly the duties of a good citizen. The disposition which he made of his money in his will showed his eagerness to continue to be a benefit to society even after his death. Having never married, and being without heirs, he had long planned to bequeath his estate to some public insti- tution. At one time he thought of establishing a fund for the support of Danish writers ; but as the read- ing public in Denmark grew in size and intelligence, such a legacy became less and less necessary. At another time he arranged to leave part of his estate as a dowry fund for poor "virtuous girls," * but no bequest for such a purpose appears in his final will. His own sense of humour evidently did not allow HOLBERG'S LIFE 57 him, an old bachelor, to make such a bequest. Be- sides, he fortunately saw a chance to devote his money to the promotion of the very thing he held most dear, the free and natural study of the Danish language and literature. Early in Christian VI's reign, a plan for reopening the Academy at Sor0, which had been closed since 1665, was proposed. The necessary buildings were erected during the reign of Christian VI, but the school still found it- self without funds for running expenses. Holberg approved heartily of the project. He felt sure that this school, free from the rigid and narrowing tra- ditions of the university, could devote itself with peculiar directness to the subjects which he believed needed cultivation. Accordingly, he willed it his estates at Brorup and Tersl0segaard, with all their appurtenances, and a considerable sum of money. By a later will, the terms of which he made public, he added all the rest of his possessions in land, and his entire library. The Crown showed its apprecia- tion of these gifts by elevating the donor to the rank of baron on March 6, 1747. This honour made no difference in the simple, dignified manner of Holberg's life, or in his assidu- ous literary activity. His last years were devoted to the composition of his Epistles. Like his Moral Reflections, these are essays on all sorts of serious subjects, theological, philosophical, and aesthetic, 58 HOLBERG'S LIFE occasionally frankly humorous and satirical. Four volumes of the Epistles were published in the year 1748-50, and a fifth volume posthumously. His last literary work of any importance was his Moral Fables, published in 1751, for which almost no critic has a good word. The date of the curious transla- tion of Metastasio's UArtaserse cannot be definitely determined. It was arranged as an heroic play in prose, with incidental songs and arias, but never played until January, 1757, when Holberg's prose was put into verse. The most probable time for the composition of this bit of dramatic hackwork seems to be the year 1752, when for a few months Hol- berg took the place of his friend Rappe as president of the directors of the theatre. During the last years of Holberg's life, he had been troubled with an increasingly severe affection of the lungs. In August, 1753, when he returned to Copenhagen from the country, he had grown so weak that he realized he could live but Httle longer. His will and nervous force were so strong, however, that he survived until January 28, 1754. The Royal Theatre, which his work had created and main- tained, took no official notice of his death. In those days no one would have thought a theatre a fittmg place for any service of commemoration. Holberg was buried as he had lived, simply, almost un- noticed by his fellow citizens. He lies buried in the ** HOLBERG'S LIFE 59 old cathedral at Sor0, by the side of the great Bishop Absalom. And this mighty mediaeval pre- late and warrior seems no unfit companion for the keen modern satirist who made the Danish bour- geoisie laugh at itself. HOLBERG'S PLAYS CHAPTER II HOLBERG'S PLAYS OF all the results of Holberg's varied literary activity, only his comedies have retained an important place in Danish literature, and they alone will be considered in this study. These plays, with but few exceptions, were composed between the years 1722 and 1728, during the time in which the Danish theatre was making its first struggle for existence. They were nearly all the fruit of the same dramatic impulse. Holberg's art sprang full-grown from the brain of a ripened scholar and very shrewd observer of the world. It shows no gradual logical development. During the reign of Christian VI it seems to have lapsed completely, so that the six comedies which Holberg wrote after 1746 are, in most respects, quite unlike his earlier ones. They are either adaptations of comedies of classical anti- quity, or rigidly moral works, in which the author's invention falters and his wit fails. We are unable, therefore, to trace from play to play the gradual growth of Holberg' s dramatic power. We must sub- stitute for this conventional method an analysis of a remarkable art which even at its first appearance seems to have been mature. Holberg's plays maybe classified under four heads :* 64 HOLBERG'S PLAYS I. Domestic Comedies of Character^ which hold up to ridicule the foibles of some one central figure, as they are revealed in his relations with a well-organ- ized family group. Although the plots of these plays are occasionally resohed by the tricks of a conven- tional servant or even by an elaborate intrigue, the dramatic interest is always focused upon the central character and the situations in which his foibles in- volve both him and his family . Here may be grouped : The Political Tinker^ Jean de France^ The Busy Man, Jeppe of the Hill, The Lying-in Chamber, Honourable Ambition, The Fortunate Shipwreck, Eras- mus Montanus, Don Ranudo di Colibrados, Pemille'' s ShoH Experience as a Lady, and The Bridegroom'^ s Metamorphosis. II. Simple Comedies of Character, in which the dramatic milieu is not the family in any organized sense. The emphasis in these plays is laid, however, no less clearly than in those of the first type, on the exhibition of some ridiculous foible of one central character.Heremay be grouped: The Fickle-minded Woman, Without Head or Tail, Master Gert West- phaler, Invisible Ladies, and A Philosopher in His Own Estimation. III. Comedies of Intrigue, in which the interest is mainly concentrated upon a series of tricks, usually devised and managed by roguish servants, who bring about bewildering confusions of identity HOLBERG'S PLAYS 65 through their numerous elaborate disguises. Hol- berg's comedies of this sort differ from his simple comedies of character only in dramatic emphasis. The butt of all the tricks is, of course, a figure of some individuality; yet the emphasis is laid, not upon the display and progress of his characteristic foible, but rather upon the humour of trickery, for which alone he exists. Here may be grouped: The Eleventh of June, Masquerades, Henrich and Per- nille, Arabian Powder, The Journey to the Spring, Jacob von Tybo, Christmas Eve, The Peasant Boy in Pawn, Diderich, Terror of Mankind, and A Ghost ill the House. IV. Comedies of Manners: Melampe, Ulysses von Ithacia, Witchcraft, Plutus, The Republic, and Sga- narelle'' s Journey to the Philosophical Land. No two of these plays are at all alike, but each one satirizes some social or political folly which is not treated as the particular foible of an individual. The plays included in the first of the four classes comprise Holberg's most original and effective work. In them appear, almost without exception, those fig- ures familiar to every Danish schoolboy. The dra- matic method which the author employs seems entirely adequate for his purpose. Although no sin- gle comedy can illustrate satisfactorily all Holberg's virtues of method, the plot of Erasmus Montanus 66 HOLBERG'S PLAYS may be regarded as fairly representative of his best technique. In the first scene of this play we are introduced into the home of a typical Danish peasant, Jeppe Berg. He is attempting to read a letter from his son Rasmus, a student at the University of Copenhagen. In accordance with the academic pedantry of the time, the young man has transformed his name Rasmus Berg into the more dignified Erasmus Mon- tanus; and he has further shown his proper respect for the language of learning by filling his letter so full of Latin that his poor father can make nothing of it. Jeppe is compelled, therefore, to enlist the aid of the one supposedly learned man of the countryside, Peter, the fat and blear-eyed deacon. His transla- tions, although satisfactory to Jeppe and his eager wife Nille, are far from accurate. Logica he trans- lates by "pulpit," rhetorica by "ritual;" and be- cause he has never seen the word tnetaphysica, he is quite sure that it must be French. He hastens to ex- plain to Jeppe that Latin has changed radically since his day, and proves his mastery of old-fashioned Latin by reciting vocabularies remembered from his First Latin Book. Flushed by the review of his own learning, he boldly offers to meet Erasmus in a con- test either in singing or in academic disputation. This spirited conversation is interrupted by the en- trance of Lisbed, Rasmus's betrothed. She has come HOLBERG'S PLAYS 67 with her father and mother to find out when her lover will reach home. The girl shows an inane and not very maidenly longing for her sweetheart, and is harshly rebuked by her father for the unseemly display of her elemental love. She pays little atten- tion to the scolding, because at this moment Ras- mus's younger brother Jacob enters with the excit- ing news that the scholar has already arrived. More- over, he has heard conclusive proofs of his brother's magnificent erudition. The driver of Rasmus's cart on the way home has told that the scholar lay prone upon the floor of the wagon during the entire jour- ney, disputing incessantly with himself; and that at least twice, while gazing at the moon, deep in philosophic speculation, he fell out of the wagon, and so nearly broke his neck — from sheer learning ! With this announcement, the first act closes. The principal character has not appeared, though from the very opening of the play he has been the centre of interest. Each of the minor characters, nev- ertheless, has become a distinct and striking indi- vidual. The first act, therefore, besides arousing a keen interest in this important figure, has created a very real domestic milieu in which he is to display himself. At the beginning of the second act, Erasmus himself enters, with his stockings falling down over the calves of his legs, and presenting in general a 68 HOLBERG'S PLAYS farcically exaggerated picture of learned preoccupa- tion. He immediately bewails the lack of those aca- demic disputes which have become his sole delight. The first member of the family to greet the home- sick scholar is his young brother Jacob. Erasmus, horrified at being called "brother" by this mere farmer's boy, promptly orders him to call him there- after Monsieur Montanus. He then attempts to im- press Jacob still further by explaining the difficult nature of his profession. Montanus. Do you know what disputation is ? Jacob. Of course ! I dispute here every day with the girls in the house, but it doesn't do me any good. Montanus. Oh, yes ! Thatkind of disputation is common enough. Jacob. Well, what is it that you dispute about, Monsir? Montanus. Oh, I hold disputations about important and learned things, — for example, whether angels were created before men, whether the earth is round or oval, about the sun, moon, and stars, their size and distance from the earth, and other similar matters. Jacob. No, that 's not the kind of thing I dispute about. Nothing of that sort makes a bit of difference to me. If I can only get folk to work, they may say for all I care that the earth is eight-cornered. Montanus. O, animal brutum ! Finally, Jacob's crude pragmatism and his com- plete lack of respect for the philosopher's exalted calling so exasperate Erasmus that he flings his book at his brother's head. The uproar of this unaca- HOLBERG'S PLAYS 69 demic disputation brings in both Jeppe and Nille. After stoutly taking Erasmus's part, they try to soothe his indignation at Jacob's ignorance by prom- ising him that he will find a worthy fellow scholar in Peter the deacon, a man who both in his sing- ing and in his preaching has given abundant evi- dence of sound learning. Erasmus contemptuously disposes of claims to erudition based on such ac- complishments, and shows what real learning is by giving an exhibition of the power of his own dialectic. Montanus. Little Mother, I will turn you into a stone. Nille. Nonsense ! Even learning can't do tliat. Montanus. Well, you just listen ! A stone cannot fly. Nille. That 's so, not unless it 's thrown. Montanus. You cannot fly. Nille. That 's so, too. Montanus. Ergo, Little Mother is a stone. (^Nille cries.) . . . What are you crying about ? Nille. Oh, I am so afraid that I shall turn into a stone ; my legs begin to feel cold already! Montanus. Don't worry. Little Mother, I will turn you right back into a human being again. A stone can neither think nor talk. Nille. That 's so. I don't know whether it can think or not, but it surely can't talk. Montanus. Little Mother can talk. Nille. Yes, thank God! I talk as well as a poor peasant woman can. 70 HOLBERG'S PLAYS Erasmus. Well ! Ergo, Little Mother is no stone. Nille. Oh, tliat 's good. Now I feel like myself again. Gracious, it takes strong heads to bear study. In these few scenes the main elements of Erasmus's nature are fully developed. His insufferable intel- lectual conceit, through which the undisciplined feel- ings of a spoiled peasant boy continually appear, is realisdcally drawn, with little or no exaggeration. In what follows Erasmus changes little. But as he displays the same ridiculous foible to one char- acter after another, each reacts in his own way. He shocks his prospective father-in-law by asserting that the world is round. The old man is so horrified by this piece of atheism that he utterly refuses to let his daughter marry Erasmus, unless he makes a complete recantation, a thing which the scholar self-righteously refuses to do. Montanus. I love your daughter more than my own soul, but surely you can't wish me for her sake to renounce my intel- lect and to give up philosophy ! Jeronimus. Ha, ha I So you have another girl, have you? You are welcome to your Lucy or Sophie ; I will not force my daughter upon you. In the meantime, with his adoring parents and Jesper the bailiff for audience, Erasmus has had his long promised debate with Peter the deacon. The wily churchman answers Erasmus's interroga- tions with the only Latin he knows, grammatical HOLBERG'S PLAYS 71 rules that he learned at school. The listeners, par- ticularly Jesper, are enormously impressed with his glib replies; and in the pedant's exasperated de- mand that the argument be carried on in Danish, so that they may understand the nonsense that Peter is talking, his auditors find an admission of defeat. Nille cries in chagrin. The scene ends in a fight between Erasmus and Peter. When the two next meet, the scholar shows his contempt for the deacon by proving him to be a cock. Jesper, who has been an outraged witness of this insult to Peter, first contradicts Erasmus's con- clusion in an excited answer, which has every ap- pearance of being categorical, and then rushes off to plan some revenge. He finds a recruiting officer,, whom he immediately sets upon the scholar. The lieutenant flatters Erasmus by expressing a desire to see an exhibition of his famous logical method. He bets Erasmus that he cannot prove that it is a child's duty to beat his parents. This proposition the young pedant establishes almost automatically, merely by putting an argument of Pheidippides in Aristophanes' s Clouds into the form of his infallible dialectic. The lieutenant acknowledges the scholar's triumph, pays him the wager, and then maintains that because Erasmus has taken the king's money, he has enlisted. The glib man of words is helpless in the hands of this masterful soldier, who drills him 72 HOLBERG'S PLAYS Avith exaggerated military severity. Finally, Jeroni- mus hears of the plight of his prospective son-in- law, and, after making him swear that the earth is "flat as a pancake," bribes the lieutenant to free him. Erasmus thus emerges from the action of the play, cured of his intellectual pride and his insane love for disputation, ready for an ordinary marriage with Lisbed. The method of the play is very like that employed in the rest of Holberg's comedies of character. The bourgeois family is usually composed of the same members. There is the typical middle-aged father, sensible and kindly. Though called Jeppe in this comedy, he almost always bears the name Jeroni- mus. Over him stands the mother, unlike Nille, the absolute ruler of the household, and able to es- tablish her wishes there, in spite of any feeble pro- tests that he may make. Magdelone is the conven- tional name of this type figure. If the child of the two old people is a daughter, her name is probably Leonora, and she is a colourless little thing who is in love with her young neighbour Leander. He is a faithful lover and nothing more. If the amoroso is the child of Jeronimus and Magdelone, his beloved Leonora is the daughter of some friend of Jeroni- mus. This second old man is often little more than a voice of common sense, like Lisbed' s father in Erasmus Montanus. If any member of the family -^ HOLBERG'S PLAYS 73 becomes the figure against whom the ridicule is di- rected, he loses the conventional character he would possess as a mere member of the family. The entrance of the principal figure into this comparatively normal group is usually postponed until the conversation of the family has aroused an expectant interest in him. In their expository dia- logue they draw the picture of which his subsequent actions must be the enlarged, yet faithful, copy. His exhibition of the nature attributed to him is re- peated two or three times for no other dramatic rea- son than the fun for the spectators in the exhibition itself and in the attitudes which the other charac- ters strike before it. Only after such scenes of expo- sition is the intrigue contrived which precipitates the denouement. In many of Holberg's domestic comedies of char- acter the denouement is managed in a more conven- tional way than in Erasmus Montanus. To the family are added the very important servants, Pernille, Leonora's maid, and Henrich, Leander's man, Hol- berg's equivalents of the unnaturally clever intrigu- ers familiar in French and Italian comedy of the time. These two usually devise a plot for the osten- sible purpose of bringing together the lovers, who are separated, Hke Erasmus and Lisbed, as a result of the folly of the central character. The fundamen- tal dramatic purpose of the intrigue, however, is 74 HOLBERG'S PLAYS the creation of a situation in which the central figure may most fully display his foible. By clever manip- ulation of the action, the servants finally make him the dupe of his own peculiarity, and therefore ready to see it as the folly it is. If, in Erasmus Montanus^ Lisbed had been provided with a maid Pernille, who had induced Henrich, a servant of Erasmus, to disguise himself as the recruiting officer, for the express purpose of curing the pedant of the foible which was proving fatal to his plans for marrying Lisbed ; if then Henrich had assumed the disguise in the hope of winning Pernille for his wife, and if he had disciplined Erasmus into normality, then the management of the denouement would have been entirely typical. Erasmus Montanus^ like all of Holberg's come- dies, is composed of many farcical elements ; yet it is by no means so completely a farce as it inevit- ably seems from a mere resume of the plot. In spite of the exaggerated and fantastic action, the author succeeds in giving us a memorable series of genre pictures. But he does more than that. His realistic scenes present a situation of universal interest.* Erasmus is the perennial young prig who has acci- dentally assimilated some new ideas. His stubborn adherence to them is a sign, not so much of right- eous conviction, as of scornful superiority to his less intellectual fellows. Prizing his ideas not because HOLBERG'S PLAYS 75 they are true, but because they give him caste, he displays his supreme folly in his devotion to so obvious a truth as the roundness of the world. He represents, therefore, in his own wrong-headed way, the enlightened youth of every generation ; and his ideas are greeted as ignorance, prejudice, and priv- ilege always have greeted progressive thought. Erasmus and his ideas raise an intellectual up- roar in the village. Each apostle of the old order opposes them in characteristic fashion. Jeppe and Nille have no notion that ideas can concern the hard routine of living. Such things are forms of personal peculiarity. Jeppe is firmly convinced that learned folk are always a little crazy and so must be treated with indulgence. Nille considers all book learning a form of magic. She believes that her son's syllogisms are spells that will actually turn her into stone. And when the parents realize that the formulas of Eras- mus, the wizard, are to have disastrous practical ef- fects upon the life of Erasmus, their son, they regard the former with hopeless but half-admiring terror. The opposition of Jeronimus, the pedant's pro- spective father-in-law, to new ideas is in its essence quite as unintellectual as the distressed wonder of his parents. The old man considers himself, how- ever, an intellectual leader, because he has by his own exertions raised himself to a position of wealth and importance in the village. His inherited ideas 76 HOLBERG'S PLAYS are now a part of his irreproachable respectabiUty. Erasmus's assault upon his fundamental notions is, therefore, an insult to his career and a threat to the stability of the entire community. As a man of affairs, he takes the practical steps necessary for reforming the young heretic. Jeronimus represents a type of restricted intellect, combined with the arrogance that attends material success, which is not wholly unknown to-day. Jesper the bailiff regards himself as a thorough man of the world. His judgements are affected, not by any prejudices, but solely by his knowledge of life. He therefore greets Erasmus's strange notions with shouts of laughter. It is wonderful to him that the learned folk of Copenhagen can fall into such ridiculous errors. His experience as a man confutes them at every turn. He knows, for example, that if people lived on the other side of the earth with their heads down, they would speedily fall off into the abyss. How much learned men are in need of a bailifTs common sense ! Finally, there is Peter the deacon, the priest of the old faith. His position in society, his livelihood, depends on the persistence of the old notions. His learning is not sound, but it has passed for gospel in the village. Let it be shown defective in any par- ticular, and morality and true religion will forsake the community. Yet his faith is not a conviction; HOLBERG'S PLAYS 77 it is only a pious formula. He cannot argue with Erasmus. He can only appeal to the love which his parishioners bear him to justify his doctrine. Against the combined attack of these philistines, Erasmus cannot triumph. He has not enough real belief himself. He holds his opinions only because they are the intellectual fashion at the university. Unable to stand out against the bigotry of tradi- tion, he renounces with oaths his assertion that the world is round. Prejudice and superstition conquer the truth, partly because it possesses no disinter- ested advocate, partly from mere weight and force of numbers. For all that, there is nothing tragic or pathetic in the pedant's renunciation. He is as great a fool as any character in the play. Erasmus Mon- tanus is thus a pure comedy, in which the author's humour plays freely and impartially upon all the characters, and it is because the characters absorb our interest that the play is, in spite of the farcical nature of the comic action, no mere farce. Indeed, it clearly deserves Professor Vilhelm Andersen's description," a Danish culture comedy of universal significance." In Jeppe of the Hill, Holberg has made a world- old farce a vehicle for realistic and profound deline- ation of character. Jeppe, the comic hero, is an ex- traordinarily complete and vivid human being. Dr. Georg Brandes says of him : ' ' All that we should 78 HOLBERG'S PLAYS like to know of a man when we become acquainted with him, and much more than we usually do know of the men with whom we become acquainted in real life or in the drama, we know of Jeppe. All our questions are answered."* This praise is just. We know not only the conditions under which Jeppe lives, but also his shrewd opinions of men, and even the attitude with which he will meet death. Jeppe in the first act is a wretch cowed into ab- ject submission to everybody and everything. His wife Nille beats him ; the bailiff forces him to work like a beast of burden ; and the deacon quite brazenly makes him a cuckold. The morning when we first see the wretched man, his wife hales him out of bed at sunrise, and, threatening him with her whip, which she picturesquely calls Master Erich, she orders him to walk to the village five miles away, to buy her two pounds of soft soap. With an empty stomach, Jeppe stumbles out to accomplish his cheerless errand. Inevitably he goes, as he has too often gone before, directly to Jacob Shoemaker's tavern. This miserable place is his one refuge from the tyranny of his shrewish wife; and brandy his one source of happiness. The greedy innkeeper will not trust Jeppe, and easily persuades him to spend some of his wife's soap-money for his first drink. Under the genial -* HOLBERG'S PLAYS 79 influence of the brandy, his mind reverts to the one proud recollection of his life, the ten years he served in the militia. The roseate memories of his some- what doubtful military daring make him feel so brave that he swears that if he only had his wife in his clutches at that moment, he would beat her until she cried for mercy. After Jeppe has taken his first gulp, he is utterly unable to continue his jour- ney. Every time he attempts to start, the temptation to take just one drink more brings him back to the alluring bottle, until he has drunk up all Nille's money. Then Jacob, who has been urging him to imbibe as long as his cash lasted, realizes that Jeppe may consume more than is good for him, and with a pious exclamation of horror at such a possibility, slams the door in his face. Poor Jeppe is by this time very drunk, and, although he makes a few mechan- ical efforts to go on the errand that he now only vaguely remembers, he soon falls down in a com- plete stupor. The wretched peasant is no less a vic- tim of the one man to whom he comes for comfort, than of Nille, the bailiff", and the deacon. In the second act Jeppe awakes in the baron's bed, gorgeously clothed, and attended by a train of obsequious servants. Like a true peasant, he suffers no embarrassment at finding himself the apparent lord of all this grandeur. The problem of his iden- tity does, however, perplex him ; and he wrestles 80 HOLBERG'S PLAYS with that with all the ingenuity of his native wit. Is he asleep? Is he still really Jeppe the peasant? At last he decides that the luxury about him is so much greater both in kind and degree than any- thing he has ever imagined, that it must be the perfect felicity of paradise. He chuckles to think how litde he deserves heaven. When he is finally convinced that he really is the baron, he begins to take his physical pleasures in great gulps. As Dr. Brandes says, " It is natural for the man who has worked like a horse to take his pleasures like a dog." So, after eating and drinking his fill, he is eager to have immediate possession of the wife of the baron's bailiff. For years he has been oppressed by a fellow of this sort. Power, therefore, means to him the opportunity to be despotic and arbitrary, and he naturally chooses his victims from the class of men that has abused him. As a con- stant accompaniment to all these unusual delights of power, he continues his old pleasure of drinking, though now fine wines take the place of raw brandy. His luxurious carousal ends, however, as did his wretched brandy-tippling, in a drunken sleep. Then he is stripped of his finery and cast out again upon the dung-heap. After he awakes, half believing that he has made a brief visit to heaven, he is made the victim of a series of brutal practical jokes. He is subjected to a pretended arrest, on the ground that HOLBERG'S PLAYS 81 he has insinuated himself into the baron's castle with criminal intent, put through the forms of a mock trial, condemned to take poison, and to have his body hung up at the cross-roads. The poison- ous draught, however, is a mere sleeping-potion ; when he awakes later upon the gibbet, he believes that he has died. We are grateful for all this wild horse-play, be- cause it gives Jeppe opportunities to show his true character. In the supposed presence of death, he exhibits real dignity and courage. The man who has been desperately afraid of Nille and cowed by the bailiff and the clerk, is not afraid to die. He does weep, to be sure, when he hears his advocate plead for him ; and offers him, in a kind of maudlin grati- tude, a bit of his chewing tobacco. But when the lawyer refuses the gift with the lofty remark that he is defending him solely from motives of Chris- tian charity, he quickly recovers his shrewd sense of humour, "I beg your pardon," he says with mock humility,"! didn't realize that you men were so honourable." The tenderness with which he takes leave of his daughter Martha and of his dappled horse shows for what things he has a deep affection. "Good-bye, my dappled horse," he says, "and thanks for every time that I have ridden you. Next to my own children, I have no beast that I have loved as much as you." 82 HOLBERG'S PLAYS The illuminating exposition of Jeppe's charac- ter continues throughout the leisurely denouement ol the last act. When on the gibbet, in conversation with his grief-stricken wife, he adopts the generous, lofty tone that should be the expression of a disem- bodied spirit. But when his incorrigible thirst has once more mastered him, he assumes the domineer- ing manner of an immortal and orders Nille to run and fetch him a crown's worth of brandy. Jeppe cannot be convinced that he is not an orthodox mix- ture of corpse and ghost, until he is doomed back to life again by the judge who convicted him. Then he naturally tries to maintain that his ignominious experiences have been heroic adventures. He can- not hurry to his friend the innkeeper fast enough. "Hat under your arm!" he says to the astonished Jacob." Compared with such a man as I am now, you are but a poor dog." But after he hears the true explanation of his romantic fortunes, he silently sneaks out of the inn, back to the vicious circle of the life with which we have become perfectly ac- quainted. Here a character, apparently the creature of a time-worn farcical story, is made to represent in vital human terms the-results of a debasing social and economic system. In Jeppe the peasant of eigh- teenth-century Zealand lives immortally. Conditions in him have degraded, but not crushed, the native -- HOLBERG'S PLAYS 83 power of his race. Through the ignominy of Jeppe's life we catch glimpses of an inherent shrewdness and vigour of will that have made the Danish peas- ant so vital a part of modern Denmark. Such a trans- formation of a mere drunken lout of the Arabian Nights could have been accomplished only by rare intuition and literary skill. Evidently Holberg's best domestic comedies of character are not crude farces, nor are they mere perfunctory repetitions of a conventional method of comic construction. Such farcical forms are con- ditions of his work without being restrictions upon its essential originality. His distinctive comic power results from his ability to be at the same time buffoon, critic, and philosopher. The plays of the second class — simple comedies of character — are in structure so closely similar to the plays just considered that they need no detailed analysis. They differ from the domestic comedies only in the absence of the family group. This lack produces no real difference in the author's method, yet it makes the central character much less con- vincing. Without the striking reality which the homely bourgeois family establishes, the central fig- ure seems a palpable dramatic fiction, a puppet invented as obviously as the intrigue which dis- plays him. 84 HOLBERG'S PLAYS The method employed in the plays of the third class — the comedies of intrigue — varies necessarily with the nature of each intrigue. Yet each comedy is usually the mere presentation of a series of tricks which has been devised by a roguish servant in the interest of his master, for the sole purpose of fleecing some credulous or stupid fool. Touches of characterization, some of them very penetrating, may be given by the way ; but the main dramatic purpose of these plays is to arouse comparatively thoughtless laughter at the success of some prac- tical joke. The Eleventh of June is a fair example of this class. The first act of the comedy shows us Skylden- borg in desperate straits. He must have money to pay the debts which will fall due on the eleventh of June, the end of the fiscal year. He tries at first to get it by daring, but unsuccessful, schemes for swindling unwary strangers. His servant Henrich, as a last resort, forms an ingenious plan. A young countryman named Studenstrup is expected in town to collect a debt from Skyldenborg. Henrich, in col- lusion with his master, pretends to be the boy's cousin, and, while appearing to ofler him hospital- ity, takes him to a house of doubtful reputation, where, with the help of the proprietor, he intends to rob him thoroughly. Henrich easily gets Studen- strup into his clutches, and for the last four acts of HOLBERG'S PLAYS 85 the play makes him the victim of a series of clev- erly executed tricks. In the end, the farmer's boy, robbed of everything by the adroit and plausible Henrich, is sent home no whit the wiser. Henrich's delight as he divides his spoils with the innkeeper is supposed to be shared by the audience, for it is in the success of the tricks that it must find its incentive to laughter. Such a comedy reveals a less cultivated skill in dramatic construction and a less keen sense for the comic in life than Holberg shows in his comedies of character. Each of the comedies of the fourth class is so in- dividual that no general exposition of the author's method can be given. Foolish beliefs, as well as absurd social customs, are ridiculed. Melampe is a satire on excessive and ostentatious aifection for lap- dogs. Ulysses von Ithacia is a parody of the extrav- agant German plays presented in Copenhagen in Holberg 's day. Witchcraft is a satire against the belief of the ignorant folk in the black art. Plutus^ like Aristophanes 's play of the same name, to which it is ultimately related, is allegorical ridicule of the abuses of wealth. The Republic^ another al- legorical play, sets forth, distinctly in the manner of a moralist, the evils brought upon a state by unpractical and importunate project-makers. And Sganarelle^ s Joimiey to the Philosophical Land is a satire on insincere professions of philosophy. These 86 HOLBERG'S PLAYS plays, the last three of which are inferior products of the author's old age, are in general the least successful of his comedies. Holberg is at his best when depicting comic character. In spite of the originality and variety in Holberg's work, his dramatic methods are, in certain respects at least, thoroughly stereotyped. For almost all of his compositions he had one or two definitely con- ceived models. The necessity of his adopting some such method is patent when we recall the ex- traordinary rapidity with which he wrote. In 1722, in the short time that elapsed between the projec- tion of the Danish theatre and the opening of the playhouse, he produced five of his best plays ; and during the six subsequent years in which Mon- taigu's company eked out its fitful and precarious existence, he completed twenty-six comedies. This productivity seems the more remarkable when we remember that he had practically no models in his own language which he could follow. All the drama produced in Denmark before him bears the indeli- ble imprint of an entirely different art. The come- dies, with one exception, belonged to the type of the so-called "school comedy," from which Holberg learned nothing. This one exception was a play called The Com- edy of the Count and the Baron* written by a cer- tain Mogens Skeel about the year 1678. It not only HOLBERG'S PLAYS 87 differentiates itself sharply from school comedy, but shows certain points of resemblance with Holberg's work. It is a satire on the newly created nobles of the time of Christian V. Their silly assumption of superiority and their desperate attempts to learn the customs and graces suitable to their rank are effec- tively ridiculed. The folly of the count and countess in the play shows itself most clearly in their deter- mination to have their daughter marry a rich but rascally baron. The girl is saved from him and enabled to marry her lover by means of a plot de- vised by the countess's maid and executed with the friendly help of the count's manservant. These features of construction are found in but slightly different form in Holberg's plays. Yet they are al- most the distinguishing marks of Renaissance com- edy, and Holberg learned to apply them by studying them in forms nearer the prototype, that is, as they appear in the commedia delV arte. He must, how- ever, have known Skeel's comedy, and may have received certain definite dramatic suggestions from reading it.* The existence of The Comedy of the Count and the Baron is important because it proves that Holberg did not introduce ideas of art entirely foreign to Denmark. Neither was he the first to see the comic significance of contemporary Danish life. His work, in a broad sense, must be regarded as a continuation and, in a measure, a completion of 88 HOLBERG'S PLAYS efforts characteristic of the more enlightened part of his nation before his day. Although Holberg, then, cannot be wholly de- tached from the intellectual movements of his own country, he certainly drew his inspiration largely from abroad. Most of his dramatic models, as well as his sources of literary inspiration and suggestion, must be sought in literature other than Danish. A single definite purpose unifies all of his work. His treatises on international law, histories, essays, satires, and comedies are but diverse expressions of one absorbing intention. He wished above all else to be the bearer of the intellectual light of eighteenth- century Europe to backward Denmark. To the Danes, therefore, the significance even of Holberg 's comedies lay in the fact that they called attention, by contrast, to the social conditions of other and more progressive nations in western Europe. HOLBERG AND MOLIERE CHAPTER III HOLBERG AND MOLIERE I OF all the foreign influences to which Holberg was subjected, that of French comedy was naturally the most extensive and persistent. Every playwright of the eighteenth century inevitably felt the widely diffused influence of French drama, and Holberg, for special reasons, felt it with peculiar directness. As early as 1681, King Christian V had commissioned Meier Krone, the Danish ambassador in Paris, to engage a company of French comedians to play in Copenhagen. From that time until 1720, when Montaigu's company was dissolved, French plays were continually presented at the Danish court. The intelligent part of the Danish public nat- urally derived its dramatic taste from French com- edies and from them alone. Montaigu, moreover, the director of the company for which Holberg wrote almost all his plays, was a Frenchman. To meet his views, a comedy must needs be similar to those in which he had been trained. His judgements of Hol- berg 's plays were further limited by his imper- fect knowledge of Danish. Before he could give his opinion of them, they had to be translated into French. In writing for the approval of such a di- 92 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE rector, and for a public accustomed to French com- edies only, Holberg naturally adopted the one comic idiom which they understood. Many passages in Holberg 's autobiographical writings show that his own taste in comedy was not unlike that of his public. He expresses openly his admiration for French literature, and realizes his debt to it with apparent satisfaction. "Paris," he avers, "is the true home of literature. There is no other place in the world where one can make such rapid progress in literary studies or where one can acquire so correct a taste for literature. I must con- fess that I have to thank French books for every- thing that I know." In the light of this statement, Holberg' s repeat- edly declared admiration for Moliere is to be ex- pected ; but his comparative scorn for other French writers of comedy, and his manifest contempt for some of Moliere' s successors, notably Destouches and Legrand, are surprising. He says, for example : "The comedies which have been produced since the time of Moliere are for the most part tedious, insipid, and of such a nature that only a depraved taste, like that of Frenchmen of to-day, could take delight in them." Holberg found Moliere's com- edies his greatest French source of inspiration. He even implies, at least once, that he regarded his imi- tation of them as manifest. In criticising the taste HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 93 of the Danish public in 1746, he remarks: "Both Moliere and the authors of our own native plays modelled upon his work have been dethroned, while Destouches and other authors of the same miser- able sort have been set up in their places." By "our original plays" Holberg could have meant only his own ; no others existed. This definite assertion, added to the obvious reasons for the predominance of Moliere ' s influence upon the incipient Danish drama , compels one to appraise all possible phases of his influence upon Holberg, before one can speak with plausibility of Holberg's relation to any other foreign literature. From Moliere Holberg evidently borrowed stock comic figures, methods of expounding and grouping character, more than one plot, and even innumer- able bits of comic detail. Yet these things are the form and not the content of the comic speech of both dram- atists. Holberg made systematic attempts to learn Moliere's dramatic language, only that he might employ it for the expression of his own native hu- mour. His comic spirit remained unaffected by for- eign literary forms. In the first part of this chapter, therefore, we shall review the many lessons of tech- nique that Holberg learned from Moliere, utilizing freely in the comparison Legrelle's excellent book, Holberg considere comme imitateur de Moliere. After- wards it will be shown how the Danish author 94 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE invariably contrived to make these borrowed forms express his own individual spirit. Although Moliere's technique aided Holberg in the construction of all four types of his plays, it helped him most in the composition of his domestic comedies of character. Indeed, comedy of this sort, regarded as a distinct genre^ may be said to have been invented by Moliere. Tartuffe and all the better plays which followed it — George Dandin^ Li' Avare^ Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme^ Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Malade Lmaginaire — have the distinguish- ing characteristics of the type. The elements had, of course, existed separately much earlier. French farce for at least a century before Moliere had been obviously a kind of domestic comedy. It had been, however, comedy of situation and burlesque inci- dent. Classical comedy, on the other hand, and that written after the classical tradition, had often been comedy of character. But the character ridiculed had never been set in a definite domestic milieu. The difference between this drama and Moliere's distinctive work can best be demonstrated by a comparison of L^Avare with its obvious source, Aulalaria. In the Latin play, Euclio's cupidity results in nothing but mockery from the persons about him ; in L\4vare^ Harpagon is a miserly father, whose ava- rice disintegrates his family. Euclio's suspicion of HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 95 Megadorus's motives in wishing to wed his daugh- ter are merely ridiculous ; Harpagon's determination to force Elise to marry Anselme, so that he can keep her dowry for himself, is domestic tyranny. The French miser, moreover, insists that his son marry an heiress instead of his beloved Mariane. This ar- bitrary demand, combined with the miser's greed, leads Cleante first to a discovery of Harpagon's con- temptible usury and then to practical confederacy with the robber LaFlecheagainst his father. In every case, therefore, what is in Euclio mean personal pas- sion, in Harpagon has become a source of general domestic disorder. Euclio is, as it were, an isolated comic figure; Harpagon is a comic member of a bourgeois family. All of Moliere's domestic comedies of character are like UAvare in this respect, — the amusement depends on the way in which the foible of the central character implicates the members of his own house- hold. A writer of such comedies has two distinct problems : first, the construction of the family group ; and second, the introduction, the display, and final disposition of the main character. In solving both of these problems, Holberg followed Moliere's method, even in details. The most important unifying figure in Moliere's group is the mother. In the few pictures that he draws of a complete bourgeois family, the mother, 96 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE worldly-wise and utterly unidealistic, is the ruler. She asserts and obtains her wishes as against those of her husband in all things which concern the or- ganization and conduct of the household, and par- ticularly in all things which concern her daughter's marriage. In George Dandin^ it is Madame de Soten- ville who determines the character of the tyranny to which her wretched son-in-law is subjected. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme^ Madame Jourdain is a bet- ter embodiment of Moliere's bourgeois mother. She represents obstinate common sense in the face of her husband's absurd social pretensions and affectations. Though without influence in curbing M. Jourdain's ambition, she is thoroughly effectual in defeating his plans for marrying their daughter. She opposes him with shrewish fury until she is made a party to the deception which passes off the girl's lover upon M. Jourdain as the son of the Grand Turk. Though both Madame de Sotenville and Madame Jourdain are hard-headed, efficient domestic tyrants, they do not play their parts so vigorously as the women in Les Femmes Savantes^ where Philaminte, the wife of Chrysale, forms, with her sister-in-law, Belise, and her older daughter, Armande, a femi- nine triumvirate, which rules the family with an iron hand. To this tyranny Chrysale in particular has to submit. He is not only powerless to prevent the arbitrary dismissal of poor Martine, but he is HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 97 equally ineffectual in opposing Philaminte's plans for marrying Henriette to the insufferable pedant, Trissotin. Her preposterous scheme is thwarted only because Chrysale's brother, Ariste, devises a trick by which Trissotin is shown to be a fraud. Thus the mothers clearly rule the household. Their assertions of authority are by no means mere bursts of temper. They are rather attempts, though often irascible and shrewish, to establish a definite domestic policy. The humour of the relation between husband and wife in these groups is founded on a clear conception of a family organization. Holberg's Magdelone is a middle-class mother holding the same ideas as these women of Moliere. In Pemille' s Short Expeneiwe as a Lady^ Magde- lone's assertion of her power is thoroughly character- istic. She and her husband, Leonard, have a young daughter, who is sought in marriage by a rich old man, Jeronimus. Both parents offer the natural ob- jection to the suitor's age until the old fellow replies as follows : Jeronimus. After all, the match is not so very unequal. In the first place, I am not so old as I may seem ; and in the sec- ond place, since Heaven has granted me ample means, — sixty thousand dollars in ready money — Magdelone. Sixty thousand dollars, you say ? Jeronimus. Yes, sixty thousand dollars. Magdelone. And in ready money ? 98 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE Jeronimiis. Yes, in ready money. Does the match now seem so very indecent ? Magdelone. I thought that Mr. Jeronimus was a very old man, but now that I hear that he is n't nearly so old as I tliought, I really can't see that there is any great disparity — Leonard. He is too old for her, all the same. Magdelone. Keep still, my dear ! You are always interrupting. Let me talk. Since Mr. Jeronimus isn't so very old, and it is Heaven's Avill, we simply can't refuse his request. Leonard. But we surely can't promise our daughter until we have heard her opinion. Magdelone. You are a regular old woman, my dear. Let me talk. See, here is my hand, Jeronimus, as a pledge that you shall have my daughter. Such a woman is the same unscrupulous tyrant that we have seen the bourgeois mothers in Mo- liere's plays to be. In The Fortunate Shipwreck., Magdelone is similarly assertive. She has been flat- tered by the pedantic poet, Rosiflengius, until she determines that no one else shall be her son-in- law. Her plan for the marriage of her stepdaughter becomes, it is needless to say, the plan of Jero- nimus too. In Jean de France., Magdelone does not show her customary worldly common sense. She is completely captivated by the Frenchified airs of her foppish son, while her husband immediately sees how intensely foolish they are. Yet she compels him, unwilling though he is, to simulate her adoring attitude. These women, in spite of much personal HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 99 individuality, play parts clearly similar to that ha- bitually taken by the mother in Moliere's domestic comedies of character. The bourgeois father in Moliere, in one respect at least, is the distinct prototype of Holberg's sim- ilar figure. To be sure, the father in the French comedies is frequently the central comic figure. As such he can obviously retain no fixed conventional nature. Yet, like practically all fathers in Renais- sance comedy, the middle-class father in Moliere, whatever his importance, always insists that his daughter give up her lover for the man of his choice. Moliere is original only in making the customary opposition of the father illustrate the parent's char- acteristic foible. In UAvare^ for example, the miser Harpagon wishes Elise to marry Seigneur Anselme merely because he is willing to take her ' ' sans dot. ' ' And the neurotic Argan insists on having Thomas Diafoirus for his son-in-law, so that he may con- stantly have on hand ' ' les sources des remedes qui me sont necessaires." Holberg is like Moliere in making a tiresome convention of parental tyranny serve the needs of his comedy of character. In The Political Tinker^ for example, Hermann, the pot-house ]X)litician, objects to his daughter's lover because he refuses to become a "politicus."Vielgeschrey, who imag- ines that the duties involved in running his house- 100 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE hold force him into a headlong rush, insists on his daughter's marrying a bookkeeper, Peder Mad- sen. Only an expert, he thinks, will be able to bal- ance his household accounts. And Don Ranudo, the ragged but ferociously proud Spanish grandee, will allow his daughter to marry no one of less impor- tance than the Prince of Ethiopia, a lineal descend- ant of the Queen of Sheba. Holberg follows Moliere, therefore, in transforming an irrational convention of Renaissance comedy into an element of strength in the construction of a new form of comedy of character. In the plays of both Moliere and Holberg, there is a figure belonging to the family whose main dramatic duty is to act as an exponent of common sense. His voice alone is that of disinterested rea- son. Of this figure as it appears in Moliere, Legrelle says : " L'une des plus singulieres conventions que la comedie de Moliere impose a la bonne volonte du spectateur, c'est assurement celle d'unfrere ou d'un beau-frere, I'homme raisonnable de la piece, et le met dans I'obligation d'user a un certain mo- ment de cette sorte d'infaillibilite qui lui est attribuee pour remettre un peu dans la voie du bon sens les esprits passionnes ou aveugles, c'est a dire a peu pres tout le monde." One has but to think of the part that Ariste plays in Les Femmes Savantes to realize to what HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 101 the critic is here referring. A brother of the poor crushed Chrysale, he sees clearly enough the true nature of Trissotin, and devises the plot by which the fawning flatterer is made to reveal his real character even to the three learned ladies. In Le Malade Imaginaire^ Beralde, the brother of the ail- ing Argan, is a similar embodiment of common sense. He really directs the action but little, yet he is constantly protesting in the name of reason against Argan 's illusions. Such a mouthpiece of common sense was not the invention of Moliere. A similar personage appears even in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, where he is usually an old neighbour who now and then looks over the wall to talk a bit of sense to the obsessed characters. Mo- liere' s originality consists almost wholly in giving the figure a definite place in the life of a middle- class family. A common-sense brother, evidently modelled on Moliere's figure, often appears in Holberg's plays. He is rarely, however, a person of importance to the plot ; he is rather a mere foil to set off the fool, or a standard by which the folly of the other persons may be measured. Ovidius, for example, in With- out Head or Tail^ plays the part that Holberg usu- ally assigned to this figure. The comedy is a satire on extremes in religious belief. Of three brothers, one, Roland, is violently superstitious ; another, Le- 102 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE ander, is obstinately skeptical ; while Ovidius, the third, takes a sane middle course. A demonstration which a charlatan old witch gives of her power changes completely the position of the two extre- mists. Roland sees that the old woman is an im- postor. The miraculous bases of his faith are, there- fore, swept away, and he becomes straightway a complete skeptic. The incredulous Leander, seeing by chance the same demonstration, is terrified by the display of what seems to him supernatural power and immediately accepts devoutly all the su- perstition that Roland has just forsaken. Ovidius, in the mean time, has remained firm in his reasoned belief. "I consider it just as silly," he says, "to reject every sort of belief as to accept them all. I always take the middle course between skepticism and superstition." To the pedestrian sanity of this compromise he ultimately converts both of his er- ratic brothers. Ovidius, then, is not only the stand- ard by which the folly of his brothers is measured, but also the embodiment of the common sense which in the end prevails over their folly. This Ovidius, besides, obviously expresses Hol- berg's own ideas on the subject treated in the play. In so far as he is merely the author's voice and es- sentially unrelated to the other characters through the action, he is an unsuccessful dramatic figure. Elsewhere a similar character is nothing but a - HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 103 critic of the comic extremes embodied in the other persons in the comedy. His lectures, then, have so Httle relation to the plot that they often seem mere incidental essays on manners. Originally, Holberg's common-sense figure was probably a copy of the similar one in Moliere. Usually, both are definitely related to the family in which the dramatic action takes place ; both serve as standards by which to measure the folly of the ridiculous characters; and both act, as it were, as intellectual solvents for all the folly that appears in the drama. Holberg, how- ever, by failing to give this oracle of common sense a definite relation to the other characters through the action, makes him seem too often merely a spokesman for the author's ideas. Other members of the typical family in Holberg's plays, especially the two lovers and the two ubiqui- tous intriguing servants, seem more directly related to figures of a like sort in the commedia delVarte than to any in Moliere. Yet the most important structural members of the household are alike in the comedies of the two writers. In the works of both there appear the worldly-wise mother, who is clearly the ruler of her husband ; the father, who, although cowed by his wife, is stubbornly opposed to his daughter's marrying anyone who will not indulge his characteristic foible; a rather artificial man of common sense, a brother-in-law or some 104 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE equally convenient relative ; and finally, of course, the chief humorous figure. The entire family really exists only to serve as a realistic background for him and to keep him continually the centre of comic interest. Another set of problems, therefore, to be solved by an author in writing a domestic comedy of char- acter concerns this principal comic figure. And in the introduction, display, and disposition of this all-important personage, the two authors adopt sim- ilar methods. The entrance of the comic hero in the plays of both Moliere and Holberg is usually post- poned until his nature has been vividly described by the family of which he is a member. In Tartuffe, the hypocrite (in this case a member of the household only by adoption) does not appear until the beginning of the third act. For two acts, however, the various members of Orgon's family have been talking of little but him. Tartuffe's smug hypocrisy, when at length it is displayed, is funny, therefore, not only in itself, but also because of the satisfaction it affords to a deliberately aroused comic curiosity. The plot of Erasmus Montanus is in this respect typical of Holberg's method. The advent of Erasmus, too, has been artfully prepared for by his family. Dur- ing the first act all the characters talk of nothing but the antecedents and the peculiarities of the young pedant, so that at the moment of his first HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 105 appearance, in absent-minded disarray, at the beginning of the second act, the audience is quite ready to laugh at him. His actions need to be merely suggestive and not definitely illustrative. This skil- ful and economical method of seizing the attention of the audience for one comic figure, and of hold- ing it rivetted there with the least expenditure of dramatic invention, Holberg clearly learned from Moliere. The second period in the comic existence of the central character is alike in both authors. The hero must, of course, display the character which his family has already assigned to him. For the first ex- hibition of his nature he need not be involved in an artfully contrived situation. But both authors find it necessary to devise a plot which will ensnare him and make him irrevocably the dupe of his foible. In Tartuffe^ Elmire gives the unctuous impostor an op- portunity to make love to her after she has concealed her husband in the room. In this way TartufFe's elaborate pose is betrayed, and thereafter he is the victim of his own hypocrisy. In Erasmus Montaniis^ the recruiting sergeant traps the pedant by appealing to his love of disputation. When the boy sees into what difficulty his affected scholarship has brought him, he is ready to acknowledge it as folly and to renounce it forever. Tartuffe does not thus reform. His hypocrisy is too clearly a moral fault to be sum- 106 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE marily cast off like Erasmus's stupid monomania. Moliere's comic heroes are as a rule possessed by a mania too serious to be renounced by a fifth-act repentance. The French author, moreover, enjoyed ending his plays with a sardonic burst of laughter at the silly victim of the folly. Such cynical mirth Holberg found uncomfortable. He preferred to leave his comic heroes completely reformed and happily reconciled with their families. He was willing to blunt the edge of his ridicule for the sake of making more pointed his moral intention. Neither the subject nor the method of any of Hol- berg' s comedies of manners is borrowed from Mo- liere. Yet some incidental social satire which appears in Holberg has a counterpart in the work of his French master. Though Moliere's tiresome inveigh- ing against the medical profession is echoed in Hol- berg, the Danish writer is much less fond of this sort of fun. While Moliere chooses ridicule of doctors for the central idea of three of his comedies, Holberg makes the doctor the main object of his satire in no one of his plays. He says, indeed, with how much seriousness one cannot tell : ' ' All doctor comedies are nonsensical here at home, where the medical profession is composed of excellent men. They are in no way guilty of those faults found among the itinerant doctors abroad . " In spite of this apparently ingenuous praise, Holberg does introduce into his HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 107 comedies now and then bits of the current, popular satire on the profession. In The Lying-in Chamber^ for example, among the guests who come to con- gratulate the young mother into a state of collapse is her learned physician. His pedantic use of Latin, which the patient amusingly misunderstands, and his still more pedantic citation of authorities are the objects of Holberg's ridicule. The Young Mother. I have such horrible dreams at night. What can cause such things. Doctor? The Doctor. Dreams, Madam, are of various sorts; there are somnia divina, diabolica, and nafiiralio, or accoixiing to the opinion of Hippocrates, only somnia divina and naturalia. On other occasions, when Holberg has Henrich dis- guise himself as a doctor, the rogue assumes that the only things necessary are a long black robe, equally long excursions into Latin, and an eagerness to dis- agree violently with his colleagues in every diagno- sis. Such incidental bits of satire show Holberg's ac- quiescence in an almost universal comic tradition, rather than any definite indebtedness to Moliere for his conception of effective satire on manners. The re- lation of the two authors in this ridicule of doctors is typical. When Holberg borrows some of Moliere's satire on social customs he reduces it to the posi- tion of an insignificant comic device.* The plot of one of Holberg's comedies of intrigue, The Eleventh of June., is derived in all its essen- 108 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE tials directly from Monsieur de Pourceaiignac. * Parts of the plots of some of his plays which are not prop- erly called comedies of intrigue are also derived from plays of Moliere. Some of the dramatic ac- tion oi Honourable Ambition and Z)o« Ranudois taken from that of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme^ and the plot of The Fortunate Shipwreck is much like that of Les Femmes Savantes. In these works, however, Holberg's art is revealed, not in that dramatic ac- tion which is obvious imitation, but, as we shall presently see, in the skilful way in which he has adapted Moliere' s action to his immediate dramatic purpose, and at the same time transformed French artifice into Danish reality. Besides these lessons of structure which Hol- berg clearly learned from Moliere, he found much of what may be called his comic decoration in the work of his French master. In all comedy there must be many moments the humour of which de- pends, not upon their relation to the dramatic pur- pose of the whole play, but solely upon their own extraordinary and unexpected nature. They are de- vices for keeping the audience amused by the way, while the humour of a situation or of a character is being systematically yet gradually presented. Com- edy of this sort Holberg borrowed freely from Mo- liere. Exhaustive lists of such similarities between the two men have been compiled. f From them we HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 109 need choose only enough to show the extent and general nature of this borrowing of detail. Holberg is sometimes systematic in his use of Moliere's comic devices. In The Busy Man, for ex- ample, he uses one bit of incidental comedy after another in the same order in which these same devices appear in Le Malade Imaginaire. This steady correspondence in comic decoration makes the two plays seem strangely alike. Yet both in the characters satirized and in the plots which motivate the action, they are completely unlike. Moliere's play satirizes in Argan a man engrossed by his im- aginary infirmities, and intent on applying every conceivable remedy to their cure. Holberg' s play satirizes in Vielgeschrey one with nothing at all to do, who, nevertheless, believes himself overwhelmed with work. Two characters so unlike are naturally cured of their foibles through the operation of en- tirely different plots. There is, however, enough similarity in the march of the incidents to allow Holberg at frequent intervals to adapt a comic device in the French play to his immediate purpose. Argan 's fondness for doctors makes him insist that his daughter give up her lover for a young physician, Thomas Diafoirus. Vielgeschrey 's ex- cited determination to bring order into the confu- sion of his household accounts makes him simi- larly reject Leonora's lover, Leander, in favour of a 110 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE bookkeeper, Peder Eriksen. The first resemblance in comic device appears when the father in each play announces to his daughter his selection of her hus- band. The girl in each case, thinking that her father is surely speaking of her lover, acquiesces enthusi- astically in all his praise until at last an unequiv- ocal remark brings her astonished disillusionment. A bit of the dialogue from each of the plays will show the obvious likeness. Argan. lis disent que c'est un grand g^rgon bien fait. Angelique. Oui, mon pere. Argan. De belle taille. Angelique. Sans doute. Argan. Et qui sera reQU medecin dans trois jours. Angelique. Lui, mon pere ? Argan. Oui. Est-ce qu'il ne te I'a pas dit? Angelique. Non, vraiment. Qui vous I'a dit a vous ? Argan. Monsieur Purgon. Angelique. Est-ce que Monsieur Purgon le connoit ? Argan. La belle demande ! il faut bien qu'il le connoisse, puis que c'est son neveu. Angelique. Cleante, neveu de Monsieur Purgon ? Argan. Quel Cleante ? Nous parlous de celui pour qui I'on t'a demandee en mariage. Angelique. He ! oui. Argan. He bien, c'est le neveu de Monsieur Purgon qui est le fills de son beau-frere le medecin. Monsieur Diafoirus et ce fils s'appelle Thomas Diafoirus, et non pas Cleante.* HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 111 The following extract from The Busy Man is clearly modelled on this dialogue. Yet Holberg did not have the power of holding a dramatic fact deli- cately in suspense through a long stretch of swift dialogue, a power peculiarly French, which Hol- berg' s exact contemporary, Marivaux, possessed in the degree nearest perfection. The Danish author's imitation of this device lacks much of the charm of the original. Vielgeschrey . He is a sensible young person. Leonora. Yes, that is certainly true. Vielgeschrey. And his father is a fine man. He will follow in his footsteps. Leonora. I have no doubt of that. Vielgeschrey . And within four years he will be the cleverest bookkeeper in the city. Leonora. What ? Leander a bookkeeper ? Vielgeschrey. His name is not Leander ; it is Peder, and he is the son of Erik Madsen, the bookkeeper.* The ridiculous social manners of Thomas Diafoi- rus are much like those of the approved suitor in the Danish play. His pedantic grandiloquence is undoubtedly the model for the magnificent speeches which Leander makes when he is passing himself oiF as Peder Eriksen. Diafoirus begins the recitation of the remarks he has painfully learned by rote as follows: "Mademoiselle, ne plus ne moins que la statue de Memnon rendoit un son harmonieux lors- 112 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE qu'elle venoit a etre eclairee des rayons du soleil: tout de meme me sens-je anime d'un doux transport a I'apparition du soleil de vos beautes." Leander, though he employs none of Diafoirus's figures of speech, is no less academic and rhetorical." When I consider my condition, merits, and position," he begins, "I shame myself with the peacock. When, on the contrary, I observe and consider my ap- proaching fortune, I plume myself with the pea- cock."* Thomas Diafoirus, his head crammed with polite speeches that he has learned by heart, and awhirl with embarrassment, takes Angelique for his pro- spective mother-in-law. Peder,the bookkeeper, when he stumbles in for his initial appearance in Holberg's play, similarly mistakes the identity of the principal figures. In order to have the embarrassing business over at once, he addresses his speech to the first woman whom he chances to see ; and she unfortu- nately proves to be Pernille, the maid. Pedcr. I come here according to the agreement between my father, Erik Madsen, the bookkeeper, and Mr. Vielgeschrey, to court you, lovely maiden. Pernille. You are making a mistake, Mr. Bookkeeper, I am the maid. My mistress will honour you with her presence in a moment. t Before this ill-starred entrance, Pernille and Hen- rich have formed a plot whereby they are to pass HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 113 off the old servant Magdelone upon Peder as Leo- nora. Peder's blunder, accordingly, gives the maid her desired opportunity of ushering in the simpering Magdelone. It is interesting to note that Holberg wrote The Busy Man with his eye so closely fixed upon Le Malade Imaginaire that he was able to utilize so insignificant a comic device for his imme- diate dramatic purpose. As the plots progress, still other similarities in the incidental comedy of the two plays appear. Leonard, in The Busy Man^ crit- icises his brother's mania from the point of view of cold common sense, just as Beralde criticises his brother in Le Malade Imaginaire. At the close of the plays Vielgeschrey as well as Argan is brought to accept his daughter's lover, though, to be sure, as the result of entirely different plots. Argan expe- riences an actual change of heart at the sight of Angelique's manifestations of sincere love for him which his feigned death calls forth. Vielgeschrey, for his part, merely accepts a fact adroitly accom- plished by an elaborate series of disguises and tricks devised by Pernille. At the last moment, however, each father shows that he is not completely regen- erate. Argan consents to his daughter's marriage with Cleante only on condition that he become a doctor. Vielgeschrey makes a similar request of Leander as a sort of condition to his marriage. 114 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE Vidgeschrey . Is it certain, then, Monsieur, that you will take up bookkeeping ? Ltander. Yes, dear father, I promise. Vielgeschrey . Then I will call you son-in-law and forget all the injuries that you have done me.* The two plays in this ^\'ay preserve to the end a haunting impression of correspondence, due, in the main, to nothing more fundamental than continued similarity of incidental comedy. Such systematic borrowing of Moliere's comic devices occurs nowhere else in Holberg's w^ork.Yet fugitive bits of the former's comedy appear there constantly. Moliere, for example, often gives his dia- logue an appearance of wit by casting it in a form of exaggerated symmetry. When two characters be- come almost lyrical in mutual praise or blame, this exact verbal balance is most effective. The conversa- tion between Vadius and Trissotin in Les Femmes Savantes is an excellent example of the mannerism familiar to every reader of Moliere. Trissotin. Rien qui soit plus charmant que vos petits rondeaux. Vadius. Rien de si plein d' esprit que tous vos madrigaux. Trissotin. Aux ballades surtout vous etes admirable. Vadius. Et dans les bouts-rimes je vous trouve adorable. A moment later, when the compliments of the two change to bitter abuse, their dialogue remains ridic- ulously antiphonal. HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 115 Trissotin. Allez, petit grimaud, barbouilleur de papier. Vadius. Allez, rimeur de balle, opprobre du metier. Trissotin. Va, va restituer tous les honteux larcins Que reclament sur toi les Grecs et les Latins. Vadius. Va, va-t'en faire amende honorable au Parnasse D'avoir fait a tes vers estropier Horace.* Holberg often employs this symmetry, in a form not unlike that of classical stichomythia, to give point to his dialogue. Most frequently it adds piquancy to quarrels in themselves termagant and vulgar. f A typical dispute occurs in Henrich and Pemille. The two servants have been engaged in mutual de- ception. Henrich has passed himself off on Pernille as his master, and Pernille with equal success has fooled Henrich into believing that she is her mistress. While playing these roles they court and marry each other. When they discover the deception they break out into the following rhythmic denunciation : Pernille. Oh, let me tear his eyes out first ! Henrich. Oh, let me wring her neck off first ! Pemille. I thought that that hangman's knave was a great dandy. Henrich. I thought that that harlot's slave was a rich lady. Pernille. I see, though, that he is a fool. Henrich. I see, though, that she is a flirt. Pemille. But his very folly dispelled all my doubt, Henrich. But her very flirting dispelled all my doubt. 116 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE Pemille. He took his master's name and said he was Leander. Henrich. She took her mistress's name and said she was Leo- nora.* The elemental coarse comedy of this scene is un- doubtedly refined by the artificially balanced dia- logue. Other artifices of Moliere's style Holberg seems not to have used to any appreciable extent. f Many of the Frenchman's comic subtleties were palpably unsuited to Holberg's colloquial prose and his insatiable realism. The extensive similarities in incidental humour between the two dramatists are, on the whole, significant not so much because they clarify one's notions of Holberg's art as because they reveal the intimacy of his knowledge of Mo- liere. Many of the similarities between the work of Hol- berg and Moliere so far discussed have been indi- cated in Legrelle's study; and, in spite of certain errors in this critic's conclusions, one must admit that Holberg's knowledge of Moliere influenced fun- damentally his dramatic ideas. It formed his gen- eral conception of a comedy of character, especially of a domestic comedy of character. It supplied him with much of the action assigned to the simi- lar members of similarly constituted families. It fur- nished him with the complete plot of one of his comedies of intrigue. And, finally, it suggested to him many of the most effective bits of his inciden- HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 117 tal comedy. With such facts before him, a French critic like Legrelle almost inevitably saw in Hol- berg merely a weak imitator of Moliere. He consid- ered Holberg's divergences from his French master not as significant exhibitions of originality, but as unsuccessful attempts at imitation. His convenient explanation of Holberg as a mere Danish Moliere is, therefore, quite inadequate. This phrase, if em- ployed to define the quality of Holberg's humour, is particularly misleading. The works of the two writers undeniably produce radically different total impressions, a fact which proves conclusively that the differences between them are more fundamental than the similarities. Indispensable as Legrelle' s study is to every student of Holberg, it should be supplemented and corrected by a sympathetic analy- sis of his originality in just those plays where his debt to Moliere seems most thoroughgoing. Such an analysis will show that into each one of his bor- rowed forms Holberg introduced much of his own independent comic spirit. II The Danish author, we have seen, found proto- types for many members of a domestic group in the work of Moliere. Yet he was too keen a realist to allow well-developed foreign literary types to become his rigid and exclusive models. Once supplied with 118 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE the middle-class personages of French comedy, he modified and developed them as Danish reality demanded. His Magdelone, for example, proves often to be a copy of the hard, practical mothers of the bourgeois family as Moliere conceived it. Yet in more than one play she becomes an obviously origi- nal character, possessing little or no resemblance to Moliere's figure. Thus in Erasmus Montanus^ Nille, as the mother there happens to be called, exhibits none of the hard-headed common sense that the corresponding French person always possesses. She is by nature a wondering creature, and regards the academic accomplishments of her pedantic son with a kind of superstitious terror. She really fears that his triumphant "Ergo, you are a stone," is insid- iously causing her limbs to harden. At the same time, the terror arouses in her a kind of maternal rapture; and her husband shares her feeling com- pletely. "Tears often come to my eyes," he says, "when I reflect that the child of a peasant has become so learned." Nille has, therefore, no chance to play the traditional role of forcing her attitude towards the son upon a feebly protesting husband. In any case, Nille's simple, wondering nature could never have appeared domineering. Though occupy- ing the same position in the household as that habit- ually held by Moliere's bourgeois mothers, Nille is Holberg's creation. She is drawn from nature. And- HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 119 her prototype was one of the superstitious, stupid, yet robust peasant women of Zealand. Holberg's Magdelones are at other times indul- gent, comfortable housewives, full of an easy good humour which is utterly foreign to the sharp-tongued females in Moliere. Magdelone in Honourable Amhi- tion., for example, plays a part obviously similar to that of Madame Jourdain. She is as much averse to her husband's silly longing for a title as is the French woman to her husband's similar ambition. Yet where Madame Jourdain is violent and shrew- ish, Magdelone is calm and indulgent. Magdelone. My dear husband, I say that I neither can nor will oppose you in this matter. Jeronimus. You can, then, do me a service for which I shall be grateful as long as I live. Magdelone. What is tliat ? Jeronimus. It is to take the blame upon youi-self, so that I may say that I am seeking to be raised to the peerage against my own wishes, but that my wife has her heart set upon a title. Magdelone. That 's just it ! We poor women have always to take the blame. Jeronimus. Oh, but help me out in this affair, my chickabiddy ! No one lays up such an ambition against a woman. Magdelone. You may thank God, you men, that you have us for cloaks. Jeronimus. Help me out, anyway, this once ! Magdelone. Well, I have taken the blame so often that I may as well take it in this matter, too.* 120 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE The homely humour of this universally true situa- tion is revealed with a directness and a bald real- ism quite unlike anything in Moliere. Magdelone has not come into Holberg's comedy by way of any French comic tradition. She is, on the contrary, an unmistakable transcript from Danish life. Geske, the bourgeois mother in The Political Tinker, possesses characteristics of another sort, yet just as clearly native and original. She is, to be sure, conventionally vigorous in objecting to her husband's neglect of business for political va- pourings. Yet her furious outbursts are mere exhi- bitions of temper. They betray, indeed, a complete lack of control, and leave Hermann von Bremen bat- tered but steadfast in his ideas. Later, when Her- mann's political nonsense seems to have resulted in his elevation to the office of mayor of Hamburg, Geske shows immediately the feminine submission which is instinctive with women of her sort. She becomes most deferential to all his wishes. Every change in their way of living which her husband thinks their rise to power demands, she accepts as inevitable. Even orders which arouse in her a nat- ural revolt, she obeys meekly. The supreme test of her submission comes when Hermann concludes a long list of instructions by saying: "Listen. I forgot one thing. You must also procure a lapdog, which you must love as your own daughter. Our HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 121 neighbour Arianke has a fine dog which she can lend you just as well as not, until we can find one of our own. You must give the dog a French name, which I shall hit upon when I get time to think about it. This dog must always sit in your lap, and you must kiss it a half score of times at the least, when we have callers." * Although nauseated at the thought of kissing Arianke's dirty beast, Geske bravely ac- quiesces in this demand of fashion, and later in the play she appears, dressed in all her finery, lugging a great hairy dog about in her arms. Geske in a scene of this sort is drawn with a relentless realism which Moliere would have thought indecent. All of these women are utterly independent of the bourgeois mothers in Moliere. They show how much the following sweeping statement of Legrelle needs to be modified : " Le personnage de Magdelone dans Holberg est congu sur ce modele [that of the bour- geois mother in Moliere] .C'est surtout par ses exces d'autorite, plus ou moins couronnes de succes, qu'elle nous prete a rire, soit a ses depens, soit a ceux de son mari. ' ' f Holberg had his eyes too firmly fixed on the life about him to let his admiration for any conventional literary type destroy his power of comic invention. The same uncompromising love of realism led Holberg, at least once, to make even his amorosa an individualized peasant girl. The lovers, Leanderand 122 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE Leonora, are usually, to be sure, ridiculously per- functory figures. They plainly bore the author. Never having been in love, he apparently made no effort to portray his lovers as possessed of any real emo- tion. He wished to force the inevitable lovers to occupy a strictly subordinate place ; and he deliber- ately modelled them, not upon figures which Moliere had created out of the absorbing romance of his own life, but upon the mere puppet amoroso and amorosa of the commedia deW arte. Leonora is never a clumsy imitation of the charming young girls of Moliere, or, as Legrelle calls her, "une image paleetdecoloree, une sorte d'ombre vivante, de Lucile ou d' Agnes." The one time that Holberg gives his amorosa a de- cided individuality, he does not bestow upon her the graces of these French characters. He makes her, on the contrary, a copy of the Danish peasant girls whom he evidently knew. Lisbed, the betrothed of Rasmus Berg, in Erasmus Montanus^ from the mo- ment that she enters, is a lovesick rustic. She comes in, simpering, with her father, Jeronimus, and her mother, Magdelone, to find out when her lover is to reach home. Jeronimus. Good morning, cousin! Have you any news from your son ? Jeppe. Yes, I think that he will be home to-day or to-morrow. Lisbed. Oh, is it possible ? Now my dream has come true. Jeronimus. What was your dream ? HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 123 Lisbed. I dreamt that I slept with him last night. Magdelone. Dreams surely mean something. Dreams are not to be despised. Lisbed. But is it really true tliat Rasmus Berg is coming home to-morrow ? Jeronimus. Why, my daughter ! You should n't let folks see that you are so much in love. Lisbed. Oh, are you sure that he is coming home to-morrow ? Jeronimus. Yes, yes ! You hear, don't you, that he is coming home to-morrow ? Lisbed. How long is it till to-morrow, dear father ? Jeronimus. What silly nonsense ! These lovere act like perfect idiots ! Lisbed. Oh, I shall count every single moment !* The elemental, giggling love of this peasant girl is extravagant enough to make her a caricature. The author's conception of the lovesick girl is, however, neither an impotent copy of something in Moliere nor a perfunctory repetition of the amorosa in the commedia deW arte: it is rather his own interpretation of Danish life. This keen insight leads Holberg in many other places away from Moliere into channels of striking originality. Even in a mere comedy of intrigue like The Eleventh of June., the plot of which is carefully modelled on that of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, he finds an opportunity to draw native peasant charac- ter. In the Danish, as in the French play, the audi- 124 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE ence is supposed to derive most of its amusement from the success of a swindling scheme. Yet a far- cically conceived fellow from Limousin clearly could not serve as a model for a Danish country lout like Studenstrup, the victim in Holberg's play. This boy is so real a representative of the Danish peas- antry that whenever he is on the stage, it is his char- acter, and not the intrigue, that holds the interest of the audience. His abysmal stupidity is continually intensified by a petty sort of cleverness which he imagines to be shrewdness. His boasts of cunning in the following passage are particularly amusing because the audience at the time knows that he is securely involved in the toils of the plot. After hav- ing been successfully lodged with "cousin Jacob," the proprietor of a disreputable lodging-house, he complains to him of the attempts that the baggage porters have made to cheat him. Studenstrup. As soon as they see a stranger, they think that he is something to angle for. But they shan't cheat me. The Stu- denstrups are n't the sort of folks to be led about by the nose. They know, too, what money is for. Jacob. No, no ! I can see by your face, cousin, that no one could fool you easily. Studenstrup. I could tell any fellow who tried it by his looks, even if he were Alexander the Great himself. Clever as those porters were, I fixed them, just the same. I passed off on them a half crown piece covered with quicksilver for an eight crovvTi piece, and so got back six crowns in change. HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 125 Jacob. But I am afraid that when they notice their mistake they will come back here. Studenstrup. Then I will swear that they never got the coun- terfeit from me, for I have some small oaths in reserve, so that I can swear myself clear without perjuring myself. If, for example, I swear that I never agreed to pay them a cent, I mean, as a gift. If I should swear now that I have n't paid those fellows a thing, I add to myself that the money was n't for them, but for others for the porters' work.* This boy's credulity and his self-deluded belief in his own shrewdness make him a representative of a universal peasant type. As such he is perennially funny. The presence of this original figure, indeed, makes the essential humour of the play almost com- pletely independent of the borrowed plot. Even in Holberg's comedies of intrigue, the characters, and not the plot, prove to be the comic elements of greatest importance. The intense interest in human beings which Hol- berg always showed, led him to transform situations that in Moliere are frankly extravagant into devices for illuminating character. The denouement of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is nothing but picturesque farce. It is an extremely common dramatic conclu- sion of the Itahan Theatre, modified in a manner which allowed the author to introduce the Turkish ballet he had been commanded to devise. M. Jour- dain, it will be remembered, finds Cleante, his 126 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE daughter's lover, a person of by no means enough importance to satisfy his lofty social aspirations. The despised youth, accordingly, disguises himself as " le fils du Grand Turc," who, it appears, is also eager to marry Mile. Jourdain. After he has entered in the magnificent array of an Oriental potentate and talked a little gibberish, Turkish dancers begin a gorgeous ballet. This dance, M. Jourdain believes, is a part of his ceremonial initiation into the holy order ofl Turkish JiIama?noiichi. Once made a mem- ber of this exalted order, he delightedly promises his daughter to her disguised lover. The play ends with another ballet, devised to entertain thecompany until the eagerly awaited notary arrives to arrange for the marriage ceremony. The dhiouement \s thus a mere spectacle, much like that of a modern comic opera. It makes no pretence of being the logical conclusion of a comedy of character. Now Holberg saw that this inconsequential gam- bol could be converted into a suitable ending for his Do7i Ranudo. In this play, the comic hero and his wife are the modern representatives of an old and very much decayed family of Spanish nobility. Their daughter has for a lover a rich young par- venu, Gonzalo. His family is, indeed, so scandalously new that his suit is contemptuously rejected by Don Ranudo and his wife. Leonora, the intriguing maid, feels, however, that the marriage must be HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 127 accomplished to save the family from actual star- vation. Accordingly, she makes use of the plot by which M. Jourdain has been tricked. She has Gon- zalo disguise himself as Melchior Caspar Balthasar Theophrastus Ariel David Georgius, Prince of Ethiopia. After this pompous suitor has been an- nounced, Holberg introduces a number of scenes de- vised to display the character of Don Ranudo and his wife. He pictures the preparations which they make to receive the Ethiopian prince. Although offi- cers of the law have just confiscated all their pos- sessions, including most of their clothes, they are determined to receive the prince with the lofty dig- nity and hauteur that befit members of the ancient nobility of Spain. Don Ranudo accordingly wraps himself in a long black military cape, and his wife dons a dress which their maid has Ion g ago discarded . Then they send word to the prince that they have clothed themselves in this wretched apparel as a kind of desperate penance for their sins. But their religious humility, they will have it understood, has not modi- fied in the least their social self-respect. Don Ranudo refuses absolutely to remove his hat in the presence of the prince. "No! I will never submit to that," he explains, with wounded dignity. "Should I, a Colibrados, a grandee of Spain, who have the right to talk to the King himself with my hat on , — should I stand bareheaded before a mere foreign prince ? ' ' 128 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE After numerous scenes of this sort of exposition of character, in which Holberg's comic invention is at its best, the intrigue proceeds almost exactly as in Moliere. For the Turkish ballet is substituted, to be sure, a gorgeous procession of Arabs who form the retinue of the prince. Then the lover's disguise, as in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme^ accomplishes its purpose. To the overwhelming shame of Don Ra- nudo and his wife, their daughter is actually married to the parvenu Gonzalo before they discover the se- cret of his disguise. The woman is frankly defeated and crushed by the disgrace. As the curtain falls, she cries to her husband, "Let us go into a clois- ter." Thus, unlike the central figure in most of Holberg's plays, these insanely proud Spaniards are dismissed as unregenerate. They remain to the end fit only for the mocking laughter of the audi- ence. Much alike as are the denouements of these two plays, Holberg has made the extravagant burlesque of Moliere a more integral part of his comedy. The appearance of the fraudulent Prince of Ethiopia is not the mere occasion for a picturesque ballet. It gives Holberg, on the contrary, a clever opportu- nity for displaying and developing the characteristic foibles of the Ranudos. He has transformed a device which in Moliere is amusing only for its gorgeous extravagance, into a point of illumination in one of HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 129 his comedies of character. Holberg's interest in the realistic display of human nature remained primary with him, even when, as in the case of DonRanudo, the prototype of his figure was not to be found in Danish peasant life. Holberg's comic heroes differ from those of Mo- liere, however, not only in expressing a more un- conditional realism, but also in being possessed by foibles of a distinctly different kind. The satire of the two authors thus becomes an expression of two essentially unlike comic spirits. The objects of Moliere's satire are of two sorts. He ridicules, in the first place, fundamental blemishes of character, which usually amount to distinct moral turpitude. Such are the foibles satirized in Tartuffe, U Avare^ Don Juan^ and Le Misanthrope. The standard by which such follies are measured is simply a nor- mal sense of moral values. Folly of this nature Hol- berg never ridicules. The second object of Moliere's satire is of a slightly different sort. It is a kind of serious mania which engrosses and vitiates the character possessed. Argan in Le Malade Imagi- naire and M . Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Genhlhomme are the victims of this kind of infatuation. The cri- terion by which such follies are judged is nothing but a normal man's conception of sanity. Moliere satirizes, then, in his comedies of character, grave human failings, which, in spite of the implied com- 130 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE ment of a mocking observer, lead the action almost inevitably toward tragedy. Indeed, the tragic end- ing in many of his plays is avoided only by a kind of deus ex machina. The nature of Moliere's hu- mour is partly determined by this swift and sardonic avoidance of tragedy. To some extent the objects of his satire give his comedy its unique mixture of gaiety and melancholy. A careful study of Holberg's comedies shows that he is less interested in fundamental reform of character than in a growth of social amenity. In The Political Tinker^ his object is to ridicule the confidence that a mere tinker possesses in his ability to direct aifairs of state. In The Fickle-minded Woman ^ he sat- irizes intellectual volatility; in Jean de France^ the af- fected assumption of French airs and graces; in Gert Westphaler^ the volubility of a barber ; in Erasmus Montanus^ the complacent and stubborn pedantry of a young scholar ; in Don Raniido^ the intense pride of a family which has nothing but age to recommend it ; in Without Head or Tail, both superstition and superficial skepticism ; in The Fortunate Shipwreck, literary toadying ; in Honourable Ambition, the eager but timid ambition of a well-to-do citizen for a title ; in The Busy Man, the feverish, ineffectual activity of one who really has nothing to do ; in Pernille'' s Short Experience as a Lady, the eagerness of an old fellow to marry a young girl for reasons palpably HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 131 mercenary ; in The Bridegroom Metamorphosed^ an old woman's affectation of youthful frivolity; and in A Philosopher in his Own Estimation^ insincere professions of philosophy. No desire to satirize either moral faults or feverish manias provoked the composition of any of these works. The standard by which the fpllies displayed in them are to be measured is merely a well-de- veloped sense of social fitness. Partly for this rea- son, Holberg's hearty laughter is never restrained by any underlying melancholy. He knows that his fools are not knaves. They need not so much to ex- perience a fundamental reform in character as to gain a little social sense. Moliere's idea of the comic ex- presses some of that mixture of gaiety and intensity characteristic of the Renaissance; Holberg expresses the easy urbanity of the eighteenth century. The good-humoured attitude which Holberg ha- bitually assumes toward the world distinguishes his work from that of his French predecessor in other points than in the choice of their comic heroes. The social manners which Holberg chose to ridicule are naturally different in kind from any that Moliere could possibly have selected. The latter can hardly be imagined as levelling a satire against inordinate affection for lapdogs, as Holberg does in Melampe; against pietistic objections to masked balls, as he does in Masquerades ; or against a superstitious be- 132 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE lief in legerdemain, such as is made fun of in JFitch- crajl. Yet all these social follies are natural objects of Holberg's satiric attack. The same desire to preach humanistic control is often shown in the incidental essays which Holberg puts into the mouth of Moliere's exponents of com- mon sense, who appear in modified form in his com- edies. Through these figures, Holberg himself ob- viously addresses his audience. Leonard, in Mas- querades^ is one of these mouthpieces of the genial author. By his words he attempts to induce his un- compromising friend Jeronimus to take a more rea- sonable attitude towards the youthful indiscretions of his son, and particularly toward the boy's delight in going to masquerades. After Jeronimus, for ex- ample, has threatened his servant Henrich with abrupt dismissal and his son with disinheritance, if the pair ever dance at another masked ball, Leonard makes the following long conciliatory speech : "Come, come, cousin, do not be so hot-headed ! Let us take the middle course ! Only hear without prejudice my humble opinion of masquerades. I do not condemn masquerades because they are mas- querades, but because people make a habit of them. Frivolous ways of passing the time are sometimes as necessary for certain people as food and drink. Aside from the service they render in cheering people up, they are a very ingenious invention, in that they HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 133 represent to men the natural equality which existed in the beginning before pride of rank became pre- dominant. In those days, a man considered himself as none too good to associate with anyone. In the same way, so long as a masquerade lasts, the servant is just as good as his master. I condemn, therefore, not masquerades, but their abuse. When young men go to masquerades three times a week, they waste both their money and their health, and besides, they steal three days from the week, — sometimes, in- deed, the whole week; for through continual revel and sleep they become entirely unfitted for business. Licensed masquerades, therefore, exist nowhere throughout the entire year. To dance a certain num- ber of times a year, either masked or unmasked, is no evil; but dancing which lasts the whole year through, can transform the best ordered city into a huge madhouse."* Long undramatic speeches like this often interrupt the action in Holberg's comedies. Although usually put into the mouth of a dramatic personage, they are obviously expressions of the author's own opin- ions. Holberg seems frequently to have been unable or unwilling to reduce his discursive satire to sharply defined comic action. These incidental essays are the result of that independent satiric temper which distinguishes his comedy at many points from that of Moliere. 134 HOLBERG AND MOLIERE The radical difference, however, in the effect which the entire w^ork of the two men produces upon even the most superficial reader is due largely to the difference in the kind of realism which they felt bound to show on the stage. Moliere was essen- tially a courtier. He wrote for audiences who pos- sessed an instinctive sense of form and a preference for refined and thoughtful laughter. His figures, however vividly conceived, were drawn only after a certain compromise with realism had been effected. They are usually members of the bourgeoisie^ — a class rendered thoroughly conventional by social usages. They are, therefore, always well-mannered and decently behaved. They are never dirty, ragged, coarse — in a word, never clearly elemental. These middle-class folk, furthermore, are always seen, as it were, only in the highly polished mirror of some drawing-room, and they have been made as re- spectable as possible for the social ceremony of their introduction. Moliere' s audiences were not sup- posed to grow unbecomingly merry. However keenly they were amused, their laughter was always conde- scending, and, like all thoughtful mirth, politely restrained. Holberg, on the contrary, wrote for people with little or no literary and dramatic background. They were not satisfied with comedy unless it aroused their hearty and boisterous laughter. To amuse them HOLBERG AND MOLIERE 135 Holberg became thoroughly uncompromising in his realism. He took them without apology directly into the stuffy houses of Jeronimus and Magdelone, into a lying-in chamber, or even to see the dirty, drunken peasant Jeppe lying on a dung-heap. He insisted that his audiences should see everything that he saw, so that they might join him in his shouts of glee. If the thoughtful members of the crowd chose, they might comprehend the author's clear satiric purpose ; but every one, down to the most reck- less, was given all the opportunities for laughter that he craved. When the comic spirit of two writers is so dif- ferent, similarities in details of dramatic technique sink to a position of comparative insignificance. It is misleading, then, to regard Holberg as a mere imitator of Moliere, or to speak of him as the Danish Moliere. He is only a little more reasonably called the Danish Plautus. The truth is, not only that Hol- berg possessed a profoundly original comic spirit, but also that with the dramatic ideas which he learned from Moliere he combined and interrelated those derived from other sources. Therefore, before Holberg' s original genius can be finally described, his indebtedness to other dramatic and literary tra- ditions must be as carefully appraised as Legrelle has sought to appraise the debt that he owes to Moliere. Legrelle's thesis is too one-sided to be just. HOLBERG AND THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE CHAPTER IV HOLBERG AND THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE THOUGH Holberg is deeply indebted to the plays of Moliere, he owes a no less important debt to the commedia del P arte. Curiously enough, this relation has never been thoroughly investigated or accurately appraised.* Of the many forms which Italian comedy assumed, Holberg seems to have known only the one that flourished in France dur- ing the last years of the seventeenth century. Italian comedians first went to Paris in 1571, at the request of Catherine de' Medici, to take part in the festivities arranged to celebrate the entry of Charles IX and the crowning of his queen. Marie de' Medici also helped to keep performances of the commedia deW arte a fashion of the French court. After 1571, therefore, whenever the troublous times permitted, a troupe of Italian comedians was likely to be playing in Paris. Almost without exception, the most famous Italian actors played there at some time in their career, and many of the important col- lections of the commedia delV arte are associated with companies which had appeared at the French court. f These foreign actors invariably returned to Italy after a comparatively short visit. No one of them thought of establishing himself permanently in Paris 140 HOLBERG AND until 1662, when the company of Giuseppe Bianchi became definitely settled in the Palais Royal. Since this hall had already been assigned to Moliere's com- pany,* for a long time the two troupes played there on different days. Throughout all the combinations which the French companies effected after Moliere's death, the Italians maintained their individuaHty. They were still great favourites with the public in 1697, when they were abruptly dismissed. The sen- sitive old king had probably imagined one of their plays, LaFausse Hypocrite^ to be a satire on Madame de Maintenon. The Italians were driven into the provinces until Orleans assumed the regency, when their theatre was one of the many institutions of amusement to be restored. During the early years of the eighteenth century, a company headed by the well-known Louis Andre Riccoboni enjoyed great popularity, but it gradually lost favour with the pub- lic, and in 1 780 it was merged in the Opera Comique. Little of Holberg's knowledge even of French forms of the commedia dell ' arte could have been gained from visiting the theatre. f All of his so- journs in Paris, with the exception of his stay of ten months beginning June, 1725, were made either before the Italian comedy had been reestablished, or after he had written all save the very latest of his own dramas. The exact knowledge of the conven- tions and traditions of the commedia dell ' aite that THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 141 his work reveals must, therefore, have been acquired from printed plays. The one collection of this sort which he certainly knew was made by the actor Evaristo Gherardi in 1700. It consists of fifty-five comedies which the Italian actors in Paris had pre- sented between the years 1682 and 1697. Besides this book, Holberg may have seen a collection of the plays of Domenico Biancolelli which he had given in the French provinces during the early years of the eighteenth century, when his company was exiled from Paris. The commedia dell ' arte as it appears in Gherar- di's collection has lost some of its most distinctive features. Pulcinella,* the oldest figure, the proto- type indeed of many other buffoons, does not appear in any of these late plays. Nor does the renowned Capitano Spavento occupy a position comparable either in importance or extravagance to the one that by tradition is rightfully his. The earliest plays in Gherardi 's collection were written fully twenty years after the Italians had been permanently estab- lished in Paris, and during much of the time they had been acting in the same theatre with some of the best French companies. This association definitely modified their original comic manner. In Gherardi 's plays French satire and French raillery have in a measure superseded the original fantastic action. The zanies restrain their impulse towards physical 142 HOLBERG AND farce long enough to utter some of the traditional French diatribes against marriage ; and the orgy of trickery and disguising under the windows of Pantalone's house often gives place to a satire on French society, assembled in the gardens of the Tuileries or at the baths of Porte Saint-Bernard. Moreover, as the actors began to consider them- selves Parisians, they became eager to present plays in French. Not trusting themselves to improvise in a foreign language, they engaged French playwrights to compose at least parts of comedies for them . Au- thors like Regnard, Dufresny, and Palaprat,* who afterwards made great reputations in plays written for the French comedians, began their careers by writing scenes for the Italians. The whole of Gherar- di's book was made up of apparently complete com- edies of dialogue thus composed, and so it differed fundamentally from earlier collections of the corn- media delV arte. These had consisted of a number of mere scenarios, outlines of the action of each scene, in which the dialogue was left entirely to the actors' improvisation ; or they had been collections of vari- ous unconnected dialogues and monologues which some character, like the Capitano Spavento, in- serted into plays at his own discretion. The material which the French playwright supplied never formed, however, more than a part of an entire comedy. It was eked out with Italian scenes of improvisa- THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 143 tion, conceived in the traditional spirit of the naive commed'ia deW arte. The French playwrights, then, although often satirizing contemporary Parisian life in a manner plainly influenced by Moliere and other French writers of comedy, were compelled to conform strictly to many of the conventions of the Italians. The action had to be based upon the efforts of the amoroso to marry the amorosa in spite of the determination of her father to have her marry the pedantic old doctor. Colombine had to be given a good chance to display her facility in the invention of impudent intrigues. Arlequin had to be granted the opportunity of assuming numerous disguises and of satisfying his incorrigible appetite for roguery. The cunning of this pair had to result in the duping, not only of Pierrot, the doctor's faithful but gullible servant, but also of the doctor himself, and finally of the father. The play could then end with the happy union of the lovers, and incidentally with the mar- riage of Arlequin and Colombine. Practically all the plays in Gherardi's collection, therefore, consist of slightly modified forms of the following four elements :* (l) The amorosa'' s father refuses to allow her to marry the amoroso because he has in view a more advantageous match for her. (2) Colombine, the amoroso^ s servant, invents a series of intrigues which she expects Arlequin, the amoroso^s servant, to execute. (3) These intrigues 144 HOLBERG AND invariably demand the disguising of one or both of the ser\'ants. (4) Through the tricks the father is duped into allowing, and sometimes even into aid- ing unwittingly, the union of the lovers. The plot is never regarded as anything more than a conven- ient string upon which to hang the otherwise unre- lated scenes of horse-play and sheer lawless physi- cal gaiety. NowHolberg, in at least eight* of his dramas, uses all the terms of this formula ; in two others"}* he uses it in a less complete, but no less rigid, way. In his comedies of character he has made it a convenient and highly effective means of exhibiting and exploit- ing the figures of his own invention. In Jean de France^ for example, (l) Elsebet [amoivsa) ^w\\o is in love with Antonius {amoroso) , has been promised by her father, Jeronimus, to Jean, a Frenchified fool. (2) Marthe (Colombine), her maid, with the aid of the man-servant, Espen (Arlequin), devises an in- trigue. (3) The two servants disguise themselves: Marthe as a certain Madame la Fleche ; Espen as her servant. (4) In these disguises the two make Jean act so ridiculously that Jeronimus becomes disgusted with him and gives his daughter to her lover, Anto- nius. Although the Italian formula is here applied with mathematical precision, it produces, in the exhibition and discomfiture of the fool, a ntw and more pointed result. Similarly, in the other plays of THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 145 Holberg where this conventional plot exists in all its tiresome regularity, it always leads the interest beyond itself to the character for whom it serves as a mere foil. It may be objected that many other comedies besides those of the commedia deW arte and those of Holberg are constructed on the same plan . All Renais- sance comedies are, in a sense, mere variations and adaptations of it. Holberg's direct indebtedness to the commedia deW arte at this point is established by the simplicity and rigidity with which he makes its plot the skeleton of his plays. Had he learned to apply the formula from any other source, he could hardly have hit upon that simple form of construction which is characteristic only of the authors of Ghe- rardi's dramas. It is particularly difficult to believe that Holberg learned to use this plot from Moliere, who almost never employs it in its bare, strictly con- ventional form . * Indeed , Holberg' s preference for the simple, undeveloped dramatic plan can be seen from the apparently premeditated way in which he ig- nores all the modifications and developments which Moliere had given it. In those of his plays which are founded on Moliere, he refuses to follow his model when it deviates from the conventional form he has firmly fixed in his mind. In he Malade ImagLnaire^ the lovers are brought together because Argan, by feigning death, dis- 146 HOLBERG AND covers that his daughter Angelique bears him real, disinterested affection. In the joy of this discovery, he consents to her marriage with Cleante. In The Busy Man, which follows closely the plan of Mo- liere's play, the lovers are brought together in the old traditional way. Vielgeschrey is duped into giv- ing unwitting consent to the union of the lovers by a complicated plot of disguises, invented by Per- nille and executed by Henrich. In Les Femmes Sa- vantes, the lovers are enabled to marry because Ariste, the common-sense uncle, finds an easy way of mak- ing Trissotin, the suitor approved by the mother, display his fundamental baseness. He has merely to pretend that the fortune of Henriette's family has been lost and Trissotin withdraws precipitately his offer of marriage. Ariste needs none of the hackneyed tricks of roguish servants. In The Fortunate Ship- wreck, on the other hand, a play clearly written in imitation of Les Femmes Savantes, Holberg, ignoring the simple invention of Ariste, brings his lovers to- gether by the old plot of disguises. Henrich is made to appear in the disguise of a Dutch sailor, and to report the unhappy loss of Jeronimus's wealth-laden ship. Holberg's deliberate rejection of Moliere's changes in the traditional scheme in these two in- stances proves his preference for the simple form in which it appears in the commedia delP arte. Without any modifications or refinements, this fur- THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 147 nished, as it were automatically, enough action of a burlesque sort to please his audience. When once learned, it was easily adapted to any set of charac- ters. Given this ever available plot, Holberg could de- vote his invention to the things for which his com- edies were primarily written, — the exhibition and reformation of the follies of contemporary Danish society. He made the borrowed plot, moreover, serve his own dramatic ends. An intrigue which existed in the Italian comedy only to carry the audience with some show of logic from one burst of gaiety to the next, becomes in Holberg a means of focusing interest on the characters. In the commedia delV arte this mechanical plot ex- isted, not for its own sake, but for the conventional figures who found within its bounds unlimited scope for their own characteristic antics. Arlequin, Colom- bine, Pierrot, the amoroso^ and the amowsa were dis- tinct comic entities, independent of any one play and preexistent to all of them. Holberg, in adapting the conventional intrigue in which these personages figured, naturally used them as models for similar parts in his comedies. Each of the equivalent Dan- ish figures, therefore, derives much of his dramatic nature from his Italian prototype: Henrich from Arlequin, Pernille from Colombine, Arv from Pier- rot, Leander from the amoroso^ and Leonora from the amorosa. 148 HOLBERG AND Holberg's Henrich ought, of course, to be re- garded as standing at the end of a long development of a European comic type. He descends in direct line from the ingenious slaves of Greek and Latin comedy, whose power of impudent invention he has inherited in part directly. He possesses also some of the keen wit of Moliere's Scapins and Sganarelles ; but he is certainly most closely related to Arlequin. His schemes for disguise, his horse-play, his pe- culiar sort of practical jesting, his clownishness, — indeed, all his notions of his duty to the plot and to the audience, are very like those of his Italian proto- type. Arlequin's tradition is among the oldest of those to be found in Gherardi's plays. Neither Pulci- nella, whose origin is often thought to lie in really remote antiquity, nor Pedrolino, who plays the principal servant's part in some of the older col- lections, appears in Gherardi. In Arlequin, Arlec- chino has become the most important and char- acteristic figure in the Italian comedies composed and presented in Paris. As he himself says,"Fo il personaggio principale, je suis celui qui finis tou- jours les actes." Actor after actor took up the role without modifying appreciably its traditional char- acter. Arlequin's conventional costume probably did much to fix his comic nature. He always wore motley. At first it was composed of variegated rags, THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 149 patched together at random ; later, the bits of colour were arranged in some regular design. He was, besides, the only character who continued to wear a mask invariably, during the entire period with which we are here concerned. This mask was black and left bare the mouth, which was usually extended across the mask with a white line, so that it seemed to reach from ear to ear. His head was smooth and surmounted by a tiny felt hat. He often wore a rab- bit's tail, manifestly as a sign of cowardice. He al- ways carried a flat wooden sword , sticking out behind at an utterly unmilitary angle.* The details of this costume are significant for our comparative study only in so far as they establish the nature of the laugh- ter which Arlequin must have aroused. Whether he appeared as the Emperor of the Moon or as Proteus, it is important to remember that under the superfi- cial disguise of the moment everyone saw distinctly his motley and his grinning black face. The principal dramatic action of Arlequin, as of a character Mezzetin, who under certain conditions played Arlequin 's partf in his efforts to bring the lovers together, is the assumption of one or of many disguises. As Henrich is similarly interested in the lovers, he naturally imitates with care some of the most successful of these. Both Arlequin and Henrich often assume the very popular disguise of a doctor. This part is 150 HOLBERG AND found in so many sorts of Renaissance comedy that only close similarities between the plots of an Italian and a Danish play in which the servant as- sumes the role, make one able to say with any con- fidence that Henrich habitually played the doctor because Arlequin had done so before him. In Les Bains de la Porte Saint- Bernard, Octave's desire to marry Angelique is thwarted by her father, who insists that she marry M. Tricolors. Angelique, on the advice of Colombine, feigns illness ; then Scara- mouche, another servant, persuades the father to call in a famous new doctor, whom Arlequin, also instructed by Colombine, impersonates. After mak- ing the usual pedantic quotations of Latin and trav- estying the learned consultations of the profession, he orders Angelique to be taken to the baths of La Porte Saint-Bernard for treatment. There she meets and marries Octave. Henrich, in Holberg's A Journey to the Spring, plays this doctor's part in a very similar situation. Jeronimus wishes his daughter Leonora to marry, not her lover, Leander, but a rich young fellow named Leonard. By the advice of Pernille, Leonora pretends to be affected by a peculiar malady, which allows her to express herself only by singing arias from German opera. Pernille urges the distressed father to consult the renowned Dr. Bombastius, whom Henrich successfully impersonates. After a THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 151 pretended consultation with his assistant, Leander , in snatches of meaningless Latin, he orders the patient to be taken to a famous spring near Copenhagen.* Leonora is carried thither on the eve of St. John, when the healing powers of the water are supposed to be most active. There she meets and marries Leander. Holberg's play resembles Les Bains de la Poiie Saint-Bernard so closely there can be no doubt that it was modelled upon it. In both a similar panto- mime is introduced at the same place. The second act of Holberg's play is nothing but a long interlude of pantomime suggested by the tableau at La Porte Saint-Bernard. The following directions for action are given in the Italian play: "The back of the stage opens and discloses the Seine above La Porte Saint-Bernard. One sees many covered boats, and bath tents, and a long line of carriages on the banks of the river. Many boatmen make abusive gestures at one another and hold the stage for some time." In the Danish comedy, the scene at the spring is in- troduced in the pantomime which stands in place of a second act. The directions are as follows: "The stage is made as small as possible, so that it pre- sents at first only a road to the spring, on which are travelling, not only horsemen, but also pedestrians, with pails, pitchers, bottles. . . . Then the back of the stage is opened, where the spring is seen, and 152 HOLBERG AND around it many small tents. At the very same mo- ment is heard a great confused uproar ; some are shouting, others are talking, still others swing and crack their whips. Women are knocked down in the rush to reach the spring." This pantomime is a picture of a celebration peculiar to Copenhagen in Holberg's day. It can- not, therefore, be in its details like the tableau in the Italian play. Yet the fact that the similar pantomimes come at the same place in both comedies shows that one is the model for the other, and makes it almost certain that A Journey to the Spring is a version of Les Bains de la Porte Saint- Bernard. If this is the relation between the two dramas, Henrich, on the only occasion on which his assumption of the role of doctor is utilized to carry the action to its desired end, is a copy of Arlequin playing the same role. The follies of these mock doctors are always the same, wherever they appear, — an incorrigible eager- ness to quote meaningless Latin, and a willingness to let the patient die rather than surrender any of the pedantic formalities of time-honoured professional etiquette. It is, therefore, only by discovering Henrich borrowing from Arlequin, along with his doctor dis- guise, the entire plot in which it appears, that one can say with any confidence that it was directly from him that the Danish servant learned how to impersonate the conventional stage doctor. THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 153 When Holberg makes Henrich play the Baron in Honourable Ambition^ he has him copy one of Arle- quin's favourite disguises. In Gherardi's collection he appears in the role eight times,* and in his ac- tions observes each time a stage tradition that was, it seems, strictly and definitely established. The five most important points in this tradition Henrich fol- lows with the same fidelity : L Henrich enters, carried in a porte-chaise, shout- ing " Hal-tet porteurs." He is no sooner brought to a standstill than he begins to beg Jeronimus's pardon for his plainly premeditated ostentation. ' ' I beg your pardon, my dear sir, for being brought into your presence in this posture." This was the most ap- proved way for Arlequin to make his entrance when playing the grand gentleman. In Les Originaiioc, for example, he enters in a porte-chaise shouting " Arre- tez done, porteurs, arretez. (Sortant de la chaise.) Pardon, ma belle. Parce qu'au Louvre les marauts me portent jusques dans la courd'honneur." Arle- quin makes the same sort of pretentious entrance elsewhere in Gherardi's plays. f II. Henrich's name. Baron of the Field of Pure Cabbage (Baron von Reenkaalavalt), is probably formed on the analogy of Arlequin en Baron de la Dindonniere, and Arlequin en le Vidame de Co- tignac. J III. Henrich amusingly falls out of the spirit of his 154 HOLBERG AND disguise back into his own nature when he kisses Pernille, remarking, "That is, morhleu^ a perfect- ment fine chambermaid." This resurgence of vul- gar taste comes at equally unfortunate and ridic- ulous moments to Arlequin. In La Coquette^ he persists in paying attention to Margot, the little sewing-girl, when as the marquis he ought to have been courting Colombine. IV . Henrich explains grandiloquently to Jeroni- mus : "Inasmuch as I travel in all sorts of lands, I am compelled to have different sorts of servants. I have a Spanish servant, a French, a Polish, a German, an Italian, and an English one." Even in this peculiarity Henrich seems to be only imitat- ing Arlequin in Les Momies (TEgypte^ whose ser- vants apparently come from every part of France. " Hola some one," he shouts, "Basque, Cham- pagne, La Fileur, Poitevin, Coupe-j arret." V. Henrich considers that, to render his disguise convincing, he must pretend to have made easy conquests of numerous women. He ostentatiously gives his Polish servant, Dobre Podolsky, messages to great ladies. "Pay my respects to the Countess and tell her I will visit her towards evening for a game o{ Passedix or Obscinite — and if you can find the Mademoiselle on the same occasion say to her, ' Voulez-vous comment formez la chaise autrement perfectment, je parlerons la Contesse de la Baron- THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 155 esse que ditez vous.' But no one must hear that." * Arlequin, before him, considered the display of his power over the ladies one of the most important tricks of his gentleman disguise. "Laquais ma- jor,' ' says he, in Les Momies cPEgypte^ ' ' otherwise known as my secretary, I have left on my desk twenty or thirty billets-doux ; go open them and answer them. Laquais minneor, go tell the widow that I shan't come to see her at all. Laquais mini- mus, go to the old Baroness of Francot — " These similarities show clearly that Holberg, in creating Henrich's disguise as a baron, followed closely the traditions which had been definitely es- tablished by Arlequin in similar disguises. With Henrich once clearly established in a traditional role, Holberg uses him solely as the exigencies of his plot demand. His disguise becomes merely a means of exhibiting the absurd eagerness of a retired mer- chant for a title. Only that part of Henrich's actions, therefore, which is intended as mere exposition of the character of his disguise is traditional ; the rest is new.f Arlequin's ghost-disguise was the one perhaps best suited to the farcical nature of the commedia delV arte. Even in the collection of Flaminio Scala, a favourite joke was one character's mistaking an- other for a ghost. The disguise, an excuse for much horse-play, is assumed in order to produce in the 156 HOLBERG AND victim a state of transcendent fright, in which he will promise whatever Arlequin wishes.* Once the victim is the amoroso's father, whom the ghost terri- fies into consenting to his daughter's marriage with her lover, and so fulfils the dramatic destiny of all of Arlequin's disguises. At least three times Henrich plays Arlequin's role of half-ghost, half-devil with all the zany's extrav- agance. Twice Henrich assumes the disguise to ter- rify the simple-minded chore boy, Arv,f into con- fessing his sins. The knowledge which Henrich thus gains, he uses in The Masquerade as a kind of whip to force Arv to join in the deception of the father. In A Ghost in the House ^ which is practically a trans- lation of the Mostellaria^ Henrich not only plays the slave's part by telling the returning father that his house is haunted, but he makes his lie circumstan- tial by appearing as the ghost which he had invented. This bit of corroborative evidence Henrich could never have presented had Holberg not known of the useful disguise of the Italian clown. Thus it appears that three of Henrich 's most characteris- tic impersonations, those of doctor, gentleman, and ghost, were probably inspired by similar inventions of Arlequin. Henrich's long seizures of physical farce, always closely related to these disguises, are often in form, always in spirit, faithful copies of Arlequin's lazzi.| THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 157 These lazzi were bits of physical farce or acrobatic dexterity invented by the individual actors and bear- ing no logical relation to anything in the play. Ar- lequin, who was always an acrobat and tumbler of amazing skill, was the most fertile inventor of such tricks. One of the most successful takes the form of a dialogue carried on with himself. In L^ Empereur dans la Lune^ for example, he debates whether he shall hang himself or not. The passage is written as follows : "Ho pour cela, non, mais, vous ne vous en irez pas — Je m'en irai, vous dis-je. (II tire son cou- telas et s'en frappe, puis dit) Ah, me voila delivre de cet importun a present, qu'il n'y a personne, courons nous pendre. (II fait semblantde s'en aller et s'arrete tout court.)" Gherardi, in a note, explains this action as follows : " It is to be observed that in this scene the dashes which follow a phrase indi- cate that at that point Arlequin changes his voice and his gestures, talking now from one side of the stage now from the other. Those who have wit- nessed this scene will agree that it is one of the most amusing ever played in the Italian Theatre." * The humour consists, not only in Arlequin's playing the part of two characters, but even more in his inflic- tion of violent physical punishment upon himself. Without this element the comic device would not contain the physical farce that is an essential part of all lazzi. 158 HOLBERG AND Holberg's Henrich plays the same piece of har- lequinade more than once. In Melampe^ Sganarelle (as Henrich is called there) is to act as spy for his master, Polidorus, in a mighty mock war waged for the possession of a lapdog. In order to know how to behave in case of capture, he pretends that he has been caught by one of the enemy, with whom he has the following dialogue: "Now I will imagine that some one arrests me as a spy and takes me into court where the judge asks me, 'To what country do you belong?' (He sits down in a chair) — 'I am a German, please Sir, ' No that won't do ; I must an- swer in German — 'Ich bin a German, Monsieur.' ' No one cares what a spy says. ' — ' I tell you I am no spy.' — ' Who are you, then ?' — 'I am no one,' whereupon I am put upon the rack. (He lays him- self on the floor and pretends he is being tortured.) ' Au , Au , Au ! ' — ' Will you confess, then ? ' — ' Au , Au, Au, stop ! I will confess.' " * The humour in this scene consists, not merely in Sganarelle's acting out an imaginary conversation, but, as in the ItaHan plays, in the self-inflicted punishment which pro- vides the physical farce that any genuine imitation of Arlequin's lazzi must possess. This one piece of buffoonery, which demands the combined accom- plishments of both acrobat and clown, is, whenever Henrich attempts it, an undoubted imitation of Ar- lequin's similar trick. f THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 159 One of the favourite disguises of Arlequin was that of a great potentate from some remote coun- try.* The only time that Henrich adopts this dis- guise, in Don Ranudo di Colibrados, he seems to be using MoHere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for his model ; yet the physical farce in which Henrich in- dulges on this occasion is a copy of similar horse- play by Arlequin when he assumes this disguise. His lazzi in Mezzetin^ Grand Sophy de Perse, are the most characteristic. There M. Groguard is so much plagued by the coquetry of his wife, that he is deter- mined to have his daughter marry a Persian. Men of the Orient are the only ones, he thinks, who still rule their wives. Mezzetin, in league with the girl's lover, disguises himself as the acceptable Grand Sophy. In this role he makes M. Groguard agree to give his daughter to his son, who is none other than her lover appropriately disguised. But it is Mezze- tin's lazzi while playing this part that attract Hen- rich. The Italian clown satisfies his thirst for physical farce by buffeting and beating poor M. Groguard, and then silences the old man's protests by explain- ing that he is but observing the conventional Persian amenities. "It [a buifet] is a Persian compliment, which means that you are entirely excused. When I want you to understand that I am your humble servant, I shall give you a good kick in the stomach . ' ' In Don Ranudo, the simulated court fool of the 160 HOLBERG AND Abyssinian Prince mauls Gusman under the same pretence that he is observing forms of politeness conventional in his native land. Gusman. But, Mr. Interpreter, why are you pulling my hair ? I have done you no harm. Interpreter. That is nothing, my friend. Court fools in Abys- sinia never talk without gesturing. — That first gesture merely means "I hope we may become good friends."* The introduction of this same bit of physical farce in the same situation in both plays shows beyond doubt that the two are related, at least at that point. f The physical farce connected with Arlequin's poten- tate disguise became in Holberg one of the most amusing antics of the pretended servant of the mock Prince of Abyssinia. Once, at least, Holberg introduces a still more extravagant trick of Gherardi's theatre into one of his plays. Yet he uses it only for the delight of his audience, and he disclaims responsibility for the device by referring it explicitly to its Italian source. In Witchcraft., a chance auditor overhears Leander, an actor, while he practises the part of a tragic role in which he is compelled to summon up Mephis- topheles. He thinks that the actor is calling the devil in earnest, and rushes off to spread the news that Leander is an evil wizard. Unfortunately, the public is confirmed in this foolish notion by further rehearsals of the company. For the comedy which THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 161 is to follow the tragedy, the actors choose a piece from the Italian Theatre which they call Doctor Baloardo. Henrich's principal duty here seems to have been to manipulate something he calls a " doctor-machine. "By consulting Gherardi's play, to which he and his master are evidently referring,* we find that this machine is a sort of skeleton over which the doctor's coat is hung. Arlequin gets inside the skeleton, and after lighting some can- dles so that the bones may be seen through the coat, he moves the ghostly figure about, to the great terror of everyone. Just as Henrich has crept into a "machine" like Arlequin's and begun to practise his terrifying movements, a man who has come expressly to investigate the stories of witchcraft is brought in on his porte-chaise. When his servants see Henrich, they drop their burden and flee in wild fear. The experience of this man, embellished in the telling, confirms the entire town in its belief in Leander's practice of the black art. Holberg's use of this extravagant device of the Italian Theatre is very clever. Although he is willing to amuse his audience with it, he introduces it into his play in a fashion that enables him to show his own contempt for this most farcical and exaggerated of Arlequin's lazzi. Henrich, by his adoption of many of these con- ventional lazzi of Arlequin, together with a number 162 HOLBERG AND of his disguises, became very like the Italian zany. He too grew to be both acrobat and clown. There- fore, even his tricks that are in no sense copies of those of Arlequin are none the less conceived and executed in his spirit. His imitation of Arlequin, furthermore, made still other manifestations of the physical farce which permeates the Italian comedy natural and convenient property of Holberg's com- edy. The complicated and extravagant action of a scene of the commecUa delP arte ended most natu- rally and conclusively in an outburst of horse-play. Clowns, of course, had to make their exits in an access of grimacing and acrobatic dexterity. Some- times this farcical exit was extremely crude. In Le Marchand Duppe^ Mezzetin, after mauling Friquet, simply lets him run out ahead of him, while he gives him a series of dexterous kicks. Even this device Holberg does not scorn to use on occasion. In ^ Ghost in the House, Henrich serves the Jew Ephraim in the same way and sends him out howling with pain. Usually, however, the final action was more com- plicated and demanded a more prolonged romp about the stage. The clowns by a sudden common impulse become seized with an appetite for violent physical farce. A few moments of the wildest con- fusion follow, at the end of which all the actors have disappeared. This boisterous horse-play is an easy substitute for a climax in the legitimate dramatic THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 163 action. In the plays in Gherardi's collection the same time-honoured device for an exit often appears. In Les Chmois^ for example, such a scene is intro- duced with the comment, "Cette scene est aussi italienne." Pierrot surprises Pasquariel with the soubrette."He tries to hit Pasquariel, runs away, and hides in the edge of a curtain above the hall door. Pierrot takes a pistol and fires; Pasquariel falls down and they go out. ' ' * Many times Holberg ends his scenes with this essentially Italian farcical device. In The Busy Man, Oldfux, the Henrich- Arlequin of the play, has angered Vielgeschrey, and the following action is indicated : ' ' When Viel- geschrey runs after his club, Oldfux creeps under the table, and when Vielgeschrey and Pernille run to the kitchen door, Oldfux raises himself with the table on the other side of the room, whereupon they both run to him, but he upsets the table with the papers and rushes out. "f To make the exit of Old- fux effective, all the characters abandon themselves completely to the physical farce which makes them for the moment the clowns that they always are in the commedia delP arte. Numerous other bits of horse-play in Holberg are plainly conceived and carried out in the spirit of Italian farce. Certain sorts of extravagance can con- fidently be assigned to the influence of the comme- dia deir arte. In Without Head or TaiL for exam- 164 HOLBERG AND pie, Haagen, finding Henrich asleep, sits astride of him and wakes him with a thump of his hand. Henrich, who imagined a moment before that he had seen a ghost, is sure he is being ridden by a witch. He shrieks for mercy, addressing Haagen as "Your Grace," and swears that he has never in his life bothered a virtuous woman.* This nonsense of ghosts and witches, a favourite convention of the Italian Theatre, appears again in Permlle' s Short Expeiience as a Lady. Henrich has disguised him- self as a monk for the express purpose of swearing that Lucie, Pernille's mother, is dead. Just as he finishes his story, Lucie appears, to the great terror of all, who naturally think she is her own ghost. Henrich persists in saying she is dead until, in a fit of righteous anger, she rushes at him and pulls off his disguise, ' ' so that he stands in his livery. ' ' f This last trick is certainly borrowed from Ghe- rardi. Arlequin's thin disguises were continually stripped off to reveal his ridiculous motley, for which Henrich's livery was but a poor equivalent. These examples are fairly representative of the large number of lazzi which Holberg clearly in- vented on models furnished by the commedia deW arte. Henrich is a copy of Arlequin, therefore, in the tricks of his own which he borrowed from his Italian prototype, as well as in the spirit of phys- ical farce which he has communicated to his fellows THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 165 in the dramatic action. If Henrich owes to Arlequin not only this incorrigible propensity for physical farce, but, as I have indicated, both his part in the conventional plot and all the traditions of many of his disguises, he owes him by far the greater part of his dramatic nature. Henrich is like Arlequin, however, in another important feature: he bears the same relation to Pernille that Arlequin does to Colombine. Arlequin loves Colombine, and is persuaded to play his im- portant part in the intrigue only because he hopes thereby to win her. In La Fille de Bon Sens he ex- plains his position very clearly: "My master has promised me that if I do well what he has ordered me to do, he will let me marry Colombine, whom I love to distraction. O happy Arlequin! happy Arle- quin! " * In Le Divorce^ Arlequin, having received a similar promise, is ready to perform fifty deceitful tricks {fourberies) if he can but marry Colombine. He could do little, however, despite his willingness, his cleverness in impersonation, and his physical agility, without her cooperation. She is the more quick-witted of the two, and so invariably devises and directs the plot which is to accomplish her mis- tress's marriage with the amoroso. Henrich must, nevertheless, perform what she has planned. In some of Gherardi's plays her direction is particularly evi- dent. f She not only invents all the disguises and pre- 166 HOLBERG AND tences, and anticipates the results, but she is very- careful to explain in detail to all the characters just what they must do. When once the plot is started, she fairly compels its success. Her impudence and pert self-assurance are equal to all difficulties. When she has brought her plot to a successful issue, she and Arlequin follow the example of their master and mistress, and marry.* Sometimes the marriage has been expected from the first; at other times it comes as a sudden inspiration to the servants and a surprise to the spectators. The agreement is usu- ally concluded in a purely perfunctory way. "Mon- sieur Hymen," says Arlequin, at the very end of Le Divorce, "that is n't all, you have just broken off a match, but it is now your duty to make another between Colombine and me." And Colombine an- swers: "Oh, very gladly! on condition that we be unmarried at the end of a year." Arlequin and Colombine appear once in Holberg as it were in their own persons. In The Invisible Lovers, Leander's servant is called Arlequin, and the latter 's beloved, Colombine. Yet here the man- servant, strangely enough, is less an Italian zany than in almost any other of Holberg' s plays. The comedy is known to be the dramatization of an incident from Scarron's Roman Comiqiie. All the ri- diculous situations in which this Arlequin involves himself are the result of his attempts to apply his THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 167 master's canons of romantic love. He is not a pro- lific trickster and clever acrobat like the Italian Ar- lecchino. Like Scarron's immortal Jodelet, whom he may be definitely imitating, he is much more a Spanish gmcioso^ a figure in Spanish comedy who stood for common sense, vulgar self-interest, and cowardly egotism. The gracioso became humorous through the violent contrast he offered to the heroic and high-flown sentiments of the other characters. Sancho Panza is the most famous member of the family of graciosos to which this Arlequin of Hol- berg, as well as his more famous Chilian, is related. In the plays, however, where Holberg's servants are called Henrich and Pernille, they generally as- sume the conventional Arlequin-Colombine relation. Pernille, like Colombine, is the inventor and man- ager of the plot * which she makes her lover, Henrich , execute. Later, when her intrigue has been success- ful in bringing the lovers together, she and Henrich often either plainly imply or abruptly declare their intention of marrying each other as a reward, usu- ally self-bestowed, for their part in the intrigue. f In The Foi-tuimte Shipwreck all of these points in the relations of Pernille to Henrich exist. She invents the plot. "I have thought about tricks," she says, until the blood spins around in my head like a top. Finally I have hit upon the following, which I think is going to succeed." Then she goes on to 168 HOLBERG AND describe just what is to happen. Besides, she care- fully explains the parts that she wishes the various characters to play: "I want Henrich to pass him- self oft" for a sailor, to come to Jeronimus and make him think that his ship has been wrecked." When this intrigue has been carried to a successful issue, amid general rejoicing, there is a reference to the coming marriage of Henrich and Pernille. "But where," asks Pernille, "did you learn Dutch?" Henrich replies, "I know more than you can im- agine; when we are married, I shall show you still more. In many other comedies, all these characteristic features of the relation of Arlequin to Colombine are found existing in the similar relation of Henrich to Pernille. Henrich, therefore, proves to have still another of Arlequin's characteristics, while Pernille in all the essentials of her role proves to be modelled on Colombine. Legrelle naturally asserts that the relation of Hen- rich and Pernille is founded upon the similar one that exists between the servants in Moliere's plays. He believes it is particularly like that between Ma- rinette and Gros-Rene in Le Depif Amoureux^ and Covielle and Nicole in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Yet Legrelle himself says that the dramatic purpose of the relation between these servants is to show " un amour ressenti et partage par les personnes THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 169 d'un rang inferieur, et qui se developpe a cote de I'amour heroique des personnages principaux." Its dramatic value depends on the ' ' antithese ingeni- euse et comique," a contrast which he says, quite properly, was developed with particular success in Spanish comedy.* Moliere, in other words, finds his servants of dramatic value chiefly because in their love-dialogues and love-quarrels they oflTer a humor- ous contrast to the more dignified love-episodes of their master and mistress. Henrich and Pernille play parts utterly unlike these. Holberg almost never devotes a line to love-dialogues either of the ser- vants or even of Leander and Leonora themselves. The servants' love-episode consists of nothing but a final abrupt decision to marry. MoHere's servants are not primarily the clever, intriguing agents of the author in conducting his plot. Marinette has not Pernille's inexhaustible fund of farcical invention. Gros-Rene makes no attempt to rival Henrich 's clownish lazzi and extravagant disguises. Mo- Here's servants are in certain points more closely related to Spanish than to Italian comedy. Even such of their characteristics as are derived from the commedia deW arte have developed into something original. Holberg's servants, on the other hand, are Danish equivalents of the Italian figures. Henrich displays Arlequin's unbounded devotion to hismaster, which 170 HOLBERG AND in both of them is a relic of the Latin slave's nature. He has the zany's irrepressible delight in playing tricks, in disguise, in elaborate pretence, in horse- play ; the zany's impudence in carrying out the com- plicated intrigues which the cleverer maid-servant invents. But Holberg wrote with his eye too intent upon Danish reality to be satisfied with drawing over and over again a figure all of whose characteris- tics were borrowed and artificial. Henrich from the first shows the result of contact with Danish life.* In a number of plays he has become something far other than the impudent trickster that Arle- quin always is. In The Political Tinker^ The Fickle- minded Woman^ and The Lying-in Chamber^ he resembles much more the Jacob oi Erasmus Monta- nus^ whose sole education has been his own observa- tion. He expresses the amusement and astonishment of a level-headed young man, full of homespun wis- dom, at the folHes and contradictions of life. He may exploit the fools a little for his own delight, but he seems most inclined to reason and comments with the wit and skepticism of a peasant's sturdy com- mon sense. There is an irony unknown to Arlequin in this Henrich. He describes, for example, the transactions of the "Collegium Politicum" as fol- lows : " I heard well enough that they deposed em- perors, kings and kurfiirsts and put others in their THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 171 places. Now they talked of tariffs, now of taxes, now of Hamburg's development and the advancement of trade. Now they consulted books, and now they peeked at the map. Richard Brushmaker sat with a toothpick in his hand, so I believe that he must be the secretary of the council."* He cannot see why the council has been so foolish as to elevate his master, the tinker, to the office of mayor, but he is keen enough to see the possibilities of the office he shall hold, — that of messenger to the council. He feels that he may count on two or three hundred thaler a year from people who will be eager for audiences with his master. He will take delight in this money, not because he is greedy, but because he wants to show the world that he understands his office. Troels, in The Lying-in Chamber^ makes similar ironic comment on events. When the play opens, he has just been to the houses of ninety- three women with the news that his mistress has given birth to a daughter, a great miracle that will set the whole town in an uproar. He comments sa- tirically on social fashions of his day. He is amazed at the custom that compels a widow, with a mod- est competence, to spend so much money in giv- ing her husband an honourable burial that she will have nothing left upon which to live an honour- able life. But Troels is particularly amused at his master's apparently groundless suspicions of his 172 HOLBERG AND wife, and teases and tortures him with insinuations, the implication of which he always promptly denies, so that the poor old man cannot tell whether the boy is merely stupid or really malicious. These Henrichs have given up the restless invention of interminable tricks and intrigues long enough to display an un- expected, home-bred wisdom. They are no longer an impossible mixture of pert lacquey and unscru- pulous slave. They have become representatives of the homely shrewdness of the Danish peasantry. In The Masquerade^ Henrich, in addition to mak- ing satirical comments on life, speaks in defence and explanation of his own character. In his words the innate courage of the better sort of Danish peasant has its first voice. Although his condition has obvi- ous similarities with that of Jeppe of the Hill, the fate that reduced the feeble-willed Jeppe to a kind of battered submission has stimulated the stronger young Henrich to whimsical revolt. "We are born in poverty," he says, "reared in hunger, and then beaten a half-score of years by a crabbed schoolmas- ter ; so passes all our childhood. When we grow up, we have to moil and toil to keep from dying of starvation before our time." The recreation, the joy that such souls crave is modest and simple: it is motion. The physical elation that comes from danc- ing, good boisterous dancing, has the power to drive away despair and even sickness because it is joyful THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 173 motion. "And I have wished," adds Henrich, with a humour not lacking in profundity," that we could take the coachman and horses into the masquerade with us, so that the wretched beasts also could have some recreation and a few good times among so many hard days."* The Henrich who talks in this way is the same one who sees the humour in old men who stagger home drunk from the tavern yet criticise with lofty morality the flightier but more venial dissipations of the young ; and the same one who still has enough of Arlequin's clownishness to parade as a ghost before the easily terrified Arv. Never belying his antecedents, never quite forget- ting his inherited characteristics, Henrich at his best has grown to the full stature of a national type. He has become the expression of a satirical com- mon sense, of a profound humour, distinctively Hol- berg's own. Pernille's development is, in general, so similar to that of Henrich that it need not be traced in de- tail. Abandoning completely the pertness of Colom- bine, the mere intriguer, she becomes a character, less clever, perhaps, but infinitely more real. The plot that she invents and carries to triumphant con- clusion in The Busy Man^ for example, is absurdly complicated and artificial. Yet her talk is so per- sistently concerned with the familiar matters of the household that her actions assume a certain air 174 HOLBERG AND of plausibility. When she wants to divert Vielge- schrey's attention from a too close scrutiny of her ex- travagant intrigues, she tells him that the other hens are pecking his favourite little black hen to death, or she remarks : " The other day I found my master's catalogue on a shelf above his linen clothes in the kitchen ; the wretched cook had got hold of it and was going to fry salmon on it. " * Talk about hens and fried salmon changes once for all a conventional Jemme d^ intrigue into a very real member of a homely household. In others of Holberg's domestic comedies, Pernille's inherited artificiality is similarly trans- formed into a robust reality. Her position in the family is always impossible to comprehend ; her talk, however, has so much homely verisimilitude that it often beguiles one into belief, not only in her, but in the situations of which she is the centre. In the figure of Arv f there exists the same mix- ture of tradition and independent invention that we have found in Henrich. He is always a slow-wit- ted boy, who has never seen the world beyond his own village. His superstition, timidity, and stupidity make him an excellent foil and butt for the quick- witted, worldly-wise Henrich. He seems so clearly to reek of the soil that one thinks of him as a purely Danish figure ; yet he stands at the end of a comic tradition of the commedia deW arte. A figure like him, half clown, half stupid peasant, is almost as THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 175 old as the commedia deWarte itself. The type prob- ably appeared for the first time in 1570, in the troupe of a certain Juan Ganassa, under a name to which Leoncavallo's opera has given universal currency, Pagliaccio. He was a sort of variation of Pulcinella, but was, unlike him, stupid, slow, and awkward. In the company of the Gelosi he has become Pedro- lino,* who in Scala's collection appears as the valet of Pantalone. He is often charged with watching his master's wife or daughter, but is either outwitted by the other servants, or stupidly falls asleep at his post, or gets drunk with the Capitano Spavento and his servant. During the seventeenth century, how- ever, this figure does not appear in the companies of Italian comedians in Paris. Arlequin in the mean time having adopted many of his stupid ways, con- tinually allowed his attempts at roguery to be foiled by his own stupidity, until about the year 1670, when Dominique Biancolelli, the famous Arlequin of the Italians in Paris, banished this stupidity from his nature. He had discovered that the French pub- lic found silly simplicity out of place in a character whom they wanted first of all to be quick-witted. But Arlequin 's open-mouthed inanity offered too many obvious chances for successful y«?wx de theatre to be entirely discarded. The Italian actor Giraton invented, therefore, the figure Pierrot f to inherit the stupidity which Arlequin had abandoned. The 176 HOLBERG AND invention amounted to little more than a revival* of Pagliaccio-Pedrolino with all his characteristic traits. In Gherardi's plays Pierrot appears very fre- quently. He is occasionally an independent farmer living in the neighbourhood of the city, f but usu- ally he is the servant either of Pantalone or of the doctor. J This role he plays with the witlessness of a country lout." Monsieur," he says, with a kind of helpless frankness," you know that in our family we are all fools from father to son. My father was the first swine of his time and in me his nature sur- vives." § His ignorance, he feels, is a thing to boast of. "Ah, father and mother!" he cries, "how I thank you for not having made me learn to read ! God knows that books and learning produce nothing but fools. "II His costume, as it appears in various descrip- tions and pictures, carries out to perfection the idea - of a country bumpkin. His clothes, though appar- ently white, have all the marks of ill-made home- spun ; his trousers extend only to the middle of his calves ; his blouse is bound with a loose belt ; and his broad hat slouches down over his ears. The silly grin which always disfigures his face suits ad- mirably the humour which he generally contributes to the comedy. Colombine asks Pierrot with assumed ingenuousness if he can tell her what marriage is. THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 177 Pierrot. Surely nothing is easier — you could never have found a better question to ask me. Colombine. Well, then? Pierrot. It is like, for example, a thing when one is together. Your father — married — your mother; that resulted in their being two. And in the same way your grandfather — for his part — Nature — one doesn't know how to explain such a mixed-up mess.* In spite of occasional gleams of mother wit, the slow boy is no match for the clever schemes of Arlequin or Mezzetin, directed against his master. Arlequin finds him ridiculously easy to dupe or to terrify into stupidity. Pierrot, therefore, in spite of his dog-like devotion to Pantalone, is usually made an unwilling confederate of the tricksters in their machinations. Arv is clearly a child of this tradition. Henrich's description of him defines his character as clearly as did Pierrot's tell-tale clothes. "The chore boy \^gaards-karl^ has a position in the household only a little higher than the watchdog," says Henrich. ' ' In the last and lowest class is the watchdog ; in the next, the chore boy; in the third, the cook ; — and in the highest class, the lacquey. "Arv, like Pier- rot, is funny only because he is stupid and simple- minded. He seems never to have left the estate of which he is a definite part, while Henrich has seen life both at home and abroad, in the company of his young master. Arv's honest stupidity is sharply 178 HOLBERG AND contrasted with the worldly wisdom of the confident and cosmopolitan Henrich. The manifestations of this stupidity are mul- tifarious. He has, for example, the same kind of difficulty as Pierrot in conveying both delicately and lucidly the point of a disagreeable message. In Jean de France he knows that his master will surely be arrested if he goes home ; yet he cannot bring himself to say that everything is not right, although the perplexed way in which he scratches his head shows Jean immediately that he is seek- ing a graceful way of breaking bad news. Finally, after he has tried repeatedly to avoid the difficulty by running away, he is frightened into blurting out : "Everything is really all right, but there is some- thing mighty bad about it too." In the next scene his folly is more exaggerated and conventional. Like Scapin in Les Fourberies, he hides Jean in a sack and tells the gambler who is seeking him that the suspicious looking bundle contains butter, can- dles, lace, and vegetables. Then when none of his assertions is believed, he shouts in terror: "But it really is n't Hans Frandsen, Monsieur, I can give my oath on that, for how in the world should he ever get into a sack ? " * Of course, he continually mis- understands with a stupidity too wilful to be really funny. When Leander asks him whether "papa" ate at home to-day, Arv replies, ' ' He ate in his cage THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 179 as usual." "You fool!" shouts Leander in reply, ' ' I asked about my father, not about the popinjay. " Pierrot might have been guilty of all these fatui- ties, for no one of them fixes at all distinctly Arv's social and domestic position. Like Pierrot's actions, they are tricks of a figure whose sole dramatic duty is to be consistently witless. But Holberg was not sat- isfied to let Arv remain a mere conventional clown. He made him talk and act like the peasant boys he had seen slouching round the houses and barn- yards of Danish farms. Arv, made human by this contact with a real chore boy, shows only such stupidity as is consistent with this Danish nature. He has, for example, indignant suspicion of every- thing that he cannot understand. He believes that Jean de France's incomprehensible French contains insults. "He gives me a dog's name and calls me Garsong," he says. "If he calls me Garsong again, I am certainly going to answer, ' Yes, Fido.' For I was christened Arv Andersen and can prove it by the church-book. But what can I do when his mother lets him call her 'Mare,' which is still worse."* Pierrot's flashes of mother wit have a touch of sauciness. Arv's substitute for this is a sol- emn sententiousness, not unsuited to his character. For example, in A Journey to the Springs he realizes well enough what has happened when Leonora does not return with her doctor from the spring during 180 HOLBERG AND the night. Yet he tries to reassure the father in gen- eraHties, which sound like those vague aphorisms which are often the sum of a peasant's wisdom. Jlrv. It is possible that there are certain sicknesses which are cured best by night, and certain doctors who do not practise before the sun goes do^vn. Jeronimus. That is true. When a man is struck with a sudden weakness, like a fainting fit at night, he must have a doctor, but in long-continued illnesses the patients are allowed to sleep at night. £rv. O sir ! doctors underetand that best.* His conversation and his actions, furthermore, indi- cate continually his definite place in the household. What did we have for dinner ? ' ' asks Henrich in Masquerades. Arv. Sweet porridge and dried codfish. Henrich. You saved some for me, did n't you ? Arv. No, we gave your share to Soldan the dog, because our master says that anyone who can't come to meals in time, shall not have anything to eat. If you can get it from Soldan again, you are welcome to it.t Bits of homely conversation of this sort occur often enough to make Arv's position in the family seem perfectly natural. A scene like the one in Christmas Eve,X already quoted in another connection, serves the same purpose. There Arv comes in from the barn to play his loutish part in the Christmas cele- bration. His chief delight, of course, is to imperson- THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 181 ate the traditional Christmas goat. He comes bounc- ing in, covered with a sheet from which two horns protrude, and successfully terrifies the other ser- vants. He feels so much anxiety, however, over Per- nille's extravagant fear that he takes off his sheet to assure her that it is he who is impersonating the beast. The schoolmaster a little later makes Arv's stupidity serve as a foil to the children's crammed cleverness. At every moment we are made to see the boy playing a stupid servant's charac- teristic part in a family holiday. The conventional and artificial in Pierrot, thus brought into vital contact with Danish reality, have become in Arv natural and native. He, like Henrich and Pernille, does much to create the atmosphere of a simple Danish household. The servants, it may be said, contribute most to the establishment of that middle-class family life which is peculiar to Holberg's domestic comedies of character. In these three figures Holberg has given the essentially popular and extempore figures of Arlequin, Colom- bine, and Pierrot the only permanent literary form that they have received. Holberg first took the servants into his plays, it must be remembered, only because he found the plots to which they were essential extremely useful in his hurried writing of comedy of character. Two more figures who are vital parts of the Italian plot. 182 HOLBERG AND the amoroso and the amorosa^ have counterparts in Holberg's Leander and Leonora. They are like their Italian prototypes chiefly because they are mere pawns in similar games.* They love each other only to give the servants an excuse for intrigue. Yet they are not for that reason, as Legrelle asserts, infinitely feeble copies of Moliere's lovers. Such an assump- tion is unfair to Holberg. Moliere knew how to por- tray skilfully and sympathetically the mutual hopes and fears of young lovers. He highl}^ individualizes each couple and their love story. Holberg knew that he could not imitate Moliere successfully in draw- ing characters of this sort. Furthermore, he under- stood his artistic limitations w^ell enough to make no attempt to introduce into his portrayal of the wooden Italian lovers either originality or diversity. They remain in his plays the perfunctory figures of the commedia deW arte about whose affairs all the other persons are actively concerned. Leander and Leonora owe their bare existence to the amoroso and the amorosa ; they possess little character to owe to any literary tradition. None of these Danish descendants of figures of the commedia deW arte develop at all logically dur- ing the course of the play. Their rigid natures are never swerved from their predestined courses by any clash with men or events. Furthermore, Hen- rich, Pernille, and the rest are practically the same THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 183 persons in every play in which they appear. This complete lack of development and versatility is in- evitable in legitimate descendants of figures whose unchanging masks and costumes fixed irrevocably their humorous nature. The reappearance in play after play of favourite characters, once accepted by the audience as a tradition, becomes in itself a source of delight. Holberg, able to take for granted the immediate sympathy of his audience for half of his personages, could devote his dramatic effort to the invention of situations and to the exposition of the nature of the central figure. His use of mask- like figures was dramatic economy. By employing them, he directed the eyes of his audiences more surely and searchingly upon the central character, who absorbed most of his own interest. Complete hsts of comic details which Holberg borrowed from Gherardi's plays have been more than once carefully compiled.* Of such devices, only those which indicate structural similarities be- tween the two comic systems are of any real impor- tance. The spirit of much of Holberg's drama is like the commedia deW arte because it has inherited the latter 's traditions of humour which are peculiarly suited to masked figures. Arlequin and Mezzetin, for example, frequently appear as various gods of clas- sical antiquity. In these parts they are invariably in the grip, as it were, of crude stage machinery which 184 HOLBERG AND was obviously planned to imitate the similar effects of the contemporary opera. Jupiter is drawn up through the roof by a pulley, or Proteus and Glaucus flounder on the stage which is supposed to represent the ocean.* Whatever gods the clowns are intended to be, their Olympian insignia are invariably only a few superficial marks of identification pasted on their motley. The clown always grins incorrigibly through the disguise of the god he is trying to represent at the moment. Holberg introduces the gods into his plays, at least once, entirely in the manner of the commedia deir arte. In fact, he constructed the prologue of Without Head or Tail by combining the prologues of two plays in Gherardi's collection, Le Divorce and Les Chinois. Holberg's mythological sketch consists of three scenes. In the first, Sganarelle enters and begs the audience to help him in his search for an act of a comedy, which has been somehow lost. He and his fellow players, who expect some of the gods to attend their performance, are thrown into despair by discovering at the last moment that their comedy possesses but four acts. Vulcan, who enters while the search is going on, does not know, Philistine that he is, that a drama ought to have five acts. He goes to the theatre to see a show, the more gorgeous and spectacular the better ; so he is scorn- fully directed to the theatre of the German com- THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 185 pany. In the next scene, Jupiter and Apollo are let down upon the stage from the roof, while Momus more humbly enters by the door. Momus proves to be a pedant, fearfully distressed to learn that the comedy is to have but four acts. Apollo, however, has less rigid ideas about the construction of drama. "A comedy is a mirror," he says," which presents the foibles of mankind in such a way that it amuses and instructs at the same time. When a comedy does that, it is good, no matter what the number of acts may be. " " Even the conventions of Moliere, ' ' he adds, "are no more fundamental dramatic laws than other conventions of Italian or German com- edy." Jupiter, convinced by Apollo's liberal criti- cism, orders the play to proceed. He and Apollo then take seats in the gallery, largely because he wants to show everyone that a seat up there need not bring disgrace. The various elements of this scene are found in different works of Gherardi. In the prologue of Le Divorce^ Arlequin comes in to tell the audience that some of the actors are ill, so that the performance cannot be given. His offer to return everyone's money at the box-office is interrupted by Mezzetin, repre- senting Mercury. The motley messenger announces that Jupiter insists on seeing the advertised play. A moment later, Pierrot, in the guise of Jupiter, de- scends from the roof on the back of a turkey. He has 186 HOLBERG AND heard that in the play a man obtains a divorce, and he wants to see how the thing is done, so that he can introduce the custom into Olympian society. He announces that he has brought a few pocket thun- derbolts which he will hurl at anyone who dares in- terrupt the play. Jupiter, as he is here imagined, is clearly the model for the same figure in Without Head orTail^ who descends from heaven in a similar way to dispel by his divine fiat a serious embarrass- ment of the actors. Both gods, after their orders for the continuance of the play, mount to the gallery. The idea of putting the critical dicta expressed in the Danish prologue into the mouth of Apollo, Holberg found already developed in Les Chinois. There, Pierrot, disguised as a little girl, enters to lament her mother's refusal to let her go to the play. Apollo answers the prejudices of the old-fashioned mother with a defence of comedy. " It is the mirror of human life," he says, "which makes vice ap- pear in all its horror and represents virtue in all its glory."* In the next scene the author of the com- edy about to be presented has suddenly lost heart. He sees, too late, hundreds of unsuspected blemishes. He is in despair principally because it consists of but four acts. Thalia, however, decrees that the prologue shall count as the required fifth act, and, turning to the spectators, announces that whoever whistles will be a dead man within a quarter of THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 187 an hour.* Holberg makes the very same question of the propriety of presenting a play with but four acts the occasion for Apollo's criticism of comedy, which is similar to the other Apollo's praise given in Les Chinois. The combination of elements of a similar sort taken from different sources is characteristic of Hol- berg's work. The result in this case is a prologue full of the comic spirit of the commedia del P arte. No better incarnation of the flippancy of these Italian plays could well be imagined than the burlesque Jupiter dangling from the roof or ascending cere- moniously in his machine to sit among the rabble in the gallery. Yet Holberg, instead of having Apollo repeat his prototype's generalities, makes him ex- press his own ideals for Danish comedy. He gives his scene another characteristic touch when he makes Jupiter take his seat in the gallery solely to set a worthy example to snobs. Holberg, the irrepressible teacher, could not let slip the opportunity of talk- ing a little common sense to his audience, partic- ularly when it would help to fill vacant seats in his theatre. The Olympians appear in their Italian role of crit- ics in another little piece of Holberg' s, ./^^Y^'w Year's Prologue to a Comedy^ which was presented in 1723, after Montaigu's company had been playing in Co- penhagen for a year, and was an answer to the 188 HOLBERG AND criticisms which had been directed against it. As in Le Divorce and TVithout Head or Tail^ Sganarelle's introductory remarks are interrupted by the appear- ance of a number of strayed Greek gods. The party consists of Apollo, Mercury, Mars, Vulcan, Momus, Cupid, and Aesculapius, all of whom, with the ex- ception of Apollo, straightway begin to criticise the nature of the plays which the company has been performing. Apollo and Thalia not only answer the critics, but in addition praise the purposes and meth- ods of comedy. In this play Holberg wanted simply to give his critical defence of Montaigu's company a form amusing enough to hold the attention of the audience. The mere appearance of the Italian gods as critics was sufficient for his purpose. He there- fore made no effort to reproduce that rollicking, burlesque spirit of Italian comedy with which the prologue to Without Head or Tail is permeated. The only other occasional play of Holberg's, The Funeral of Danish Comedy* is also closely modelled on one of Gherardi's comedies, Le Depart des Comediens. In the Italian play the arrival of an unpropitious season for drama has compelled the troupe to disband. Arlequin's initial apostrophe to the vacant theatre is interrupted by Colombine, who says that most of the actors are going to leave the stage for some more lucrative employment. " They are coming in here now," she continues," so that THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 189 you can decide with whom you want to associate your fortunes." All then enter, one after another, to explain the professions they are about to adopt. Arlequin, however, remains unattracted until Mez- zetin and Pasquariel appear dressed as opera sing- ers, full of a brilliant scheme to give opera in the country. Arlequin immediately decides to cast in his lot with them ; and the play ends with a parody of Lulli's Bellerophon. Holberg's work was written for what everyone be- lieved would be the last performance of Montaigu's company in Copenhagen. Although the occasion was almost tragic for everyone interested in the com- pany, Holberg naturally enough treated it whimsi- cally. Henrich does not open the play like Arlequin by pronouncing a lyric lament, but comes upon the stage to examine his grocery bill, which, though showing very meagre purchases of food, he cannot pay. This melancholy occupation is interrupted by Mile. Hjort, the company's Leonora, who announces that after a lingering illness. Comedy has just died. Another player urges everyone to come to the fu- neral, which will be attended by various excellent folk, such as a tea-merchant, a vintner, and two chil- dren of Israel, — evidently inexorable creditors. Mile. Hjort then, like the actors in the Italian comedy, discusses her future with Henrich, who advises her to decide, as Colombine had done under similar cir- 190 HOLBERG AND cumstances, to become a servant; but she knows of no one who will engage her, for the actors by their direct satire have antagonized all sorts and condi- tions of men, officers, doctors, lawyers, tinkers, mar- quises, barons, and barbers. After this inconclusive discussion, the cortege enters. First, the corpse of Comedy, impersonated by one of the actors, is trun- dled in on a wheelbarrow. Then follows a long line of mourning actors and actresses, with their chil- dren. After the procession has marched two or three times round the stage, the barrow is wheeled down into a hole. This last dreadful symbol of eternal separation is too great for Henrich to bear. In the presence of all, he leaps into the grave, determined to be buried with his dear departed friend. Holberg obviously owes the fundamental idea of this piece to the similar Italian play. In both works acompany of cashiered players comes upon the stage to discuss their misfortunes and gloomy prospects before the audience. The imperfect way in which the Italian figures were always identified with their roles made the appearance of Arlequin and Colom- bine as mere actors seem natural and consistent with their traditional comic spirit. The appearance of the different members of Montaigu's company in their own persons is much less in the spirit of Holberg' s play. To the various burials of the Mass, he may owe the general idea of the death and burial THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 191 of Comedy, yet in none of them could he have found the farcical funeral procession in which one may read most clearly the popular appeal of the piece. At the same time it should be observed that the author filled this comedy, created under the influence of one of Gherardi's plays, with broad and realistic humour which was not Italian. Of all Holberg's dramas, however, Ulysses von Ithacia is the most completely saturated with the spirit of the commedia delP wte. Although frankly a parody of the comedies given in Copenhagen by a company of German actors, Holberg undoubtedly derived the form of the work, perhaps the very idea of writing it, from various similar pieces in Ghe- rardi's collection. The flippant, unrestrained gaiety of Italian comedy had always been well suited to this sort of literary jesting. Gherardi's company had played parodies of every kind, — parodies of scenes from contemporary dramas, of entire operas, or more particularly of the inflated shades of the gods and heroes of antiquity who strutted through the operas of the eighteenth century.* The mere appearance of Arlequin or Mezzetin in the role of Jupiter or Ulysses was in itself a complete travesty. The humour consisted, of course, in the incongru- ity between the traditional grandeur and dignity of these supermen and the traditional triviality of the clowns. The zanies are utterly unable to sink their 192 HOLBERG AND personalities in the strange parts they suddenly find themselves compelled to play. In Arlequin Phaeton^ Arlequin is obliged to impersonate a dashing hero whose every action is inconsistent with his own nature. He is, therefore, constantly falling out of his role. He halts and perverts the action. When he should be driving his plunging horses across the firmament, he and his companion Momus amuse themselves by mystifying a liquor- vendor with their aerial calls, or he loses himself in wonder at the signs of the zodiac, which he cannot believe are not real animals. He is finally forced to realize the mere ac- tion which his r61e demands, when he is suddenly pulled across the stage in a crude machine from which he is hurled to the floor by a clumsy thun- derbolt flung by Jupiter. The play is funny because Arlequin remains incorrigibly Arlequin, when he is supposed to be impersonating a character of an utterly different nature. Many other plays in Ghe- rardi's collection produce their humour in very similar ways. And, like them, Holberg's Ulysses von Ithacia is funny because Chilian, the servant of Ulysses, on all occasions falls out of his part back into his clownish nature, whence he contemplates and criticises, not only the part he is supposed to play, but all the action of the piece. Ulysses von Ithacia is, however, even more definitely related to Gherardi's dramas, for one of them, Ulysses and THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 193 Circe^ furnished Holberg much definite dramatic material from which his comedy is constructed. Both works present an absurd confusion of inci- dents in the Iliad and the Odyssey. After the fight- ing round Troy has been shown in Holberg's play, Ulysses enters to declare that ten years have passed, Troy has fallen, and it is therefore time to go home. In Ulysses von Ithacia^ this swift passage of time is even more pointedly ridiculed, where the ten years are supposed to pass during a single speech by Chil- ian.* In both comedies, the parts of the wander- ings chosen for ridicule are Ulysses's adventures on Circe's island. In Ulysses and Circe., the sorceress, throu gh love of Ulysses , cau ses his ship to be wrecked off her coast. The moment that the Greeks are tossed up into her domain, she changes all of them except Ulysses and Arlequin into animals of various sorts. These beasts, each in a disguise ridiculously par- tial, execute a chorus of appropriate cries to verses sung by Mezzetin the cat.f Later, they all appear to the horror-stricken Ulysses and Arlequin. The latter, easily recognizing his old comrades even in their animal form, goes abou't embracing them with so much grief that he finally induces Circe to re- verse her charms. When once more the men assume their proper shapes, they eagerly join Arlequin in a parody of the opera Armide. Holberg introduces the same bit of wild farce into his comedy. Chilian's 194 HOLBERG AND companions are all turned into swine, and, like the bewitched men in the Italian play, they come in crawling and grunting. Chilian, instead of embrac- ing his friends like Arlequin, enters thoroughly into the spirit of their disguise and lashes them with a whip until they get up to protest that they will complain to the author of the play. The operatic U Oiseau Bleu of the Italians has become in Hol- berg's hand sheer physical farce. The similarity in the subject-matter of the two parodies is largely adventitious. Ulysses von Ithacia is essentially an Italian comedy, first because it is filled with comic devices taken from various plays in Gherardi's collection,* but most fundamentally because it produces its humour in the peculiar manner here shown to be characteristic of the corn- media deir arte. The characters of the figures in Holberg are also utterly unsuited to the situations in which they are compelled to act. They wear no conventional costumes to make their imperfect as- sumptions of roles instantly evident. But they con- tinually show that they are merely masquerading in their parts. Chilian rudely dispels all dramatic illusion when he takes off Ulysses's beard and puts it on his own chin to convince the spectators that he is really older than in the preceding scene. The last shred of pretence is literally torn off in the last scene, when two Jewish costumers enter and strip THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE 195 the principal figure of his hired Ulysses costume, for which he has been unable to pay.* The actors who impersonate trees and stones are still more easily and obviously shown to be part of a crude masquer- ade. In this play, then, Holberg finds means as obvious as the conventional costumes of the Italian figures to fix immediately the attitude of the spec- tators toward the actors and their parts. Farce that was inherent in the commedia delVarte^ Holberg has been at pains to produce by numerous devices. Holberg's debt to the commedia deWarte, as it had come to be played in France during the closing years of the seventeenth century, was evidently fun- damental and vital. The perfunctory plot of the lovers is equally perfunctory in his plays. The clownish figures who are most instrumental in developing and conducting that plot appear again in Holberg with many of their most characteristic tricks of dis- guise, horse-play, and physical farce. Finally, not only numerous comic devices of Italian comedy, but much of its peculiar comic spirit, reappears in only slightly different form in Holberg's dramas. Yet to every element that he has borrowed he has added his own touches of realism. The unrestrained, pur- poseless gaiety of the Italians has been given point. The clowns, even in the midst of their most ex- travagant trickery, are unconsciously labouring to help an original personage to show his nature to the 196 HOLBERG best advantage. One feels in the midst of the wild- est vagaries of Ulysses voji Ithacia that behind this glut of gaiety is the author's serious desire to im- prove the taste of the Danish public. Certain ele- ments of the commedia delV arte which were sure to appeal to uneducated audiences became, like cer- tain other features of Moliere's comedy, a means of illustrating character both realistically and natively Danish. HOLBERG AND FRENCH LITERATURE OTHER THAN MOLIERE CHAPTER V HOLBERG AND FRENCH LITERATURE OTHER THAN MOLIERE BOTH Moliere's works and the commedia delV arte exerted an influence upon Holberg of much greater importance than that of any other form of comedy. Yet the Danish writer was too widely read ■ and too cathoHc in his literary tastes to find his inspiration exclusively in these two sources. His knowledge of French literature seems to have been almost encyclopedic . In the mass of French drama written by Moliere's predecessors, contemporaries, and immediate successors, Holberg more than once discovered material suited to his comic purposes. His interest in this literature was natural. The rep- ertory of Montaigu's company, which played in Copenhagen during his youth, contained comedies by Dancourt and Legrand, as well as by Moliere. The Danish company, moreover, during the first year of its existence played a translation of Bour- sault's Esope a la Ville. Any curiosity that this fa- miharity with French drama may have aroused in Holberg could have been thoroughly satisfied by his two sojourns in Paris. To French comedy anterior to Moliere, and there- fore free from his transforming influence, Holberg 200 HOLBERG AND owes but little. Even the traditional figures of the earlier comedy nearly always assumed forms in Moliere which any skilful writer would surely rec- ognize as improvements. Two persons in Holberg's plays, however, seem to attach themselves to the older tradition directly, — Terentia in The Bride- groom Metamorphosed, and Jeronimus in Pernille'^ s Shoii: Experience as a Lady. Terentia has many forerunners in the older French comedy.* In spite of the vigorous remonstrances of her two mature daughters, this old woman is determined to marry again, and, if possible, to en- snare some dashing young officer. The resourceful Pernille, of course, finds a way to cure her mis- tress of her folly. She has her sister impersonate a gay lieutenant and pay court to Terentia. After making simpering but open advances to the lovely soldier, Terentia manages to induce him to pro- pose marriage. She accepts him with indecent haste and then lets him depart. He has been gone but a moment when a third conspirator enters with the astounding news that the officer has been suddenly and miraculously metamorphosed into a girl. This miracle Terentia thinks is Heaven's punishment for her foolish desire, which she forthwith renounces penitently. The Bridegroom Metamorphosed is appar- ently the last of Holberg's plays, and is one of his feeblest. It is short, slight, and silly. The figure of FRENCH LITERATURE 201 Terentia is interesting, however, because it belongs to well-defined French comic tradition. The old woman ridiculously in love appears first in French comedy in the Alizon of "Discret," a play presented in 1638. Though Alizon Fleurie is senile, she has two devoted lovers, M. Jeremie, aged eighty, and M. Karolu, a decrepit old merchant. The comedy consists largely in the coy love-mak- ing of these three persons. Karolu kisses Fleurie in the street and she responds with a deal of bash- ful grimacing and farcical confusion. Such attempts at girlishness, it must be remembered, were made comical largely because the part of Fleurie was played by a man. M. Fournel says of the actor, Alizon, who created the part:* "II en avait fait I'etiquette d'un type, celui des vieilles ridicules, dont aucune comedienne n'avait encore pris le role. ' ' The figure, from the moment of its creation thus definitely conventionalized, reappeared constantly in subsequent comedy . It assumed a very popular form in Quinault's La Mere Coquette^ and in Thomas Corneille's Le Baron cVAlbikrac is the centre of a plot closely resembling that of The Bridegroom Meta- morphosed. La Tante in Corneille's play is in love with her niece's lover, Oronte. To free himself from her persistent advances, he has her servant dis- guise himself as a Baron d'Albikrac, who professes to be desperately in love with the old lady. His 202 HOLBERG AND gross and extravagant attentions satisfy La Xante's idea of passionate love. She fears, moreover, that, should she reject him, he would vent his furious disappointment in revenge upon Oronte. Flattered vanity masking as prudence, accordingly, makes her agree to marry the fictitious baron. Corneille is here imitating Moliere's comedy of character, with- out abandoning the methods of the early Italianate French comedy which were always a part of his dra- matic idiom. Holberg's plays, as we have seen, were an amalgamation of the same two comic methods. It is natural, then, that this dramatic experiment of Corneille should resemble The Bridegroom Metamor- phosed; but the resemblances are only general, and probably largely adventitious. Terentia is perhaps closer to La Tante than to Moliere's infinitely more amusing and real Belise, yet she is quite as much like Lady Wishfort, in a play which Holberg knew, — Congreve's The TV ay of the World. Plainly, one cannot settle upon any definite prototype of Te- rentia. It is enough to assert that she belongs to a familiar French comedy type. Jeronimus, the old man in Pernille'' s SJiort Expe- rience as a Lady, who goes to woo Leonora for his stepson and remains to woo her for himself, is also like one of the types of the older French comedy. A similar figure is not unknown to classical literature. Demaenetus, in the Asinaria,* who compels his son FRENCH LITERATURE 203 to sit by while he embraces the youth's mistress, is perhaps the best-known of these amorous old men in Latin drama. Fathers who become the rivals of their own sons appear frequently in French com- edy of the seventeenth century. In Quinault's La Mere Coquette^ Cremante, although old and half- dead with asthma, wishes to marry Isabelle, his son's mistress. Luckily he is balked by the unexpected return of the girl's father, with whom he had long before arranged a marriage between Isabelle and his son. Montfleury in La Fille Capitaine (1673) pre- sents an interesting member of this group in the character M. Le Blanc. Although married, he makes love to his nephew's mistress, Lucinde. He is forced to surrender the girl to her lover, however, by the servant Angelique, who, disguised as a firebrand of an officer, pays court to M. Le Blanc's wife.* Harpa- ^ gon mUAvare^ and to a certain extent M. Jourdain ' in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme^ both created out of this tradition, are two of Moliere's most individual comic protagonists. The Danish Jeronimus, an igno- ble mixture of avarice, deceit, and smug piety, is no less a personality than these old men in Moliere. Yet his individuality is not like theirs. Perhaps, there- fore, he does not derive the elements of his character from them, but from the simpler form which the amorous octogenarian assumed in earlier French comedy. The influence of this older comedy cannot 204 HOLBERG AND be discovered elsewhere in Holberg's work.* In the two cases just discussed, it is, one must admit, only general and indefinite. On the other hand, the influence of Moliere's suc- cessors upon Holberg is occasionally specific and definite. One group of these successors is composed of men who, though beginning their careers as au- thors for the Italians, later produced equally suc- cessful plays for the French theatre. Regnard, Pala- prat, and Dufresny were the three most important members of this group. Their work was inevitably modified by the traditions both of the commedia delP arte and of Moliere's comedy of character. Yet Hol- berg's drama is only superficially like theirs. To Dufresny 's slight and rather involved comedy of intrigue, his own bears no resemblance. Regnard, in plays like Le Joueur and Le Distrait^ did produce brilliant comedies of character ; but he neither em- ploys the motley pawns of Italian farce to conduct his dramatic action, nor does he describe character with Holberg's moral preoccupation. His attitude is nonchalant and cynical. He reproduces the pageant of life as literally as he can, without passing judge- ment on what he sees. His laughter at the foibles of his characters betrays no desire to correct them. His fools are never reformed, or even improved, by the dramatic action. Valere, the gambler, feels no real regret even at losing his mistress through his FRENCH LITERATURE 205 passion for play. At the end of Le Joiieiir^ he cheer- fully remarks : Va, va, consolons-nous, Hector, et quelque jour Le jeu m'acquittei'a des pertes de 1 'amour. The irresponsible attitude which Regnard habitu- ally takes towards his characters is the very antith- esis of Holberg's determination to impose human- istic restraints upon all his fools. One of Palaprat's plays, Le Grandeur^ is a comedy of character in which the intriguing servant plays the traditional role of an Italian zany. He accom- plishes the marriage of the grumbler's daughter with her lover, by having the youth disguise himself as the Prince of Madagascar. This play, like Holberg's Don Ranudo, is a revised version of Le Bourgeois GentUhomme; but it resembles Holberg's play even less than it does that of Moliere. There is real psy- chological fitness in the eagerness of the insanely proud Spaniard to marry his daughter to the Prince of Ethiopia. There is no corresponding fitness in the similar eagerness of an everlasting grumbler to marry his daughter to the Prince of Madagascar. The denouement in Palaprat's play is sheer farce. In Holberg's it is an important part of the comedy of character. Palaprat completely dissociates dramatic elements which Holberg fuses. A second group of Moliere's successors comprises 206 HOLBERG AND comic writers like Hauteroche, Baron, and Dan- court, who imitated only their master's more far- cical and superficial comedies of manners. They learned from him to write gay social satire, but failed completely to catch his directness and incisiveness. Christmas Eve is the only play of Holberg which expresses the irresponsible, purposeless gaiety of the short comedies composed by these men. As a matter of fact this work seems to be based partly on Dancourt's Colin- Maillard. In the French drama, M. Robinet, the old tutor of Angelique,is determined to marry her . She, although in love with Eraste, promises herself in a moment of pique to M. Robinet. Thereupon he summons a band of musicians to play for his friends to dance until the notary arrives. In the crowd of merry-mak- ers is Eraste disguised as a peasant boy. Finally, the guests tire of this form of amusement and some one proposes a game of colin-maillard, or blind- man's-buff. M . Robinet opposes the suggestion, but he is overruled and himself blindfolded. While he is groping about, the two lovers run oif to be mar- ried . In Christmas Eve, the crisis is precipitated by a similar game. The household of Jeronimus, con- sisting of Leonora his wife, Leander her young lover, and a swarm of children and domestic servants, is engaged in a homely Christmas celebration. In the course of the evening, a game of blindman's-buif FRENCH LITERATURE 207 is suggested. When Jeronimus is blinded, Leonora and her lover run away together. As soon as the old husband discovers their flight, he rushes out after them and drags them back into the house. There Leander's servants set upon him and create such an uproar that an officer of the peace breaks in and arrests all the combatants. These two scenes are alike in that the game in each case gives the lover a chance to deceive his old rival. Both plays, moreover, display the same pre- dominant comic spirit. Unlike all the rest of Hol- berg's com.edies,Cknsfmas Eve is practically point- less. No complicated intrigue is resolved, no social foible satirized, and no central character ridiculed. Like Coiin-Afaillard and, indeed, like most of Dan- court's plays, it merely occupies a definite period of time with thoughtless, unmoral gaiety. Holberg's sole experiment in the comic manner of the lively but careless Dancourt was plainly ill-suited to his genius. To the influence of Edme Boursault (1638-1 70 1), more a contemporary and rival of Moliere than in any sense his successor, we have seen that Holberg was exposed ; the one play besides those of Moliere which the founders of the Danish theatre thought worthy of immediate translation was Boursault' s Esope a la V'llle. Traces of the somewhat mechani- cal methods of this comic moralist can often be seen 208 HOLBERG AND in Holberg's work. At least once the same incident does duty in both writers. The two farcically loqua- cious women who appear in Boursault's La Comedie sans Titre* seem to be the prototypes of the simi- lar figures in The Fortunate Shipwreck . In the French play, among a host of people who visit the temporary editor of the journal, Le Mercure Galant^ are two sisters, who have found particularly instructive one of his essays commending to women ' ' le grand art de se taire." They have visited him, in fact, to as- certain which one of them has learned perfectly her lesson of silence. Then both begin to prove their ability to keep quiet by contradicting and inter- rupting each other in a torrent of words. Accord- ing to the stage directions, ' ' elles parlent toutes deux le plus vite qu'il leur est possible," and finally, "elles parlent en meme temps." In The Fortunate Shipwreck^ among those who appear in court to accuse the satirist Leander of rid- iculing them personally are two garrulous sisters. Like the French women, they interrupt each other and talk at the same time in their efforts to prove that Leander's satire against loquacious women was aimed directly at them. These sisters are enough like the two chatterers in the French comedy to be copies of them. Furthermore, the idea of this entire fifth act of The Fortunate Shipwreck — that of hav- ing sensitive people apply general satire to their own FRENCH LITERATURE 209 foibles and then accuse the author of malicious per- sonal ridicule — Holberg may have derived from Boursault's play. One of the amusing figures in Le Mercure Galant is a certain Madame Guillemot. She enters the office of the editor, furiously angry, saying : On dit que c'est de moi dont vous voulez parler, Quand certaine bourgeoise a qui la mode est douce. Pour etre en cramoisi, fit defaire une housse. Then she explains carefully just how she happened to make a gown out of an old couch-cover. Her ex- planation shows that the satire in the objectionable essay could easily be regarded as a realistic descrip- tion of herself. Like those prosecuting the poet Le- ander, whom Holberg obviously meant to stand for himself, she puts on the shoe of the author's satire and then blames him because she finds it a fit. The construction of Le Mercure Galant is loose and mechanical. Oronte, the editor, has merely to take his seat in the office and the odd figures straight- way enter one after another to display their foibles. Boursault's Esope a la Ville is constructed in the same artless manner. Although the comedy is given an appearance of organic unity through the compli- cations produced by Esope 's pretended love for Eu- phrosine, the sole interest of the play lies in the seer's episodic moral comment. The characters form aeon- 210 HOLBERG AND tinuous random sort of procession. Each person, by the advice that he asks, betrays his folly or actual immorality. Esope answers every one by narrating an appropriate moral fable; and, by his tactfully indirect sermon, invariably convinces his petitioner of folly and sends him away miraculously reformed. The naive dramatic method employed in both of these plays is a better didactic than comic medium. Yet Boursault continued to use it until it became a distinct mannerism. Holberg, whose ethical preoccupation was not un- like that of Boursault, more than once adopts the Frenchman's easy method of making satiric social and moral comment. He employs it, for example, in the last act of The Fortunate Shipwreck^ some of the incidents of which, as we have seen, were suggested by details in Boursault. There several persons who fancy themselves slandered by Leander's satire are marshalled by his enemy, Rosiflengius, to act as witnesses against him. The young Frenchified dandy, the rough and ready politician, the fickle- minded girl, the pedantic schoolmaster, the garru- lous sisters, the affected lady, the bombastic officer, — all these appear, one after another, to prefer their charges. Like the figures in Boursault's comedies, they form a continuous but unrelated procession of grotesques. Similarly, in The Lying-in Chamber, the young mother sits in her easy-chair during two acts, FRENCH LITERATURE 211 receiving calls from a long line of ridiculous women who do not come and go to satisfy the demands of any plot. They simply chance to visit the same woman on the same day. The people in Plutiis^ who enter one after another to complain of the evils which wealth has introduced into the life of their city, and those in Witchcraft^ who come to the supposed wizard Leander with innumerable absurd requests, form similar casual processions. This method of writing comedy gives unlimited opportunity for ef- fective satire and for diverse moral comment ; it does not produce amusing or even interesting scenes. In the invention of simple, organic, dramatic action, Holberg seldom shows much power. He is too often willing either to allow his characters to indulge in the wild horse-play of Italian zanies, or to arrange that they march as in review before him with the ex- press purpose of being satirized. The second of these substitutes for the action that develops naturally from clash of character, Holberg seems to have learned from Edme Boursault. Legrand, another writer of comedy who is in no proper sense a successor of Moliere, exerted some in- fluence upon Holberg. The only explicit criticism that Holberg makes of him is unfavourable. The de- light of the French public in 1725-26 in Legrand's spectacular extravaganza, and its consequent par- tial neglect of Moliere' s comedies, provoked him 212 HOLBERG AND to disgusted protest.* To some of Legrand' splays of a diflferent sort, however, he evidently gave a quali- fied approval. He seems, at any rate, to have been indebted to two of them ; for LP Epreuve Reciproque probably suggested the plot oi H enrich and Pernille, and Legrand 's Plutiis is probably the immediate source of Holberg's comedy of the same name. Hol- berg's knowledge of these plays would have been quite natural. During the years 1725-26, when he was in Paris, Legrand 's popularity was at its height. Nine of his comedies were presented, with a total of seventy-six performances, in 1725; and in the following year ten were given, with a total of fifty-seven performances. L"* Epreuve Reciproque was first played in 1726, the year in whioh H enrich and Peimille was probably composed ; and Plutus, although first played in 1720, was not printed until 1 75 l,f the same year in which the Danish Plutus appeared. Holberg's personal knowledge of Legrand 's popularity probably caused him to follow his work with curiosity and to imitate it whenever he could. RahbekJ long ago suggested that the source of the plot of H enrich and Pemille was either Cervantes' s JVovela del Casamiento Enganoso or the version of the same story which appears as an epsiode in Beaumont and Fletcher's Rule a Wife and have a Wife. As an afterthought, he intimates that the Danish plot may be related to Legrand 's FRENCH LITERATURE 213 VEpreuve Reciproque. This last relation seems, on examination, to be the most probable of the three. The plot oi H enrich and Peniille runs as follows : Henrich, Leander's valet, has been sent to town to prepare for his master's arrival. Having access to Leander's wardrobe, he dons his rich clothes and parades as a gendeman. Adorned in this borrowed finery, he wins the love of an apparendy rich girl across the way. She is in reality, however, merely the maid Pernille, decked out in the clothes of her mistress Leonora, the betrothed of Leander. When the lovers themselves finally come to town, each one is astonished to learn that the servant has success- fully masqueraded himself into the favour of thecrim- inally fickle lover. Both Leander and Leonora are grimly determined that the deception shall be kept up until the disastrous marriage is made. Delighted at their successful hoax, the two servants are proudly wedded. Only after this event does Jeronimus, Leo- nora's father, succeed in revealing the true situation to all concerned. The lovers then marry happily ; the servants beat each other stoutly for their mutual deceit, but decide to accept the inevitable. The distinctive feature of this plot is the dou- ble disguise. Valets and masters had occasionally changed places in French comedy ever since the appearance of Scarron's Jodelet ou le Maitre Valet ^ in 1645. In Cervantes's tale, as in Beaumont and 214 HOLBERG AND Fletcher's dramatic redaction, which Holberg might easily have seen,* there is a double deception. Esti- fania, while her mistress is abroad, by occupying her mansion, fools a certain Perez into believing her a lady of fashion. This fellow, in his turn, by a dis- play of worthless jewels, successfully plays the role of a fabulously wealthy copper "king." The two marry, only to discover that they have been mutu- ally duped. These Spanish impostors adopt devices for ensnaring each other similar to those of Henrich and Pernille. Yet they are not valet and maid in the employ of the two real lovers, as in both Holberg' s comedy and in Li'Epreuve Reaproque. In Legrand's play, Valere, the lover of Phila- minte, decides to test her constancy. He accord- ingly sends her letters purporting to be written by a famous financier who is infatuated with her. Phil- aminte similarly tests Valere by having a profess- edly rich lady of fashion write him a love-letter. Each lover answers the test letter so favourably that each decides to put the other still further to proof. Valere has his valet Frontin impersonate the amo- rous financier at the same moment that Philaminte has the maid Lisette impersonate the fictitious au- thor of her letter. Then each lover gloats over what he supposes is the other's favourable reception of a masquerading servant's wooing. When the ser- vants meet, they, like Henrich and Pernille, decide FRENCH LITERATURE 215 to make their own fortunes by marrying. Before the ceremony actually takes place, however, the real situation becomes clear to all. The servants avoid matrimony, while Valere and Philaminte are recon- ciled. This plot is like that of Holberg, not only in the essential feature of the double disguise of valet and maid, but also in accomplishing the estrange- ment of the lovers through similar impersonations by the servants. The emphasis, to be sure, is dif- ferently placed. Legrand, whose main interest is in the lovers, devotes but one scene to the mutual de- ception of the disguised servants. Holberg, always bored in the presence of lovers, gives Henrich and Pernille the centre of his stage and involves Leander and Leonora in their deception only incidentally. All the comic elements of Holberg' s play exist in U Epreiwe Reciproqiw. His rearrangement of them is consistent with his well-known dramatic prefer- ences. He regularly made a love story subordinate to a rollicking game of disguise. The differences in emphasis in the two plots do not weaken the proba- bility that U Epreuve Reciproqiie is the direct source of Henrich and Pernille. Of his Pliitus^ Holberg says : "The impulse for this comedy came from Aristophanes 's Plutus; but it may be said that I have taken almost nothing but the mere title from it. My play, therefore, may be 216 HOLBERG AND called genuinely original." * Thisexplicit statement has naturally been accepted as final by all biogra- phers of Holberg. Legrand's Pliitus, however, re- sembles the Danish play so minutely in a number of details that it apparently served as a definite model for it. If this be a fact, Holberg's statement, to say the least, is disingenuous. The plot of Aristophanes's work is in outline as follows : Chremylus, a poor but honest man, enquires of the Delphic oracle whether he ought to teach his son those vices which are essential to the accumu- lation of riches. The oracle answers by telling him, inconsequentially it seems, to follow the first man he meets on leaving the temple. The man thus in- dicated proves to be no less a person than the god Plutus, whom Zeus has stricken with blindness. In bestowing his gifts, therefore, Plutus gives impar- tially to the just and the unjust, until his sight is restored by Aesculapius. Then he makes the deserv- ing rich and the undeserving poor. After the com- plaints of several of those who have suffered from the god's wise discrimination have been heard, a mob of delighted citizens, led by the priest of Zeus, decides to pull the king of gods and men down from his seat and to elevate Plutus in his stead. Holberg's play is like this only in its most gen- eral features. Plutus, his sight already restored by Aesculapius, visits a city which has hitherto been FRENCH LITERATURE 217 poverty-stricken. All the citizens, except the sage Diogenes, are overjoyed at his arrival, and one after another besieges him with prayers for his gifts. By the character of these petitions Holberg satirizes the abuses and follies of his own Danish society. These blemishes the god seeks to remedy, both by his severe arraignments of fraud and hypocrisy, and by the just disposal of his gifts. Later, Penia, the goddess of poverty, appears with Plutus before the city council to debate at length the comparative value of their gifts to the city. After much excited comment, the council decides in favour of Plutus and decrees Penia 's banishment. But the undisputed sway of the god of wealth soon corrupts the entire community. Jupiter, pained at the general deterio- ration of the city, descends from Olympus to lead away Plutus, once more stricken with blindness. Then follows a spectacular procession of the tri- umphant partisans of Penia, with which the comedy ends. None of the details of this work are like any in the Greek play, and the comic spirit is completely different. Aristophanes, cynical satirist as always, has his comedy end in an orgy of impiety and cor- ruption. Holberg, no less anxious to show the sinister influence of money, benevolently sends Jupiter down to tell the citizens of their mistake and to carry off the vexatious Plutus. Legrand's play is, to be sure. 218 HOLBERG AND in general spirit equally unlike the Danish comedy. His moral may be said to be, "Money brings joy to the deserving." In several details, however, his comedy is like Holberg's. In Legrand, La Pauvrete and Plutus set forth their respective merits in a debate before two of the characters, at the close of which La Pauvrete is ignominiously driven out. In Holberg, Plutus and Penia have a similar spirited debate before the city council, as a result of which Penia is banished. In Aristophanes, although Penia pleads her cause be- fore two characters, she has no debate with Plutus. At least two of the figures, moreover, who come to beg favours of Plutus after he has regained his sight are the same in both the French and the Dan- ish play. In Legrand, Cistenes, the poorest man in Athens, has been given 100,000 francs, all the money that he needs. Yet he is utterly unhappy because his neighbour has been given a million. Plutus, after hearing his complaint, indulgently brings his por- tion up to the desired million. In Holberg, Timo- theus, like Cistenes, has been made rich ; but his happiness is embittered by the thought that his neighbours too are to become rich. He accordingly begs Plutus to let all but him remain in poverty. The god bids him mind his own business. In Aristo- phanes, there is no such figure as Cistenes or Timo- theus, nor indeed any similar line of petitioners. In FRENCH LITERATURE 219 Legrand, Filene, a younger daughter, humbly begs and obtains money from Plutus for her dowry. In Holberg/'an old maid with a long nose" makes a like request, which Plutus benevolently grants, sending her home confident of an early marriage. In Aristophanes, there is no such figure. These similarities between the French and the Danish plays are, in themselves, utterly trivial. Yet it seems hardly probable that Legrand and Hol- berg, each independently of the other, should have made the same changes in the Greek comedy. While Holberg may have been justified in assert- ing that the inspiration for his play came from the Plutus of Aristophanes, his source was, strictly speaking, the Greek comedy as rearranged by Le- grand. The fact illustrates the secondary and super- ficial character of Holberg 's knowledge of Greek literature. The title of The Fickle-minded Woman immedi- ately suggests a connection with Li' hresolu of Des- touches. This relation seems to have been suspected even in Holberg 's own day, for he takes pains to mention the fickle-minded woman as one of the characters that no one before him had ever brought upon the stage. * Yet he knew Destouches's comedy. In one of his Epistles^ indeed, Holberg criticises Li Irresolu at length , comparing it unfavourably with The Fickle-minded Woman. When he pronounces 220 HOLBERG AND his play an original, therefore, he feels compelled to add, parenthetically: "It is much older than Des- tOLiches's U Iiresolu.'''' This statement is not true. The French comedy is at least two years older than his. Although Holberg was undoubtedly sincere in the belief in his originality, the similarities be- tween the two plays are curious enough to deserve notice. The same foible is satirized in both comedies. Lucretia in Holberg and Dorante in Destouches are both subject to innumerable changes of mind and mood, and the resemblance between them extends to unimportant dramatic circumstances. The irre- solution of Lucretia, for example, is first shown over the use of a porte-chaise. After Henrich, at her command, has summoned the conveyance for her, she suddenly decides to walk. Dorante, too, shows his first change of mind over a coach he has ordered. After Frontin has the carrosse ready for him, he, like Lucretia, suddenly decides not to use it. This similarity seems significant, just because it concerns so unimportant a detail. The fickleness of each is afterwards systematically shown in the changing attitude taken towards three lovers. Lucretia has three suitors : Eraste, a serious, economical youth ; Apicius, a frivolous fop, happy and heedless to the verge of imbecility; and Petronius, an elderly ped- ant. When Eraste comes to woo, he finds Lucretia FRENCH LITERATURE 221 in a mood of irresponsible gaiety ; while the foolish Apicius finds her in the gloom of religious mel- ancholy. Lucretia is naturally displeased with the character of these lovers ; after numerous fits of ir- resolution, she finally chooses Petronius, only at the very end of the play suddenly to change her mind and refuse him. Dorante's volatility is shown by similar conduct towards three girls, not unlike Lu- cretia's lovers : Celimene, whom love renders "bien reveuse " and vaguely discontented, is similarto the sober, melancholy Eraste ; Julie, whom love exalts into a state of frivolous, careless gaiety, reminds one of Apicius; and Madame Argante, the amo- rous mother of the two younger women, is not a poor feminine counterpart of the pedant Petronius. Do- rante, to be sure, chooses Julie and not Madame Argante, yet he is no better satisfied Math his deci- sion than is Lucretia with hers. His final remark to his servant is the famous " J'aurois mieux fait, je crois, d'epouser Celimene." These resemblances, both in one or two curiously minute details and in the general form of the plays, would hardly be regarded as accidental but for Holberg's own assertion. Without questioning his veracity, one is justified in assuming that when he wrote The Fickle-minded Woman ^ he wrote under the vague, unrecognized influence of a comedy which he cer- tainly knew. 222 HOLBERG AND More important, however, than the mere fact of these similarities is the clearness with which Hol- berg's distinctive dramatic methods are revealed when they are thus applied to a problem previously solved by another dramatist. The simplicity of the action in U Inesolu seemed to Holberg a dramatic anomaly. The play, he complained, was merely the expansion of one long scene, in which Dorante wavered over the making of but a single decision. His Terentia, like all of his possessed characters, was made to show her irresolution repeatedly. In- deed, much of the ridiculous nature of her foible lies in the simple fact of incessant repetition. Des- touches's strict economy of character exposition, more unconsciously, but no less sharply, annoyed Holberg. All of his secondary figures were made too palpably subservient to the exhibition of Dorante. Holberg always refused to allow the strict logic of a plot to restrict unduly his treatment of character. In his best comedies he invariably tried to give the illusion of reality by creating numerous secondary figures, who claimed in their own right the inter- est of the spectators. This dramatic fulness of life, as opposed to French economy in the presentation of character, may almost be regarded as a distin- guishing mark of Germanic, as opposed to Romance genius. Like Holberg, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Hauptmann (in one of his latest plays, Die Jiatten) FRENCH LITERATURE 223 show their interest in establishing the reality of even those persons who are by no means essential to the progress of the plot. The Fickle-mmded Woman ^ then, differs from L? Itresolu largely in its diffusion of interest among a number of characters. Holberg is plainly as much concerned about the torpid Eraste and the volatile Apicius as about Terentia ; and he makes the return of these two youths to normality, as a result of their association with the fickle girl, fully as important a centre of dramatic interest as the woman's incorrigible indecision. Holberg, moral by nature and conviction, and diffuse by na- ture, seems to display his quaHties almost defiantly when a comparison is forced between them and Des- touches's restricted, narrow methods of presenting character. Holberg' s relation to all these French comedies is clearly much less important than his dependence upon Moliere and the commedia delP arte.* Kxcept for the monotonous method, learned fromBoursault, of presenting a line of heterogeneous grotesques, and except for the plot of Henrich and Permlle^ Holberg's comedy both in form and in substance would be almost exactly what it is, had he known no French comedy other than that of Moliere. Holberg's knowledge of French literature was not, however, limited to plays. At least two non- dramatic French works gave him dramatic inspira- 224 HOLBERG AND tion. In placing the scene of one of his comedies in a lying-in chamber, he was simply following a very old and popular French satiric tradition . The birth of a child, from the Middle Ages until comparatively recent times, was accompanied by social formalities which now would seem extraordinary. One of these forgotten customs demanded the attendance of all the women friends of the accouchee at the actual de- livery. Later, the commeres considerately substituted for this inconvenient attendance, formal calls upon the mother immediately after the child had been born. The conduct and the chatter of these visiting women early became an object of French satire. The first to ridicule such customs at all memorably seems to have been the author of the popular Qidnze Joyes de Manage. La Tierce Joye, which describes the anxieties of a man during his wife's confine- ment, makes fun particularly of the lavish expense and the silly talk which the commeres force upon the confused family. Other satirists, including Guil- laume Coquillart, who devoted one of his most dar- ing works to the tatde of these women, followed in the same vein. Of the later satires, the one most like Holberg's play is a certain once popular Recueil General des Caquets de P Accouchee.* The situation there is curious. A young man visits his cousin, who has lately given birth to an infant. After he has ex- tended his congratulations, he begs her to hide him FRENCH LITERATURE 225 behind her bed, so that he can listen to the twaddle of the women who are to call during the afternoon. She consents and arranges a comfortable chair for him be- hind a curtain. He takes his seat, when, as he phrases it, " toutes sortesde belles dames, demoiselles jeunes, vieilles, riches, mediocres de toutes fagons" come in and begin to talk. They are distinguished merely by such titles as "la femme d'un conseiller" and ' ' la femme d'un avocat. ' ' The conversation of these women, at first devoted with some attempt at sys- tem to subjects like politics and religion, subse- quently deteriorates into mere gossip. In one of the editions of the satire, there is a fron- tispiece representing the lying-in chamber filled with callers and the man listening with evident amuse- ment to the chatter of the women . This picture might almost serve as an illustration for the second act of Holberg's Lying-in C/z«/W(6e>r. There Corfitz, the old husband, goes into his wife's room to talk quietly with her. He has no sooner entered, however, than some women arrive to make their conventional calls. To escape them, Corfitz crawls under a table, where, concealed by a cloth, he is compelled to sit and listen to the silly prattle of Anne, the plumber's wife, Inge- borg, the tinker's wife, and the wives of other trades- men. Corfitz, crouched in an awkward position and almost suffocated by the talk he unwillingly hears, seems to be Holberg's humorous equivalent for the 226 HOLBERG AND stiff young Frenchman, who sneers behind his cur- tain. The Danish housewives and their barselsnak are obviously like the French women and their eter- nal caquet.'Y\\& essential similarity of these two scenes leads one to believe that Holberg became familiar wath the French tradition through the medium of this Caquets de T Accouchee. Holberg may, of course, have known other works on the subject. We have already noted his acquaint- ance with the old Danish Comedy of the Count and theBaron^ in Avhich there is a little incidental ridicule of the customs of a lying-in chamber. He may also have known Les Qiiinze Joyes de Mariage,* where the thing held up for ridicule is the expense in which the demands of the nurses and the incessant eating and drinking of the commeres involve the desperate husband. t Corfitz is thrown into tragic despair by the same unreasonable expenses. While he grinds coffee for his guests to drink, he^confides his troubles to his friend Jeronimus: "One wishes coffee, another green tea, another tea de poco or de peco or what the devil they call it — so that if this business lasts much longer, I shall hardly have enough money left to buy a cord to hang myself withal. ' ' In the next scene, a maid enters to demand money for this and for that ; and when Corfitz thinks that she has at last reached the end of her almost inter- minable list of expenses, she breaks out: " Noth- FRENCH LITERATURE 227 ing more, except twelve crowns for Dantzig brandy which was used in the coffee to-day ; four crowns for brandy for the nurse, who has been ill ; two crowns for sponge-cake ; one for apples ; twenty for a smell- ing-bottle." Whereupon Corfitz rushes to her, and, putting his hand over her mouth, shouts, "Stop, stop! The girl is surely possessed." This farcical distress is clearly an expansion and elaboration of such satire as appears in Les Qiiinze J oyes de Manage. The originality of Holberg's play consists partly in the change which he has made in the traditional emphasis. He himself says of his comedy: "My seventh play, T^/?*? Lying-in Cham- ber^ is an attempt to show in a series of humorous scenes that the annoyances to which women in child- bed are commonly exposed are more intolerable than the pains of labour," It is the woman in his play, even more than the husband, who is shown to be the sufferer from the irrational social custom. Her fatigue and her husband's unjust suspicions combine to make her almost a pathetic figure. But Holberg also shows originality in his substitution of individual- ized Danish women for the conventionalized, name- less callers of the French satires . That part of the com- edy which amuses and delights a Danish audience to-day is the procession of various sorts and condi- tions of men of eighteenth -century Copenhagen. Holberg seems to have read Scarron's Roman 228 HOLBERG AND Comique with much interest, and transformed one of the stories in that collection into his unusual play, Invisible Lovers. Scarron's Histoire de V Amante In- visible runs as follows. Among the ladies yv\\o fall in love with Dom Carlos d'Aragon is one closely veiled. Although, in giving the Dom a ring, she shows "la plus belle main du monde," she persists in her refusal to show him her face. Indeed, she still further piques his curiosity by artfully evading him until at the end of eight days he hears her voice mys- teriously calling him from the latticed window of a great mansion. To this window Dom Carlos returns day after day to worship a voice, which finally con- fesses love for him. The lady insists, however, that the magic time for revealing herself has not yet ar- rived. The gallant, therefore, only redoubles his as- siduities, until one evening four masked men seize him, bind him, and take him willy-nilly from the mysterious house to a splendid castle far from the city. Here, after being magnificently entertained and housed for a night, he is led the next morning into the presence of the mistress of the castle, the Prin- cess Portia. Though she unmasks her beautiful face and confesses herself desperately in love with him, he, faithful to his fair unknown, will not return her love. He is, therefore, again blindfolded and cour- teously taken back to Naples, where he repairs im- mediately to his latticed window. Dom Carlos then FRENCH LITERATURE 229 finds his lady at last ready to reveal her face. The ceremony is carried out in a romantic spot, and he discovers to his delight that she and the Princess Portia are one and the same person. Holberg has made this fanciful tale a kind of setting for the realistic comedy which is the essen- tial part of his Invisible Lovers. In the first scene of the play, Leander recounts in long narrative speeches to his servant Harlequin an adventure almost the exact counterpart of that of Dom Carlos. He, too, has heard a charming, angelic voice speak to him in the gloaming from a latticed window. Because his lady has persisted in remaining veiled, he, like Dom Carlos, has been compelled to return night after night to pay court to the voice, until he has been seized by eight masked men and carried to " a beau- tiful bower." His experiences there have been exactly like those of his prototype, and although he has, with equal constancy to his fair unknown, refused to return the love of the beautiful enam- oured mistress of the castle, he has sought to assuage her grief by giving her a ring. Thus far Leander describes events that have already taken place. The rest of the mysterious adventure is presented in dramatic action. When Leander returns to his masked lady, at first he is bitterly rebuked for his inconstancy in giving a ring to another lady; then his despair arouses pity in the fair unknown, who 230 HOLBERG AND confesses that she has played the part of the lady of the bower in order to test his constancy. So far Holberg has told a version of Scarron's tale, but apparently only to ridicule it. He represents Harlequin, enraptured by his master's idealistic con- ception of love, as attempting to imitate it. The servant suddenly finds Colombine's eager yield- ing to his lightest Mdsh, shocking forwardness. He scorns her frankly physical love and leaves her to ponder over his high-sounding phrases about the worthlessness of fruit which may be plucked from every tree. He has no sooner turned his back upon the perplexed and frightened girl than he has the extraordinary luck to meet a heavily veiled lady. And, when he begins to make love to her, he finds to his joy that she observes scrupulously all the canons of spiritual love that he has just learned from his master. He immediately pays her entranced, assiduous court, begging her but to show her face to him. After making him swear that his love will be eternal, she removes her veil and discloses the face of an ugly old hag. Colombine enters in time to en- joy his predicament, from which she agrees to save him through marriage with her, but only after he has sworn to give her shocking matrimonial liberties. This farcical imitation of a formal and pompous master by his servant is, as already indicated, the distinguishing characteristic of the Spanish gj'a- FRENCH LITERATURE 231 cioso^ and of his descendant who first appears in French comedy as the Jodelet of Scarron. To the story taken from the Roman Comique^ Holberg has appended a travesty such as Jodelet might easily have acted. Invisible Lovers is thus a combination of two naturally associated elements. Though both are found in the work of Scarron, they are, in spirit at least, ultimately Spanish. Amusing as Holberg's play is now and then, it must be regarded as a rather unsuccessful experiment.* Holberg's knowledge of miscellaneous French works did not modify either systematically or fun- damentally the method formed largely by Moliere and the commedia delV arte. To general comic and satiric traditions of French literature he sometimes adhered. When he borrowed more in detail, he either transformed his material, or he experimented in the manner of authors who were unable to aid him in the attainment of his own definitely conceived satiric ideals. The extension of our knowledge of Holberg's sources of inspiration ought by no means to diminish our respect for his originality. Although the tools with which he constructed his dramatic edifice prove to have been borrowed, he remains none the less an independent workman. He always adhered to his own dramatic purpose, — that of writing moral satires of the Danish society which he knew. HOLBERG AND ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER VI HOLBERG AND ENGLISH LITERATURE ALTHOUGH Holberg's knowledge of French -^ ^ literature was undeniably extensive, it was, in a sense, less intimate and vital than his knowledge of English literature. He learned to understand French life by reading French books in Paris, while he "thirsted like a Tantalus for society. ' ' His knowledge of English life, on the contrary, was obtained through happy association with friends of his own age at Oxford. Indeed, his acquaintance with English lit- erature seems to have been but one of the results of his enthusiastic participation in the diversions of his fellow students . The comparatively long period which he spent in England, at an impressionable age, absorbing English culture in the most direct ways, fell in the midst of a time of unusual significance in politics and literature. During the early years of the eighteenth century, England was forging ahead of the rest of Europe in liberal thought and literary in- vention. It would have been surprising, therefore, if the mind of the Norwegian youth had not been greatly stimulated by its first contact with English ideas. Yet the account given in Holberg's autobiography of these important years is very unsatisfactory. He treats his entire visit to England as a rather hare- 236 HOLBERG AND brained, youthful escapade. He tells us that he and a Danish friend, Christian Brix, after landing at Gravesend, went on foot to London. Even on this journey he knew enough English to manage their affairs and to serve his friend as interpreter. From London they went almost directly to Oxford, where without delay they observed the formalities neces- sary for gaining access to the Bodleian. ' ' As soon as we had registered in the university, all our thoughts were occupied, not so much with copying and collat- ing manuscripts, as with relieving our actual want. My companion wished to teach music, and I, lan- guage ; but he, God knows, was no more an Orpheus than I a Varro. We derived, therefore, but httle benefit from those arts in a community where people are not satisfied with the mere shell of things, but are accustomed to demand the kernel. Consequently, we lived in Oxford for three months so economically that we ate meat only once every four days; on the other days we had to be satisfied with bread and cheese." This enforced economy in food reduced his companion to such a pitiful state that the two went up to London to raise some money. After Brix had obtained funds on the security of a Norwegian friend, they stayed in London for a month, doing nothing, according to Holberg, but eat. Then, when Brix had acquired the paunch of an alderman, they returned to Oxford. ENGLISH LITERATURE 237 When we were again in Oxford, ' ' Holberg con- tinues, "we abandoned our former solitary way of living and took up quarters in a tavern which was especially frequented by Oxford students. There we quickly became acquainted with many of them and with some we became good friends." This inn seemed a grossly objectionable place of residence to one of their Scotch friends, who insisted, quite prop- erly, that a tavern was no fit dwelling; but there the Danish youths continued to live, and Holberg, ap- parently to justify his strange quarters, at this point breaks out into long, enthusiastic praise of the deco- rum and sobriety of the undergraduates, — an ac- count, be it said, strangely at variance with contem- porary English descriptions of their life. "We had a merry time of it for a month after our return to Oxford," remarks Holberg. But at the end of that time, his friend Brix was summoned back to London and he was left alone " in a state of anxiety and perplexity ."" My one comfort in my abandoned and difficult situation," he adds, was the friendship that I had recently formed with some Oxford students. They continually eulo- gized my learning and good qualities and talked of my skill in foreign languages and music." His friends were in this way giving him professional advertising, for Holberg evidently made his living by tutoring in these two subjects. His skill as a flute- 238 HOLBERG AND player seems to have made the greatest impression. He tells with great pride how he was jfinally admitted to the Musical Club, an association of amateurs, who gave a concert every Wednesday . " In this man- ner I passed fifteen months, after my friend had left me. During all this time I lived well, even sump- tuously, for almost every day I was invited to dine at midday and in the evening with my fellow stu- dents, or, as they call it at Oxford, 'take common' [«"cj .... I confess that I am indebted to Oxonians in many ways. I can mention among other proofs of their kindness and generosity toward me the fact that when I had been in Oxford almost two years and was thinking of going home, a student of Mag- dalen College came and asked leave to talk con- fidentially with me. He then begged me to tell him quite frankly just what the state of my finances was and promised me in the name of the entire College a considerable sum of money to defray the expenses of my journey." Although Holbergdid not need to accept this generous offer, it is, nevertheless, a strik- ing proof of his popularity. The mention of this act of generosity leads Hol- berg to a short discussion of both the good and the bad qualities of Englishmen, with particular refer- ence to the impression he made upon his English acquaintances. Of peculiar interest, from the point of view of his later drama, are his remarks about ENGLISH LITERATURE 239 the art of disputation at Oxford. "They admired my ready wit in parrying and answering every ver- bal onslaught," he writes, " because the English are not very well skilled in the art of disputation. . . . Continental nations devote their attention entirely to polemics . . . and create so many systems and learned journals that, with their aid, they gain the appearance of possessing information about every- thing. The English, on the contrary, go to the bot- tom of things and therefore make slow progress ; they are learned before they seem to be. In my own estimation, I spoke Latin haltingly and with diffi- culty ; but the English thought that I spoke fluently and well. They give so little attention to that exer- cise, indeed, that, of all those that I met at that time. Doctor Smalridge was the only one who spoke even tolerable Latin. Not even Hudson, the libra- rian, who was considered one of the most distin- guished philologists of his time, spoke the language well. The students at Oxford, to be sure, do hold public disputations, but they proceed so awkwardly that as soon as they see a strange face they begin to shake and perspire. Presently they come to a halt and break off' the thread of their discourse entirely for shame of the stranger, who, they think, has come, not to listen, but to ridicule." Formal disputation was, nevertheless, an aca- demic exercise rigorously required of all undergradu- 240 HOLBERG AND ates at Oxford at that time. Amhurst, in his Terrae Filiiis* burlesques one of these mighty exercises ; and in this travesty appear many of the set phrases which Erasmus Montanus loved so much to mouth, — ' ' probo minorem, " " negatur minor, " " distin- guendum est ad tuam probationem." Yet at Oxford no one seemed to take the disputations seriously. Students inherited syllogistic strings which enabled them to go through the perfunctory public dispu- tation with the appearance of mastery. The sensible English attitude toward this outworn mediaeval cus- tom may have confirmed Holberg in his disgust for the Continental passion for it. His years in Oxford may thus have played an important part in estab- lishing a mental attitude which expresses itself in the satire of Erasrnus Montanus. "At length I left Oxford," Holberg continues, "and returned to London, where I sedulously went to see everything that could be seen for nothing. ' ' He gives us no further account of his stay in London, except a circumstantial narrative of the conduct of a friend's dog at an Anabaptist ceremony. This dog, it seems , almost j umped into a baptismal font to retrieve a woman who was being immersed. After exhaust- ing the humour of the incident, Holberg concludes: ' 'At length I boarded a Swedish ship, and , after a voy- age of live days, landed safely and in good condition at Elsinore, whence I walked to Copenhagen." ENGLISH LITERATURE 241 Holberg's account of his stay in England is most disappointing to a literary historian who is eager to know just what effect his sojourn there had upon his intellectual and literary development ; but it is not necessary to invent elaborate and subtle reasons to ex- plain the flippant tone of his narrative. It is hardly likely that he sedulously avoided a serious consider- ation of English life in his autobiography because, as has been suggested, the relations between Eng- land and Denmark were not very cordial in 1726, or because Frederik IV had never been to England and so would have been bored by hearing much about it.*" As a matter of fact, Holberg does not tell much less of his stay in England than he does of his more re- cent visits to France and Italy. He was not a roman- tic poet, who believed that all the incidents in the history of his soul during his childhood and youth were of interest and importance to the world. His first Autobiographical Epistle is not a Wordsworth- ia.n Pre/ude. He describes his youth, as any humanist might, whimsically and indulgently . Until one attrib- utes tremendous, hidden purposes to his autobiog- raphy, one finds it thoroughly natural. The author writes as most Englishmen and Americans of middle age talk of their college years. Fortunately, Holberg affords us, in documents more worthy of consideration than a light-hearted series ofreminiscences, abundant proof of his admira- 242 HOLBERG AND tion for English life and thought. In January, 1714, he wrote a letter to the Danish king, soliciting an appointment to a professorship in the University of Copenhagen. In the enumeration of his qualifica- tions, he gives his residence in Oxford a prominent place. "On my own initiative," he says, "I stayed in England two and a half years, entirely occupied with my studies." In his serious moments, he re- membered something besides his social engagements and the antics of his friend's dog in London. In a brief account of his life which he contributed to a short history of Danish literature in 1722, he again emphasizes the importance of his studies at Oxford, and declares that "they lasted two whole years."* These references to his stay in England, of their na- ture necessarily slight, were both made a good while before he wrote his first Autobiographical Episde. They show that when Holberg was not trying to be amusing, he looked back upon his years at Oxford primarily as a time of serious application. Later in his life, Holberg expresses keen admira- tion for the conditions that stimulated English men of letters." In Germany, in France, and especially in England," he says, "where one may say any- thing that occurs to one, and where genius is bound by no shackles, it is easier to display keenness of judgement and strength of genius than here in the North, where we are plagued by the most rigid cen- ENGLISH LITERATURE 243 sorship, as a result of which an author's zeal is cooled and the point of his wit blunted. For this rea- son, even if poets and philosophers were to arise among us capable of rivalling the English, they would scarcely reach maturity." The habits of English thought he applauds with enthusiasm. He extols Englishmen's candid discus- sion of religious questions, even if it produced a lamentable impudence in opposing revelation. Their mental processes he really prefers to those of French- men. "The English do not comprehend a thing so quickly as the French, ' ' he says, ' ' but they possess better judgement. They talk but little, but what they say is pithy and vital. The French form friendships hastily and as quickly break them; the English form them slowly, but break them just as slowly. The French respect most their superiors; the English, themselves. The former are, therefore, better citi- zens; the latter, better men." It is not strange that Holberg should think that men so superior in character should produce superior literature. After showing the esteem in which let- ters and scholarship are held in England, by citing the extraordinary honours paid to Newton and Bishop Burnet, he concludes : "Since learning is there held in so great honour, it is no wonder that Englishmen have won the foremost place in both learning and literature, two things which have, as it were, taken 244 HOLBERG AND up their abode on this island . ' ' This unreserved state- ment is extremely significant. It means nothing less than that Holberg believed English to be the best of all modern literatures. Holding such views, Holberg was glad to think that his intellectual nature was like that of the Eng- lish. He says: "It is believed in this respect that I have adopted something of the character of English- men. In England it used to be said of me, ' He looks as l^sic] an Englishman.' I pleased them and they pleased me. And, in truth, I seem to be a remarka- bly faithful copy of them both in manners and in disposition . ' ' The eflfect of English thought upon Holberg 's historical and philosophical writing has long been recognized. His direct references to English docu- ments are, indeed, largely to books of history and philosophy.* Yet it must be remembered that the Epistles, in which most of such references appear, were written at the end of his life, when his mind was engrossed by philosophical speculation, and works of pure literature are mentioned there almost by chance. As a matter of fact, the literary ideas of English authors exerted as vital an influence upon his essays, satires, and comedies, as upon his other productions. In particular, his comedies, to which this study is confined, appear to owe several of their most distinctive characteristics to English literature. ENGLISH LITERATURE 245 The contribution of Oxford to the young Dane's knowledge of contemporary English writings must have been slight. During the early years of the eighteenth century, if we may trust the critics of the time, the university was intellectually stagnant. The professors were indolent and made but little pretence of lecturing. The students were zealous only in ogling and toasting women, and in drink- ing deep potations to the true king over the water. Oxford, indeed, escaped complete intellectual torpor only by her championship of a lost cause. Non-jurors determined the political bias of the place. True, the dons and fellows did nothing more heroic than wor- rying and persecuting any dog of a Whig who dared to appear among the undergraduates, and nothing more insurgent than listening to sermons in which treason was expressed in transparent ambiguities. Sacheverell's sermons, which, when delivered in London, overthrew a ministry, was the sort of thing that an Oxford congregation expected every Sunday. Strangely enough, the few traces of Holberg at Oxford that we can discover now, bring him into connection with the non-jurors. Holberg tells us that one of the first of his acts there was to observe the forms necessary for obtaining access to the Bod- leian. In the Liber Peregrinonim Admissonim of the Library, which all foreigners who used the books between 1683 and 1783 were compelled to sign, 246 HOLBERG AND may be seen the oldest authenticated copy of Hol- berg's signature. The name of his companion ap- pears first, Christianus Brixius^ JVidrosia^ JVorvegus^ 1 8 Apr. Anno 1 706 ; and following it, Ludovicus Hol- bergiusy Aforvegus, 18 Apr. 1706.* One w^ho studied in the Bodleian as regularly and as sedulously as Holberg f apparently did, would almost surely have become acquainted with the deputy librarian, the an- tiquary and sturdy non-juror, Thomas Hearne. Just before Holberg and Brix went down to Oxford, a countryman of theirs, named Francis Bacche, had been working in the Library. He had been a friend of Hearne's, and, as is evident from entries in the Englishman's diary, had supplied him with much valued information about Scandinavian scholar- ship. J When he returned to London, he sent Hearne a letter, dated April 6, 1706, in which he expresses his gratitude for the favours he has received from the librarian and promises to send him reports of the progress of letters in the North, in return for such information as Hearne can send him from the "fountain of Hterature." § It would hav^e been nat- ural for Bacche to have given his two young coun- trymen, who went down to Oxford about a week after this letter was written, a note of introduction to his friend Hearne, and this he seems to have done. At any rate, on a fly-leaf of Hearne's almanac for 1706, the following note is written in Holberg's ENGLISH LITERATURE 247 hand : ' ' For Mr. Francis Bacche, Danish Gentleman at Drammen in Norgue. To be left at the Crown House, near Royal Exchange in London. St0ems0e is a Sea Harbour, as in the maps is called Copper- wick. " As Olsvig suggests, this note is undoubtedly an explanation of Bacche's various addresses.* If Holberg really knew Hearne, he may have been received in the inner circle of the most stubborn of the Oxford non-jurors. Hearne would have been likely to introduce him to Dr. George Hickes, who had been living since 1696 at Gloucester Green. Although Hickes's precious Thesaurus had been published two years before Holberg came to Eng- land, the elder scholar would have welcomed an ac- quaintanceship with a young Scandinavian at any time. Holberg could hardly have received from this group many ideas which influenced his comedies. f With their political creed he probably had scant sympathy. Yet association with them would have given him a keen idea of the fierce chauvinism of the non-jurors. No one could have lived at Oxford during the early years of the eighteenth century with- out realizing the bitterness of English party strife. The absurd screed of Gert Westphaler, Holberg's talkative barber, may well have been Holberg's own satiric comment on the political discussions which he had heard carried on at Oxford. " There are four principal sects in England, ' ' explains Gert, ' ' Tories, 248 HOLBERG AND Wigs[5z perillustris" a no less eminent person than King FrederiklV. These theories can by no means be accepted in their entirety. Olsvig's effort to make the date on the letter read December 31, 1 726, is certainly not successful. Not only NOTES 339 is it impossible to make the Latintwords mean what he wishes, but much of the letter can be shown to have been written in 1727. His assumption, furthermore, that the '"'' vir perillus- tris" is the king, is highly fanciful. Other phases of his in- terpretation have been received with greater credence. Just Bing, in his Holbergs F0rste Lexmttsbrev^ believes with him that the letter is Holberg's apology for his life, written in Latin because he was anxious to show his skill in the subject in which he was professor. He believes, however, that the letter is addressed through Rostgaard to Count U. A. Holstein, then patron of the university, and the one man in all Denmark to whom a letter such as Bing assumes tliis to be would inost appropriately be addressed. Unfortunately, this interesting theory is not sufficiently established by facts. In the firet place, it is almost impossible that Holberg could have known of this proposed commission. The proposal never came to the notice of the king, as shown by evidence in the possession of Mr. Carl S. Petereen, Under Librarian of the Royal Libi-ary in Copenhagen. Deikmann left Copenhagen early in 1 725, never to return, and the plan was probably so completely forgotten by April, 172 6, that no friend of Holberg could have heard of it then. If Holberg had believed that this commission was actively plotting against him in the spring of 1726, he would scarcely have waited almost two years before finishing tlie apology for his life which was to be his answer to their machinations. Finally, there is nothing apologetic about the epistle. Fage 47. The fii'st translation appeared in 1 742 under the title, ^ Jaiirney to the Wo)id Underground, by Nicholas K/imius. Translated f ram the Original. A second edition of this transla- tion appeared in 1755. Since then there have been three trans- lations, the last in 1828. Page 50. The existence of three different vereions of the play gives some colour to this supposition. The first version exists only in a manuscript preserved in the University Library at Copenhagen (Folio MS. No. 149); the second vereion ap- peared in the edition of 1 745 ; the third and best known ver- 340 NOTES sion appeared in the posthumous collection of his plays, pub- lished in 1754. Page 5 1 .* See a letter by Holberg written to the actore in 1753. In it he says : " Jeg har at igjennemsee Stykker og at d0mme om deres Capacitet som antages til at agere." Page 5 1 .tThe performance on April 14,1 747, which Overekou (II, 29) gives as the first, was undoubtedly private. Page 5 6. For this will, see Wille H0yberg: Kjobenhavnske Samlinger af rare trykte og utrykte Piecer, No. XV, p. 457. The girl had to satisfy the following conditions : ( 1 ) She had to be Danish bom; (2) to have at least one Norwegian or Danish parent ; (3) to be of spotless reputation ; (4) to be too poor to furnish her own dowry. To one girl fulfilling these requirements a dowry was to be given each year. Page 63. Neither ^ New Tear's Prologue to a Comedy nor The Mineral of Banish Comedy is included in this classification. They are mere clever strings of dramatic business, concocted to serve one particular occasion. They do not, therefore, de- serve to be classed with his comedies proper. Page 74. Professor Vilhelm Andersen, in his essay Erasmus Montanus {Litteratur Billeder, I, 1-28), develops this idea in his usual brilliant fashion. To him I owe much in my analysis. Page 78. Om Ludvig Holbergs Jeppe paa BJerget, p. 1 . I have followed in some detail Dr. Brandes's analysis of this play. Page 86. Grevens og Friherrens Komedie ; en dramatisk Satire fra Christian Vs Tid, ed. Sophus Birket Smith. Page 87. For example, the talk (III, 2) about the social cus- toms of a lying-in chamber may have given him the original idea of writing an entire comedy on the same subject. Page 1 07. Certain figures in Hofoerg's comedies are, to be sure, clearly fashioned on some one of Moliere's characters. Jeroni- mus in Bet Lykkelige Skibbrtid, for example, is a copy of Trissotin, and Jeronimus in Ben Honnette Ambition is a. copy of NOTES 341 M. Jourdain, Yet in each of these cases Holberg has changed the nature of his character enough to make his satire subtly different in kind . Trissotin is the embodiment of the hterary ideals of the learned ladies. Moliere shows through him that literary taste cultivated for the social market-place is pedantry and affectation, "Qu'un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant. ' ' Rosiflengius is an essentially different sort of fool. He is a professional poetical encomiast. Moliere is satirizing pedantic preciosiie;iio\herg,the human delight in fulsome flattery. The former foible is essentially intellectual ; the latter, largely social. M. Jourdain pui'sues the graces of high society with a headlong intensity that is utterly extravagant ; Jeroni- mus seeks a title by timid, devious diplomacy. The former lacks intellectual decency ; the latter, social savoir faire. In changing the nature of the foibles, Holberg always changes the nature of the laughter that they provoke. Page 108.*Legrelle says (p. 145) : " Le ridicule de la rusticite, c'est-a-dire celui de M. de Pourceaugnac, lui [Holberg] a foumi jusqu'a trois comedies, Le Onze Jimii (Den Ellefte Ju- nii) , Le Petit Paysan en Gage {Den Pansatte Bonde-Dreng) , et Jeppe de Berg {Jeppe paa Bjerget) . ' ' He makes no further comparison of the plays. The first of the three Danish plays is distinctly similar in plot to Moiisieur de Pourceaugnac ; the other two are like it only in having a fooled rustic for the central character. Page 108.t Legrelle, in his fourth chapter, called "Des Analo- gies du Style," gives the most complete collection of this sort of similarity. Indeed, his list is more than complete. More than once he attributes some extremely conventional comic device found in Holberg to the influence of Moliere, simply because he finds Holberg in these cases more like Moliere than like Plautus.On pp. 301, 302, for example, he proves by this curiously fallacious logical method that so inevitable a comic convention as quarrels between man and wife are copies of similar quarrels in Moliere. Almost half of the similarities presented by Legrelle in this chapter are of this general and inconclusive sort. 342 NOTES Page 110. Le Malade Imaginaire, I, 5. Page 111. Den Shmdesl0se, 1,7. Holberg uses exactly the same device in Pemilles Korte Fr0ken- Stand ^ I, 7. Page 112.*7Jzc?.,II, 2. Page 112.t7Z»J6?.,II, 7, 8. Page 114. /Z»«c?., Ill, 4. Pflg-e 115.* Xe* Femmes Savantes, III, 3. Legrelle suggests (p. 330) other examples, Melicerte^ 1,1, and the conversation between Alain and Georgette in UEcole des Femmes^ I, 3. The quarrel between Cleante, Harpagon, and Elise {V Avare^ I, 4) is also a case in point. Page 1 1 5.t Legrelle gives as an example Jacob von Tyhoe^ III, 5, where the braggart soldier and Stygotius, the pedant, quarrel. See also Henrich og Pemille, II, 7, and Det Lykkelige Skibbnid, I, 6. Page 116.* Henrich og PemiHe, III, 3. Page 11 6. t Legrelle does not agree with me on this point. He asserts, for example, that Moliere's trick of making a phrase ridiculous by mere repetition, as the " le pauvre homme " of Orgon in Tartuffe., 1,4, and the " sans dot " of both Valere and Harpagon in UJlvare, I, 5, is used by Holberg. Unfor- tunately for his argument, the principal example tliat he gives (pp. 338,339) of this repetition in Holberg, the "ligesaahos os" in Ulysses von Ithacia^ II, 2, is demonstrably modelled on a scene in one of the comedies in Gherardi's Thtdtre lialien (see infra, chap, iv) . Page 119. Den Honnette Ambition, I, 3. Page 121,* Den Politiske Kandest0ber, III, 4. Page 121.t Page70. Page 123. Erasmus Montanus, I, 5. Page 125. Den Ellefte Junii, V, 9. NOTES 343 Page 133. Mascarade^ II, 3. Page 139.* Robert Prutz (Luding Holberg, pp. 148-154, pas- sim) makes a number of general assertions about Holberg's relation to Gherardi's collection. The following two are char- acteristic. He says (p. 149) that Holberg took from Ghe- rardi "nicht nur den Stoff seiner meisten Stiicke, nicht nur einzelne Red en u. Gegenreden, sondem auch gauze ange- fiihrte Scene u. Situationen." Again, he says: "Holberg entfernte die abstracten Masken der Commedia dell' Arte u. setzte an ihreStelle lebendige wirkliche Charaktere." Prutz makes no attempt either to establish definite points of resem- blance or to define with any precision Holberg's debt to this popular form of drama. All other critics who have discussed Holberg's relation to Gherardi havecontented themselves with giving lists of borrowed comic devices. Dietrich (Pulcinella, etc., p. 2 73) realized the need of a thorough study of this question. He says : " Es wiirde nicht schwer sein, die Ent- stehung seines [Holberg's] lustigen Dienerpaares, Hendrik [szc] und Pemille, nahernachzuweisen. . . . Aber die Quel- lenuntersuchung miisste doch wohl . . . viel umfassender und scharfer gefuhrt werden." Page 1 39.t Flaminio Scala, author of the earliest and most im- portant Canevas, belonged to the company of Gelosi which began to play in Blois, January 25, 15 77. Francesco An- dreini, the author of the equally important Bravure del Capi- tano Spavento^ played with his remarkable vdfe, Isabella, in Paris from 1 605 to 1 607. Dominique Biancolelli, who played in Paris from 1 660 to 1 688, made a collection called Scenario de Dominique. And finally, Evaristo Gheraixii, the author of the French collection most important for our immediate pur- pose, played in France from October, 1689, when he made his debut as Arlequin, until the Italians were dismissed in 1 697. Page 1 40.* For an interesting account of Moliere's relations with this troupe, see Molilre et les I/a/iens, in Le Mo/ieriste, Novem- ber 1, 1879, pp. 237 ft'. The Italian actors received a much greater royal subsidy at this time than any other company. 344 NOTES After 1 664 it received 1 5,000 livres, while the large consol- idated company which later played in the Hotel Guenegaud never received more than 12,000 livres. Page 1 40. t Holberg's acquaintance with the commedia dell' arte as played in Rome (see chap, i, p. 16) ought to be recalled in this connection. He describes {Autobiography ^ p. 96) his relation with the Italian comedians as follows : " The loneli- ness in the house where I lived lasted until the end of Decem- ber. But as soon as the old year was over and all the jugglers, pantomimers, actors and rope dancers in Italy streamed into Rome, tlie house was filled with comedians, who kept up their buffoonery far into the night, much to my annoyance. . . . After Christmas twelve bands of comedians came to Rome. Each group is accustomed to choose one comedy, which it plays day after day. The company lodged in our house, chose a play about a doctor, which was very much like Moliere's Le Medecin malgre lid. ' ' Holberg's interest in the commedia dell' arte may have been first stimulated by his association with these comedians. Page 141. Pulcinella (French, Polichinello) has been thought to be a resurrection of Maccus, the mimus albiis of the Fabu- lae Attellanae (see Riccoboni's Histoire du Theatre Italien^ pp. 316 ff. ; Sand's Masques et Buffons ; and A. Dietrich's Pulcinella, etc., chap, x, passim). In France, Polichinelle early (circa 1630) left the comedians for troupes of mario- nettes. He later had his own theatre. Polichinelle also ti'av- elled to England about 1 688, where he became, in Punch of the puppet shows, the monster of muixlerous ferocity that he has remained to this day. Page 142. Besides these men, the following authors, known also in French literature, wrote plays which appear in Gherar- di's collection. La Motte, Le Noble, and Montchesney; the follo\ving, who are known only through their work for the Italians, Nolant de Fatourville, Brugiere de Bai-ante, Louis Biancolelli, and Evaristo Gheraixii ; and the two following, who are mere names, Mongin and Borspan. NOTES 345 Page 143. The following plays in Ghei-ardi are formed on a plot consisting of these four principal elements : Arlequin, Lingere du Palais ; Arlequin, Empermr dans la Lune ; La Cause des Femmes; Le Divorce; Mezzetin, Grand Sophy de Perse; Arlequin, Homme h Bonne Fortune; La Coquette; Arlequin^ Esope; Les Chinois; La Fille de bon Sens; Les Mal-Assortis ; Les Originaux; Le Bel Esprit; Arlequin^ Defenseur du beau Sexe ; Le Retour de la Foire de Bezons ; Les Bains de la Porte Saint- Bernard. Page 144.* These are Jean de France^ Jacob von Tyboe^ Den Stundesl0se^ Pernilles Korten Fr0ken-Stand^ Don Ranudo, Den Honnette Ambition^ Det Lykkelige Skibbrud, Kilde-Reysen. Page 144.t Den Politiske Kandest0ber and Gert Westphaler. Page 145. In only one play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, does the plot appear in all its formality. In Le Malade Imaginaire there is the important difference which I have indicated. Page 149.* Many of the details of this costume, e.g. , the black mask and the pointed hat, are inheritances from the more primitive Pulcinella. The swoixi is apparently a souvenir of the time when he was usually the servant of the Capitano Spavento. In twenty of the forty-two comedies in Scala's col- lection he plays the part. The interrelation of the various fig- ures of the commedia dell ' arte, esich one popular in some one locality, is, however, so complicated a subject that one can pronounce definitely on any of these points only after more extended and careful investigations than have hitherto been made. In one or two cases Arlequin took off liis mask and made an attempt to identify himself with the character he was impereonating. See, e.g., La Fille Sava7ite, scene 8 (G. Ill, 84) . In Les deux Arlequins, we know from a note of Gherardi's (II, 298) that Arlequin, in parodying Baron, the actor, took off his conventional costume. Page 149.t Angelo Constantini invented the character Mezzetin in 1683. He had been the underetudy of the famous Domi- nique Biancolelli for the role of Arlequin. Tired of being a 346 NOTES mere substitute, he invented the new figure, so that he could appear every time the company presented a play. To his new part he inevitably brought most of the good points of his old one. Mezzetin is, indeed, so faithful a copy of Arlequin that in one play, Les deux Arlequins^ he is called Jirlequin cadet. When Dominique died in August, 1688, Constantini natu- rally played the part of Arlequin, but because of the deep respect which the whole company felt for Dominique's mem- ory, the old understudy kept the name and costume of Mez- zetin. In October, 1689, Evaristo Gherardi presented Arle- quin again in his own proper person. In the plays given, therefore, between the death of Dominique and the debut of Gherardi (Ze Marchand Ditpe^ Colombine^ Femme Vengee, La Descente de Mezzetin aux Enfers^ and Mezzetin.^ Grand Sophy de Perse) , it is only fair to regard Mezzetin as Arle- quin playing under a different stage name. Page 151. For an interesting discussion of the site of this spring and the customs which grew up around it, see Varvov Kilde og Holbergs ^^Kilderejse," by R. M. Stolpe, Ban. Sam.^ 2d series. III, 77-79. Page \ 53.* La Cause des FemmeSy scene 5 (G. II, 25) , "Arle- quin deguisS en Baron ; "La Critique de la Cause des Femmes^ scene 3 (G. II, 70) , ' ' Arlequin en Chevalier ;" Le Marchand Dupe^ I, 6 (G. II, 169), " Mezzetin en Marquis;" Arle- quin^ Homme d, Bonne Fortune^ scene 5 (G. II, 367) , "Arle- quin en Vicomte;" La Coquette, III, 3 (G. II, 156), "Arle- quin en Marquis ;" Les Chinois, I, 6 (G. IV, 179), "Arle- quin en Baron de la Dindoniere;" Les Originaux, II, 3 (G. IV, 332), "Arlequin en le Vidame de Cotignac;" Les Momies d'Egypte, I, 4 (G. VI, 273), " Arlequin en Baron de Gronpignac." Page \5S.\ La Cause des Femmes (G. I, 28) and Les Momies d'Egypte (G. VI, 273). Page 1 53.1 The first disguise he assumes in Les Chinois (G. IV, 179) ; the second in Les Origirumx (G. IV, 332). NOTES . 347 Page 155.* Ben Honnette Ambition, II, 4. Page 1 5 5 .t In Henrich og Pernille, where Henrich impersonates Leander, he too adopts some of the traditions of Arlequin's gentleman disguise. He entere in his porte-chaise (I, 6) , shout- ing to his servants, and then obsequiously begs pardon for his precipitate entrance. He also makes the same efforts to app>ear to be on terms of easy familiarity with nobility. Mascarille, in Les Precieuses Ridicules, of course, makes his entrance in a porte-chaise and is also beaten out by his master, as is Henrich at the end of Den Honnette Ambition. Yet the disguise of Mascarille has not as many points of contact with Henrich as that of Arlequin. It seems to be itself a clever adaptation, for the purpose of a special travesty, of the same Italian tra- dition ; for Arlequin used to disguise as a noble gentleman long before the plays in Gherardi's collection were composed. (Cf. n Lunatico in Scenario di Dominique Parfaict, p. 169, where Arlequin appears as Marquis de Blanchefleur) . Page \ 56.* La Matrone d' Ephese (G. I, 18 ff.) and La Lin- gere du Palais (G. I, 65 ff,). It is significant that both ex- amples of this disguise occur in two of the earliest and most fragmentary of the plays in Gherai-di's collection. The French authors who wrote for the Italians discarded this disguise as too farcical to appear in any of their plays that were delib- erately composed. Page 1 56.t Mascarade, I, 11 , and Uden Hoved og Hale, II, 6. Page 156.t Riccoboni (p. 65) describes these lazzi as follows: "Nous appelons lazzi ce que 1' Arlequin ou les autres Acteurs masques font au milieu d'une Scene qu'ils interrompent par des epouvantes ou par des badineries etrangeres au sujet de la matiere que Ton traite, et a laquelle on est pourtant tou- jours oblige de revenir: or ce sont ces inutilites qui ne consistent que dans le jeu que I'Acteur invente, suivant son ggnie, que les Comediens Italiens nomment lazzi. " The form " lazzi " was used both as a singular and a plural by the time of Gherardi. The origin of the word is obscure. It is perhaps connected vnth the Tuscan lacci bands, because the physical 348 NOTES farce bound the action together. Cf. a discussion by E. Re : La Commedia veneziana e il Goldoni (Giomale Storico, LVIII, 367 ff.)- Page 157. G.I, 114. Page 158.* Melampe, III, 4. See also Hexerie, III, i, where Arv is compelled by the exigencies of an imaginary dialogue to drag himself about by the hair. Page 158.t Legrelle (p. 344) asserts that this comic device, especially as it appears in Melampe^ is a copy of a similar device practised in Moliere's Amphitryoii (I, l). There the slave rehearses the announcement of Amphitryon's victory to his wife Alcmene by an imaginary conversation, in which he lets his lantern represent the lady. He speaks, of course, for both himself and Alcmene, undoubtedly making appropri- ate changes in his voice and manner of speech. But the physi- cal farce which is the important part of the trick in both the Italian and Danish comedy is wholly absent from this scene of Moliere. Therefore, even if the device as it appeal's in Gherardi were a modification of Sosie's actions here, I believe that Holberg none the less adopted it from the Italian source, after Sosie's trick had been transformed to suit the charac- teristic antics of Arlequin. Page 159. This disguise Arlequin adopts in Arlequin., Empereur dans la Lune, Arlequin^ Chevalier du Soleil, Arlequin, Homme d Bonne Fortune, and Le Bel Esprit. Page 160.* I)o7i Ranudo, V, 4. Page 1 60. t It is interesting to note that Holberg knew that the potentate disguise was as much a tradition of Gherardi 's the- atre as of Moliere's. When Isabella and Leonora are inventing their plot to pass off' the lover as the Prince of Abyssinia, they decide that, bold as it is, there is more reason to count on the success of his disguise than upon similar ones in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Arlequin, Empereur dans la Lune {Don Ranudo, IV, i) . NOTES 349 Page 161. La Fille de bon Sens^ I, 7-13. A Danish translation of this comedy was played, May 24, 1728, under the title Mange Hunde om et Been. See Overekou, p. 250, for con- temporary advertisements of the play. Page 163.*G. II, 175. Page \6c,.\ Den Stundesl0se, II, 10. Page 164.* Uden Hoved og Hale, III, 2. Page 164.t Pernilles Korte Fr0ken-Stand, III, 7. Page 165.* G. IV, 77. Page 1 65.t She is palpably the manager and director of the plot in Colombine, Avocat; La Cause des Femmes; Le Divorce; Le Marchand Dupe (since, for reasons already given, there was Arlequin in this play, her plans here naturally do not involve his execution of them) : La Coquette and Les Bains de la Porte Saint-Bernard, La Fille de bon Se7is, and La Fon- * taine de Sapience. Page 166. Arlequin and Colombine marry at the close of the following : Arlequin, Empereur dans la Lune; Le Marchand Dupe (here she marries Pasquariel, because there is no Arle- quin in the play) ; Mezzetin, Grand Sophy de Perse (here it is Mezzetin for the same reason as above) ; Arlequin, Homme a Bonne Fortune ; Les deux Arlequins ; Ulysse et Circe ; La Fille de ban Sens ; Les Promenades de Paris. Page 167.* In the folloAving plays, Pemille invents the plot in which she makes the disguises of Henrich play an important part : Jean de France, Det Lykkelige Skibbrud, Den Stundesl0se, Den Honnette Ambition, Kilde-Reysen. In the following plays, Pemille also invents the plot, which she carries on, however, with little or no help from Henrich, by her owti disguises or by the help of other characters than Henrich : Den pantsatte Bonde-Dreng, Gert Westphaler, Philosophus udi egen Indbild- ning, and Republiquen. Page 1 6 7. tin the following plays, Henrich and Pernille marry : 350 NOTES Jean de France^ Mascarade^ Henrich ogPemille, and Det Lyk- kelige Skibbnid. In Henrich's last speech in Kilde-Reysen^ there is a hint of marriage : " Denne gode Jomfrue er dog ikke den f0rste, som er bleven cureret ved Kilden, vil og ikke blive den sidst. Er det ikke sandt Peniille ? " Page 168. Det Lykkelige Skibbrud^ IV, 10. Page 169. Page 197. Page 170. Professor Vilhelm Andersen's excellent essay on Holberg's Henrik {Litteratur Billeder^ Anden Samling, Cop. , 1907) has suggested to me many of the ideas about Henrik which I express here. Page 171. Den Poliiiske Kandest0ber^ I, 6. Page 173. Mascarade, II, 3. Page 174.* Den Shindesl0se, II, 3. Page 174.tHe appears in the foUomng plays, in all of which he is called a " Gaai'ds Karl : " Jean de France, Mascarade, Henrich og Pemille, Hexerie, Den Honnette Ambition, Jule- stue, Kilde-Rejsen, and Republiquen. Page 1 75.* Pedrolino is more than the reappearance of Pagli- accio under a new name. He has also inherited traits of a figure called Bertoldo or Bertoldino. This figure owes its existence to a certain Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1609),of Bologna. He was an improvisor and popular poet who sang on the streets the adventures of a fictitious Bertoldo. These songs were so popular that he decided to print them. His first collection he called The Life of Bertoldo, the second The Life of Bertoldino. The enormous popularity of these figures ex- tended to the theatre, so that by the end of the sixteenth cen- tury every company which played the commedia deW arte had its Bertoldo or Bertoldino. The latter figure, a sort of farmer, a mixture of naivetS and rustic shrewdness and a great enun- ciator of peasant aphorisms, had a particular vogue. From this Bertoldino, Padrolino, and through him Pierrot, has in- herited much. NOTES 351 Page 1 75. t The first recorded mention of Pierrot occurs in La Suite du Festin de Pierre^ first performed February 4, 1673. (See MS. 483, 484, Bibliotheque de Grand Opera de Paris, Catalogue Soleinne, Vol. V, No. 329, or Copie de la Traduc- tion du Scenario de Dominique, MS. in Bibfiotheque Nation- ale; see Catalogue Soleinne, Vol. Ill, No. 3348, fol. 169.) " Cette scene se passe a la campagne. Je [Arlequin] fais tomber aux pieds de Spezzafer le cor de chasse dont il sonne, en suite en courant, je culbute Pierrot," etc. — Quoted by Klinger, p. 154, in his excellent description of Pierrot, to which I am indebted for much of my description. Page 176.*Moland, in Moliere et la Comedie Italienne, asserts that the idea of this figure was suggested to Giraton by Pierrot in Moliere's Bon Juan. It seems highly improbable to me that the Italian actor learned to know an old traditional figure of his own theatre from a modified copy of Moliere. Page 176.t In .Arlequin Esope ; Les deux Arlequins ; TJlysse et Circe; Les Promenades de Paris, and Le Retour de la Foire de Bezons. Page 176.1 The name Pantalone occurs but once in Gherardi. I have used it as the generic name of the amorosa's old father. Pierrot is his servant in La Critique de la Cause desFemmes; La Coquette : L' Opera de Campagne ; Les Chinois; Les Ori- ginaux; Le Bel Esprit; Arlequin, Befenseur du beau Sexe; La Fatisse Coquette ; La These des Bames. He is the doctor's servant in La Fille de bon Sens; Les Bains de la Porte Saint- Bernard; Pasquin et Marforio. Page 176.§ G. V, 41. Page 176.11 G. II, 366. Page 177. Jean de France, V, 2. Page 179. IMd., II, 4. Page 180.* Kilde-Rejsen, III, i. Page 180.t Mascarade, I, 2. 352 NOTES Page 1 80. t Jule Stue, 8. Page 182. The evidence of names, often tempting, is here thoroughly inconclusive. The amoroso was always given the stage name of the actor who played the part. In Gheraixii's collection he was called Leandre only in pieces 43-5 5, when C. V. Romagnesi played the part. Holberg may have hap- pened on the name there or in the two plays of Moliere in which the lover is called Leandre. The name was, in any case, a good one for a lover. The evidence dra^vn from the amoroso •is even less convincing. She is usually called Isabelle, although she is also called Olivette, Angelique, Lucile, and Elise. Page 183. Skavlan, pp. 191 ff. He prefaces this characteristic sentence to his list : "If one runs over Gheraixii's ThMtre Italien, he will find various details which Holberg seems to have borrowed." See also Rahbek, VI, passim, where he dis- cusses Holberg's relation to Gherardi's collection in this fi'ag- mentary manner. Page 184. Jupiter appeal's in this way in Le Divorce^ I? i > Proteus and Glaucus in Arlequin Protee^ G. I, 69. Page 186. G. II, 167. Page 187. G. II, 171. Thalia descends to perform a similar office in the prologue of Les Originaux^ G. IV, 314. Page 188. Firet printed in Schwartz, Lommebog for Skuespil- lere, 1786. For the text, see Overskou, I, 190-199. The full title of this play was Den Dariske Comedies Ligbegjaengelse med Thai/as Afskeedstale^ forstillet til allersUdste Sluting af de Danske Acteurs, den 2 5 Februari 1727. For the text, see Rahbek, VI, 516-526. Rahbek remarks (p. 528) on the ob- vious resemblance between these two plays. Page 191. For a complete list of parodies of individual scenes, see La Descente de Mezzetin aux Enfers, IV; Les Aventures aux Champs-Elysees, III, 4-8 ; and La Naissance d'Amadis. Page 193.* Ulisse et Circe, I, 9 ; and Ulysses von Ithacia, III, 6. Page 193.t Ulisse et Circe, II, 12. NOTES 353 Page 194. Among them is the following, which seems to me obvious (noticed by Prutz, pp. 753 if.): In Arlequin, Em- pereur dans la Lune (G. I, 753 ff.), Arlequin, disguised as the emperor of Uie moon, discusses the affaire of his realm with a doctor and Columbine. To every bit of explanation that he gives, either one or the other of his interlocutoi-s, astonished at the identity of conditions there with those on the earth, exclaims: " C'est tout comme ici." This phrase is repeated seven times. Finally, Arlequin gives a long de- scription of the society women of the moon, which fits so perfectly the women of the world that the doctor and Col- umbine cry out in amazement: "C'est tout comme ici." In Ulysses von Ithacia, Chilian meets a Trojan outside the walls of his city. This stranger explains conditions in Troy, to which Chilian replies with a similarly repeated "Ligesaa hos os" ("Just the same with us "). The Trojan: " The greatest virtue with us is to waste more than one can earn." Chilian: "Just the same with us," etc. Holberg's humor- ous quip is practically a translation of the similar Italian one. It is not Moliere's illuminative "Sans dot," or " Le pauvre homme," debased to mere foolish iteration. Other similari- ties, such as the following, are interesting only because they show how thoroughly Holberg knew Gherardi's collection and how systematically he borrowed from it to enliven his dialogue: cf. Arlequin, Empereur dans la Lune, G. I, 131 : Arlequin (to Doctor): "Parlez, etes-vous de cette ville, ou la ville, est-elle de vous?" with Ulysses von Ithacia, V, 2 — Chilian: "God-dag, Landsmand,er du fra denne Bye, eller er denne Bye fra dig?" Page 195. This very incident is found in one of Gherardi's plays, Parodie de Berenice, scene v, in Arlequin Protee (I, 93, 94) . There Arlequin is taking part of Titus in parody, when an old-clothes man {fripier) entere and strips him of his rented costume. This interruption ends the parody of Berenice just as the similar interruption ends Holberg's parody. PagQ 200. For a list of plays in which she appeal's, see Four- nel's Le Theatre au XVII^ Siecle, p. 111. 354 NOTES Page 201. Foumel's Le Thedtre au XVIF Silcle^ pp. 400 ff. Page 202. Asinaria^ V, 1, 2. Page 203. This disguise may have suggested tlie similar one in Den Forvandlede Bnidgom. Not only the disguises but also the purposes of both of them (to make love, in the guise of a soldier, to an old woman) are alike. Montfleury's play was presented often during the early years of the eighteenth cen- tury, so that Holberg almost certainly knew it. In 1 7 1 4, it was played four times ; in 1715, twice ; during the years of his later stay in Paris, it seems not to have been played at all. Page 204. One of Rotrou's comedies is curiously enough called L' Heureux Naufrage (1634). It is an excessively ro- mantic tragi-comedy, devoted to the love adventures of a prince of Epirus who is shipwrecked on the Dalmatian coast. Holberg's Det Lykkelige Skibbnid has absolutely no connec- tion with this play, so that tlie identity of title is probably entirely fortuitous. Page 208. Le Mercure Galant, IV, 3, Page 2 12.* See Winkel-Horn, p. 158. Page 212.t A complete edition of Legrand's works was pub- lished in 1751. The influence of his Pluhis upon Holberg, therefore, may have been exerted through purely literary channels. Page 212.t Holbergs Udvalgte Skrifter, VI, 427. Page 214. There is no evidence to show that Holberg knew any of the work of Cervantes, except Don Quixote. To Rule a Wife and to Have a Wife was given at the London theatres during Holberg's stay in England. Genest (pp. 3 58, 365, 384) notes the follovidng performances : ( 1 ) November 30, 1 706, at The Haymarket; (2) February 12, 1707, at The Haymarket; (3) December 1 7, 1 707, at The Drury Lane. Page 216. Epistler, V, 166 (Epistle No. 506 a). Page 219. P^istler^V, 122 (Epistle No. 493). NOTES 355 Page 223. Saint- Evremond's ^/> Politick Would-Be has often been regarded as the source of Holberg's Den Politiske Kan- dest0ber (see Rahbek, VI, 26 ff. ; Skavlan, VII, 195; and Albrecht, Lessings Plagiate, I, 662). The author wrote this play in England about 1662, undoubtedly in collaboration with the Duke of Buckingham and M. d'Aubigny. (See (Euvres, I, 597.) These three authors have consciously ele- vated the figure of Sir Politick from the subordinate place which he holds in Ben Jonson's Volpone to the central posi- tion in their "humour" comedy. Holberg knew this play, which he mentions at least twice (Just Jiistesens Betxnkning over Satiriske Skrifter, and in Helte Historier, I, 176), call- ing it quite properly "en engelsk Komedie." Sir Politick is much less likely the prototype of Hermann of Bremen than another English figure, the Political Upholsterer, whose relation to the Political Tinker is discussed in chapter vi, page 2 69. The situation in the dmouement of the two plays is, I admit, vaguely alike. Both Sir Politick and Hermann have been encouraged by a plot of disguises to believe themselves advanced to positions of honour and influence. Both dupes imagine persons of simple, even degraded, condition to possess important social rank. Both make heroic efforts to receive their guests with the ceremony that they consider proper. Yet Sir Politick, mincing and simpering as he forms the receiving line in his salon to greet the harlot whom he believes to be the wife of the Doge of Venice, is a spectacle different in humorous kind from that of Hermann, spitting on his hands from sheer excitement as he tries to show his wife how to make the neigh- bour's dirty woolly dog behave like a lapdog. The social in- competence of Hermann and his Geske for the parts of mayor and wife is, then, only vaguely like the tawdry elegance of Sir Politick. All the similarities between the two plays seem, in- deed, unimportant enough to be regarded as fortuitous. Page 224. Each of the assemblies of the chattering women was published originally as a separate work, all during the year 1 622. These eight were first collected in 1 723 and published under the title of Recueil General des Caquets de V Accouchee. 356 NOTES Of this collected work, six editions were published between the years 1623 and 1630. Page 226.* Reimpressions of the 1499 edition were made in Paris, 1595; Rouen, 1596; Rouen, 1606; Lyon, 1607; and Paris, 1620. Any one of these editions may have fallen into Holberg's hands in those libraries of Paris which he tells us that he visited day after day during the year 1715-16. That general interest in this satire had not lapsed in Holberg's time is proved by two contemporary reprints of the 1499 edition at The Hague in 1726 and 1734. See Brunet, IV, 1030. Page 22 6. t Les Quinze Joyes de Manage^ p. 27 : " Or a grant soussi pour querir ce qu'il faut aux commeres et nourrisses et matrones qui y seront pour garder la dame tant comma elle couchera, qui beuvront de vin autant Ten bouteroit en une bote." Page 231. Other relations which have been thought to exist be- tween Holberg's plays and Le Roman Comique (Albrecht, I, 6 ; I, 591) seem extremely fanciful. The similarities between Kilde-Reysen and the story of Les Deux Freres Rivaux (Part II, chap, xix, ed. Fournel, II, 83-1 1 7) are very general and conventional ; while those between Den Vaegelsindede and L'Histoire de la Capricieiise in Offiray's Suife du Roman Co- mique (ed. Fournel, II, 280-290) are inexact and thoroughly unconvincing. Page 240. Terrae FiliuSy pp. 108 ff. Page 241. These ingenious theories are suggested in Olsvig, Om Holbergs saakaldte Selvbiogra/i, passim. Page 242. Albert Thura's Idea Hist. Lift. Danorum^ quoted Olsvig, col. 16. Page 244. He states that he has read Humphrey Prideaux, Buniet, and Rymer's Fotdera (Winkel-Horn, p. 231). He also shows familiarity with the follomng : Historical Passages from Private Passages of State., 1 6 1 8-4 8 , by John Rushworth , NOTES 357 London, 1659 ; (2) The History of the Royal Society of Lon- don for the Improvement of the National Knowledge^ by Thomas Sprat, 1 667 ; (3) Account of Denmark as it was in the Year 1 694, by Robert Molesworth, London, 1 694 ; (4) The Chronicles of the Kings of England^ written in the Man- ner of the Ancient Jewish Historians^ by Nathan Ben Saddi^ a Priest of the Jews, London, 1740 (this work is not, to be sure, serious history ; it is merely a.jeu d' esprit of some anony- mous cleverling, whom Holberg censures for his impious imitation of Biblical style); (5) Thomas Gordon's English translation of Tacitus ; (6) The Trial and Sufferings of Mr. Isaac Martin, who was put into the Inquisition in Spain for the Sake of the Protestant Religion, by Isaac Martin, London, 172 3 ; (7) Travels and Observations relating to Several Parts ofBarbary and theLevant,hy Thomas Shaw, London, 1 738. The general progress of religious and philosophical thought in England he seems to have followed even more zealously than the productions of English historical scholarship. " I have read everything that England in our time has vomited up against reUgion," he says (Winkel-Horn, p. 243), " but whatever disturbance Toland, Collins, Tindal, Woolaston, The Moral Philosopher, and othere waked in my mind, others who have boldly come to the defence of the Christian religion have set at rest." He shows familiarity with Bacon's Novum Organum and The New Atlantis (Ep. 361 ; II, 1 67), and with Ralph Cud worth's The True Intellectual System of the U?iiverse, as well as with Nehemiah Grew's objection to this system expressed in his Cosmologia Sacra (Ep. 50 ; I, 50). He refers to both Hobbes and Locke (Ep. 144 ; II, 204) ; to William Whiston's theory of the flood, given in his A New Theory of the Earth from its Origin to the Con- summation of all Things (Ep. 4 ; I, 118; also Ep. 82 ; II, 203) ; and to Newton, whose theory he rejected in favour of the Cartesian theory of vortices. He mentions favourably William King's answer to Bayle, De Origine Mali (Ep. 322; II, 62). He refers to Shaftesbury's Characteristics (Ep. II 9 ; II, 128), and makes a long translation from one of the theological works of George Hickes (Ep. 364 ; II, 176). 358 NOTES Page 246.* This entry has been noted by a number of students of Holberg; e.g.^ by Olsvig in his Otn Holbergs saakaldte Selvbiografi^ and in the preface to the one-act drama on Hol- berg's life written by Anna Borch and called HvorforP Hol- bergske Studie i en Act. Page 246. t Holberg's firet serious historical investigations were apparently undertaken there. He says of his Eiiropaeiske Rigers Historie : " Dette Arbeide begyndte jeg i England paa Bod- ley's Bibliotek, hvor der gaves mig rigelig Adgang til at benytte B0ger tjenlige til dette Brug," etc. Page 246.JDolbell, I, 206. Page 246. § Among Rawlinson MS. Letters in the Bodleian, vol. ii, letter ia. Page 247.* Om Holbergs saakaldte Selvbiograjij col. 155. Page 2 4 7. t Professor Schofield has suggested to me that Hol- berg's advanced opinions about the education and the rights of women developed while he was in England. Elizabetli Elstob, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, was a close friend of Dr. Smal- ridge, Dr. Hickes, Humphrey Wanley, and their associates in the study of Northern antiquities. During the years 1 706- 08, to be sure, she did not live in Oxford. She was then in London with her brother, preparing her edition of the Eng- lish-Saxon Homily on the Nativity of Saint Gregory, which appeared in 1709. All the phases of that work, however, were almost surely discussed by her litemry friends, patrons, and sponsors at Oxford. One of the most interesting of these phases must have been tlie question which she considers at length in her preface. There she defends vigorously a wo- man's right to become a scholar, and incidentally explains what she consider the proper sphere for woman. Holberg might well have heard her ideas defended by her patrons and have thus learned to regard them sympathetically. It is sig- nificant that every one of Holberg's arguments for the eman- cipation of woman he bases upon the notion which Eliza- beth Elstob emphasized, that woman's intellect is inferior to NOTES 359 man's, not by nature, but because of its inferior education. This revolutionary idea came naturally to Elizabeth Elstob, who was eager to justify her career both to herself and to the world. Holberg's enunciation of the same idea has hitherto seemed extraordinary and completely inexplicable. Page 248. Genest records performances of the following plays of Shakespeare during the time that Holberg was in England : in tragedy, Hamlet, Timo?i of jlthens, King Lear, and Mac- beth; in chronicle history, Henry IV; in romantic comedy. The Tempest ; in pure comedy. The Taming of the Shrew. Page 250.* Philipsen, in Den Holbergske Literaturs Historie og Bibliographi, pp. 38-41, indicates the three points of sim- ilarity that I have mentioned (along with one more too in- exact and trivial to notice) as existing between Jeppe paa Bjerget and the older Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's source. All of the points do appear there as well as in Shake- speare's play, but Holberg could have hit upon that old play only by a miracle of chance. Page 250. t July 4, 1706, and October 15, 1707, both times at The Haymarket. These performances show that the play was well knoA^ai in Holberg's London, in spite of the fact (men- tioned by Rahbek, VI, 164) that Steele {Tatter, No. 231; September 30, 1710) tells the story of The Taming of the Shrew as though it were original with him. Page 251.* Mindre Poetiske Skrifter, p. 121. Page 25l.t Genest records the following performances: Vol- pone, December at The Haymarket, and April 27, 1708, at TheDrury Lane; The Silent ^owzora, January 1, 1707, and October 28,1 707, at The Haymarket, and April 21,1 708, at The Drury Lane ; Bartholomew Fair, August 1 2 and Oc- tober 22, 1707, at The Haymarket, and August 26, 1708, at The Drury Lane. Page 252.* I am indebted to Miss Elizabeth Woodbridge's excellent analysis of Jonson's comic art (Studies in Jonson's Comedy) for help in this comparison. 360 NOTES Page 252.t Mermdd Edition oi Farquhar^ Introd., p. 26. Page 253. Cf. Jean de France^ I, 2 ; Det Lykkelige Skibbmd, I, 3 ; Ude?i Hoved og Hale^ I, i ; Erasmus Montanus^ I, pas- sim, particularly 6; Den Stiindesl0se, I, i; Ben Honnette Am- bition, 1,2; Don Ranudo, 1,2; Philosophus udi egen Indbild- ningj I, i; Den Politiske Kandest0ber, I, 2 ; Gert Westphalery I, i ; Det Arabiske Pulver, Ij 3 ; and Jacob von Tyboe, I, i. Page 259. George Farquhar, Introd., p. 24. Page 260, This bit of imitation has already been pointed out more than once. See Skavlan, p. 196 ; and Brandes, Ludvig Holberg, p. 212. Page 262. The first of these verses closes Pluhis; the second, Jeppe paa Bjerget. The following plays are also closed by a bit of doggerel : Den Politiske Kandestober, Barselshien, Jean de France, Den Ellefte Jimii, Ulysses, Uden Hoved ogHale, Hexerie, Den Forvandelde Brudgrom, Den StandesUse, and Sganarels Rejse. Page 265. Werlauff (p. 14) calls attention in this connection to the tobacco-councils of the Prussian King, Friedrich Wil- helm I, at which news-sheets were read and commented upon by the learned smokers assembled. He also mentions (i&z't?. , note 5 ) a tavern in Copenhagen where the guests used to foiTn a Collegium Politicum, not unlike that in Holberg's play. Page 270. No. 108 ; suggested first by Olsvigin Det store Ven- depunkt i Holbergs Liv, p. 63. Page 272. The first collected edition of The Tatter was, issued in 1710-11. Holberg may have seen the original sheets of The Spectator, which were published in monthly parts, or more probably the firet edition in octavo, seven volumes of which were published during the first months of 1 7 1 3 , and the eighth in 1715. Page 273. Olsvig, p. 82. Page 276.* See, e.^., Prutz, p. 163: "Esmuss,meinenwir,zu- gestanden werden dass Holberg auch in seinen Dichtungen NOTES 361 zum mindesten ebenso sehr Moralist als Dichter ist. . . . Wir geben zu, dass dies sehr undramatisch u. langweilig ist und wenn es der Holbergschen Komodie, trotz des unverwust- lichen Kerns von komischer Kraft u. Laune u. volksthiimli- cher Stimmung der darin steckt, bei uns in neuerer Zeit in Ganzen so wenig gelungen worden — so liegt das wohl zum grossten Theil eben in dieser moralisirenden Farbung." Page 276. t Tatler^ Nos. 40, 47, 121. Page 283. Cf. Tatler, No. 41 ; I, 338 (Steele's defence of his critical method) , with the Det Lykkelige Skibbrud, V, passim ; Tatler, No. 173 ; III, 10 ff. (a satire on the inefficiency of a polite education) , with Den Shindeshse, 1,5; Tatler^ Nos. 2 5 , 26,29,31,33, and 3 9 (attacks on duelling) , with Den Vaegel- sindede. III, 3. Page 289 * Hagedoms Werke, V, 291, 292. Page 2 8 9. t The titles of these four were: (l) Om Menniskens Idraet^ Vandel og Maneere i disse Dage; (2) Om Mamodisk Klaededragt; (3) Om Alamodisk Sprog og Titter; (4) Om Poeteri og Rimdigter. Page 290. Ed. Paludan, p. 101. Satire IV, 259 ff. Page 291.* Scene 13. Page 291.t In this same satire, Lauremberg ridicules passing fashions in speech. In a long list he contrasts the good old words for many common things with the fashionable equiva- lents of the day. See III, 1 76 ff. Cf. the following lines which the Danish translator left in the original even in his version : Wol da ein Schlungel was, de is nu ein Cojon, Wat damals was fort, fort, is nu allohu, allohu. Contrasts of exactly this sort are frequently made in Hol- berg. Cf. Erasmus Montanus^ I, 2, where Jeppe says : "In my youth people didn't talk here the way they do now. What used to be called a 'boy' they now call a 'laquey,'" etc. Page 291.1 Skavlan (p. 196) suggests that Jean de France has 362 NOTES been modelled on Wycherley's M. de Paris, in the Gejitle- man Dancing Master. Yj. GegSis[K0benhavnI)agbladei, 1884, No. 172) believes Jean de France to be an imitation of Moreto's El Lhido Bon Diego. Tliis seems a priori a very improbable source, and considering the existence of Lau- remberg's satire, ridiculously remote. Page 292.* I, 6. Page 292. t Of the periodicals Der Politische Stockjisch (II, 2) and Der Europaeische Herold (I, 4), and of the novels Her- cules (I, 2), — called Heradus by Henrich, — Der Politische Nachtisch (I, 4), and Herculiscus are mentioned. Page 293.* The full title is Das Verwirrte Haus Jacob oder das Gesicht der bestraften Rebellion an Stielcke und Liitze. Page 293.t Gaedertz, I, 183; repeated by Albrecht in his Less- ings Plagiate, I-II, 583, with his usual amusing animus. Page 293.1 Holberg uses this same name, spelled a little differ- ently, for one of the numerous women in his Barselstueti, II, 12 (Gedske Klokkers). Page 296. The plays were not often printed. For texts, see R. C. Prutz, Vorlesungen ilber die Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, Berlin, 1847, pp. 197-205. Page 297. For an account of this man, seeWerlauff, Historiske Antegnelser, pp. 290 ff. Page 300. See Werlauff, p. 300, note 29. Page 301.* See Holbergs Forhold til det aeldre tyske Drama, pp. 5 6 ff. A fuller title of the opera that he mentions was Ulysses, in einemmusicalischenSchauspiel . . . auffgefilhret. Page 301.t Compare, for example, his Ich will mich nicht dem Henker drauf ergeben. Einjunges Weib Kann ohne Manner Zeitvertreib JVicht so vielJahre leben, with Ulysses von Ithacia, V, 1,2. NOTES 363 Page 302. These comedies were almost surely The Clouds and Plutus, both of which he could have read in Madame Dacier's French translation of 1688. Page 303. Epistle, 557; V, 16. This reference to Regnard's play seems perfectly gratuitous. The play appeal's to have had no influence on Holberg. Page 304. Les Esprits, a comedy by Pierre de Larivey (for the text, see E. Fournier, Le Thedtre Franqais au XVP et au XVIF Siecle, pp. 5 7-89), introduces a servant playing the same trick of disguise into a situation plainly like that in the Mostellaria (II, 2). It is not necessary, however, to infer that Holberg knew and copied this play of Larivey, for, like all his plays, and like his very name, for that matter (L' Ar- rive is a translation of the Italian Giunto, tlie name of the playwright's parents), it is taken from the Italian, namely from Lorenzino de Medici's Aridosio. The first thing that would occur to any Italian writing a version of the Mostellaria, would be to introduce into it the exceedingly common de- vice of the commedia deW arte. And Holberg introduced the same device because he, too, was very familiar with Italian comedy, and not because he copied an obscure French play. Page 305 . Skavlan (p. 1 76) points out that this name is a trans- lation of Pyrgopolinices. Page 306. Curculio (IV, 2), like Henrich himself, imperson- ates the servant of the blustering captain, and so, like him, gets the slave girl into his own hands. Planesium learns by a ring that Curculio possesses that she is a sister of the brag- gart soldier, and so, like Hyacinthe, is a free woman. Page 308. The following are two of his famous witticisms: Is ubi molestus magis est, quaeso, inquam. Strata, Eone esferox, quia habes imjierium inbelluas. EuNUCHus, I, 414, 415. Quid agis, inquam, homo impudens Eefius tute es, et Jndfiaman turn quaeris. Ibid., I, 425, 426. RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO"^- 198 Main Stacks LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS. Renewls and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. Books may be Renewed by coiling 642-3405. DUE AS STAMPED BELOW M'2?'^- UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY FORM NO. DD6 BERKELEY CA 94720-6000 U^J, ^ r&w kjt^ U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CD^fl^D3Dfl5 ^' 29757.7 UNIVERSITY OF CAIvIFORNIA LIBRARY