Just here it is interesting to note that the dissolving of the marriage bond has become the favorite theme of modern novelists and playwrights, among which group Paul Hervieu has particularly distinguished himself. In one of his most important works, "Les Tenailles," he pictures a woman struggling against marital authority when it comes to the question of how her son shall be brought up. In "La Loi de l'Homme," we have again a woman in open rebellion against the outrageous law which deprives a mother of all right to oppose the marriage of her daughter once the father sanctions it, and, generally speaking, against a code which assigns to woman a second rank.

"Deux Vies," the last much talked of novel by Paul and Victor Margueritte, treats of the injustices which it would be easy to remedy by dissolving the marriage ties at the request of both husband and wife, or of merely one of the parties concerned. It is not the members of the upper class who apply for divorce in France, as they do in Italy, where the lower classes disapprove of it, and in England where it is shunned by the middle classes. In Paris divorce is favored by a certain free thinking "bourgeoisie." If the working people do not take more frequent advantage of the divorce, it is because proceedings of this kind are expensive, and that a laborer prefers to have direct recourse to the "union libre " without bothering over so much ceremony. I say "in Paris," expressly; throughout the rest of the country this movement has been very little followed, as it is contrary to the Catholic religion, which goes no further than the old "séparation de corps." This in all times has made it possible to throw off a chain which had become odious, not making it, however, permissible to aquire fresh rights to marry.

The majority of honorable women are aghast at the thought that while they are circulating in society on the arm of a second husband they may come upon his predecessor, still extant. But will such scruples last forever? Or is the divorce law destined to be of short duration like the one which sprung into being under the Revolution,—which was opposed by Napoleon, but who, nevertheless, himself made use of it,—and was finally abolished in 1816 ?

The future alone can decide this.

For the time being the family in France finds itself confronted as in America by a double peril; on the one hand, divorce which diminishes the dignity of marriage, and on the other hand, "race suicide" which can have consequences much more grave for us than for the United States where it is remedied by immigration. We can but hope for both countries a development of character and customs which, more than any civil laws, contribute to the superiority of a nation.

Then those coeducational schools which encourage a harmless intimacy between the sexes, will perhaps be established in France; the innocence of the young girl, becoming more enlightened, will be protected by the respect of the young man; love matches will no longer be the synonym for a foolish caprice; the parents, always listened to respectfully, will no longer meet with blind submission; divorce will then be merely a sad remedy applied in desperate cases, which will become more and

more rare.

This will be the golden age.

And in the meantime, while France is adopting the best of the American customs and fitting them to her thousand-year-old traditions, America will renounce her borrowed European ambitions; those which too often result in the exchange of a large dowry for a title; the heiress of the merchant prince will no longer confer the millions gained in industry upon the young and gracious foreigner who in exchange makes her marquise or duchesse.

Let us add that, in spite of all the mutual modifications which are possible, there will exist for a long time yet, in these two nations, on the opposite sides of the ocean, decidedly different ways of looking at marriage and a hundred other things. Old civilizations are more complicated than new ones, and they have mysterious reasons for holding fast to their own social prejudices. America will learn this for herself in good time, though she has not the Latin heritage from which it takes the longest to shake free.

Latin civilizations are like the beautiful "French gardens," somewhat artificial in their architectural symmetry. Disorder does not become them. Compared to them the wilderness offers the irresistible charm of unmastered forces, of nature run wild. But, no matter what means one might take to force it, the Park of Versailles could never again become a wilderness.

Unless it is to be once for all destroyed, it is our duty to preserve its regular lines, its classsic colonades.

BRANDER MATTHEWS

PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

T

I.

HE law of the theatre, as M. Brunetière has formulated it, is that the drama must deal with an exercise of the human will,

and that, therefore, a struggle of some sort is an essential element in the pleasure we take in a play. A clear understanding of this law is helpful in any question of classification; for example, in the difficult attempt sharply to set off tragedy from melodrama, and comedy from farce. If the obstacle against which the will of the hero finally breaks itself is absolutely insurmountable, the Greek idea of fate, for example, the Christian decree of Providence, or the modern scientific doctrine of heredity, then we have tragedy pure and simple. If the obstacle is not absolutely insurmountable, being no more than the social law, something of man's own making, and, therefore, not finally inexorable, then we have the serious drama. If the obstacle is only the desire of another human being, then the result of the contention of these two characters is likely to give us a comedy. And if the obstacle is merely one of the minor conventions of society then we may have farce. But as there is no hard-and-fast line separating these several obstacles which the several heroes are struggling to overcome, so the different types of play may shade one into the other, until it is often difficult to declare the precise classification. Who shall say that the "Comedy of Errors" is not, in fact, essentially a farce? Or that the Elizabethan tragedy-ofblood is not essentially a melodrama?

Although the true dramatist cannot but conceive both the incidents of his play and its personages at the same moment, yet we are accustomed to consider tragedy and comedy nobler than melodrama and farce, because in the former the characters themselves seem to create the situations of the plot and to dominate its structure; whereas in the latter it is obvious rather that the situations have evoked the characters and that these are realized only in so far as the conduct of the story may cause them to reveal the characteristics thus called for. Comedy, then, appears to us as a humorous piece, the action of which is caused by the clash of character on character; and this is a definition which fits the "Misanthrope," the "Marriage of Figaro," the "School for Scandal,” and the "Gendre de M. Poirier." In all these comedies the plot, the

Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

action, the story, is the direct result of the influence of the several characters one on the other.

A consideration of the history of dramatic literature will show that comedy of this standard is very infrequent indeed, since the humorous piece is always tending either to stiffen into drama, as in "Froufrou," for example, or to relax into farce, as in the "Rivals." And satisfactory as the definition is on the whole, and useful as it is in aiding us to perceive clearly the true limitations of comedy, we must not insist upon applying it too severely or we shall find that we have erased from the list of the writers of comedy, the names of two of the greatest masters of stage-humor, Shakspere and Aristophanes, from neither of whom have we a single comic play the action of which is caused solely by the clash of character on character. The delightful fantasies of Shakspere fall into another class, which we may term romantic-comedy and in which we find the comic plot sustained and set off by a serious plot only artificially adjoined to it. The imaginative exuberance of Aristophanes displayed itself not in any form fairly to be called comedy but rather in what may be described as lyrical-burlesque.

II.

Three of the most important phases of Greek tragedy are preserved for us in the extant dramas of Æschylus, of Sophocles, and of Euripides. Other tragic writers there were whose works are now lost forever; but these three were ever held to be the foremost and we are fortunate in having the finest of their plays. Three phases there were also in Greek comedy although less clearly distinguished; and here we have not been so lucky. To represent an early stage of its evolution, we have half a score of the lyrical-burlesques of Aristophanes, but only a single play of his survives even to suggest to us the kind of comic drama which was acceptable in a second period when other humorous playwrights rivaled him. The third epoch, illustrated by the noble name of Menander, can be but guessed at, since we have not the complete manuscript of even a single play. And yet an attempt to trace in outline the development of the Greek comic drama is not an altogether impossible task, despite our deficiency in illustrative examples.

Comedy seems to have sprung into being at the vintage festival of the Greek villagers, when all was jovial gaiety and jesting license in honor of Dionysus. "On public occasions," so a recent historian of the origin of art has reminded us, "the common mood, whether of joy or sorrow, is often communicated even to those who were originally

possessed by the opposite feeling; and so powerful is infection of excitement that a sober man will join in the antics of his drunken comradesyielding to a drunkenness by induction." And these seasons of contagious revelry were exactly suited to a development of the double desire of mankind for personation,—one man seeking to get outside of his own individuality, and to assume a character not his own, while another finds his satisfaction rather in the observation of this simulation, in being a sympathetic spectator when actions are represented not proper to the actor's own character.

So it came to pass that there were companies of young fellows, often disguised grossly as beasts or birds, who broke out into riotous phallic dances, enjoyed equally by those who looked on and by those who took part. In time the dancers grouped themselves in rival bands, the leaders of which indulged in a give-and-take of banter and repartee, certainly vulgar and personal and probably as direct and artless as the chop-logic dialogues of the medieval quack-doctor and his jack-pudding, or of the modern ringmaster and circus-clown. The happy improvisations of this carnival spirit which happened to delight the crowd one year would surely be repeated the next year deliberately, perhaps only to evoke an unexpected retort with which it would thereafter be conjoined in what might prove to be the nucleus of a comic scene of some length. Thus a form would tend to crystalize, as the tradition was handed down from season to season, enriching itself constantly with the accretions of every venturesome jester. However frail this framework might be, it would be likely to contain a rough realization of the more obvious types of rural character; and almost from the beginning there would be abundant and irreverent parody of heroic legend and of religious myth. Then in time this incobate medley of ribald song and phallic dance and abusive repartee would come to feel the influence of the other dramatic form, the origin of which was quite as humble-it would come to feel the influence of tragedy as this had been organized at last with its chorus and its three actors. Indeed, the same native instinct which led the Greeks to regulate tragedy and to attach it to a festival of the state, would suggest sooner or later that comedy should also be adopted by the city. And this is what happened in time; although Greek comedy when taken over by the authorities was apparently far less advanced and far more archaic than Greek tragedy had been when first officially regulated. In the earlier dramatic poems of Eschylus we can see tragedy not yet developed out of the dithyramb and struggling to find its own form; and so in the earlier comedies of Aristophanes we can see not only a primitive but a very peculiar stage of the evolution of the comic drama.