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Harlequin between Tragedy and ComedyAuthor(s): Edgar WindSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 6 (1943), pp. 224-225Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750440 .Accessed: 08/09/2013 19:06

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224 MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

Raphael au Vatican. Ce morceau eit fait honneura Athenes du temps de P&riclks. Dix jours d'ob-servations ne firent que confirmer l'idee generaleque je m'etais formee, qui est, qu'il est parfait detous points.

Ce tableau, dont le sujet est Socrate recevantle poison, a pour auteur M. David de l'Academiede France. Je n'entreprendrai pas de le detailler.Le but de la peinture est de rendre les id6es Al'esprit par des images d'un goat qui peut mieuxetre senti qu'exprime. Tout, dans ce tableau,annonce l'intelligence infinie de l'excellent maitredont il est l'ouvrage. Douze figures concourentsans distraire l'attention du fait. Les accessoiressont naturellement plac6s; les expressions, vives etpathetiques; les traits philosophiques sont fine.-ment exprimes. Ce grand maitre a su, dans setouvrage, ouvrir une carriere tres tendue .. . M.David, ag environ de 37 ans, a eu la bonte denous faire voir plusieurs autres tableaux dignes desplus grands maitres. Il nous fit voir aussi des

ouvrages de ses 6l1ves qui travaillent a devenir sesrivaux. Sa maniare honnate joint I'affection aurespect que nous conservons pour ses etonnantesproductions."I see no reason for assuming that these excerpts

are fraudulent.1 On the contrary, the somewhatpontifical tone, the invocation of Michelangeloand Raphael, the reference to Pericles' Athens, themingling of generalities with specific observations,also the bland manner in paying a compliment to thepoliteness of the French Academician, soundthoroughly familiar even through the French word-ing and would presuppose a consummate forger,with a sense of Reynolds' style which one can hardlyimpute to Jules David, but at best only to an Englishimitator of Sir Joshua's literary manner.

On the other hand, there are reasons for suspectingthe first editor of Reynolds' Literary Works, is friendEdmund Malone, of having deliberately suppressedthe article. In the preface to his edition, he isanxious to have it known that Reynolds, a professedWhig, never sympathized with the French Revolu-tion:

He has, however, one claim to praise, which Ithink it my duty particularly to mention, becauseotherwise his merit in this respect might perhapsbe unknown to future ages: I mean the praise towhich he is entitled for the rectitude of his judg-ment concerning those pernicious doctrines thatwere made the basis of that Revolution which tookplace in France not long before his death. Beforethe publication of Mr. Burke's Reflections n thatsubject, he had been favoured with a perusal ofthat incomparable work, and was lavish in hisencomiums upon it.

Reynolds' extravagant praise of David in 1787,two years before the outbreak of the Revolution in

which David took such a prominent part, wouldhave pained and embarrassed Malone, and possiblywas deplored by Reynolds himself. The omissionwould have been an act of editorial piety on the partof a zealous man who could hardly regret that, byhis discretion, there vanished the evidence for aninteresting episode in Reynolds' biography: his visitto the French Academy in 1787. Malone himselfpolitely referred to Paris as "that opprobrious denof shame which, it is to be hoped, no polishedEnglishman will ever visit."

E. W.

1 Those who have access to the contemporary journals mightbe able to locate the article and to decide whether Sir Joshua,or perhaps another "Reynolds," was its author.

HARLEQUIN BETWEEN TRAGEDY ANDCOMEDY

F or the "Opening and Alterations f the Theater,Drury Lane," Garrick wrote and produced in

1775 The Theatrical Candidates, a Musical Prelude.The chief characters are Tragedy and Comedy who,

as two "rival petticoats," engage in a musical combatculminating in a duetto:

Ever distant we will be,Never can or will agree.

To their horror, Harlequin jumps on to the stageand places himself between them, arguing that bothdames would be "draggled" without him so that theaudience ought to prefer him to either:

Though Comedy may make you grinAnd Tragedy move all within,-Why not poll for Harlequin?

The scene was intended for an audience ac-

quaintedwith

Reynolds' paintingof Garrick etween

Tragedy nd Comedy nd which would laugh at seeingGarrick's r6le taken over by Harlequin.2 HoweverGarrick was quick in offsetting this note of self-derision. For in the final scene, when the quarrelbetween the muses is settled by a divine verdicttransmitted from heaven by Mercury, the name ofEngland's greatest theatrical genius is invoked tosanction their reconciliation:

Each sep'rate charm: you grave, you light as feather,Unless that Shakespear bring you both together.

The equation Garrick= Shakespeare, which per-vades the emblematic theatrical prints of the period,was

perfectedto the point of

simplicityin France

a The picture of a stage with 'Harlequin between Comedyand Tragedy' exists in a drawing in the British Museum (PrintRoom Ee 23-227) attributed to Gravelot and reproduced in anengraving by Van der Gucht. When I published the drawing(Vortriige er Bibliothek Warburg, 930o-3I, p. 210, pl. XXII, fig.65), I assumed a connection with Reynolds' painting of Garrick,but I was not acquainted with Garrick's play, which is re-printed in A Collection f the Most Esteemed arces and Entertain-ments, Edinburgh, 1792, Vol. VI, p. 159 (Supplement to Bell'sBritish Theatre) nd for an earlier edition of which the engravingof Van der Gucht must have served as a frontispiece. Since theplay was written in i775, ori the occasion of the remodellingof Drury Lane by the Adams, the attribution of the drawing inthe British Museum to Gravelot must be a mistake; for Gravelothad left England long before and had died in 1773.

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"MILKING THE BULL AND THEHE-GOAT"

Dr. Johnson, in one of his outbursts against DavidHume and the sceptics, employs a daring image

for the deviation from truth:

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such peopleno more milk, and so they are gone to milk thebull.3

Spontaneously though the phrase must have cometo his mind, it is based on a literary reminiscencewhich seems to have been widely shared by letteredmen of the I8th century; for Immanuel Kant, whocertainly knew nothing of Dr. Johnson's temper orstyle, used the same image in a discussion on Truth;but in the place of the bull he introduced a he-goatand expanded the joke (on the authority of theAncients) by making the milkers use a sieve:

... Was ist Wahrheit ?... Es ist schon ein grosserund n6tiger Beweiss der Klugheit oder Einsicht

zu wissen, was man vernilnftiger Weise fragensollte. Denn wenn die Frage an sich ungereimt istund unnotige Antworten verlangt, so hat sie,ausser der Beschiamung dessen der sie aufwirft,bisweilen noch den Nachteil, den unbehutsamenAnh6rer derselben zu ungereimten Antworten zuverleiten und den belachenswerten Anblick zugeben, dass einer (wie die Altert sagten) den Bock melkt,der andere ein Sieb unterhidlt.4

Though Kant refers vaguely to die Alten n general,he has a specific text in mind. His passage is alaboured paraphrase of a jest in Lucian's Demonax:

On seeing two philosophers very ignorantly de-

batinga

given subject,one

asking silly questionsand the other giving answers that were not at allto the point, he (Demonax) said: "Doesn't itseem to you, friends, that one of these fellows ismilking a he-goat (-pkyov &p.T1xeLv) nd the otheris holding a sieve for him !"5

The joke (codified in Erasmus' Adagia)6 must havebeen imported to England at the time of Erasmusand Thomas More when Lucian's wit became themodel for an entire species of humanist literature.7It may well have been from a reading of Lucian orMore that the phrase impressed itself upon Johnson.However, the double absurdity in Lucian's originalimage, which was retained in the quotation of Kant,was too involved to suit the straight-forward terse-ness of Dr. Johnson's wit. With his instinct foreffective simplification he.changed the he-goat intoa bull and omitted the sieve altogether; and thejoke gained in vigour what it lost in intricacy.

E.W.

6 Mulgere hircum Adagia, Hanover, 1617, p. 15).Both Erasmus' Encomium Morie and More's Utopia are

Lucianic in temper and style. The Dialogues of Lucian had beentranslated into Latin by Erasmus and More in 1505-6.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES 225where Garrick was addressed by his friends "moncher Shakespeare."'1 Garrick himself seems to haveencouraged the fashion, for he is said to have posedas model for the statue of Shakespeare which heordered from Roubiliac.2 The image of the rivalmuses "brought together by Shakespeare" was there-fore bound to be understood in a personal sense; for,in alluding again to Reynolds' painting, the phrasepresented Shakespeare in the r61e of Garrick.

E. W.

1 F. A. Hedgcock, David Garrick nd his French Friends.2 Cf. K. A. Esdaile, Life and Works of L. F. Roubiliac, 1929.

BLAKE'S "BRAZEN SERPENT"

he Boston Museum possesses one of Blake's mostcurious and at the same time one of his least-

known water-colours, entitled "The Brazen Ser-pent" (P1. 66a). It is described by Gilchrist asfollows:

High in colour-red, blue and yellow-especi-ally in the serpents and in the sky. Great in energyand in the conception of the serpents, which flareup into the air, loaded with their burden of humanagony. A serpent is twisted lax around Moses,dying out before the saving brazen image, and itscolours fading into slaty extinction: the brazenone is as horrent and living in aspect as any of theothers. The only figures not tormented by theserpents are two maidens, one of whom is in anaction of thanksgiving. For this figure Blakeprobably had in his mind the promise, 'It shallbruise thy head,'-the head of a dead serpentcoming just at her feet. Whiffs of flame flit acrossthe sky. A wonderful piece of invention through-out.8From his reference to the text "It shall bruise thy

head," it is clear that Gilchrist had a suspicion thatBlake was not treating the subject in a straightfor-ward manner, but was also expressing in his designideas not directly connected with its principal theme.He does not, however, seem to have noticed howvery singular Blake's rendering is. How, for instance,can we explain in a literal treatment of the "Brazen

Serpent" the presence of figures falling from the skyentwined in snakes? There is nothing in the biblicaltext which could possibly be construed in this way.

The answer, however, is not difficult. When Blaketreated a biblical subject he rarely intended a literalinterpretation of his theme. Wicksteed9 has shownhow freely he twisted the story ofJob to suit his ownideas, and it is in general true that when he chooses

8 Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, x88o, ii, p. 236.9 In Blake's Vision of the Book of Job, 1910.

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