and reality. At first sight one can see nothing there but a kind of
conventional fantasy, playing charmingly round impossible situations
and queer delightful personages, who would vanish in a moment into thin
air at the slightest contact with actual flesh and blood. But if
Marivaux had been simply fantastic and nothing more, his achievement
would have been insignificant; his great merit lies in his exquisite
instinct for psychological truth. His plays are like Watteau's pictures,
which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect
owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the
realities of life. His characters, like Watteau's, seem to possess, not
quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality--the
distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting
in the human spirit. His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged
of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their hearts are
miraculously one; in their conversations the subtleties of
metaphysicians are blended with the airy clarities of birds. _Le Jeu de
l'Amour et du Hasard_ is perhaps the most perfect example of his work.
Here the lady changes places with her waiting-maid, while the lover
changes places with his valet, and, in this impossible framework of
symmetrical complications, the whole action spins itself out. The beauty
of the little piece depends upon the infinitely delicate art which
depicts each charmingly absurd, minute transition in the process of
delusion, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and explanation, with all the
varieties of their interactions and shimmering personal shades. It would
be difficult to find a more exquisite example of tender and
discriminating fidelity to the loveliest qualities in human nature than
the scene in which Silvia realizes at last that she is in love--and with
whom. 'Ah! je vois clair dans mon coeur!' she exclaims at the supreme
moment; and the words might stand as the epitome of the art of
Marivaux. Through all the superfine convolutions of his fancies and his