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From the time of the Revolution, the hand of the civil power began to fall more heavily on the Comédie-Française. Shortly before the Revolution, the company had taken possession, in 1782, of the new theatre, which had been built for it on the site where the Odéon now stands. Two years later it had triumphantly produced "Le Mariage de Figaro." In 1791, however, a law was passed abolishing its precious monopoly, and in 1793 the whole company was arrested for supposed reactionary tendencies, and thrown into prison, while its six most important members were condemned to death for betraying the Revolution. By the sympathetic procrastination of a secretary in the office of the Committee of Public Safety, who was also an enthusiastic playgoer, the execution of the sentence was delayed, until the coup d'état of the ninth Thermidor changed the face of the Revolution, and procured the release of the condemned actors and actresses.

After this one break in its continuous history, it was long before the Comédie fully recovered, although the imprisonment itself was only a matter of months. The company was divided against itself, for some of its members had joined the rival Théâtre de la République. The company had also lost its theatre and its subsidy. In 1799, however, its members reunited, and in 1800, Napoleon gave it once more a home and an annual grant. After fourteen years of renewed prosperity, during which Talma, who was not only a great tragedian, but the personal friend of the emperor, was its shining star, Napoleon granted to the ComédieFrançaise what is still its charter. This Decree of Moscow, as it is still called, was actually signed at the imperial headquarters in Russia in 1812, and its promulgation at that moment and from that place was evidently chosen to try and persuade the world that if at such a moment Napoleon could concern himself with the organization of a theatre in Paris, his victory in Russia could not be so barren as had been believed. It remains perhaps the only one of his acts during that ill-fated expedition which still carries weight in the world.

By the Decree of Moscow a representative of the central government was, for the first time, installed as an official in the theatre. He was called the Commissaire Impérial. The post was several times suppressed and several times restored. It was finally confirmed in 1850 by a decree of Napoleon III. The VOL. 246. NO. 501.

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official was then for the first time called the AdministratorGeneral, and was given more extended powers, some of them delegated from those already held by the government representative, and some of them taken from the committee. Those powers are what he holds to-day. He controls all monetary payments. He signs the contracts for purchases of material, which have been approved by the committee. He engages the Pensionnaires, subject to the cancellation of the engagements after two years by the committee. He distributes the parts in the plays, and chooses the repertoire. He can grant or refuse holidays—an important power. He engages the staff and controls all the internal administration of the theatre.

In 1850, when these powers were granted to Arsène Houssaye, they seemed to the Sociétaires to be almost what the establishment of a dictatorship would be in the political arena. Yet the powers of the Sociétaires in the choice of plays and in many other matters remained great, and tradition made them in practice greater still. That tradition would have made even the provisions of this decree impossible, if the whole balance of the Comédie-Française had not been upset by the passage of a star of the first magnitude. This star, Rachel, although she brought material prosperity and artistic fame alike to the Comédie, was by the nature of her genius so unsuitable to the organization of "la Maison " that she could not but make that organization unworkable. The ComédieFrançaise was in essence an artistic republic, and she was an empress. She was also an empress who had no desire to rule, but merely to triumph, and she was all the more disturbing as a practical factor. The only corrective was to set up against her a power as individual by its administrative attributes as was hers by her artistic personality. If Rachel had arisen at a time when the actors who composed the company had been even normally distinguished, the development of her career would have been to leave the Comédie when she became too big for it, as did Sarah Bernhardt, thirty years later. She was allowed to remain, to dominate and disunite it.

Since 1850 there has been no material change in the constitution of the Comédie-Française, though the decision of the Emperor in 1856 to remit for ever the rent of the theatre, which had often been remitted in practice, was an important event in its fortunes. Part of the place which it holds in the life of Paris

to-day has, however, been created in these later years. The Tuesday and Thursday subscription performances were instituted by Perrin after the war of 1870, and to them is due much of the modest bourgeois habit of going regularly to the Comédie, and especially of taking the children there as part of their education. The multiplication of other theatres, though it throws the period of the monopoly of the Comédie-Française back into the distant past, has made the National Theatre stand out as more definitely unique in spirit than it was, either when it was unique in fact, or, later, when it had only one or two rivals. The practice of adding to the repertory the most remarkable plays of living or recently deceased authors, although the plays may originally have been produced and have exhausted their initial popularity at other theatres, has also grown up since 1850, and, by making the modern repertory a sort of honours list of contemporary drama, has encouraged authors also to offer the best of their new plays for original production at the Français.

All this is far, indeed, from anything to which either Molière or Louis XIV can have looked forward. It has been a slow growth, and those who, at different dates, have contributed most to it, have generally done so from motives so remote from those of art, that they built not only better than they knew, but other than they designed. Napoleon was the first to recognize that the Comédie-Française "deserves support, for it is part of the national glory." It required the gradual rise, during the nineteenth century, of the tradition that all the arts are part of the national glory, to rally around the Comédie, not only the support of the State as one of the duties of government, but the support of the public as one of the duties of citizenship.

This tradition cannot be created all of one piece in a country which does not possess it. Until it is created, the establishment of a national theatre is not only bound to be an expensive matter in money, but it will be difficult to rally that support of actors, authors and public without which its life will not only be expensive but unreal. Without a theatre subsidised either from national resources, or from private munificence, the masterpieces of past dramatic literature will be forgotten. To save them from oblivion may be worth the price and the inevitably long struggle of creating such a theatre; but it is as well to realise what the price and the struggle are likely to be.

PHILIP CARR

CHINA

1926.

1. China, Land of Famine. By WALTER H. MALLORY. American
Geographical Society. Special publication No. 6.
The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. From the
Keyserling. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

2.

German of Count 1926.

3. New China. Report on Labour conditions, etc. Independent Labour Party Publication Department. 1926.

4. China, The Facts. By LT.-COLONEL P. T. ETHERTON.

Benn. 1927.

By WONG CHING-WAI. Martin Hopkinson

5.

China and The Nations.

& Co. 1927.

6.

7.

The Revolt of Asia. By UPTON CLOSE. Putnams. 1927.
China in Turmoil. By LOUIS MACGRATH KING. Heath Cranton.
China in Revolt. By T'ANG LEANG-LI. I.L.P. Publication Department.
1927.

1927.

8.

9.

The Chinese and Their Rebellions. By T. T. MEADOWS. Smith, Elder. 1856.

IN studying the nature and causes of the irreconcilable differences

between East and West and the tangled history of their generally hostile relations, one is frequently struck by a tendency to evanescence in the knowledge of the East which Europe has won from time to time in paths of peace or through ordeal by battle. It is a tendency of respectable antiquity. The East, to do it justice, has never concerned itself very seriously with the West or its affairs-to the Confucian scholars and philosophers of China's Golden Age (twelfth century) the habits and habitats of the outer barbarians were quite unworthy of attention. They were aware of the existence of countries from which Indian and Arab traders brought spices and precious stones, ivory and rare woods; but their knowledge of this outside world was secondhand and supercilious. Marco Polo and his father achieved, it is true, a certain degree of influence for themselves, and prestige for foreigners, at the Court of Kublai Khan, and from the European priests and traders who subsequently visited Cathay by way of the Indian Ocean, the Chinese acquired and recorded a fair amount of knowledge concerning Catholic Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries-but, being confined to a few scholars and Encyclopædists, and supplying no felt want, it was soon forgotten. That this should be so is not surprising, but there is something strange in the fact that in Europe the knowledge of Cathay, obtained by Marco Polo and increased by the

Catholic Missions and Italian traders of the fourteenth century, should have faded into complete oblivion, as it did towards the end of the Mongol dynasty. The China re-discovered by the Portuguese navigators of the sixteenth century was at first not recognised in Europe as Marco Polo's Cathay.

Coming to later days, the Chronicles of the East India Company* contain evidence, spread over a hundred and fifty years, of the tendency of those in authority at home to lose sight of the knowledge and experience derived by pioneer traders, mariners and missionaries from direct intercourse with the Chinese. When in 1792, Lord Macartney was sent as Special Envoy to the Court of Peking, bearing a letter and gifts from King George III to the venerable Emperor Ch'ien Lung, he addressed a letter to the Secretary of State outlining the proper method for conducting the proposed Embassy and the objects which it should pursue. In this letter, as in his dignified bearing and refusal to perform the kotow at the Chinese Court, Lord Macartney showed that he had studied to good purpose the record of Great Britain's trading activities in the Far East. His was a friendly mission, intended to impress upon the Chinese, from the outset, that "our views are purely commercial, having not even a wish for territory, that we neither desire fortification nor defence, but only the protection of the Chinese Government for our merchants or their agents." At the same time he realised that it was necessary in dealing with so haughty a Court, bolstered by Oriental arrogance, and ignorant of the power and importance of the nations of the West, to impress the Emperor and his ministers by a display of pomp and dignity." Therefore he requested that he might be sent out in a king's ship and provided with an escort of light infantry and of field pieces for parade purposes. The mission was essentially peaceful; nevertheless the Ambassador and his Secretary of Embassy, Sir George Staunton, were ever mindful of the imperative necessity of obtaining some alleviation of the intolerable exactions and humiliations imposed by the Mandarins on the British merchants at Canton. They shared the opinion of the East India Company's Select Committee that the position of foreigners is never improved, but made worse, by tame submission to indignity; they perceived

*Vide" Pioneer Days in China," EDINBURGH REVIEW, July, 1926.

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