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AUGIER,
GUILLAUME VICTOR ÉMILE, French dramatist, was born at
Valence, Drôme, on the 17th of September 1820. He was the
grandson of Pigault Lebrun, and belonged to the well-to-do bourgeoisie
in principles and in thought as well as by actual birth. He received
a good education and studied for the bar. IN 1844 he wrote a
play in two acts and in verse, La Ciguë, refused
at the Théâtre Français, but produced with
considerable success at the Odéon. This settled his career.
Thenceforward, at fairly regular intervals, either alone or in
collaboration with other writers--Jules Sandeau, Eugène-Marie
Labiche, Ed. Foussier--he produced plays which were in their
way eventful. Le Fils de Giboyer (1862)--which was regarded
as an attack on the clerical party in France, and was only brought
out by direct intervention of the emperor--caused some political
excitement. His last comedy, Les Fourchambâult,
belongs to the year 1879. After that date he wrote no more, restrained
by an honourable fear of producing inferior work. The Academy
had long before, on the 31st of March 1857, elected him to be
one of its members. He died in his house at Croissy on the 25th
of October 1889. Such, in briefest outline, is the story of a
life which Augier himself describes as "without incident"--a
life in all senses honourable. Augier, with Dumas fils
and Sardou, may be said to have held the French stage during
the Second Empire. The man respected himself and his art, and
his art on its ethical side--for he did not disdain to be a teacher--has
high qualities of rectitude and restraint. Uprightness of mind
and of heart, generous honesty, as Jules Lemaître well
said, constituted the very soul of all his dramatic work. L'Aventurière
(1848), the first of Augier's important works, already shows
a deviation from romantic models; and in the Mariage d'Olympe
(1855) the courtesan is shown as she is, not glorified as in
Dumas' Dame aux Camélias. In Gabrielle (1849)
the husband, not the lover, is the sympathetic, poetic character.
In the Lionnes pauvres (1858) the wife who sells her favours
comes under the lash. Greed of gold, social demoralization, ultramontanism,
lust of power, these are satirized in Les Effrontés
(1861), Le Fils de Giboyer (1862), Contagion, first
announced under the title of Le Baron d'Estrigaud (1866),
Lions et renards (1869)--which, with Le Gendre de M.
Poirier (1854), written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau,
reach the high-water mark of Augier's art; in Philiberte
(1853) he produced a graceful and delicate drawing-room comedy;
and in Jean de Thommeray, acted in 1873 after the great
reverses of 1870, the regenerating note of patriotism rings high
and clear. His last two dramas, Madame Caverlet (1876)
and Les Fourchambault (1879) are problem plays. But it
would be unfair to suggest that Émile Augier was a preacher
only. He was a moralist in the great sense, the sense in which
the term can be applied to Molière
and the great dramatists--a moralist because of his large and
sane outlook on life. Nor does the interest of his dramas depend
on elaborate plot. It springs from character and its evolution.
His men and women move as personality, that mysterious factor,
dictates. They are real, several of them typical. Augier's first
drama, La Ciguë, belongs to a time (1844) when the
romantic drama was on the wane; and his almost exclusively domestic
range of subject scarcely lends itself to lyric outbursts of
pure poetry. But his verse, if not that of a great poet, has
excellent dramatic qualities, while the prose of his prose dramas
is admirable for directness, alertness, sinew and a large and
effective wit. Perhaps it wanted these qualities to enlist laughter
on his side in such a war as he waged against false passion and
false sentiment.
This article was originally
published in Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition.
F.T.M. Cambridge: University Press, 1911.
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