Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/447

427 FRENCH.] D K A M A 427 France ; but the impulse which gave rise to the revolu tion the drama itself was to undergo was not one of 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. (See OPERA). 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 Pousurd (1690-1765) and Marmontel (1723-1799). The latter, 1 as well as Rousseau, 2 likewise composed operettes a smaller kind of opera, at first of the pastoral sort ; and these flexible species easily entered into combination. The melodrama proper, of which the invention is also attributed to Rousseau, 3 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 Theatre Frangais, or Comedie Frangaise, 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 Chenier (1764-1811), 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 4 in which in the memorable year 1789 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 Theatre Frangais 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 out of the earth. The tragedies of C. Delavigne (17941844) represent the transition from the expiring efforts of the classical to the ambitious beginnings of the romantic school of the French drama. Of this 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 trans formed nearly every modern European literature, others from the rhetorical tendency which is a French national feature. Victor Hugo was its conquering founder; A. Dumas the elder (1803-1870) its middleman. The marvellous energy and poetic genius of the former, always in extremes, was nowhere more signally so than in the drama ; the latter was a Briareus, working with many hands besides his own. The name of A. de Vigny (1799-1863), &quot; George Sand &quot; (1804- 1876), A. de Musset (1810-1857), whose dramatic &quot; proverbes &quot; and other pieces of a similar kind have a delicate flavour all their own, and perhaps that of P. Me rimee (1803-1870), who invented not only Spanish dramas but a Spanish dramatist, 5 may be all with more or less precision classed in the romantic school, which in its turn has come to an end as a productive body of writers. It was not, however, the brief classical revival begun by F. Ponsard, and continued, in closer relation to modern ideas, both by him and by E. Augier, which overthrew the Romanticists. While the theatrical ability of E. Scribe (1791-1858) supplied a long series of productions attest- ing the rapid advance of the playwright s mastery over the secrets of his craft, and while the name of his competitors, with the aid of some of whom he held his own against the rest, is legion, the latest developments of the French drama 1 Zemire et A zor; Jeannot et Jeannette. 2 Lcs Muses Galcmtes; Le Devin du Village. Thedtre de Clara Gazul. possess a social and often a moral interest of greater depth, while they are not inferior in technical skill to anything that has preceded them. After a fashion which would have startled even Diderot, the younger A. Dumas has under taken to reform society by means of the stage ; O. Feuillet and others have, with perhaps fewer prefaces, applied themselves to the solution of the same &quot; problems ; &quot; and whatever style will best succeed with the public is the style of V. Sardou. That the theatre will lose the hold it possesses over the The fu intellectual and moral sympathies of nearly the whole , of the educated, and of a great part of the uneducated t] iea t re population of France, seems hardly within the range of of the probability. But this is not tantamount to a prophecy French that the creative activity of French dramatic literature draina - is certain to endure. The art of acting is not depen dent upon a contemporary literary productivity ; Talma and Mdlle. Mars (1779-1847) flourished in one of the most barren ages of the French literary drama ; the authors and actors of the softies, like those of the Palais Royal farces of our own day, could strike their roots in the lightest of soils. The constantly accumulating experience and the apparently inexhaustible fertility of the art of acting in France may ensure to it a future not less brilliant than its past ; and the judicious policy of not leaving the lead ing theatres at the mercy of shifting fashion will at all events supply the possibility of maintaining a high histrionic standard. So long as the French nation continues to main tain its ascendency over other nations in much that adorns and brightens social life, the predominant influence of the French theatre over the theatres of other nations is likewise assured. But in the end its own future must be ruled by that progress or decay of French dramatic literature. The history of that literature shows periods of marvellously rapid advance, of hardly less swift decline, and of frequent though fitful recovery. Its future may be equally varied ; but it will not be less dependent on the conditions which in every people, ancient or modern, are indispensable to national vigour and vitality. Should the calamity- for it would be nothing less befall modern civilization of a hope less degeneration of the French drama, the fault will lie in the severance of self-consciousness from self-control ; and, under other circumstances, but with even deeper regret, the story of the Roman theatre of the later Empire may have to be told aain. Among the nations of Germanic descent, but one our own succeeded under the influence of the Renai ? sance movement in transforming the last growths of the mediaeval drama into the beginnings of a great and enduring national dramatic literature. This transformation connects itself with one of the greatest epochs of the national history, or, more properly speaking, forms part of it ; the Elizabethan drama and the Elizabethan age are, it is no exaggeration to assert, equally inconceivable the one without the other. It has been seen how already in the reign of Edward VI., the breath of a new age with its &quot; new learning &quot; had quickened the relatively inanimate species of the morality into the first chronicle history (still intermingled with remnants of the earlier species) ; and how at an even earlier date John Heywood s interludes had bridged the distance separating from only partially relieved abstractions the con crete directness of comedy proper. Soon afterwards, the study and imitation of the ancient classical drama were in troduced into the English world of letters ; and under their influence tragedy and comedy, which might otherwise have from the first coalesced, were in their early growths ic our literature kept asunder, though not absolutely so. Already, iu Queen Mary s reign, translation was found the readiest form of expression offering itself to literary scholar- Bcgim of the r, egu
 * i Pyrpialion. * Charles IX. ou I ticole des Rois.