Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/38

26 PROLEGOMENA. and purpose (enforced in the printed plays by very charac- teristic prefaces) which occasionally interferes with their dramatic, and still more with their literary merit. M. Emile Augier, on the whole the foremost dramatist of the time, has escaped this danger, though he also reflects the moral and social characteristics of his time very powerfully. But the literary spirit of the best kind is strong in M. Augier, and in such plays as UAventuribe, Lejils de Giboyer, and Le Gendre de M. Poirz’er(which he wrote in collaboration with the novelist Sandeau, and which is based on a prose fiction of the latter’s) he succeeds in doing what is most difficult, giving exaci portraiture of fleeting and ephemeral peculiarities without so much descent into detail as is likely to make the portraits obsolete when the originals are forgotten. As a rule this is the weak point of the drama of these days, and M. Augier himself cannot be said to be wholly free from the weakness. The third dramatist mentioned, M. Sardou, is the most unequal and also the most unoriginal of the three. But his Famille Benoiton is likely to remain a locus classicus for the representation of the worse side, socially speaking, of the second Empire, and his Rabagas gives a sketch of the successful demagogue which is, as few things of our time are, sufficiently imbued with perennial and not merely fleeting colours to last. These three writers display in themselves pretty fully the general characteristics of the comic drama in France to-day, though for a complete view they require to be supplemented by M. Labiche for light work of the older and more bourgeois kind, M. Pailleron for that of the latest ’elegant’ society, and M. Hale"vy for burlesque. There are very many other dramatists who, if the purpose here were to give a dictionary of the French drama, would have to be mentioned, but who, the purpose being what it is, scarcely need mention. It should, however, be observed that M. Feuillet, the now veteran novelist, is also an exceedingly skilful adapter of his own novels. It is necessary to take this close connection between novel and drama together with the constantly increasing realism of the novel. It may be open to doubt whether as at some times the conventionalities of literary