When Rumanians are asked, "Are there any great comic writers in Rumanian literature?" there can be no question that most of them think first of Caragiale. If I were asked, "Who is the most original of Rumanian writers?" I should be tempted to answer likewise: "Caragiale!" Perhaps what I should really mean is that his writing is exceptionally vivid and vital, so that through him Rumania, and especially Bucharest, of the late nineteenth century lives in the imagination with an intensity and individuality such as that, for example, with which another great comic writer, Mark Twain, has endowed the Mississippi Valley of a slightly earlier period.

Ion Luca Caragiale was born on January 29, 1852, in a Wallachian village not far from Ploesti. His father was one of three brothers who were all connected with the theater, but had left the stage years before, divorcing his actress wife and marrying a country woman. While I. L. Caragiale was still a small boy, the family moved into Ploesti, and it was there that he went to school.

In 1868 he left for Bucharest to study declamation with his uncle, Iorgu Caragiale, and to be prompter to his company. After his father's death in 1872, he combined the job of prompter and copyist with that of proofreader for two newspapers. Thus he was initiated in his teens into a life of poverty and hard work. In 1877 he began to write for the Conservative paper Timpul, of which his friend, the poet Eminescu, had just become editor. For a while, in 1878, Caragiale, too, was on its editorial staff. But it was the production of his verse translation (from the French) of Alexandre Parodi's classical tragedy, Rome Conquered, which first attracted attention to his literary gifts. That imposing figure, Titu Maiorescu, professor, critic, and politician, approved of him and introduced him to the literary circle Junimea ("Youth"), over which he presided at Jassy. No doubt it was Maiorescu's influence which later procured him an inspectorship of schools (1881-84).

Caragiale's period of productivity as a playwright lasted a little over ten years. The comedy, O Noapte Furtunoasa (A Stormy Night) was first performed in 1879; O Scrisoare Pierduta (A Lost Letter) marked the zenith in 1884; and the period closed with the drama Napasta (False Witness) in 1890. For a few months in 1888 Caragiale was Director-General of the National Theater, but was not a success. It was then that he married. The financial responsibilities of married life made his position—and he was never economical—still more difficult than before; an irregular income from journalism was not enough. Nor did his sarcasm and irritability help matters; to offense thus given may be attributed to a very large extent not only the refusal of the Rumanian Academy on two occasions to award him a prize for his writings, but also his inability to get a good job and keep it.

From 1889 to 1904 his struggles for a decent livelihood were continuously frustrated. Among the expedients he tried was running a tavern, and at another time, a station buffet. Only for two years (1899-1901) did he hold a minor post as a civil servant. To add to his troubles he became involved in a lawsuit against an unscrupulous critic who accused him of plagiarism. From this period of fifteen years date most of his stories and sketches.

In 1904 his luck turned. He obtained a share of a long-disputed inheritance. At once he removed with his family to Berlin, where there were greater opportunities for cultural activities, and especially for going to concerts. Though he made occasional trips to Rumania, he continued to reside in Berlin for the rest of his life. He died unexpectedly on the night of June 9, 1912.

Most of Caragiale's best-known work consists of short sketches, two or three pages long. These are normally scenes of contemporary Rumanian life, sometimes in the capital, sometimes in the provinces. Very often they are about clerks and their wives, the life not of the more fashionable parts of Bucharest, but of the mahala (the "suburb," if only one could divest that word of its specific associations in modern English). Sometimes they are about Caragiale's own world of journalism, about his acquaintances, about the people he meets in trains. He is continually making fun of pretentious ideas voiced by fools or humbugs; of the petty ambitions and quarrels of provincial life; of the folly of women who spoil their children or their lapdogs; of the absurdities of journalism; and so on. Sometimes the fun consists as much in parody as in ridiculous situations. For example, there is the delightful series of "Telegrams" about a scandalous incident in a provincial town, which starts with the prefect of the local police smacking the face of an ex-M.P. at the Central Café. Here a great deal of the fun lies in the combination of the style of official telegrams with the melodramatic exaggeration of the whole affair by the senders. Another parody of official jargon is a series of letters about the supply of firewood for a provincial girls' school. Incidentally, Caragiale published literary parodies in prose and verse. His facility in this line is illustrated by the following story. On one occasion, in a literary circle, the poet Iosif asked him how it was that Bolintineanu had written verse so prolifically. Caragiale told him to take a piece of paper, and then dictated impromptu a parody of Bolintineanu's verse, thirty-six lines long. "You see," said he, "it's not difficult. The fact is, Bolintineanu could write a poem in twenty-five minutes, and assuming that he only worked six hours, that means sixteen a day."

How much as a rule in these sketches the effect is made by dialogue, and how comparatively little by narrative and description! That is very characteristic of Caragiale—who was a dramatist and came of a theatrical family—and it contributes very largely to the liveliness and concreteness of his work. The habit of driving home his points by repeating key phrases, and especially of sharpening the outline of his characters by giving them clichés which they constantly repeat, serves him as well in his sketches as in his comedies. Just as in the comedy A Lost Letter Trahanache, the chairman of many committees, cannot be thought of apart from his mannerism, "Just a moment!" (Ai putintica rabdare!), so in the sketch "O Lacuna" ("A Gap") Mache is forever identified with his "Stop it, Lache!" (Lasa, Lache!), and Lache with his "You're dreadful, old boy, really you are!" (Esti teribil, monser, parol!).

Such sketches as "Petitie" ("An Application") are practically dramatic dialogues. In fact, some of them have actually been put on the stage with some success. Their resemblance to the mimes of Hellenistic literature in the third century B.C. has been noted by Zarifopol, the editor of the definitive edition of Caragiale's works; he compares them to the Mimes of Herondas. And surely Caragiale might well have written the Fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, The Women at the Festival. Indeed, his sketch "At Peles" is strongly akin to it in spirit and observation: Madam Piscopescu is at her toilet before lunching with the King and Queen, her mother assists while her husband waits impatiently outside.

Generally speaking, Caragiale's sketches are comic, while his stories are serious. But naturally there are no-table exceptions to this. The sketch "O Reparatie" ("An Act of Redress") describes a visit to a little monastery in the hills. A bear has been robbing the apple tree. The monks' servant, a dumb, half-witted, epileptic gipsy, had tried to stop him the previous day, but the bear had knocked him flat. Now the gipsy lies in wait, and as the bear mounts the stile, the gipsy cracks it over the head with his staff. Both fall dead, the bear with its head broken, the gipsy overstrained by his effort. The monastery bell, tolling for vespers, reëchoes his knell among the wooded hills. Here Caragiale, who normally was preoccupied with human idiosyncrasies and not notably fond of nature, contrives to give his little sketch of a thousand words an extraordinary atmospheric charm. Conversely, in "Doua Loturi" ("Two Lottery Prizes") he writes a story of ten thousand words on a theme contrived to display the irony of fate in a comic light. Lefter Popescu, a minor civil servant, has mislaid two lottery tickets, each of which has gained the first prize in its own lottery. Under the strain of this situation, all the worst side of him comes to light. He harries his wife, he bullies an oldclothes woman because he fancies that a coat which his wife let her have, had the tickets in one of its pockets, he stays away from the office to carry on the hunt. At last, when he is compelled to go back to work under threat of dismissal, he finds the tickets there, and in triumph sends in his resignation. When he reaches the bank to draw the prize money, the banker points out that he has in one lottery the ticket which won first prize in the other—and vice versa. "If I were one of those self-respecting and respected authors," continues Caragiale, "I should finish my tale thus." And there follows a mock-pathetic description of Madam Popescu years later as an old nun and Popescu himself as a little old man murmuring, "Vice-versa! … Yes, vice-versa!" "But," says Caragiale, "as I am not one of those authors, I prefer to tell you frankly: after the row at the bank, I don't know what happened to my hero and Madam Popescu." This ending has been criticized as an artistic irrelevancy which should have been pruned away. But there is a good deal to be said for the gently frivolous conclusion to a story which was otherwise on the point of getting itself taken too seriously.

Caragiale reaches the highest level of his powers in the story "Kir Ianulea," one of his latest works. Here he has taken Machiavelli's The Marriage of Belphegor, which itself, we are told, can be traced back to ancient India, and has expanded it into a nouvelle. What in Machiavelli's version is not much more than a study becomes in Caragiale's hands a finished painting. He sets the tale in eighteenth century Wallachia under the Fanariot regime, a very happy choice because he could depict a Levantine scene most convincingly. Aghiuta, an imp, is sent upon earth by the King of Hell to find out the truth about women, since all the men who arrive in Hell lay the blame for their perdition upon their womenfolk. He is under orders to marry and live with his wife for ten years. He puts on the likeness of a man in his prime, and choosing Bucharest for his activities, settles down there in the guise of a Greek merchant with the name of Kir Ianulea. He marries a young woman named Acrivita, who is a beauty, but proves to be a shrew. Not only does she make his life intolerable with her tantrums; she also ruins him with her extravagance. On the verge of bankruptcy he runs away, and being hidden from his creditors by a certain Negoita, rewards him as follows. Whenever Negoita hears of a woman being possessed by the devil, he may be sure that it is Kir Ianulea, or rather Aghiuta, who has entered into her. Aghiuta will depart from her at Negoita's bidding, and the latter will naturally receive a suitable reward from her grateful relations. At his first case Negoita asks a fairly modest reward. The spirit reproaches him and tells him that he will only have one more chance, but that the patient will be the wife of the governor of Craiova. Of course, Negoita's fortune is made. Unluckily, Aghiuta proceeds later to enter into the daughter of the reigning Prince, who summons Negoita to cure her. Negoita, though well aware that the spirit will be angry this time, cannot refuse to go. He is greeted with fury by Aghiuta, speaking through the possessed Princess, but has the brilliant idea of announcing that he will bring Acrivita to assist him in the exorcism. The spirit at once departs appalled, and Negoita is showered with wealth and honors. Aghiuta returns to Hell, defeated and exhausted, and as a reward for his labors, asks only for rest and that Acrivita and Negoita may go to Heaven so that he may never see them again.

This tale is told by Caragiale with many pleasing details, and many minor characters are touched in with an admirable economy of strokes. Here, illustrating one aspect of his humor, a blend of the ruthless and the absurd, is an extract from the cock-and-bull story which Kir Ianulea tells his housekeeper about his past.

When I was in my seventh year, my parents felt a longing to make a pilgrimage; and so, procuring some money, they took me with them and we went on muleback as far as the port of Salonica. There we boarded a large ship which was waiting with sails spread for a wind, to make southwards to Jaffa. Presently the expected wind began to blow, the canvas filled, and we sailed. For three sunny days and moonlit nights we kept straight ahead without any trouble. According to the custom we were fasting. About the third day, for our midday meal, we ate beans and radishes. What was the result? About the time of vespers my parents began to clap their hands to their bellies and wail horribly: "I'm dying! I'm dying!" The captain, seeing them writhing and curling up in deadly pain, quickly sent for a papist monk who had boarded the vessel with us, a learned man who was skilled in the care of disease. Before the monk arrived, the patients had begun to turn livid and could scarcely tell him what they had eaten—beans and radishes. The monk asked again: "I understand, my children. But you must tell me, did you eat beans and radishes or radishes and beans?" My mother replied in a faint voice: "Radishes and beans." "Ah, that's bad!" said the monk. And he gave orders to rub their bellies with rough tow. But they rubbed in vain till they took the skin off; for while the moon was rising, first my father and immediately after him my mother passed away. What was I, a child, to do? I followed the captain and the monk about, weeping, and I heard them talking as follows. Said the captain: "Father, if it's cholera, I'm done for; they won't let me enter port for forty days, and my cargo will be spoiled. I shall be left a poor man." But the learned man replied: "It is no more cholera than I am a nun. It is a sort of disease which is particularly prevalent among Eastern Christians during Lent. People make a mistake—men are like that, subject to error—they eat radish first and then beans. The radish, you see, directs its strength upwards, and the bean exerts its force in the opposite direction; one pushes, the other resists. The struggle begins with great speed in the entrails, spasm after spasm, until there is an entanglement of the bowels and the stomach bursts. Then the patient dies of hurduharismus—that is the name the Greeks give to this fearful disease." "Is it infectious?" "Not at all; don't be alarmed." … They wrapped my parents decently in some clean sheets and lit a wax candle at their heads. Another Greek monk read the burial service, and early in the morning, as the sun showed above the waves—"eternal rest" … one! two! three! … and they cast them into the deep.

The other story in which Caragiale reaches his highest level is "Mânjoala's Inn." This story of the Rumanian countryside of the nineteenth century is a masterpiece of delicate irony. The hero is riding to his betrothal. He stops to rest the horse at the inn, run by a widow, Marghioala. She charms him into lingering, but at last he breaks away. Caught in a storm, he loses his way and in the end finds himself back at the inn. There he succumbs to the fascination of Marghioala and has to be removed forcibly by his future father-in-law. The story must be read and re-read for the subtlety of its detail to be fully appreciated. With delicious irony every indication that his hostess is a witch draws from the hero a rationalistic interpretation. Even at the end, when years later they hear mat Marghioala has perished in a fire which destroyed her inn, the hero greets with scepticism his father-in-law's assurance that she was a witch. The descriptions of the ride, the inn, the storm, are remarkably vivid. Nowhere else, I think, does Caragiale create with such sustained delicacy.

In these stories "Kir Ianulea" and "Mânjoala's Inn" we have seen Caragiale treating the supernatural, and from that it is a short step to the macabre and the gruesome. These he treats most notably in the story "An Easter Candle." The Jewish landlord of a lonely country inn is terrified of a brutal ruffian whom he has dismissed and who has threatened to come back on Easter Eve. Late on Easter Eve a band of robbers, led by the ruffian Gheorghe, try to make a hole in the door and break in. The Jew, his wits sharpened by the extremity of his terror, traps Gheorghe's hand in a noose as he completes the hole, and the other robbers run away. When the villagers return from the midnight service, they find the corpse of the robber trapped in the door with the hand burned off. The Jew explains that he is now a Christian—for he has lit a candle to Christ! In all this there is something of Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories The Mask of the Red Death and A Cask of Amontillado Caragiale translated into Rumanian from Baudelaire's French version. The frightful tension of the Jewish innkeeper as the robbers bore through the door to break into his lonely inn is as skillfully depicted as mat of the victim of the Inquisition in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. But the scenery is not the fantastic scenery of Poe; it is the naturalistic background of a Moldavian village in the marshes. The element of the monstrous and unnatural in me psychology links this tale with the play False Witness, though the process whereby the menace of the robber Gheorghe acting on a mind already excited by terrifying memories is more credible than the cold-blooded vindictiveness of Anca. Though the revolting brutality of the whole tale may not be emphasized beyond what is artistically necessary, it is neverheless unpleasant reading. Unpleasant reading too, and without such artistic justification, is the story "Sin" ("Pacat"), in which Caragiale deploys lurid descriptions of bloodshed, unnatural cruelty and other horrors, without creating an impressive whole.

Allied to these tales, "An Easter Candle" and "Sin," in theme and psychological treatment, and contemporary with them, is Caragiale's only serious play Napasta, a word with the double meaning of "unjust accusation" and of "disaster," which I have translated False Witness. It is a drama in a setting of peasant life. Anca suspects her second husband, Dragomir, of having murdered her first husband, Dumitru, in order to marry her. Nine years after the murder, the woodcutter Ion, who had been unjustly accused of it and sent to the mines, escapes, half-witted as a result of his sufferings, and by chance calls at their house for something to eat. Anca becomes increasingly certain of Dragomir's guilt. When Ion kills himself during one of his mad fits, Anca talks to Dragomir as though he had killed Ion. Dragomir, thoroughly demoralized, allows her to extort from him the confession that he did kill Dumitru, and Anca hands him over to the authorities as the murderer of Ion. "False witness for false witness!" are her last words to him as the curtain comes down. This two-act drama has a classical simplicity of structure and unity of time and place. The plot is ingeniously constructed and the whole development logical. And yet there is something unsatisfying about the play. Perhaps this would disappear on the stage, and a fine actress might be able to make Anca's calculated revenge convincing. But I do not feel that Caragiale succeeded in making his audience believe in this persecution, as for instance, Strindberg makes us believe in the equally monstrous hounding of the husband by his wife in The Father.

Of Caragiale's comedies I propose to consider the best, A Lost Letter. The scene is a provincial town. Just before an election, a letter from Tipatescu, the prefect of police, to Zoe, the young wife of Trahanache, chairman of innumerable committees, falls into the hands of an unscrupulous newspaper editor, Catavencu. Although Trahanache implicitly trusts his wife and friend, Catavencu blackmails them all by threatening to publish the letter unless they throw over their parliamentary candidate Farfuridi, and nominate him instead. They are prepared to agree, when a telegram from Bucharest imposes an outsider, Dandanache, as the candidate. Before the public meeting at which the nomination is to be announced, Trahanache discovers a forgery committed by Catavencu; so, enabled by this to counter the blackmail, he announces the nomination of Dandanache. When Zoe sends for Catavencu and proposes to give him his forgery in exchange for the prefect's indiscreet letter, she finds that he has lost it. It is then handed to her by the same Drunken Citizen that originally let it fall into Catavencu's hands. Finding Catavencu at her mercy, Zoe forgives him, and a general reconciliation takes place at the reception in honor of Dandanache.

The striking thing about this comedy is its detachment. Our sympathy is not given to any character or set of characters, nor yet, despite their corruption, are we revolted by any. The prefect Tipatescu is hasty and violent, Zoe is heartless, and both are selfish. The amiable Trahanache is fatuously trusting. Catavencu is a scoundrel, though his demagogic gifts fascinate us. The policeman Ghita is dishonest and unprincipled, even if likeable. Dandanache is not only fatuous but a blackmailer. The Drunken Citizen is a complete sot. And the reconciliation of all these people in the finale is remarkably cynical. Yet as a whole the comedy is delightful and leaves no unpleasant taste behind. The fact is that Lamb's words on Congreve apply remarkably closely: "Judged morally every character in these plays … is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes—some little generosities on the part of Angelica perhaps excepted—not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever." Substitute Zoe for Angelica, and this last sentence fits A Lost Letter admirably. "Whether he did this designedly," continues Lamb, "or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing—for you neither hate nor love his personages—and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole." That description might have been written of A Lost Letter.

While engaged in writing the play, Caragiale is said to have asked his friends' advice as to who was to win the election, Farfuridi or Catavencu? One friend answered: "Both!" Some time later Caragiale said to him: "I have made them both win, as you jokingly suggested … but in the person of one man, Agamita Dandanache, who is more of a fool than Farfuridi and more of a cad than Catavencu. That is the dramatic climax, the surprise dénouement, which I had been after for two months and couldn't find!"

It is easy to imagine the splendid vivacity with which A Lost Letter must sparkle in actual performance. The public meeting of Act III, with its uproar and interruptions, and the contrasted speeches of the incoherent bungler Farfuridi and the fluent demagogue Catavencu, is skillfully worked up to the climax when the candidate's name is announced, and the curtain comes down on a general riot. Once more Caragiale has a surprise in store for us, in Zoe's clemency toward Catavencu, and the finale must surely be exhilarating as the music of the band draws nearer and nearer, until the electors pour onto the stage, and the reconciliation takes place to the clinking of champagne glasses.

What now are the characteristics of Caragiale's writings? In the first place, his comic spirit is what one would call "astringent." It is the antithesis of that of Alphonse Daudet or James Barrie. The tender, caressing, arch humor of such writers is quite foreign to him, and would no doubt have been repugnant. On the other hand, he lacks the indignation of satirists of morals and the partisan bitterness of political satirists. He is curiously detached in his outlook. We have noticed this particularly in A Lost Letter. But as it is the secret of A Lost Letter's success, so perhaps it is the secret of False Witness' failure. In the tragedy the audience must feel in sympathy with at least one of the main characters. Neither Anca nor Dragomir engage our sympathy, and so False Witness remains a study in abnormal psychology rather than a tragedy. It is interesting to see in the half-witted convict, Ion, the one type of character for which Caragiale does seem to show a sympathetic emotion, a sort of indignant pity for the unfortunate whose weakness of intellect or character gets him pushed around by the harder and more capable members of society. Ion is, in fact, the tragic counterpart of the Drunken Citizen in A Lost Letter.

Caragiale's ironic detachment is not to be understood as indifference. But indignation did not blind him, nor did it tempt him to sacrifice the values of art to those of propaganda. His attitude to his creations has been well pointed out by D. Murarasu in placing side by side two antithetical remarks of Caragiale about his own characters: "I loathe them!" and "See what dears they are!"

The other main characteristic of Caragiale's work is the fascination which the cruel and the monstrous have for him. We have noticed it already in False Witness and in the tales "An Easter Candle" and "Sin." But it is often to be seen in his comic work too. Sometimes it is ruthless in the manner of Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes; sometimes, like the stories of Saki, it is more sinister. The extract given above from "Kir Ianulea" illustrates his light-hearted ruthlessness, and so does a tale which he had heard in his childhood from a Ploesti barber and which he retells with the title of "Pastrama Trufanda" ("Prime Salted"). A Turk, Yussuf, to oblige a Jew, Aaron, takes a sack of salted meat with him on a trip to Jerusalem. Tempted by the appetizing smell, he eats or sells it all. On his return he explains to the Jew and offers to pay for it. The Jew is appalled. When his father had died, expressing a wish that his remains might moulder away in the soil of Palestine, Aaron for motives of economy had salted the flesh and entrusted it to Yussuf to save the cost of transport!

We have seen Caragiale's treatment of the cruelty of fate in "Two Lottery Prizes." Subtly connected with this is his love of the unexpected twist. In the story, "Inspection," the cashier Anghelache behaves in a peculiar manner just before his accounts are due to be audited. He disappears and presently he is discovered to have committed suicide. We await the result of the audit—and the accounts are found to be in order! "Why should Anghelache have committed suicide?" Caragiale used to say to his friends with a chuckle; "I don't know myself!" Not only the unexpected twist, but also the unsolved enigma ap-pealed to his sense of the ironic.

At the age of thirty Caragiale must have seemed destined to a long and successful career as a writer of comedies. Yet his last comedy appeared in 1884. Next, he was occupied with his tragic creations, "An Easter Candle," "Sin," the drama False Witness, and so on. Then, once more, the comic began to prevail, but this time in the form of sketches and tales. The best of these mostly date from the last decade of the nineteenth century; "Mânjoala's Inn," for instance, was published in 1898-1899. He reached his highest level once more in "Kir Ianulea," published in 1908. What he would have made of a projected comedy, reintroducing characters from A Stormy Night and Catavencu from A Lost Letter, as he imagined them to have developed in the twenty-five years or so since their first appearance, we cannot know. But it is probable that he could not have equalled his own previous achievement in that line, and that he was wise to end his career as a writer with the posthumously published "Abu-Hasan," which, like "Kir Ianulea," is an old tale retold. Thus, the man who at thirty-two was the author of the best of Rumanian comedies forsook the stage and became a master of story-telling. At the very least, "Kir Ianulea" and "Mânjoala's Inn" deserve to rank among the classics of the world's literature.