It is certainly not necessary that to every play, as to every fable, a
moral easily deducible from it should be attached; though every play
that presents a true picture of life must almost as a matter of course
teach some lesson. _Othello_ is the drama of jealousy, _Macbeth_ the
drama of ambition, _Romeo and Juliet_ the drama of passionate love;
but it was not to show the danger of jealousy, of ambition, or of
passionate love, that these dramas were written. A picture of the
“green-eyed monster,” in all its hideousness, occurs in the first; a
reflection on the futility of “vaulting ambition” in the second; and
a warning of the “violent ends” produced by “violent delights” in
the third. The moral purpose of the play, supposing such a purpose
to exist, is not, however, in either case made obvious. In numbers
of the most successful plays of modern France, on the other hand, we
find a moral thesis adopted beforehand and deliberately worked out by
dramatic means. This moral thesis does not necessarily embody a high
moral notion. It may be, and often is, paradoxical in character. The
one thing essential is that it shall assert a principle, and present a
case of as dramatic a character as possible in illustration of it. The
moral which, as before remarked, belongs to every incident in life,
is not always an evident one; nor in the finest works of art does the
moral ever lie conspicuously on the surface. But if a vivacious comedy
or a dramatic play is specially intended to teach or rather to prove
something, it is as well that there should be no mistake about it; and
in these cases the audience is generally informed in the first act
of what in the succeeding acts the author proposes to demonstrate. A
French drama of incidents has often no moral beyond the familiar—not
to say vulgar—one that virtue prospers and vice does not; and though
each of Victor Hugo’s dramas teaches some special lesson it might
sometimes be difficult, but for the preface, to discover it. Numbers of
French dramas, however, deal not only with the facts of life but also
in an explicit manner with its theories, and though often immoral are
constructed on what may be called a moral basis.
In that edifying work, the _Pink Dominos_, for instance, the
complicated and certainly very ingenious intrigue which forms the
substance of the piece has its origin in an argument between two
ladies, one a thorough Parisian, the other a simple-minded and rather
backward provincial, as to the true nature and appropriate treatment
of husbands. A husband, according to the Parisian lady, is never
perfect; and the wise wife is she who pardons his “slight slips ’gainst
_bonos mores_,” and, to avoid driving him to humiliating subterfuges
and denials, pretends even not to see them. In the long run a husband
will be grateful to such a wife, and she may be sure in a general way
of his fidelity and affection; whereas to a wife too vigilant and
too implacable he will be obliged to behave with a duplicity which,
reacting upon his own sensitive nature, will make him despise himself
and detest her.
A good many modern French plays are in fact pamphlets in dramatic form;
and some of them have suffered as works of art from having been too
evidently written with a purpose. The dramatist who wishes to prove
the truth of a proposition put forward by himself will of course make
his characters act as it is necessary they should act in order to give
the desired result. He must not violate probability in too flagrant
a manner, and his play will scarcely succeed if the dénouement seems
altogether unnatural; but even while observing these conditions he
may, and usually does, so mould his personages as to make them quite
exceptional; though it is with these exceptional personages that he
works towards establishing his general rule. The interesting thing,
however, in connection with the moral and philosophical plays of
modern France is not any lesson that they teach, but the fact that
such plays exist, showing as it does that the theatre in France is
much more than a place of amusement. It is a place of discussion,
in which every question that agitates society is treated, and often
in several different pieces from several different points of view.
Absurdities of the day (such as those of æstheticism) are satirised
no doubt on our own stage. But the social questions dealt with on the
French stage are often of a far graver character than any connected
with dress. This was the case even with M. Sardou’s _Famille Benoiton_,
notoriously a costume piece, and dependent in a large measure for its
success on its amusing exaggerations of the exaggerated costumes of
the day. But it was more than that. It touched upon many other follies
akin to that of exaggeration in dress; and was really a stage echo of
M. Dupin’s celebrated pamphlet on _Le Luxe effréné des Femmes_. M.
Sardou’s exhilarating picture of the unbridled luxury of women called
for no reply, and in fact admitted of none. His eloquent apostrophe
to white muslin, “O sainte mousseline,” was criticised in the press
on economical grounds, the work of “getting up” a muslin dress being
neither so simple nor so inexpensive as M. Sardou had imagined.
But admitting the existence of the evils that he attacked it was
impossible to defend them. Similarly when, in the lively days of 1848,
_La Propriété c’est le Vol_ was brought out, and the serpent of Eden
was presented on the stage with the hat and spectacles and the very
physiognomy of M. Proudhon, it was not likely that any dramatist would
take the part of the Socialist and seek to represent individualism as
ridiculous. The “right to labor” is asserted in this same piece by
a dentist without patients, who insists as a matter of principle on
pulling out the teeth of the first person he meets. This again could be
met by no counter-presentation from a socialistic point of view, nor
would the Government have permitted it; for despite the article in the
_Constitution_ of 1830, declaring that “the censorship is abolished and
cannot be re-established,” it has never been found possible to dispense
in France with stage censorship, which, temporarily set aside as a
result of some revolutionary movement, has always been re-established
before long. So necessary, indeed, had it become under the second
French Republic, to restrain the Aristophanic tendencies of the newly
emancipated dramatists, that the censorship went to extremes, and not
content with prohibiting political subjects interfered with social
subjects also. Thus it was under the second French Republic that the
younger Dumas’ sympathetic picture of the woman who has gone astray
(_La Traviata_, as she is considerately called in the Italian version
of the play) was objected to by the censorship, nor was it until the
Empire that _La Dame aux Camélias_ could be brought out.
It would probably be a mistake to see in this piece any deliberate
attempt to raise up the fallen woman. The play was only a dramatic
version of a novel by the same author for which the subject had been
furnished by the life and death of a certain Marie Duplessis—whose
story Dickens, becoming acquainted with it during a visit to Paris,
had at one time proposed to treat. _La Dame aux Camélias_ was in any
case destined to achieve such popularity that for a time the class to
which the heroine belongs became invested with unusual interest. Vice
by being represented as consumptive lost all its grossness; but no
sooner had the play attained its maximum of success than the discovery
was made that it rested on a wrong moral basis. It “rehabilitated
the courtesan;” and M. Théodore Barrière, assisted by the inevitable
collaborateur, undertook to set matters right by exhibiting that
objectionable personage in her true colors. The outcome of this
undertaking was _Les Filles de Marbre_: too fine a name for them
according to Théophile Gautier, who preferred as a substitute _Les
Filles de Platre_. Instead of dying of love, complicated by phthisis,
with claims to forgiveness based on her having “loved much,” the
leading lady of M. Barrière’s piece reduced her lover to poverty and
despair, unconsciously ruined his talent, and consciously insulted
him when she could no longer extort money from him. The God this young
woman avowedly worshipped was not love but gold. She was without pity,
without remorse; nor did the author think fit to place in contrast
with her a more amiable specimen of depravity—even as Dumas has placed
side by side with his tender-hearted Marguerite Gauthier, the selfish
and ignoble Prudence. Marco, the chief of the _Girls of Marble_, is
doubtless a much more common character in the world than Marguerite
Gauthier; and Balzac, who knew the world, had anticipated in only
one of his characters—the unfortunate Coralie—all the best points
in Marguerite Gauthier, whereas he had anticipated in half-a-dozen
different characters, from Madame de Marneffe downward, the worst
points in Marco. But though Marco may have been a good deal truer to
nature than Marguerite Gauthier she was far less interesting; and
the picture of a fallen woman saved by an access of genuine feeling
was much more agreeable than that of a degraded one dragging to his
destruction a miserably weak man.
The _Girls of Marble_ seemed, however, to M. Léon Laya too hard, too
cold; and to show that women might lead irregular lives, and yet be
kind and generous, he wrote _Les Cœurs d’Or_. Here two young women,
attached by anti-matrimonial ties to two young men, find that they
are preventing them from making suitable marriages in a decent sphere
of life. The young men know what, in a worldly point of view, they
ought to do, but are restrained by good feeling and the remembrance
of past affection from doing it. The young women, however, resolve to
sacrifice themselves. They take the initiative in breaking off the
connection, and by doing so prove that they have “hearts of gold.”
This sentimental piece, written in the style called “honnête,” did not
meet with anything like the success of the highly emotional _Dame aux
Camélias_, or of the cynical _Filles de Marbre_; nor did it close the
stage discussion as to the goodness or badness of a particular class
of women—a discussion which, indeed, might have been carried on for an
indefinite time, seeing that the class in question comprises a great
number of different specimens, from Cleopatra—that “reine entretenue,”
as Heine called her—to the Esther of Balzac’s _Splendeurs et Misères
d’une Courtisane_.
Then arose the question—suggested, no doubt, by M. Laya’s _Cœurs
d’Or_—whether a woman really possessing a heart of gold ought to be
abandoned whenever it suited the convenience or the caprice of her
lover to get rid of her. M. Léon Gozlan took one view of the matter
and M. Emile Augier the other; the former developing his ideas on
the subject in a single act, the latter in a full-sized drama. In
Léon Gozlan’s charming little piece, _La Fin du Roman, ou Comment
on se débarrasse d’une Maîtresse_, a young man is represented as so
hopelessly attached to a young woman whom he has omitted to marry, that
his friends, as “men of the world,” think it necessary to speak to him
on the subject. The attachment has lasted a considerable time, and it
is explained to him that it will be mere weakness on his part to allow
it to continue any longer. He is invited to join a travelling party to
Italy, and is mockingly told that he will want to bring his mistress
with him. He repels the taunt, and, in response to the suggestion
of one of his friends, makes a bet on the subject. The separation
having been decided on, a division of household effects takes place.
Difficulties arise about the appropriation of certain objects to which
a sentimental interest belongs, and which each, from regard for the
other, wishes to retain. A favorite dog is disputed for; and when it
is arranged that he shall be the property of the one he goes to most
willingly, the faithful animal hesitates between the two, and maintains
an attitude of strict but friendly neutrality. Lastly, there is a
child’s miniature which neither will consent to part with; and thus,
little by little, the impossibility of the separation is made manifest.
The young man takes the young woman with him to Italy. But he wins his
bet all the same, for he is accompanied not by his mistress but by his
wife.
As a counterpart to this work, in which an immoral situation is
rectified by the simplest means, may be taken M. Emile Augier’s
_Mariage d’Olympe_, in which a similar situation is, by similar means,
made to yield terrible and tragic results. Only M. Augier’s young woman
happens to be not at all the same sort of person as M. Gozlan’s young
woman; so that whereas to abandon the one would have been culpable and
foolish, to introduce the other into decent society was reckless and
criminal.
Dumas showed before long a disposition to turn, not against his own
views, but of views supposed to be his. Whatever allowances might be
made for a woman in the position of Marguerite Gauthier, a real wife
ought not, according to his very original idea, to deceive her husband.
He exhibited, in _Diane de Lys_, a lady who took this liberty, and who
was shot in consequence by her justly indignant spouse.
M. Dumas’ _Fils Naturel_, in which a father disavows his son, until at
last the young man finds himself in such a position that he can in his
turn disavow his father, gave rise to a good many pieces on the same
subject. The half-a-dozen or dozen plays in which it is shown that
irregular relations between men and women are likely to have awkward
consequences, are, as studies of social problems, scarcely worth
dwelling upon. Every one knows that (as in _La Fiammina_) the son of
a prima donna who has misconducted herself may find difficulties in
his way when he proposes to marry a girl whose parents are eminently
respectable; and we need no sensational dramatist to teach us (as in
_Coralie_), that an officer whose mother has amassed a large fortune by
the most shameful means may, in spite of his personal merits, meet with
slights and indignities.
M. Emile Augier’s _Gendre de M. Poirier_ started the son-in-law as a
dramatic subject. In this comedy, one of the best of modern times, a
rich bourgeois has married his daughter to a penniless aristocrat, who
directs the household in such a sumptuous style that the father-in-law
finds himself in a fair way of being ruined. To this a sort of
counterpart was furnished by M. Augier himself in _Un Beau Mariage_;
which, while sparing fathers-in-law, exposes the thoughtlessness of
some mothers-in-law who expect their daughters’ husbands, not only
to take charge of their affairs, but to accompany them to evening
parties and balls. This to a serious-minded young man would doubtless
be a great trial; and in M. Augier’s comedy the end of the matter is
that the husband leaves the house of his rich mother-in-law, and,
followed at a very dramatic crisis by his wife, supports himself by the
exercise of his talents as a chemist, mechanician, and inventor. The
mother-in-law, even when she possesses the advantage of being rich,
is not a popular character on the French stage; nor, apparently, on
the Spanish stage either. There is, at all events, a modern Spanish
comedy, called _The Meadow Coat_ (the rough coat, that is to say, of
the untrained, unclipped horse), in which, as in _Un Beau Mariage_, a
rustic husband who rises early meets, on coming down in the morning,
his wife and mother returning from a late ball. In M. Augier’s
corresponding scene the husband has been reading and writing all night
when the two ladies in their ball dresses suddenly burst upon his
solitude.
_Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, too, was the progenitor, or at least the
caller-into-existence, of another son-in-law piece called _Les Petites
Mains_, in which a son-in-law of fashionable tastes and habits, but
without money of his own, is harshly treated by a father-in-law, who
insists upon his adopting some occupation, and who ultimately, by dint
of persecution and misrepresentation, separates him from his wife and
forces him to become clerk and touter to a house agent. The moral of
this amusing little comedy is not quite apparent to the unspectacled
eye. The semi-burlesque proposition on which it rests is, however, to
the effect that men with large hands are intended by nature to make
money, and men with small hands to spend it. The piece belongs in any
case to the son-in-law series, in which, by its entertaining qualities,
it may claim to hold an honorable place.
The latest social subject dealt with by French dramatists has been the
fertile one of divorce, which M. Sardou has treated both seriously
and comically. Before _Odette_ and _Divorçons_, he had, however,
written the less known _Daniel Rochat_, which ends with a divorce in
Switzerland, the divorced persons being of course citizens of the
Helvetian Republic; and though the main subject of _Daniel Rochat_
is the union, followed immediately afterwards by the separation, of
two persons who are prevented from living together as husband and
wife by incompatibility of religious convictions, it may all the same
be classed with M. Sardou’s other divorce pieces. The author lets
it be seen that the mistake made by _Daniel Rochat_ can easily be
remedied in Switzerland, a country, where divorce is easy; whereas
it would have been without remedy in France, where divorce was at
that time impossible. The case, however, though an effective one for
the dramatist—at least for such a dramatist as M. Sardou—is of too
exceptional a character to merit attention from the dramatic moralist
or legist.
The practice of treating subjects of the day in dramatic form is one
which, from a purely artistic point of view, cannot be commended.
The process involves almost necessarily forced motives and distorted
characters. Works, too, produced on this system must, from the nature
of the case, be of ephemeral interest. Who, for instance, now that
France, like England, Germany, and the United States, has a law of
divorce, can care for pieces in which the interest turns upon the
iniquity of treating as indissoluble every contract, to whatever
painful consequences it may have led, which has once been signed in
presence of Monsieur le Maire? In Shakespeare and Molière so little are
affairs of the day touched upon (without ever being made the subject of
an entire work) that a reader might find it difficult to determine from
internal evidence at what period either of these writers lived. The
characteristic talk of _Les Précieuses_ is about the only indication in
the case of Molière of the time to which the piece belongs. There is
scarcely a work, on the other hand, from the pen of M. Sardou (who may
be taken as the representative comedy writer of modern France) which
does not bear the impress and color of the time, and which (especially
in the case of his later pieces) does not in a very direct manner
reproduce the incidents or reflect the ideas of the life around him. If
immediate and striking success with a Paris audience be the author’s
aim, it must be admitted that M. Sardou’s method is more effective
than that of his predecessor, Scribe, whose comedies are masterpieces
of ingenuity, but are for the most part independent of place and time.
Many of Scribe’s pieces have been quite as successful in England as in
France. This cannot be said of any of Sardou’s plays, with the solitary
exception of “_Les Pattes de Mouche_,” one of his earliest works,
written at a time when Scribe was still his model. But so far as Paris
at the present moment is concerned, M. Sardou hits the mark, and hits
it harder than ever Scribe did.
The stage in France would be used for the discussion of political as
well as social questions, did the censorship permit it. Of this we
had a sign in M. Sardou’s _Rabagas_, produced soon after the Commune,
in various pieces brought out during the revolutionary days of 1848,
and in _Les Cosaques_, which, after being previously rejected by the
censorship, was authorised for representation just before the outbreak
of the Crimean war, when, as a matter of policy, antagonism to Russia
was encouraged and stimulated by the Government. As a rule, however,
no performance likely to call forth manifestations of political
feeling, or to give offence to a friendly State, or to its people, is
allowed. M. Sardou’s _L’oncle Sam_ was objected to as calculated to
hurt the feelings of the Americans; and the authors of a little piece
called _L’Etrangère_—not to be confounded with the five-act comedy
of the same name—were required to change it because (as set forth in
a document which figures among the _Papiers secrets de l’Empire_)
numbers of foreigners visit Paris and might be annoyed at seeing the
leading character of the very objectionable little piece put forward
as a typical lady from abroad! All social questions of the day have,
however, for the last thirty years been left freely to the dramatist
to treat as he may think fit. Or it may be that such questions have
always been left to him, and that it is only during the last quarter of
a century or so that he has thought fit to occupy himself with them.
The true character of women who have none was the first theme to be
treated controversially, with examples in lieu of arguments; then the
desirability of getting married in certain cases where the marriage
ceremony had been dispensed with; then, in due time, the rights of
natural children and their compromising effect in connection with
mothers proposing to lead a new life. The son-in-law question—of such
slight interest to Englishmen—had meantime sprung up; and the quiet,
studious son-in-law, bullied by his wife’s mother; the fashionably
extravagant son-in-law, devouring the substance of his wife’s father;
the idle but well-meaning son-in-law, misunderstood by every one, were
turn by turn exhibited. Finally, the divorce question produced a whole
crop of pieces, serious and comic; and it may be that the treatment
of this question by a succession of dramatists, who dwelt on the
misery and disgrace resulting from marriages practically dissolved,
but legally indissoluble, had some effect in hastening the adoption
of M. Naquet’s Bill. The cruel position of a husband chained to a
disreputable wife, and unable to set himself free, has been shown in
one of M. Sardou’s most effective pieces, which, thirty years ago, when
England also was without a divorce law, would have been as effective
in England as in France. But it was difficult for English audiences to
realise the situation; and now that continued wedlock between husbands
and wives who hate one another is no longer enforced by law, the
difficulty for French audiences may soon be equally great. With the
passing of M. Naquet’s Divorce Bill such pieces as the _Odette_ of M.
Sardou, the _Diane de Lys_ of M. Alexandre Dumas the younger, and the
_Fiammina_ of M. Mario Uchard lost all significance. When the pressure
of the matrimonial knot has become quite unbearable it is now no longer
necessary either that the wife should retire to a convent or that
the husband should be shot. The difficulty is solved by the simpler,
though less dramatic, means of a divorce. It is matter of publicity
that immediately after M. Naquet’s Bill became law the author of _La
Fiammina_ took precisely this view of his own matrimonial trouble.
There has been a recent instance, too, in Germany, of a subject of
the day—this time a serious one—being dealt with by a dramatist.
_Die Gräfin Lea_, a play by Herr Rudolf Lindau, contains a striking
exhibition of that prejudice against everything Jewish, to which in
Germany the high-sounding name of anti-Semiticism has been given. In
a very ingenious succession of scenes he shows that the widow, who by
reason not only of her Jewish faith, but also of her low origin, is
deemed by her husband’s relatives unworthy to succeed to his nobiliary
estate, is an excellent and charming woman, who would not be out of
place even in the very highest position. The tribunal before which the
case is brought takes just this view of the matter, and the Countess
Lea triumphs. But the dramatists argument in favor of the Jews is
somewhat weak; and he leaves us to suppose that if the Countess Lea
had been an ill-bred, commonplace Jewess, instead of a Jewess of great
refinement, the court might equitably have given judgment against her.
A reply to Herr Lindau’s piece, such as in France it would certainly
have elicited, might easily have been written. But in Germany, as in
England and all countries except France, the stage has not enough hold
upon society to cause social questions to be often discussed in stage
pieces. In France, on the other hand, the public takes such an interest
in the theatre that the “boards” are almost to them what the platform
is to the English and the Americans.
The production of a whole series of pieces on one particular subject of
debate implies a continuous attention on the part of the intelligent
public such as no stage but that of Paris—and the Paris stage only in
modern times—seems ever to have enjoyed. Until the end of the last
century the French dramatist was poorly paid, and as dramatist had
little offered to him in the way of distinction beyond the hollow
applause of the public. It was not until Beaumarchais obtained the
decree fixing the remuneration to dramatic authors at so much per
cent. on the gross receipts that writers of all kinds, and of every
degree of eminence, began to occupy themselves with the stage; and it
was not until all the best literary talent in the country had thus
been attracted to the drama that the French Academy opened its doors
to dramatists as such. Victor Hugo was a poet first and a dramatist
afterwards. The elder Dumas was a dramatist first and a novelist
afterwards—and he was never admitted to the Academy at all. The
election of Scribe, a dramatist, and virtually nothing else, was quite
an event. Since that time, however, the entry of a highly successful
dramatist of long-established reputation into the Academy has come
to be looked upon as a matter of course. The last dramatist elected
as such was a very admirable farce writer, M. Labiche, author of _Un
Chapeau de Paille d’Italie_, _Le Voyage de M. Perrichon_, _Les Petites
Mains_, and other similar pieces, full of humor, but without the least
academical pretensions.—_Fortnightly Review._