Bataille de dames | Page 2

often reached $30,000, and he died worth nearly half a million. He might well take for his crest a pen and panpipes, and the motto "Inde fortuna et libertas" for he passed the latter years of his life in wealth and ease in the palatial country-seat of Sérincourt, over whose door he inscribed the characteristic lines:--
Le théatre a payé cet asile champêtre Vous qui passez, merci! Je vous le dois peut-être.
But as he had gained easily he spent liberally, and many stories tell of his ingenious and delicate generosity.
Scribe's popularity has become a tradition, and his works have proved a veritable bonanza to the dramatic magpies of every nation in Europe; but among the French critics of the past generation he has found a very grudging recognition. It was with a tone of aristocratic superiority that Villemain welcomed him to the French Academy with the words: "The secret of your dramatic prosperity is that you have happily seized the spirit of your age and produced the kind of comedy to which it best adapts itself, and which most resembles it." In the same tone Lanson says that Scribe "offers to the middle class exactly the pleasure and the ideal that it demands. It recognizes itself in his pieces, where nothing taxes the intellect." Dumas fils goes even further, and compares him to the sleight-of-hand performer with his trick-cups and thimble-rings, in whose performance one finds "neither an idea nor a reflection, nor an enthusiasm, nor a hope, nor a remorse, nor disgust, nor pleasure. One looked, listened, was puzzled, laughed, wept, passed the evening, was amused. That was much, but one learned nothing at all."
These critics, and others too, fail to find in Scribe more than an ingenious artisan, a purveyor to the public taste, and sometimes a panderer to it. He has indeed no trace of the lofty purpose that permeates the whole dramatic work of Dumas fils and Augier, and little careful study either of character or of manners. His style, too, though almost always light and lively, is often slovenly and incorrect. His mastery lies elsewhere, in his perfect command of the resources of the stage, which he managed as no dramatist before or since has done, except perhaps his spiritual child, Sardou, and also in his marvellously dexterous handling of intrigue. All this is admirably shown in "Bataille de dames;" but there is something more and better here, and that something is due to Legouvé, whose unaided talent sufficed to produce no work of enduring quality.
Ernest Legouvé was born in February, 1807, and died in 1903 as the doyen, or senior member, of the French Academy. Except for the plays that have been named, he owed his success less to his novels, dramas, or poems, than to his patriotic activity and to journalistic work, aided by most amiable social qualities, and a delicate, almost feminine psychological observation,[F] with which he inspired the lively but unspiritualized creations of Scribe. In the marriage of true minds that produced the "Bataille de dames" and those other plays, his was the feminine part. The working up of the dramatic conception, the contrast of political and social antagonisms, the "characters," if we may call them so, of Henri and Montrichard, the farcical caricature of De Grignon, these are all Scribe's, and they make up the skeleton, perhaps even the flesh and blood, of the comedy: but its spirit, its soul, lies in the delicate touches that give a sympathetic charm to the conquest of De Grignon's timidity by his love; it lies in the gracious magnanimity of the countess, who has read her niece's heart long before Léonie knows her own, who follows with a generous jealousy every phase of her passion, and yet guards her own loyalty to her niece in the true spirit of noblesse oblige, even while she sees that that loyalty is costing her own happiness. But most of all the soul of this little play is in that triumph of simple girlish na?veté, Léonie, so true, so artless, disarming all rivalry, and winning every spectator's heart, as she all but loses and then gains her lover's. These traits are Legouvé's. They are not qualities that will stand on the stage alone. They need the setting of Scribe's stage-craft, the facile ingenuity of his intrigue, to give them corporeal reality. Hence Legouvé's other dramas were unsuccessful, while the four in which he joined with Scribe are among the best of their generation. Each author gave to the common stock what the other lacked and needed. The one gave fertile invention, lively wit, and technical skill, the other gave delicacy, instinct, and charm. Each was the better for the other's partnership; and perhaps no child of their communion is more fascinating to gentle hearts, or will bear better