Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/28

l6 PROLEGOMENA. Spanish models show themselves clearly in L Etounii and Le De’pit Amoureux,and when, following Corneille, he entered on true comedy with Les Precieuses Ridicules, only improve- ment (in the sense of studying the life rather than academic copies) not innovation (in the sense of substituting a new form for an old one) resulted. It may. properly be asked at this point in what this general resemblance consists? The question is not very difficult to answer. In French comedy, as in all French comic literature, fidelity to nature has entirely the better of the close adherence to forms and types which obtained in many other departments of letters in France. There is this adherence to types even in comedy ; and it is remarkable that despite all the genius and all the observation of Moliere it receives some countenance from him. But when we contrast French comedy with any other comedy, or French comedy with any other department, save the modern novel, of French literature, it is in comparison conspicuously absent from the very first to the very last. The French comedy writer is freer from rules of any kind than any of his craftsfellows. He may take his comic situa- tion and work it out as he likes, at the length that he likes, and with the conditions that he likes. He is not bound to prose or to verse. No unities torment him. He may have one act and a score of scenes, three acts and half a dozen scenes in each, five acts and any number of scenes he likes. His characters are unrestricted in number, and almost unrestricted in behaviour and diction. No style noble weighs on him, no Horatian theories of doing the action off the stage, no notion of the decorum of the Theatre. He is always able — whether he is a farce-writer of the fifteenth century dramatising a single rough or indecorous situation, or Moliere in the seventeenth constructing complete and immortal criticisms of life, or M. Sardou and M. Feuillet in the nineteenth painting ephemeral manners — to shape his treatment to his subject, and not forced to shape his subject to his treatment. In short, the likeness which has been spoken of is the likeness that is sure to exist whenever men of any age or country allow themselves to be guided by nature.