“Yes,” said Howells, “what the American public wants is a tragedy—with a happy ending.”
And Mrs. Wharton added her own comment that what Howells said of the American attitude in the theater “is true of the whole American attitude toward life.” In other words we Americans both in the playhouse and out of it are lacking in the intellectual honesty which the French possess. We are not convinced, and we are not willing to let our plays, and even our novels, convince us, that “things are what they are and will be as they will be.”
With the praise that Mrs. Wharton bestowed upon the French, no one who has profited by the masterpieces of French literature could cavil for a moment. The French are intellectually honest, more so than any other modern nation, and perhaps as much so as the Greeks. There is abundant insincerity in our drama and in our fiction; and no one long familiar with either is justified in denying this. But, none the less, Howells’s characteristically witty remark has not perhaps all the weight which Mrs. Wharton attached to it. And it instantly evokes the desire to ask questions. Is it really true that we Americans like tragedies with happy endings? And, supposing this to be true, are we the only people who have ever revealed this aberration? Finally, if we have revealed it, are there any special reasons for this manifestation of our deficiency in intellectual honesty?
Having propounded these three queries, I propose to answer them myself as best I can, and as the farseeing reader probably expected me to do; and it appears to me prudent to commence by considering the second of them, leaving the first to be taken up immediately thereafter. Are we Americans the only people who like tragedies with happy endings? Here we have a starting point for a discursive inquiry into the tastes of the playgoing public in other countries and in other centuries. Nor need we begin this leisurely loitering by too long a voyage, for we have only to go back a hundred years, more or less, and to tarry a little while in France itself.
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.