Francisque Sarcey (1827–1899) was a graduate of the Ecole Normale, having as classmates, Taine, Edmont About and Prévost-Paradol. In his ‘Souvenirs de Jeunesse’ (1844), of which there is a translation in English, he has left an amusing account of his student years. Upon his graduation he was duly appointed as a professor of French literature in one of the smaller cities of France. Those were the most dismal and depressing days of the Second Empire; and Sarcey’s frankness in expressing his liberal opinions rendered it certain that he could not hope for promotion. In 1858 Edmond About persuaded him to drop teaching for journalism,—just as Jules Lemaitre was to do a quarter of a century later.
At first Sarcey was a journalistic free lance, writing in all the periodicals, daily or weekly, which he could persuade to accept his articles and writing on all sorts of subjects, literary and linguistic, social and political. It was only after several years of this miscellaneous newspaper hackwork, that he began to specialize as a theatrical reviewer; and he attracted little attention until 1867 when he was appointed dramatic critic of the Temps, then as now the most reputable and the most dignified of Parisian dailies. Thereafter for forty-two years he contributed to the Temps every Sunday afternoon a dramatic criticism, which came speedily to possess an indisputable authority.
In 1878 he began a series of studies of the actors and actresses of the Comédie-Française and of the other important theaters of Paris,—‘Comédiens et Comédiennes.’ He continued to contribute to various newspapers articles on topics of contemporary interest, social and political. He became a frequent lecturer; and in his ‘Souvenirs d’Age Mur’ (1892), also translated into English, he analized with his characteristic acuteness the principles of public speaking. He refused regretfully an invitation to become a member of the French Academy, fearing that he would not be free to express his opinions frankly and fully. He declined also the cross of the Legion of Honor; and he declared that all he wanted upon his tombstone was the record that he had been both “Professor and Journalist.”
At the beginning of the first volume of ‘Quarante Ans de Théâtre,’ the editor printed a selection from the many warmly appreciative articles which appeared in the French press immediately after Sarcey’s death in 1899. Noteworthy among these were the tributes of Jules Claretie, Jules Lemaitre and Emile Faguet. Jules Lemaitre had earlier publisht in the second volume of his ‘Contemporains’ a characteristically clever study of Sarcey. The article by Henry James, (to which reference is made in the Introduction) is entitled the ‘Théâtre Français’; and it is included in his volume on ‘French Poets and Novelists’ (1878).
The essential point of Sarcey’s attempt to formulate a theory of the theater is that all the laws of the drama are the result of the fact that every play is intended to be performed before an audience, and that therefore the desires, the opinions, and the prejudices of the spectators must always be taken into account. No one has declared this undeniable truth so completely as Sarcey. Yet other French critics have set forth similar views. In his lectures on the ‘Epochs of the French Theater’ Ferdinand Brunetière pointed out that altho men of letters in France between 1550 and 1600 were trying to write plays, there were then no professional actors, no regular theater, and therefore no public before which plays could be performed:—“Now a play does not begin to exist as a play except before the footlights, by virtue of the collaboration and of the complicity of the public, without which a play never has been, and never can be, anything more than a mere literary exercise.”
In Jules Lemaitre’s ‘Corneille et la Poétique d’Aristote’ there is an account of the vain struggles of Corneille against the rigors of the classicist code which the Italian critics had elaborated from their misreading of Aristotle; and Lemaitre quoted Corneille’s plea for permission to employ a neutral ground, not specifically anywhere, in which all the characters of a tragedy might be supposed to meet. Corneille defined this as a “theatrical fiction,” akin to the legal fictions accepted by lawyers; and Lemaitre commented that the theatrical fictions which Corneille askt the privilege of using are simply what we now know as the conventions of the drama:—
“If the characters of tragedy speak in verse,—that is a convention. If they meet every time they have something to say to one another,—that is a convention. If they talk aloud when they are alone,—that is a convention. If the poet develops under our eyes a single action, altho there are are none in real life not tangled up with a host of others,—that is a convention. He who seeks to abolish conventions can only change them. The alleged Rules of the unity of Time and the unity of Place had for their purpose, as Corneille admits, to suppress certain conventions, which were, however, easily acceptable; and then, to obey these Rules, Corneille invents conventions of his own, far less simple and far more difficult to accept,” (pp. 67–68).
In the preface to his ‘Etrangère,’ the younger Dumas with his customary incisiveness lends his support to Sarcey, altho without mentioning him:—“In all the arts there is a share, larger or smaller but indispensable, which must be left to convention. Sculpture lacks color; painting lacks relief; and they are rarely, either the one or the other, of the dimensions of the object they represent. The more richly you bestow on a statue the colors of life. . . . Nature is the basis, the means of art, it is not the aim of art. . . . Whether he wields the mallet, the pen or the brush, the artist really merits the name only when he can give a soul to the things of matter and a form to the things of the soul, when, in a word, he idealizes the real he sees and realizes the ideal he feels.”
B. M.
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