302

THE FRENCHI TRAGIC THEATRE-VOLTAIRE.

incestuous love in which, by his allowance, they had also become unknowingly entangled; the brother, after he has wonder blindly executed his horrible mission, he rewards with poison, Ichless and the sister he reserves for the gratification of his own vile is altogeth-lust. This tissue of atrocities, this cold-blooded delight in or dis unter wickedness, exceeds perhaps the measure of human nature; ited his but, at all events, it exceeds the bounds of poetic exhibition, stimate even though such a monster should ever have appeared in the I l'oltaire? course of ages. But, overlooking this, what a disfigurement, nay, distortion, of history! He has stripped her, too, of her wonderful charms; not a trace of oriental colouring is to be found. Mahomet was a false prophet, but one certainly under the inspiration of enthusiasm, otherwise he would never by his doctrine have revolutionized the half of the world. What an absurdity to make him merely a cool deceiver! One alone of the many sublime maxims of the Koran would be sufficient to annihilate the whole of these incongruous inventions.

Semiramis is a motley patchwork of the French manner and mistaken imitations. It has something of Hamlet, and something of Clytemnestra and Orestes; but nothing of any of them as it ought to be. The passion for an unknown son is borrowed from the Semiramis of Crebillon. The appearance of Ninus is a mixture of the Ghost in Hamlet and the shadow of Darius in Eschylus. That it is superfluous has been admitted even by the French critics. Lessing, with his raillery, has scared away the Ghost. With a great many faults common to ordinary ghost-scenes, it has this peculiar one, that its speeches are dreadfully bombastic. Notwithstanding the great zeal displayed by Voltaire against subordinate love intrigues in tragedy, he has, however, contrived to exhibit two pairs of lovers, the partie carrée as it is called, in this play, which was to be the foundation of an entirely new species.

Since the Cid, no French tragedy had appeared of which the plot was founded on such pure motives of honour and love without any ignoble intermixtures, and so completely consecrated to the exhibition of chivalrous sentiments, as Tancred. Amenaide, though honour and life are at stake, disdains to exculpate herself by a declaration which would endanger her lover; and Tancred, though justified in esteeming her faithless, defends her in single combat, and, in despair, is about to

CONCLUDING REVIEW OF HIS WORKS.

303

seek a hero's death, when the unfortunate mistake is cleared
up. So far the piece is irreproachable, and deserving of the
greatest praise. But it is weakened by other imperfections.
It is of great detriment to its perspicuity, that we are not at
the very first allowed to hear the letter without superscription
which occasions all the embarrassment, and that it is not sent
off before our eyes.
The political disquisitions in the first act
are extremely tedious; Tancred does not appear till the third
act, though his presence is impatiently looked for, to give ani-
mation to the scene. The furious imprecations of Amenaide,
at the conclusion, are not in harmony with the deep but soft
emotion with which we are overpowered by the reconciliation
of the two lovers, whose hearts, after so long a mutual mis-
understanding, are reunited in the moment of separation by
death.

In the earlier piece of the Orphelin de la Chine, it might
be considered pardonable if Voltaire represented the great
Dschingis-kan in love. This drama ought to be entitled The
Conquest of China, with the conversion of the cruel Khan
of Tartary, &c. Its whole interest
Its whole interest is concentrated in two
children, who are never once seen.
The Chinese are repre-
sented as the most wise and virtuous of mankind, and they
overflow with philosophical maxims. As Corneille, in his old
age, made one and all of his characters politicians, Voltaire in
like manner furnished his out with philosophy, and availed
himself of them to preach up his favourite opinions. He was
not deterred by the example of Corneille, when the power of
representing the passions was extinct, from publishing a host
of weak and faulty productions.

Since the time of Voltaire the constitution of the French stage has remained nearly the same. No genius has yet

arisen sufficiently mighty to advance the art a step farther, Victor Hugo and victoriously to refute, by success, their time-strengthened did it. prejudices. Many attempts have been made, but they generally follow in the track of previous essays, without surpassing them. The endeavour to introduce more historical extent into dramatic composition is frustrated by the traditional limitations and restraints. The attacks, both theoretical and practical, which have been made in France itself on the prevailing system of rules, will be most suitably noticed and observed upon when we come to review the present condition of the French stage, after considering their

501 SUBSEQUENT CONSTITUTION OF THE FRENCH STAGE.

Comedy and the other secondary kinds of dramatic works, since in these attempts have been made either to found new species, or arbitrarily to overturn the classification hitherto established.

LECTURE XXI.

French Comedy-Molière-Criticism of his Works-Scarron, Beursault, Regnard; Comedies in the Time of the Regency; Marivaux and Destouches; Piron and Gresset-Later Attempts-The Heroic Opera: Quinault-Operettes and Vaudevilles-Diderot's attempted Change of the Theatre The Weeping Drama-Beaumarchais-Melo-Dramas— Merits and Defects of the Histrionic Art.

THE same system of rules and proprieties, which, as I have endeavoured to show, must inevitably have a narrowing influence on Tragedy, has, in France, been applied to Comedy much more advantageously. For this mixed species of composition has, as already seen, an unpoetical side; and some degree of artificial constraint, if not altogether essential to Comedy, is certainly beneficial to it; for if it is treated with too negligent a latitude, it runs a risk, in respect of general structure, of falling into shapelessness, and in the representation of individual peculiarities, of sinking into every-day common-place. In the French, as well as in the Greek, it happens that the same syllabic measure is used in Tragedy and Comedy, which, on a first view, may appear singular. But if the Alexandrine did not appear to us peculiarly adapted to the free imitative expression of pathos, on the other hand, it must be owned that a comical effect is produced by the application of so symmetrical a measure to the familiar turns of dialogue. Moreover, the grammatical conscientiousness of French poetry, which is so greatly injurious in other species of the drama, is fully suited to Comedy, where the versification is not purchased at the expense of resemblance to the language of conversation, where it is not intended to elevate the dialogue by sublimity and dignity above real life, but merely to communicate to it greater ease and lightness. Hence the opinion of the French, who hold a comedy in verse in much higher estimation than a comedy in prose, seems to me to admit fairly of a justification

I endeavoured to show that the Unities of Place and Time are inconsistent with the essence of many tragical subjects, because a comprehensive action is frequently carried on in distant places at the same time, and because great determinations can only be slowly prepared. This is not the case in Comedy: here Intrigue ought to prevail, the active spirit of which quickly hurries towards its object; and hence the unity of time may here be almost naturally observed. The domestic and social circles in which Comedy moves are usually assembled in one place, and, consequently, the poet is not under the necessity of sending our imagination abroad: only it might perhaps have been as well not to interpret the unity of place so very strictly as not to allow the transition from one room to another, or to different houses of the same town. The choice of the street for the scene, a practice in which the Latin comic writers were frequently followed in the earlier times of Modern Comedy, is quite irreconcileable with our way of living, and the more deserving of censure, as in the case of the ancients it was an inconvenience which arose from the construction of their theatre.

According to French critics, and the opinion which has become prevalent through them, Molière alone, of all their comic writers, is classical; and all that has been done since his time is merely estimated as it approximates more or less to this supposed pattern of an excellence which can never be surpassed, nor even equalled. Hence we shall first proceed to characterize this founder of the French Comedy, and then give a short sketch of its subsequent progress.

Molière has produced works in so many departments, and of such different value, that we are hardly able to recognize the same author in all of them; and yet it is usual, when speaking of his peculiarities and merits, and the advance which he gave to his art, to throw the whole of his labours into one mass together.

Born and educated in an inferior rank of life, he enjoyed the advantage of learning by direct experience the modes of living among the industrious portion of the community-the so-called Bourgeois class--and of acquiring the talent of imitating low modes of expression. At an after period, when Louis XIV. took him into his service, he had opportunities, although from a subordinate station, of narrowly observing the court. He was an actor, and, it would appear, of peen

U

306

FRENCH COMEDY-MOLIERE.

har power in overcharged and farcical comic parts; so little was he possessed with prejudices of personal dignity, that ho renounced all the conditions by which it was accompanied, and was ever ready to deal out, or to receive the blows which were then so frequent on the stage. Nay, his mimetic zeal went so far, that, actually sick, he acted and drew his last breath in representing his Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade Imaginaire) and became, in the truest sense, a martyr to the laughter of others. His business was to invent all manner of pleasant entertainments for the court, and to provoke "the greatest monarch of the world" to laughter, by way of relaxation from his state affairs or warlike undertakings. One would think, on the triumphant return from a glorious campaign, this might have been accomplished with more refinement than by the representation of the disgusting state of an imaginary invalid. But Louis XIV. was not so fastidious; he was very well content with the buffoon whom he protected, and even occasionally exhibited his own elevated person in the dances of his ballets. This external position of Molière was the cause why many of his labours had their origin as mere occasional pieces in the commands of the court. And, accordingly, they bear the stamp of that origin. Without travelling out of France, he had opportunities of becoming acquainted with the lazzis of the Italian comic masks on the Italian theatre at Paris, where improvisatory dialogues were intermixed with scenes written in French: in the Spanish comedies he studied the ingenious complications of intrigue: Plautus and Terence taught him the salt of the Attic wit, the genuine tone of comic maxims, and the nicer shades of character. All this he employed, with more or less success, in the exigency of the moment, and also in order to deck out his drama in a sprightly and variegated dress, made use of all manner of means, however foreign to his art: such as the allegorical opening scenes of the opera prologues, musical intermezzos, in which he even introduced Italian and Spanish national music, with texts in their own language; ballets, at one time sumptuous, and at another grotesque; and even sometimes mere vaulting and capering. He knew how to turn everything to profit: the censure passed upon his pieces, the defects of rival actors imitated to the life by himself and his company, and even the embarrassment in not being able to produce a theatrical entertainment as quickly as it was required by the king,—all became