“That is a long word: forever!”
—Georg Buchner, German dramatist, born October 17, 1813
Voi Sapete Quel Che Fa (You Know What He Does)
Decided yesterday that Jeeves prefigures the Artisanal Servant of the future. He is in fact an Artist. His medium is Bertie Wooster and his social network. (Can’t resist: Aunts Dahlia and Agatha; pals Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle, Harold “Stinker” Pinker, and Hildebrand “Tuppy” Glossop.) The entire edifice of upper class life in Wodehouse’s stories comes to depend on Jeeves.
Mozart’s operas “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” feature servants as major characters. Leporello opens “Don Giovanni”. While Giovanni is inside raping Donna Anna, he waits outside and complains about his lot in life: “Io non voglio più servir” ( I don’t want to serve anymore). Leporello is clear-sighted about his master’s wickedness, but he admires him, too. He boasts in the Catalog Aria in Scene 2 about the thousands of women his master has seduced. We are in the 18th century, and “master” is literally what Don Giovanni is to Leporello: he beats him. No Artisanal Service here: Leporello has no options and must head off to find a new master when Giovanni meets his dreadful fate.
Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro is actually running the show at Count Almaviva’s house: he is the head of the Count’s servants. The Count tries to exercise his feudal prerogative and have his way with Susanna, Figaro’s fiancée. This would have been common and unquestioned before the eighteenth century, and Figaro would simply have had to stand aside. But this story takes place on the brink of the French Revolution. Feudal privilege and aristocratic license are about to give way to bourgeois marriage and domesticity. Don Giovanni gets dragged off to Hell by a ghostly avenger; Count Almaviva gets manipulated by Figaro (through jealousy, in a somewhat situation-comedy manner) into renewed desire for his Countess. We’re heading into the territory of the miracle-working Jeeves.