It is certainly not necessary that to every play, as to every fable, a moral easily deducible from it should be attached; though every play that presents a true picture of life must almost as a matter of course teach some lesson. Othello is the drama of jealousy, Macbeth the drama of ambition, Romeo and Juliet the drama of passionate love; but it was not to show the danger of jealousy, of ambition, or of passionate love, that these dramas were written. A picture of the “green-eyed monster,” in all its hideousness, occurs in the first; a reflection on the futility of “vaulting ambition” in the second; and a warning of the “violent ends” produced by “violent delights” in the third. The moral purpose of the play, supposing such a purpose to exist, is not, however, in either case made obvious. In numbers of the most successful plays of modern France, on the other hand, we find a moral thesis adopted beforehand and deliberately worked out by dramatic means. This moral thesis does not necessarily embody a high moral notion. It may be, and often is, paradoxical in character. The one thing essential is that it shall assert a principle, and present a case of as dramatic a character as possible in illustration of it. The moral which, as before remarked, belongs to every incident in life, is not always an evident one; nor in the finest works of art does the moral ever lie conspicuously on the surface. But if a vivacious comedy or a dramatic play is specially intended to teach or rather to prove something, it is as well that there should be no mistake about it; and in these cases the audience is generally informed in the first act of what in the succeeding acts the author proposes to demonstrate. A French drama of incidents has often no moral beyond the familiar—not to say vulgar—one that virtue prospers and vice does not; and though each of Victor Hugo’s dramas teaches some special lesson it might sometimes be difficult, but for the preface, to discover it. Numbers of French dramas, however, deal not only with the facts of life but also in an explicit manner with its theories, and though often immoral are constructed on what may be called a moral basis.
In that edifying work, the Pink Dominos, for instance, the complicated and certainly very ingenious intrigue which forms the substance of the piece has its origin in an argument between two ladies, one a thorough Parisian, the other a simple-minded and rather backward provincial, as to the true nature and appropriate treatment of husbands. A husband, according to the Parisian lady, is never perfect; and the wise wife is she who pardons his “slight slips ’gainst bonos mores,” and, to avoid driving him to humiliating subterfuges and denials, pretends even not to see them. In the long run a husband will be grateful to such a wife, and she may be sure in a general way of his fidelity and affection; whereas to a wife too vigilant and too implacable he will be obliged to behave with a duplicity which, reacting upon his own sensitive nature, will make him despise himself and detest her.
A good many modern French plays are in fact pamphlets in dramatic form; and some of them have suffered as works of art from having been too evidently written with a purpose. The dramatist who wishes to prove the truth of a proposition put forward by himself will of course make his characters act as it is necessary they should act in order to give the desired result. He must not violate probability in too flagrant a manner, and his play will scarcely succeed if the dénouement seems altogether unnatural; but even while observing these conditions he may, and usually does, so mould his personages as to make them quite exceptional; though it is with these exceptional personages that he works towards establishing his general rule. The interesting thing, however, in connection with the moral and philosophical plays of modern France is not any lesson that they teach, but the fact that such plays exist, showing as it does that the theatre in France is much more than a place of amusement. It is a place of discussion, in which every question that agitates society is treated, and often in several different pieces from several different points of view. Absurdities of the day (such as those of æstheticism) are satirised no doubt on our own stage. But the social questions dealt with on the French stage are often of a far graver character than any connected with dress. This was the case even with M. Sardou’s Famille Benoiton, notoriously a costume piece, and dependent in a large measure for its success on its amusing exaggerations of the exaggerated costumes of the day. But it was more than that. It touched upon many other follies akin to that of exaggeration in dress; and was really a stage echo of M. Dupin’s celebrated pamphlet on Le Luxe effréné des Femmes. M. Sardou’s exhilarating picture of the unbridled luxury of women called for no reply, and in fact admitted of none. His eloquent apostrophe to white muslin, “O sainte mousseline,” was criticised in the press on economical grounds, the work of “getting up” a muslin dress being neither so simple nor so inexpensive as M. Sardou had imagined. But admitting the existence of the evils that he attacked it was impossible to defend them. Similarly when, in the lively days of 1848, La Propriété c’est le Vol was brought out, and the serpent of Eden was presented on the stage with the hat and spectacles and the very physiognomy of M. Proudhon, it was not likely that any dramatist would take the part of the Socialist and seek to represent individualism as ridiculous. The “right to labor” is asserted in this same piece by a dentist without patients, who insists as a matter of principle on pulling out the teeth of the first person he meets. This again could be met by no counter-presentation from a socialistic point of view, nor would the Government have permitted it; for despite the article in the Constitution of 1830, declaring that “the censorship is abolished and cannot be re-established,” it has never been found possible to dispense in France with stage censorship, which, temporarily set aside as a result of some revolutionary movement, has always been re-established before long. So necessary, indeed, had it become under the second French Republic, to restrain the Aristophanic tendencies of the newly emancipated dramatists, that the censorship went to extremes, and not content with prohibiting political subjects interfered with social subjects also. Thus it was under the second French Republic that the younger Dumas’ sympathetic picture of the woman who has gone astray (La Traviata, as she is considerately called in the Italian version of the play) was objected to by the censorship, nor was it until the Empire that La Dame aux Camélias could be brought out.
It would probably be a mistake to see in this piece any deliberate attempt to raise up the fallen woman. The play was only a dramatic version of a novel by the same author for which the subject had been furnished by the life and death of a certain Marie Duplessis—whose story Dickens, becoming acquainted with it during a visit to Paris, had at one time proposed to treat. La Dame aux Camélias was in any case destined to achieve such popularity that for a time the class to which the heroine belongs became invested with unusual interest. Vice by being represented as consumptive lost all its grossness; but no sooner had the play attained its maximum of success than the discovery was made that it rested on a wrong moral basis. It “rehabilitated the courtesan;” and M. Théodore Barrière, assisted by the inevitable collaborateur, undertook to set matters right by exhibiting that objectionable personage in her true colors. The outcome of this undertaking was Les Filles de Marbre: too fine a name for them according to Théophile Gautier, who preferred as a substitute Les Filles de Platre. Instead of dying of love, complicated by phthisis, with claims to forgiveness based on her having “loved much,” the leading lady of M. Barrière’s piece reduced her lover to poverty and despair, unconsciously ruined his talent, and consciously insulted him when she could no longer extort money from him. The God this young woman avowedly worshipped was not love but gold. She was without pity, without remorse; nor did the author think fit to place in contrast with her a more amiable specimen of depravity—even as Dumas has placed side by side with his tender-hearted Marguerite Gauthier, the selfish and ignoble Prudence. Marco, the chief of the Girls of Marble, is doubtless a much more common character in the world than Marguerite Gauthier; and Balzac, who knew the world, had anticipated in only one of his characters—the unfortunate Coralie—all the best points in Marguerite Gauthier, whereas he had anticipated in half-a-dozen different characters, from Madame de Marneffe downward, the worst points in Marco. But though Marco may have been a good deal truer to nature than Marguerite Gauthier she was far less interesting; and the picture of a fallen woman saved by an access of genuine feeling was much more agreeable than that of a degraded one dragging to his destruction a miserably weak man.
The Girls of Marble seemed, however, to M. Léon Laya too hard, too cold; and to show that women might lead irregular lives, and yet be kind and generous, he wrote Les Cœurs d’Or. Here two young women, attached by anti-matrimonial ties to two young men, find that they are preventing them from making suitable marriages in a decent sphere of life. The young men know what, in a worldly point of view, they ought to do, but are restrained by good feeling and the remembrance of past affection from doing it. The young women, however, resolve to sacrifice themselves. They take the initiative in breaking off the connection, and by doing so prove that they have “hearts of gold.” This sentimental piece, written in the style called “honnête,” did not meet with anything like the success of the highly emotional Dame aux Camélias, or of the cynical Filles de Marbre; nor did it close the stage discussion as to the goodness or badness of a particular class of women—a discussion which, indeed, might have been carried on for an indefinite time, seeing that the class in question comprises a great number of different specimens, from Cleopatra—that “reine entretenue,” as Heine called her—to the Esther of Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères d’une Courtisane.
Then arose the question—suggested, no doubt, by M. Laya’s Cœurs d’Or—whether a woman really possessing a heart of gold ought to be abandoned whenever it suited the convenience or the caprice of her lover to get rid of her. M. Léon Gozlan took one view of the matter and M. Emile Augier the other; the former developing his ideas on the subject in a single act, the latter in a full-sized drama. In Léon Gozlan’s charming little piece, La Fin du Roman, ou Comment on se débarrasse d’une Maîtresse, a young man is represented as so hopelessly attached to a young woman whom he has omitted to marry, that his friends, as “men of the world,” think it necessary to speak to him on the subject. The attachment has lasted a considerable time, and it is explained to him that it will be mere weakness on his part to allow it to continue any longer. He is invited to join a travelling party to Italy, and is mockingly told that he will want to bring his mistress with him. He repels the taunt, and, in response to the suggestion of one of his friends, makes a bet on the subject. The separation having been decided on, a division of household effects takes place. Difficulties arise about the appropriation of certain objects to which a sentimental interest belongs, and which each, from regard for the other, wishes to retain. A favorite dog is disputed for; and when it is arranged that he shall be the property of the one he goes to most willingly, the faithful animal hesitates between the two, and maintains an attitude of strict but friendly neutrality. Lastly, there is a child’s miniature which neither will consent to part with; and thus, little by little, the impossibility of the separation is made manifest. The young man takes the young woman with him to Italy. But he wins his bet all the same, for he is accompanied not by his mistress but by his wife.
As a counterpart to this work, in which an immoral situation is rectified by the simplest means, may be taken M. Emile Augier’s Mariage d’Olympe, in which a similar situation is, by similar means, made to yield terrible and tragic results. Only M. Augier’s young woman happens to be not at all the same sort of person as M. Gozlan’s young woman; so that whereas to abandon the one would have been culpable and foolish, to introduce the other into decent society was reckless and criminal.
Dumas showed before long a disposition to turn, not against his own views, but of views supposed to be his. Whatever allowances might be made for a woman in the position of Marguerite Gauthier, a real wife ought not, according to his very original idea, to deceive her husband. He exhibited, in Diane de Lys, a lady who took this liberty, and who was shot in consequence by her justly indignant spouse.
M. Dumas’ Fils Naturel, in which a father disavows his son, until at last the young man finds himself in such a position that he can in his turn disavow his father, gave rise to a good many pieces on the same subject. The half-a-dozen or dozen plays in which it is shown that irregular relations between men and women are likely to have awkward consequences, are, as studies of social problems, scarcely worth dwelling upon. Every one knows that (as in La Fiammina) the son of a prima donna who has misconducted herself may find difficulties in his way when he proposes to marry a girl whose parents are eminently respectable; and we need no sensational dramatist to teach us (as in Coralie), that an officer whose mother has amassed a large fortune by the most shameful means may, in spite of his personal merits, meet with slights and indignities.
M. Emile Augier’s Gendre de M. Poirier started the son-in-law as a dramatic subject. In this comedy, one of the best of modern times, a rich bourgeois has married his daughter to a penniless aristocrat, who directs the household in such a sumptuous style that the father-in-law finds himself in a fair way of being ruined. To this a sort of counterpart was furnished by M. Augier himself in Un Beau Mariage; which, while sparing fathers-in-law, exposes the thoughtlessness of some mothers-in-law who expect their daughters’ husbands, not only to take charge of their affairs, but to accompany them to evening parties and balls. This to a serious-minded young man would doubtless be a great trial; and in M. Augier’s comedy the end of the matter is that the husband leaves the house of his rich mother-in-law, and, followed at a very dramatic crisis by his wife, supports himself by the exercise of his talents as a chemist, mechanician, and inventor. The mother-in-law, even when she possesses the advantage of being rich, is not a popular character on the French stage; nor, apparently, on the Spanish stage either. There is, at all events, a modern Spanish comedy, called The Meadow Coat (the rough coat, that is to say, of the untrained, unclipped horse), in which, as in Un Beau Mariage, a rustic husband who rises early meets, on coming down in the morning, his wife and mother returning from a late ball. In M. Augier’s corresponding scene the husband has been reading and writing all night when the two ladies in their ball dresses suddenly burst upon his solitude.