Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/26

14 PROLEGOMENA Moliere, was Pierre Larivey, an Italian by extraction, who was born in 1540, and survived till the seventeenth century was in its teens. Larivey is in one sense one of the most, and in another one of the least, original of writers. Of the twelve comedies which he wrote, nine of which we possess, it would appear that every one had an Italian origin, while most of them were imitated by their Italian authors from Piautus and Terence. But Larivey adapted in the freest possible fashion, and wrote his adaptations in French of very considerable excellence for his time, besides displaying no little stage knack. Moliere borrowed something from him directly, and was indirectly still more indebted to him for advancing the general conception of French comedy by complicating the plot, making the action brisk and lively, and accustoming the spectators to demand smart ’ humours ’ and dialogue. After Larivey, however, no very great advance was made, with the exception of the comic work of Corneille, until Moliere himself, nearly half a century later, came to his period of flourishing. The first half of the seventeenth cen- tury, though it witnessed a considerable amount of experi- mentation in comic work, produced little that is of much permanent interest. The old farces apparently continued to be acted, and new ones of the same kind to be written by the poets who were attached to every strolling company of actors. Adapters, of whom Alexandre Hardy was the chief, transferred many Spanish and Italian plays to the French boards. Curious experiments were tried, such as the writing of a comedy composed entirely of popular songs or tags from them. Most of the tragedians of the time wrote comedies, and Corneille’s, even before the Menteitr, have decided merit and interest. The Pedant Joue of Cy- rano de Bergerac gave Moliere something to borrow, and Paul Scarron was a dramatist of not a little popularity and of some power. So also Ouinault, Boursault, and Mont- fleury — contemporaries of the great comic writer — showed, as the lesser contemporaries of great writers generally do show, that genius is not the complete, independent, self- caused and self-centered thing that uncritical critics would