A POPULAR STAR OF A REVUE
“Then, too, the modern comforts we find in our restaurants and other public places are lacking in our playhouses, whose interiors have remained unchanged for more than half a century, and where one is badly seated or stifled in a stuffy box. Again, the theater proper, once the most moderate-priced of amusements, has become with us so expensive that most bourgeois families or the average Parisian cannot afford to go.
“Besides, in the serious theaters the entr’actes have become interminably long, the acts ridiculously short. We begin to have enough, too, of what we term pornographie; of plays full of salacious intrigue and of moral degeneracy, which most of our young authors seem to revel in, and which they call ‘a slice of life (une tranche de vie).’” He added earnestly:
“The Parisian wants gay plays, clever vaudeville, or little comedies full of sparkling wit and humorous situations. The Parisian wants it all the more because the stage lately has been too much under the influence of foreigners like Ibsen, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Tolstoy and the rest.” And the Baron added, with a wink:
THE SETTING OF A SOCIETY PLAY
“It is, after all, an eternal exchange. They have taken from us what we have taken from them. The Romantic school has nourished them, Georges Sand has deeply influenced Russian literature. The type of the Ibsenian woman is Georges Sand’s ‘Lélia’; even the last play of Dumas, that ‘Route de Thèbes,’ shows the influence of Ibsen. Dumas imitated Ibsen, but remained himself. These foreign writers are the sons of our French romantiques, who themselves were the sons of Schiller and Goethe, just as they in turn were the sons of the eighteenth century and were descended from Diderot and the Encyclopedists.
“But the public revolts against all this modern pessimism,” continued my friend—“against Monsieur Hervieu, for example, because he tries to prove in his plays that the stage of to-day is less pessimistic than of old. But he can say all he wishes,” affirmed the Baron, warmly, “and the dramatic world may insist that it used to be even sadder, that the old playwrights made people die, that Camille was dead! that the ‘Femme de Claude’ was dead! that the theaters in bygone days were sumptuous slaughter-houses, becoming veritable battle-fields by the fifth act, as in ‘L’Étrangère,’ ‘La Princesse George,’ and so many others. But what do you want?” the Baron went on. “The public like it better, for when the people in the play are killed off once and for all, the good spectator has no more to worry over.” And the Baron pushed aside his écrevisses.
“Everything is settled! nothing to think about,” he continued. “What fault then do the public find in the modern plays? It is not that they finish badly, but that they do not finish at all!
“The ‘dénouement’! Ah! There is a word,” cried the Baron, “that has the gift of exasperating all our young authors. They cannot resign themselves like Augier, Dumas and Sardou, to see on the stroke of midnight the hero marry the heroine and virtue get its reward.