[An Advantage of French Dramatists ]
There are many people who entertain the idea that modern French drama is better than modern English drama; and from this it seems a natural deduction that the French playwrights of to-day are abler than their contemporary English dramatists. A study of the large collection of French plays produced at the New Royalty Theatre by M. Gaston Mayer, as well as those presented under other managements during the last few years, and some knowledge of those which have not crossed the unamiable Channel, causes me to wonder. The careless may make the mistake of comparing the imported French pieces with the average English plays; this, of course, is absurd, since only the successful foreign works are played over here; consequently, for purposes of fair comparison, one must eliminate not only our failures but our plays of average merit. Even after the process of elimination has been made there lurks the danger of error, for when comparing the efforts of our playwrights with those of Paris one is making a comparison between men working under a heavy handicap and men unburdened by it. There is a whole world, or at least a whole half-world, open freely to the French writer into which the English dramatist is only permitted to crawl furtively. A large proportion of the foreign works in question, if faithfully translated and presented in London, would cause a howl of horror, based on the proposition that some of them are immoral and some are indelicate, and many both.
No sane people pretend to agree with the observation of some celebrated person, to the effect that anybody can be witty who is willing to be indecent; it is not more universally true than the proposition that no one can be witty unless he condescends to be indecent. Nevertheless there is something in it. Many real witticisms are indecent; some profoundly immoral plays are brilliant, and it is doubtful whether the authors of them would have been as successful if forbidden to be indecent or immoral.
Let us contrast fairly the positions of the French and the English dramatist. The former has at his disposal all the material for drama available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of local humour, whilst the Englishman not only would be unwise to employ the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of subjects and ideas open to his competitor. In other words, the Englishman's stock may be regarded as x, and the Frenchman's as x + y, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local humour on the other.
Now y, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by many of the Parisian playwrights. They and their audiences have grown tired of x, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine themselves to this far from unknown quantity. Thackeray is said to have regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a Fielding. Which of our playwrights does not envy the licence of a Capus? Think of our poor British dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. Really his position is pitiful. The peculiar laws of the theatre require such brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round a little track of conventional morality.
It is a rather curious fact that two different schools of French dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles—but they get there. Emile Augier and Dumas fils were sincere moralists according to their points of view, though the methods of their moralizing some times seem quaint to us. Both of them preached the importance of chastity and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family—an idea deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country.
On the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a queer twist in their expression of them. In order to support their ideas of social and family life and their view of the sanctity of true marriage they were forced to exhibit the perils caused by lawless passion, and frequently their works, as in such extreme instances as Le Mariage d'Olympe and La Femme de Claude, which has the memorable preface with the Tue la phrase, deal candidly with very ugly matters.
Their successors, putting aside such men as Brieux and Hervieu—whose intentions are strictly honourable—may pretend to be moralists, but they adopt an impudently unconventional attitude. They seem to modify the phrase that "property is theft" into the proposition that "marriage is a selfish monopoly." We have had play after play apparently based upon a merely sensual idea of free love. Like their predecessors they handle mud, and they handle it as Walton bade the angler handle the frog when using it as bait. Some of them seem to have no prejudice in favour of people who try to exercise decent self-restraint. Without pleading their cause, one must point out that in the domain of lawless passion there are hundreds of thrilling or vastly comic situations at the command of the dramatist, whether he be moralist or simply boulevardier. No wonder then that there seem to be far more original plays in France than in England.
The advantage of the foreigners is even greater in the matter of dialogue than subject. With the aid of tact and certain elaborate conventions the English dramatist is able to handle many of his competitor's themes and has contrived to adapt some of his forward, if hardly advanced, plays and by ridiculous changes decidedly emasculating them, has succeeded in presenting a sort of version of a number of the saucy farces. The dialogue baffles him.
It cannot be denied that a great deal of the dialogue of French plays is very funny, rather shocking, and not exactly gross. As a rule the more distinguished writers avoid the tone of the joyeusetés of an Armand Sylvestre, a writer capable of using bluntly without acknowledgement the crudest of Chaucer's tales and also of writing beautiful poetry quite free from offence; but even when the humbler gauloiseries are neglected the finer indelicacy is employed, and the men laugh and ladies pretend to put up their fans. Nobody, perhaps, is at all worse, for the jeune fille is only taken to carefully selected plays, except at the seaside, where in the casino she attends performances of works that in Paris she would not be allowed to see; and, moreover, there is truth in what a French manager once shrewdly observed—"Those who can't understand the jokes won't be hurt, and those who can, can't."