Part 6

Thus the beginnings of the regular drama in France, which, without absolutely determining, potently swayed its entire course, came to connect themselves directly with the great literary movement of the Renaissance. Du Bellay sounded the note of attack which converted that movement in France into an endeavour to transform the national literature; and in Ronsard the classical school of poetry put forward its conquering hero and sovereign lawgiver. Among the disciples who gathered round Ronsard, and with him formed the "Pleiad" of French literature, Étienne Jodelle, the reformer of the French theatre, soon held a distinguished place. The stage of this period left ample room for the enterprise of this youthful writer. The popularity of the old entertainments had reached its height when Louis XII., in his conflict with Pope Julius II., had not scrupled to call in the aid of Pierre Gringoire (Gringon), and when the _Mère sotte_ had mockingly masqueraded in the petticoats of Holy Church. In the reign of Francis I. the Inquisition, and on occasion the king himself, had to some extent succeeded in repressing the audacity of the actors, whose follies were at the same time an utter abomination in the eyes of the Huguenots. For a time the very mysteries of the Brethren of the Passion had been prohibited; while the moralities and farces had sunk to an almost contemptible level. Yet to this reign belong the contributions to farce-literature of three writers so distinguished as Rabelais (non-extant), Clément Marot and Queen Margaret of Navarre. Meanwhile isolated translations of Italian[81] as well as classical dramas had in literature begun the movement which Jodelle now transferred to the stage itself. His tragedy _Cléopatre captive_ was produced there on the same day as his comedy _L'Eugène_, in 1552, his _Didon se sacrifiant_ following in 1558. Thus at a time when a national theatre was perhaps impossible in a country distracted by civil and religious conflicts, whose monarchy had not yet welded together a number of provinces attached each to its own traditions, and whose population, especially in the capital, was enervated by frivolity or enslaved by fanaticism, was born that long-lived artificial growth, the so-called classical tragedy of France. For French comedy, though subjected to the same influences as tragedy, had a national basis upon which to proceed, and its history is

## partly that of a modification of old popular forms.

French tragedy in the 16th century.

The history of French tragedy begins with the _Cléopâtre captive_, in the representation of which the author, together with other members of the "Pleiad," took part. It is a tragedy in the manner of Seneca, devoid of action and provided with a ghost and a chorus. Though mainly written in the five-foot Iambic couplet, it already contains passages in the Alexandrine metre, which soon afterwards J. de La Péruse by his _Médée_ (pr. 1556) established in French tragedy, and which Jodelle employed in his _Didon_. Numerous tragedies followed in the same style by various authors, among whom Gabriel Bounyn produced the first French regular tragedy on a subject neither Greek nor Roman,[82] and the brothers de la Taille,[83] and J. Grévin,[84] distinguished themselves by their style. In the reign of Charles IX. a vain attempt was made by Nicolas Filleul to introduce the pastoral style of the Italians into French tragedy;[85] and the Brotherhood of the Passion was intermingling with pastoral plays its still continued reproductions of the old entertainments, and the religious drama making its expiring efforts, among which T. Le Coq's interesting mystery of _Cain_ (1580) should be noted. Beza's _Abraham sacrifiant_ (1550), J. de Coignac's _Goliath_ (dedicated to Edward VI.), Rivandeau's _Haman_ (1561), belong to a group of Biblical tragedies, inspired by Calvinist influences. But these more and more approached to the examples of the classical school, which, in spite of all difficulties and rivalries, prevailed. Among its followers Montchrétien exhibited unusual vigour of rhetoric,[86] and in R. Garnier French tragedy reached the greatest height in nobility and dignity of style, as well as in the exhibition of dramatic passion, to which it attained before Corneille. In his tragedies[87] choruses are still interspersed among the long Alexandrine tirades of the dialogue.

Comedy under Italian influence.

During this period comedy had likewise been influenced by classical models; but the distance was less between the national farces and Terence, than between the mysteries and moralities, and Seneca and the Greeks. _L'Eugène_ differs little in style from the more elaborate of the old farces; and while it satirizes the foibles of the clergy without any appreciable abatement of the old licence, its theme is the favourite burden of the French comic theatre in all times--_le cocuage_. The examples, however, which directly facilitated the productivity of the French comic dramatists of this period, among whom Jean de la Taille was the first to attempt a regular comedy in prose,[88] were those of the Italian stage, which in 1576 established a permanent colony in France, destined to survive there till the close of the 17th century, by which time it had adopted the French language, and was ready to coalesce with French actors, without, however, relinquishing all remembrance of its origin. R. Belleau, a member of the "Pleiad," produced a comedy in which the type (already approached by Jodelle) of the swaggering captain appears,[89] J. Grévin copied Italian intrigue, characters and manners;[90] O. de Turnèbe (d. 1581) borrowed the title of one Italian play[91] and perhaps parts of the plots of others; the Florentine F. d'Amboise (d. 1558) produced versions of two Italian comedies;[92] and the foremost French comic poet of the century, P. de Larivey, likewise an Italian born (of the name of Pietro Giunto), openly professed to imitate the poets of his native country. His plays are more or less literal translations of L. Dolce,[93] Secchi[94] and other Italian dramatists; and this lively and witty author, to whom Molière owes much, thus connects two of the most important and successful growths of the modern comic drama.

The close conjunction between the history of a living dramatic literature and that of the theatre can least of all be ignored in the case of France, where the actor's art has gone through so ample an evolution, and where the theatre has so long and continuously formed an important part of the national life. By the middle of the 16th century not only had theatrical representations, now quite emancipated from clerical control, here and there already become matters of speculation and business, but the acting profession was beginning to organize itself as such; strolling companies of actors had become a more or less frequent experience; and the attitude of the church and of civic respectability were once more coming to be systematically hostile to the stage and its representatives.

French tragedy and comedy in the 17th century before Corneille.

Before, however, either tragedy or comedy in France entered into the period of their history when genius was to illuminate both of them with creations of undying merit, and before the theatre had associated itself enduringly with the artistic and literary divisions of court and society and the people at large, the country had passed through a new phase of the national life. When the troubles and terrors of the great civil and religious wars of the 16th century were over at last, they were found to have produced a reaction towards culture and refinement which spread from certain spheres of society whose influence was for a time prevailing. The seal had been set upon the results of the Renaissance by Malherbe, the father of French style. The masses meanwhile continued to solace or distract their weariness and their sufferings with the help of the accredited ministers of that half-cynical gaiety which has always lighted up the darkest hours of French popular life. In the troublous days preceding Richelieu's definitive accession to power (1624), the _tabarinades_--a kind of street dialogue recalling the earliest days of the popular drama--had made the Pont-Neuf the favourite theatre of the Parisian populace. Meanwhile the influence of Spain, which Henry IV. had overcome in politics, had throughout his reign and afterwards been predominant in other spheres, and not the least in that of literature. The _stilo culto_, of which Gongora was the native Spanish, Marino the Italian, and Lyly the English representative, asserted its dominion over the favourite authors of French society; the pastoral romance of Honoré d'Urfé--the text-book of pseudo-pastoral gallantry--was the parent of the romances of the Scudérys, de La Calprenède and Mme de La Fayette; the Hôtel de Rambouillet was in its glory; the true (not the false) _précieuses_ sat on the heights of intellectual society; and J. L. G. de Balzac (ridiculed in the earliest French dramatic parody)[95] and Voiture were the dictators of its literature. Much of the French drama of this age is of the same kind as its romance-literature, like which it fell under the polite castigation of Boileau's satire. Heroic love (quite a technical passion), "fertile in tender sentiments," seized hold of the theatre as well as of the romances; and La Calprenède, G. de Scudéry[96] and his sister and others were equally fashionable in both species. The Gascon Cyrano de Bergerac, though not altogether insignificant as a dramatist,[97] gained his chief literary reputation by a Rabelaisian fiction. Meanwhile, Spanish and Italian models continued to influence both branches of the drama. Everybody knew by heart Gongora's version of the story of "young Pyramus and his love Thisbe," as dramatized by Th. Viaud (1590-1626); and the sentiment of Tristan[98] (1601-1655) overpowered Herod on the stage, and drew tears from Cardinal Richelieu in the audience. J. Mairet was noted for superior vigour.[99] P. Du Ryer's style is described as, while otherwise superior to that of his contemporaries, Italian in its defects. A mixture of the forms of classical comedy with elements of Spanish and of the Italian pastoral was attempted with great temporary success by A. Hardy, a playwright who thanked Heaven that he knew the precepts of his art while preferring to follow the demands of his trade. The mixture of styles begun by him was carried on by the marquis de Racan,[100] J. de Rotrou and others; and among these comedies of intrigue in the Spanish manner the earliest efforts of Corneille himself[101] are to be classed. Rotrou's noteworthier productions[102] are later in date than the event which marks an epoch in the history of the French drama, the appearance of Corneille's _Cid_ (1636).

Corneille.

P. Corneille is justly revered as the first, and in some respects the unequalled, great master of French tragedy, whatever may have been unsound in his theories, or defective in his practice. The attempts of his predecessors had been without life, because they lacked really tragic characters and the play of really tragic passions; while their style had been either pedantically imitative or a medley of plagiarisms. He conquered tragedy at once for the national theatre and for the national literature--and this, not by a long tentative process of production, but by a few masterpieces, which may be held to be comprehended within the ten years 1636 to 1646; for in his many later tragedies he never again proved fully equal to himself. The French tragedy, of which the great age begins with the _Cid_, _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_ and _Rodogune_, was not, whatever it professed to be, a copy of the classical tragedy of Greeks or Romans, or an imitation of the Italian imitations of these; nor, though in his later tragedies Corneille depended less and less upon characters, and more and more, after the fashion of the Spaniards, upon situations, and even upon spectacle, were the forms of the Spanish drama able to assert their dominion over the French tragic stage. The mould of French tragedy was cast by Corneille; but the creative power of his genius was unable to fill it with more than a few examples. His range of passions and characters was limited; he preferred, he said, the reproach of having made his women too heroic to that of having made his men effeminate. His

## actions inclined too much to the exhibition of conflicts political

rather than broadly ethical in their significance. The defects of his style are of less moment; but in this, as in other respects, he was, with all his strength and brilliancy, not one of those rarest of artists who are at the same time the example and the despair of their successors. The _examens_ which he printed of all his plays up to 1660 show how much self-criticism (though it may not always be as in this case conscious) contributes to the true fertility of genius.

In comedy also Corneille begins the first great original epoch of French dramatic literature; for it was to him that Molière owed the inspiration of the tone and style which he made those of the higher forms of French comedy. But _Le Menteur_ (the parent, with its sequel, of a numerous dramatic progeny[103]) was itself derived from a Spanish original,[104] which it did not (as was the case with the _Cid_) transform into something new. French tragi-comedy Corneille can hardly be said to have invented;[105] and of the mongrel growths of sentimental comedy and of domestic drama or _drame_, he rather suggested than exemplified the conditions.

Racine.

The tragic art of Racine supplements rather than surpasses that of his older contemporary. His works reflect the serene and settled formality of an age in which the sun of monarchy shone with an effulgence no clouds seemed capable of obscuring, and in which the life of a nation seemed reducible to the surroundings of a court. The tone of the poetic literature of such an age is not necessarily unreal, because the range of its ideas is limited, and because its forms seem to exist by an immutable authority. That Racine should permanently hold the position which belongs to him in French dramatic literature is due to the fact that to him it was given to present these forms--the forms approved by his age--in what may reasonably be called perfection; and, from the point of view of workmanship, Sophocles could not have achieved more. What his plays contain is another question. They suit themselves so well to the successive phases in the life of Louis XIV., that Madame de Sévigné described Racine as having in his later years loved God as he had formerly loved his mistresses; and this sally at all events indicates the range of passions which inspired his tragic muse. His heroes are all of one type--that of a gracious gloriousness; his heroines vary in their fortunes, but they are all the "trophies of love,"[106] with the exception of the scriptural figures, which stand apart from the rest.[107] T. Corneille, Campistron, Joseph Duché (1668-1704), Antoin de Lafosse (c. 1653-1708) and Quinault were mere followers of one or both of the great masters of tragedy, though the last named achieved a reputation of his own in the bastard species of the opera.

Characteristics of French classical tragedy.

The type of French tragedy thus established, like everything else which formed part of the "age of Louis XIV.," proclaimed itself as the definitively settled model of its kind, and was accepted as such by a submissive world. Proud of its self-imposed fetters, French tragedy dictatorially denied the liberty of which it had deprived itself to the art of which it claimed to furnish the highest examples. Yet, though calling itself classical, it had not caught the essential spirit of the tragedy of the Greeks. The elevation of tone which characterizes the serious drama of the age of Louis XIV. is a true elevation, but its heights do not lose themselves in a sphere peopled by the myths of a national religion, still less in the region of great thoughts which ask Heaven to stoop to the aspirations and the failures of man. The personages of this drama are conventional like its themes, but the convention is with itself only; Orestes and Iphigenia have not brought with them the cries of the stern goddesses and the flame on the altar of Artemis; their passions like their speech are cadenced by a modern measure. In construction, the simplicity and regularity of the ancient models are stereotyped into a rigid etiquette by the exigencies of the court-theatre, which is but an apartment of the palace. The unities of time and place, with the Greeks mere rules of convenience, French tragedy imposes upon itself as a permanent yoke. The Euripidean prologue is judiciously exchanged for the exposition of the first act, and the lyrical element essential to Greek tragedy is easily suppressed in its would-be copy; lyrical passages still occur in some of Corneille's early masterpieces,[108] but the chorus is consistently banished, to reappear only in Racine's latest works[109] as a scholastic experiment appropriate to a conventual atmosphere. Its uses for explanation and comment are served by the expedient, which in its turn becomes conventional, of the conversations with _confidants_ and _confidantes_, which more than sufficiently supply the foil of general sentiments. The epical element is allowed full play in narrative passages, more especially in those which relate parts of the catastrophe,[110] and, while preserving the stage intact from realisms, suit themselves to the generally rhetorical character of this species of the tragic drama. This character impressed itself more and more upon the tragic art of a rhetorical nation in an age when the loftiest themes were in the pulpit receiving the most artistic oratorical treatment, and developed in the style of French classical tragedy the qualities which cause it to become something between prose and poetry--or to appear (in the phrase of a French critic) like prose in full dress. The force of this description is borne out by the fact that the distinction between the versification of French tragedy and that of French comedy seems at times imperceptible.

Voltaire.

The universal genius of Voltaire found it necessary to shine in all branches of literature, and in tragedy to surpass predecessors whom his own authority declared to have surpassed the efforts of the Attic muse. He succeeded in impressing the world with the belief that his innovations had imparted a fresh vitality to French tragedy; in truth, however, they represent no essential advance in art, but rather augmented the rhetorical tendency which paralyses true dramatic life. Such life as his plays possess lies in their political and social sentiments, their invective against tyranny,[111] and their exposure of fanaticism.[112] In other respects his versatility was barren of enduring results. He might take his themes from French history,[113] or from Chinese,[114] or Egyptian,[115] or Syrian,[116] from the days of the Epigoni[117] or from those of the Crusades;[118] he might appreciate Shakespeare, with a more or less partial comprehension of his strength, and condescendingly borrow from and improve the barbarian.[119] But he added nothing to French tragedy where it was weakest--in character; and where it was strongest--in diction--he never equalled Corneille in fire or Racine in refinement. While the criticism to which French tragedy in this age at last began to be subjected has left unimpaired the real titles to immortality of its great masters, the French theatre itself has all but buried in respectful oblivion the dramatic works bearing the name of Voltaire--a name persistently belittled, but second to none in the history of modern progress and of modern civilization.

French classical tragedy in its decline.

As it is of relatively little interest to note the ramifications of an art in its decline, the contrasts need not be pursued among the contemporaries of Voltaire, between his imitator Bernard Joseph Saurin (1706-1781), Saurin's royalist rival de Belloy, Racine's imitator Lagrange-Chancel and Voltaire's own would-be rival, the "terrible" Crébillon the elder, who professed to vindicate to French tragedy, already mistress of the heavens through Corneille, and of the earth through Racine, Pluto's supplementary realm, but who, though thus essaying to carry tragedy lower, failed to carry it farther. In the latter part of the 18th century French classical tragedy as a literary growth was dying a slow death, however numerous might be the leaves which sprouted from the decaying tree. Its form had been permanently fixed; and even Shakespeare, as manipulated by Ducis[120]--an author whose tastes were better than his times--failed to bring about a change. "It is a Moor, not a Frenchman, who has written this play," cried a spectator of Ducis' _Othello_ (1791); but Talma's conviction was almost as strong as his capacity was great for convincing his public; and he certainly did much to prepare the influence which Shakespeare was gradually to assert over the French drama, and which was aided by translations, more especially that of Pierre Letourneur (1736-1788), which had attracted the sympathy of Diderot and the execrations of the aged Voltaire.[121] Meanwhile, the command which classical French tragedy continued to assert over the stage was due in part, no doubt, to the love of Roman drapery--not always abundant, but always in the grand style--which characterized the Revolution, and which was by the Revolution handed down to the Empire. It was likewise, and more signally, due to the great actors who freed the tragic stage from much of its artificiality and animated it by their genius. No great artist has ever more generously estimated the labours of a predecessor than Talma judged those of Le Kain; but it was Talma himself whose genius was pre-eminently fitted to reproduce the great figures of antiquity in the mimic world, which, like the world outside, both required and possessed its Caesar. He, like Rachel after him, reconciled French classical tragedy with nature; and it is upon the art of great original actors such as these that the theatrical future of this form of the drama in France depends. Mere whims of fashion--even when inspired by political feeling--will not waft back to it a real popularity; nor will occasional literary aftergrowths, however meritorious, such as the admirable _Lucrèce_ of F. Ponsard and the attempts of even more recent writers, suffice to re-establish a living union between it and the progress of the national literature.

Comedy.

Molière.