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 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 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, 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 Coeurs 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 Then arose the question—suggested, no doubt, by M. Laya’s Coeurs 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 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 par 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 Re 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 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 desira 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 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 |