IV
TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS
IV
TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS
I
In Mrs. Wharton’s acute and often penetrating analysis of ‘French Ways and Their Meaning,’ she dwelt upon the innate intellectual honesty of the French, “the special distinction of the race, which makes it the torch-bearer of the world”; and she asserted that Bishop Butler’s celebrated declaration, “Things are what they are and will be as they will be,” might have been “the motto of the French intellect.” She called it “an axiom that makes dull minds droop, but exalts the brain imaginative enough to be amazed before the marvel of things as they are.”
She pointed out that in Paris the people who go to the moving-pictures to gaze at an empty and external panorama are also the people who flock to the state-subventioned theaters, the Français and the Odéon, to behold the searching tragedies of Corneille and Racine, immitigably veracious in the portrayal of life as it is on the lofty plane of poetry:
The people who assist at these grand tragic performances have a strong enough sense of reality to understand the part that grief and calamity play in life and in art; they feel instinctively that no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy its fearless representation.
This intellectual honesty Mrs. Wharton failed to find in the audiences of our American theaters, because it is not a habitual possession of Americans generally. And she ventured to quote a remark which she once heard Howells make on our theatrical taste. They had been talking about the pressure exerted upon the American playwright by the American playgoing public, compelling him to wind up his play, whatever its point of departure, with the suggestion that his hero and heroine lived happily ever after, like the prince and princess who are married off at the end of the fairy-tale. Mrs. Wharton declared that this predilection of our playgoers did not imply a preference for comedy, but that, on the contrary, “our audience wanted to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight till ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.”