L'Amour on the French Stage

Age Cannot Wither Nor Custom Stale the Infinite Lack of Variety on the Part of Gallic Playwrights

FRANK MOORE COLBY

IN itself there was nothing astonishing in the twist given to the treatment of Vamour in the last act of The Return, by MM. de Flers and de Croisset, presented in New York at the close of the season, and the audience seemed pleased but not enthusiastic. But I myself nearly broke into a cheer. For there was the same old right-angled triangle of l'amour and it was not described with the rigidity of Euclid. Here, precisely, are the terms of the proposition, that is to say, the elements of the crisis: The husband had consented to the departure of the wife with the lover, and the wife had consented to one final meeting between the husband and the lover after pledging them both to keep the peace, all of which of course was strictly according to rule. Moreover, during the crisis the wife remained where wives always must remain in the circumstances, that is behind the door trembling. Nor was the alignment of passion in any respect irregular. Passion ran at the moment straight through husband and lover converging on the wife, while from the wife its main general direction was toward the lover. These being the data of the situation, the denouement might have been found in at least fourteen authenticated expedients, every one perfectly compatible with the stage interests of the human heart, and you would have returned from the theatre saying to yourself, as you always do say after a good triangular drama, though in a language varying with the occasion and the art, "After all, the square described on the hypotenuse really does equal the sum of the squares described on the other two sides."

Now there is no need of my mentioning the various things that ought to happen when husband and lover in the last act face each other and the wife is trembling behind the door, for they must all be set down in the text-books somewhere, and are probably covered in courses of lectures at Princeton and Harvard. And I do not say that what did happen in this instance was without stage precedent.

Antique Precedents

ON the contrary, I should imagine from desultory reading that the most austere and classic precedents could be found for wriggling out of the last act of a drama in almost any way you like, or, if it ran too long, for merely hacking off a piece of it—sending Don Juan to hell when you are tired of him, as Moliere did without bothering about the dialogue; murdering all around in Shakespeare's way, with a jingle after the deaths to show that if the last act had no reason, at least it had a rhyme; or, like Terence, winding up a love affair by giving to the lover at the last minute some girl he never saw', instead of the girl he wanted, and making him admit in a few cheerful verses at the end of the play that, while he had not thought of this particular solution, it would probably serve him just as well. But though precedents can no doubt be found for any solution, the precedent for the solution in this instance was not among the contemporary and customary fourteen. For when these two men met in dispute about a woman, they did what men are constantly doing when they are talking off the stage, but hardly ever do when they are on it; they forgot what they started to talk about; in this case they forgot the woman. Not that they dropped her like an umbrella without any adequate divergent interest to account for the mind's desertion. Their absence of mind is amply accounted for by a new and absorbing concern. The two men were re-found comrades of the war with a common fund of memories. Moreover, as the raisonneur of the piece explains, there is a better excuse than there formerly was for the dropping of a woman from the mind: "Women are not quite what they were before the war, when they represented nearly all the excitements that we had. Like the 100-franc note they have depreciated. They are quoted to-day at only about seventy per cent."

If I had followed the French stage in the normal way, I might not have found this remarkable, but having just read about a hundred and fifty contemporary French plays handrunning I had the impression, or perhaps the illusion, of escape from an iron law. I supposed that all that a French playwright might say about the sex relation must be compiled from what preceding French playwrights had said about the sex relation, and that otherwise he could not become a member of the Academy. I knew that novelty was permitted and even desired in the arrangement of motive and circumstance, in the names, ages, and occupations of the characters, in external contemporary reference, and in the distribution of the ideas and phrases. But I did not believe there could ever be any difference in the ideas and phrases on the subject of Vamour although they might be differently distributed.

The Verbal Diversity

NOT that one playwright actually stole his language of the heart from another. The coming of love would often exhibit a certain verbal variety from play to play, even when there was no difference whatever in the woman or the maid and hardly any difference in the playwrights; and the same woman might decide in different language to s'abandonner straight through five plays produced within six months of one another, by five authors over fifty years of age, of an apparently identical amatory experience, who had all agreed upon the logic of the situation down to the last syllogism in the female breast. And when you considered the limitation of the interest and the rigour of the rules, this verbal diversity of the same . love passage, as rendered by the five elderly gentlemen, was surprising. There were many pages of Capus, Wolff, Bernard, Bataille, Donnay, or any other contemporary five, which, though written in a dread of deviation, nevertheless did verbally deviate. But for this to be true, they had to be strictly contemporary. Phrases may change from one month to another, but they do not change from one five-year period to another; they are merely re-combined.

This at least was my theory of the thing— the unconscious re-combination of phrase in all matters of sex interest at intervals ranging from five to ten years, so that, if you attended the love drama steadily for twenty years, you would probably get through the same text about three times, just as you would hear the whole Bible over again, if you were constant,enough in attending divine service. Otherwise I could not account for the sense of monotony on this subject produced by playwrights whose freedom of speech I greatly envied, whose morality I thought far higher than that of our own whose minds often seemed to me ingenious and supple when engaged on almost any other subject, and whose plays I could read by the fifties and the hundreds when I could not read the American or English even by twos and threes

Hearts and Bathtubs

I DO not say that the treatment of the subject ought not to be eternal, but only that playwrights ought not to seem eternal when they treat of it. The best French playwrights seem to me to eterniser when they write about it, and I believe the critics and the public must either have no verbal memory at all or else must blaze with an interest that transcends all iterations, as devout souls may soar while repeating the Litany. So there is no compulsion from without ever to change the language of Vamour, but only the sex, age, class, occupation and physical properties of its vehicles, the required variety being attained simply by re-combination as from grocer, duke, and stenographer, to duchess, clerk, and grocer's wife, or from the seduction of a banker's wife by a poet, to the seduction of a poet's wife by a banker. At each re-combination, wonders of psychological penetration, wit, subtlety, cynicism, audacity, grace, gaiety, charm, and the esprit Gaulois are reported by the critics, with a convivial generosity that gives the impression of a group of men mad with joy every time the chef changes the menu. Nowhere is there so happy and demonstrative a body of men as a certain group of distinguished French critics contemplating the sex relation on the stage. Dramatic achievement in this field is accompanied by an even flow of superlatives, and words are still found for psychological wonders of each new amatory complication, when you would swear that the vocabulary of amazement had been exhausted on the one before.

Perhaps this constant assurance of entire satisfaction with the language of love deters playwrights from making any change in it, or it may be that individuality in respect to a woman's heart seems to the brotherhood as much out of place as in the treatment of polygons or the habits of bees. But there is certainly a repression of individuality in the discussion of this subject, and though the level is high the fact remains that it is a level and seems unnecessarily regular. Love on the French stage is one of the highest achievements of routine. A French playwright is as efficient in the construction of a woman's heart as an American plumber in the making of a bath tub, and since there are no better hearts nor bath tubs on any stage, or in any household in the world, it seems like flying in the face of Providence to find fault in either case. Yet, as you pass steadily through French plays from one mari trompe to another, you are disturbed by the very meeting of all your reasonable expectations, which in the case of successive bath tubs seems so meritorious.