Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/27

THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH COMEDY. 1 5 sometimes have it to be. But in almost all comedies before Moliere, and in most written by other men during his life, the reader feels that he is in presence of men who do not distinctly know what they are aiming at, and who are still unsure of their artillery. The dramatic construction is faulty, the action lags, the comic motives are extravagant or indecorous, the characters are improbable or unamusing, the whole play lacks that direct and evident connection with human life which is necessary in comedy. Even the first two plays of Moliere are in some sort liable to these ob- jections, and the first two plays of Moliere are far superior to everything before them, with the exception of Le Menteur. It is, however, still noticeable how little the general scheme, as distinguished from the execution of French comedy, is changed. A new influence is indeed brought in to supplement the Latin, and the Italian-Spanish intrigue comedies have their effect on the contemporaries of Cor- neille. The result appears in Melite, still more in Le Men- teur, but these various influences are conditioned by the fact that comedy of all nations and languages is after all very much the same. Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Plau- tus, had idiosyncrasies at least as different as Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Corneille, Seneca. But what principally strikes the reader in comparing Prometheus, Othello, Cinna, Octavia, are differences : what principally strikes him in reading The Birds, As You Like It, Les Precieuses Ridicules, the Mostel- laria, are resemblances. Here, at least, there is some proof that man is really and not merely in scholastic imagination a ’ laughing animal.’ But what is most remarkable in con- nection with the present subject is that Moliere not merely follows his leaders but distinctly harks back in his following of them. The two existing examples of his earlier work, and the titles of the rest of that work, clearly show that for many years he wrote farces pure and simple — farces hardly changed in general plan between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth. When he took to a more serious style of composition he passed rapidly through the stages which French comedy had tra- versed since the time of his earlier models. Italian and