moralising strain in French drama is to be found a full century after Diderot in the raisonneurs of the younger Dumas. But the important fact is that with all this excess of moralising rhetoric over action, the French turn for logic had its way. Such action as there was tended steadily to an ordained end, never zigzagging or marking time or deviating into mere irrelevance, as was, for the most part, the case with our English platform-drama. Logical, well ordered, as French drama was by comparison with our own, it was not logical enough for the French critics. The aim of their playwrights is all the more unmistakeable from the frequency with which they deplored failure to attain it. We have heard Diderot as a dramatist, but listen to him as a critic of drama :

'En général il y a plus de pièces bien dialoguées, que de pièces bien conduites. Le génie qui dispose les incidents paraît plus rare que celui qui trouve les vrais discours. Combien de belles scènes dans Molière ! On compte ses dénouemens heureux. On serait tenté de croire qu'un drame devrait être l'ouvrage de deux hommes de génie, l'un qui arrangeât et l'autre qui fît parler.'

Here is Diderot virtually passing the very criticism on Molière that we have passed on Congreve. In both the dialogue surpasses the conduct of the fable.' How many belles scènes' in both! How few dénouemens heureux '! And by this time the cause of the resemblance between the two national dramas, in so far as resemblance there was, ought to be manifest enough; it was the common factor in each, the platform-stage, always favourable to rhetoric and unfavourable to the strict ordering of plot. But there is this great difference between the two cases, that the French spirit, its turn for logic, almost from the first reacted against the influence of the platform-stage, whereas the English did not. Nothing could be more significant on this head than a remark of Voltaire's in his commentary on Horace. Tout doit être action dans la tragédie,' he says; 'chaque scène doit servir à nouer et à dénouer l'intrigue, chaque discours doit être préparation ou 'obstacle.' Voltaire failed to observe his own precepts; but he has here stated in the clearest terms what is nothing else than the ideal of modern drama.

For that ideal, whatever else it may cover, includes simplicity and strict economy of plot, and in these respects the French have always been ahead of us. Go back as far

Diderot, De la poésie dramatique.'

as 'that memorable day, in the first summer of the late war, 'when our navy engaged the Dutch'* (June 3, 1665), and you will find the English and the French ideals compared by Dryden. It was one of the objects of his Essay,' as all readers know, to contrast the two national theatres and to make the best case he could for the English. Lisideus, the advocate for France, observes that another thing in which 'the French differ from us is that they do not embarrass or 'cumber themselves with too much plot; they only represent so much of a story as will constitute one whole and great 'action sufficient for a play; we, who undertake more, do 'but multiply adventures, which, not being produced from 'one another, as effects from causes, but barely following, 'constitute many actions in the drama, and consequently 'make it many plays.' To which Dryden, in the character of Neander, answers by decrying the barrenness' of the French plots and praising the variety and copiousness' of the English. But the point is that he never attempts to dispute Lisideus's main fact: The French carry on one 'design, which is pushed forward by all the actors, every scene in the play constituting and moving towards it.'

It was because the French did this, even in the period of the platform-stage, that, so soon as that stage had given place to the picture-stage, they were the first to create what is legitimately entitled to be called modern drama. Literary historians, each docilely repeating the commonplaces of his predecessors, were for long accustomed to trace the modern French drama back to the great Romantic movement of the thirties. The best opinion of to-day is dead against that attribution. What is there in the contemporary French theatre that can be shown to owe its origin to Romanticism? People talk of a 'romantic' revival, but these are the people who cannot see any further than Cyrano's nose. M. Rostand's plays are 'romantic' in a sense-because the word 'romance' can be used in almost any sense, the sense of anti-classicism or of anti-realism or of mere troubadourism -and out of these senses one or more can be found to fit M. Rostand. But Cyrano de Bergerac' and 'L'Aiglon' and 'La Princesse Lointaine' are not romantic in the sense of 1830. Must we come to the conclusion that the Romantic movement was merely an episode in the history of the French stage? We can hardly recognise Victor Hugo's plays as modern drama; they belong to the old

* Essay of Dramatic Poesy: opening paragraph.

VOL. CXCVI. NO. CCCCI.

drama of rhetoric. Every one of them is based upon an antithesis-a king at odds with a bandit, a queen enamoured of a lackey, a court fool turned tragic protagonist-and antithesis is a figure of rhetoric. Rhetoric, the monologue of Charles Quint before the tomb of Charlemagne. Rhetoric, the scène des portraits.' Rhetoric, the address of Ruy Blas to the ministers. That grotesque document the preface to Cromwell,' so far as it had any intelligible meaning whatever, meant a rhetorical dramaturgy. The author of 'Hernani' was not the first of the modern dramatists; he was the last of the rhetoricians. So much was written about the excitement over the 'première' of 'Hernani,' to say nothing of Gautier's red waistcoat, that at last the public was fooled into believing that there must be something in it. The legend grew up, and epoch'marking' became the cant word about it. But an ounce of fact is worth a pound of legend. And the fact is that the first of the moderns was the author of 'Antony,' a play which substituted for the Romantie formula a brand-new formula of its own. Here at last was a tale in plain (indeed, in bad) prose about the actual life of the day as Dumas saw it. Dumas, to be sure, saw life neither steadily nor whole. But what he saw, or thought he saw, he took bodily into the theatre. For he was a born dramatist. Antony' is all rapidity and fire, all action and passion. It is easy to laugh at the Byronic, Wertherian, Satanic hero. But Antony was a true type of his time, brother to Stendhal's Julien Sorel, and to the exorbitant adventurers of Balzac-the men of a generation burning with the Napoleonic fever driven inwards. This type of ferocious egoist had a long stage posterity down to the 'homme fort' of Feuillet and the strugforlifeur' of Alphonse Daudet. Countless, too, are the descendants in French drama of Adèle d'Hervey, at once heroine and adulterous woman. But Dumas did something more important than fix types of modern stage-character. He hit in Antony' upon the great modern dramatic theme, the conflict of passion and the social world, of the individual and opinions-the very stuff out of which his son's plays were afterwards to be made. While Dumas père supplied the motive power of the new drama, Scribe perfected its mechanism. It is the present fashion to speak contemptuously of Scribe, as a mere manufacturer, turning out machine-made plays by the gross. But that is because we are wise after the event. Scribe triumphantly vindicated in practice a position of Aristotle's, which has been recently

and by no means intelligently assailed-the position that while you can have drama without character you cannot have drama without plot. No doubt Aristotle overestimated the importance of plot. We suspect that he did so deliberately, in the belief that in neglect of plot lay the special pitfall for the 'bas-relief' drama of his time. Be that as it may, it would be untrue to say to-day, as Aristotle said, that plot was the end of drama; but it is, assuredly, the beginning. Scribe made too much of it, made everything of it. Nevertheless, he fulfilled a purpose useful for the moment. A new craftsmanship was wanted for the picturestage, the old craftsmanship of the platform-stage being as useless as a sedan-chair on a railway. Scribe supplied what was wanted, just when it was wanted. If he was only a craftsman, he could at least make instruments which others were to put to real use; and that is what Scribe actually did for Augier and the younger Dumas. He gave them the neat framework of the well-made piece,' and within that framework they did what he could not do, they worked out ideas of their own.

What ideas were these? Of what kind were they? What relation had they to reality, to the practical conduct of life? To answer these questions is to indicate the fundamental difference between modern French and English drama. The ideas of Augier and Dumas fils were ideas about society, its economic structure, its hierarchy of castes, its pressure on the individual; and they were ideas about private ethics, the relations of men and women, fathers and children, the disparity between the Civil Code and the moral law. In other words, these men made the French drama, in Matthew Arnold's phrase about poetry, a 'criti'cism of life.' That has been the vital, the prime characteristic of the French stage for half a century and moreits rule-whereas with our modern English drama it has been the exception. Only in quite recent years have one or two English plays attempted anything like a criticism of 'life,' and even in the rare instances wherein these plays have been accepted by the public, they have been accepted against the grain. The English attitude in this matter is well illustrated in a brief passage of irony from the 'Critic: '

'Mrs. Dangle. Well, if they had kept to that [i.e. 'serious' comedy from the French], I should not have been such an enemy to

*Poetics, ch. iv.

the stage; there was some edification to be got from those pieces, Mr. Sneer!

Sneer. I am quite of your opinion, Mrs. Dangle: the theatre, in proper hands, might certainly be made the school of morality; but now, I am sorry to say it, people seem to go there principally for their

entertainment!

'Mrs. Dangle. It would have been more to the credit of the managers to have kept it in the other line.

'Sneer. Undoubtedly, madam; and hereafter perhaps to have it recorded that, in the midst of a luxurious and dissipated age, they preserved two houses in the capital, where the conversation was always moral at least, if not entertaining!'

What Sheridan said wittily enough over a hundred years ago the majority of English playgoers are tiresomely repeating today. We go to the theatre, they say, for 'entertainment;' we want to leave the world behind us, to escape from the pressure of reality; we do not go there for a criticism of life. There is a double fallacy underlying this popular statement of the case. Entertainment,' in the fullest sense of the term, is, of course, the aim of all drama, from the Prometheus Bound' or ' Lear' down to Box and Cox' or 'Charley's 'Aunt.' Further, to treat reality as a spectacle is in the very act to relieve it of its pressure. Art, however faithfully it may follow the lineaments of life, is not life itself; it is life which has undergone a ká@apois, life purged of the will-tolive. What the popular statement merely means is that the typical English playgoer does not find entertainment where the typical French playgoer does, in a criticism of life. And in that sense the statement is undeniable. If the English playgoer stopped there, if he were content with the admission that he found moral questions in drama a bore, whatever we might think of his intelligence, we could not contest his right to choose his own pleasures. But he goes further. He considers it immoral' to raise moral questions on the stage. This habit he acquired, it would seem, from the moment that Dumas fils began to raise those moral questions. La Dame aux Camélias' was produced in 1852. At the Theatrical Fund dinner of 1853 a speaker, after admitting that the English owed much to the French stage (it was, indeed, living upon French adaptations), went on to say: But we should limit our obligations to the French, in order to keep our own drama pure; and, in availing ourselves of their art, we should 'be careful to avoid their immorality.' Unfortunately, his very next sentence gave the case away. 'We cannot be 'insensible to the changes that are taking place around