With the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the French romantic school of literature was ushered into existence; the three Coriphaes of which were De Lavigne, De Lamartine, and Chateaubriand. Schiller, Young, and Milton, seemed to have been their models; but the modern prose writers soon followed the lyric poets in their imitations of the romantic schools of England and Germany; and we have since had French pupils of Fielding, Smollet, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul Richter. Eugene Sue at first imitated Fennimore Cooper; but he soon gave into the “tendency novels,” on the Miss Martineau style of treating political and domestic economy. But his great genius, and the rich resources of his imagination, soon made him shoot by his dull originals, and he has since grappled successfully with religion, morals, and politics; in all which combats he may be said to have come out victorious; for he has nearly, if not altogether, annihilated his antagonists.
The Feuilleton literature which has grown in proportion to the decline of essays and memoirs, has opened a new field to the romantic pens of France, and has made that style of writing popular with the masses. Since then the abuse of it has passed all bounds; half a dozen writers have absorbed the Feuilletons of all the large sheets published in the capital—so that talents less known and appreciated must content themselves with some feudal tenure under one of these literary lords; for it must not be imagined that writers like Sue, Alexandre Dumas, Soulié, &c., do their own works, or are put to the necessity of even inventing the incidents of their stories. All this is done for them by their literary vassals, who work for five francs a day, while their masters, who occasionally correct the phraseology of some chapter, but whose principal business it is, when matters come to a crisis, to furnish the dénouement and the conclusion, to which they put their name, receive hundreds of thousands for their contributions.
But what the feudal writers of the romantic school of France have not attempted till lately was to imitate Shakspeare on the stage. Hitherto the modern dramas of Victor Hugo were more in the melo-dramatic line, and as such admirably adapted to the taste of the frequenters of the theatre de la Porte St. Martin. But Victor Hugo was a brave man, and with the popularity acquired among the masses, soon forced his way to the French academy, as Lucien Bonaparte, at the head of his grenadiers, forced the legislative assembly of the republic to close its sessions. He got in and seated himself, and has since had strength enough to draw some of his best friends after him, notwithstanding all the opposition of the classic Molé, who has even pronounced a discourse against Alfred de Vigny.
Alexandre Dumas, the Créol of the Isle of Bourbon (the French use the term Créol as a sort of embellishment to a Mulatto) is the greatest literary factotum of France now living. He imitates every thing—history, comedy, tragedy, novels, and romance, and will with great difficulty be kept from “the forty” qui en savant comme quatre.[[1]] His Monte Christo is an imitation of “The Wandering Jew;” his Age of Louis XIV. and XV., an important commentary on Voltaire; but his chef d’œuvre we have now before us;—it is nothing less than a new version of Shakspeare’s Hamlet!
The present Feuilleton literature of France is, properly speaking, the commercial or shop-keeper literature of the day, in which a few thoughts abstracted from some greater works are carefully spun out and disposed of at retail prices; or, to use a still better figure, a ragout with all sorts of spices, but made from a piece of meat which has served to appease the appetite of hundreds. There is a perfect dearth of ideas in all of them, and a morbid desire for ornament. The form is everywhere more valuable than the substance—the elegance of style superior to the naked thought. It is the process of the gold-beater, who, with a single grain of that precious metal, covers the backs of a whole library.
The taste for Shakspeare is, in France, of recent origin. Since the performance of Macready on the French boards, Parisian audiences have become acquainted with ghosts, witches, and the whole laboratory of philosophical superstition in which the British bard surpassed all others, ancient and modern. Still Shakspeare remained unintelligible or unpalatable to many, notwithstanding the learned reviews of the Revue de deux Mondes, and the Revue de Paris, both of which strove to show that though in point of abstract genius Shakspeare may have possessed more than Racine, Voltaire, and Corneille put together, still he lacked that scenic arrangement, and that peculiar close connection between cause and effect which distinguishes the dramatic works of France. “Shakspeare’s Hamlet is a philosophical dissertation,” said a French writer, “in a dramatic form.” “There is no reason for Hamlet’s madness”—“none in the world for Ophelia’s ravings, who ought to spurn the taunts and insults of her coward lover,” &c.
All these criticisms have moved Alexandre Dumas to try his hand at the work, and to correct the logic and dramatic arrangement of “the British savage, who occasionally found a pearl on a dunghill.” The work of the French Creole is admirable of its kind; but equally “unintelligible” in regard to the scenic arrangements. Hamlet is as much a coward in the French play as he is in the English, only a little less philosophical; and instead of Laertes and the king being killed, the queen poisoned, and what not, the ghost takes charge of eternal justice and finishes them off himself. Why he does not do so, in the first act, immediately after his appearance, is an enigma; but as that would have saved the remaining four acts—which would not have answered the views of Alexandre Dumas—it was necessary that Hamlet—the only character who survives in the French play—should do some courting, and the queen and king some talking and feasting, all according to the rules of the French drama. We cannot refrain, by way of a rich treat, from giving the readers of the magazine the closing scene of Dumas’s play. It will speak for itself, and save us the necessity of further comment.
| [1] | The Calembourg perpetrated by Piron, who was never admitted a member of the Academy. |