Part 7

The rival influences under which classical tragedy has after a long struggle virtually become a thing of the past in French literature are also to be traced in the history of French comedy, which under the co-operation of other influences produced a wide variety of growths. The germs of most of these--though not of all--are to be found in the works of the most versatile, the most sure-footed, and, in some respects, the most consummate master of the comic drama whom the world has known--Molière. What Molière found in existence was a comedy of intrigue, derived from Spanish or Italian examples, and the elements of a comedy of character, in French and more especially in Italian farce and ballet-pantomime. Corneille's _Menteur_ had pointed the way to a fuller combination of character with intrigue, and in this direction Molière's genius exercised the height of its creative powers. After beginning with farces, he produced in the earliest of his plays (from 1652), of which more than fragments remain, comedies of intrigue which are at the same time marvellously lively pictures of manners, and then proceeded, with the _École des maris_ (1661), to begin a long series of masterpieces of comedy of character. Yet even these, the chief of which are altogether unrivalled in dramatic literature, do not exhaust the variety of his productions. To define the range of his art is as difficult as to express in words the essence of his genius. For though he has been copied ever since he wrote, neither his spirit nor his manner has descended in full to any of his copyists, whole schools of whom have missed elements of both. A Molière can only be judged in his relations to the history of comedy at large. He was indeed the inheritor of many forms and styles--remaining a stranger to those of Old Attic comedy only, rooted as it was in the political life of a free imperial city; though even the rich extravagances of Aristophanes' burlesque was not left wholly unreproduced by him. Molière is both a satirist and a humorist; he displays at times the sentiments of a loyal courtier, at others that gay spirit of opposition which is all but indispensable to a popular French wit. His comedies offer elaborate and subtle--even tender--pictures of human character in its eternal types, lively sketches of social follies and literary extravagances, and broad appeals to the ordinary sources of vulgar merriment. Light and perspicuous in construction, he is master of the delicate play of irony, the penetrating force of wit, and the expansive gaiety of frolicsome fun. Faithful to the canons of artistic taste, and under the sure guidance of true natural humour, his style suits itself to every species attempted by him. His morality is the reverse of rigid, but its aberrations are not those of prurience, nor its laws those of pretence; and, wholly free as he was from the didactic aim which is foreign to all true dramatic representation, the services rendered by him to his art are not the less services rendered to society, concerning which the laughter of genuine comedy tells the truth. He raised the comedy of character out of the lower sphere of caricature, and in his greatest creations subordinated to the highest ends of all dramatic composition the plots he so skilfully built, and the pictures of the manners he so faithfully reproduced.

Molière's contemporaries and successors.

Even among the French comic dramatists of this age there must have been many who "were not aware" that Molière was its greatest poet. For though he had made the true path luminous to them, their efforts were still often of a tentative kind, and one was reviving _Pathelin_ while another was translating the _Andria_. A more unique attempt was made in one of the very few really modern versions of an Aristophanic comedy, which deserves to be called an original copy--the _Plaideurs_ of Racine. The tragic poets Quinault and Campistron likewise wrote comedies, one[122] or more of which furnished materials to contemporary English dramatists, as did one of the felicitous plays in which Boursault introduced Mercury and Aesop into the theatrical _salon_.[123] Antoine Montfleury (1640-1685), Baron and Dancourt, who were actors like Molière, likewise wrote comedies. But if the mantle of Molière can be said to have fallen upon any of his contemporaries or successors, this honour must be ascribed to J. F. Regnard, who imitated the great master in both themes and characters,[124] while the skilfulness of his plots, and his gaiety of the treatment even of subjects tempting into the by-path of sentimental comedy,[125] entitle him to be regarded as a comic poet of original genius. With him C. R. Dufresny occasionally collaborated.

In the next generation (that of Voltaire) comedy gradually--but only gradually--surrendered for a time the very essence of its vitality to the seductions of a hybrid species, which disguised its identity under more than a single name. A. R. le Sage, who as a comic dramatist at first followed successfully in the footsteps of Molière, proved himself on the stage as well as in picturesque fiction a keen observer and inimitable satirist of human life.[126] The light texture of the playful and elegant art of J. B. L. Gresset was shown on the stage in a character comedy of merit;[127] and in a comedy which reveals something of his pointed wit, A. Piron produced something like a new type of enduring ridiculousness.[128] P. C. de Marivaux, the French _Spectator_, is usually supposed to have formed the connecting link between the "old" French comedy and the "new" and bastard variety. Yet, though his minute analysis of the tender passion excited the scorn of Voltaire, it should not be overlooked that in _marivaudage_ proper the wit holds the balance to the sentiment, and that in some of this frequently misjudged writer's earlier and most delightful plays the elegance and gaiety of diction are as irresistible as the pathetic sentiment, which is in fact rather an ingredient in his comedy than the pervading characteristic of it.[129] Some of the comedies of P. H. Destouches no doubt have a serious basis, and in his later plays he comes near to a kind of drama in which the comic purpose has been virtually submerged.[130] The writer who is actually to be credited with the transition to sentimental comedy, and who was fully conscious of the change which he was helping to effect, was Nivelle de La Chaussée, in whose hands French comedy became a champion of the sanctity of marriage, and reproduced the sentiments--in one instance even the characters--of Richardson.[131] To his play _La Fausse Antipathie_ the author supplied a _critique_, amounting to an apology for the new species of which it was designed as an example.

The new species known as _comédie larmoyante_ was now fairly in the ascendant; and it would be easy to show how even Voltaire, who had deprecated the innovation, had to yield to a power greater than his own, and introduced the sentimental element into some of his comedies.[132] The further step, by which _comédie larmoyante_ was transformed into _tragédie bourgeoise_, from which the comic element was to all intents and purposes extruded, was taken by a great French writer, D. Diderot; to whose influence it was largely due that the species which had attained to this consummation for more than a generation ruled supreme in the dramatic literature of Europe. But the final impulse, as Diderot himself virtually acknowledged in the _entretiens_ subjoined by him to his _Fils naturel_ (1757), had been given by a far humbler citizen of the world of letters, the author of _The London Merchant_. Diderot's own plays were a literary rather than a theatrical success. _Le Fils naturel ou les épreuves de la vertu_ was not publicly performed till 1771, and then only in deference to the determination of a single actor of the Français (Molé); nor was the performance of it repeated. Diderot's second play, _Le Père de famille_, printed in 1758 with a _Discours sur la poésie dramatique_, went through a few public performances in 1761; and a later revival was unsuccessful. But "at a distance," as was well said, the effect of Diderot's endeavours, the earlier in particular, was extremely great, and Lessing, though very critical as to particular points, greatly helped to spread it. Diderot had for the first time consciously sought to proclaim the theatre an agency of social reform, and to entrust to it as its task the propagation of the gospel of philanthropy. Though the execution of his dramatic works fell far short of his aims; though Madame de Staël was not far wrong in denouncing them as exhibiting not nature itself, but "the affectation of nature," yet they contained, in a measure almost unequalled in the history of the modern drama, the fermenting element which never seems to subside. Their author announced them as examples of a third dramatic form--the _genre sérieux_--which he declared to be the consummation of the dramatic art. Making war upon the frigid artificiality of classical tragedy, he banished verse from the new species. The effect of these plays was intended to spring from their truth to nature--a truth such as no spectator could mistake, and which should bring home its moral teachings to the business as well as the bosoms of all. The theatre was to become a real and realistic school of the principles of society and of the conduct of life--it was, in other words, to usurp functions with which it has no concern, and to essay the direct reformation of mankind. The idea was neither new nor just; but its speciousness will probably continue to commend it to many enthusiastic minds, whensoever and in whatsoever shape it is revived.

The comedy of the Revolution and the first empire.

Vaudevilles, etc.

From this point the history of the French drama becomes that of a conflict between an enfeebled artistic school and a tendency which is hardly to be dignified by the name of a school at all. Among the successful dramatists following on Diderot may be mentioned the critical and versatile J. F. Marmontel, and more especially M. J. Sedaine, who though chiefly working for the opera, produced two comedies of acknowledged merit.[133] P. A. C. de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), who for his early sentimental plays,[134] in which he imitated Diderot, invented the appellation _drame_--so convenient in its vagueness that it became the accepted name of the hybrid species to which they belonged--in two works of a very different kind, the famous _Barbier de Séville_ and the still more famous _Mariage de Figaro_, boldly carried comedy back into its old Spanish atmosphere of intrigue; but, while surpassing all his predecessors in the skill with which he constructed his frivolous plots, he drew his characters with a lightness and sureness of touch peculiar to himself, animated his dialogue with an unparalleled brilliancy of wit, and seasoned action as well as dialogue with a political and social meaning, which caused his epigrams to become proverbs, and which marks his _Figaro_ as a herald of the Revolution. Such plays as these were ill suited to the rule of the despot whose vigilance could not overlook their significance. The comedy of the empire is, in the hands of Collin d'Harleville, Louis Picard (1769-1828), A. Duval, Étienne and others, mainly a harmless comedy of manners; nor was the attempted innovation of N. Lemercier--who was fain to invent a new species, that of historical comedy--more than a flattering self-delusion. The theatre had its share in all the movements and changes which ensued in France; though the most important revolution which the drama itself was to undergo was not one of wholly native origin. Those branches of the drama which belong specifically to the history of the opera, or which associate themselves with it, are here passed by. Among them was the _vaudeville_ (from Val de Vire in Calvados), which began as an interspersion of pantomime with the airs of popular songs, and which, after the Italian masks had been removed from it, was cultivated by Ponsard and Marmontel, while Sedaine wrote a didactic poem on the subject (1756). Sedaine was the father of the _opéra-comique_ proper;[135] Marmontel,[136] as well as Rousseau,[137] likewise composed _opérettes_--a smaller sort of opera, at first of the pastoral variety; and these flexible species easily entered into combination. The melodrama proper, of which the invention is also attributed to Rousseau,[138] in its latter development became merely a drama accentuated by music, though usually in little need of any accentuation.

The stage.

Transition to the romantic school.

The chief home of the regular drama, however, demanded efforts of another kind. At the Théâtre Français, or Comédie Française, whose history as that of a single company of actors had begun in 1680, the party-strife of the times made itself audible; and the most prominent tragic poet of the Revolution, M. J. de Chénier, a disciple of Voltaire in dramatic poetry as well as in political philosophy, wrote for the national stage the historical drama--with a political moral[139]--in which in the memorable year 1789 the actor Talma achieved his first complete triumph. But the victorious Revolution proclaimed among other liberties that of the theatres in Paris, of which soon not less than 50 were open. In 1807 the empire restricted the number to 9, and reinstated the Théâtre Français in sole possession (or nearly such) of the right of performing the classic drama. No writer of note was, however, tempted or inspired by the rewards and other encouragements offered by Napoleon to produce such a classic tragedy as the emperor would have willingly stamped from out of the earth. The tragedies of C. Delavigne represent the transition from the expiring efforts of the classical to the ambitious beginnings of the romantic school of the French drama.

The romantic school.

Of modern romantic drama in France it must suffice to say that it derives some of its characteristics from the general movement of romanticism which in various ways and at various points of time transformed nearly every modern European literature, others from the rhetorical tendency which is a French national feature. Victor Hugo was the founder whom it followed in a spirit of high emprise to success upon success, his own being the most conspicuous of all;[140] A. Dumas the elder its unshrinking middleman. The marvellous fire and grandeur of genius of the former, always in extremes but often most sublime at the height of danger, was nowhere more signally such than in the drama; Dumas was a Briareus, working, however, with many hands besides his own. Together with them may, with more or less precision, be classed in the romantic school of dramatists A. de Vigny[141] and George Sand,[142] neither of whom, however, attained to the highest rank in the drama, and Jules Sandeau;[143] A. de Musset, whose originality pervades all his plays, but whose later works, more especially in his prose "proverbs" and pieces of a similar kind, have a flavour of a delicacy altogether indescribable;[144] perhaps also P. Mérimée (1803-1870), who invented not only Spanish dramas but a Spanish dramatist, and who was never more audacious than when he seemed most _naïf_.[145]

Modern schools.

The romantic school was not destined to exercise a permanent control over French public taste; but it can hardly be said to have been overthrown by the brief classical revival begun by F. Ponsard, and continued, though in closer contact with modern ideas, both by him[146] and by E. Augier, a dramatist who gradually attained to an extraordinary effectiveness in the self-restrained treatment of social as well as of historical themes.[147] While the theatrical fecundity and the remarkable constructive ability of E. Scribe[148] supplied a long series of productions attesting the rapid growth of the playwright's mastery over the secrets of his craft the name of his competitors is legion. Among them may be mentioned, if only as the authors of two of the most successful plays of the historical species produced in the century, two writers of great eminence--C. Delavigne[149] and E. Legouvé.[150] Later developments of the drama bore the impress of a period of social decay, prepared to probe its own sufferings, while glad at times to take refuge in the gaiety traditional in France in her more light-hearted days, but which even then had not yet deserted either French social life or the theatre which reflected it. After a fashion which would have startled even Diderot, while recalling his efforts in the earnestness of its endeavour to arouse moral interests to which the theatre had long been a stranger, A. Dumas the younger set himself to reform society by means of the stage.[151] But the technical skill which he and contemporary dramatists displayed in the execution of their self-imposed task was such as had been undreamt of by Diderot. O. Feuillet, more eminent as a novelist than on the stage, applied himself, though with the aid of fewer prefaces, to the solution of the same or similar problems; while the extraordinary versatility of V. Sardou and his unfailing constructive skill was applied by him to almost every kind of serious, or serio-comic, drama--even the most solid of all.[152] In the same period, while E. Pailleron revived some of the most characteristic tendencies of the best French satirical comedy in ridiculing the pompous pretentiousness of learning for its own sake,[153] the light-hearted gaiety of E. Labiche changed into something not altogether similar in the productions of the comic muse of L. Halévy and H. Meilhac, ranging from the licence of the musical burlesque which was the congenial delight of the later days of the Second Empire to a species of comedy in which the ingredients of bitterness and even of sadness found a place.[154]

Tendencies of the drama and of the theatre in France.

Dramatic criticism in France has had a material share in the maintenance of a deep as well as wide national interest in the preservation of a high standard of excellence both in the performance of plays and in the plays themselves. Among its modern representatives the foremost place would probably be by common consent allowed to F. Sarcey, whose Monday theatrical _feuilleton_ in the _Temps_ was long awaited week by week as an oracle of dramaturgy. But he was only the first among equals, and the successor and the predecessor of writers who have at least sought to be equal to a function of real public importance. For it seems hardly within the range of probability to suppose that the theatre will for many a generation to come lose the hold which it has established over the intellectual and moral sympathies of nearly the whole of the educated--to say nothing of a great part of the half-educated--population of France. This does not, of course, imply that the creative activity of French dramatic literature is certain to endure. Since the great changes set in which were consequent upon the disastrous war of 1870, French dramatic literature has reflected more than one phase of national sentiment and opinion, and has represented the aspirations, the sympathies and the philosophy of life of more than one class in the community. Thus it has had its episodes of reaction in the midst of an onward flow of which it would be difficult to predict the end. The tendency of what can only vaguely be described as the naturalistic school of writers has corresponded to that even more prominent in the dramatic literatures of certain other European nations; but it must be allowed that a new poetic will have to be constructed if the freedom of development which the dramatic, like all other arts, is entitled to claim is to be reconciled to laws deducible from the whole previous history of the drama. The reaction towards earlier forms has asserted itself in various ways--through the poetic plays of the later years of F. Coppée; in the success (notable for reasons other than artistic) of Vicomte H. de Bornier's first tragedy; and of late more especially in the dramas--highly original and truly romantic in both form and treatment--of E. Rostand.

The art of acting is not altogether dependent upon the measure of contemporary literary productivity, even in France, where the connexion between dramatic literature and the stage has perhaps been more continuously intimate than in many other countries. Talma and Mlle Mars flourished in one of the most barren ages of the French literary drama; and though this cannot be asserted of the two most brilliant stars of the French 19th century tragic stage, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, or of their comic contemporaries from Frédérick-Lemaître down to types less unique than the "Talma of the boulevards," the constantly accumulating experience of the successive schools of acting in France may here ensure to the art a future not less notable than its past. Moreover, the French theatre has long been, and is more than ever likely to continue, an affair of the state as well as of the nation; and the judicious policy of not leaving the chief theatres at the mercy of shifting fashion and the base demands of idleness and sensuality will remain the surest guarantee for the maintenance of a high standard both in principle and in practice. So long as France continues to maintain her ascendancy over other nations in matters of taste, and in much else that adorns, brightens and quickens social life, the predominant influence of the French theatre over the theatres of other nations is likewise assured. But dramatic literature is becoming international to a degree hardly dreamt of half a century ago; and the distinctive development of the French theatre cannot fail to be affected by the success or failure of the national drama in retaining and developing its own most characteristic qualities. Its history shows periods of marvellously rapid advance, of hardly less swift decline, and of frequent though at times fitful recovery. Its future may be equally varied; but it will remain not less dependent on the conditions which in every people, ancient or modern, have proved to be indispensable to national vigour and vitality. (A. W. W.)