Hi! i I i! I! HI! ii i 1 by Grander {Matthews : ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS French Dramatists of the I9th Century Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance Aspects of Fiction, and Other Essays The Historical Novel, and Other Essays Essays on English (in press) FRENCH DRAMATISTS OF THE i 9 th CENTURY OF THE i 9 th CENTURY BY BRANDER MATTHEWS, D.C.L., PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY THIRD EDITION, BROUGHT DOWN TO THE END OF THE CENTURY NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1881, 1891, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRANDER MATTHEWS. All rights reserved. THE CAXTON PRESS NEW YORK. PREFACE. IT is not yet sixty years since the Romanticists and the Classicists first met in battle-array ; and it is but little more than fifty years since Hernani sounded his trumpet, and the hollow walls of Classicism fell with a final crash. This half-century is a period of no slight importance in the history of the drama : it is one of the two epochs when the plays of France have been conspicuously and incomparably superior to the plays of any other country ; the earlier epoch was when the French stage saw in rapid succession the newest works of Corneille, of Moliere, and of Racine. Although, with our ownership -of Shakspere constantly in mind, we may not be willing to allow that the French have reached the highest pinnacle of the drama, we can see clearly enough that it is in the drama that they have mounted highest. If we seek to know why this is, why they have done better work in the drama than in any other department of literature, it is easy (although vi Preface. perhaps not altogether sufficient) to answer that it is because the dramatic is the form best suited for the expression of certain qualities in which the French excel the men of other races. Chief among these national characteristics are a lively wit, a love of effect for its own sake, a gift for writing beautiful prose, and a passion for order and symmetry and clear- ness. These are precious qualities to the dramatist ; and, just as they did their share toward the beauty of the comedy and the tragedy which amused and moved the people of Paris and the court of the king in the age of Louis XIV., so they now help to make the present drama of France what it is. The plays of Corneille, of Moliere and of Racine, have been written about superabundantly; while, so far as I know, the story of the more modern French drama has nowhere been told. Now and again one may chance on the portrait of an individual, but a picture of the whole period is not to be found anywhere. For this reason, I have sought in the following pages to give an outline of the course of the drama in France from the first quarter of this century to the present time. In the attempt to embrace the whole I have been forced to neglect some of the parts, and to pass with but casual attention over more than one dramatist of note, Casi- mir Delavigne, for example, Alfred de Musset (who, in spite of his genius and of the latter-day success of certain of his comedies, was a dramatist only second- Preface. vii arily, and, so to speak, by accident), Frangois Ponsard, and Mme. de Girardin, among the dead ; M. Jules San- deau, M. Ernest Legouve, M. Edouard Pailleron, and M. Edmond Gondinet, among the living. In an earlier and less complete condition, most of the chapters which make up the book have already appeared here and there in various reviews and magazines. Be- fore taking its appointed place in these pages, each chapter has been carefully revised, often enlarged, and in all cases "brought down to date." Space has been found for more minute criticism and for more ample quotation than was possible in the scant quarters of a serial. It will be noted that the French titles of plays have been turned into English whenever a translation appeared possible and profitable ; and the use of French has been conscientiously avoided, save where no English equivalent could be found for a technical term, and in an occasional specimen quotation of the verse of Victor Hugo or Emile Augier, to which no translation would do justice. I take pleasure in expressing my thanks here to a friend, who, in spite of our constant disagreement as to the relative value of M. Augier and M. Dumas, has lent me the aid of his literary skill and of his knowledge of the modern French drama, as he did before, when the ' Theatres of Paris ' was passing through the press. B. M. NEW YORK, October, 1881. viii Preface. NOTE TO THIRD EDITION. To the second edition of this book, published in 1891, there was added a chapter covering the years of the ninth decade; and the present edition is now enlarged by a final chapter considering the condition of the French drama at the end of the nineteenth century. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, February, 1901. CONTENTS. >AGE. PREFACE v CHAPTER. I. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT i II. VICTOR HUGO 15 III. ALEXANDRE DUMAS 46 IV. EUGENE SCRIBE 78 V. EMILE AUGIER 105 VI. ALEXANDRE DUMAS jils 136 VII. VICTORIEN SARDOU 172 VIII. OCTAVE FEUILLET 203 IX. EUGENE LABICHE 224 X. MEILHAC AND HALEVY 243 XI. EMILE ZOLA AND THE PRESENT TENDENCIES OF FRENCH DRAMA 264 XII. A TEN YEARS' RETROSPECT: 1881-1891 . .285 XIII. AT THE END OF THE CENTURY: 1891-1900 . . . 303 FRENCH DRAMATISTS OF THE igth CENTURY. CHAPTER I. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. " THERE is in every thing a maturity which must be waited for," said Chamfort ; " happy the man who arrives at the moment of this maturity ! " Toward the end of the first quarter of this century it was evident, to any one who had eyes to see, that a moment of maturity in the history of the French drama was soon coming. The time was ripe for a new growth. Else- where in literature and in art, there was the murmur of new life ; in prose fiction and in poetry, there had been a new birth ; even on the stage there were begin- ning to be signs of the coming of new blood. And nowhere else was there as much need of a renascence as in the theatre, where all was chill and lifeless. During the imperial rule of Napol6on the position of the Parisian theatres had been peculiar. They were under the direct control of the General Government^ represented at the fall of the empire by M. de R6mu- sat. They were limited in number; and the style of play each could perform was rigidly prescribed by the 2 French Dramatists. imperial decree. To one theatre the production of operas-comiques was permitted, and nothing else; to another, vaudevilles ; to a third, melodramas ; while to the Theatre Frangais was reserved the exclusive right to perform the pieces of the classic repertory. The comedies and tragedies of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Regnard, Marivaux, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais, could be seen on the stage of the Theatre Frangais, and nowhere else. This lack of liberty brought about the usual result of restriction, a dearth of novelty and a desolating monotony. The imperial interference was, in part at least, responsible for the low condition into which French dramatic literature was sinking in the first ten years of the Bourbon restoration. At the Theatre Frangais comedy was almost childish, and tragedy was in its dotage: there was neither action nor animation ; all was dull, dreary, and commonplace. Now and again, in a minor theatre, there was an attempt at something less constrained: opera-comique was beginning its lively career ; the national vaudeville had been renewed by Eugene Scribe, who had stamped it forever with his own image and superscription ; and Pixe're'court and Victor Ducange had made themselves masters of melodrama imported from Germany, and were using it to wring all hearts. But the official theatre and the official critics chose to ignore, even the existence of vaudeville and melo- drama, or at best, to regard them as wholly inferior forms of art, if indeed they were not altogether beyond the pale of art. The attitude of the French critics toward such unliterary plays as vaudevilles and melo- dramas was not unlike that of a cultivated New-Yorker toward the old Bowery Theatre, or that pf a cultivated The Romantic Movement. 3 Londoner toward the similar Transpontine houses. Such places might serve to amuse the vulgar throng ; but the plays acted therein were too far removed from literature to call for criticism, or even consideration. The new comedies and tragedies brought out from time to time by the Comedie-Franc.aise received all the more consideration and criticism : they were judged accord- ing to a code of Draconian severity ; and if they broke one jot or tittle of the dramatic law, if they were found wanting in one iota of dramatic decorum, condign and exemplary punishment was at once visited upon the hapless author. In general, however, authors and critics were quite comfortably agreed on what was fit and proper and in accordance with the dignity of the drama. To be dignified was the chief end of the dramatist, and both tragedy and comedy were constantly taking les- sons in deportment. Never to infringe upon the rules laid down by Boileau, and discussed by numberless commentators, was an equal duty. Slowly and surely the desire to do nothing outside of the rules, or in any way indecorous, was choking all life out of the drama. As Mr. Saintsbury aptly puts it, " Each piece was ex- pected to resemble something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and insufficient cul- ture." The French drama of the first quarter of this century is the empty echo of a hollow past. Its aim was to equal Voltaire. Voltaire had admiringly copied Racine ; Racine had sought to reproduce in French the tragedy of the Greeks as he saw it, chiefly through the medium of the Latin adaptations ; and thus there was imitation of an imitation, and no end. "French tragedy," said Goethe, "is a parody of itself." If the great critic thought this of the tragedy of Voltaire, 4 French Dramatists. what must he have thought of the tragedy of Vol- taire's feeble followers ? The trademark of a tragedy, according to the rules, was the blind obedience paid to the "unities." The French critics pretended to derive from Aristotle a law that a dramatic poem should show one action happening in one place in the space of one day : these were the unities of action, place, and time. As to the unity of action, there need be no dispute : any work of art must have a single distinct motive and mainspring. But both the unity of time, which compelled the hurried massing of all the straggling incidents of a tale into the course of twenty-four hours ; and the unity of place, which forbade all change of scene, these were absur- dities. In 1629 a Frenchman, Mairet, had brought out at Rouen an imitation of the Italian Trissino's 'Sofonisba,' in which the three unities appeared for the first time. Corneille early gave in his adhesion to the principle, but found it hard to reconcile his prac- tice. Although the Italians and French supposed that they were imitating the ancients, it is a fact that the unities of time and place were not erected among the Greek tragedians into a principle, nor does Aristotle lay them down as laws. 1 He says nothing at all as to the unity of place ; and in speaking of the unity of time he probably meant merely to declare the habitual practice among the best dramatists. It is safe to say that not ^Eschylus, Sophocles, nor Euripides ever gave a thought to either the unity of time or the unity of place. By accident, and because of the physical condi- 1 For an elaborate discussion of the subject, with abundant citation of authori- ties, see the ' Dramatic Unities in the Present Day,' by Edwin Simpson. London. Triibner, 1874. The Romantic Movement. 5 tions of the Greek theatre, they had to condense their story as well as they could, and to be sparing of change of scene. That they did not hesitate to shift the place of action when it suited their purpose, there can be no doubt. The ' Hecuba ' of Euripides is an instance, and others are not wanting. The simplicity, the directness, and, above all, the un- consciousness to which the Greek drama owed so much of its poetry and its power, were qualities wholly for- eign to the French court of Louis XIV., and they were neither appreciated there, nor in the main even under- stood. The severity and stately dignity of the Greek drama, in great part the result of the circumstances under which it was acted, were foreign to the turbu- lent and fiery tragedy of Corneille, produced under wholly different conditions and in a wholly altered state of society, with far more complex emotions. The Greek actor, raised in lofty buskins, and speaking through a resonant mask, that he might be seen and heard by the vast multitude seated before him in the open amphitheatre, was thus hampered from all vio- lent action, and achieved perforce a certain stateliness. But the French actor, in the rich and elaborate cos- tume of his own time, declaimed his verses in a small hall, before a select audience, many of whom had seats upon the stage, crowding the performers into a narrow lane between these rows of spectators, and into a narrow space between these spectators and the foot- lights. To attempt to reproduce, under these conditions, the massive dignity of the Greek stage, was to attempt the impossible. Of a certainty, the result would be literary merely, and not lifelike. It is not to be de- nied that the regularity and concentration and nudity 6 French Dramatists. imposed on the dramatist by the observance of the three unities may at times have helped the writer of genius, who is but the stronger for the difficulties he struggles with : the feeble, however, were made more feeble still ; and even a writer of genius, like Corneille, chafed against rigid restrictions he was not flexible enough to get around. It is pitiful to see how the virile and vigorous Corneille, in his three discourses on dramatic composition, humbles himself before the shadow of Aristotle and the ancients, and begs to be allowed to stretch the "single day" to, say, thirty hours, and to take as the " single place " a whole town, in different parts of which the action may go on. How the bonds hampered the poet is summed up concisely in the judgment which the Academy, at Richelieu's order, passed on Corneille's best play, the 'Cid,' to the effect that the poet/ in endeavoring to observe the rules of art, had chosen rather to sin against those of nature. Racine's calmer genius worked without revolt under the rules which pinioned Corneille : he found his ac- count in them. To him his characters were of first importance, and what they felt and thought and said ; whereas Corneille was concerned chiefly with the action, and with what his people did, what they might have to say was of less interest. When action was proscribed, and little was done, and every thing was talked about, Corneille chafed against the tightening bonds ; but Racine seemed to dance best in fetters. And as Racine came after Corneille, and became the foremost tragic writer of the magnificent court of Louis XIV., the courtly graces with which he had endowed tragedy were afterward inseparable from it. The Romantic Movement. 7 So the frank and free-spoken drama of Corneille gave way before the fine-lady muse of Racine, not any weaker, it may be, but more polished and mannered. The twist once given, French tragic drama turned more and more away from nature, and became more and more artificial and barren. Later came Voltaire, who was never tired of finding fault with Corneille, and had nothing but praise for Racine. He gave in to the pseudo-unities of time and place, although with characteristic ingenuity he evaded them, while pretend- ing to be bound by them. Voltaire even refined on his predecessor. He had a horror of the colloquial : he screwed dramatic diction two or three turns higher, and still farther from nature. For his fastidious taste, even Greek tragedy was too simple and too familiar. He never by any chance allowed to pass any of those homely words which reach the heart so readily : these were banished, and a dignified periphrasis took their place. Voltaire, after all, was a man of genius, however false his doctrines ; and the full feebleness of which French tragedy was capable, when it was made accord- ing to his precepts, was evident only after his death and in the works of his followers, men of moderate talent, able to copy correctly the faults of their elders and betters. In their hands the tragic drama lost what little life it had left, and the red heels of Racine lengthened into unmistakable stilts. There were not wanting those who now and then inveighed against long monologues, and the two false unities, and the device of confidants ; but the admirers of " dignity " and "correctness" made a firm front against these barbarians. As time went on, tragedy went from bad 8 French Dramatists. to worse. Even in the hot days of the Revolution, even in the carnage of '93, the Theatre Frangais con- tinued to bring forth vapid and innocuous classical tragedies. With the return of order and the subse- quent worship of Republican Greece and Rome, the so-called classic drama got the benefit of the craze for antiquity. When Napoleon was first consul, and after he was firmly seated on the throne, every thing was still more pseudo-classic. In tragedy, as in sculp- ture and in painting, subjects were chosen almost ex- clusively from Greek and Roman history and legend. Napoleon was anxious to have a great dramatist to illustrate his reign. He fostered tragedy as well as he knew how : but the conditions were not favorable ; the moment of maturity had not yet come ; and somehow or other the great dramatist refused to be made to order. The fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons made no change in literary fashions. The returning exiles found the tragic drama as they had left it. In 1792, the year before the Terror, the good Ducis had produced his 'Othello,' in which a ban- deau is the token of guilt, and the Moor stabs his wife, instead of smothering her ; for the sight, or even the mention, of so low and common a thing as a handkerchief or a pillow would have been fatal to the proper elevation of tragedy. In 1815, when the Bour- bons sat again on the throne of their fathers, there was the same painful effort after " dignity " and " cor- rectness." Holding that action or even violent emo- tion was unseemly, every thing was told, and nothing was done. As Victor Hugo put it in the preface to his 'Cromwell,' published in 1827, "Instead of The Romantic Movement. 9 scenes, we have narrations ; instead of pictures, descrip- tions. Grave personages, placed like a Greek chorus between us and the drama, come and tell us what is taking place in the temple, in the palace, in the public place, until we are tempted to call out to them, ' Truly ? Then why do you not take us there ? It must be amusing, it must be well worth seeing.'" Still worse, not only was real emotion proscribed, but also the simple, homely, heartfelt words in which real emotion is wont to show itself. The language of tragedy had to be literary, and without any phrase plucked from the roots of humanity, and racy of the soil. The words such as Shakspere was wont to use without stint, simply and nobly, were shunned for a roundabout pomposity. The simple and direct word, to obtain which without baldness is the highest poetry, was always avoided. In its stead were strained and stilted verses, in which an infantine idea was swaddled in long robes of verbiage. By a process of selection and puri- fication the vocabulary had become extremely impover- ished. No welcome was extended to new words, and good old words were constantly getting thrust aside because they lacked "dignity." There was a steady attempt to reach the grand style by the use of big words, and to attain elevation by standing on tip-toe. Laced in a tight corset thus, poor tragedy could scarcely breathe, and was, indeed, well-nigh at its last breath. Yet it died hard. Talma, whom Carlyle notes as incomparably the finest actor he ever saw, asked for Shakspere, and got Ducis, and left the stage without having played one part really worthy of him. All over the tragic drama was the abomination of desolation. By the end of the first quarter of this century, how- IO French Dramatists. ever, the moment of maturity approached, and the time began to be ripe for revolt against the rigid restraints and monotonous mannerism of the Classicists. During the forcible-feeble reign of the Bourbons, a new genera- tion, born in the thick of the Napoleonic combats and conquests, had grown to manhood. It was restless and militant, and it had a congenital impatience of inherited authority. A change came over the spirit of the scene : instead of a slumber like unto death, there were signs of a general awakening. In all depart- ments of art there were wars, and rumors of wars. The effect of Mme. de Stael's precepts on the one hand, and of Chateaubriand's practice on the other, was beginning to be felt. Byron and Scott, and our own Cooper, were getting themselves read in France as no foreign authors ever had been read there. A knowledge of Goethe and of Schiller was spreading slowly. Weber's ' Freischiitz,' sadly mutilated, it is true, was sung with success. In art, pictorial and plastic, in architecture, in music as well as in poetry, both lyric and dramatic, there was turmoil and ebul- lition. From Byron, in a measure, came a spiritual unrest and a mild misanthropic pessimism ; and from Germany came a certain tendency to vehement exag- geration. Like the movement headed by Wordsworth, the movement headed by Hugo was "a great move- ment of feeling, not a great movement of mind." The publication of Victor Hugo's ' Odes et Ballades ' was the signal for a general revolt against the estab- lished forms ; and it began to be evident that an artistic revolution impended, although where the first rising might be expected was doubtful. But in 1827 the best actors of Eigland Kean, Young, Charles Kemb'e, and The Romantic Movement. 1 1 Macready crossed the Channel, and revealed the English drama to the Parisians. No greater contrast could well be imagined than the tumultuous action of Shakspere, and the decorous declamation of French classic tragedy. One enthusiastic admirer of the Eng- lish performances said to Charles Kemble, " Othello ! voila, voila la passion, la tragedie. Que j'aime cette piece ! il y a tant de remue-mtnage f" 1 In December, 1827, a few weeks after the English actors had left Paris, Victor Hugo published his ' Cromwell,' a his- torical drama in five acts, accompanied by a preface, which was at once a protest against the prevailing taste, a plan of reform, and a declaration of war. Obviously the theatre was to be the battle-ground of the factions : nowhere else could they fight hand to hand and face to face ; nowhere else would there be so stubborn a resistance to the new gospel. In every group there is an individuality, acting as a pivot, around which the others gravitate, just as a system of planets revolves around the sun. Among the impatient romanticists this central individuality was Victor Hugo. He was the happy man, who, to use Chamfort's phrase cited at the beginning of this chap- ter, "arrived at the moment of maturity." More multi- farious and of higher genius than any of his compan- ions-in-arms, Hugo was well fitted to be a chief. He was void of fear, and he believed in himself. His friends and followers believed in him and in the right- eousness of their common cause, and they made ready for battle. The political debates and disturbances which 1 " There, there's passion for you, and tragedy I How I love that play 1 There is so much of a rumpus in it." Mrs. KEMBLE'S 'Recollections of a Girlhood.' New York: Holt, 1879. p. 115. 12 French Dramatists. led to the final fall of the Bourbons, in 1830, were scarcely more acrimonious than the contemporaneous romantic attacks on the Classicism which, like the ex- iled family, had learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. " Something of the intensity of the odium theologicum (if, indeed, the cestheticum be not in these days the more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict," wrote Lowell of the war of critics, which began when Words- worth proclaimed himself the prophet of a new poetic dispensation. And Hugo's disciples were like Words- worth's, in that " the verses of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles, stimulant of zeal, and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criti- cism." Second only to Hugo, if, indeed, second even to him, came Alexandre Dumas, whose 'Henri III.' was to shock the staid frequenters of the Theatre Frangais, and to achieve an indisputable and unexpected success a full year before Hugo's ' Hernani ' was acted. Next came Alfred de Vigny, whose 'More de Ve'nise' also won a triumph at the Theatre Frangais before the final fight over the first acted play of Hugo. Besides these three leaders, there were Charles Nodier (much the oldest of them all), Gerard de Nerval, The"ophile Gautier, Auguste Maquet, Joseph Bouchardy, and many another as ardent for the cause as the chief himself. Ranged in battle-array over against the irregular band of Romanticists were the serried ranks of the Classicists, men full of years and honors, and all so carefully forgotten now of the public that their names can be recalled only with an effort, even by the professed student of the stage of that time. Between the com- batants, a little off at one side, and perhaps a trifle The Romantic Movement. 13 nearer to the Romanticists than to the Classicists, was a tiny group of conservatives, who stood halting between the old and the new. In his entertaining account of this phase in the history of French dramatic literature, Alphonse Royer considers this group of conservatives as Classicists, holding that those who were not for the Romanticists were against them. Consequently he divides the Classicists into two sets, the pure Clas- sicists and the mitigated Classicists ; designating by this latter name those whom I have called the conser- vatives. The pure Classicists were the no-surrender and die-in-the-last-ditch party, who brooked no com- promise with the Romanticists, and who always voted the straight ticket. The mitigated Classicists, or conser- vatives, were the more amiable persons, who confessed some of the failings and abuses of the existing state of things, but believed in "reform within the party." The little knot of the mitigated, who thus sought safety in the middle path, had for its chief Casimir Dela- vigne, remembered now as the author of ' Louis XI.' The only other authors of any permanent value belong- ing to this group were Lebrun, whose ' Marie Stuart ' is still remembered ; and Soumet, whose tragedy, * Nor- ma/ is familiar to all as the book of Bellini's opera. Great was the dismay among the pure Classicists when Casimir Delavigne quit the camp, and set up for himself as the chief of a new sect, conciliatory and conserva- tive, when, in 1829, he chose the Porte St. Martin Theatre, instead of the Theatre Frangais, to produce his 'Marino Faliero,' based on Byron, as his 'Louis XI.' had been made out of Scott's 'Quentin Durward.' In like manner his later drama, the ' Enfants d'Edou- ard,' was taken from Shakspere. And this frequency 14 French Dramatists. of imitation was characteristic of the timid talents of Delavigne. His plays lacked boldness, and his verse lacked relief. His was an amiable talent : but during the hot battle between the Romanticists and the Classicists was no time for a merely amiable talent ; and Delavigne had to submit to be thrust on one side, and remembered rather for the share he might have taken in the combat than for any positive quality in the work he actually did. The interest in the fight of the factions centres almost altogether around the two chiefs, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas ; and the course of the combat can best be told in considering their separate dramas. It suffices now to note that the English actors left Paris in the fall of 1827, and that Victor Hugo published his profession of faith in the preface to * Cromwell ' before the end of the year. Less than fifteen months after- ward Alexandre Dumas brought out his first acted play, 1 Henri III.,' at the Theatre Francois. In another year, at the same theatre, came 'Hernani,' the first acted play of Victor Hugo. Within eighteen months ' Antony ' and ' Marion Delorme ' followed, and victory was assured. The Romanticists, like Jove's thunder- bolts, were but a handful, yet they annihilated the Titans who had overawed their predecessors. CHAPTER II. VICTOR HUGO. IN the year 1778 there was acted in Paris, at the Theatre Frangais, ' Irene,' the last tragedy of Voltaire, whose first play, ' CEdipe,' had been brought out at the same theatre in 1718, sixty years before. On March 31, at the sixth performance of 'Irene,' the presence of the aged author called forth the greatest enthusiasm. To the yet living Voltaire, it was, as it were, a foretaste of literary immortality, and he was much affected by the demonstrations. " You smother me with roses," he said, " and kill me with pleasure." In our day we have seen but one sight like unto this. On Feb. 25, 1880, at the same Theatre Frangais where Voltaire was honored, was celebrated the fiftieth anni- versary of the first performance of ' Hernani,' a play by Victor Hugo. In the half-century it had been acted over three hundred times in that theatre. The house was full and enthusiastic ; and the list of those present at this semi-centennial performance holds nearly all the notable names of modern France. After the acting of ' Hernani,' the curtain drew up again, and discovered that incomparable company of actors, the Comedie- Frangaise, grouped around a bust of Victor Hugo in the centre of the stage. Then from the ranks of the performers, each of whom was dressed in the costume of the character he had acted in one of the poet's plays, came forward the chief actress of tragedy, and recited 5 1 6 French Dramatists. in the most musical of voices, and amid the plaudits of the audience, the poem written for the occasion by one of the foremost of younger French poets, a poem which proclaimed that Victor Hugo would have long life before he had immortality, and which declared that his drama and Glory had celebrated their golden wedding. Voltaire has been dead only a century, and already the dust lies thick on his dramatic works. A hundred years is a long life for any thing in literature. What may befall Victor Hugo's dramas in a hundred years, it were vain to prophesy. Shakspere has been dead two centuries and a half, and his plays are as young as the day they were born. Victor Hugo does not lack par- tisans who declare him to be of the race and lineage of Shakspere. Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, is an English poet and critic who cannot men- tion M. Hugo's name without dithyrambic rhapsodies ; and the late Th6ophile Gautier was a French poet and critic, who, when almost on his death-bed, told a friend, that, if he had the ill-fortune to find a single line of Hugo's poor, he would not dare to confess it, to him- self, all alone, in the cellar, without a light. Gautier, at least, had the excuse that Hugo had been his leader in a fierce fight, and that it ill becomes a soldier to doubt the captain who brought the battle to an end. It is needless to tell again, and at length, the tale of the battle between the Romanticists and the Classicists. It is enough to remember that the theatre was the chief battle-ground. Now, for an assault on the stage, Hugo was the best possible leader. He was a born playwright. Although only twenty-five years old when he put forth 'Cromwell,' in 1827, he had already published two novels and two volumes of poetry. Nov- Victor Hugo. 1 7 elist and poet then, he has revealed himself since as critic, orator, historian, and satirist ; but in every dis- guise he shows his strong native bent toward the theatre. His poems are often but the lyric setting of a dramatic motive : his novels are but plays told in narrative, instead of put en the stage. All the elements of the play are to be found in the novel : situations, scenery, effects, even to the exit-speeches, all are there. No reader of the ' History of a Crime ' need be reminded how dramatic, not to say theatrical, he can make history. As an orator, also, his stage-training stands him in good stead : his oration becomes a play with only one part, and he uses as best he may the scenery which chances to surround him. In 1851, for example, pleading in court against the death-penalty, he pointed to the crucifix over the judge's head, and appealed to "that victim of capital punishment." It is in his novels, however, that his dramatic instinct is most plainly seen. His methods are those of a melo- dramatist. He plans and paints his scenery himself, and far better than the material brush of the scenic artist could do it ; and he delights in the violent con- trasts always effective on the stage, in the cut-and- thrust repartee of the theatre, and in the sharply out- lined characters whose complexity is only apparent. Abundant proof of the dramatic tendencies of his youth are to be found in the curious book, 'Victor Hugo ; raconte par un T6moin de sa Vie/ which is at least semi-autobiographical : it is an open secret that the Witness of his Life was his wife. In this we are told that he wrote a tragedy, 'Irtamene,' at the age of fourteen and an optra-comique, 'A Quelque Chose Hasard est Bon,' before he was sixteen. Between the 1 8 French Dramatists. two, at fifteen, he had written a more elaborate tragedy, ' Athalie.' The witness of his life tells us that it was " perfectly regular, in five acts, with unities of time and place, dream, confidants," etc. At nineteen he planned a play, 'Amy Robsart,' taken, for the most part, from ' Kenil worth.' Seven years later he gave it to his brother-in-law, Paul Foucher, not thinking it fit that after the publication of ' Cromwell,' he should borrow a subject. The play was acted anonymously, and hissed. Hugo at once came forward, and claimed his share of the failure. None of these early dramatic attempts of Hugo has been published ; but the witness of his life prints in full another play, ' Inez de Castro,' written at the age of sixteen, apparently just after the com- position of the opfra-comigue, and three years before the adaptation from Scott. ' Inez de Castro ' is a remarkable production for a boy of sixteen, and it has never received the attention it deserves from critics of Hugo's literary career. We can detect in this youthful sketch the germ of his later dramatic work. Here, in fact, is Victor Hugo the play- wright, in the chrysalis. ' Inez de Castro ' is a melo- drama in three acts and two interludes. These latter are spectacular merely, and call for no comment. But the three acts of melodrama repay study. The story of the play need not be told here at length : it has a juvenile want of profundity, and it shows a juvenile love of the marvellous and astounding. But the effects are not altogether external, and there is a willingness to grapple with weighty subjects, not a little charac- teristic. Here are the firstlings of Hugo's theatrical genius, and we can see here in embryo some of his later qualities. The scene is laid in Spain, where the Victor Hugo. 19 poet had passed part of his wandering childhood ; and there is a lavish use of local color. That the young poet had already broken with the unity of place is shown by the frequent change of scene. There is the commingling of the comic and the serious, which, nine years later, in the ' Cromwell ' preface, he declared to be essential to a proper dramatic presentation of life. The humor is not grim and grotesque, as it became in some of his later plays, but frankly mirthful. There is the use of the prattle of little children to relieve the strain of tense emotion, an effect repeated half a century later in ' Ninety-three.' There are intriguing officials, recalling those in ' Ruy Bias ; ' and there is a liberal use of spies and poison, recalling 'Lucrece Borgia' and 'Angelo.' There are lyric interludes and antitheses, and violent contrasts, and a seeking of star- tling effects by the sudden diclosure of solemn situa- tions. There is one scene in the tomb of the king, which perhaps suggested the act of ' Hernani ' in the tomb of Charlemagne ; and there is another in a vast hall, hung with black draperies, and containing a throne and a scaffold, around which are grouped guards in black and red, and executioners in the black robes of penitents, with torches in their hands. This scene seemingly has served as raw material for one in ' Marie Tudor,' and also, it may be, for the famous supper- scene in * Lucrece Borgia.' And, last of all, there is a ghost, which, I am glad to say, Victor Hugo has made no attempt to utilize in any of his later works. After Victor Hugo had begun to be recognized as the chief of a new sect, his liking for the stage prompted him to plan a play which should exemplify what the drama of the future ought to be. He sketched out 2o French Dramatists. 'Cromwell,' intending it for Ta'ma, who heartily ap- proved of the new principles. Unfortunately, the great actor died, worn out with giving form to the emptiness of the plays he had to act. Bereft of the one actor who could do justice to his hero, Hugo gave up the thought of the stage, and elaborated the play, until it is well-nigh as long as Mr. Swinburne's interminable 'Bothwell.' However, the original acting-play remains visible, though embedded in a mass of superabundant matter. Although the scenes are unduly prolonged, and the characters developed at needless length, care- ful cutting would make its performance a possibility. It is to be judged frankly as a play for the stage, and not as that half-breed monstrosity, a "play for the closet." Of course, it marks an immense advance on the ' Inez de Castro ' of nine years before ; but it is far inferior to the ' Hernani ' of three years later. The restrictions of actual stage representation are whole- some to Hugo's exuberant genius. As a historical drama, ' Cromwell ' is not quite so accurate as its author pretends ; but it presents vividly the superficial aspects of a man and a time still waiting for a dramatist who can see their great capabilities. The plot, the incidents of which are not as closely ser- ried as in Hugo's later plays, turns on the Protector's intrigues for the crown he afterward refused. There is the familiar use of moments of surprise and suspense, and of stage-effects appealing to the eye and the ear. In the first act Richard Cromwell drops into the midst of the conspirators against his father, surprise : he accuses them of treachery in drinking without him, suspense; suddenly a trumpet sounds, and a crier orders open the doors of the tavern where all are sit- Victor Hugo. 2 1 ting, suspense again ; when the doors are flung wide, we see the populace and a company of soldiers, and the crier on horseback, who reads a proclamation of a gen- eral fast, and commands the closing of all taverns, surprise again. A somewhat similar scene of succeed- ing suspense and surprise is to be found in the fourth act. The setting off of the Roundheads against the Cavaliers is rather French in its conception of char- acter, but none the less effective. There is real humor in the contrast of Carr, the typical Puritan, with Lord Rochester, the ideal courtier ; and the improbable, not to say impossible, disguise of Rochester as Cromwell's chaplain is fertile in scenes of pure comedy. The fun, light and airy and graceful in Rochester, gets a little forced and farcical in Dame Guggligoy : the effort is obvious, and the hand rather heavy. The opening line of ' Cromwell ' was a protest against the stiff, stilted, and unnatural decorum which forbade the use of the simple word for a simple thing, prescrib- ing in its place a sort of roundabout hinting at it : this is the first line of Hugo's first published play, a date only. "Demain, vingt-cinq juin, mil six cent cinquante-sept." To see the curtain rise on a tavern, and to hear a date as the first phrase of a five-act historical drama in verse, was enough to shock even the most liberal Classicist. The second act began, in like manner, with a question as to the time of day, and the simple answer, "Noon." In the preface to the play, a preface which was as a declaration of independence, the attempt to get away from effete conventionalities was set up as a principle. In this iconoclasm, Hugo broke the shackles of the tragic stage He disavowed the unities of time and 22 French Dramatists. p ace ; he proclaimed the supreme importance on the stage of action; he demanded a return to nature in poetic diction; and he rejected the rigid couplets of contemporary poets, to plead, not for prose, but for a freer use of verse ; for, as he says, " an idea steeped in verse becomes at once more cutting and more glittering : it is iron turned to steel." A poet who can handle such verse need not fear the simplest and humblest phrases, for to him nothing would be trivial. " Genius is like the stamp, which prints the royal image on the coins of copper as well as on coins of gold." Above all, the poet must not be afraid to mingle the grotesque with the terrible : he must, indeed, choose rather the charac- teristic than the abstractly beautiful. In this principle, especially the juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy (which he supported in this preface by citation of the Greeks, Dante, Shakspere, Moliere, and Goethe), we may see the mainspring of his next plays. As Dryden has told us, "They who would combat general authority with particular opinion must first es- tablish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other men." Now 'Cromwell' was unactable. Its preface irritated many, but converted few. It re- mained for Hugo to prove his superior understanding of the stage by his own works acted on the stage. In the spring of 1829, eighteen months after the publica- tion of ' Cromwell,' Hugo was asked to write a play for the Comedie-Frangaise. He had two subjects in his head. He chose to write first ' Marion Delorme,' a task which took him from June i to June 24, the fourth act having been finished in one day's steady labor. Accepted by the theatre, the play was interdicted by the censors. Hugo at once turned to his second sub- Victor Hugo. 23 ject, and in three weeks he had completed ' Hernani.' It is a coincidence that Voltaire wrote 'Zaire/ much his best tragedy, in just the same space of time that Hugo took to write ' Hernani,' his most popular play. In explanation of this wondrous improvisation, for 'Hernani' is a play in five acts of full length, one may venture to suggest that the plot had been slowly matured in the author's head, the situations had linked themselves together in order, and that, when the poet sat him down to his desk, he had but to clothe his con- ceptions with verse. To him this was a task of no diffi- culty, for Hugo has superabundantly the gift of metrical speech : his vocabulary is surpassingly rich, and he has lyric melody at his beck and call. And of a truth his Muse responded nobly to the appeal. In no other play of Hugo's is the verse finer or firmer. The lumbering and jingling rhymed Alexandrine is not the best metre for dramatic poetry ; it is not even a good metre ; but it is here handled by a master of verse. Though no carelessness betrays the improvising, the verse retains the rush and impetus of its making. The whole work is full of the freshness and vigor of youth. One can almost hear the rising sap, and see the spreading foliage of spring. Although the French cannot be accused of taking their pleasure sadly, the first performance of an impor- tant play at the national theatre is a solemnity. The production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Frangais on the evening of Feb. 25, 1830, was a national event. It was the first pitched battle between the Classicists and the Romanticists. The pit was filled with bands of young artists of all kinds, who had volunteered in place of the salaried applauders of the theatre, and who 24 French Dramatists. were admitted on the presentation of a special ticket, the word hierro (Spanish for iron) stamped in a bold handwriting on a little slip of red paper. Chief among these young enthusiasts was Theophile Gautier, resplen- dent in a flaming crimson waistcoat. With the first line the conflict broke out. The hisses of the old school were met by the plaudits of the new. Phrases which now pass without notice were then jeered and hooted. Extra-hazardous expressions were cheered before they were fairly out of the actors' mouths. When the curtain fell, the victory lay with the young author. But the end was not yet. The fight was renewed with the same bitterness at every performance ; speeches roughly received one night were rapturously applauded the next ; a scene lost by the Romanticists to-day was taken by assault to-morrow; until at last there was not one single line in the whole five acts which, at one time or another, had not been hissed. The theatre was crowded night after night. The excite- ment was not confined to the capital, and provincial towns echoed the animated discussions of Paris. At Toulouse a quarrel about 'Hernani' led to a duel, in which a young man was killed. It was the position of the play as a manifesto, and not its merits, remarkable as they were, which called forth such demonstrations. Yet it needs no wide ac- quaintance with the works then holding the stage in France to understand that a play as fresh and as full of force as ' Hernani ' must needs make a strong impres- sion. The rapid rush of its action carries the specta- tor off his feet ; the lyric fervor of its language is intoxicating; and it is only a sober second-thought which lets us see the weak points of the piece. If Victor Hugo. 25 this is its effect now, when the play has no longer the charm of novelty, when, indeed, its startling innovations have been worn threadbare in the service of second- rate and often clumsy followers, we may guess what its effect was then on the ardent generation of 1830, surfeited with the sickly inanities of the self-styled classic school. Whatever we may now think of Dona Sol and her three lovers, the young artists of half a century ago took them for types of a dramatic renas- cence, a new birth of the stage. What we do now think of them is, that all four characters although full of movement, and rich in color are hollow, and with- out real life. They live, move, and have their being, in a world that never was : in brief, they are operatic impossibilities, ruled by an inexorable fate and the firm hand of the author, who has decided on ending a pic- turesque play with a pathetic situation. The plot may be recalled briefly. Ruy Gomez in- tends to marry his niece, Dona Sol, who, however, loves a mysterious bandit, Hernani, own brother to my lord Byron's ' Giaour.' The King of Spain also loves Dona Sol, and bears her away with him. Hernani owes his life to Ruy Gomez, to whom he gives his hunting- horn, agreeing to take that life himself whenever he hears the horn ; and then Ruy Gomez and Hernani, for revenge, join in a conspiracy against the king. But Don Carlos, the King of Spain, is elected Roman Emperor, and he surprises the conspirators. Changed by his higher office, he pardons. Hernani is restored to all his rank and titles, and Dona Sol is wedded to him. In the midst of the marriage-feast comes the sound of the horn. Ruy Gomez is implacable : Her- nani has sworn to die ; and his poison serves also for 26 French Dramatists. his bride. ' Castilian Honor/ the sub-title of the play, seems a very queer thing when we consider this story in cold blood. For the plot not to look ludicrous, one must be almost as hasty and hot-headed as the hero himself. And the incidents are as like each other as the whole play is unlike life. As Mr. W. H. Pollock has aptly remarked, every act ends with somebody spar- ing the life of somebody else, save the last, in which all the chief characters, except Charles V., die together. The catastrophe, although it is the logical sum total of the situations, would be revolting, if it were not so extravagant. The lugubrious tooting of the horn it was, doubtless, that Goethe had in mind when he called ' Hernani ' " an absurd composition." But to detect these demerits takes afterthought. While the play is acting before us, we are under the spell : we are moved, thrilled, excited. The pleasure it gives is not of the highest kind intellectually, if, indeed, it may be termed intellectual at all ; but as to the amount of pleasure it gives, there can be no ques- tion. The quality of its power may be doubted, never the quantity. It is a very interesting play, melodra- matic in its motive, poetic in its language, and pictur- esque at all times. The same phrase describes fairly enough 'Marion Delorme ' and ' Le Roi s'amuse,' which followed ' Her- nani ' upon the stage. 'Marion Delorme,' forbidden by the Bourbon censors, waited a few months, till the revolution of 1830 overturned the Bourbon throne; and then, in a few months more, on Aug. n, 1831, it was brought out at the Porte St. Martin Theatre. It was received with the same outburst of contend- ing prejudices and preferences which had been let Victor Hugo. 27 loose upon ' Hernani.' To my mind it is a better play than its predecessor on the boards. To the full as moving and as picturesque, it bears study better. For one thing, it mingles humor and passion far more skil- fully. It may perhaps be called the only one of Hugo's plays which fulfils the conditions of the new drama as laid down by the author in the preface to ' Cromwell.' And from this freer use of humor results a great supe- riority in the presentation of character. In no other play of Hugo's are the characters as natural as in 'Marion Delorme.' They are not mere profile masks set in motion to face each other in a given situation. Louis XIII. and Saverny are real flesh and blood. The king indeed is a royally well conceived character ; Hugo brings before us by a few light and humorous touches the feeble, melancholy, pious, moral, fearful, restive, and helpless monarch, chafing under the iron curb of his red ruler, and yet inert in self-assertion. True to history or not, the portrait is true to itself, which is of greater importance in dramatic as in other art. The scene between Louis and his solemn jester, who seeks to gain his end by playing on the king's failings, is in the true comedy vein, and would greatly surprise those, who, familiar only with Hugo's later works, pretend that he does not know what humor is. Saverny is a figure filled in with a few easy strokes of an airy fancy : he is the embodiment of light-hearted grace and true-hearted honor. He is a young fellow who wears feathers in his cap, it is true : but he bears down in his heart the motto of his order, "Noblesse oblige ;" and he acts up to it when time serves. His is a poetic portrait of a characteristic Frenchman, with the national quality of style, and a capability for lofty 28 French Dramatists. sacrifice. There is true comedy, again, in his attitude, when his friend, the Marquis de Brichanteau, tries to console Saverny's uncle for his supposed death, by pointing out his faults, and dwelling on them at length, until at last Saverny revolts. There is, perhaps, a slightly too epigrammatic emphasis in the final self- possession of Saverny, which lets him coolly point out three mistakes in the spelling of his own death-war- rant. Emphasis and epigram, however, are kept more subordinate in ' Marion Delorme ' than in any other of Hugo's plays. Marion Delorme the heroine, and Didier the hero, are simpler figures, and more like those to be found in the ' Hernani.' Didier is another brother of the Giaour, mysterious, melancholic, misanthropic. Like Hernani, he is a wanderer on the face of the earth, and has great capacity for suffering. Marion Delorme is a poetic portrait, no doubt highly flattered, of the fair and fragile beauty who has come down to us from history, leaving her character behind her. Although, as in all of Hugo's plays, the plot is of prime importance, I have said nothing of it here, because it is both hard and unfair to give in a scant sentence or two a sample of the situation for which the playwright has cunningly prepared by all that pre- cedes it. In the skill with which the plot is conducted, in the force and effect of its situations, 'Marion De- lorme ' does not yield to its fellows. In no other play of Hugo's is there any thing to compare with the skill with which the action of the drama is dominated by the red figure, and stiffened by the steel will of the unseen cardinal, the Richelieu, who, before Prince Bis- marck, proved his belief in the efficacy of blood and iron. Victor Hugo. 29 It was possibly to ' Hamlet ' that Hugo owed the troop of strolling players among whom Marion Delorme hides ; and he may have been indebted for the self-sale by which she tries to procure Didier's escape either to the fiction of ' Faublas, ' or to the fact in the rela- tions of Josephine Barras and Napoleon ; just as it may have been a recollection of an incident in the ' School for Scandal ' which suggested the far more dramatic picture-scene of ' Hernani.' To conclude this list of hypothetic borrowings, there are in ' Cromwell ' four clowns almost too Shaksperian in the most objec- tionable sense of that much-abused word. When he began to write for the stage, Hugo seemed to be greatly taken with the king's jester, a figure at once mediaeval and grotesque, and therefore doubly capti- vating. After the four in * Cromwell/ let us imagine, if haply we can, the Protector with four fools, we have the doleful and black-robed jester in 'Marion Delorme.' In the next piece, the ' Roi s'amuse,' the protagonist is the court -fool, Triboulet, the jester of Francis I. of France. This play was brought out at the Theatre Francois, in Paris, one evening in November, 1832. Before the first night audience it failed, and it had no chance of recovery, for the next morning the govern- ment forbade the performance of the play on the ground that it libelled Francis I. So the 'Roi s'amuse' has had but one performance ; and yet the plot of no play of Hugo's is so well known out of France, for it served Verdi as the libretto of ' Rigoletto.' Space fails to consider it here in detail. In form and spirit it does not differ from ' Hernani ' or ' Marion Delorme,' al- though it rises to a higher reach of passion than they. 30 French Dramatists. If any one wishes to see how a strong story can be watered into symmetrical sentimentality, he may read the 'Roi s'amuse,' and then take up the 'Fool's Revenge,' a drama in three acts, by Mr. Tom Taylor. The essential tragedy of the motive is weakened to a triumph of virtue, and conversion of the vice. The desperation and death, which are the vitals of the French play, are in the English anodyned for the sake of the conventional happy ending. Now we come to a curious change of manner. The 'Roi s'amuse/ 'Marion Delorme,' and 'Hernani' are all written in a rich and ample verse, full of fire and color : the three plays which followed 'Lucrece Borgia,' ' Marie Tudor,' and ' Angelo' are in prose ; and the effect of the change of medium is most surprising. Of course verse is not always poetry, and prose may aim as high and be as lofty as verse ; but in Hugo's case the giving-up of verse seems like a giving-up of poetry. The elevation, the glow, and the grace of, say, 'Her- nani,' are all lacking in 'Lucrece Borgia' and its two companions in prose. There is no falling-off in the ingenuity of invention, or in the constructive skill of the author ; but the plays in prose seem somehow on a much lower level than those in verse ; and this is in spite of Hugo's use of a metre hopelessly unfit for the quick work of the stage. Before Mr. Matthew Arnold, Stendhal * had dwelt on the insufficience of the Alex- andrine for high poetry. The jigginess of the metre and the alternating pairs of male and female rhymes are fatal to continued elevation of thought. Shak- 1 "Les vers italiens et anglais permettent de tout dire; le vers Alexandria seul, fait pour une cour d6daigneuse, en a tous les ridicules." ' Racine et Shak* spere,' p. 36, note. Victor Hugo. 31 speare and Dante could not have been sublime in Alexandrines. Yet the metre has a certain fitness to the French intellect, to the French love of order and balance ; and, moreover, it is the recognized and regular metre of the higher theatre : so a French dramatist must needs make the best of it. Victor Hugo is a master in versification ; it has no mysteries for him : and in his hands, even the stubborn Alexan- drine is bent to his bidding. Archbishop Trench calls Calderon " nearly as lyric as dramatic." Victor Hugo is even more lyric than dramatic. The most poetic lines in his plays have a lyric lilt and swing. A friend of mine who has a most acute insight into rhythmic intricacies has suggested to me a subtle likeness between the verse of ' Hernani,' particularly, and of the ' Lays of Ancient Rome ; ' and just as the quotation of a single stanza would do injustice to Macaulay, whose merit lies mainly in the movement of his verse, so it is almost impossible to pick out for quotation any passage of the far finer and higher verse of Hugo which will be fairly representative. A pretty couplet is that of the king, Don Carlos, in ' Hernani,' when he, having been elected emperor, pardons his rival, gives him Dona Sol to wife, and finally bestows the accolade : . . . "je te fais chevalier. Mais tu 1'as, le plus doux et le plus beau collier, Celui que je n'ai pas, qui manque au rang supreme, Les deux bras d'une femme aime'e et qui vous aime ! Ah, tu vas etre heureux; moi, je suis empereur." (' Hernani,' act iv. sc. 4.) And lovely are the last lines of the same play, after Hernani and Dona Sol have taken the fatal poison, 32 French Dramatists. Hernani falls back; and Don Ruy Gomez, lifting his head, declares him dead ; but Dona Sol will not have it so : ..." Mort ! non pas ! . . . nous dormons. II dort ! c'est mon dpoux, vois-tu, nous nous aimons, Nous somraes couche"s la. C'est notre nuit de noce. Ne le reVeillez pas, seigneur due de Mendoce . . . II est las. . . . Mon amour, tiens-toi vers moi tourne*, Plus pres . . . plus pres encore . . ." (' Hernani,' act v. sc. 6.) And then she, too, falls back dead. Fine lines again are those of Didier at the end of ' Marion Delorme,' when the bell tolls the hour of his execution, and he turns to the by-standers : " Vous qui venez ici pour nous voir au passage. Si 1'on parle de nous, rendez-nous te*moignage Que tous deux sans palir nous avons e'coute' Cette heure qui pour nous sonnait 1'e'ternite' ! " (' Marion Delorme,' act v. sc. 7.) Perhaps as beautiful a monologue as any in the lan- guage is the touching speech of the jester, Triboulet, over the body of the daughter he has killed, thinking to slay the king : . . . "Je croi Qu'elle respire encore ! elle a besoin de moi ! Allez vite chercher du secours a la ville. Laissez-la dans mes bras, je serai bien tranquille. Non ! elle n'est pas morte ! oh ! Dieu ne voudrait pas. Car enfin il le sait, je n'ai qu'elle ici-bas. Tout le monde vous hait quand vous etes difforme, Ou vous fuit, de vos maux personne ne s'informe ; Elle m'aime, elle ! elle est ma joie et mon appui. Quand on rit de son pere, elle pleure avec lui. Si belle et morte ! oh, non ! Donnez-moi quelque chose Pour essuyer son front. Sa levre est encor rose. Victor Hugo. 33 Oh ! si vous 1'aviez vue, oh ! je la vois encor Quand elle avait deux ans avec ses cheveux d'or ! Elle e'tait blonde alors ! O ma pauvre opprime'e ! Ma Blanche ! raon bonheur ! ma fille bien-aimde ! Lorsqu'elle 6ta.it enfant, je la tenais ainsi. Elle dormait sur moi, tout comme la voici ! Quand elle reVeillait, si vous saviez quel ange ! Je ne lui semblais pas quelque chose d'dtrange, Elle me souriait avec ses yeux divins, Et moi je lui baisais ses deux petites mains ! Pauvre agneau ! Morte ! oh non ! elle dort et repose. Tout a 1'heure, messieurs, c'e'tait bien autre chose, Elle s'est cependant re'veille'e. Oh ! j'attend. Vous 1'allez voir rouvrir ses yeux dans un instant ! Vous voyez maintenant, messieurs, que je raisonne, Je suis tranquille et doux, je n'ofrense personne ; Puisque je ne fais rien de ce qu'on me defend, On peut bien me laisser regarder mon enfant. J'ai de"ja re'chauffe' ses mains entre les miennes ; Voyez. touchez les done un peu ! . . . UNE FEMME. Le chirurgien. TRIBOULET. Tenez, regardez-la, je n'empecherai rien. Elle est eVanouie, est-ce pas ? LE CHIRURGIEN. Elle est morte." * (' Le Roi s'amuse,' act v. sc. 5.) When Hugo drops verse, he gives up a great advan- tage. His plays in verse may pass for poetic dramas ; but his plays in prose are of a truth prosaic. A garment of verse veils 'Hernani* and 'Marion Delorme;' but 1 A metrical translation of this passage into English will be found in the note to this chapter. 34 French Dramatists. ' Lucr6ce Borgia ' and ' Marie Tudor ' are naked melo- drama, without any semblance of poetry. 'Lucrece Borgia,' written in the summer of 1832, immediately after the 'Roi s'amuse,' and acted in 1833, is strangely like 'Inez de Castro,' its predecessor in prose. It is simply a melodrama, owing its merit mainly to its sim- plicity. We have an adroit and cunning handling of a single fertile theme. There is none of the involute turgidity of the ordinary melodramatic playwright ; but for all its simplicity the play is a melodrama, even in the etymological sense, which requires the admixture of music. With all her accumulated vices, Lucrece Borgia herself has no grandeur, no touch of the wand which transfigures the wicked woman of Webster or Ford. It is not imaginative, it is not poetic, and it is immensely clever. In spite of the magnitude of her crimes, and the force with which she is depicted, she remains commonplace. She arouses the latent instinct of caricature. When, in the first act, she tries special pleading for herself, and lays the blame and the burden of her sins on her family, " It is the example of my family which has misled me," one involuntarily recalls the fair Greek heroine of the ' Belle Helene,' who com- plains of " the fatality which weighs upon me ! " Coincident with the change from verse to prose is a sudden falling-off in the humor which lightened the sombre situations of the metrical plays. The romantic formula which prescribed the mingling of comedy and tragedy to make the model drama is disregarded already in ' Lucrece Borgia ; ' in Gubetta the humor we found frank and free in the Saverny of 'Marion Delorme ' is getting grim and saturnine. It is less frequent and more forced, as though the author was beginning to Victor Hugo. 35 make fun with difficulty. In 'Marie Tudor/ written and actec in the same year (1833), the humor has wholly disappeared, and we may therefore detect a growing extravagance of speech and structure. The * Marie Tudor ' of M. Hugo is the ' Queen Mary ' of Mr. Tennyson ; and the poets themselves are scarcely more unlike than the pictures they present us of the miserable monarch who went down to history as Bloody Mary. Tennyson could probably give chapter and verse for every part of his play. Hugo has no warrant for dozens of his extraordinary assertions and assumptions as to the manners and customs of the English. Tennyson is patriotic, and always seeks the subjects of his plays in the national history which he has reverently studied. Hugo has laid the scene in France of only two of his plays : he prefers foreign countries, which offer more frequent opportunities for sharp contrasts and strange mysteries. Spain, Italy, England, even Germany, can be taken by storm with less fear of the consequences. But in 'Marie Tudor' the joke is really carried a little too far. The play is absurd where it is not ridiculous. It is a caricature of history, a wanton misreading of rec- ords, and, worse yet, a passing-over of the truly dramatic side of the reign, to invent vulgar impossibilities. The play is in every way inferior to its predecessors. It has action, and it is shaped solely with an eye to effect before the footlights ; but even as a specimen of jour- neyman play-making it is cheap. There is no touch or trace of poetry anywhere. The unfortunate queen is transformed into a sanguinary and lascivious virago, a Madame Angot of a monarch, scolding like a fishwife, and threatening like a fury. The third play in prose, ' Angelo,' written and acted 3 6 French Dramatists. in 1835, though inferior to 'Lucrece Borgia,' is superior to ' Marie Tudor,' because it does not make history to suit itself, and because its story is simpler and more pathetic. The contrast of the chaste patrician lady with Tisbe, the lawless woman of the people, is capable of development into affecting situations. The two parts were originally acted by Mile. Mars and Mme. Dorval. Tisbe was afterward acted by Rachel, and in America an adaptation by John Brougham was played by Char- lotte Cushman. Outside of these two parts there is little in the piece. Homodei is not very like a man of God, though he is represented as the personification of ubiquitous omniscience. It is one of Hugo's first attempts at embodying an abstraction, or rather at clothing a really commonplace character with marvel- lous attributes. He looms up as something far more wonderful than he appears when seen close to. There is an effort to pack a quart into a pint, to the resulting fracture of the vessel. ' Angelo ' has no more humor than ' Marie Tudor : ' so the extravagance has a chance to grow. There is a perceptible increase in the affecta- tions of plot and dialogue, and an equally perceptible increase in Hugo's fondness for mystic devices. In all his plays there are sliding panels, and secret passages, and hidden staircases in plenty ; spies and hireling bravos and black mutes are to be found in them ; subtle Italian poisons, and sudden antidotes thereunto, and strange narcotics, at an instant's notice are ready at hand : in short, there is no lack of tools for the most Radcliffean mysteries and mystifications. Of poison especially, is there no miserly use. Hernani poisons himself, and so does his bride ; Ruy Bias takes poison ; Angelo Jhinks to poison his wife; and Lucrece Borgia Victor Hugo. 37 poisons a whole supper-party. In fact, to read Hugo's plays straight through is almost as good as a course in toxicology. The dagger is abused as freely as the bowl. To call the death-roll of all the dramatis persona who die by the sword or the axe would be as tedious as un- profitable. In 1838, three years after ' Angelo,' came 'Ruy Bias,' in many ways Hugo's finest play. It is a happy return to verse and the earlier manner. The plot suggested possibly by the story of Angelica Kaufmann, and slightly similar to Lord Lytton's 'Lady of Lyons' is at once simple and strong. Verse again throws its ample folds over the characters, and cloaks their lack of the complexity of life. And again we have the wholesome and lightsome humor which kept the metrical dramas from the exaggerations and extravagances of the prose plays. It is as though the exuberant genius of Victor Hugo needed the strait-jacket of the couplet. There is true comedy in the conception of Don C6sar de Bazan ; and very ingenious and comic is the scene in the fourth act, when he drops into the house occupied by Ruy Bias (who has assumed the name of Don Cesar), and is astonished at the adventures which befall him, and does in every thing the exact reverse of what would be done by Ruy Bias, for whom the adventures were intended. It is only in this scene, and in one or two in 'Marion Delorme,' that we can see any thing in Hugo's work approaching to large and liberal humor. Wit he has in abundance, and to spare ; grim humor, ironic playfulness, grotesque fancy, are not wanting : but real comic force, the enjoyment of fun for its own sake, the vis comica of Moliere, for example, or of Shakspere, or Aristophanes, is nowhere to be found. ^8 French Dramatists. I have already dwelt on the utter absence of any kind of comedy from the prose plays. If it were not for 'Ruy Bias,' which seems to come out of its proper chronological order, since it is closely akin to its fellow metrical dramas, and not to the prose plays which pre- ceded it, if it were not for ' Ruy Bias,' we might trace the gradual decay of Hugo's feeling for the comic. After 'Ruy Bias,' after 1838, neither in play nor in any other of the multifarious efforts of Victor Hugo, can I recall any attempt at comedy, or even any conscious- ness of its existence. It is as though, born with a full sense of humor, in the course of time he had allowed his vanity to spring up and choke it ; for, oddly enough, as his humor died, his vanity grew apace. It is an ag- gressive vain-glory, and may best be seen in his prefaces. In that to ' Cromwell ' he is defiant, and not on the de- fensive ; in those to later plays we can see the undue humility which is the chief sign of towering vanity. Just after 'Hernani,' Chateaubriand, who was gifted with no slight self-esteem, hailed Victor Hugo as his fit successor. And Hugo has inherited, not only some of the literary methods and some of the authority of Chateaubriand, but a full share of his intellectual arro- gance. It was this intellectual arrogance which prompted him to withdraw from the stage after the popular failure of his next play. The 'Burgraves,' written in October, 1842, and acted in March, 1843, is an attempt to set on the stage something of the epic grandeur of mediaeval his- tory. It sought to make dramatic use of the legend of the mighty and undying Barbarossa. As a poem, it is one of Hugo's noblest ; as a play, it is his poorest. We have a powerful picture of Teutonic decadence and of Victor Hugo. 39 imperial majesty ; but in aiming high Hugo naturally missed the heart of the play-goer. There is nothing human for the play-goer to take hold of, and carry away with him. The plot, with but little of the melodramatic machinery Hugo directs so effectively, is uninteresting, and in its termination undramatic. The characters, grandly conceived as they are, seem like colossal statues, larger than life, and not flesh and blood. No real passion was to be expected from such stony figures, perfect as may be their cold and chiselled workmanship. The ' Burgraves ' is the most ambitious of Hugo's dramas, and the least successful in performance. Its career on the stage was short. About this time, too, a re-action had set in against the Romanticists, and Pon- sard's ' Lucrece ' was hailed as a return to common sense. Victor Hugo took umbrage, and declared that it was unbecoming to his dignity to submit himself to the hisses of a chance audience. Although he had two plays nearly ready for acting, he has never again pre- sented himself as a dramatist. One of these plays, the 'Jumeaux,' was about finished in 1838; and since then he has written ' Torquemada,' a drama of the Spanish Inquisition, a most promising subject for his peculiar powers ; neither of which is to be acted until after Hugo's death. A recent biographer refers to still other pieces of the poet, among them a fairy-play called the 'Foret Mouillee,' in which trees and flowers speak. In this enumeration of Hugo's plays I have omitted only one, the libretto of an opera, 'Esmeralda,' pro- duced at the Op6ra of Paris in November, 1836. It was a lyric dramatization of his romance * Notre Dame de Paris/ made for Mile. Bertin, the daughter of a friend, after he had refused to do it far Meyerbeer. 4