Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/344

324 and Rotrou. Corneille's experiment was the most interesting—an endeavour to paint the life of Paris, not satirically, but realistically and comically, suggestive of one aspect of Jonson's comedies and of the Tatler. Pierre du Ryer's Les Vendanges de Suresnes (1635) was an experiment in the same direction, a study of the manners of the rich bourgeois class framed in the improbable plot of the pastoral drama. Once revived, however, comedy came under the prevailing influence of the Spanish drama. Corneille himself in Le Menteur and its successor, Rotrou in La Bague d'Oubli and Diane, Scarron in his burlesque Jodelet ou le Maître valet and Don Japhet d'Arménie and others, translate and adapt from the Spanish; and the general trend of this comedy is towards burlesque, the study of humours more extravagant but presented with less accumulation of detail than Jonson's. An excellent example is Les Visionnaires (1640) of Desmarests Saint-Sorlin, the confidant and useful servant in onerous offices of Richelieu. It is a comedy quite in the style of Jonson, from the preface explaining the "humours" of the characters to the interesting discussion of the Unities between the lady whose passion is the stage and the Ronsardising poet. But Saint-Sorlin's boasting captain is more like the captain of the Commedia dell' Arte than Boabadil. The scene of the play would require for probability to be the inside of an asylum. It was not to these burlesque polite comedies that Molière's work is most closely akin, but to the native and older farce, as is set forth in the next volume.