For threescore years, at least, Scribe was the salient figure in the
French theater; and his influence endured more than twoscore years after
his death. He can be considered from discordant standpoints; to the men
of letters Scribe seems wholly unimportant, since his merits were in
great measure outside of literature; to the men of the theater Scribe is
a personality of abiding interest, since he put his mark on the drama of
his own day in almost every one of its departments. In the course of his
active career as a playwright he made over farce, first of all, then the
comedy-of-intrigue, and finally the comedy-of-manners; he tried his hand
at the historical play; and he was the chief librettist of the leading
French composers of opera, both grand and comic. He might lack style;
he might be barren of poetry; he might be void of philosophy; his
psychology might be pitifully inadequate; his outlook on life might be
petty;--but he was pastmaster of the theater, and from him were hidden
none of the secrets of that special art.
It was in Scribe's hands that there was worked out the formula of the
"well-made play,--" _la pièce bien faite_,--in which the exposition was
leisurely and careful, in which the interest of expectancy was aroused
early and sustained to the end, in which the vital scenes of the
essential struggle,--the _scènes à faire_,--were shown on the stage at
the very moment of the story when they would be most effective, and in
which a logical conclusion dimly foreseen, but ardently desired, was
happily brought about by devices of unexpected ingenuity. In perfecting
the formula of the "well-made play" Scribe may have taken hints from
Beaumarchais, especially from the final act of the 'Marriage of Figaro';
and he had found his profit also in a study of the methods of the
melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theaters of the Parisian
boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had
been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas. At its best, the
"well-made play" was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy
which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its
maker had constructed it to do.
The piece put together according to this formula was sufficient to
itself, with its wheels within wheels; and its maker had no need of
style or of poetry, of psychology or of philosophy. So long as the
playwright was content to be a playwright only and did not aspire to be
a dramatist with his own views of life, the formula was satisfactory
enough; but when the younger Dumas and Augier came on the stage they
wanted to put a broader humanity into their plays, and they could make
room for this only by simplifying the machinery. Yet, while they were
delivering each his own message, they accepted the model of the
"well-made play"; and it is to this that we may ascribe the
artificiality we begin to discern even in such masterpieces of
dramaturgic craftsmanship as the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' and the
'Demi-monde.'
Upon Ibsen also the influence of Scribe is as obvious as it is upon
Augier and Dumas _fils_. The earliest of his social dramas, the 'League
of Youth' and the 'Pillars of Society' are composed according to the
formula of the "well-made play," with its leisurely exposition, its
intricate complications of recoiling intrigue, its ingeniously contrived
conclusion. If we compare the 'League of Youth' with Scribe's 'Bertrand
et Raton,' or with Sardou's 'Rabagas'; if we compare the 'Pillars of
Society' with Dumas's 'Étrangère,' or Augier's 'Effrontés' we cannot
fail to find a striking similarity of structure. Set even 'A Doll's
House' by the side of any one of a dozen contemporary French comedies,
and it is easy to understand why Sarcey declared that play to be
Parisian in its construction,--up to the moment of _Nora's_ revolt and
self-assertion, so contrary to the social instinct of the French. And
this explains also why it was that Ibsen, as Herr Lindau has told us,
made little or no impression on the German dramatists until after the
appearance of 'Ghosts,' altho the preceding plays had been acted
frequently in the German theaters. The scenes of these early plays are
laid in Norway, it is true, and the characters are all Norwegian, and
altho it is easy enough for us, to-day, with our knowledge of what Ibsen
has become, to find in them the personal equation of the author, still
he was then frankly continuing the French tradition of stage-craft, with
a willing acceptance of the formula of the "well-made play" and with no
effort after novelty in his dramaturgic method. Not until he brought
forth the 'Ghosts' is there any overt assertion of his stalwart and
aggressive personality.
In the beginning Ibsen was no innovator. So far at least as its
external form is concerned, the kind of play he proffered at first was
very much what actors and audiences alike had been accustomed to,--a
kind of play perfectly adjusted to the existing customs of the stage.
What he did was to take over the theater as a going concern, holding
himself free to modify the accepted formula only after he had mastered
it satisfactorily. Considering Ibsen's inexperience as a writer of
prose-plays dealing with contemporary life, the 'League of Youth' is
really very remarkable as a first attempt. Indeed, its defects are those
of its models; and it errs chiefly in its excess of ingenuity and in the
manufactured symmetry of the contrivance whereby the tables are turned
on _Stensgard_, and whereby he loses all three of the women he has
approached.
As Lowell has said: "It is of less consequence where a man buys his
tools than what use he makes of them"; but it so happened that Ibsen
acquired his stage-craft in the place where it is most easily attained,
in the place where Shakspere and Molière had acquired it,--in the
theater itself. In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, he had been
appointed "theater-poet" to the newly opened playhouse in Bergen; and
after five years there he had gone to Christiania to be director of a
new theater, where he was to remain yet another five years. In this
decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in
the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also
original in his native tongue by Holberg and Öhlenschläger, and many
more translated from Scribe, from Scribe's collaborators and from
Scribe's contemporaries. In his vacation travels, to Copenhagen and to
Dresden, he had opportunity to observe a wider variety of plays; but
even in these larger cities the influence of Scribe was dominant, as it
was all over the civilized world in the mid-years of the century.
As Fenimore Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the
backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the
Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of
Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece
in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is
obvious significance in the fact that of all Ibsen's dramas, those which
have won widest popularity in the theater itself are those which most
frankly accept the Gallic framework,--the 'Pillars of Society,' the
'Doll's House,' and 'Hedda Gabler.' Yet it is significant, also, that
even in the least individual of Ibsen's earlier pieces, the action is
expressive of character; and we cannot fail to see that Ibsen's
personages control the plot; whereas, in the dramas of Scribe, the
situations may be said almost to create the characters, which, indeed,
exist only for the purposes of that particular story.