II
It was in the minor theatres of Paris at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth that there was slowly developed a new type of play, the melodrama. Its first masters were Ducange and Pixérécourt, who had profited by the experience of their ruder forerunners and who taught the secrets of their special craft to their more expert followers, the fertile Bouchardy, for one, and, for another, the only lately departed Dennery, the most adroit and the most inventive of them all.
A melodrama may be described briefly as a play with a plot and nothing but a plot; it abounds in situations enthralling, intricately combined and adroitly presented; and it contains characters simplified to types, drawn in profile and violently stencilled with the primary colors. It has a Hero, who struggles against his fate and struggles in vain until the final episode, when the Villain, as black as he is painted, is cast into outer darkness, the entirely white Hero being then rewarded for all his sufferings and for all his struggles with the hand of the equally pale Heroine, truly the female of his species. The melodrama may be devoid of veracity, but it is compelling in its progressive interest. It is dextrously devised to delight audiences which want “to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight to ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.” In short, it is “a tragedy with a happy ending.”
What could be more tragic than the tale of the ‘Two Orphans’? In that ultimate masterpiece of melodrama, two lovely sisters, one of them blind, are severally lost in Paris in the wickedest days of the Regency. We are made to follow their appalling misadventures; and we behold them again and again in danger of death and worse than death. The sword of Damocles was suspended over their fair heads from the first rising of the curtain until within five minutes of its final fall. The odds are a hundred to one, nay, a thousand to one, against their escaping unscathed from their manifold perils. And yet, nevertheless, at the very end, the clouds lift, sunshine floods the stage; and the two heroines are left at last to live happy like two princesses with their two princes in the most entrancing of fairy tales. And many thousand Parisian audiences, laying aside their intellectual honesty for the occasion, dilated with the right emotion, sobbed at the sorrows of the sisters, cheered the rescuers and venomously hissed the villains who had pursued them.
So completely were the playgoers of Paris subdued to what they worked in, that the makers of melodrama were emboldened to strange tricks. Théophile Gautier once described a long-forgotten melodrama by Bouchardy, himself long forgotten, in which an important character was killed off in the third act. Then in the fifth act when the unfortunate but immaculate Hero was absolutely at the mercy of his vicious enemies, and when he could extricate himself from the toils only if he had the talisman he had been seeking in vain,—the needed password, the necessary key, the missing will, the incriminatory documents, or whatever you prefer—when all is lost, even honor, then in the very nick of time, the character who was killed off in the third act, and dead beyond all question, reappears and gives the Hero the talisman (whatever it was). The Hero receives this with joy, commingled with surprize. “I thought you were dead!” he cries; “how is it that you are here now?” “Ah,” answers the traveller from beyond, “that—that is a secret that I must carry back with me into the tomb!”
It is only fair to record that Parisian melodrama was not often as rude and as crude as this in its subterfuges and its expedients. Indeed, it sometimes rose to a far higher level, as in the ‘Don César de Bazan’ of Dennery and in the ‘Lyons Mail’ of Moreau, Giraudin and Delacour. It even served as the model for Victor Hugo’s superb and sonorous ‘Hernani’ and ‘Ruy Blas,’ in which he flung the rich embroidered mantle of his ample lyricism over an arbitrary skeleton of deftly articulated intrigue, as artificial as it was ingenious.
In its earlier manifestations it was imitated in Great Britain, notably by Edward Fitzball, the first playmaker who perceived the theatrical possibilities of the legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman.’ Fitzball did not disdain to intimate that he considered himself the “Victor Hugo of England,”—which tempted Douglas Jerrold to remark that Fitzball was really only the “Victor No Go” of England. In its later manifestations the melodrama of the French supplied a pattern for the ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones, one of the most satisfactory specimens of this type of play. The ‘Silver King’ won the high approval of Matthew Arnold, who called it an honest melodrama, relying necessarily “for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents” and none the less attaining the level of literature because the dialog and the sentiments were natural.
By the side of the British ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones may be set the American ‘Secret Service’ of William Gillette, which also relies for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents; and yet the sensational incidents are so fitly chosen and so artfully interwoven that they serve to set off the very human hero, an accusable character, a Union spy, with a divided duty before him. Toward the end of the play it becomes evident that this brave and resourceful man is doomed to death; and to this fatality he is himself resigned, wilfully throwing away a chance to escape and welcoming a speedy exit from his impossible position. Yet, once more, just before the curtain falls, the dramatist intervenes, like a god from the machine, sparing his hero’s life, and even permitting the spectators to foresee that hero and heroine will live happily ever after, thus consoling and reassuring the audience before eleven o’clock.
I make bold to say that this happy ending is not inartistic and that it does not outrage our intellectual honesty, for the obvious reason that ‘Secret Service’ is not essentially a tragedy; it is a serio-comic story which never uplifts us to the serene atmosphere of the irresistible and the inevitable in which tragedy lives. It is too brisk in its humor, too lively in its representation of the externalities of life, to justify a fatal conclusion. A true tragedy must not only end sadly, it has also to begin sadly; it has to impress us subtly with a sense of impending disaster, inherent in its theme. What Stevenson said of the short-story, when that is as dramatic as it can be, is applicable to the drama itself. “Make another end to it?” he wrote in answer to a suggestion to that effect. “Ah, yes, but that is not the way I write; the whole tale is unified. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong.... The body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.” In other words the beginning of a melodrama never demands a tragic ending, and rarely even permits it.