Bataille de dames | Page 2

in his hands. No dramatist, hardly any
writer of our time, has accumulated such wealth. His annual income
from copyrights 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 théâtre 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 naïveté, 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