THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH COMEDY. 1% and to hold the mirror up to nature. Moreover, the strong romantic tendency (in the proper sense) of the time, that is to say, the desire to illustrate great passions and strong situa- tions, was not favourable to comedy. The earliest effort of the great literary movement of 1830 directed itself, as far as the theatre was concerned, into tragedy or else drame, that is to say, in the older phrase, tragi-comedy. By degrees, however, a new and remarkable development of the comic theatre, showing the most distinct traces of the naturalism which was at the root of the romantic revolt, made itself apparent. The fault of the eighteenth-century comedy, and of all French comedy speaking generally, from Regnard to Andrieux, was its failure except in a few cases to mark sharply the changes of manners and of life. The heroes and heroines of the end of the eighteenth century are somehow or other identical in general characteristics with the heroes and heroines of the end of the seventeenth : in other words, what was nature in the earlier becomes convention in the later. The men of 1830 quickly changed this. For conventional personages and manners, often amusingly enough handled, but very difficult to put into definite chronological circum- stances, they once more substituted copies from the life. It so happened that only one of the greatest men of the original ’generation of 1 830’ produced properly comic work of great merit, but this was work of very great merit indeed. The comedies, and still more the Proverbes, of Alfred de Musset are in some respects the most original things of their kind since the time of Moliere. They restored to comedy the poetical element which had long been lacking to it in French, which had indeed in that language never been prominent in it. In the Proverbes especially — short pieces in which some proverbial maxim is exemplified and worked out by a dramatic application — a wonderful liveliness of touch and delicacy of dramatic fancy is apparent. Those who judge all things from the technical point of view of the playwright or the actor sometimes affect to disparage these dainty plays in miniature, just as other persons of the same stamp sometimes tell us in England that Shakespeare did not really write good plays, but only yood literature. But the public, though rather
