cal evils were not his concern. Instinctively avoiding extremes of opinion and emotion, he always preserved a moderate attitude, conservative, yet inclining to the opposition when the government steered too close to reaction. Neither did he make any effort to solve the great social questions of his day; at most, he suggested occasionally that the way of the evil-doer is hard, and then passed on to more pleasant fields.

As the successful marriage and establishment of the child was the great preoccupation of the middle-class families, as all their planning, working and saving had that for its object, Scribe, a faithful reflector of this period, if not its historian, could not refuse to marriage a predominant rôle in his theatre. One is struck by the number of plays with such titles as: la Demoiselle à marier, le Mariage de raison, le Mariage d'inclination, le Mariage d'argent, etc. In some of the earlier plays, as les Adieux au comptoir (1824) and la Demoiselle à marier (1826), he shows that devotion to the solid, material side of life which, always characteristic of the French bourgeoisie, was particularly strong at that time. A moderate fortune, honestly earned, a comfortable home and children well married, was all that an honest man should desire. The Demoiselle à marier is a forerunner of Labiche's la Poudre aux yeux and of Brieux's les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, showing how the efforts of the parents to make an impression upon the suitor nearly always succeed in driving him away. The importance of the dowry and the sordid, even cynical view which many people took of it, are portrayed in la Charge à payer, ou la Mère intrigante (1825), a play in which an ambitious mother marries her son to a girl who is unfortunately a humpback, but who has a large dot. To each objection which her son makes to this match, she replies: "Et ta charge à payer?" The brutal tone of the play makes one think of les Corbeaux of Henri Becque.

The first of his vaudevilles to deal directly with the money question was le Mariage de raison (1826), in which, while indicating his own views, Scribe undoubtedly expressed the convictions of many of his contemporaries. The comte de Bremont forbids his son to marry Suzette, a young orphan who had been fostered by Mme. de Bremont and who had been her maid, for,

although he does not deny that Suzette is a girl of natural refinement, he maintains that a marriage between her and his son can result only in the unhappiness of both. The Count, however, in order to make amends to the young girl, marries her to a kindly veteran of the Empire who had lost a leg in Napoleon's service. Suzette is assured by her husband's cousin, Mme. Pichon, that eventually she will learn to love Bertran, for, as she says, "on finit toujours par aimer le père de ses enfants." Throughout Scribe's vaudevilles appears an abhorrence of the marriage of passion, a certainty that that love is best, and the only lasting one, which grows slowly from mutual esteem and domestic joys. Passionate, overwhelming love is, at the beginning at least, not only unnecessary, but often fatal to happiness. According to the Mariage de raison love and marriage are two quite distinct things, one simply a passing emotion, the other a very serious matter, regulated by convention and interest, in which, indeed, love may spring from habit and continued friendship. Moreover, the wise parent will oppose a marriage between his child and one who is not his equal socially. The picture is completed in le Mariage d'inclination, in which Malvina Dubreuil, who has married an English adventurer secretly and against her father's wishes, is to suffer life-long misery as the result of her disobedience. Her father has picked as her husband his nephew Arved, and too late she realizes that after all it is Arved that she really loves.

A reading of these two plays makes clear why Scribe should have found such favor with the great part of the upper and middle bourgeoisie. He was defending, against the attacks of the Romanticists and against intriguers and adventurers, the solid virtues of the home, the authority of parents, and the sacredness of the marriage relation. In his plays there is no glorification of passion and guilty love; there is, indeed, no acceptance of the idea that a marriage can be a happy one when based merely upon love, no matter how pure. The prerequisites of a happy marriage are: a satisfactory dowry, good dispositions, mutual esteem, and equality of social rank and education. After marriage it is order and economy, together with the desire to help each other, that make the young couple realize the joys of domestic life.

Throughout his plays one finds pictured the sorrow that inevitably comes from infidelity, and the happiness that quiet, strong love can bring. Le Budget d'un jeune ménage (1831) is a lesson in domestic economy, containing good-natured criticism of those young couples whose tastes and social ambitions lead them into extravagance and cause them to live beyond their means. The same theme is found, less well developed, in an earlier play, la Pension bourgeoise (1823). The disastrous effects of indifference, which often leads to infidelity, are described in la Seconde Année ou à Qui la faute? (1830). The greatest concord, moreover, is found in those homes in which it is neither the husband's will nor the wife's caprice which rules, but where the direction and responsibility are shared. The husband should submit himself to the same moral code he would have his wife follow, for as one of the characters in la Cour d'assises (1829) remarks: "Quand monsieur trompe madame, madame trompe monsieur." Having in la Seconde Année suggested the certain results of indifference, in Une Faute (1830) he goes further and shows that even the most virtuous wife is subject to temptation when left alone for a great length of time, and points out that no matter what excuse there may be for proving faithless to the marriage vow, such infidelity is always punished by life-long remorse and sorrow.

As love and marriage play so important a part in the life of the middle class, Scribe, thoroughly bourgeois in taste and principles, made of them the most prominent elements in his plays. According to the laws of nature and society, marriage is the complement, or ultimate object, of love; but Scribe, although too completely imbued with the principles of bourgeois orthododoxy to maintain the contrary, firmly believed that one can exist without the other. He put reason, interest, desire for luxury, in the place of passion, and made of them motive forces which influence the choice in marriage where the heart is not consulted. At the Gymnase, love is not represented as being that paroxysm of violence and fury which consumes Hernani, Didier, and Antony, but as a quiet, gentle passion, suffering in its own modest way, perhaps, with tears, sighs, and tender effusions. Love, in Scribe's vaudevilles, unlike the love of the Romanticists, is

not, per se, the motive force in the action; it is always preparatory to marriage, and it is marriage which interests him and which he makes the main theme of the story. Himself the opposite of all that is romanesque, Scribe painted the world as he saw it, with its sorry realities, its prejudices, and social conventions, which he respected instead of protesting against. And while this earned for him the scorn of many idealists, he had on his side the great mass of the spectators, the parents especially, who were delighted to find an argument and safeguard against the raptures and temptations of youth.

Second in importance only to love and marriage, in these plays, and in many ways interwoven with them, is the subject of money. Scribe paints an interesting picture of the fierce struggle for financial preeminence which characterizes the July Monarchy, accompanying the great industrial and commercial growth of France during that period; he notes the power of money as a factor in social life, and deplores the prevalence of gambling and speculation; he satirizes the noblesse d'argent, and, considering money a worthy object of effort, comes out strongly for the nobility of work, asserting that honest labor ennobles the worker.

A play written in the middle of the reign of Louis Philippe, le Veau d'Or (1841) contains the following lines: "Apprends donc, mon garçon, que de nos jours il existe peu de principes, peu de religions: il en est une cependant que tout le monde professe. Une divinité devant qui chacun se prosterne. N'as-tu pas entendu dire qu'autrefois les Juifs adoraient le Veau d'or? Eh bien, notre siècle est un peu juif, et la seule idole qu'on encense c'est l'or!" Such a statement may be somewhat extreme. It was doubtless essentially true. The bourgeois suffered from the universal weakness which makes men fawn upon those in power and upon the rich; which tempts one to cultivate the acquaintance of those wealthy in the world's possessions; and which, when once one has acquired wealth, makes him forget the friends of former days and turn to those whose wealth exceeds his own.

With his tendency toward moderation, regularity, and economy, Scribe delights in ridiculing those who through extravagance or gambling dissipate fortunes built up by hard work. It is certain

that during the July Monarchy the gambling fever reached an intensity not often surpassed in French history, and the gambler was one of the most prominent figures in the plays, not only of Scribe, but in other comedies and melodramas as well. Moreover, the great development of industry and the subsequent national prosperity soon gave rise to a passion for speculation unequaled since the days of Law. A reflection of the extravagance prevalent early in the reign of the Roi-Citoyen, and of the dishonesty occasionally discovered in high places, is found in a number of the vaudevilles, notably in le Voyage dans l'appartement ou l'Influence des localités (1833). The gambling evil is vividly portrayed in two plays, l'Ecarté (1822) and le premier Président (1832). In the former the card mania is lightly satirized. The gambling scenes are handled with great dexterity and with an attempt to portray life with bits of realism which anticipates the gambling scene in la Dame aux Camélias. Here he not only depicts the ruinous effect of gambling, but also shows that this evil has caused a deterioration in the social life, driving out the older and more refined pleasures and causing a general coarseness of manners. The Premier Président is a far more vigorous treatment of the theme, practically unrelieved by any comic touches. The play, which is pure melodrama, in the style of Ducange's Trente ans, ou la Vie d'un Joueur, sets before the audience, logically and emphatically, the fatal effects of gambling, the crime and suffering it almost invariably causes. The punishment of those corrupted by it is made as severe as possible.

Another widespread vice of the time, that of speculation, which furnished the theme for many of the comedies of the Restoration and of the July Monarchy, is taken up by Scribe in les Actionnaires (1829), in which, due allowance made for the forcing of tone legitimate in such a genre, there is a good picture of this frenzy for agiotage. The moral to be drawn from the play may be said to be that which terminates l'Agiotage, by Picard and Empis: "Anathème à l'agiotage! honneur et respect à l'industrie!"

The practice of declaring bankruptcy for the purpose of profiting from the results of such a procedure, an evil which furnishes the theme for Picard's Duhautcours, is frequently