Even the language had its own style,
outside which nothing was appropriate. All this was classicism in its
most degenerate form, an art from which original inspiration was
banished to the profit of a much inferior species of skill. Be it
granted that the drama, more than any other kind of literature, is
liable to the encroachment and dominance of such artificiality on
account of its foreshortening in perspective. Be it granted, also,
that sometimes a new movement will intensify an old habit. The
Romanticists, though reformers in other respects, did little or
nothing to render the stage more real. Their lyricism, in front of the
footlights, needed buskins and frippery, or, at any rate, fostered
them, as the pieces of Hugo and de Vigny proved.
The younger Dumas, Emile Augier, Halevy and Becque--with a crescendo
that in the last of the four is somewhat harsh--diverged from the
traditional path, and in their plays put men and women whose motives
and conduct were nearer to the humanity of their audience. The
departure from old lines in these dramatists is patent; and, after
discounting the part that may have been temperamental or contingent on
some other cause, there remains the larger share to attribute to
Balzac's influence.
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