Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/39

THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH COMEDY. 2J standards have led the novelist and still more the dramatist too much away from actual life, so at the present time the habit of copying what is or is thought to be actual has not in the drama as elsewhere led to a forgetfulness that photography is not art, that art is not a mere reproduction of nature, and that if it attempts to be this it loses much of the interest and more of the beauty which should belong to it. But as the theatre at its best has always clung very closely to the facts of life, and as comedy in particular must be in the main a reproduction of those facts, the mischief is perhaps less here than it is in some other departments of literature. Though it has not a few grave drawbacks, the present value of French comedy is positively considerable, and relatively still more so ; and if it is not higher, this must be set down to the accidental fact that no man of the highest genius has lately made it his province. The especial object and use of such a brief summary of the history of French comedy as this is not merely to give the student a bird’s-eye view of the principal forms and names which have illustrated its progress. It is rather that he may understand the remarkable and unique unity which prevails throughout it. There is no doubt that of modern nations France is the special home of comedy. Other countries have either produced occasional masterpieces due to imitation of Moliere, such as the works of Congreve and his contemporaries, or artificial pieces’like the Italian comedy of the eighteenth century, and the English humour comedy of the early seventeenth, or else romantic and poetical drama like that of Shakespeare and Calderon, the main merits of which are not comic but romantic and poetical. But in France the comic writer Irom the thirteenth century downwards has never been very far from pure comedy, which may be defined as the dramatic representation of the ludicrous side of actual life. At one time this definition has been more closely adhered to and more intelligently inter- preted than at another : one period has produced workmen of greater talent or greater genius than another. But it has never been wholly lost sight of; and thus, the conditions of the form being natural, not artificial, it has preserved