Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/80

Rh been the active part played by the stage in France during these forty years, its incalculable fertility and its insatiable absorption of talent and ingenuity. Buried authors and actors are packed away in Gautier's pages as on the shelves of an immense mausoleum; and if, here and there, they exhibit the vivifying touch of the embalmer, the spectacle is on the whole little less lugubrious. It takes away one's breath to think of the immense consumption of witticisms involved in the development of civilization. Gautier's volumes seem an enormous monument to the shadowy swarm of jokes extinct and plots defunct—dim-featured ghosts, still haunting the lawless circumference of literature in pious confidence that the transmigration of souls will introduce them to the foot-lights again. Gautier's dealings with the theatre were altogether those of a spectator; for the little comedies collected in the volume which forms the text of our remarks are not of the sort approved by managers. They are matters of colour, not of structure, and masterpieces of style rather than of "effect." The best of them, the "Tricorne Enchanté, Bastonnade en un Acte, et en Vers, Mêlée d'un Couplet," has been represented since the author's death, but, we believe, with only partial success. The piece is a pastiche, suggested by various sources—Molière, Goldoni, the old prints