I
Every dramatist is of necessity subdued to what he works for—the playgoers of his own generation in his own country. Their approval it is that he has to win first of all; and if they render a verdict against him he has no appeal to posterity. It is a matter of record that a play which failed to please the public in its author’s lifetime never succeeded later in establishing itself on the stage. Partizans may prate about the dramatic power of the ‘Blot in the ’Scutcheon,’ but when it is—as it has been half-a-dozen times—galvanized into a semblance of life for a night or a fortnight, it falls prone in the playhouse as dead as it was when Macready first officiated at its funeral. Even the ‘Misanthrope,’ mightiest of Molière’s comedies and worthy of all the acclaim it has received, was not an outstanding triumph when its author impersonated Alceste, and it has rarely rewarded the efforts of the succession of accomplished actors who have tried to follow the footsteps of the master; it is praised, it is admired; but it does not attract the many to the theater, because it does not give them abundantly the special pleasure that only the theater can bestow. ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Femmes Savantes’ do this and also half-a-score of Molière’s lighter and less ambitious pieces, supported by stories more theatrically effective than that of the ‘Misanthrope.’
The playwright who is merely a clever craftsman of the stage has no higher aim than to win the suffrages of his contemporaries. He knows what they want—for he is one of them—and he gives them what they want, no more and no less. He does not put himself into his plays; and perhaps his plays would be little better if he did. He is strenuously and insistently “up to date,” as the phrase is; and as a result he is soon “out of date.” He writes to be in the fashion; and the more completely he portrays the fleeting modes of the moment, the more swiftly must he fall out of fashion. The taste of the day is never the taste of after days; and the journalist-dramatist buys his evanescent popularity at a price. Who now is so poor as to pay reverence to Kotzebue and to Scribe, who once had all the managers at their feet? No maker of plays, not Lope de Vega or Dumas—Alexander the Great—was more fertile than Scribe in the invention of effective situations, none was ever more dextrous in the knotting and unknotting of plots, grave and gay. But his fertility and his dexterity have availed him little. He wrote for his own time, not for all time. What sprang up in the morning of his career and bloomed brightly in the sunshine, was by night-fall drooping and withered and desiccated.
The comic dramatists of the Restoration had perforce to gratify the lewd likings of vicious spectators who wanted to see themselves on the stage even more vicious than they were. Congreve and Wycherly put into their comedies what their contemporaries relished, a game flavor that stank in the nostrils of all decent folk. The Puritan shrank with horror from the picture in which the Impuritan recognized his own image. So it was that a scant hundred years after they had insulted the moral sense (which, like Truth, tho “crushed to earth will rise again; the eternal years of God are hers,”) they were swept from the stage. What had delighted under Charles II disgusted under George IV.
Even the frequent attempt to deodorize them failed, for, as Sheridan said—and he knew by experience since he had made his ‘Trip to Scarborough’ out of the ‘Relapse’—the Restoration comedies were “like horses; you rob them of their vice and you rob them of their vigor.” Charles Lamb, who had a whimsical predilection for them, admitted that they were “quite extinct on our stage.” Congreve’s pistol no longer discharged its steel bullets; and Wycherly no longer knocked his victims down with the butt of his gun. Yet they died hard; I am old enough to have seen Daly’s company in the ‘Trip to Scarborough’ and the ‘Recruiting Officer,’ in the ‘Inconstant,’ in ‘She Would and She Would Not’ and the ‘Country Girl’ (Garrick’s skilful cleansing of Wycherly’s unspeakable ‘Country Wife’)—all of which reappeared because they had appealing plots, amusing situations and lively characters and because they did not portray the immorals of the days of Nell Gwyn.
Yet when an adroit playwright who seeks to please the public of his own time by the representation of its manners, happens to be also a creative artist, enamored of life, he is sometimes able so to vitalize his satire of a passing vogue that it has abiding vigor. This is what Molière did when he made fun of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules.’ Even when he was writing this cleverest of skits, the cotery which had clustered around Madame de Rambouillet was disintegrating and would have disappeared without his bold blows. But affectation is undying; it assumes new shapes; it is always a tempting target; and Molière, by the magic of his genius, transcended his immediate purpose. He composed a satire of one special manifestation of pretence which survives after two centuries and a half as an adequate satire of all later manifestations. The Précieuses in Paris have long since been gathered to their mothers; so have the Esthetes across the channel in London; and soon they will be followed to the grave by the Little Groups of Serious Thinkers who are to-day settling the problems of the cosmos by the aid of empty phrases. No one sees the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ to-day without recognizing that it is almost as fresh as it was when Madame de Rambouillet enjoyed it.
The man of genius is able to please his own generation by his depiction of its foibles and yet to put into his work the permanent qualities which make it pleasing to the generations that come after him. The trick may not be easy, but it can be turned. How it shall be done,—well, that is one of the secrets of genius. In the case of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ we can see that Molière framed a plot for his lively little piece that is perennially pleasing, a plot which only a little modified was to support two popular successes nearly two centuries later,—the ‘Ruy Blas’ of Victor Hugo and the ‘Lady of Lyons’ of Bulwer-Lytton. He tinged his dialog with just enough timeliness to hit the taste of the town in 1658; and he did not so surcharge it as to fatigue the playgoers of Paris two centuries and a half later.