There are three kinds of drama in France, which you may subdivide as much as you please.
There is the old classical drama, wellnigh dead, and full time too:
old tragedies, in which half a dozen characters appear, and spout sonorous Alexandrines for half a dozen hours.The fair Rachel has been trying to revive this genre, and to untomb Racine; but be not alarmed, Racine will never come to life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore.Madame Rachel can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it.Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and be-periwigged, lies in the grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised.There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid.An Englishman will seldom reconcile himself to the roulement of the verses, and the painful recurrence of the rhymes; for my part, Ihad rather go to Madame Saqui's or see Deburau dancing on a rope:
his lines are quite as natural and poetical.
Then there is the comedy of the day, of which Monsieur Scribe is the father.Good heavens! with what a number of gay colonels, smart widows, and silly husbands has that gentleman peopled the play-books.How that unfortunate seventh commandment has been maltreated by him and his disciples.You will see four pieces, at the Gymnase, of a night; and so sure as you see them, four husbands shall be wickedly used.When is this joke to cease? Mon Dieu!
Play-writers have handled it for about two thousand years, and the public, like a great baby, must have the tale repeated to it over and over again.
Finally, there is the Drama, that great monster which has sprung into life of late years; and which is said, but I don't believe a word of it, to have Shakspeare for a father.If Monsieur Scribe's plays may be said to be so many ingenious examples how to break one commandment, the drame is a grand and general chaos of them all;nay, several crimes are added, not prohibited in the Decalogue, which was written before dramas were.Of the drama, Victor Hugo and Dumas are the well-known and respectable guardians.Every piece Victor Hugo has written, since "Hernani," has contained a monster--a delightful monster, saved by one virtue.There is Triboulet, a foolish monster; Lucrece Borgia, a maternal monster;Mary Tudor, a religious monster; Monsieur Quasimodo, a humpback monster; and others, that might be named, whose monstrosities we are induced to pardon--nay, admiringly to witness--because they are agreeably mingled with some exquisite display of affection.And, as the great Hugo has one monster to each play, the great Dumas has, ordinarily, half a dozen, to whom murder is nothing; common intrigue, and simple breakage of the before-mentioned commandment, nothing; but who live and move in a vast, delightful complication of crime, that cannot be easily conceived in England, much less described.
When I think over the number of crimes that I have seen Mademoiselle Georges, for instance, commit, I am filled with wonder at her greatness, and the greatness of the poets who have conceived these charming horrors for her.I have seen her make love to, and murder, her sons, in the "Tour de Nesle." I have seen her poison a company of no less than nine gentlemen, at Ferrara, with an affectionate son in the number; I have seen her, as Madame de Brinvilliers, kill off numbers of respectable relations in the first four acts; and, at the last, be actually burned at the stake, to which she comes shuddering, ghastly, barefooted, and in a white sheet.Sweet excitement of tender sympathies! Such tragedies are not so good as a real, downright execution; but, in point of interest, the next thing to it: with what a number of moral emotions do they fill the breast;with what a hatred for vice, and yet a true pity and respect for that grain of virtue that is to be found in us all: our bloody, daughter-loving Brinvilliers; our warmhearted, poisonous Lucretia Borgia; above all, what a smart appetite for a cool supper afterwards, at the Cafe Anglais, when the horrors of the play act as a piquant sauce to the supper!
Or, to speak more seriously, and to come, at last, to the point.
After having seen most of the grand dramas which have been produced at Paris for the last half-dozen years, and thinking over all that one has seen,--the fictitious murders, rapes, adulteries, and other crimes, by which one has been interested and excited,--a man may take leave to be heartily ashamed of the manner in which he has spent his time; and of the hideous kind of mental intoxication in which he has permitted himself to indulge.
Nor are simple society outrages the only sort of crime in which the spectator of Paris plays has permitted himself to indulge; he has recreated himself with a deal of blasphemy besides, and has passed many pleasant evenings in beholding religion defiled and ridiculed.
