[In the following essay, Cazimir discusses Caragiale's reliance on classical literary principles and the realistic presentation of character in such works as A Stormy Night and A Lost Letter.]

The attempt to define by a terse formula the essence of Caragiale's view of man invariably resorts, in the most penetrating exegesis, to invoking classicism as the proximate genus and realism as the specific difference. Yet another survey of his œuvre confirms this opinion, supporting it with several considerations on Caragiale's way of conceiving of the situation of types in space and time, on their degree of stability and pregnantz as resulting from such determinations, on the more general aspects of their affective and moral moulding, and lastly, along a somewhat secondary line of thought, on the author's attitude to his own creations, on the distinct tonality of Caragiale's laughter.

The whole comic oeuvre of Caragiale points with negligible differences between one segment and another, to his "fixist" conception of character. A more careful definition of the latter would note that evolution—only retrospectively admissible as a finite process of character crystallization—in general precludes the hypothesis of later changes. Relating the moral structure of the characters to the diagram of their movement on the social scale, one can see that the most markedly outlined figures were captured at the time of a final situation-character concretion. Master Dumitrache, to quote George Calinescu, "no one can imagine as a speculator. His condition is fixed and so is Pristanda's, who by definition cannot get out of his 'fixed pay' condition, without becoming structurally altered." Some could say that the author thought differently for twenty five years later he depicted Titirca as a ruling-party senator, big landowner and capitalist, and oil magnate. But the lack of success of Caragiale's Berlin project illustrates the flimsiness of its groundwork, flagrantly emphasized by the parallel rise of all the characters: Chiriac, Sotirescu is a ruling-party deputy, Spiridon Ionescu a deputy, doctor of law from Liege University, owning a motorcar and race horses, Nae Ipingescu a county prefect—all three being big landlords and capitalists, oil magnates, etc. Schematic and unconvincing, this removal into an Eldorado of men whom A Stormy Night had fixed between the bounds of satisfied mediocrity, with no inclination for grand-scale arrivism, is a demonstration per contrarium of the principle of indestructible solidarity between character and social condition. Further evidence is the less expressive delineation of those characters that age or profession places in transition stages. Compared with Titirca or Zaharia Trahanache, with Ipingescu or Pristanda, Chiriac and Tipatescu are evanescent figures. One obvious consequence in such cases is the scarcity of comical effects, these being—to the extent that they do occur—connected with the conjuncture rather than with the essence.

Sketches like "Tempora" … or "Hard, from Hand to Mouth." … , apparent deviations from the law of character immutability, merely go to confirm it indirectly. From the brave tribune who, for years on end leads "the generous university youth" and its anti-government demonstrations to the stage of "any impudent police inspector, regular scoundrel, shameless knave, savage brute and man-eating butcher" we see the hierarchical rise rather than the evolution of Coriolan Draganescu. Outwardly contradictory, these two facets are closely connected beneath, ultimately providing the comical turn of the story. Generalizing broadly, we could also mention the stages in the humbug's ideology: "From primary school to high school leaving—an anarchist. From high school leaving to the first college examination—a socialist. From the first college examination to graduation a progressive. From graduation to job-finding—a liberal. From job finding to retirement—a conservative." In all these forms of manifestation, the humbug's essence remains unchanged.

Constant formulae, which some have accused of schematism without denying their impact, are actually just another expression of character fixity, as seen notably from Caragiale's specific manner of using this age-old device. In Plautus or Molièere, no matter how effective, characteristically, the formula is born and disappears within a single scene ("Sine dote?", "Qu'allait-il faire dans cette galère?", "Le pauvre homme!", etc.) Labiche extends the life of formulae to the length of a whole play ("Mon gendre, tout est rompu!" "Embrassons-nous Folleville!"), but their strict dependence on the texture of the plot deprives them of any more lasting significance. Caragiale's formulae, instead, are more wide-embracing. They are not mere momentary expressions but accompany the characters over an indefinite length of existence and implicitly guarantee their structural consistency. Similar conclusions can be drawn from conflict-solving, in a spirit totally different from the sudden, facile conversions to which his forerunners' comedies—supported by foreign models too—had so often resorted. Far from altering the moral profile of the character, the finale of Caragiale's plays subjects it to a last check and reinforcing, and vigorously projects it into a surpriseless future. It is on this conception on character stability essentially refusing all flexibility, that the basic mode of defining them through actions stands, by devising situations that can bring them under revealing pressure. Self-important Master Dumitrache is placed in a state of alarm as to his spot of maximum sensibility, theorist Leonida is faced with circumstances defying his power of explanation, placid Trahanache is confronted by several occasions for indignation, zealous Intoxicated Citizen is baffled by a number of hindrances on his path to duty. Once the artistic goal has been achieved by an adequate determination of the substance, the characters are restored to their original state of balance. To judge by Caragiale's approach the best way to bring out a character is to place him in vexing situations.

Caragiale's adherence to classicism—no doubt, in an expanded sense of the concept—must also be viewed from other angles too, such as that stressing the great importance attached by him to the technical aspect of literary art, his constant emphasis on the formal scruple, his considering expression a reality consequent on the content and possibly diverging from it. However ironical generally, the author's intended answer to those who sent him manuscripts asking for certain plastic-surgery operations contains some enlightening lines: "In principle, by rectifying or, to put it differently, by repairing a piece of poetry, one understands, quite naturally, changing only the material side, that is the wording, rather than the thinking, the poetry itself. Similarly, when one calls upon a tailor to have a misfitting coat corrected, one does not ask to have the body reshaped but only to have a badly cut coat adjusted to the body, such as it is in shape." The writer's youngest son, Luca Ion Caragiale, gives us some complementary details: "In his youth, at Iasi, he had frequented the Junimea circle and there he had established a strong, much-cherished link with Vasile Pogor. With Pogor, he had talked about style. Pogor had been reared to the aesthetic dogmas of French classicism, and Caragiale too had grown familiar with them. Caragiale mocked the cold style of the French classics, but, after all, his own aesthetic rules were not too far removed from Boileau's. 'Tout doit tendre au bon sens' was his principle also. Clarity and conciseness were to him the true qualities of style." The writer's literary practice, cultivating the tragic and the comic alike, adds to the above his respect for the classical precept of genus separation: "Le comique, ennemi des soupirs et des pleurs./N'admet point en ses vers de tragiques douleurs."

Against the background of such views and positions, the placing of Caragiale beyond the bounds of orthodox classicism can be more clearly realized. His "fixist" conception of character blends with his dynamic view of society, based directly on the example of Romania, whose overall image had been greatly changed in the nineteenth century: "Our parents tell us incredible stories about the state of public life in their youth, as if they talked of things that happened five hundred years ago; people still young can very well remember the time of their child-hood, with no railways and when only two or three cities in the country had their centres lit up with tallow candles or rudimentary oil lamps." The aesthetic consequences of this world-view are often important to Caragiale. He demands of artistic representations to observe the unity between the generally human, unchanging in its essentials, and the specific tune and place colour: "although man will be man and mankind will be mankind anywhere and at any time, yet the customs, thoughts and feelings will differ just as do places, times and people." Literary genres like satire, drama and the novel "will preserve the passing social physiognomies of various periods." The writer praises the sketches of D. D. Patrascanu for depicting valuable figures of human comedy in the local Romanian garb. While postulating the pervasion of the artistic creations by the social-historical concrete, Caragiale rejects its being brought down into the contingent and any improvised actualizations. The initiave taken by a group of actors to lend the heroes in The Lost Letter the physiognomies of some politicians of the day justly bring forth the writer's indignation, as he saw in his comedies "not mere buffooneries meant to incidentally ridicule real persons, but works of art aimed at more lastingly depicting ideal types."

Undoubtedly, between a moving-world concept and one of static character there cannot be perfectly peaceful coexistence. When the former tries to restrain the latter, my effort will be made in vain (see Caragiale's plans for the comedy Titirca. Sotirescu & Co.) Aggravation of this virtual contradiction can however be averted by presenting the individuals in accordance with the time-unity rule. In the historical film produced by Caragiale the heroes change with the setting and thus the feeling of social evolution, illustrated with unique force in the global approach to the work, remains without notable consequences on the plane of individual lives.

As an entity taken from under the sway of becoming, the heroes increase their force as memorable representations of the milieux and times that produced them. Caragiale's path is not quite unlike that formerly followed by Molière, a playwright belonging more to the classical age than to classicism as such, who took enough liberties at the expense of dogmatic spirits. (An unmistakable departure from the classical doctrine can also be seen in the language used by Molière's heroes, geared to their social environment and thereby open to a wide variety of sources.) As is well known, with the author of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme the comedy of character and of manners draws towards a synthesis repeatedly achieved in his masterpieces. An organic communion is thus established between the generality of inherent tendencies of human nature and the historically determined mode of the way they start and manifest themselves, a communion that analysis no longer can dissolve. In its subsequent evolution, French comedy could not retain or retrieve this close unity, because of a variety of factors. As noted by Lanson, "Molière quite involuntarily helped to accredit a false idea born of a superficial study of his plays: the idea of a comedy of characters without any treatment of manners, with an elevated, restrained comicality, allegedly representing the higher form of comedy… . On the other hand, those not having such lofty ambitions would no longer attempt to lend a moral sense or universal value to manner depictions." [G. Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, 14th revised edition, Paris, 1918, p. 530.] Significant in this respect are also the views of Diderot, who called for replacing character study with investigating the social conditions and ultimately advocating a comedy of vocations. The eighteenth-century theories could not, however, find any viable embodiments and then comedy had to traverse a period of precariousness, between indifference on the part of most romanticists and the artisan skill of vaudeville writers. The nineteenth-century comedy of manners, with its keen interest in the social and moral problems of the day, was born under the auspices of Balzac's novels. The new trend was not unconnected with the awareness that characteriological study had been exhausted. "L'homme moral est déterminé," wrote A. Dumas fils, "l'homme social reste à faire." (Preface to Le Fils naturel).

The particular circumstances attending the growth of Romanian comedy offered Caragiale a favourable position. For the French dramatists of the mid-century the golden age of comedy was already a matter of the past. With us, the comic character had only reached the embryonic stage, and the comedy of manners, in a fertile existence of several decades, had the characters' moral structure at the level of sketchy, labile forms. The legacy of the forerunners, never felt to be a burden, pointed, on the contrary, to an unachieved synthesis and to the conquest of still unatained perfection. In terms of exploring the contemporary realities, Caragiale carried on and completed the work of his predecessors, in agreement, also, with some wider tendencies of European literature. His keen perception endows each separate type with attributes intensely characteristic of the place and time that produced him. Caragiale's heroes bear the indellible mark of the surroundings where they were born and live, and transplanting them to another milieu seems impossible. The character is not dressed in period costume but inwardly moulded by his social condition. Outside his conditioning the self-importance of Master Dumitrache, the ambition of Catavencu and the servilism of Pristanda would remain empty concepts, without any support. In this sense we may presume to believe that Caragiale's creative approach starts from the manner to reach the characters, that, in other words, without the global intuition of a frame of existence, the men peopling it could not have come into being. This impression is also based on Caragiale's masterly sureness in drawing the supra-individual traits. The most general of them is the characters' belonging to changing times, with many novel, surprising aspects likely to seduce or confuse one, at any rate to impose an attitude and thus help define the characters and achieve a deeper motivation of the comic effects.

With determining consequences for the inalterable vitality of his types, Caragiale's eyes are wide open to the concrete picturesqueness of human actions, which he eagerly recorded—witness his biography and work alike. "I occasionally happened," recalled loan Slavici, "to be with Caragiale in the same coffee house or restaurant, or at some celebration when lots of people came in, stayed and went out, and hours passed with no word between us.

Still we felt very fine together. One of his perfect pleasures was to watch those passing about him, to scrutinize their faces, to capture gestures and attitudes—a pleasure of mine also, to the present day. He would nadge me now and then, or wink at me and whisper, 'Did you get that?' and we understood each other to perfection. 'Why,' he would also say, 'nature works to pattern, she casts every one in a different way. This has one oddity, that another, each in his distinct manner, you never tire watching them and getting heaps of fun.'" In view of such remarkedly eloquent lines, the concept of Caragiale's classicism needs must take another correction. "All the pleasure of a classical mind," wrote G. Calinescu in The Sense of Classicism, "lies in never coming across novelty, in perpetually sticking to the typical. But, no doubt, the world of the particular will quite often bring new appearances. Faced by them, the classical mind has a feeling of contradiction …" Caragiale, on the other hand, far from feeling annoyed by unusual forms, derived from contemplating them a state of exultancy that passed into his world with undiminished freshness. To capture the image of Mr. Leonida at the height of his dramatic stupefaction, of Pristanda perched on Catavencu's fence, of the coffee-house keeper wearing his Civil Guard coat over the five-inch longer apron into which he now and then blows his snivelling nose, one must possess the eye and pen of a Daumier in his unique Croquis d'expression.

Hegel saw the ideal character as resulting from the fusion of three capital elements: richness, determination and firmness. The first involves associating the dominant trait with several others so as to turn the hero into a real, complete man, capable of acting in a variety of situations, under a variety of aspects. Determination adds the imperative of a fusion between the several qualities so as to form an indivisible whole rather than merely remain juxtaposed. The highest goal is consistency and firmness, enabling a character to retain the unity above all contradictions or fluctuations. There is no other work in Romanian literature better suited to answer to Hegel's postulates than the comic œuvre of Caragiale, notably his comedies. Anticipating by some critics, the only observation could refer to richness, if taken in a quantitative sense. True, the writer builds his heroes out of a few traits, but this is only found out analytically, for in terms of the action the elements included are precisely those required by a convincing vigorous presence, ultimately synonymous with substantial vitality. Caragiale may sometimes define a character summarily but never mutilates him, never makes him unstable, unequal or expressionless. Possessing the virtue of identity in the highest degree, he confirms himself by every sentence however unexpected it may be. His unflinching consistency, organically and unostentatiously maintained, seems devoid of rigidity and cannot be reduced to a general concept. This is more remarkable as one essential tendency of the comic lies precisely in a character's generality, unthinkable without some concessions to schematism.

In achieveing the organicity of Caragiale's heroes a major role is played by the relationship established between character and temperament, the latter integrating the inner structure in a sensorially perceptible reality. This calls for some general considerations, for the heroes' belonging in one large family is vividly felt here, which once more proves the author's unitary approach. The emotional type of Caragiale's heroes points to a prevalence of excitation over inhibition, hence to a notably greater consumption of nervous energy than needed. One much exploited source of the psychological comic is making an affect do duty for a passion. Overwhelming though superficial emotional reactions assume, during their brief evolution, the garb of profound, irresistible feelings. But one moment suffices to give them the lie. From a deadly foe of Cracanel, Pampon instantly turns his protector, willing to wipe away his tears with touching gentleness: "Don't cry any more, it isn't done by a volunteer like you …" Transferred into politics, the meridional spirit of noisy quarelling followed by equally noisy reconciliations lend to such pieces of opportunism of an inimitable naturalness: "Trahanache: And so you're one of ours, aren't you, my dear? Good show, I'm very glad. Catavencu: Venerable Mr. Zaharia, in circumstances like these (moved) the little passions must vanish. Trahanache: Well said! Good show! Bless you!" Knowing how much importance it deserves, people are not upset by violence: "We contented ourselves with taking the agent provocateur to the police station to be kept there till the rage blows over." Similarly inconsistent is the threatened suicide, undermined by its very repetition: "Mrs. Zamfira Popescu changed the subject because Portia, who was a highly sensitive being, had repeatedly threatened with suicide at moments of downheartedness"; "I told him, 'Lae, she's not your type', but he, madly in love… . nothing doing, would never listen to me and said he'd kill himself if I refused to let him"; Poor Mita is in despair because Octavian told her frankly that if he failed to get his remove he would shoot himself." In certain situations one will note the contribution of bookish models to the emergence of affective complexes and their verbal expression. We have to do with a false romanticism born of unconsciously mimicking poses drawn from epigonic literature. Throughout the comic oeuvre of Caragiale passions are noted for their ridiculous, ephemeral character. As aesthetician Mihail Ralea points out, the heroes would never commit murder or other crimes just to indulge a desire: "They will make a great fuss and boastfully display their carnival fate, but actually they are 'bons enfants', jovial and quite good-natured." This is indeed a major characteristic. The heroes' self-pride almost invariably includes a false notion of their own emotional capacity. In fact it is a mole-hill turned mountain that quickly reverts to its real size. In his tragic writings, Caragiale took a different course and depicted tenacious hatred and implacable revenge blended with desperation, madness and death. Through this strange symmetry, his œuvre seems to reveal an intimate law governing the genetic processes in a way alien to all deliberation.

The morals of Caragiale's heroes are a heatedly discussed problem. Some commentators agree in investing these heroes with a monstruous selfishness" (G. Ibraileanu); they have "a solid instinct of self-preservation," are "selfish in their adaptability," the women in their turn appearing to be "vulgar, hypocritical and selfish" (Pompiliu Constantinescu); the characters in A Stormy Night are "obtuse, selfish, uninterested in the outside world unless it comes into immediate contact with their real interests" (I. M. Sadoveanu). A more nuanced position is taken by G. Calinescu who, while pointing out the heroes' instinct of individual self-preservation, which accounts for their manifest cowardice, does not fail to notice their fatalism, which entails a limitation on this selfishness. Reviewing the elements of the œuvre, one must admit that the impulse in question, no matter how typical of a large number of cases, cannot be viewed as general and absolute. Master Dumitrache's concern about the success of Zita's marriage; Veta's pity for Spiridon and even for the unknown nocturnal guest, Trahanache's delicacy in sparing his wife's blushes, or his indignation at his friend being slandered, to say nothing of Pristanda, who can be fully exonerated from selfishness—all these are just a few examples worth noting.

With special reference to Ibraileanu's opinion, it must be said that selfishness is too deeply rooted in every one of us to be useful in motivating our hatred of those afflicted with the same infirmity. Caragiale's heroes remind us of a hateful social order, but no one can actually say they too are hateful. It is only a mechanical identification of the heroes and situations with their real prototypes that leads to the false conclusion that the ridiculous blends with the detestable. In fact, Caragiale's peculiar vision consistently aimed at removing the hateful and thus give rein to laughter. For many of his heroes vice is a medium of existence, but it does not result from a conscious option, nor does it entail an understanding of guilt. In this modelling of the heroes' morals we find the most profound expression of Caragiale's irony. With some exaggeration arising from his well-known moral rigorism, Slavici was able to grasp this particular aspect: "In comedy we laugh at the foibles of innocent people. In Caragiale's comedies we are tempted to laugh at the ugliest passion, of morally dead people who can only end up in the cemetery, in prison, or in the lunatic asylum. 'Nonsense', the master used to say, 'in other times and places (this could really happen—S. C) ; in this country of ours falsehood, cowardice, vile intriguing, seduction and adultery are just as many funny trifles at which everyone laughs heartily.' And he would laugh at those who laughed." I stressed the last sentence for its synthetic virtues. And this brings us back to the question of the innocence of Caragiale's heroes, a trait that considerably facilitates placing them under the auspices of the comic. It should be noted here that some heroes display a guilty innocence, if one may put it so, that is a kind of innocence born of long-standing familiarity with wickedness, which is no longer perceived as such. It is at such innocence that Caragiale's irony is chiefly directed, at the taking of bland, good-natured attitudes in the face of detestable phenomena. The author's leniency is as Slavici most pertinently remarked, a malicious reflex of the heroes' own leniency towards themselves: "You must for-give and love me," Catavencu asks the prefect, "because we all love this country, we are all Romanians—more or less honest ones!"

Caragiale's attitude to his own creations rules out the hostile impulse ascribed to him by some exegeses. Quite undoubtedly, the dramatist was deeply dissatisfied with the unjust social order, he was particularly indignant at the mockery of bourgeois democracy, at "the chasm between reality and appearance." fie rebelled against the social environment, but in the individuals he saw the inevitable products of determining circumstances and did not refuse them his superior understanding. "After the toast proposed by Brezeanu [the actor who played the Intoxicated Citizen on the first night—S. C.]," Caragiale commented on the finale of A Lost Letter "a good-natured man cannot leave the theatre without being reconciled to, even without feeling sympathy for the distinguished lady of the world and for the pub-debased drunkard, two erring, strayed, guilty creatures, God knows for what reasons, but nice, whatever hypocrites might say, undoubtedly nice." Sympathy for the hero is a more general disposition with Caragiale, generally blended with irony, in the multiple nuances the latter may assume. The blending of sympathy and irony takes us into the core of the writer's comic art, perfectly consonant with the style of his human actions, as so many contemporary records have preserved for us.

To infer from the social conditions of a period the temperament of its artists is a most regrettable piece of schematism. The circumstances evoked by Caragiale's writings may have the bitterest substratum, yet his laughter is not constricted but clear and powerful, a laughter of invincible moral strength. Only a man could laugh thus who had grasped the transcience of that wrong social order, its inability to destroy the perennial values of our national life. The timbre of Caragiale's laughter should not be confused with the colour of the thoughts it inspires for the simple reason that the timbre is unique and the thoughts are many, capable sometimes of changing and evolving under the impact of an indefinite number of factors. What remains unchanged is his œuvre's power to stimulate thinking—the surest mark of its inner earnestness. There are few authors in world literature who can be admired for the same generous laughter allied to the same substantial profoundness. "In our short toilsome lives," Caragiale maintained, "merrymaking is not so frivolous, after all, as some sages, grumblers and hypocrites would have us believe."

The common paradox of the comic author's sadness is so old that we owe it some respect. The attempt to apply it to Caragiale (Delavrancea and Vlahuta are among those who have made it) seems less fruitful than any other. "The Caragiale's," Paul Zarifopol tells us, "were a dynasty of people with a genius for laughter … The habitual guests of the Caragiale family were able to know at first hand the vocation for laughter as an art and the sense of the comic as a basic instinct." A more recently found record goes to confirm the above. On April 28, 1852, writing to her husband with the usual pride of young mothers, Ecaterina Caragiale noted, as a striking trait of their first-born, a permanent inclination to laugh: "God had given us a blessed child; his kindness is extraordinary, now he's got used to water and he'll utter no sound till I bath him, and then he'll laugh very, very gaily, he'll even wake up laughing and babbling." Those are words that no one, under the sign of fate, can read without emotion. It was the birth of the loudest and most richly echoing laughter ever heard within Romania's boundaries.