England. He informs us also that it was founded on a fact then recent and well known; and another author✶ assures us, that the same stratagem was very lately employed. We no longer wonder that the Newgate Calendars of both countries should be so out of proportion to their respective morality, since the crimes which, in England, would inevitably lead their perpetrators to the gallows, in France bring them only on the stage. What with us excites horror, is there admired as the master-piece of comic mirth; and felony is punished by ridicule.

Regnard is considered as the second comic author of France. Qui ne se plaît pas avec Regnard (says Voltaire) n'est pas digne d'admirer Molière.' In wit, however, and in philosophy, though we have already expressed our opinion of Molière's philosophy, he is much inferior. Indeed the comic writers of France have not taken a wider view of their art, than her tragic writers have taken of theirs. Both, by a predilection for artifice, have narrowed the legitimate extent of the drama, and imagined a nature peculiar to the stage, that is to say, a nature curtailed of all that is genuine. We lately said, that tragedy seemed to be a conception too vast for the minds of French poets and critics; we may now say the same thing of comedy, we mean of fair large comedy, which paints men as they really are in life, not as abstract genera and species, but as individuals endowed with all the humours and propensities which distinguish one mind from every other mind. This defect proceeds from their imperfect ideas of character, and the little scope allowed to the human heart, in the constitution of French society, to range unsophisticated, and follow its own native impulses, unappalled by the terrors of ridicule and the tyranny of fashion.

There is, however, one kind of comic painting in which the French, for truth and neatness of execution, surpass all the nations that have attempted any thing analogous; and that is, the portrai ture of French society, such as it exists in almost every class from the highest to the lowest; and of all the little nothings which compose the daily intercourse of persons who place in that intercourse the chief pleasures of life. As an example of what we mean, we will mention Le Cercle, ou la Soirée à la mode' by Poinsinet, of credulous memory.† The Cercle represents a lady, Araminte, who is at home in the evening, and to whom a number

See Annales Dramatiques, 1812.

+ Poinsinet was persuaded by his friends that the King of France, struck with his merit, had created a place in his household on purpose for him, and that was, the place of fire-skreen, to stand between his Majesty and the chimney; but that he must be able to support great heat; which the poor poet tried to accustom himself to every day, till his legs were covered with blisters. FF 4

of

of visitors pay their court; an homme de robe, a baron, an old militaire, a marquis (which title, by the by, is generic on the French stage for a coxcomb), a poet, an abbé, her physician, and two petites-maîtresses. It contains, in fact, no plot or story, but represents exactly what its title announces.-The personages act and speak perfectly in character. The baron is open and sincere, and does not conceal from Araminte her little foibles. The poet comes, by appointment, to read his tragedy to the ladies, who, upon his drawing his manuscript from his pocket, call for a cardtable. The two petites-maîtresses are intimate friends of Araminte, and consequently lose no opportunity of turning her into ridicule. The abbé is an admirable picture of the abbé petitmaître; fluttering about from toilette to toilette, and who, as he says of himself, sans devenir la terreur des maris, fait quelquefois les délices des dames.' When entreated to sing, he refuses; when neglected, he takes up his guitar, as it were par distraction, and hums a song; when applauded for it, he asks est-ce que j'ai chanté? The physician was copied from the fashionable Esculapius of his time: he enters into all the particulars of the health of the ladies, their vapeurs, their nerfs qui se crispent, and talks a little nastiness too. But the real hero of the soirée is the Marquis. He embroiders a chair for Araminte; a falbala for Ismene, and carries a work-bag in his pocket containing garters for Lise, and knots for Chloe. He is desirous of marrying the daughter of Araminte; but being informed that a lady to whom he had paid his addresses, but who had taken a strange folly in her headthat of marrying him—had inherited a large fortune, he abruptly quits the house to return to her. Araminte's maid enters to announce that her canary bird had escaped, upon which melancholy event the company separates; and Araminte, learning the departure of the marquis, gives her daughter to Lisidor, who long had loved her. This little piece, in one act, is perfect in its style; its chief merit, however, turns upon the representation of society such as it once existed (1764) in the salons of Paris; and without some knowledge of what that was it cannot be justly ap preciated. Another comedy, belonging to the same class, and of almost equal merit, is the Gageure Imprévue, by Sedaine (1768), once performed in this country under the title of Lock and Key; but the state of society in England did not allow it to be fully judged. There are also many comic operas, representing light traits and incidents of society, independently of the music, which are admirable. Such is La Maison à vendre, Joconde, and many of an older date; and many of the short pieces performed upon the minor theatres, as the Somnambule, La Visite à Bedlam, Le ci-devant jeune Homme; in a word, all the

plays,

plays, in which some short story, some anecdote, some whim of society, or folly of the day, is pictured.

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The praise which we bestow upon such theatres as the Variétés, the Vaudevilles, and the Gymnase, will stamp us at once as barbarians in the opinion of the French, and confirm the idea which they have, or affect to have, of English taste in general. But we cannot help it; we are not very anxious about their opinion; but we would willingly be understood by our own countrymen. We do not mean to say that the conceptions of such plays as are performed there are, in any respect, so great as those of the Coquette Corrigée, for instance, and those which in general occupy the Théâtre Français. But so many defects concur to lower our estimation of the great comedy of France, that we do not hesitate to place it, as a whole, infinitely below the little comedywe do not mean the farce-of the same country. In the first place, even while we allow the conceptions of the former to be greater, we cannot avoid saying that they are woefully inferior to that which they would copy, man and nature; and the distance which separates the imitation from the original is so immense, that a painful wearisomeness generally accompanies us during their representation. In the little comedies the object, it is true, is not so ambitious; but the copy approaches so near to the prototype, which is itself so weli calculated for representation on the stage, that we know of nothing which can be compared to it, of its own scale and dimensions, in the dramatic art. Secondly, the execution of those little comedies, though we are far from comparing their authors with the poets of high comedy, is generally so exquisite that nothing remains to be desired, and the pleasure they bestow is without alloy. The execution of the best comedies, on the large scale, is, in our minds, inferior to the subject; and while we admire the wit, the comic force, the mirth of *Molière, we feel that something is wanting; and still more do we feel the deficiencies of every other French author of the same class. And, thirdly, something must be allowed to the perfection of the representation. The actors of the French stage seem to follow the same ratio as the plays, and this may naturally be expected. The performers in the great comedy are not so excellent as those in the smaller pieces. Their conceptions may be greater, but they are more inadequate; and their execution, as a whole, cannot be compared with the execution of the little comedy, which comes as near to perfection as any little thing we remember to have seen. There is in the French minds an attachment to minutiæ which precludes great thoughts, and all their greatness is squandered upon trifles. The same spirit pervades their drama, As they admit no such thing as small tragedy, they have remained unsuccessful

unsuccessful in the walk; but as comedy is susceptible of various proportious, they have indemnified themselves in executing the light traits of society for their inability to paint the more deep seated, the grander, and the more diversified humours of individuals. The light comedy, of which we have been speaking, is the true national comedy of France; and if the French were wise, they would fling away the disastrous ambition of attempting any other. We must regret, however, that indecency, and the too natural expression of sensual love, sometimes renders those exhibited upon the minor theatres quite inapproachable to modest

ears.

The style of dramatic painting which we have just now been praising on the French stage is wholly inapplicable to the state of society in England, and would not even be tolerated. We require larger traits, and more comprehensive views, even in our amusements, and our pastimes must partake of something serious and instructive. Whenever we pass those boundaries we run into caricature, and farce becomes our province. But even there we require individual humours, with strong delineation and diversity of character. French farce is mere caricature, without these, and sinks into buffoonery. Certainly, though we feel but ill-disposed toward O'Keefe for having lowered the tone of English comedy, and given rise to the modern productions of farces in five acts, we must say that there is not an author in France who understood that province half so well, and cultivated it with so much success, as he did. If the English know nothing between great comedy and farce, the French know nothing between little comedy and buffoonery. The only advantage which any foreign stage we are acquainted with, ever derived from the introduction of any thing French, is the adoption of the little French comedy in Germany. Many of the small pieces have been translated and performed with considerable success, and have served as models for original compositions of the same kind. The state of manners in Germany is such that, though this species of comedy might not have arisen there as an original production, it may very well be introduced and relished. An affectation of French habits, too commonly engrafted in some parts of Germany upon a national character very much the reverse of the French, may help to make it current where it otherwise would not have gained footing. It is remarkable that the national character of the Germans much more resembles that of the English than of the French; but their habits and manners are more an imitation of the latter; and wherever these have become predominant, German frankness and sincerity have retrograded.

At the present moment an incipient desire of change, vague indeed,

indeed, as most things in their beginning are, yet strongly pronounced, seems to reign among a certain portion of the literati of France, and the theatre has given expression to that wish. A new edition of a French Shakspeare, the basis of which is Le Tourneur's translation, is now appearing, and in it the mistakes of the former translation are said to be corrected. The prospectus to this publication contains opinions new in France, and which must displease the partizans of the present literature of the country.

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'The name of Shakspeare,' it is said, begins to be naturalized in France, and soon, like that of Raphael, it will be held by us, not only as the glory of a foreign nation, but as the honour of a school become European. The tendency of the age is toward that literature which is, improperly, called Romantic; the object of which is to be national, and to paint for every people the recollections of its infancy' (a very inadequate idea, in our minds, of what romantic poetry is.) 'A taste for this species of literature became prevalent in France at a later period than in other countries, because, possessing a literature of another nature, less original perhaps, but full of brilliancy and glory, we protected it with jealous pride against every rival. But those ancient monuments, however admired and studied, are not sufficient for the gress of a nation ambitious of maintaining the glory of its ancestors, and compelled to draw from more abundant and diversified sources the materials of a literature worthy of being ascribed to its new destinies.'This, indeed, is unusual language in French criticism. It is from the country of Shakspeare that this new impulse, to which we are disposed to yield, was communicated to us. The works of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott have spread the taste for romantic literature in France; but its true character must be sought for in Shakspeare himself. Shakspeare is not merely the painter of the times improperly called Romantic, he is the man of the period which he painted, and presents us not with traditionary recollections, but reflects the times themselves entirely in his poetry, always original. His rudeness is not a garb assumed by his personages, but the forms in which many sentiments were then expressed. His quaintness is the spirit of his age, sharpened by theological controversies. His simplicity is the simplicity of nature, and of truth, in every time and country; but as he penetrated into every condition of man and of society, nature and truth appeared to him as they were in the period near to his own; and he was historical as well as poetical, and, above all, instructive.'

We make no apology for this long extract, as it must interest an English reader to learn the opinion of the literary revolutionists of France concerning our great bard, and the chance there is that he may one day be appreciated in a country where, for want of large views, he so long and so invidiously has been styled a barbarian. Should this revolution succeed, it will be curious to see this island still the model of France-still copied, envied and admired—and still defamed. It is M. de la Martine,