The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 29, March, 1860. Various
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earnest developments of the soul, children. A new artificial lake in the Bois de Boulogne, a grand military reception, news of a victory in some distant corner of the globe, the distribution of eagles to brave survivors,—in a word, an appeal to the love of amusement, of display, and of glory,—quiets the murmur about to rise against interference with human rights or usurpation of the national will. Political interests of the gravest character are treated with flippancy: one writer calls the formation of a new government Talleyrand's table of whist; and another casually observes that "tous les gouvernements nouveaux ont leur lune de miel."
That great principle of the division of labor, which the English carry into mechanical and commercial affairs, the French also apply to the economy of life and to Art; but, as these latter interests are more spontaneous and unlimited, the result is often a perfection in detail, and a like deficiency in general effect. Thus, there are schools of painting in France more distinct and apart than exist elsewhere; usually the followers of such are distinguished for excellence in the mechanical aptitudes of their vocation; the figure is admirably drawn, the costume rightly disposed, and sometimes the degree of finish quite marvellous; but, usually, this superiority is attained at the expense of the sentiment of the picture. French historic Art, like French life, is apt to be extravagant and melodramatic, or over-refined in unimportant particulars; it often lacks moral harmony,—the grand, simple, true reflection of Nature in its nicety. Delaroche, who, of all French painters, rose most above the adventitious, and gave himself to the soul of Art, to pure expression, was, for this very reason, thought by his brother artists to be cold and unattractive. There is one sphere, however, where this exclusiveness of style and partition of labor are productive of the most felicitous results: namely, the minor drama. In England and America the same theatre exhibits opera, melodrama, tragedy, comedy, rope-dancing, and legerdemain; but in Paris, each branch and element of histrionic art has its separate temple, its special corps of actors and authors, nay, its particular class of subjects; hence their unrivalled perfection. Ingenuity, science, and Art are concentrated by thus assigning free and individual scope to the dramatic niceties and phases of life, of history, of genius, and of society. At the Opera Comique you find one kind of musical creation; at the Italiens the lyrical drama of Southern Europe alone; at the Variétés a unique order of comic dialogue; and at the Porte St. Martin yet another species of play. One theatre gives back the identical tone of existing society and current events; another deals with the classical ideas of the past. Satire and song, the horrible and the brilliant, the graceful and the highly artistic, pictorial, elocutionary, pantomimic, tragic, vocal, statuesque, the past and present, all the elements of Art and of life, find representation in the plot, the language, the sentiment, the costume, the music, and the scenery of the many Parisian theatres.
Yet how much of this superiority is fugitive! how little in the whole dramatic development takes permanent hold upon popular sympathy! Much of its significance is purely local, and of its interest altogether temporary. Scholars and the higher classes can talk eloquently of Corneille and Racine; the beaux and spirituelle women of the day can repeat and enjoy the last hit of Scribe, or the new bon-mot of the theatre: but contrast these results with the national love and appreciation of Shakspeare,—with the permanent reflection of Spanish life in Lope de Vega,—the patriotic aspirations which the young Italian broods over in the tragedies of Alfieri. The grace of movement, the triumph of tact and ingenuity, the devotion to conventionalism, either pedantry or the genius of the hour, also rules the drama in Paris. With all its brilliancy, entertainment, grace, wit, and popularity,—there exists not a permanently vital and universally recognized type of this greatest department of literature, familiar and endeared alike to peasant and peer, a representative of humanity for all time,—like the bard around whose name and words cluster the Anglo-Saxon hearts and intelligence from generation to generation.
But nowhere do life and the drama so trench upon each other; nowhere is every incident of experience so dramatic. Miss H.M. Williams told the poet Rogers that she had seen "men and women, waiting for admission at the door of the theatre, suddenly leave their station, on the passing of a set of wretches going to be guillotined, and then, having ascertained that none of their relations or friends were among them, very unconcernedly return to the door of the theatre." A child is born at the Opera Comique during the performance, and it is instantly made an event of sympathy and effect by the audience; a subscription is raised, the child named for the dramatic heroine of the moment, and the fortunate mother sent home in a carriage, amid the plaudits of the crowd. You are listening to a play; and a copy of the "Entr'acte" is thrust into your hand, containing a minute account of the death of a statesman two squares off whose name fills pages of history, or a battle in the East, where some officer whom you met two months before on the Boulevard has won immortal fame by prodigies of valor. So do the actualities and the pastimes, the real and the imaginary drama, miraculously interfuse at Paris; the comedy of life is patent there, and often the spectator exclaims, "Arlequin avait bien arrangé les choses, mais Colombine dérange tout!"
The Parisian females are "unexceptionably shod,"—but the agricultural instruments now in use in the rural districts of France are of a form and mechanism which, to a Yankee farmer, would seem antediluvian; the cooks, gardeners, and other working-people, have annually the most graceful festivals,—but the traveller sees in the fields women so bronzed and wrinkled by toil and exposure that their sex is hardly to be recognized. When the Gothamite passes along Pearl or Broad Street, he beholds the daily spectacle of unemployed carmen reading newspapers;—there may be said to be no such thing as popular literature in France; mental recreation, such as the German and Scotch peasantry enjoy, is unknown there. The Art and letters of the kingdom flourished in her court and were cultivated as an aristocratic element for so long a period, that neither has become domesticated among the lower classes; we find in them the sentiment of military glory, of religion in its superstitious phase, of music perhaps, of rustic festivity,—but not the enjoyments which spring from or are associated with thought and poetic sympathies such as national writers like Burns inspired. An exception comparatively recent may be found in the popular appreciation of Béranger and Souvestre.
There is not a natural object too beautiful or an occasion too solemn to arrest the French tendency to the theatrical. Even one of their most ardent eulogists remarks,—"All that can be said against the French sublime is this,—that the grandeur is more in the word than in the thing; the French expression professes more than it performs"; and old Montaigne declares that "lying is not a vice among the French, but a way of speaking." Both observations admit too much; and indicate an habitual departure from Nature and simplicity as a national trait. Who but Frenchmen ever delighted in reducing to artificial shapes the graceful forms of vegetable life, or can so far lay aside the sentiment of grief as to engage in rhetorical panegyrics over the fresh graves of departed friends? Compare the high dead wall with its range of flower-pots, the porches undecked by woodbines or jessamine, the formal paths, the proximate kitchen, stables, and ungarnished salon of a French villa, with the hedges, meadows, woodlands, and trellised eglantine of an English country-house; and a glance assures us that to the former nation the country is a dernier ressort, and not an endeared seclusion. Yet they romance, in their way, on rural subjects: "À la campagne," says one of their poets, "où chaque feuille qui tombe est une élégie toute faite." Through an avenue of scraggy poplars we approach a dilapidated château, whose owner is playing dominoes at the café of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature and inaptitude for rural life in France, that, when we desire to express the opposite of natural tastes, we habitually use the word "Frenchified." The idea which a Parisian has of a tree is that of a convenient appendage to a lamp. The traveller never sees artificial light reflected from green leaves, without thinking of his evening promenades in the French capital, or a dance in the groves of Montmorency. The old verbal tyranny of the French Academy, the painted wreaths sold at cemetery-gates, the colored plates of fashions, powdered hair, and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and insensibility to her unadulterated charms, which constitute the real barrier between the Gallic mind and that of England and Italy,