“B-r-r-r-r-r.... B-r-r-r-r-r.... Yes, my children! Here I am! I, Polichinelle with my big stick! Here I am! The little man is still alive, you see. I come to amuse you, as pleasantly as I can, for certain quidams have told me that you are sad! Now, why should you be sad? Is not life a pleasant thing, an idle jest, a veritable farce, in which all the world is the theatre and where there is plenty to excite your laughter, if you will but take the trouble to look? It is getting on for four thousand years, my children, that I have been parading my humps about the surface of the globe, among men who are no whit less ferocious and savage than tigers and crocodiles; and it is getting on for four thousand years that I have been laughing, sometimes until I have had a pain in my back. Is it not droll, is it not very droll, tell me, to see upon such a little space as that which we call the world, this ant-heap of creatures, each of which, taken separately, conceives itself to be privileged by all nature? Ask one of these atoms if it would change its skin with its neighbour. Ah no, be easy, its own skin pleases it too well. But ask it if it would change its purse with that of its neighbour. ‘Oh yes, if his is fatter than mine,’ it will answer you. And each one strives, comes, goes, amasses, stirs up, rolls, grovels, and gives more thought to to-morrow than to yesterday. You would suppose to look at them that they must live for ever. They are all mad! Observe me this one, he amasses and piles up ducat upon ducat, waiting until the hour of his death to make use of this fortune. His son makes haste to scatter it all, and goes to a deal of trouble to ruin himself in body as well as in purse; sometimes he dies before having succeeded. That is the law; to make and to unmake. Behold me this fellow, who plagues his brains to discover some means of attracting the attention of some other unfortunates who do not wish to be turned aside from the road which they follow, which their fathers followed, and which their children will follow. He has had some sort of a notion to disturb his neighbours; they seize him, shut him up, or have him burnt or drowned. Is it not droll? Ah! you would have laughed to have seen thousands of human carcasses hanging from the trees by the roadside after I know not what jest had gone through the minds of some lunatics. I never laughed so much as some fifteen centuries ago. There were whole roastings of people whose tort it was to be weaker than those who were the stronger at that time. It was very amusing to see them rent and devoured by wild animals. You’re going to call me a dull fellow, a fool, and to tell me that I have not understood what I have seen. Pish! my children! it is best to laugh at things, for the children of these disembowelled wretches avenged themselves later on.
“But droller still, the drollest thing of all, is woman. Ah! now there we have a strange animal! Oh, the vanity, the malice of these little beings, for whom I am still capable of committing follies! By Pluto or by Satan! (they are both one, and I don’t think much of either, for after all they are but human inventions) it is good to watch men and women desiring each other, deceiving each other, hating each other. The two sexes have declared war, and yet neither can live without the other. Ask a man what he thinks of women. He will reply: ‘They are vain and untruthful.’ Ask a woman what she thinks of men. She will say: ‘They are egotistical and perfidious!’ Come, come! there is truth on both sides, because with gold either may be bought. Be rich and you shall be honoured, loved and flattered; you shall be beautiful, even young if you please; you shall find love, consideration and honours. Be poor and you shall not be worth a string of onions!
“I can see from here one or two who do not share my opinion. They may please themselves; they are still young. If, like me, they had seen whole cities disappear under volcanic ashes, if their shoes had been scorched by the hot lava of Vesuvius, if they had seen the sanguinary people of the south hurl themselves upon the ferocious people of the north, and vice versa; if they had spoken the truth in three words, as I did, to the mighty ones of the earth; if they had told the proudest nations of the world that they were no better than savages and brutes, they would think differently, and they would consider the matter carefully before contradicting me.
“Is my conscience wide and easy? Of course it is! that which belongs to others belongs to me; and I have only to stoop so as to fill my hat with the gold and the wealth of my neighbours. You find that wrong? It is my point of view; I have such a contempt for men that I am little concerned with what they may think or say of me.
“But do not dare to call me a thief! It is not the word that wounds me, it is the intention. Take care! I have never been insulted with impunity, and I am never more to be feared than when I am in a good humour. You do not deserve that I should waste my merry words upon you, because that which should make you laugh seems, instead, to annoy you. What! would you weep because everything goes wrong? Look at me! I have suffered as much as any man, but I cover my hump and my heart with a cuirass. I am laughter incarnate, laughter triumphant. So much the worse for those rows of paper capuchins which are to be overthrown by the first breath that blows. I am of wood and iron, and as old as the world!”
Polichinelle is right to say that his heart is as dry as his cudgel: he is an egotist in the fullest acceptance of the term. Under a good-humoured exterior he is a ferocious being: he works evil for the pleasure of it. Caring no more for the life of a man than for that of a flea, he delights in quarrels, making a point of seeking them, and takes great pleasure in bloodshed. Far from being a boaster he does not always speak of his evil actions, and whenever you hear his laughter crackling, you may be sure that he has killed his man. He fears neither God nor devil, for he has beheld too many civilisations and religions come and go under his hooked and warty nose.
After his cudgel—his staff of credit, as he calls it, because it is the money with which he pays his debts—his chief predilections are women and the bottle. It is very true, as he says himself, that for women money is necessary, and he has no money. Although he pretends that he has only to stoop to take what he needs from the coffers of his friends, his friends are not quite so simple; they hide themselves and their riches on his approach. Without money it is necessary to be persuasive towards the fair sex, and, notwithstanding his humps and his unattractive figure, he is so caustic, so cajoling, so enterprising and so insolent, that he is not without his successes.
“I have no illusions on the score of my physical appearance,” he declares, “and I shall not disclose to you my secret, because I do not know it; on the other hand, can you explain women to me? He who pleases them does so because he pleases them; there are no other reasons. Woman is a bizarre and mysterious being: she is the only good thing in this world, after wine and hard knocks.”
He loves all women alike because there is not one who may boast that she held him long.
ii
It would be somewhere about the year 540 of Rome, that the Romans introduced the style of improvised pieces known as Atellanæ, with Maccus, Bucco, Pappus, and Casnar as the principal types, speaking Oscan, Greek and Latin.
Their subjects were nearly always rustic, setting forth the manners of the peasants of the Campagna, and the oddities of the inhabitants of the little cities. It is Pappus præteritus, or, as it were, Pantaloon dismissed; Maccus the soldier; Maccus, the testamentary legatee, the doctor, the painter, the baker; Pappus agricola, etc. The Atellanæ possessed two distinct buffoons, two sanniones: Maccus, who was lively, witty, insolent and a little ferocious; and Bucco, who was a self-satisfied flatterer, boaster, thief and coward. In the modern Pulcinella these two characters are combined; he is a mixture of bravery and cowardice, of stupid vanity and witty insolence.
It is pretended that these opposite traits of character were similarly attributed to Maccus, the Oscan peasant, who in his day was as well known and loved as is Pulcinella now.
“Maccus, the Oscan character,” says M. Ferdinand Fouque, “has a character compounded of stupidity, impertinence, and disorder, as his name indicates, because in Greek, μακκοἃδθαι signifies to play the buffoon, to drivel, to be mad. Maccus of the Atellanæ corresponds sometimes to Harlequin, but more often to Polichinelle. The image in metal preserved in the museum of the Marquis Capponi is a Maccus. He wears a sort of cloak, which descends to his knees, and he is shod in sandals. His head is shaved, his nose is large and hooked. Another Maccus is to be seen upon a cornelian: he is dressed in purple, his feet are naked, his head shaven, his pendulous nose covers his mouth and chin, giving him a stupid expression; his face is phlegmatic, and his arms, crossed upon his breast, are entwined into his coat. He represents a philosophic Maccus akin to the Pulcinella of the comedy entitled Pulcinella the Pretended Doctor (Pulcinella Finto Dottore).
“Bucco is of Oscan origin. In name and countenance he resembles the parasites of comedy. His character is compounded of loftinesses and meannesses, of oddities and of follies. He can be pleasant at need, impertinent according to the circumstances; subtle, officious, insinuating, clownish, garrulous, indolent, greedy and familiar: he has all the vices which go with the manners of a corrupt nation; also he possesses the secret of pleasing the great and rendering himself necessary to them: he studies their tastes, adapts himself to their fancies, ministers to their passions and countenances their libertine undertakings. Bucco had monstrous cheeks and an enormous mouth.”
Pulcinella, then, descends in a direct line from Maccus. But how has the name of Pulcinella come to substitute that of Maccus? The point has been practically cleared up by now. We know that Maccus had a crooked nose, long legs, a slightly arched back, a prominent stomach, and that, after the fashion of all the ancient mimes, he excited mirth quite as much by his gestures and his cries as by such witticisms as he uttered. The special attribute of Maccus was to imitate the cries of birds and the cackle of hens, by means of a sort of bird-call which became the sgherlo or pivetta. This instrument cannot have been of his invention; no doubt he borrowed it from those schœnobates, or Greek marionette performers, who had invented their sgherlo to imitate the voices of actors passing through the speaking trumpet of the mask and acquiring thus a metallic ring. Maccus came therefore to be nicknamed, in consequence of these avian cries of his, and perhaps also because of his beak-like nose and his eccentric gait, Pullus gallinaceus, and hence, by contraction, Pulcinella.
A little bronze figure suggesting Maccus, now in the Capponi Museum, was unearthed in Rome in 1727. Of this the Abbé of Saint-Non remarks in his Voyage de Naples, in 1782: “But what may perhaps seem remarkable is to find here a Polichinelle who, in the essential features, is absolutely similar to our own, with the humps behind and in front.” He supplies a drawing of this little image, of which he further says: “This bizarre figure is copied from an ancient bronze found in Rome in 1727. The original is preserved in the Capponi Museum, together with the history of this character, of whom it is impossible to deny that the titles and the genealogy are of the greatest antiquity:
“Vetus histrio personatus in Esquiliis repertus an. 1727 ad magnitudinem æri archetypi expressus, cui oculi et in utroque oris angulo Sannæ seu globuli argentæi sunt. Gibbus in pectore et in dorso, inque pedibus socci. Hujus generis moriones et ludiones, verbis gestique ad risum movendum compositi, locum habuerunt in jocularibus fabulis Atellanis, ab Atella Oscorum opido, inter Capuam et Neapolim, ubi primum agi cæperunt denominatæ. Unde homines absurdo habitu oris et reliqui corporis cachinnos a natura excitantes, etiamnum prodeunt; huic nostro persimiles et vulgo Pullicinellæ dicuntur, a Pulliceno fortasse: qua voce Lampridius in Severo Alexandro, Pullum gallinaceum appellat. Pullicinellæ autem speciatim excellunt adunco, prominentique naso, rostrum pullorum et pipionum imitante.”
Louis Riccoboni gives at the end of his Histoire du Théâtre Italien a reproduction of this same little image. It is to be observed that in each corner of the mouth there is a little ball which can only belong to a sort of sgherlo or bird-call.
“In the course of writing my History of the Italian Theatre,” he says, speaking of the Mimus Centunculus, “I had entered into conjectures on the score of the character of the Neapolitan Polichinelle, and I had supposed him a Mimus Albus, giving him a derivation as ancient as that of Harlequin; but as I failed to find proofs that should in any way support my opinion I suppressed that chapter when the book was on the point of going to press. If at that time I had been acquainted with the monument of which I speak (the little bronze image) I should have worked on Diomedes and Apuleius, to arrive at the conclusions which have been reached by Italian scholars. No further proof is needed to assure me that I was not mistaken when I believed Polichinelle to be a direct descendant of the Mimus Albus of the Atellane comedies.”
In an article upon the Italian comedy written by George Sand in 1852, is the following statement:—
“The most ancient of all the types is the Neapolitan Polichinelle. He descends in direct line from Maccus of the Campagna, or, rather, he is the same character. The ancient Maccus did not appear in regular comedy but in that very ancient kind of satirical drama called Atellanæ, from the name of the city of Atella, which had given it birth. A bronze statue, discovered in Rome in 1727, can leave no doubt on the score of the identity of Maccus and Polichinelle. The Polichinelle of the Atellanæ is equipped like his descendants with two enormous humps, a nose hooked like the beak of a bird of prey, and heavy shoes, tied about the ankle, which are not unlike our modern sabots. His air is mocking, sceptical and evil; two little silver balls placed at the corners of his lips increase the size of his mouth and lend his countenance something false and base, an expression entirely foreign to that of the modern Polichinelle. This difference between the externals of the two personages seems to me to indicate a profounder difference between the characters. The ancient type must have been somewhat baser and more hateful than the modern Polichinelle; provoking laughter chiefly by his deformities, I imagine that I can see from afar a sort of Thersites, popular in the struggle with the oppression of slavery and ugliness. Polichinelle personifies the accomplished revolt; he is hideous but he is terrible, severe and vengeful; neither god nor devil can make him tremble when he wields his great cudgel. By means of this weapon, which he freely lays about the shoulders of his master and the heads of public officers, he exercises a sort of summary and individual justice which avenges the weak side and the iniquities of official justice. I am confirmed in this opinion by the fact that in the Neapolitan farces two Polichinelles are to be found: one is base and doltish, the veritable son of Maccus: the other is daring, thieving, quarrelsome, Bohemian and of a more modern creation.”
When the pagan theatres were destroyed, and the tragedies and the comedies suppressed with them, we know that the Atellanæ continued to be performed in the public places. Polichinelle took part in them as well as Harlequin who also was beloved by the Romans.
Throughout the entire Middle Ages, an epoch in which the theatres saw none but mystery plays, Polichinelle was never seen. He had disappeared. It is only in the sixteenth century, upon the renascence of the theatres, that a comedian named Silvio Fiorello wrested this character from oblivion and introduced Pulcinella into the Neapolitan shows. Fiorello was the leader of a troupe of comedians. He himself played under the name of Captain Matamoros, and entrusted the rôle of Pulliciniello (as it was then called) to Andrea Calcese, a sometime tailor, surnamed Ciuccio, who imitated to perfection the accent and the ways of the peasants of Acerra, near Naples.
The costume of Pulcinella has varied but little since the days of this Andrea Calcese. Pulliciniello—it is thus that he is still called in the beginning of the seventeenth century—wears a sort of ample white blouse, gripped about his waist by a leather belt which carries a wooden sabre and a purse. His trousers are wide and pleated; his shoes are of leather. He wears no collar and a rag of white material with green embroidery serves him as a tabaro; he wears a black half-mask with long moustachios; his head is covered by a white skull-cap and an enormous grey hat whose brim is looped up on either side into the shape of an enormous cap such as was still worn under Louis XI.
It was thus that he was presented by Argieri, born in Rome, and known in Paris as Polichinel romain. At the foot of a picture of him is to be read: “Burlesque mask, speaking the language of the Neapolitan peasants and dressed in white linen feigning stupidity.”
In the middle of the seventeenth century at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris Pulcinella suddenly effected a change in his costume. Barbançois, the Pulcinella of Mazarin’s troupe, imitated Jupilles, the French Polichinel of 1640. He assumed doublet and breeches of red and yellow, laced with green, but he continued to wear the hat and mantle of the Italian tradition.
In 1697 Michael Angelo da Fracassano exaggerated the two humps of the costume, assuming a grey felt hat adorned by two cock’s feathers, and thus rendering his appearance absolutely similar to that of the Polichinel of the fairs. It is in this guise that he has been represented by Watteau.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century we find Pulcinella succumbing in Italy to the French influence; under the name of Pulcinello, Coleson, who enjoyed a great vogue in the forain theatres of Florence, Venice, Milan and Paris, represents him with a stomach which entirely fills his ample coat buttoned from top to bottom. He wears the black half-mask with a protuberant nose, surmounted by a great wart, the collar and the high-crowned, wide-brimmed great hat; his trousers are wide and rather short. He is still dressed in white linen and wields a heavy cudgel. This character, called in Bologna Purricinella, seems to me to be Roman rather than Neapolitan, for the costume of the Neapolitan type has been but little modified since his creation. According to Riccoboni this fat and heavy personage was the second Neapolitan Pulcinella, the stupid type.
“The Neapolitan comedies” (he says), “instead of a Scapin and a Harlequin, have two Polichinelles, one cunning and the other stupid. It is the common opinion of the country that these two opposite characters were drawn from the city of Beneventum, the capital of the Samnites of the Latins. It is said that this city, the half of which is on the top of a hill, the other half at the foot, produces men of entirely different characters.”
Beneventum is built like Bergamo, where, as we have seen, the same tradition existed, the stupid Harlequin representing the inhabitants of the lower town, and the witty Brighella those of the higher.
Pulcinello, then, is to be accepted as the type of the stupid and the coarse, a direct descendant of Maccus; whilst the Neapolitan Pulcinella, witty and astute, may be considered the sensual descendant of Bucco. This latter type became European. In France he was known as Polichinelle; in England as Punch, an abbreviation of Punchinello, and Jack Pudding; in Germany as Hanswurst (Jack Sausage) and Pulzinella; in Holland as Toneelgek; in Spain as Don Christoval Pulichinela; even in the East, Karagheus is none other than Polichinelle.
Pulcinella is, turn by turn, and according to the piece, master, servant, magistrate, poet or dancer, but never an acrobat; in essentials the character is always the same. In what concerns him the piece adapts itself to his rôle. Sometimes, but rarely—and then only in the marionette theatres—one has seen him married to a Pulcinellina, and thus equipped with wife and children.
“Thirty years ago,” says a wit, in the middle of the nineteenth century, “there was not a single individual in Naples who had not in himself something of Pulcinella. A deal of that has been lost to-day, but sufficient still remain.”
In Naples, Pulcinella took up his domicile in the theatre of San Carlino.
“It is there,” says M. Fred. Mercey, “that night and day he is the hero of marvellous and comical adventures. Indeed, although the Polichinelle of San Carlino is not of wood, he never rests, and whenever some new piece has been announced for morning and evening performance, most choice in all its scenes, full of bizarre happenings, with Pulcinella, Pulcinella must be under arms and on view living or dead.”
Do you wish to form an idea of these pieces, most choice in all their scenes, full of bizarre happenings, pieces which owe their success entirely to Pulcinella? Let us analyse one or two, selecting preferably from those which best reveal the Neapolitan character.
Pulcinella, Brigand-Chief
The scene is laid in Calabria. Pulcinella, whose business affairs have been going badly, devotes himself to a fresh line of industry; he exploits the highways. Pulcinella has all the attributes that go to make an excellent brigand-chief. He is without scruples and without mercy, and he professes a most sovereign contempt for human life. The new chief has designs upon the wife of a miller of the neighbourhood of Nicastro, who, in addition to her personal attractions, has, if public rumour is to be believed, a great sack of ducats in her cupboard. Pulcinella leaves his band in a neighbouring wood and, accompanied by a single follower, he goes to visit the miller’s wife. So as not to arouse her suspicions, he conceals his follower behind a bush, and presents himself alone upon her threshold. The day is Sunday, and the brigand has chosen it because he knows that the miller will be at Mass in the neighbouring township and that he will have left his wife alone with her child at the mill. Pulcinella represents himself as a miller’s boy out of work. He is well received. Suddenly, seizing a moment in which the child has gone apart, he draws a knife and threatens to cut the woman’s throat unless she gives him at once all the money she possesses. “My money is up there,” she says, “in my cupboard. Come with me and I will give it to you.” Pulcinella follows her. Whilst he is rummaging in the cupboard, the woman slips quickly out of the room, shuts the door and turns the key. The windows are equipped with iron bars; the door is a half-foot thick. Pulcinella is taken in a gin like a starling. The miller’s wife loses no time; she calls her child: “Run to Nicastro,” she bids him, “and fetch your father and the carabineers; run quickly, tell him that there is a brigand in the house.” The child sets out, but Pulcinella’s companion, hearing the cries of his chief, bars the lad’s passage and seizes him. The miller’s wife, however, does not lose courage. She bolts the doors and barricades the windows. Her situation is most critical. She hears Pulcinella who, by means of a hammer, is beginning to demolish the ceiling over her head, and she sees her child threatened with death by the other brigand unless she opens. Eventually this brigand pinions the child, casts him into a corner, and sets about seeking some door or opening by which he may enter the house to deliver his chief. Presently the idea occurs to him to slip down the wheel of the mill and through the opening left by the axle of the sails; but at the same moment the miller’s wife conceives the notion of setting this wheel in movement. The brigand is already half through the space between the wall and the axle when the miller’s wife draws back the bolt which holds the wheel; this begins to move, and before it has turned twice the brigand is crushed as if by a pestle in a mortar. Meanwhile Pulcinella has completed his hole in the ceiling and is about to drop through into the chamber below when the miller arrives with a detachment of carabineers. Pulcinella does not lose courage. As these ascend the staircase leading to the chamber in which he is locked, he jumps down through the hole in the ceiling, escapes by another staircase, and climbs on to the roof of the house.
The remainder of the piece is merely a sort of burlesque divertissement, in which we see the miller’s wife, the soldiers and the peasants pursuing Pulcinella, who displays his address and performs all sorts of tours de force. We see him, for instance, taking the place of the vane, and turning this way and that in the wind; but in the instant in which the carabineers are aiming at this extremely unmetallic vane, he leaps to the roof, and from the roof to the gardens, and thrusts himself into a corner, where he pretends to be a pillar. A soldier climbs upon this pillar to look through a window; the pillar comes to life and takes to its heels; then Pulcinella slips under a winnowing basket, and attempts to reach the wood, crawling like a tortoise. In the end he is taken and conducted to Nicastro to be hanged. The history of his hanging is well known. Pulcinella permits himself calmly to be led to the scaffold, but when the rope is ready he plays all sorts of tricks upon the hangman; he feigns stupidity and pretends not to be able to find the noose. “You fool!” cries the impatient hangman. “Look! It is thus that the noose is adjusted.” And he slips his own head through it. Pulcinella seizes this favourable moment, takes hold of the rope, and strangles the hangman, crying to him: “How now? Am I still a fool?”
In Le Ruine di Pompeia, Pulcinella, who is in love with the daughter of one of the custodians of the place, has attached himself to a group of foreign visitors, whom he amuses with his sallies, and at whose expense he regales himself, stealing the best bits of their dinner, and for ever juggling away the coin which they place in the custodian’s hand. The visitors end by seeing through his game, are displeased with it, and seek to seize him by the collar. Pulcinella grows angry; he raises his voice indignantly to protest that anyone should suspect an honourable man such as he, a person of his importance. He pretends to be, by turns, an English lord and a French officer. Soon, however, being convicted of imposture, and closely pressed, he plies his cudgel, takes to flight through the ruins, and suddenly disappears at the very moment in which his pursuers believe they have captured him. He is found at last in one of the newly discovered caves, lying amid a litter of empty amphoræ in company with the custodian’s daughter. Everything is arranged, and the piece concludes with a marriage which appears to be extremely necessary.
The characters taking part in these pieces of an entirely national type are, in addition to Pulcinella and Scaramouche, the peasant, the Roman woman and the soldier.
Polliciniella, as he is called in the Neapolitan dialect, wears a sort of short and very ample blouse, with or without girdle, the sleeves of which are gathered at the wrist as are the trousers at the ankle; his white shoes are strongly soled. He wears no collar; his black half-mask is beardless, and his hat is a rimless grey or white felt in the shape of a sugar-cone. On certain occasions when it is necessary for him to dress up a little, he changes his felt hat for another of white cambric like his coat, as high and as singular in shape, but adorned with rose-coloured ribbons. His black half-mask has a large aquiline nose, embellished by a wart, and its cheeks are profoundly wrinkled to announce that Polliciniella was not born yesterday.
The spirit of this Polliciniella differs greatly from that of the French Polichinelle and the English Punch. He is a buffoon, a mocker and a jester, but not wicked. He represents the type of the Neapolitan bourgeois in its natural grossness but instinct with that biting spirit of which the Abbé Galiani is a refined type. He is slow in his movements (all famous Pulcinelle are very sparing of gesture), his air is foolish, but his wit is ready money, particularly in the asides which he always addresses directly to the public.
Although to be seen in various theatres in Naples, Pulcinella’s special stage was that of the San Carlino, whither he would attract twice daily an audience drawn from all ranks of society. The San Carlino had a famous troupe, chiefly composed of masks of unalterable national types. Here, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, several actors created great reputations, such as Celesi Balli and Tomaso Fabioni in 1800, Lucio Bebio in 1803, Camerano in 1805, etc. One famous Pulcinella was applauded there throughout five and twenty years. After having been one of the most brilliant cavalry captains of King Murat, after having accompanied him upon several great and victorious campaigns, after having been decorated by the Emperor Napoleon, when the Bourbons returned to Naples, he donned—either out of necessity or caprice—the coat of Pulcinella, and in this amassed a very handsome fortune. He was the idol not only of all Neapolitans but of all who understood the dialect. Restrained in his movements, cold, sluggish, full of awkwardness, speaking as little as possible, but seeing to it that the few words he uttered bore the imprint of the liveliest and most biting wit, he contrived, notwithstanding the mask which covered the half of his countenance, a miraculously expressive physiognomy. One of the buffooneries which he repeated frequently, especially during carnival (because in this season Polliciniella is forbidden to wear either mask or costume) was to eat mountains of macaroni, of which the character is traditionally very fond, out of an enormous cantaro. You might see him drawing forth these long macaroni and causing them to descend into his mouth from the full height of his arm, to the peals of laughter of his audience.
Speaking of Pulcinella, M. Charles Magnin says:
“The Pulcinella of Naples, a tall fellow, as straight as anyone else, noisy, alert, sensual, with his great hooked nose and black half-mask, his pyramidal grey bonnet, his white camisole, his wide white pantaloons, gathered and girt about his waist by a rope from which hangs a little bell, may well bring to mind the Mimus Albus, and the still more remote Maccus; but, with the exception of his beak-like nose and his bird-like name, he has no connection with, nor does he resemble, our French Polichinelle. For one trait of resemblance that is perceptible ten contrasting ones may be pointed out.”
iii
“Polichinelle,” says M. Charles Magnin, “such as we have made or adapted him, represents in the highest degree Gallic humour and physiognomy. I might even say that under the compulsory obligation of a loyal caricature, Polichinelle permits us to perceive the popular type, I dare not say of Henry IV., but at least of the Gascon officer, imitating his gait in the guard-rooms of the castle of Saint-Germain or of the old Louvre. As for the hump, Guillaume Bouchet reminds us that from time immemorial it has been the appendage of the jester ès farces of France. In the thirteenth century Adam de la Halle was called the hunchback of Arras, not because he was a hunchback, but on account of his mocking spirit:
As for the second hump, it brings to mind the bright and bulging cuirass of the soldier, and the pigeon breasts so much the fashion in that time which imitate the curve of the cuirass. Even the hat of Polichinelle (I do not refer to his modern tricorne, but to the felt with turned-up rim which he wore in the seventeenth century) was the headdress of the cavaliers of the time, the hat à la Henri IV. Lastly there is even in certain characteristic features, even in the jovial, daring, amorous humour of a good soldier, something that reminds me of the qualities and short-comings of the Béarnais. In short, notwithstanding his Neapolitan name, Polichinelle seems to me to be a type entirely French, and one of the most spontaneous and vivacious creations of Gallic fantasy.”
It was in 1630, they say, that Polichinelle passed from the trestles to the marionette theatre. But in any case it is quite certain that in 1649 Polichinelle had his theatre on the left bank of the Seine, at the house of one Brioché or Briocci.
“A tradition which still survives,” says M. Charles Magnin, the learned historiographer of Polichinelle, “and which the true children of Paris, of Chartres and of Orléans transmit from one to another, has preserved for us the air and the couplets of the famous song of Polichinelle:
“This song places Polichinelle as belonging to the reign of Henry IV. and the epoch of our long quarrels with Spain.”
The real home of Polichinelle was in the fairs of Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent, at Bertrand and at Francisque, where for over a century he jested, making a mock of all people and all things; but many of his wickednesses were forgiven him on account of his shape and his wooden person.
In 1721, when the Théâtre-Français caused the theatres of the fairs to be closed, Polichinelle laughed and mocked more thoroughly than ever. In the following year Polichinelle covered again with his cudgel a vengeance which Lesage, Fuzelier and d’Orneval set themselves to extract from the united theatres of the Opéra, the Comédie-Française and Comédie-Italienne. They came to an understanding with Laplace, who managed a marionette theatre, and they gave him three unpublished comic operas which attracted all Paris, and emptied the royal theatres. Polichinelle sang and mocked still more loudly. Our three associates had hung out a sign upon which was a life-sized Polichinelle with this legend: “I am worth many another” (J’en valons bien d’autres).
The number of actors who have played Polichinelle is incredible. Among the pieces which had most success we may mention: Polichinelle Grand Turc; Polichinelle Colin-Maillard; La Noce de Polichinelle et L’Accouchement de sa Femme; Les Amours de Polichinelle; Polichinelle Magicien; Polichinelle à la Guinguette de Vaugirard; Polichinelle Maçon; Polichinelle Don Quichette; Polichinelle Gros-Jean, etc.
In 1793 the Vieux Cordelier exclaims:
“This egotistical multitude is made blindly to follow the impulse of the stronger.... Alongside of the blade of the guillotine, under which crowned heads are falling and in the same place and at the same time, Polichinelle also is being guillotined, thus earning the attention of the avid mob.”
But, after the 10th of Thermidor, Polichinelle took his revenge upon the executioner and upon the devil himself. He began again to beat and hang the pair of them as before and from the same rope.
In 1819, Arnault, speaking of the rôle of Polichinelle played at the Opéra by Ely and at the Porte Saint-Martin by Mazurier, wrote:
“He is an important character; he is the man of the day. During his quarter of an hour no one will dispute with him his public favour unless it is himself; for Polichinelle is double, as was Amphitryon in other days, and like that hero he combats also against himself, to the great satisfaction of the public. When one thinks of all the qualities that a perfect Polichinelle must unite in himself, it is difficult too greatly to congratulate the century which produced in duplicate such a model. In the matter of deformity Polichinelle should be what Apollo is in the matter of perfection. Humped, in front and behind, perched upon legs like a heron’s, equipped with the arms of an ape, he must move with that nerveless stiffness, with that suppleness without springs which characterises the steps of a body deprived of the principle of movement, whose limbs, set in action by a cord, are attached to the trunk not by articulations but by rags. The aim of the actor in this rôle is to imitate the machine with the greatest fidelity which, in another rôle, this machine would employ to imitate the man. It is in this that the Polichinelle of the Porte Saint-Martin (Mazurier) is marvellously successful. There is nothing human about him; from the nature of his movements and his tumbles one cannot believe him to be flesh and bones; he seems of cotton-wool and cardboard. His countenance is truly wooden, and such is the illusion that he creates that children take him for a grown-up marionette, and perhaps they are right.”
Speaking of Ely, at the Opéra, he says:
“What is there more clever than his gestures and his attitudes, whether when leaning against one of the wings he seems suspended from it rather than supported by it, or when collapsing upon himself he appears to have been abandoned by the hand which sustained him, or the nail from which he hung? It is truly sublime. Polichinelle has been accorded the honours of lithography. One may inscribe according to one’s predilection for one or the other of these virtuosi the name either of Mazurier or of Ely.”
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century M. Champfleury presented several very original pantomimes at the theatre of the Funambules. He sought to restore to light the character of Polichinelle, and in his scenarii he gave him something more to do than perpetually to break himself. He sought to rejuvenate the personage; but the ancient tradition was already lost, and Vauthier, who was an admirably wooden Polichinelle, could render only that with which he was acquainted—namely, the traditions of Mazurier and Ely.
“O Polichinelle,” exclaims M. Charles Nodier, “original and capricious fetish of children! grotesque Achilles of the people! modest and powerful Roscius of the highways! inappreciable philosopher of the unfortunate ages which did not know Shakespeare!
“O Polichinelle, animated simulacrum of natural man given over to his naïve and ingenuous instincts! eternal type of truth of which the indolent centuries were slow to seize the deformed but witty and agreeable outline! O Polichinelle, whose original theme so often enchanted the leisures of Bayle and revived more than once the indolence of La Fontaine!
“O Polichinelle, inexhaustible orator, imperturbable philosopher, intrepid and vigorous logician, mighty practical moralist, infallible theologist, able and unerring politician!
“O Polichinelle, thou whose wooden head contains essentially in its compact and inorganic mass all the knowledge and all the common sense of the moderns!”
“Should we not be well-advised to reawaken Polichinelle?” asks M. Ch. Magnin. “... Above all do not suggest that he is dead. Polichinelle never dies. Do you doubt it? You cannot know, then, what Polichinelle is. He is the good sense of the people, he is the alert sally, he is laughter irrepressible. Yes, Polichinelle shall laugh and sing and whistle as long as there are vices, follies and eccentricities in the world. You see then that Polichinelle is very far from being dead. Polichinelle is immortal.”
iv
It was in 1688, after the Stuarts, that Polichinelle passed into England. His English name of Punch is clearly derived from Punchinello, for in the early days of his installation in London he was called indifferently Punchinello and Punch. There, as in Paris, Punch became the king of the marionettes. This Neapolitan, after having been French, became, when he naturalised himself English, a difficult fellow to manage, of a mocking ferocity, which is still to-day the basis of his character.
M. Charles Magnin says that “Punch, according to the definition of Mr Payne, is the Don Juan of the populace.” The most ancient text in which this able critic finds mention of the adventures of Punch and Judy is a ballad thought to be no older than 1790.
v
The German Polichinelle, Hanswurst (Jack Sausage), is, in the matter of character and wit, a mixture of Pulcinella and Harlequin, though resembling neither in costume. In the tenth century Hanswurst’s exterior resembled that of the Neapolitan Pulcinella of the time, whilst, however, being very much fatter.
“He is,” says M. Magnin, “a sort of Franca-Trippa. In the last two centuries the physical and moral type of Hanswurst has changed but little. This buffoon, according to Lessing, possesses two characteristic qualities. He is doltish and voracious, but of a voracity which profits him, so that he is in very different case from Harlequin, whose greediness profits him nothing and who in spite of it remains always light, svelte and nimble. In Holland, Hanswurst has for a long time now been no better than a clown: he thumps the drum at the door of the booth, and invites the crowd to enter. As actor and as marionette he has been supplanted by Hans Pickelharing (Jack Pickled Herring), and more recently by Jan-Klaassen. This latter, who has become the hero of the Dutch marionette theatre, has appropriated, not without success, the turbulent and jovially rascally habits of the English Punch and the Parisian Polichinelle. In Germany Hanswurst has had several rivals. He has been compelled to give way more than once to Harlequin, to Polichinelle and to Pickelharing.”
In the eighteenth century this character was played in the German improvising troupes by Prehauser, who made of him a sort of lackey having some points of resemblance with Brighella. But the improvisation theatre of Vienna having been forced to give way to the classical theatre, Hanswurst was supplanted by Casperle, the joyous Austrian peasant.
vi
In Rome the inhabitants of Trastevere possessed two types which are certainly of the family of Polichinelle—types which nevertheless have aged a little: they are Meo-Patacca and his faithful companion Marco-Pepe.
Meo-Patacca is a native of Trastevere. He claims descent like Pulcinella from Maccus, in which very possibly he is justified. Like Maccus he is witty and insolent, and no better able to suffer contradiction, his most persuasive argument lying in his cudgel. He begins by striking, and having felled his man to earth he then proceeds to explanations with him. He has a bright and lively eye, a tanned skin, a profile exaggerating the ancient Roman type. He is the personification of the inhabitant of Trastevere, the descendant of Nero or of Maccus, whose blood has been slightly mingled in the course of time. He speaks the Roman dialect, and never utters a sentence without repeating its most energetic word, thus: “I want you to do so-and-so—I want it.”