Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/22

IO PROLEGOMENA. ruptcd. The two great turning-points of the history of tragedy — the reform of the Pleiade and the further reform of the mid-seventeenth century — have nothing to correspond to them on the comic side. No two things can well be more different than a tragedy of Jodelle and a mystery of his chief immediate predecessor Chevallet. But Jodelle’s comedy Eugene, though it shows the influence of Terence, is rather an improved version of the old farces than a new style, and Moliere’s great comedies are only separated from his own Jalousie du Barbouille and Medecin Volant by improvements of degree not of kind. It is therefore un- necessary to divide an essay on French comedy, to what- ever author it may have immediate reference. From Adam de la Halle to Sardou the history of the French comedy is as continuous as the history of the English Parliament from Simon de Montfort to Lord Beaconsfield. Comedy, however, though it has a more continuous, has a less early history than tragedy. We can trace tragedies, or at least ’ histories ’ (in the sense in which the word is used in reference to the early English drama), to the eleventh century, if not earlier : it is not until the thirteenth that comedy assumes an independent form, though there are comic interludes in serious plays before that date. This is in accordance with general experience, and still more in accordance with the fact that the early French drama was entirely under ecclesiastical influence. There was nothing Puritanic in the mediaeval Church, but it naturally did not go out of its way to invent or favour purely secular amuse- ments. There are comic scenes in more than one early mystery (indeed, it is rather the exception to find one with- out such); but no comedy pure and simple appears till the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Adam de la Halle, a native of Arras, of whose history little is known, about that date produced two plays which in different ways de- serve the title, the dramatised pastourelle of Robin et Marion and the already mentioned Jeu de la Feuillie. The pas- tourelle proper is a peculiar form of ballad-romance which was extremely popular in the middle ages, and which, with infinite variety of detail, has an almost invariable subject.