[In the following chapter from The Development of Dramatic Art, Stuart traces the influence of Scribe and the well-made play on the development of the French realistic drama.]

The Mariage de Figaro had combined a discussion of a social problem with an intricate plot handled with great dexterity. During the Revolution the theatre had been given over to propaganda. The characters were mere masks. The plots were often inartistically sacrificed for the sake of satire in comedy, and in order to voice republican sentiments in serious plays. Drama, like all other arts, was at low ebb. But, while the war over tragedy was being waged, comedy began a peaceful development which was to culminate in the work of Scribe and, through him, to exert a powerful influence on all European drama of the nineteenth century.

Picard, an actor-dramatist, was chiefly responsible for the reestablishment of true comedy on the stage. His Mediocre et Rampant (1797) was an artistic success in comparison to the plays of the sans culottes of the revolutionary period, although it was no novelty in comparison to the comedies of the Old Régime. In his Entrée dans le Monde (1799), Picard consciously sacrificed plot to a discussion of manners. He pointed out in his preface that he introduced episodic scenes and a large number of characters in order to show a part of the society of Paris in 1799, that he hurried events in an improbable manner, and that the dénouement does not spring either from the action or the characters. In 1801 he produced a study of the provincial manners entitled La Petite Ville. His point of departure was the theme of the unattractiveness of society in small towns. Realizing that there was no unified plot in the play, Picard called it an episodic comedy. He even deleted one of the acts without seriously harming what plot there was; but the element of plot, though insignificant in these two plays, was to become increasingly important in his work.

His Duhautcours (1801) was a step towards realistic comedy. Inspired by Turcaret and by Noland de Fatouville's Banqueroutier, Picard presents in this play a study of the world of high finance, which was to become the subject of countless plays in the new century. This comedy becomes a serious drama in the fourth act when Durville and his advisor, Duhautcours, try to effect a bankruptcy which will enrich them. They are finally foiled and exposed by Franval in a realistic scene which foreshadows many such episodes in modern drama in which, during a brilliant soirée, guests, creditors and lawyers assemble in the home of a captain of industry. The plot does not overshadow the study of high finance in 1801; but the question as to whether the would-be bankrupt can succeed in his nefarious plans is important enough to satisfy anyone who insists that every play must have a story. A secondary love story between the nephew of Durville and a young girl whose father is being ruined by the financier is loosely connected with the main action. Picard was still inclined to be episodic instead of neatly dovetailing the component parts of his action as Beaumarchais had done and as he himself was to do in a few years.

He said that his Marionettes (1806) was a play based on character and hence the plot was subordinate to the characters. However, his aim was to show that people are governed by events, not by will power or personal traits. In a word, we are all marionettes and when circumstance pulls the strings we dance accordingly. He developed this view of life still further in his Ricochets (1807). He says of the plot: "My little groom obeys his mistress. The son of the minister obeys his, the mistress obeys her own caprice; and the caprice, by which he is dominated, dominates and decides by a series of ricochets, the fate of all the personages. Finally, in destroying all hopes by the loss of a little dog, in causing them to be reborn, in realizing them, in bringing about marriages and getting positions by the gift of a canary bird, I prove that small causes often produced great results." That such a chain of cause and effect acts upon people that are marionettes was Picard's view of life. Scribe's method of constructing plays was to be based on this theory.

When Pascal remarked that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the history of the world would have been different, he implied that small causes bring forth great effects; but the statement also embodies the idea that chance plays an important rôle in the drama of life. Fate and Chance are as far apart as the two poles and quite as similar in effect. The concepts expressed in these two words are diametrically opposed to each other, and yet, are so constantly interchanged, that they seem to the average man to be interchangeable. Is it Fate or Chance which rules the destiny of an Œdipus or a Romeo? The individual may answer the question according to the state of his digestion; but anyone who believes that small causes produce great results, that kingdoms are lost for want of a horse-shoe nail, that the upsetting of a glass of water may bring political upheavals, will allow the element of chance free play in his philosophy of life.

Many of Scribe's contemporaries believed that the destruction of class distinction by the Revolution had made the comedy of manners impossible. Scribe went much further and insisted that the stage never had been and never could be the mirror of society. Perhaps he was wearied of the solemn reiteration of the opposite view by the Academicians. It was his fate to mirror the larger part of contemporary society better than they did and better than the nervous romanticists who believed so ecstatically in missions and purposes of art. Holding these conceptions of life and of drama and becoming the master-builder of the well-made play, Scribe's influence on dramatic art in the nineteenth century was universally condemned by serious critics and dramatists. The critics were content to censure him. The dramatists criticized him consciously and imitated him unconsciously.

"You go to the theatre, not for instruction or correction, but for relaxation and amusement. Now what amuses you most is not truth, but fiction. To represent what is before your eyes every day is not the way to please you; but what does not come to you in your usual life, the extraordinary, the romantic, that is what charms you, that is what one is eager to offer you…. The theatre is then very rarely the expression of society; … it is very often the inverse expression."

Thus spoke Scribe to the Academicians in 1836. Not since Molière had a dramatist had the temerity to insist that the principal aim of the theatre is amusement. He began his career by writing comédies-vaudevilles. The vaudeville aims solely to entertain. It is a play in one to three acts in which songs are introduced. The plot is often based upon some curious, actual incident, and the quiproquo is constantly employed. A descendant of the farce, the vaudeville was often satirical. As Molière developed the farce into high comedy in the seventeenth century, so Scribe started with the vaudeville, and with the aid of the example of Picard, he gradually transformed the vaudeville into a comedy which actually deals with manners and society, but in which the plot is carefully stressed. Scribe's ability to build intricate situations and to extract from them the maximum amounts of surprise and suspense, has caused him to be considered usually as a playwright who sacrifices all to dramaturgic dexterity. The charge is true; but in spite of this sacrifice, some of his plays contain social problems.

His formula for constructing plays is simple. The variations of his method are many. As a rule, his point of departure is a plot. If he begins with a social problem, such as marriage, and money, or with the idea of showing how great results arise from small causes, or with a character, the plot assumes finally such importance that the problem, character or theme is overshadowed.

His point of attack is fairly close to his dénouement. Though his plots contain many incidents, he feels no need of the large framework of romantic drama. His Bertrand et Raton (1833), produced in the heyday of romanticism, is a compact historical comedy. When the curtain rises on any of his full length comedies, there is often much to be explained. Scribe is deliberate in his first act. He would be boring in some of his openings were it not for his wit. If a social problem is involved in the plot, he states it lucidly and discusses it clearly. If events of the past are to influence the present, he explains them and their effect on his characters. He does not avoid long speeches, asides or monologues, and does not mystify the spectator by keeping secrets.

By the end of the first act or in the first part of the second, all the important circumstances are clear. Then the fireworks begin. Letters miscarry. The quiproquo occurs at any moment. He weaves together the many threads of his plot and dexterously unties them at the end. It is the incidents which develop, not his characters.

An outstanding example of his dramatic juggling is his Bataille de Dames (1851). Henri de Flavigneul has been condemned to death for conspiracy and is hiding, disguised as a servant, in the home of the Countess d'Autreval. She is secretly in love with him. Her niece, Léonie, does not know who this valet is, but finds herself uncomfortably attracted by him. The juggling of the question: Will he be discovered? then begins. Henri is constantly on the point of revealing his identity by his gentlemanly manners and conduct. He confesses his identity to Léonie because she felt insulted at his attitude toward her after he rescued her from a bolting horse. Henri is in love with Léonie, but he is in a very awkward position. The Countess loves him, and is saving him from death.

Montrichard is searching for Henri in order to capture him. Henri meets him, and pretends to aid him in his search. Léonie, questioned by Montrichard, practically betrays Henri through agitated answers. The Countess saves Henri by having an admirer of hers, De Grignan, dress as a servant and pose as Henri. Montrichard actually gives Henri a pass and a horse to carry a message. Henri escapes but learns that De Grignan has been taken. He returns. Montrichard discovers he has captured the wrong man. He returns. Henri conceals himself behind the broad skirts of the two ladies. Montrichard announces that Henri has been pardoned. Henri reveals himself. Montrichard immediately arrests him. His statement was a trick. He has won. The Countess is in consternation for a moment. Then she announces that Montrichard is joking; that his statement was true. Montrichard laughingly admits it. Henri is free. The Countess, however, is defeated. She must renounce Henri for the sake of Léonie; but she is partially consoled by accepting De Grignan.

Artificial as the plot is, it is deftly handled and enlivened by sparkling wit. The suspense, surprises and sudden appearances are mechanical; but the machinery runs so smoothly, so quietly, that one is not disturbed by it. Scribe sweeps gracefully to a climax while his contemporaries labored heavily to reach it. His theatrical effects may be meretricious, but they are never dull. Hugo piled up heavy complications and romantic drama cracked under them. Scribe wove complications into a piece of lace work—light and diaphanous.

The plausibility of the development of his situations has been a thorn in the flesh of his hostile critics. He was careful in his preparation. In Adrienne Lecouvreur his heroine dies through breathing a subtle poison. This event is not foreshadowed but is fully prepared in the first act. Scribe's characters always enter at the psychological moment; but their entrances are never improbable. Letters bring the dénouements of the Manage d'Argent and of Camaraderie; but the spectator does not feel that the situation of the characters as the curtain falls is illogical. In Bertrand et Raton many suprising events take place, but he shows that those who actively conspire against a government, especially the bourgeois, are not the people who reap the benefits of a revolution. Much can be said for this idea. It is a sensible view; and common sense—meaning the point of view of the average man—dominates Scribe's plays. His popularity with the majority of theatre-goers and his unpopularity with the feverish romanticists were due partially to his common sense. The accusation that he was not a profound thinker is true; but he cannot be accused justly of being illogical. He had a sane outlook on life. He avoided sentimentality. He sacrificed the romantic to the reasonable. Even his theory of the small cause leading to great results has a certain plausible logic in it as he presents it in his developing actions.

His play Une Chaine is based upon the situation of a young musician who has succeeded in obtaining recognition through the efforts of a young married woman. They are lovers. He feels deep gratitude towards her; but when he falls in love with his cousin and wishes to marry her, his mistress becomes a chain. This idea is stated clearly three or four times during the play; but there is no study of the problem. The action develops through a series of events that is full of surprise, suspense, and Scribian tricks. The situation becomes complex to a high degree, but always remains clear. The play is more than well made; it is beautifully made. The interest lies in the plot, not in the problem. Yet the ending is logical and sensible although it is brought about by a trick. But the time was soon to come when Augier and the younger Dumas were to place much more emphasis on the problem and somewhat less on the plot. The well-made play, however, was to continue its vogue for many years. Scribe invented nothing. French playwrights for two centuries had shown great skill in construction. But Scribe used all the tricks of the trade all the time. Others used some of them some of the time. He excelled everyone in dramaturgic dexterity, and he taught the dramatists of the nineteenth century their art of playmaking. His greatest virtue was his greatest fault: he was too skilful. But as Sarcey says, "One must know Scribe. One must study, but not imitate him."

Augier and the younger Dumas owed much to Scribe; but, unlike him, they held that drama reflects contemporary society. Augier was content to treat problems impassively. Dumas sought to give the answer to the problem. He was militant, argumentative, presenting one side of the question with logic that seems, for the moment, irrefutable. Augier presented both sides of the problem with delicate balance. He concluded on the side of common sense like Scribe, like Molière; but the conclusion is unobtrusive. The final curtain of a play by the younger Dumas reminds one of the Q.E.D. of a geometrical problem. One has experienced a demonstration. The point has been hammered home.

The elder Dumas was the most romantic of all romantic playwrights. He was still producing great historical spectacles when the realistic problem play was evolving in the middle of the century. His Antony (1831) is an extravagant example of romanticism; yet it foreshadows the problem play as it was to be produced by his son. Vigny's Chatterton (1835) contains a romantic poet as a hero, but it is a conscious attempt to introduce that form of drama in which plot is relegated to the background and the idea or thought is the important element in the synthesis.

The curtain of Antony rises on the salon of Adèle d'Hervey. She receives a letter from Antony, who was in love with her before her marriage, but who has dropped out of her life for three years. He wishes to see her; but Adèle, the mother of a three-year-old child, fears to see him lest her former love for him revive. She arranges to go out in her carriage, leaving her sister Clara to interview Antony and dismiss him. Out of a window, Clara sees the horses take fright and a young man leap forward and save Adèle. It is Antony. He is badly injured. Adèle enters and is given a portfolio found on Antony. It contains her picture, her only letter to him—and a dagger. Antony is carried in. Adèle, feeling her love for him once more, says he may remain only if his life is in danger. He tears' off the bandages and cries: "Now I can stay—can't I?"

The explanation of the situation is given in the second act. Antony is still at Adèle 's home. The veils are withdrawn from the past. Antony left Adèle three years before, because a marriage was proposed between her and Colonel d'Hervey. Antony is a foundling without family, rank or occupation. He had asked for a space of two weeks in order to solve the secret of his birth. He was unsuccessful. Because of the prejudice of society against such men as he, Antony could not be the rival of Colonel d'Hervey. Adèle comes more and more under the spell of the pale, young romanticist as he talks of his life and love. Adèle confesses her love for him; but she has decided to seek the protection of her husband stationed in Strasbourg. Antony leaves her, knowing nothing of her decision which is to be communicated to him in a cold letter.

The third act is at an inn two leagues from Strasbourg. Antony arrives. He engages the two vacant rooms. He makes it impossible for any traveller to obtain fresh horses; but he tells the hostess he may give up the extra room if a guest arrives. He sends his servant to Strasbourg to watch Colonel d'Hervey. At the slightest sign of the Colonel's departure for Paris at any time, the servant is to inform Antony. In a passionate monologue, punctuated by driving his dagger into the table, he informs us that he has passed Adèle on the way. He is going to demand an explanation of her departure. He exits. Adèle arrives. The hostess gives her the extra room, since she cannot continue her journey. She hears a noise in the next room. She is beside herself with fear. Antony appears on the balcony, breaks the window and enters. Adèle screams. Antony takes her in his arms and, putting a handkerchief over her mouth, draws her into the other room as the curtain falls.

The fourth act passes some time later at a ball given by the Vicomtesse de Lacy. Adèle has ventured into society with Antony. Under the cloak of a discussion of literature, a Madame de Camps cites their case only too plainly. Left alone with Antony, Adèle is crushed by the impending scandal. Antony takes her in his arms, but the Vicomtesse enters too suddenly. Adèle rushes from the room. Antony's servant informs him that Colonel d'Hervey is nearing Paris.

The fifth act reveals a room in D'Hervey's house. Adèle has reached home. Antony arrives with the crushing news of her husband's arrival. They must fly. A pounding is heard at the door. The Colonel is outside. Nothing remains but death. Antony stabs Adèle. The door is broken down.

ANTONY (throwing the dagger at the COLONEL'S feet)

Yes. Dead. She resisted me and I killed her.

To the modern realist such a series of coups de théâtre so neatly dovetailed seems too melodramatic to represent life. The characters are too exceptional. Their psychological reactions seem as superannuated as the medicine practised by the doctor who bleeds Antony for an injury which has already caused a loss of blood. The passions displayed by Antony made him seem false to certain contemporaries. The element of chance in the action seems overworked, with the timely and untimely appearances of the personages and the remarkable succession of events of the past and present.

But Dumas was entirely conscious of what he was trying to do in constructing this "drame d'exception, " as he called it. The dialogue contains a running comment on his ideas. In the fourth act, Eugène, a dramatist, is asked why he does not write a play on a subject of modern society instead of the Middle Ages. "That is what I repeat to him every minute," says the Vicomtesse. "Do something of real life. Are we not much more interested in people of our own times, dressed like us, speaking the same language?" Beaumarchais and Diderot had asked the same question, years before, in regard to classical tragedy. It was pertinent to the new romantic historical drama. A baron replies for Eugène: "It is easier to take subjects from chronicles than from the imagination. One finds in them plays almost entirely written." Eugène—probably speaking for Dumas—says that comedy of manners is very difficult because the Revolution levelled all differences of rank. He continues:

The drama of passion remains, and here another difficulty presents itself. History gives us facts, they belong to us by right of inheritance, they are incontestable, they belong to the poet. He revives the men of bygone times, clothes them in their costumes, agitates them with their passions which increase or diminish to the degree to which he desires to carry the dramatic. But if we tried, in the midst of our modern society, in our short-tailed, awkward coats, to lay bare the heart of man, one would not recognize it. The resemblance between the hero and the audience would be too great, the analogy too close. The spectator who follows, in the actor, the development of the passion will want to stop it where it would have stopped in his own heart. If it surpasses his own power of feeling or expressing, he will not understand it any longer, he will say: "That is false; I do not feel thus; when the woman I love deceives me, I suffer without doubt … yes … for a time … but I don't stab her and die, and the proof is, here I am." Then the cries of exaggeration and melodrama, covering the applause of these few men, who, more happily or unhappily organized than the others, feel that passions are the same from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.

This passage contains the indictment by the realists before they pronounced it upon romantic drama. Indeed, it is a common indictment of all drama. It implies the eternal question: Just how melodramatic can an art be which seems to represent real life actually before us? The point of melodramatic saturation depends entirely upon the views of contemporary society.

Dumas felt that in Antony he was writing something much more realistic than the romantic historical drama. Though some contemporaries called the hero false, he is the incarnation on the stage, not only of the romantic lovers in novels and poems of the time, but of the romanticists as they imagined themselves to be, as they were, in so far as was possible in an everyday world of reality. The success of the play would otherwise have been impossible.

Antony, the foundling of mysterious parentage, has descended from a long line of children, beginning with Euripides' Ion, who are lost for theatrical purposes in both tragedy and comedy. But Dumas' treatment of this idea of the foundling was both new and dramatic. The fact that Antony is an orphan of unknown parents is the determining factor in his character and raises the problem of the attitude of society towards foundlings. The play, therefore, not only foreshadows realistic drama because it deals with contemporary characters, but also because it raises a social problem. This question is the basis of the plot and is directly discussed in the second act in a manner resembling that of the later problem play. The unfaithful wife had appeared on the German stage in Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue in 1789; and his play had been given in French adaptations in 1792, 1799 and 1823. The grown-up, illegitimate child had been a source of sentimental emotion in European bourgeois drama from the time of Diderot's Fils Naturel. In Antony, however, the unfaithful wife and the illegitimate child are tragic characters. Their lives give rise to problems, rather than to sentimentality. The fallen woman on the stage can no longer always escape punishment by repentance and by living a life of charity and virtue. Thus Antony rightly belongs to the nineteenth century, while Menschenhass und Reue is clearly a product of the sentimental optimism of the eighteenth century.

Having struck this modern note in Antony, Dumas turned once more to romantic melodrama. It was easier for his active brain to construct plots than to study carefully problems of his society. But Alfred de Vigny, the most profound thinker of all the French romanticists, was deeply impressed by this drama. He insisted that it contained a dominating thought, that it was a moral satire against the atheism, materialism and egoism of the age. He denied that the play was too "talky." While the stage was ringing with the sonorous lyricism of Hugo and the spectators were being dazzled by theatrical surprises, Vigny revolted against the complicated mechanism of romantic drama. He said in his preface to Chatterton that the time had come for the "Drama of Thought." He proposed to show "the spiritual man stifled by a materialistic society." He chose the simplest possible plot: "the story of a man who has written a letter in the morning and who awaits the reply until evening; it comes and it kills him." Had there been a simpler plot, he would have chosen it, because in this play "the moral action is everything." The action is in the heart of Chatterton, the symbolic figure of the Poet; in the hearts of Kitty Bell and the Quaker.

In Chatterton, Vigny consciously produced a problem play before the expression itself was used as a term of dramatic criticism. Many dramatists before him had written eloquent prefaces to show how their plays taught morality by stripping vice of its mask and rewarding virtue. Social problems had been mirrored more or less consciously. But no dramatist had so clearly stated his problem, and deliberately reduced the plot to a bare skeleton in order to spend all the time on the "moral action." If dramatists had employed this method consciously, they had kept silent in regard to it. Diderot had advocated simplicity of plot and a study of family life, of profession and positions, such as The Father, instead of characters and characteristics such as The Flatterer. Sedaine, under the influence of Diderot, depicted a family in a charming manner and even introduced the problem of the duel in Le Philosophe sans le Savoir. But the bourgeois drama was not primarily a problem play as is Chatterton in which every character and every scene arise from the point of departure of "the spiritual man stifled by a materialistic society."

It is probable that Vigny was influenced by Sedaine rather than by Racine in re-introducing a simple plot into French drama. He admired Sedaine's Philosophe sans le Savoir. It was a beautiful work to him; and the result of careful study of human nature and art. The rarity of such plays was evidence of their extreme difficulty. He prophesied that this form of drama would gain in power as it treated graver and greater problems. The characters were "happy creations which time cannot wither." The simplicity of the dialogue, the gracious nobility of the scenes following each other with such ease and naturalness appealed to him. These words of high praise were written in 1841; but Le Philosophe sans le Savoir was constantly played and Vigny's knowledge and delight in this drama are certainly of earlier date.

The material action of Chatterton observes the unities strictly. It takes place in the house of John Bell, a gross materialist, in which Chatterton, the poet, has rented a room. He is starving. His brain refuses to work. He has pledged his body as security for a loan. He has written the Lord Mayor asking for a position. He has fallen in love with Bell's wife, Kitty; and she loves him, although both have locked their secret in their hearts. The Lord Mayor offers the poet a position as his valet. Chatterton drinks opium and dies. Kitty Bell's death follows symbolically and actually from his kiss.

The moral action is the clash of spirituality and materialism. The spiritual world is represented by Chatterton, Kitty Bell, her children, and the Quaker. John Bell is the successful industrialist, surrounded by young lords who live riotously and see in Kitty only a woman to seduce. The Lord Mayor is the personification of a thankless national government which sees in a poet only a worthless citizen.

Those who looked for a plot in the play saw only a justification of suicide; but fortunately the majority of the spectators caught the deeper meaning. The stupid keepers of their brother's morals are always with us in the theatre; but this time their vapid cry of immorality was soon drowned in applause. The drame serieux had returned to the French stage in the form of a problem play even while Hugo and Dumas were thundering forth their gorgeous melodramas and Eugène Scribe was playing his clever parlor tricks.

Throughout the period of romanticism, Scribe had preserved the compact classical form of drama. Augier was even more classical. The point of attack in his plays is almost as close to the dénouement as it is in the comedies of Molière or Regnard. The scene changes from one salon to another, but it does not wander from place to place as in romantic drama. The element of time is unimportant. One does not ask how many hours or days have elapsed between the acts. The epic and lyric elements of Hugo have disappeared. The striking settings, local color and the melodrama are things of the past so far as Augier is concerned.

His plots are complex but they are never imbroglios giving rise to surprising events. Mistaken identity and the quiproquo have no place in problem plays. When Augier employs a coup de théâtre or any technical device, it is not for the purpose of dazzling the spectator with his brilliant dexterity, but in order to show a new development of his plot. He holds a middle ground between Scribe and the later realists who would banish all the devices of the well-made play.

His situations are skilfully articulated. Just as he discusses both sides of the question, so he balances delicately both his characters and their fortunes. This equilibrium is beautifully exemplified in his Gendre de M. Poirier, which he wrote in collaboration with Landeau. In this comedy the clash between the ideals of the newly enriched bourgeois and the old nobility is depicted. Poirier, the rich bourgeois, has married his daughter, Antoinette, to Gaston, a young marquis riddled with debts. On both sides it is a marriage of convenience. Poirier wishes to become a peer of France. Gaston desires to live a life of idleness and luxury. They represent the extremists of their respective classes. Montmeyran personifies the more moderate wing of the nobility. He has accepted the fate of his class and become a soldier. Verdelet, Poirier's friend and Antoinette's godfather, is a bourgeois willing to remain a simple, solid citizen. Between the two parties stands Antoinette. Gaston, utterly egoistic, is not unconscious of the fact that she is attractive and charming; but he considers her merely the source of his income. He is carrying on an intrigue with a Madame de Montjay, more through force of habit than because he loves her. To have a mistress is a part of his scheme of life. The duel which he is to fight on her account is also a part of the code of his world. In spite of his faults, which are presented as those of his class, Gaston is a likeable character. Poirier also has grave faults, but the right is often enough on his side to make the audience sympathize with him at times.

The first three acts of the play deal with questions arising from the intermingling of the two classes. The attitudes of the nobleman and of the bourgeois in regard to honor, money, marriage, ambition, and usefulness to society are brilliantly set forth. The virtues and vices of each class are depicted with incisive wit. Neither side is entirely condemned or exonerated. Finally, the concrete question as to whether Gaston and Antoinette can continue to live together boils out of the social ferment. Gaston has learned to love her because she has shown true nobility of character, but will he give up his ideal of honor in order to prove his love for her, by refusing to fight the duel? Thus even the sentimental interest is the result of the clash of social ideas. Scribe sacrificed the study of a problem to the development of his plot; but it is the problem not the development of the story, which dominates the construction of this play from start to finish.

Social questions had formed the basis of many a play in past ages, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the problem play came into its own. So long as the rule of the separation of tragedy and comedy was observed, the canonical happy ending of comedy was often a false note, destroying the harmony of the developing action. Now, for practically the first time in France, the dramatist could observe social conditions and treat them on the stage with freedom from tradition or rules. The question as to whether comic scenes can be mingled with tragic situations is far less important than the question as to whether a dramatist is allowed to take a situation involving customs of contemporary society and develop it to its logical outcome, happy or bitter as the end may be. When dramatic art threw off the incubus of the rule of the separation of comedy and tragedy it scored a veritable triumph.

Looking back over the centuries of dramatic art one is impressed by the dearth of plays which deal with problems of men and women in their everyday life. Without detracting one iota from the tragedies and comedies of the Greeks, the Elizabethans, the French and the Germans, one feels that the human, personal touch is too often lacking, that a whole section of joys and sorrows of men and women has been left unrepresented. The dramatists depicted vice and virtue, true ideals and perverted ideals. But where was the picture of the normal man and woman laughing and weeping by turns in the comedy of life which ends with tragic tears? English, German and French domestic tragedy had attempted to supply such pictures of life; but they were often pictures and nothing more. The problem play, as the expression implies, deals with certain conditions in society which cause trouble. It seeks to analyze the opposition between social custom and the law, or between custom and justice. The dramatist does not consider the problem as merely ridiculous. He sees that there is right and wrong on both sides, although he concludes for or against one side of the question. This method is very different from the dramatic presentation of such vices as avarice, hypocrisy, affectation, etc., as ridiculous foibles of man. Molière could employ any means to end his play Tartufe after he had shown the effects of hypocrisy. The dénouement was unimportant, provided vice had been held up to ridicule. The portrait of the hypocrite was complete. In the problem play, each step must be logical. The dénouement becomes highly important for it contains the answer to the whole question. Thus the younger Dumas founded his whole scheme of dramaturgy on the basis of the problem. Social questions had been discussed in drama before his time; but he finally made the problem the point of departure.

His first drama, La Dame aux Camélias (1852), is a play which tells a story. He did not write it in order to discuss the question of a courtezan regenerated through love. His formula of play-making had not yet been devised. Diane de Lys (1853) likewise depends more upon its dramatic plot than upon the presentation of a problem of marital infidelity for its interest. However, the situations upon which these plays are based contain moral questions which only need to be discussed at length to turn the dramas into pièces à thèse. The problem of marital infidelity is inherent in the plot of Antony; but the rôle of the husband exists for purposes of plot and dénouement alone. What he thinks, what are his rights, are questions of vital importance in a pièce à thèse; but they are not raised by the elder Dumas. In the final analysis, Antony is the portrayal of enthralling passion of the decade of the thirties, done in romantic style. In Diane de Lys the rôle of the husband is important. His situation, his rights are carefully set forth. The plot is still of greater interest than the discussion of the question of infidelity; but there is a marked development in the importance of the problem between Antony and Diane de Lys.

La Dame aux Camélias and Diane de Lys opened a long series of realistic plays which remains unbroken to the present day. The erring woman and her relation to society had been presented in the theatre sporadically; but from 1852 on she holds the centre of the stage. After three-quarters of a century of such plays and at a time when motion pictures rehabilitate the courtezan continuously every day from noon until midnight, it is difficult to imagine the younger Dumas' first play as being considered a rather shocking novelty when it was first produced. Its realism seems a bit sentimental. The pistol shot which brings down the curtain of Diane de Lys has become as banal as the arrival of the long-lost father or son with a fortune.

Scribe's Dix Ans dans la Vie d'une Femme (1832) was a realistic study of a woman who became a courtezan; but it was an isolated example without influence. These dramas of the younger Dumas ushered in a new development of dramatic art. When he wrote the Demi-Monde, the playwright turned still more to the study of a social problem. The plot is complicated; but on leaving the theatre one is not thinking merely of the fact that Suzanne, a member of the demi-monde, has not been able to rise out of it by marrying Raymond. Much less is one concerned with the marriage of Olivier to Marcelle by which she will escape from her surroundings. It is the whole social problem of the demi-monde, which is uppermost in one's thoughts. The spectator feels that a case has been tried and settled before him.

Hugo had used the five acts to present a complicated story embellished with long speeches resembling operatic arias. Scribe had taken advantage of the full length play to dazzle the spectators with kaleidoscopic developments of his plot. Dumas belongs to the Scribian school in that he usually devised a plot full of surprising turns; but he left plenty of time to argue his point and to paint his portraits fully. Especially impressive in this respect is the Demi-Monde. He presents several different types of people belonging to this society. Each one is clearly differentiated from the other. Little by little we learn of their past, their present, their ambitions, their habits, their incomes, and their previous relations with each other. He even succeeds in making a striking personality of Madame de Lornan who plays a part in the action, but who never appears on the stage. Likewise, a Monsieur de Latour does not enter but is sketched into the picture as a type of the men who frequent this society.

The concrete question which forms the plot is: Can Suzanne, a woman with a past, rise out of the demi-monde by marrying Raymond? This causes the gradual disclosure, not only of her past, but that of all the other characters. The technique of developing the action by withdrawing veils from the past was employed by Dumas with great effectiveness. As each discovery takes place the action moves forward and the resultant phase of the moral problem is discussed.

While the audience is supposed to draw inferences from the development of the plot and especially from the dénouement in regard to the problem and its answer, much of the discussion is direct. It is a debate or argument, thinly disguised, in which each character presents his case. The whole drama is plainly a conflict of opposing forces, and the action works up to the point in which the opposing wills clash in an obligatory scene. One character is pre-eminent in leading the discussion and in presenting the author's views. In the Demi-Monde, Olivier de Jalin fills the rôle of the raisonneur, as it was called. This rôle has been compared to that of the chorus or the confidant in classical tragedy; but at least these characters are not mere moralizers. They are active and effective. They fight for a moral principle. They give their views; but they dominate the action to such an extent, that they resemble dangerously an exhibitor of marionettes as he moves the strings. Only Dumas' skill saves him from too apparently manipulating everything through the person of his raisonneur. While the rôle of the confidant persists in many modern dramas as a friend of the family or a kindly old uncle, the raisonneur is more than a mouthpiece for aphorisms. He may represent the crux of the whole action for the intellectuals in the audience, although he may not be the hero of the concrete story to the sentimentally inclined. Thouvenin, the raisonneur in Denise, harangues André for four and one-half minutes in order to prove to him that he should marry Marthe who is the mother of an illegitimate child. So far as the problem is concerned, this lecture, as Dumas called it, is the culmination of the drama.

Dumas believed that the Demi-Monde was more a portrayal of manners than a problem play; but in writing the Fils Naturel (1858) he reached the goal of the pièce à thèse. He said in the preface (1868): "For the first time, it is true, I was trying to develop a social thesis and to render, through the theatre, more than the depiction of manners, of characters, of ridiculous foibles and of passions. I hoped that the spectator would carry away from this spectacle something to think about a little." As Vigny's wish had been to introduce a theatre of "thought," so the younger Dumas dreamed of a "useful" and "legislative" theatre. "Through comedy, through tragedy, through drama, through buffoonery, in the form which fits us best, let us inaugurate the useful theatre, at the risk of hearing cry out the apostles of art for art's sake—four words absolutely empty of meaning."

The theatre was not the end but the means. Eleven years after writing this preface he admitted, in his preface to L'Etrangère, that people would not look to the theatre for the solution of great problems; but he was none the less sincere in his belief that the theatre should attempt to solve problems.

Sarcey held that the theatre never had reformed anyone and never will. He saw no reason, therefore, for treating Dumas' favorite theme: adultery. Sarcey was correct in his first contention. The theatre can only reform people indirectly, by showing life; but there is no reason why adultery or any other phase of society should not be represented on the stage, provided the portrayal is true. Innocence and ignorance were once practically synonymous terms when applied to women—especially young women. Even Dumas advocated veiling the dialogue so that certain passages could be understood only by men. The jeune fille had an influence on dramatic art far greater than that of the "tired business man." Happily both these innocents belong to the past.

Dumas considered drama as an art by itself and not as a mere branch of literature. When he said that drama ought always to be written as if it were only to be read, he meant that a play, in order to live, must contain ideas. He pointed out that the reader often does not find the emotion in the printed play which he did in the representation, because a word, a look, a gesture, a silence, a purely atmospheric combination had held him under its charm. The language of great writers would only teach the dramatist words and a number of these would have to be excluded because they lack "relief, vigor, almost the triviality necessary to put in action the true man on this false ground" (the stage). "The language of the theatre does not have to be grammatically correct. It must be clear, full of color, incisive." He cited the line by Racine: "Je t'aimais inconstant: qu'aurai-je fait fidèle!"—as an example of bad grammar but as an excellent line on the stage. The style of Scribe would be acceptable to Dumas if it contained a thought.

Such ideas are a bold challenge to the literary critic. They had been expressed, in part, by Diderot a century before. In the nineteenth century dialogue grew less and less stylistic, but Dumas' lines are by no means devoid of embellishment. In comparison with dialogue in our contemporary drama, his speeches are often rhetorical. In scenes of action he is clear and concise. The illuminating phrase came to him naturally. Not since Sedaine and Beaumarchais had a playwright expressed his ideas so brilliantly, so tersely when brevity is demanded in the particular scene. His greatest fault was the constant use of aphorisms. It is easier for an author to be brilliant than to be life-like in dialogue. His use of the aside and the monologue is regrettable because he could be subtle, and subtlety is extinguished by the aside and the monologue used to explain facts obvious to the modern audience.

Dumas fought valiantly to set drama free to tell the truth about life. Whether he succeeded or not in always telling the truth is not now a vital question. He set up an ideal of sincerity in drama. He was never false to his conscience. He insisted upon the necessity of being a master in the art. He said in the preface to Un Père Prodigue: "A man without any value as a thinker, as a moralist, as a philosopher, as a writer, can be a man of the first order as a dramatic author. To be a master in this art, one must be clever in the business." He admired Scribe's ability as a technician, though he deplored his lack of depth and sincerity. If it were possible, he would think like Æschylus and write like Scribe. "The dramatic author who would know man like Balzac and the theatre Scribe would be the greatest dramatic author that ever existed." He learned from Scribe to know the theatre. Indeed, at the close of his career, Dumas' plays were criticized for being too well made. Yet he never sacrificed what he felt was the logical demonstration of his thesis to a striking theatrical effect, although he devised coups de théâtre in order to prove his point. "The real in the foundation, the possible in the fact, the ingenious in the means, that is what can be demanded of us." But he never swerved from the belief that "the most indispensable quality is logic, which includes good sense and clearness."

"The truth (of a play)," he held, "can be absolute or relative according to the importance of the subject and the place that it occupies; the logic must be implacable between the starting point and the place of arrival, which it must never lose from view in the development of the idea or the fact." There must be "the mathematical, inexorable and fatal progression which multiplies scene by scene, event by event, act by act up to the dénouement which ought to be the total and the proof."

Thus the dénouement of a play assumed great importance. The desire of an audience for a happy ending, and the rule that comedy must end happily and tragedy unhappily went by the board. The whole construction of the play depended upon the ending. In the preface to La Princesse Georges Dumas said: "You can make mistakes in the details of execution; you have no right to be mistaken in the logic and in. the linking of the sentiments and facts, still less in their conclusion. One ought never to modify a dénouement. One ought always to begin a play with the dénouement, that is, not begin the work until one has the scene, the movement and the word of the end." One cannot help wondering how much Molière would have changed the endings of his plays had he constructed them after this method.

Naturally a great deal of controversy arose over the dénouements of Dumas' plays. Were they logical? Were they moral? Were they practical solutions of the problems raised? He was accused of representing special cases and deducing general conclusions.

He did create situations which were extraordinary. He complicated his plots so much that the later naturalists dismissed them as improbable. It is very improbable that an illegitimate child could be brought up in affluence by its mother who had been poor; that the child as a young man should wish to marry his father's niece; that he would save France; that his father's brother would offer him a title; that his father would wish to recognize him in order to gain the title, etc. But that all happens in the Fils Naturel. Such a plot is not the result of observation of life, but is devised to present a thesis. His demonstration of his hypothesis may be perfectly logical, but the hypothesis is so far-fetched that he has not represented the usual, but an unusual problem of the illegitimate child. Dumas was quite correct in pointing out in his preface the advance he made in treating this subject. "It was agreed formerly, in the theatre, that an illegitimate child should groan, for five acts, at not having been recognized, and that at the end, after all kinds of trials, each more pathetic than the others, he would see his father repent and they would throw themselves in each other's arms crying: 'My father! My son!' to the applause of an audience in tears." This particular brand of sentimentality Dumas made ridiculous.

Scribe was a master technician who merely wished to amuse an audience. Dumas was a master technician who felt he had something to prove and wished to make an audience think. He finally constructed plays in which the plot was of secondary importance. In the Question d'Argent (1857), he was so intent upon presenting the various phases of the influence of money on contemporary society that the plot almost disappeared. The first and second acts are discussions of the thesis: money means success. By the end of the third act, Eliza, the daughter of an honorable but poverty-stricken nobleman, is going to marry Giraud, a man of the people, who has amassed a fortune by methods which are within the law but are questionable from the strict moral point of view. The audience knows that such a marriage spells tragedy; and Eliza finally repudiates her engagement. The interest of the play does not lie primarily in the story, but in the discussion of the whole money question and in the idea that one should win a fortune by esteem, not win esteem through a fortune.

As a rule, Dumas was careful to build up a gripping plot which unfolds with surprise and suspense. He insisted upon the "ingenious in the means." The ingeniousness appears somewhat overdone, now that the reaction against the coup de théâtre has put us on guard against the too cleverly devised scene. But if he forced events or characters it was in order to demonstrate his thesis. In L'Ami des Femmes he frankly used the legerdemain of Scribe throughout the play. De Ryons pulls the strings. He foretells what will happen. It seems as if what he prophesies is impossible. Then, presto, it comes to pass, but the thesis is proved. At the close of all his plays there is a surprising peripeteia. The unexpected happens. The last scenes form an exciting climax in which all the strings of the plot are gathered together and suddenly untied in an ingenious manner.

In La Princesse Georges, the husband of the heroine is apparently going to meet his certain death; but the bullet strikes another lover of Sylvanie. Césarine, in La Femme de Claude, seems on the verge of successfully betraying her husband and making good her escape. She has seduced his young assistant. The plans of the invention are in her grasp. Her confederate is just outside the window, and she is about to throw them to him when the sound of her husband's voice makes her stop involuntarily. Then the bullet strikes her. The climax of the Demi-Monde is produced when Olivier makes Suzanne—and the audience—believe he has killed Raymond. By this trick, he unmasks Suzanne, who declares her love for Olivier when she believes that Raymond is dead. Even in the Question d'Argent, the least exciting of his plays, Giraud's unexpected return, when everyone considers him an absconder, constitutes a surprising coup de théâtre.

Generally the last few minutes of Dumas' plays contain the psychological and dramatic climax. The curtain descends almost instantly after the line and event which bring the solution of the problem. The tension is not relaxed gradually with explanations or prophecies of the future, as in Shakespearean and Greek tragedy. The tension snaps. The knot is cut with one stroke. The spectator is left gasping with theatrical excitement. Dumas insisted that the dénouement should be unforeseen, but logical. This procedure was commonly followed by the realists. When Freytag was expounding his theory of the rise and fall of the dramatic action, the playwrights had ceased to represent the fall.

The objection was made, especially in regard to the pistol shot as a climax and dénouement, that social problems in real life were not solved by bullets. Alphonse Royer said in 1878: "This simple procedure which charges the arms manufacturer with the decision of questions that logic cannot solve has been the pons asinorum of the realistic school which has used and abused it as long as the public was willing to lend itself to this trickery against which it protests to-day." From the point of view that realism is a transcript of real life, the objection is sound. Dumas' attempt to answer such objections is found in the preface to L'Étrangère.

"When we attack a law on the stage, we can only do it by means of the theatre and most often without even mentioning the law. The public must draw the conclusions and say: 'Indeed, that is a case in which the law is wrong!' Our means are a certain combination of events drawn from the possible, laughter and tears, passion and interest, with an unforeseen dénouement, personal initiative, the intervention of a deus ex machina, mandatory of a Providence which does not always manifest itself so aptly in real life, and which, playing the rôle which the law should have undertaken, employs in the face of unsolvable situations, the great argument of the old theatre, the argument without reply—death."

To such arguments the naturalists replied: "That is not life, hence not truth." Dumas retorted: "That is logic, hence it is truth." He insisted that there is a vast difference between truth in life and truth in the theatre. Zola denied the existence of any such difference. The reason for this distinction, according to Dumas, was that audiences were governed by mob psychology, were enormous masses and had to be attracted and held by gross means. Truth had to make concessions; and he relied upon Goethe's prologue to Faust to show that "the public has been and always will be a child, both ignorant and wishing to learn nothing, curious and convinced that there are many things very natural, very true, of which the theatre should never speak, impressionable and heedless, sensitive and teasing … deaf to reasoning and always open to an emotion."

Such arguments voiced by a sincere man who had spent his life trying to reason even in his theatrical manner are depressing, far more depressing than if they came from Goethe, who was more of a poet-philosopher than a dramatist. This theory of the audience was widely accepted. But though an audience has some characteristics of a mob and though there are audiences of varying degrees of intelligence, people are enough the same in a theatre as outside of it to make it unnecessary to misrepresent life on the stage. A dramatist must write for an audience. He does not have to write down to an audience. He can tell the truth in the theatre, if he knows how to tell the truth in the theatre. Sooner or later popular success will be his. Where is the dramatist of ability who was faithful to the truth who failed to be recognized by the crowd as a great artist? At least, he has left no trace of his plays in written form.

When a subject fitted for dramatic representation and demonstration had occurred to Dumas, he studied it in all its ramifications. He knew the life history of all his characters. Thus in the preface to Monsieur Alphonse he gave a full biographical account of his principals up to the opening of the play. Such complete details cannot be presented in the play itself. The limit of time precludes that possibility. Yet such careful analysis of character and of the problem has its effect upon the drama. One may or may not agree with the author's conception of the development of the action; but one realizes that Dumas knew why his people are what they are and do what they do.

But they are what they are because of the problem; and they do what they do in order to prove his thesis. His characters impress one as his creations, not as people observed in life. In that period of naturalism when novel writers were striving to be impartial observers, Dumas sacrificed whatever power of objective observation he possessed to his thesis. His characters tend to become generalizations and in La Femme de Claude, allegorical abstractions. He admitted that he spoke through them. As Zola said, his characters are "colorless, stiff as arguments, which disappear from the mind as soon as the book is closed or the curtain falls…. All that he touches instead of becoming animate grows heavy and turns towards dissertation…. Balzac wants to paint and M. Dumas wants to prove." He was like a lawyer in court. He convinced his auditors by his arguments. But just as a lawyer may win a case by a clever array of facts which are not the real truth, so a dramatist writing a problem play is in danger of convincing an audience in a theatre only to have them question his conclusion on calmer consideration.