Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/537

 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. 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, while the skilfulness of his plots, and his gaiety of the treatment even of subjects tempting into the by-path of sentimental comedy, 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. 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; and in a comedy which reveals something of his pointed wit, A. Piron produced something like a new type of enduring ridiculousness. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. P. A. C. de Beaumarchais (1732–1799), who for his early sentimental plays, 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