Molière (1622-1673) [born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin]
Le Misanthrope (1666)
translated by Richard Wilbur as The Misanthrope (1952–54)

490. That’s in the middle of Molière’s list, so I read the first work listed. Not sure why that’s the rule, but it is. The Misanthrope, and Bloom specifies the Richard Wilbur translation.

I bought this one. I thought this was something I would feel good about owning, and, in the moment, I liked the way it looked. Beth thinks the cover is tacky, what with the gradient and the fake signature and all, but those very things remind me of comfortable times (i.e. 1993).

I’ll begin by noting once again that plays are short. I can’t stress this enough. We’re not talking about a novel, here. We’re talking about an hour or two.

Richard Wilbur points out in his introduction that Molière’s plays are particularly self-sufficient as texts, such that “a mere reading-aloud of the lines, without any effort at performance, can provide a complete, if austere, experience of the work.” This was borne out. I read the play aloud with a partner (we even made a gentle “effort at performance”) and it charmed — right before our eyes, not just in some imagined theater.

Wilbur’s introduction also notes that maintaining rhymed verse in the translation seemed to him mandatory, essential to Molière’s wit and tone. I don’t know the original but I daresay he did an excellent job. The text is clear and graceful and all sorts of wit lands very nimbly.

We read it aloud with complete rhythmic fidelity to the meter — not robotically, but faithfully in a fluid way — which I found extremely congenial to the tongue and to the ear. And Wilbur’s point about its contribution to the wit is exactly right. The buoyancy made it all delectable.

Not for the first time, I couldn’t help but think: why aren’t Shakespeare’s plays performed this way?

Why are we so afraid of rhythmic speech? It’s something like the aversion to “Mickey-Mousing” in incidental music; there’s this idea out there that strong rhythm makes things tasteless or absurd. As though if the iambs bounce too much, it’s undignified – certainly undignified for, say, Shakespearean Tragedy. But isn’t that just a form of the classic embarrassment of the sensual? Shame at dancing, shame at music, shame at the flesh, shame at art itself? Dance is only absurd in a context of repressing the dance.

What’s so undignified about doggerel, really?

I think that somehow over time we’ve come to think of metered rhyme as something only fit for jest because we wrongly feel it best to try to set “real thought” apart and keep it separate from our art. As though to guard against a threat: that if mere pleasure were to get inside a thought, the senseless vigor would contaminate its rigor.

But obviously that isn’t true; it’s just what art’s supposed to do! The more you integrate the mind — the more the rational’s combined with stuff that stimulates the senses — the more acute experience is. The rational part only gains from someone having taken pains to render it in dancelike verse; it doesn’t make the logic worse, but rather gives it heft and bite, and at some level makes it right.

The dance conveys that thought is good, the joy of being understood, and this can only elevate the author’s sense, and give it weight. And that’s why we should hear the rhyme and feel the iambs keeping time, instead of merely glancing down and with a Harold Bloom-y frown commending Shakespeare’s “splendid song — but to perform it would be wrong.” The notion that in Shakespeare’s plays the rhyme and rhythm are just ways of flaunting discipline and skill — essentially a test of Will — and aren’t to be heard, per se, but only sensed in some vague way, while being willfully obscured by actors who feel reassured by pulling out that standard trick of alternating slow with quick, and taking stabs at “naturalism” by running roughshod through the rhythm — this notion makes no sense to me as anything but anxiety. And yet I know it’s very hard to find productions of The Bard performed in full iambic lilt, where Hamlet singsongs without guilt.

But someday I might see, I hope, a staging of The Misanthrope that honors all the rhymes, as we did, in which I think we succeeded. It wouldn’t be the same in prose, as Richard Wilbur clearly knows.

Or knew, rather.

That tired me out so I think I’m about done here.

The Misanthrope is about the impossibility of absolute sincerity and the grotesqueness of rampant insincerity. It brings up these issues swiftly and elegantly, gets a few laughs with them, sets up some light dramatic conflict with them, and then ends, setting the matter back down without undue moralizing. For this restraint I greatly admire it. The question of sincerity is for each of us to struggle with individually; there’s plenty bite enough in the fact that the philosophical questions are real and timeless (despite the “urbane” subject matter, this stuff is entirely as accessible today as it was in 1666). I found the work far more thought-provoking than I would have found some kind of lesson play on the same subject.

Well, for the duration anyway. Of course afterward I just went on to the next thing and stopped thinking about The Misanthrope. I guess if it had some kind of horrible catharsis and an overbearing moral, I would have been more inclined to wrestle with it in my mind for days afterward.

But that would have been my anxiety at work, clinging to the discomfort as it tried desperately to set right what can’t be set right. You can get people to think about your art by shoving something dismaying in their faces, but that’s the low road. So again, I admire this for going the high road. It comes from an unanxious milieu, a bewigged world of ephemeral grace and wit, and I feel not just soothed but heartened by that soft touch. “For the duration” is a perfectly natural and reasonable amount of time to think about something.

Like I said, plays are short.

I haven’t done excerpts for plays up until now, but why not. I think people like the excerpts. It makes this site a little less blatantly like me talking to myself about something nobody else actually knows about. (Except for Maddie, who so far continues to follow along. Oh, and in this case also except for my reading partner. Never mind, there are plenty of you who’ve read this. But here comes an excerpt anyway.)

This is the first passage that made me chuckle aloud. Alceste, our misanthrope, crusader against hypocrisy, has said that he will not hold back from frankly stating his beloved Celimene’s faults.

ACASTE
I see her charms and graces, which are many;
But as for faults, I’ve never noticed any.

ALCESTE
I see them, Sir; and rather than ignore them,
I strenuously criticize her for them.
The more one loves, the more one should object
To every blemish, every least defect.
Were I this lady, I would soon get rid
Of lovers who approved of all I did,
And by their slack indulgence and applause
Endorsed my follies and excused my flaws.

CELIMENE
If all hearts beat according to your measure,
The dawn of love would be the end of pleasure;
And love would find its perfect consummation
In ecstasies of rage and reprobation.

ELIANTE
Love, as a rule, affects men otherwise,
And lovers rarely love to criticize.
They see their lady as a charming blur,
And find all things commendable in her.
If she has any blemish, fault, or shame,
They will redeem it by a pleasing name.
The pale-faced lady’s lily-white, perforce;
The swarthy one’s a sweet brunette, of course;
The spindly lady has a slender grace;
The fat one has a most majestic pace;
The plain one, with her dress in disarray,
They classify as beauté négligée;
The hulking one’s a goddess in their eyes,
The dwarf, a concentrate of Paradise;
The haughty lady has a noble mind;
The mean one’s witty, and the dull one’s kind;
The chatterbox has liveliness and verve,
The mute one has a virtuous reserve.
So lovers manage, in their passion’s cause,
To love their ladies even for their flaws.

As with the rest of the play, this is, like a good modern standup routine, not only funny but also resonant. Where should tact end? Who is really being mocked here? I laugh in part because I don’t know. Everyone equally, I’d like to think.

Anyway, good going, random.org. That’s-a more like it.

See below for the Maddie report, I hope.