Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/29

THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH COMEDY. 1 7 Speaking roughly, it was in teaching h^ brethren, the French comic dramatists, to give themselves up to the guidance of nature more thoroughly than they had dared to do, and in raising the drama from the position of copy- ing mere humours and stock subjects, that Moliere achieved his greatest success. As we have endeavoured to point out in the preceding pages, the mere formal changes which he made — like the formal changes which all his predeces- sors had made on the simple original farce— were of very small account. It was by the alteration of the spirit and style of the drama, and by increasing the literary merit of its text — a matter in which up to his time comedy had been decidedly behind tragedy — that he mainly influenced the stage ; and, as in all such cases, the influence was exercised once for all. It was nearly impossible for the most arrant dunce to write so bad a comedy after Moliere as men often of great talent and even genius had constantly written before him. Moreover, the great success of his plays raised the reputation as well as the literary standards of the comic dramatist, created an additional demand for comedy, and thus led to the subdivision of it into different kinds, with special apparatus for representing them. For about a hundred years after Moliere’s cttbut comedy was represented in Paris (not always uninterruptedly in every case) by four different theatres, each of which had a special kind of drama. There was the Come’die Franchise, the successor of Molie-re’s own company, which played mainly what would be called in English legitimate comedy. There was the Come’die Italienne, which, after being a visitor at the French capital, established itself there permanently in the eighteenth century, and played a peculiar variety of the same kind of dramas as the Come’die Franchise, adjusted more or less to the stock characters of the Italian comedy proper. There was the Ope’ra Comique, which explains itself, and which became popular when the originally Italian model of the musical drama (first established by Quinault as a writer of words and Lulli as a composer of music) had adjusted itself to French tastes. Lastly, there were the minor theatres — tolerated during the great fairs of St. Germain and St