French drama

“ We speak of the old French Drama: with the modern we do not profess to be acquainted, having met with scarcely any specimens in our own bookstores or libraries; but if it has been revolutionized with the rest of their literature, it is probably as unlike as possible to the former models. ”

“ The modern French drama, so far as I am acquainted with it, is a disease. It deals with the abnormal. It is fashioned after Balzac. It exhibits moral tumors, mental cancers and all kinds of abnormal fungi,—excrescences. Everything is stood on its head; virtue lives in the brothel; the good are the really bad and the worst are, after all, the best. It portrays the exceptional, and mistakes the scum-covered bayou for the great river. The French dramatists seem to think that the ceremony of marriage sows the seed of vice. ”

“ For ourselves, we believe the day of the regular drama to be past; and, though we recognize the need of some kind of spectacle and dramatic representation to be absolutely coincident with an animated state of the public mind, we have thought that the opera, ballet, pantomime and briefer, more elastic forms, like the vaudeville of the French theatre, or the proverb of the social party, would take the place of elaborate tragedy and comedy. ”

“ Gorgeousness of mounting has ceased to help managers; even the maidens in their teens have grown sophisticated, and jeer at the bread-and-butter love-stories; and successful modern French drama offers a much smaller proportion of adaptable plays than used to be the case. ”

“ The origins of the drama in France, like most other points affecting mediaeval literature, have been made the subject of a good deal of dispute. It has been attempted, on the one hand, to father the mysteries and miracle-plays of the twelfth and later centuries on the classical drama, traditions of which are supposed to have been preserved in the monasteries and other homes of learning. ”

“ It is perhaps one of the strongest arguments in favour of the general plan of the English drama, and one of the best proofs that dramatic poetry ought to be judged by very different principles from those by which other kinds of poetry are criticised, that one of the principal merits of the French actors consists in hiding the chief peculiarities of their own dramatic school. ”

“ If the art of the drama, as a great French master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations, that is true only to a less extent of the art of the novel, and true exactly in the degree in which the art of the particular novel comes near that of the drama. The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely unequal. ”

“ To sum up, the French, as regards the present condition of their drama, were confronted with two alternative movements. Naturalism, furthered by science and philosophy, was contending against traditions three centuries old, and seemed unable to crystallize into masterly works; while romantic drama, founded on vague and exploded theories, had become embodied in productions of real artistic beauty, which have been warmly welcomed by the general playgoer. ”

“ Intrigue is not, in itself, a Tragical motive; to Comedy, it is essential, as we have already shown. Comedy, even at its close, must often be satisfied with mere suppositions for the understanding; but this is by no means the poetic side of this demi-prosaic species of the Drama. Although the French Tragedy endeavours in the details of execution to rise by earnestness, dignity, and pathos, as high as possible above Comedy, in its general structure and composition, it still bears, in my opinion, but too close an affinity to it. ”

“ Bulwer, Victor Hugo, Janin, and Eugene Sue. What success have they had? What sort of things are they? We pass over the horrors, the indecency, adulterous incest, and murders of the modern French drama, founded on the romances of three popular and imaginative novelists, and come to the dramas founded on our own great romance writers, against whom no such charges can be brought, and the original plots of which have been constructed with the utmost talent by the greatest master of prose fiction the world ever saw. ”

“ So far as they have abused that freedom, so far as they have become the mere purveyors of [Pg 14] sexual eccentricity and perversity, so far the French drama has declined. So cunningly economic is Nature, she will slip in her moral by hook or by crook. ”

“ Our author attributes the ambitious loquacity of the French drama to their characteristic vanity, and the general desire of this nation to shine on all occasions. But this principle seems itself to require a prior cause, namely, a facility of shining on all occasions, and a disposition to admire every thing. It has been remarked, as a general rule, that the theatrical amusements of a people, which are intended as a relaxation from their ordinary pursuits and habits, are by no means a test of the national character ”

“ It may be a question even, whether, in scenes of popular convulsion, the reckless courage of the French—unquestionable as is that courage—does not arise from a sort of fancy that the whole drama of contention they are acting is, in a manner, unreal—that they are but actors on a living stage—that the whole, in fact, is a theatrical part. ”

“ It is part of the abiding insularity of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. ”

“ By the time of the close of the great war, the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy—authors on the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now French, and in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the arbiter of taste in Europe. ”

“ It is, no doubt, to be borne in mind that although the English drama was incomparably the best in the world at one time, and though the English dramatists are the only moderns who will bear comparison with the Greeks, the French have excelled us for two centuries and a half in the average excellence of their work, and in the capacity for criticism. Now, the decadence of the drama in France is by no means so marked as it is in England. ”

“ This new species of tragedy (for such it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a large extent supplied by recent French romance—the romans de longue haleine of the Scudérys and their contemporaries—and by French plays treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences ”

“ There is no book from which the English reader can obtain so trustworthy a view of the contemporary French drama, and none surely in which a theme so complex is so pleasantly unfolded. The analysis of the realistic school, its methods and aims, is, in spite of its brevity, an excellent thing, excellently well done. ”

“ The weakness of the drama in the French epics, even more than their compliance with foreign romance in the choice of incidents or machinery, is against their claim to be reckoned in the higher order of heroic narrative. They are romantic by the comparative levity of their imagination; the story, with them, is too much for the personages. ”

“ Quite enough is known of the defects of the French tragedy, and it is much to be regretted, that those who have had an opportunity of attending the French theatre, have generally carried their national prejudices along with them, and seem to have been more desirous to confirm the prepossessions they had previously acquired, than to form any fair and correct estimate of the merits of that drama. ”

“ 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 The comedy of the Revolution and the first empire. ”

“ But surely the opposite extreme of allowing to the eye no conviction of its own, and always referring to something absent, is deserving of equal reprobation. In many French tragedies the spectator might well entertain a feeling that great actions were actually taking place, but that he had chosen a bad place to be witness of them. It is certain that the obvious impression of a drama is greatly impaired when the effects, which the spectators behold, proceed from invisible and distant causes. ”

“ He associated the absence of drama with the French Revolution, its tendency to deal in abstractions and to regard everything in relation to man and not men—a tendency irreconcilable with dramatic literature, which is essentially individual and concrete. ”

“ The French dramatists of to-day are not men of genius like Molière, but, in their airy, sparkling plays, they represent the freaks, follies, and fancies of society so exquisitely that nothing remains to be desired. ”

“ In England we might learn something from the theatrical regulations of France. The trampling of our crowds at the doors of theatres, the occasional losses of life and limb, and the general inconvenience and confusion of the entrance on crowded nights, might be avoided by the were adoption of French order.
But why should not higher objects be held in view? The drama is a public necessity; the people will have it, whether good or bad. Why should not Government offer prizes to the best drama, tragic or comic? ”

“ Now for the pamphlet itself. It was in the form of a drama, that style of literary production being most congenial to the Native mind, and consequently most likely to draw the attention which was required. Some dramas, particularly the French, dealt with caricature and other harmless productions at which no sensible man would think of questioning. But when arson, forgery, fornications, and other cardinal vices, form the subject of the drama, then he maintained the caricature dropped to the ground. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To copy nature is to copy them.
2. Imitation of the French. Charles II had spent most of his years of exile in France, and when he returned to England he brought with him a new admiration for French literature. In particular the effects of this penetrated very deeply into the drama, especially into comedy, the most copious literary product of the Restoration. Of French comedy the great Molière was the outstanding exponent, and his influence was very great. In the more formal tragedy French and classical models were combined to produce a new type called the heroic play. ”

“ In the French dramatists, only the class is represented, never the individual: their kings, their heroes, and their lovers are all the same, and they are all French—that is, they are nothing but the mouth-pieces of certain rhetorical common-place sentiments on the favourite topics of morality and the passions. ”

“ English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind. ”

“ It is farther said that the French dramatists have to do with a public not only extremely fastidious in its dislike of any low intermixture, and highly susceptible of the ludicrous, but also extremely impatient. ”

“ Thus at a time when a national theatre was perhaps impossible in a country distracted by civil and religious conflicts, whose monarchy had not yet welded together a number of provinces attached each to its own traditions, and whose population, especially in the capital, was enervated by frivolity or enslaved by fanaticism, was born that long-lived artificial growth, the so-called classical tragedy of France. For French comedy, though subjected to the same influences as tragedy, had a national basis upon which to proceed, and its history is partly that of a modification of old popular forms. ”

“ Read the modern novelists and read the modern dramatists, and observe the difference of tone. There is in the common run of modern dramas—whether tragedy, comedy, or farce—such an utter absence of noble purpose, that not a whole army of claqueurs could ever succeed in establishing their popularity.
The fact is, the Muse of the British drama seems at this moment inclined to vacate the theatres, and to take up her abode in the halls and concert-rooms. ”

“ That the theatre feels this reflex influence, that it appreciates all that is going on around it, that it is not asleep, that it is penetrated with the spirit of the century, whether that spirit be good or evil, the selection of plays now popular is another proof. In France, where the success of the histrionic art now culminates, a contemporaneous drama is flourishing, the absolute society of the day is represented. That society has faults, and the stage mirrors them. ”