Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/36

24 PROLEGOMENA. slowly, has done Musset justice, and among properly quali- fied literary critics his position could never have been matter of doubt. His peculiar style of writing is as much a genuine kind of true comedy as Moliere’s own. But it must be noted that one of the innovations of 1830 was to break down (following in this respect and improving upon the already mentioned upholders of comidie larmoyante) the old rigid canon that a comedy must have a good ending and a tragedy a bad one, so that not a few pieces after 1833 would have been refused the title of comedy before that date. This more especially applies io Musset, who rarely writes without a touch of tragedy. Thus, for instance, the exquisite On tie badine pas avec f amour, comic in motive almost throughout, ends with a sharp and sudden, though perfectly natural, tragic turn. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Musset as a dramatist (and in this he has pretty generally been followed, at least in intention, by his successors) is, that his wit, brilliant as it is, constantly and after a fashion more usual with English humour than with French wit, passes thus rapidly and naturally into tears. The modern comedy, except of the purely farcical sort, is therefore a more mixed kind than the older, and is perhaps a little inferior to it in artistic proportion and completeness. But what it loses in these respects it undoubtedly gains in verisimilitude and in appealing not merely to the faculty of laughter, but to the nobler sympathies of man. The dramatists of the last half century are so numerous, and the lines on which they have worked have been so wide and diverse, that an account of them in a few lines is not easy to give. Indeed, as far as form is concerned, it is not so much difficult as impossible, for during the whole period dramatists, and comic dramatists especially, have been practically free to follow or to invent for themselves any patterns they chose. There have resulted perhaps few plays that posterity will read, as posterity has read Moliere, or even as it has read Marivaux, but many which have had singular acting success, and not a few which have had singular acting merit. In the lightest kind of comedy the most prominent writers of the century have been Eugene