Le Gendre de M. Poirier, too, was the progenitor, or at least the caller-into-existence, of another son-in-law piece called Les Petites Mains, in which a son-in-law of fashionable tastes and habits, but without money of his own, is harshly treated by a father-in-law, who insists upon his adopting some occupation, and who ultimately, by dint of persecution and misrepresentation, separates him from his wife and forces him to become clerk and touter to a house agent. The moral of this amusing little comedy is not quite apparent to the unspectacled eye. The semi-burlesque proposition on which it rests is, however, to the effect that men with large hands are intended by nature to make money, and men with small hands to spend it. The piece belongs in any case to the son-in-law series, in which, by its entertaining qualities, it may claim to hold an honorable place.
The latest social subject dealt with by French dramatists has been the fertile one of divorce, which M. Sardou has treated both seriously and comically. Before Odette and Divorçons, he had, however, written the less known Daniel Rochat, which ends with a divorce in Switzerland, the divorced persons being of course citizens of the Helvetian Republic; and though the main subject of Daniel Rochat is the union, followed immediately afterwards by the separation, of two persons who are prevented from living together as husband and wife by incompatibility of religious convictions, it may all the same be classed with M. Sardou’s other divorce pieces. The author lets it be seen that the mistake made by Daniel Rochat can easily be remedied in Switzerland, a country, where divorce is easy; whereas it would have been without remedy in France, where divorce was at that time impossible. The case, however, though an effective one for the dramatist—at least for such a dramatist as M. Sardou—is of too exceptional a character to merit attention from the dramatic moralist or legist.
The practice of treating subjects of the day in dramatic form is one which, from a purely artistic point of view, cannot be commended. The process involves almost necessarily forced motives and distorted characters. Works, too, produced on this system must, from the nature of the case, be of ephemeral interest. Who, for instance, now that France, like England, Germany, and the United States, has a law of divorce, can care for pieces in which the interest turns upon the iniquity of treating as indissoluble every contract, to whatever painful consequences it may have led, which has once been signed in presence of Monsieur le Maire? In Shakespeare and Molière so little are affairs of the day touched upon (without ever being made the subject of an entire work) that a reader might find it difficult to determine from internal evidence at what period either of these writers lived. The characteristic talk of Les Précieuses is about the only indication in the case of Molière of the time to which the piece belongs. There is scarcely a work, on the other hand, from the pen of M. Sardou (who may be taken as the representative comedy writer of modern France) which does not bear the impress and color of the time, and which (especially in the case of his later pieces) does not in a very direct manner reproduce the incidents or reflect the ideas of the life around him. If immediate and striking success with a Paris audience be the author’s aim, it must be admitted that M. Sardou’s method is more effective than that of his predecessor, Scribe, whose comedies are masterpieces of ingenuity, but are for the most part independent of place and time. Many of Scribe’s pieces have been quite as successful in England as in France. This cannot be said of any of Sardou’s plays, with the solitary exception of “Les Pattes de Mouche,” one of his earliest works, written at a time when Scribe was still his model. But so far as Paris at the present moment is concerned, M. Sardou hits the mark, and hits it harder than ever Scribe did.
The stage in France would be used for the discussion of political as well as social questions, did the censorship permit it. Of this we had a sign in M. Sardou’s Rabagas, produced soon after the Commune, in various pieces brought out during the revolutionary days of 1848, and in Les Cosaques, which, after being previously rejected by the censorship, was authorised for representation just before the outbreak of the Crimean war, when, as a matter of policy, antagonism to Russia was encouraged and stimulated by the Government. As a rule, however, no performance likely to call forth manifestations of political feeling, or to give offence to a friendly State, or to its people, is allowed. M. Sardou’s L’oncle Sam was objected to as calculated to hurt the feelings of the Americans; and the authors of a little piece called L’Etrangère—not to be confounded with the five-act comedy of the same name—were required to change it because (as set forth in a document which figures among the Papiers secrets de l’Empire) numbers of foreigners visit Paris and might be annoyed at seeing the leading character of the very objectionable little piece put forward as a typical lady from abroad! All social questions of the day have, however, for the last thirty years been left freely to the dramatist to treat as he may think fit. Or it may be that such questions have always been left to him, and that it is only during the last quarter of a century or so that he has thought fit to occupy himself with them.
The true character of women who have none was the first theme to be treated controversially, with examples in lieu of arguments; then the desirability of getting married in certain cases where the marriage ceremony had been dispensed with; then, in due time, the rights of natural children and their compromising effect in connection with mothers proposing to lead a new life. The son-in-law question—of such slight interest to Englishmen—had meantime sprung up; and the quiet, studious son-in-law, bullied by his wife’s mother; the fashionably extravagant son-in-law, devouring the substance of his wife’s father; the idle but well-meaning son-in-law, misunderstood by every one, were turn by turn exhibited. Finally, the divorce question produced a whole crop of pieces, serious and comic; and it may be that the treatment of this question by a succession of dramatists, who dwelt on the misery and disgrace resulting from marriages practically dissolved, but legally indissoluble, had some effect in hastening the adoption of M. Naquet’s Bill. The cruel position of a husband chained to a disreputable wife, and unable to set himself free, has been shown in one of M. Sardou’s most effective pieces, which, thirty years ago, when England also was without a divorce law, would have been as effective in England as in France. But it was difficult for English audiences to realise the situation; and now that continued wedlock between husbands and wives who hate one another is no longer enforced by law, the difficulty for French audiences may soon be equally great. With the passing of M. Naquet’s Divorce Bill such pieces as the Odette of M. Sardou, the Diane de Lys of M. Alexandre Dumas the younger, and the Fiammina of M. Mario Uchard lost all significance. When the pressure of the matrimonial knot has become quite unbearable it is now no longer necessary either that the wife should retire to a convent or that the husband should be shot. The difficulty is solved by the simpler, though less dramatic, means of a divorce. It is matter of publicity that immediately after M. Naquet’s Bill became law the author of La Fiammina took precisely this view of his own matrimonial trouble.
There has been a recent instance, too, in Germany, of a subject of the day—this time a serious one—being dealt with by a dramatist. Die Gräfin Lea, a play by Herr Rudolf Lindau, contains a striking exhibition of that prejudice against everything Jewish, to which in Germany the high-sounding name of anti-Semiticism has been given. In a very ingenious succession of scenes he shows that the widow, who by reason not only of her Jewish faith, but also of her low origin, is deemed by her husband’s relatives unworthy to succeed to his nobiliary estate, is an excellent and charming woman, who would not be out of place even in the very highest position. The tribunal before which the case is brought takes just this view of the matter, and the Countess Lea triumphs. But the dramatists argument in favor of the Jews is somewhat weak; and he leaves us to suppose that if the Countess Lea had been an ill-bred, commonplace Jewess, instead of a Jewess of great refinement, the court might equitably have given judgment against her. A reply to Herr Lindau’s piece, such as in France it would certainly have elicited, might easily have been written. But in Germany, as in England and all countries except France, the stage has not enough hold upon society to cause social questions to be often discussed in stage pieces. In France, on the other hand, the public takes such an interest in the theatre that the “boards” are almost to them what the platform is to the English and the Americans.
The production of a whole series of pieces on one particular subject of debate implies a continuous attention on the part of the intelligent public such as no stage but that of Paris—and the Paris stage only in modern times—seems ever to have enjoyed. Until the end of the last century the French dramatist was poorly paid, and as dramatist had little offered to him in the way of distinction beyond the hollow applause of the public. It was not until Beaumarchais obtained the decree fixing the remuneration to dramatic authors at so much per cent. on the gross receipts that writers of all kinds, and of every degree of eminence, began to occupy themselves with the stage; and it was not until all the best literary talent in the country had thus been attracted to the drama that the French Academy opened its doors to dramatists as such. Victor Hugo was a poet first and a dramatist afterwards. The elder Dumas was a dramatist first and a novelist afterwards—and he was never admitted to the Academy at all. The election of Scribe, a dramatist, and virtually nothing else, was quite an event. Since that time, however, the entry of a highly successful dramatist of long-established reputation into the Academy has come to be looked upon as a matter of course. The last dramatist elected as such was a very admirable farce writer, M. Labiche, author of Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie, Le Voyage de M. Perrichon, Les Petites Mains, and other similar pieces, full of humor, but without the least academical pretensions.—Fortnightly Review.
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS.
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD.
It is a long time since I quoted Bishop Wilson, but he is full of excellent things, and one of his apophthegms came into my mind the other day as I read an angry and unreasonable expostulation addressed to myself. Bishop Wilson’s apophthegm is this: Truth provokes those whom it does not convert. “Miracles,” I was angrily reproached for saying, “do not happen, and more and more of us are becoming convinced that they do not happen; nevertheless, what is really best and most valuable in the Bible is independent of miracles. For the sake of this I constantly read the Bible myself, and I advise others to read it also.” One would have thought that at a time when the French newspapers are attributing all our failures and misfortunes to our habit of reading the Bible, and when our own Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal is protesting that the golden rule is a delusion and a snare for practical men, the friends of the old religion of Christendom would have had a kindly feeling towards any one—whether he admitted miracles or not—who maintained that the root of the matter for all of us was in the Bible, and that to the use of the Bible we should still cling. But no; Truth provokes those whom it does not convert; so angry are some good people at being told that miracles do not happen, that if we say this, they cannot bear to have us using the Bible at all, or recommending the Bible. Either take it and recommend it with its miracles, they say, or else leave it alone, and let its enemies find confronting them none but orthodox defenders of it like ourselves!