Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/34

22 PROLEGOMENA. or to what the writers considered nature, than the subjects of the Molieresque drama. It is undeniable that in this drama, even of the most natural kind, a certain violence is still done to nature, so that pure comedy always becomes artificial comedy. When the rustic hero of Sandford and Merton was taken to see the Marriage of Figaro, and was Asked his opinion of the piece, he replied with bluntness that it seemed to him that the people did nothing but lie, and cheat, and deceive, and that he could only suppose that if any lady or gentleman in real life had such a set of servants they would turn them off immediately. There is much truth in this as regards the Molieresque comedies of the decadence, when as usual the character of the play had become stereo- typed. There is some truth in it even in regard to Moliere’s own comedies, where the fact that there are other passions in man than that of laughter is occasionally forgotten. La Chaussee and Diderot tried to make a kind of comedy of ’ sensibility’ as it was then termed, of the moral and domestic affections as we should say now. They did not succeed very well, but they at least indicated a blot in the Molieresque style when it is not at its very highest. Every literary class in all countries, and in France most of all, tends to become conventionalised, and it is only by continual reminders of the fact that it can be revivified. As a matter of fact the later comedy of the eighteenth century, though often amusing, is not very much less conventional than its tragedy. But fortunately for it the convention was based on types and models which, unlike those of tragedy, had originally abundant touches of nature. Although no comedies of extraordinary merit had been produced for some half-century before the Preface of M. Victor Hugo’s Cromwell definitely gave the programme of the romantic movement, the foregoing pages will have made it evident that no such outward change was likely or was required in comedy as in tragedy. Whatever disability may have weighed on the comic dramatist of 1825, weighed on him, not because of any hard and fast rules to which he was formally bound, but simply because he did not choose to avail himself of the liberty to which he was formally entitled,