Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/740

 at any required distance from the plain bar; a sliding plate carrying a vertical tube, to hold either the axle of the fulcrum, the pencil, or the pointer, is mounted on one of the arms and on a prolongation of the plain bar beyond the other arm, and also on the graduated connecting bar; and an additional arm is provided by means of which reductions below or enlargements above the scales given on the instrument can be readily effected.

The eidograph (Gr. , form) is designed to supersede the pantograph, which is somewhat unsteady, having several supports and joints. It is composed of three graduated bars, one of which is held over a fulcrum and carries the others, which are lighter, one at each extremity. The three bars are movable from end to end in box-sockets, each having an index and a vernier in contact with the graduated scale. The box-socket of the principal bar turns round the vertical axle of the fulcrum; that of each side bar is attached to a vertical axle, which also carries a grooved wheel of large diameter and turns in a collar at either end of the principal bar. The two wheels are of exactly the same diameter and are connected by a steel band fitting tightly into the grooves, so that they always turn together through identical arcs; thus the side bars over which they are respectively mounted, when once set parallel, turn with them and always remain parallel. A pointer is held at the end of one of the side bars and a pencil at the diagonally opposite end of the other. The bars may be readily set by their graduated scales to positions in which the distances of the pencil and the pointer from the fulcrum will always be in the ratio of the given and the required map scales.

Numerous other modifications have been proposed from time to time; many forms are described in G. Pellehn’s Der Pantograph (Berlin, 1903).

 PANTOMIME, a term which has been employed in different senses at different times in the history of the drama. Of the Roman pantomimus, a spectacular kind of play in which the functions of the actor were confined to gesticulation and dancing, while occasional music was sung by a chorus or behind the scenes, some account is given under Drama. In Roman usage the term was applied both to the actor of this kind of play and to the play itself; less logically, we also use the term to signify the method of the actor when confined to gesticulation. Historically speaking, so far as the Western drama is concerned there is no intrinsic difference between the Roman pantomimus and the modern “ballet of action,” except that the latter is accompanied by instrumental music only, and that the personages appearing in it are not usually masked. The English “dumb-show,” though fulfilling a special purpose of its own, was likewise in the true sense of the word pantomimic. The modern pantomime, as the word is still used, more especially in connexion with the English stage, signifies a dramatic entertainment in which the action is carried on with the help of spectacle, music and dancing, and in which the performance of that action or of its adjuncts is conducted by certain conventional characters, originally derived from Italian “masked comedy,” itself an adaptation of the fabulae Atellanae of ancient Italy. Were it not for this addition, it would be difficult to define modern pantomime so as to distinguish it from the masque; and the least rational of English dramatic species would have to be regarded as essentially identical with another to which English literature owes some of its choicest fruit.

The contributory elements which modern pantomime contains very speedily, though in varying proportions and manifold combinations, introduced themselves into the modern drama as it had been called into life by the Renaissance. In Italy the transition was almost imperceptible from the pastoral drama to the opera; on the Spanish stage ballets with allegorical figures and military spectacles were known towards the close of the 16th century; in France ballets were introduced in the days of Marie de’ Medici, and the popularity of the opera was fully established in the earlier part of the reign of Louis XIV. The history of these elements need not be pursued here, but there is a special ingredient in modern pantomime of which something more has to be said. From the latter part of the 16th century (Henry III. in 1596, sought to divert the dreaded states-general at Blois by means of the celebrated Italian company of the Gelosi) professional Italian comedy (commedia dell’ arte, called commedia all’ improviso only because of the skill with which the schemes of its plays were filled up by improvisation) had found its way to Paris with its merry company of characters,

partly corresponding to the favourite types of regular comedy both ancient and modern, but largely borrowed from the new species of masked comedy—so called from its action being carried on by certain typical figures in masks—said to have been invented earlier in the same century by Angelo Beolco (Ruzzante) of Padua. These types, local in origin, included Pantalone the Venetian merchant, who survives in the uncommercial Pantaloon, the Bolognese Dottore. The Zannis (Giovannis) were the domestic servants in this species of comedy, and included among other varieties the Arlecchino. This is by far the most interesting of these types, and by far the best discussed. The Arlecchino was formerly supposed to have been, like the rest, of Italian origin. The very remarkable contribution (cited below) of Dr Otto Driesen to the literature of folk-lore as well as to that of the stage seems however to establish the conclusion (to which earlier conjectures pointed) that the word Harlequin or Herlequin is of French origin, and that the dramatic figure of Harlequin is an evolution from the popular tradition of the harlekin-folk, mentioned about the end of the 11th century by the Norman Ordericus Vitalis. The “damned souls” of legend became the comic demons of later centuries, the croque-sots with the devil’s mask; they left the impress of their likeness on the hell-mouth of the religious drama, but were gradually humanized as a favourite type of the Parisian popular street-masques (charivaris) of the 14th and 15th centuries. Italian literature contains only a single passage before the end of the 16th century which can be brought into any connexion with this type—the alichino (cat’s back) of canto xxi. of the Inferno. The French harlequin was, however, easily adopted into the family of Italian comedy, where he may, like his costume, have been associated with early national traditions, and where he continued to diverge from his fellow Zannis of the stolid sort, the Scapin of French comedy-farce. From the time of the performances in France of the celebrated Fedcli company, which played there at intervals from the beginning to the middle of the 17th century onwards, performing in a court ballet in 1636, Tristran Martinelli had been its harlequin, and the character thus preceded that of the Parisian favourite Trivelin, whose name Cardinal de Retz was fond of applying to Cardinal Mazarin. There can be no pretence here of pursuing the French harlequin through his later developments in the various species of the comic drama, including that of the marionettes, or of examining the history of his super session by Pierrot and of his ultimate extinction.

Students of French comedy, and of Moliere in particular, are aware of the influence of the Italian players upon the progress of French comedy, and upon the works of its incomparable master. In other countries, where the favourite types of Italian popular comedy had been less generally seen or were unknown, popular comic figures such as the English fools and clowns, the German Hanswurst, or the Dutch Pickelhering, were ready to renew themselves in any and every fashion which preserved to them the gross salt favoured by their patrons. Indeed, in Germany, where the term pantomime was not used, a rude form of dramatic buffoonery, corresponding to the coarser sides of the modern English species so-called, long flourished, and threw back for centuries the progress of the regular drama. The banishment of Hanswurst from the German stage was formally proclaimed by the famous actress Caroline Neuber at Leipzig in a play composed for the purpose in 1737. After being at last suppressed, it found a commendable substitute in the modern Zauberposse, the more genial Vienna counterpart of the Paris féerie and the modern English extravaganza.

In England, where the masque was only quite exceptionally revived after the Restoration, the love of spectacle and other frivolous allurements was at first mainly met by the various forms of dramatic entertainment which went by the name of “opera.” In the preface to Albion and Albanius(1685), Dryden gives a definition of opera which would fairly apply to modern extravaganza, or to modern pantomime with the harlequinade 