It can boast fewer chef-d'œuvres, and has remained in far longer intervals of decadence. Italy does not possess a single good comedy; and if Goldoni has recorded that he wrote sixteen of his pieces in one season, it is the activity of his pen and fingers we admire, not that of his brain. The forte of French literature is said to be their comedy. It may be so; and we do not think much of it; nor does the frank opinion of Schlegel," that Moliere had no genius," which so astounded the French admirers of the German critic, at all amaze us. Moliere was a great moral poet, though not a deep one; he was an acute observer of man in all the phases of society that came before him; he possessed wit, vivacity, and a language formed to express every shade of social feeling, foible, satire; but he had no invention, no deep, or more than ordinary passion; none of those great qualities, in fine, that stamp a genius dramatic par excellence. Had his comedies, at least the serious ones, been moral epistles, they had been unrivalled in their kind-but they possess no dramatic spirit. The principal and leading characters, the miser, the misanthrope, the hypocrite, are mere pure abstractions, to conceive which never required invention. And he has brought them on the stage as cold, abstract, and untempered, as if they were still but the subjects of the moral or the apophthegm. There is no individuality bestowed on them by the poet,-no parental mark, by which they might be distinguished from any other of their kind. If a boy were ordered to compose a comedy, of which a religious hypocrite was to be the principal personage, he would make him the same, blank, unshaded hypocrite as Tartuffe, and would just draw him the same unmingled villain without relief. Nor could the school-boy conduct the piece with greater improbabilities than the blindness of Orgon, &c.; and the untaught boy would certainly have recourse to the same convenient denouement-the interference of absolute wisdom and power to dissolve the difficulty, and give a moral finale to the piece. It is above all wonderful that Moliere did not possess the acquirable art of managing the action of a drama, and giving at least a probable denouement. But he lived and wrote for the court of a despotic prince, when the ever-so-strange and unexpected interference of power in the solving of knotty cases was, perhaps, customary and natural. Wanting, then, the lower as well as the higher qualities of a great dramatist, how does Moliere support his character? By his excellence as a moral poet and a satirist; if not by developing character, like our great dramatists, at least by depicting them no wise inferior to our Pope. To us Moliere's Misanthrope' presents nothing so comic as Celimene's satirical description VOL. III. PART II. of her acquaintance. But description is no dramatic virtue. Moliere was a great poet, but as his countryman, Mercier, says of him, il n'alla pas jusqu'au drame." The French, however, can find no fault on the score of character with Moliere. Even their tragic writers know of no such thing in their drama. M. Jouy makes an attempt at such by pillaging an unknown dialogue of Montesquieu; but what M. Jouy's opinions on the subject are worth, we may learn from his calling Voltaire's Fanatisme' a tragedy of character. How far even Voltaire's view extended in this direction may be learned from his Siecle de Louis Quatorze.' After asserting that tragedy is limited, he adds, 6 "La haute comedie a les siennes. Il n'y a dans la nature humaine qu'une douzaine, tout au plus, de caractères vraiment comiques et marqués de grande traits. L'Abbé du Bos, faute de génie, croit que les hommes de génie peuvent encore trouver une foule de nouveaux caractères, mais il faudrait que la nature en fit. Il s'imagine que ces petites differences qui sont dans les caractères des hommes, peuvent être maniées aussi heureusement que les grands sujets. Les nuances, à la verité, sont innombrables, mais les couleurs eclatantes sont en petit nombre; et ce sont ces couleurs primitives qu'un grand artiste ne manque pas d'employer." If the critic had been a little more exact, he might have enumerated the broad comic characteristics, and allowed a drama to each, which would have proved convenient in letting us know the exact bulk that the comedy of a country would swell to. This ridiculous restriction is precisely in French taste, and springs from their utter ignorance of any subject fit for the drama, beyond abstract passion. The great defect complained of in Moliere and the other comic writers of his country, by an enlightened French critic of the present day is, that they always excite the rire amer, never the rire gai, or the rire fou. The same critic was particular enough to take account, at the Theatre Français, of the emotions of the audience during the representations of the Tartuffe, Valerie, and other comedies. Although there was frequent applause at an allusion, a satirical or well-turned verse, yet the pen of the critic has it recorded, that during the representation of the Tartuffe the French audience laughed but twice, at those times at insignificant passages,-at Valerie but once. We e are far from wishing to sink comedy into farce, or from estimating a comic drama by the quantity of grinning it excites, but comedy that thus loses itself in satire, not only ceases to be agreeable, but to be natural. Boileau or Horace are amusing in the closet, but would be impertinent when declaimed from the stage. And those moral sermons, that are extremely well for the pulpit, prove but very dull entertainments after dinner and in the scene. The French are altogether sadly given to the didactic, and so preposterous an idea have they of their dignity, that they scorn to be amused without putting forward as a pretext, that they come to be instructed. A dramatic poet with them, it seems, would be ashamed to write poetry for poetry's sake; and, like our Spenser, he must endeavour to cloak the crime of verse under some dull allegory or moral. This mighty respect for morality is praiseworthy, no doubt, if it may not, as is greatly to be feared, be attributed, in a measure, to a want of invention, and of confidence on the part of the poet in his powers. It is far easier to teach, than to afford simple delight, without any further pretence-much easier to take hypocrisy, or avarice, or misanthropy, for a theme, present a personage simply actuated by one of these unmixed passions, and punish him in a moral denouement-it is much easier to do this than to take a character from life, of many and mingled qualities, support that, and render it amusing through a drama, with an eye to nothing beyond truth and reality. One traverses a straight and open path, with a visible end in view; the other, careless whither he may arrive, trusts himself boldly with the clue of genius to the labyrinth of nature. The didactic pretensions of French comedy are avowed by Moliere in the pieces he has called Schools, such as the Ecole des Hommes, Ecole des Femmes, &c., absurdly imitated by Sheridan in naming his comedy the "School før Scandal," a title, the exact meaning of which is not very evident—the proof is, that it has been found untranslatable, and in the French version, it is christened anew, and not ill, the Tartuffe des Maurs. M. Casimir Delavigne, whose elegies or Messeniennes, have proved so popular in France, brought forth at the commencement of this year the Comedy that suggests this article. It is called, the School for Old Men,' which not only expresses the didactic professions of the author, but also implies an attempt to revive the classic comedy of Moliere. And in this, critics, journals, and enthusiastic audiences, all proclaim him to have been successful. Fourteen thousand francs, an enormous sum for the literary world at Paris, have been given him for his copy-right. Its uniting the powers of Talma and Mademoiselle Mars, has added éclat to the piece. And even the Ultras, in their love of old taste revived, listen with complacency to the comedy written by the liberal poet, and dedicated to the Duke of Orleans. The principal character of the piece, Danville, is an old gentleman, an inhabitant of Havre, who has amassed a moderate fortune by the fitting out of privateers. A widower, with an only son, he has grown weary of his single condition, and has taken to him a young wife, Hortense, along with whom and her mother he makes a voyage to Paris. The scene there opens obviously with the meeting between the newly-married elder and his old friend Bonnard. News are exchanged. The bachelor supports his choice of singleness, and the husband vaunts the pleasures of the marriage state-a common-place dialogue, but livelily supported. But to pass over the commencement as well as the under-plot of Bonnard's borrowing from Danville for Danville's own son in distress;-they are lodged, it seems, in the mansion of the Duc D'Elmar (that a duke should let lodgings, gentle reader, is no incongruity whatsoever), who becomes enamoured of Hortense-promises to procure a place for Danville, through his interest with his uncle the ministerand craves the honour of conducting Hortense to a ball at the minister's upon a certain evening. The action and spirit of the piece lies in the husband's jealousy, and the wife's peevishness and frowardness at first, and her penitence afterwards, her honour being preserved throughout. Instead of giving quotations here and there, the most satisfactory mode of allowing readers to judge of the comedy will be to extract a whole scene, one of the most brief and striking. It is, when Danville discovers the duke, concealed in her cabinet; the enraged husband insults and defies the young noble. "Danville. Sortez, c'est trop long-tems éviter ma présence. Venez. Le Duc. Que voulez vous ? Danville, Punir votre insolence. Le Duc. Mais, Monsieur Danville. Quand ? dans quel lieu ? comment? Le Duc. Que votre sang plus froid se calme un seul moment. Bouillonne et rajeunit aussitôt qu'on l'outrage. Offense un titre en vous qui dût m' être sacré, Danville. A quoi bon cette ruse ? Et votre aspect l'accuse. Le Duc. Quand c'est moi qui l'atteste, osez vous en douter? Le Duc. De quel rang parlez vous ? si mon honneur balance, Vous ne le pouvez plus quand je veux les venger. Le Duc. Je serais ridicule et vous seriez victime. Et vous le commettrez ; c'est votre châtiment. La mort d'un honnête homme est un poids éternel. Mais dès que leur sang coule, on ne rit plus, on blâme. Notwithstanding the vigour of such scenes as the foregoing, and some others of the same piece, the fame of M. Delavigne must rest upon his lyric effusions. These principally are the 'Messeniennes,' a Greekish title, by which he would import elegies. The first collection of these were on such subjects as Waterloo, Joan of Arc, the Spoliation of the Museum, and other equally Anti-Anglican themes, that allowed of patriotic fury at least, if they inspired not poetic. The bard became popular in abusing us, and truly he is welcome to popularity at our expense. When France became unable to avenge herself with the sword, she wisely took to the pen ; and the sword which Napoleon flung down was speedily metamorphosed by the genius of the nation into a pen for the Poete vengeur. To us, nevertheless, M. Delavigne's efforts at our vilification call to mind the Irish story of the wren picking crumbs and tapping on a drum-head, he feeds himself, and raises some little noise, but no alarm. Before the second batch of elegies, the rage of the poet had subsided, and Greece and Naples, with their attempts at liberty, are his theme. His third, published last year, contains a fine ode to Napoleon; but as these have been all more or less |