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 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; Marmontel, as well as Rousseau, 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, in its latter development became merely a drama accentuated by music, though usually in little need of any accentuation.

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 —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.

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; 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 and George Sand, neither of whom, however, attained to the highest rank in the drama, and Jules Sandeau; 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; 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.

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 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. While the theatrical fecundity and the remarkable constructive ability of E. Scribe 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 and E. Legouvé. 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. 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. 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, 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.

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