United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for morals than literature. But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue. "Castigat ridendo mores, Monsieur Bournisien!
Dante describes the soul of a man as coming from the hand of God 'weeping and laughing like a little child, and Christ also saw that the soul of each one should be a guisa di fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia. He felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death.
Monsieur de Marquet looked at him. "Ah, sir," Rouletabille began, "You must not be angry with Monsieur de Maleine. It is not with Monsieur de Marquet that I desire to have the honour of speaking, but with Monsieur 'Castigat Ridendo. Permit me to congratulate you personally, as well as the writer for the 'Epoque." And Rouletabille, having first introduced me, introduced himself.
Chaucer wrote in the true spirit of comedy mores corrigere ridendo, but Langland, his contemporary, who described similar types of men of State as well as of Church, did so from the point of view of a moral reformer whose satire is a trenchant weapon.
Monsieur de Marquet, with a nervous gesture, caressed his beard into a point, and explained to Rouletabille, in a few words, that he was too modest an author to desire that the veil of his pseudonym should be publicly raised, and that he hoped the enthusiasm of the journalist for the dramatist's work would not lead him to tell the public that Monsieur "Castigat Ridendo" and the examining magistrate of Corbeil were one and the same person.
Point out his fault, and lay bare the dire consequences thereof: expose it roundly, and give him a proper, solemn, moral whipping but do not attempt to castigare ridendo. Do not laugh at him writhing, and cause all the other boys in the school to laugh.
Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for morals than literature. But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue. "'Castigat ridendo mores,* Monsieur Bournisien!
If there had been journalists in the time of Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers, doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the writer of plays? And why should Comedy, qui castigat ridendo mores, make an exception in favor of one power, when the Parisian press spares none?
Monsieur Marquet had spent the night in Paris, attending the final rehearsal, at the Scala, of a little play of which he was the unknown author, signing himself simply "Castigat Ridendo." Monsieur de Marquet was beginning to be a "noble old gentleman." Generally he was extremely polite and full of gay humour, and in all his life had had but one passion, that of dramatic art.
His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught his readers ridendo dicere verum, it was rather that of the elder Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote That patience is a virtue high is plain, Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, Things that rude valour never could attain, but that of The Lye, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's Gulliver or the letters of Junius.
Word Of The Day