blasphemed. Yet if France cannot boast of a great na-
tional tragedy, she can offer something that no other
modern European literature can equal -- a long unbroken
line of masterpieces of national comedy. A pure Gallic
stream has pervaded French comedy from the fifteenth-
century Maître Pathelin to the contemporary farces of
Georges Courteline.

French literary critics, and too many foreign critics
taking their cue from the French, have been wont to pay
undue attention to schools. The rigidly logical mind of
the French has led them into the error of netting writ-
ers into fixed literary schools, as if they were so many
fish. Authors are often found pigeon-holed into groups in
most arbitrary fashion. Many shades of writers would be
much happier in their Elysian sojourn were their names
removed from this or that school. French dramatic litera-
ture of the nineteenth century suffers much from this
scholastic mania. It has been conveniently divided into
three parts, the romantic, the realist, and the naturalist
schools. Since the eruption of the symbolists, neo-roman-
ticists, psychologists, Freudians, dadaists, unanimists, and
expressionists, no critic has had the temerity to invent a
single all-embracing name. The most drastic pronounce-
ment has been that the drama of contemporary France,
being in a state of semi-decadence, is unworthy of a spe-
cial designation.

To squeeze such antipodal names as Musset and Scribe
into the romantic school, as do so many dramatic critics,
merely because they wrote when romanticism was in
flower, requires a deal of straight-jacketing. These two
playwrights can by no Procrustean method be made to
sleep in the same dramatic bed. As individuals, they ex-

-4-