LE PHILOSOPHE SANS LE SAVOIR Comédie en cinq actes, en prose Représentée pour la première fois à la Comédie-Française le 2 décembre 1765 SEDAINE The life of Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719-1797) was quiet and uneventful. He was born in Paris July 4, 1719. His father, who was an architect, died early, leaving Michel-Jean to provide for the family. The youth, with an admirable sense of duty, abandoned his schooling and went to work to learn the stone-cutter's trade. In his leisure moments he read what he could and was largely self-educated. This fact accounts in some degree perhaps on for the original and personal character of his work. Eventually he came into the employ of Buron, the architect. Noticing his literary inclinations, Buron introduced him to several men of letters, gained him a protector, and thus put him out of financial need. Sedaine's literary activities began modestly with the composition of songs and short poems. These he collected and published in 1752. The success of this volume led him to take up the writing of comic operas and vaudevilles. In 1756 he produced his first work of this character, the comic opera le Diable à quatre. The composition of pièces mêlées de musique and of the librettos of comic operas became his life-work, and aside from one domestic comedy, le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765), and a one-act comedy, la Gageure imprévue (1768), all of his dramatic efforts were in this field. Comic operas enjoyed an immense vogue in France in the second half of the eighteenth century; Sedaine was fortunate in having some of the best composers of the day supply his musical scores, and much of the success of his comio operas is undoubtedly due to this fact. He became a member of the Academy in 1786. The later years of his life were spent quietly at Saint-Prix, near Paris. His old age was not free from troubles and disappointments. The Revolution ruined him financially. He was omitted from membership in the Institute when it was created in 1795 to replace the academies. This was a deep injustice to a man of distinction who had always lived an honorable and upright life and who enjoyed the highest esteem. He died in Paris, May 17, 1797. Sedaine has given an account of how he came to write the Philosophe sans le savoir. "En 1760, m'étant trouvé à la première représentation des Philosophes [Palissot's play], (mauvais et méchant ouvrage en trois actes), je fus indigné de la manière dont étaient traités d'honnêtes hommes de lettres que je ne connaissais que par leurs écrits. Pour réconcilier le public avec l'idée du mot philosophe, que cette satire pouvait dégrader, je composai Le Philosophe sans le savoir" (Quelques réflexions sur l'opéra comique). A little domestic episode of which he had heard gave him the idea for the plot. All the rest is of his own invention. When it came to performing the play, Sedaine encountered stern opposition on the part of the censor. The alleged objection was against. permitting a father to send his son to a duel. Sedaine defended his play stubbornly, but finally had to yield and change the objectionable scenes before the play was performed at the Comédie-Française on December 2, 1765. It had an immense popular success and numerous performances, The author was permitted in the second printed edition of 1766 to include the censored passages in the appendix. It was the censored version which was employed in all printed editions and in all performances until the revival of the play on September 17, 1875, when the original text was restored to use. Critics have been almost unanimous in pointing out the weakness in style. of the play, and George Sand's statement that its merit is "dans son individualité, non dans sa forme" (preface to le Mariage de Victorine) is largely true. In spite of its failings in the matter of form, it is a highly original work, and emphasis should be placed upon the original features of the play. Sedaine, mainly as a result of the character of his education, was not imbued with the traditional respect for the conventional practices of the theatre, which his predecessors had been unable to shake off. Furthermore, he had an unusual sense of the theatrical. He wrote for the stage rather than for the reading public. He took as his guide the theories of Diderot. He had the same aim as the latter, namely, to present a moral lesson through the imitation of nature, With the ability of a real dramatist he was able to interpret and illustrate these theories in a great play. He saw Diderot's weakness in insisting upon the serious alone; and he created a much greater impression of reality, of lifelikeness, through a combination of the serious and the comic. He too gives us a père de famille, but as a great dramatist would present such a character in interpreting the theories of domestic comedy. In what does the originality of the Philosophe sans le savoir consist? Principally in the impression of reality created through a set of very natural characters who speak and act like ordinary human beings. Even the secondary figures stand out as individuals. Never before on the eighteenth-century French stage had such a sympathetic group of persons appeared. We are shown a picture of family life in which all the members love and respect each other. The plot does not develop out of the vice or virtue in a single character; rather they all contribute to the presentation of a social problem. It is to be noted that the milieu is still essentially aristocratic. Drama had become domestic, but it had to wait a few years before becoming really bourgeois. Vanderk the father, who dominates the play, is a minutely-drawn and thoroughly consistent figure. This kindly, considerate old man is a real philosophe expressing the opinions of his century. He is the outstanding example of the négociant, a type frequently employed in earlier comedy. Jourdain and Turcaret are his dramatie ancestors. His son is the son of a philosophe, honorable, upright, and clean-living. He comes along in the line of descent from Molière's Alceste. Victorine with her delicate and ingenuous love is a charming and subtlydrawn personage who strikes a new note in comedy. Never had such a complete, convincing, and attractive picture of the ingenuous girl been portrayed in French comedy, from the time that Molière typified her in his Agnès. Antoine is a development out of the rôle of Scapin, the wily servant in older comedy. He and the Marquise furnish the comic element in the play. The servants are no longer the traditional valets and soubrettes, who had gone by the board with Diderot. All of these characters express themselves in refreshingly natural language. We look in vain for the declamatory tirades of the Diderotype. The scenes of the play are skilfully handled, and even the seemingly episodic ones have their ultimate purpose. Sedaine leaves no loose |