Chapter XXXII: The Drama: Vitet, Dumas, De Vigny, Hugo

The success of the Romantic School in lyric poetry, fiction, and criticism was indisputable; but there was one branch of literature in which it failed to realise the bold expectations with which it started on its career; and this was the branch which, according to the old principles of æsthetics, was (and curiously enough, as a rule, still is) regarded as the highest, namely, the drama. As the art stood in such high estimation, the comparative slightness of their success in it was painfully felt by the Romanticists. Their plays never found real favour with the public, never became part of the permanent repertory of any theatre. Victor Hugo's were only popular as librettos for Italian operas; Mérimée's were never played at all; George Sand's and Balzac's had generally only a _succès d'estime_; and it was long before a few of Alfred de Musset's short pieces found their way on to the stage; whereas Scribe and his collaborators drew full houses, not only in France but abroad.

And yet the school did much admirable work in the domain of drama. The first essay was made by Vitet, who between 1826 and 1829 wrote a succession of _Scènes dramatiques_, subsequently published in a collected form under the title of _La Ligue_. The original idea had suggested itself to him of dramatising episodes in French history without adding anything fictitious whatever; his imagination was allowed to do nothing but vitalise history, and it succeeded most admirably in doing so. The atmosphere of Vitet's works is the atmosphere of long-past days, and the talk of his sixteenth-century characters conveys such an impression of authenticity that we feel when we are reading his dramas as if we were living history, hour by hour.

Ludovic Vitet was born in Paris in 1802, received his education at the Ecole Normale, took part as a Liberal in the political movements of the day, was a member of the society _Aide toi--le ciel t'aidera_, and wrote (as already mentioned) in the _Globe_ as an ardent champion of Romanticism. His poetico-historical works were all produced in this youthful period, with the exception of a series of dramatic scenes, distinctly inferior to the rest, which he published in 1849 under the title of _Les Étais d'Orléans_.

His career was uneventful. As a young man he was an inseparable friend of Count Duchâtel. When the Revolution of July placed his friends in power and Duchâtel became a member of the Guizot ministry, Vitet was made Inspector of Historical Monuments, a post which Guizot devised specially for him. Henceforth he was a politician; in 1834 he became a member of the Chamber of Deputies, in 1836 a member of the Council of State, in 1846 a Member of the Academy.

He was a consistent Monarchist and Conservative. From 1851 to 1871 he held aloof from public affairs altogether. After the war he again took a prominent position, under Thiers. He died in 1873.

Vitet furnishes a good example of the power of the first impetus of a strong artistic movement to inspire even minds which are not productive and artistic by nature. After 1830 he was eminent only as a learned historian of art. He wrote a biography of Count Duchâtel. His literary and historical essays are as dry and tedious as Mérimée's.

To his youthful works we always return with pleasure--to _Les Barricades, Les États de Blois_, and _La Mort de Henri III_. The principal characters in them, Henri II, Henri III., and the Dukes of Guise of several successive generations, are portrayed in such masterly style as to bear comparison with the heroes of Shakespeare's great historical plays (Henry IV. and Richard III. certainly excepted). The manners and ideas of the age are so clearly placed before us that we feel as if they cannot have been better known or understood by contemporaries. _Les États de Blois_ is unmistakably the finest of these works. Let any one who wishes to make acquaintance with Vitet at his best, read the scenes which describe the murder of the Duke of Guise. Seldom has an author ventured to set aside poetic convention to such an extent in a historical play. The event is much more vividly and realistically brought before us than even in Delaroche's fine painting, which shows us Henri III. cautiously opening the door and peeping at the body of his great enemy lying on the floor. Vitet first shows us the King in his room at four o'clock in the morning, dipping Spanish poniards into holy water and tremblingly handing them to his minions without even daring to utter his enemy's name. Then comes the scene in the Duke's room, in which his mother and his mistress in vain beseech him not to imperil his life, but to keep away from the Council to be held next morning. We next see him in the Council-chamber; an uncomfortable feeling comes over him; his nose begins to bleed; he has forgotten his handkerchief, and sends a messenger to fetch it. The Scottish guards stupidly bar this messenger's way; but they quickly perceive their mistake, and the Duke gets the handkerchief. But he is uneasy, this great soldier who has faced drawn blades so often without turning pale, and he begins to feel faint. It is because he is still fasting; the feeling will pass off if he eats something; he opens the little _bonbonnière_ which hangs at his belt; it is empty. Some one is despatched to fetch him sweetmeats or fruit. At this moment Révol comes out of the King's apartment and says: "The King wishes to speak with you, Monseigneur!" The other lords of the Council stop their conversation and exchange glances. The Duke rises; he takes a little time to fasten his mantle, which slips first off one shoulder, then off the other; he is unconsciously trying to delay his departure--too proud not to be ready to go, even if it be to death, and yet human enough to hesitate a moment on the fatal threshold. He must have another handkerchief, as the first is stained with blood; again one of the conspirators goes, leaving the others in anxious suspense. It is a masterly representation, this of Vitet's, of the restlessness, impatience, and foolish feeling of shame which at times overcome us and impel us to rush blindly into the most hazardous situations, merely to escape from painfully ridiculous ones. The messenger sent for the handkerchief again delays. Then the proud Guise loses patience. With the words, "I cannot keep the King waiting longer," he goes out at the door; as it closes behind him, a dozen officers thrust their long poniards into his body.

We observe that Vitet enters into details which would be unsuitable for the stage. His _Scènes dramatiques_ are only intended to be read. Therefore they are not genuine dramas. And the explanation of this is, that Vitet, with all his historical insight, lacked both poetic passion and the artistic gift of organisation. Because he is never capable of developing pathos, of rising to a climax, from the height of which all the rest would be felt to be preparation and result, he never attains to really artistic construction. He was evidently haunted by a species of artistic anxiety, a fear of making the slightest alteration in the historical facts, a fear of obtruding his own personality. He had not a strong enough individuality to dare to issue an artistic coinage stamped with his own image. His productivity ceased as early as it did, because the imagination which inspired his works, though vigorous, was not free, not independent, either in its observation or in its reproduction; it was hampered and weighted by scholarship, by the dust of the record office. This beautiful and fiery Pegasus stood tethered in a library.

It would be a shame to employ the same metaphor in writing of the Romantic author who, following in Vitet's steps, set himself to dramatise historical episodes, and who in February 1829, a year before Victor Hugo, achieved popularity with a historical drama, _Henri III. et sa Cour_. This writer was Alexandre Dumas (born in 1803), a man of brilliant, spontaneous talent and Titanic constitution, who displayed the same aptitude for Herculean tasks in literature as his father had done in war. For forty years he continued without a pause to produce tragedies, comedies, novels, short stories, books of travel, and memoirs. It would be foolish to write contemptuously of such prodigious inventiveness, such incredible productivity. We can trace in these works the French-African blood; there is something in them of the easy-going Creole disposition, something of the ardent sensuality of the negro race. Assisted by numerous collaborators, all much inferior to himself, Dumas peopled the stages, crowded the booksellers' shelves, filled the _feuilleton_ columns of the newspapers with the creations of his brain; the printing-presses creaked and groaned in their efforts to keep pace with his incessant production. What one cannot but regret is the easy-going worldliness which prevented any real process of development taking place. Dumas was an artist only in his first period. Beginning in a romantic age, he began romantically; continuing in a commercial age, he continued commercially.

In _Henri III et sa Cour_ he did what Vitet had not succeeded in doing with the same historical material, namely, produced a spirited and playable drama; but it was a drama in which the defiance of classic theatrical convention was of the most superficial kind. He ventured to reproduce in externals the court customs of the period. On the boards where for a couple of centuries the hero and his confidant had conversed either with both arms hanging by their sides or with their left hands on their sword-hilts, a whole troop of King Henry's courtiers appeared with cups and balls (the game of cup-and-ball was an invention of that day); and in the pauses these same gentlemen amused themselves by blowing small darts out of blow-pipes. Nevertheless they felt and spoke like the young men of 1828.

The psychology of the other historical plays of Dumas' youth (_Napoléon Bonaparte, Charles VII chez ses grands Vassaux_, &c.) is equally superficial. It was not until he lit upon an age the spirit of which he understood and could master, that he succeeded in giving such excellent representations of past days as we have in the interesting and effective dramas, _Un Mariage sous Louis XV_ and _Gabrielle de Belle-Isle_, both of which (and especially the latter, with its slightly idealised picture of the manners and customs of the Regency) possess real literary value. But before this, in 1831, it had fallen to Dumas' lot to present the young Romantic generation with one of the typical figures which it recognised as representative of itself. He wrote _Antony_.

With all its faults, there is something in this play which makes it better than even the best of Dumas' other works. There is warmer blood, more human nature in it than in the others. And the reason why, with all its naïveté, it makes a really powerful impression on us is, that in it Dumas has flung his own ego, himself, with his wild passion, his youthful enthusiasm, and chivalrous instincts, on to the stage. Antony is an 1830 hero, of the same type as all of Hugo's--broad-shouldered, lion-maned, enthusiastic and despairing, capable of living without food or sleep, ready at any moment to blow out his own or any one else's brains. But the sensation produced by _Antony_ was due to the fact that Dumas had done what Hugo never would or could do, namely, laid the action of his play in 1830, and put his hero on the stage dressed in the fashion of the day, in the very same black coat as the male members of the audience wore. Hitherto Romanticism had voluntarily restricted itself on the stage to the Middle Ages. Now it revealed itself in undisguised modernity.

We come upon a vindication of this step in the play itself. A conversation on the subject of the literary disputes of the day is introduced into the fourth act. During the course of it a poet, who is defending the Romanticists' practice of going back to the Middle Ages for their themes, says:

"The drama of passion must necessarily be historical drama. History bequeaths to us the passionate deeds which were really done. If in the midst of our modern society we were to attempt to lay bare the heart which beats under our ugly short black coats, the resemblance between the hero and the public would be too great; the spectator who was following the development of a passion would desire to have it arrested exactly where it would have stopped in his own case. He would cry: 'Stop! that is wrong; that is not how I feel. When the woman whom I love deceives me I suffer, certainly, but I neither kill her nor myself.' And the outcry against exaggeration and melodrama would drown the applause of the few who feel that the passions of the nineteenth century are the same as those of the sixteenth, and that the blood can course as hotly beneath a cloth coat as beneath a steel corselet."

We can imagine the applause which followed this speech. All wished to show that they belonged to these few. Passion was the order of the day, and they proved themselves to be passionate by applauding. And _Antony_ truly is a symphony of raging passions, the like of which it would be difficult to find. After several years of travel the hero returns to Paris and finds that the woman he loves is married. He saves her life at the risk of his own by stopping her runaway horses; the shaft of the carriage has pierced his breast; he is carried into her house. Antony is an illegitimate child and a foundling; hence as a lover he is a rebel against the laws of society. "Other men," he says to the woman he loves, "have a father, a mother, a brother--arms which open for them when they are in trouble; I have not so much as a tombstone upon which I can read my name and weep. Other men have a country; I have none, for I belong to no family. One name meant to me everything that I possessed, and that name, your name, I am forbidden to pronounce." The lady reminds him of social obligations: "Call them duties or call them prejudices; such as they are, they exist." "Why," he replies, "should I submit to these laws? Not one among those by whom they were made has spared me a suffering or done me a service. I have received nothing but injustice, and I owe nothing but hatred. My unfortunate mother's shame has been branded on my forehead."

Adèle loves Antony, but avoids him. In the course of a journey she takes, she has to spend a night at an inn; he surprises her there and takes possession of her with violence. In spite of this dastardly act she continues to love him. We meet the couple again in Paris. Their story is known. We hear hypocritical women, who manage to combine secret leanings to the forbidden with irreproachable outward behaviour, destroying Adèle's reputation. Their attacks on her evoke outbursts of indignation from the really worthy, indignation against society and its hypocrisies. But the drama is drawing to a close. The husband, Colonel d'Hervey, returns from a journey; Antony tries in vain to persuade Adèle to escape with him; the step of the injured husband is heard in the anteroom; the lover draws his Romantic dagger and plunges it into Adèle's breast; to save her honour he meets d'Hervey with the cry: "Elle me résistait; je l'ai assassinée!"

What chiefly strikes us now on reading the play is its preposterous absurdity. We feel that if we were to see it acted, as a new play, we should not be able to refrain from smiling at the parts intended to touch us. We can hardly understand to-day how it happened that on the night of its first performance in 1831 a select audience were excited by it to the wildest enthusiasm. They applauded, shed tears, sobbed, shouted Bravo! The effect of the play was heightened by the splendid acting of Bocage and Marie Dorval. Dumas tells that a handsome green coat he was wearing was positively torn off his back and into scraps, which were preserved as relics by the enthusiastic youths who formed a large proportion of the audience; and even if we do not take this anecdote quite literally, there is no doubt of the unboundedness of the enthusiasm. The explanation is, that men never laugh at a work which gives expression to their own moods and feelings. Antony was not merely the impersonation of passion verging on savagery, in combination with a tenderness so great that it would rather take upon itself the responsibility of a murder than expose the beloved one to insult and scorn; he was also the Byronic, mysterious young hero, who is predestined to struggle against the injustice of fate, and is greater than his fate. But even in those days there were not wanting critics who saw the weaknesses of the play. Bocage, who acted Antony, considered the closing speech so foolish, that he would have omitted it if he could. He did omit it one evening, and the curtain fell without it, but only with the result that the audience began to shout and scream as if possessed. They would not be defrauded of their speech. Bocage had gone; but Madame Dorval, who was still lying dead upon the stage, had the presence of mind to order the curtain to be raised again, upon which, holding up her head, she said with a smile and a transposition of the pronouns, "Je lui résistais, il m'a assassinée!"[1] One sharply satirical voice was raised within the precincts of the Romantic camp. Let any one interested turn up the long and excellent criticism of _Antony_ in Jules Janin's _Histoire de la littérature dramatique_, undoubtedly the best piece of criticism its author ever wrote, and he will have the pleasure of beholding delirious Romanticism overwhelmed with ridicule.

Whilst _Antony_ may be described as the Romantic fit of hysterics, _Chatterton_, the one play of Alfred de Vigny's which was a success on the stage, may be designated the Romantic dirge. These two favourite dramas of the generation of 1830 complement each other; the one represents the cult of genius, the other the cult of passion; the one sympathy with the suffering, the other admiration for energetic action; or, to go deeper, the one the Teutonic, the other the Latin side of Romanticism.

Alfred de Vigny (born 1799) had failed to win the approbation of the theatre-going public by his excellent historical drama, _La Maréchale d'Ancre_, which was put on the stage in 1834. The reason probably was, that in everything essential its characters belonged to those types with which the public had already become familiar in other Romantic historical tragedies. Borgia, the lover, for instance, is of exactly the same species as Victor Hugo's lovers, and is not even very different from the lover of Dumas' plays, in spite of the widely different characters of the two authors. This shows us the power of a school to set its stamp upon writers of the most varied individualities.[2]

_Chatterton_, on the other hand, is a work peculiarly characteristic of De Vigny. This play, which was performed in 1835, is based on an idea to which its author had already given expression, in three different forms, in a volume of tales entitled _Stello_, published two years previously--the idea of the true poet's unhappy and neglected position in modern society. De Vigny, to begin with, regarded the poet from the Romantic standpoint, regarded him, that is to say, as a superior being, nay, as the noblest of all beings (the idea with which the German Romanticists, too, were so thoroughly impregnated); and a feeling of strong compassion had been aroused in him by the poet's fate, especially the fate of the young poet who, when he stands most in need of help and appreciation, so seldom finds hearts that understand him and patrons who prevent his life being a struggle for existence. What lent a certain charm to De Vigny's constant appeal to the public on behalf of the poet, was the fact that he was not pleading his own cause; for he was a man of good family, who had always been in comfortable circumstances. According to his idea, the poet is a poor unfortunate who is entirely in the power of his own imagination. He is "incapable of everything except fulfilling his divine mission," and especially incapable of earning money; it is possible for him, indeed, to make a living by writing, but if he does so it is probably at the cost of his noblest gifts; he develops his critical faculty at the expense of his imagination; and the divine spark which burns in him is extinguished. Therefore this heavenly messenger ought not to be allowed to degrade himself by common work; his brain is a volcano, from which the "harmonious lava" (_laves harmonieuses_) can only issue when he is in a position to be idle as long as he pleases.[3]

There is, as the modern reader sees at once, some truth in this idea, but more exaggeration. The play which was based on it, and which produced floods of tears, appeals so exclusively to the instinct of compassion, that it has no properly tragic effect; and it has too strong a lyric bias in favour of its hero to possess the inward equilibrium without which a drama lacks stability. Chatterton and the young Quakeress whom he loves have appropriated every single noble quality of mind and soul; around them there is nothing but coarseness, cold-heartedness, prose, and stupidity. What we are shown is the cruel treatment of the intellectual genius by the coarse, earth-bound world around him. The view of life is not unlike what we find in Germany in the writings of Novalis, in Denmark in those of Andersen and Ingemann; for authors such as these Goethe has written his _Tasso_ in vain. We in our day are tired of the dramas with artist heroes which were ushered in by Oehlenschläger's _Correggio_, and are represented in Germany by Holtei's _Lorbeerbaum und Bettelstab_, &c. We no longer indignantly sympathise with Chatterton, "the man who has been created to descry in the stars the way pointed out by the finger of the Lord," when he chooses rather to poison himself than accept an unpoetical appointment which would bring him in a hundred a year. In this case also, what touched every heart in an audience of the year 1835, now only elicits a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

Romanticism was too essentially lyric to produce dramatic works of enduring value. This fact is perhaps most strongly borne in upon us when we consider the plays of the greatest of the Romantic lyric poets. Victor Hugo's dramas have many points of resemblance with Oehlenschläger's tragedies. We frequently observe that both authors have been influenced by their reading. In Hugo's _Marie Tudor_ we trace the influence of Dumas' _Christine à Fontainebleau_, and the last scene of _Lucrèce Borgia_ owes something to Webster's _Duchess of Malfi_. The characters in the plays of both authors are merely outlined; in neither are they real, complete human beings; and yet the power of genuine enthusiasm and lyric pathos inspires them with life. Hugo's characters certainly approach nearer to real life, and for this reason, that events such as those represented in his plays had occurred in France in much more recent times than in Denmark. Hernani reminds us of the rebel leaders who defied the Government in La Vendée; Gilbert, who goes to the scaffold of his own free will to avenge the woman he loves, does no more than many a noble victim of the guillotine had done; and Ruy Blas' elevation from the position of a footman to that of a minister of state is not much more remarkable than Rousseau's rise from the same position to that of one of the world's most famous authors. This, however, practically makes little difference; for the author's love of the unusual, nay, of the monstrous, represses everything which might remind us of the reality with which we are familiar, and gives prominence to unnatural phenomena which, though sublime in his eyes, are merely absurd in the eyes of readers of a later day.

The conception of human nature which reveals itself in Hugo's plays is purely lyric; it reminds us in all essentials of the psychology of his rival, Lamartine, an author who was such a contrast to him in other respects. The only difference is that, whilst Lamartine, with his harmonious nature, loves to represent a pure and beautiful character which yields to some sudden temptation and then expiates the one weak moment with years of repentance and penance (Jocelyn, Cèdar in _La Chute d'un Ange_), Hugo, in his dramas, loves to represent a human soul debased by bad passions, by all kinds of misery and humiliations, by vice, by slavery, by infirmity, yet so constituted that, under given circumstances, it is irresistibly attracted by the good and beautiful, in alliance with which it fights against the horrible past which it has forsworn. This soul aspires; it understands even the most delicate refinements of the good and beautiful; but it feels unworthy of the noble emotions which it experiences; it cannot mount into these unfamiliar regions, and so it falls back, exhausted and defeated, into its former degraded condition.

Let me illustrate my meaning by a few examples. Triboulet (_Le Roi s'amuse_) has been corrupted by his position as the unscrupulous mouthpiece and butt of mockery, yet he loves his daughter with the purest tenderness. She is stolen from him, and he gives himself up entirely to hatred and projects of revenge.--Marion (_Marion Delorme_) has sold herself hundreds of times; but she falls in love with a young, brave man, and this passion completely purifies her. Didier is condemned to death, and in the dread hour of trial she becomes Marion again. She gives herself to the judge in order to save the man she loves, not understanding that Didier would far rather die than be saved thus.--Lucrèce Borgia was begotten in crime and has lived a life of crime. But this licentious woman, this poisoner, has a son whom she loves, and for his sake she is prepared to renounce the life she has hitherto led. But a mortal insult is offered her, and in her fury she has recourse to her old weapons; she invites her enemies to a repast, gives them poison, and unwittingly murders her son along with the others.--Ruy Blas, compelled by poverty, has become a nobleman's lackey. The love of a queen makes of this lackey a minister of state. He is fit for the position; he evolves and carries out great and noble plans; he is on the point of becoming the saviour of his country, when his past rises up against him. The disappointment of all his hopes is too much for him; he revenges himself like the man he was; he will not fight a duel with his master, but gets possession of his sword and kills the defenceless man with it.[4]

The conception of the tragic is, we observe, always the same. But of chief significance in all these dramas, as far as Hugo is concerned, is the fountain of lyric pathos which wells forth when the degraded human soul is raised by noble passion from the mire. The real kernel of the drama is in every case the hymn of strong emotion with which the guilt-stained soul sings itself pure.

One of Hugo's most famous poems (_Les Chants du Crépuscule_, xxxii.) contains an allegory of which we are reminded when considering his dramas. High in a church tower--so he writes--hangs an old bell. Long ago its metal was clean and bright. The only inscription it bore was the word God, with a crown below it. But the tower has had many visitors, and each of them, one with his blunt knife, another with a rusty nail, has scratched his own mean name, or a foul word, or a silly witticism, or a platitude on the bell. It is covered with dust and cobwebs; rust has found its way into the scratches, marring and corroding it.

"Mais qu'importe à la cloche et qu'importe à mon âme!
Qu'à son heure, à son jour, l'esprit saint les réclame,
Les touche, l'une et l'autre, et leur dise: chantez!
Soudain, par toute voie et de tous les côtés,
De leur sein ébranlé, rempli d'ombres obscures,
À travers leur surface, à travers leurs souillures,
Et la cendre et la rouille, amas injurieux,
Quelque chose de grand s'épandra dans les cieux."

The poet was only attempting to describe the condition of his own soul when he sang thus, but he did more; for the allegory strikingly depicts the outbursts of lyric pathos which escape from the lips of the unhappy and guilt-stained characters who give his dramas their interest.

But pathos and lyric sonority, in however ample measure, are not materials out of which alone a dramatic edifice can be constructed. A strong foundation of accurate reasoning is demanded, or, failing this, at least of sound common-sense and correct taste.

Such foundations Hugo could not supply. And his failings as a dramatist increased with time. There happened in his case what happens with so many artists: his style degenerated into mannerism. He became, as it were, his own best pupil; as a dramatist he ended by parodying himself--the most cruelly effective kind of parody.

He had always been wanting in a sense of the comic, and had always been inclined to confuse the sublime with the colossal. To this inclination he yielded more unrestrainedly than ever before in writing _Les Burgraves_. The very list of characters evokes a smile: Job, Burgrave of Heppenheff, aged 100; Magnus, son of Job, aged 80; Hatto, son of Magnus, aged 60; Gorlois, son of Hatto, aged 30. A Parisian caricature of the Burgraves, of about the same date as the play, represents them standing in a row, decreasing in height and quantity of beard according to age.

The centenarian is the most energetic of them all; he represents the good old days. He calls his son of eighty: "Young man!" but Hugo does not smile. All these old gentlemen vie in declamation with a beggar of ninety, who turns out to be no less a personage than Frederick Barbarossa, who has lived in concealment for twenty years, but has come to execute vengeance upon the eldest of the Burgraves, who as a youth had plotted against his life. The play teems with improbabilities and Romantic absurdities. For instance, in order to bring about a recognition scene, Hugo makes a soldier fight with a piece of red-hot iron, with which he sets a mark upon an opponent whom he wishes to be able to recognise again, and whom he cannot see rightly because it is dark.

When this monstrous production of an overstrained imagination was put upon the stage, in 1843, it proved a complete failure. On the first night, in the middle of the play, hissing began. One of Hugo's faithful henchmen rushed to tell him. Hugo who, like Napoleon, relied upon his guard, answered as usual: "Get hold of some young men!" It is said that the messenger answered despondently, with downcast eyes: "There are no more young men." The generation to which Romanticism had appealed thirteen years before was no longer young, and, what was worse, it had grown weary; more than one of its poets had made too heavy demands upon it.

A reaction was inevitable, and it set in that very year. It found its author and its histrionic genius.

A young man as yet unknown to fame had left the provincial town in which he had been brought up, and come to Paris with a manuscript in his pocket. He was a thoroughly high-principled young man, with no great gift of imagination, but with much refinement and taste, and of a nobly serious turn of mind. His name was François Ponsard, and the title of the manuscript was _Lucrèce_. It was a tragedy on an antique theme--the rape and death of the chaste Lucretia. The style was sober and severe; it recalled Racine's. The public was tired of the Romantic style. For long the quiet citizen had shaken his head over such phrases of Hugo's as "the tones purled from the organ like water from a sponge," or "the table-linen was white as pale grief's winding-sheet," or "the old woman walked with bent, slow back." But until now there had been no one capable of competing with Hugo. Here at last seemed to be a possible rival. At the first glance Ponsard's play appeared to be exactly on the lines of the old classical tragedy. In their eagerness its welcomers did not notice in what a modern manner the antique theme was treated, how much Ponsard had learned from the Romanticists, how much of its warm colouring his drama owed to Victor Hugo, and how small an amount of originality the new-comer really possessed.

All the public saw was that this drama was sane and simple. They saw that its heroine was Lucretia--not Hugo's horrible Lucrèce, that monster of bloodthirstiness and sensuality, but Rome's Lucretia, the emblem of chastity, another name for feminine purity. She represented marriage, the family, the poetry of home, as Antony and his kin had represented the morality of the foundling, and lawlessness. All Catholic and Classic France, all orthodox Switzerland, hymned the praises of the new dramatist and his play. At last Hugo had found his superior, Racine his equal. Even the critical Vinet joined in the great Hallelujah. He went into ecstasies over Ponsard's style: "This author spins gold as his Lucretia does wool &c."

_Les Burgraves_ was hissed on the 7th of March 1843. On the 22nd of April of the same year _Lucrèce_ was received on its first night with thunders of applause. So closely as this did the short-lived triumph of what went by the name of _l'école du bon sens_ follow on the defeat of Romantic dramaticism. If the worthy Ponsard relied upon the verdict of his critics, Janin and the others (Théophile Gautier and Théophile Dondey alone protested), he must have believed that his fame was established for all time.

The Classic reaction had found its actress as well as its dramatist. In 1838 a young Jewess had made her début in the Theatre Français. She was then eighteen, an ignorant child who had played the harp and sung in the cafés and in the streets; but time proved _Rachel_ to be a genius, the greatest actress France had ever known. And this great actress, as it happened, had a thorough distaste for the rôles with which the Romantic drama provided her, whilst she studied and played those of the old Classic repertory with such zeal and passion that she actually succeeded in doing what no one had believed possible namely, restoring their power of attraction to the tragedies which the Romantic School had disdainfully driven from the stage. Of what avail was it that Gautier wrung his hands! Iphigénie, Mérope, Émilia, Chimène, Phèdre, again trod the boards. And so nobly and naturally were they personated that an impressionable public was at times actually roused to a kind of fury with the authors and critics who had dared to throw contempt on these sacred national treasures. A nation is naturally rejoiced to learn that it has not been mistaken in the eminence of the men and works it has reverenced for centuries.

Although the title-rôle of _Lucrèce_ had been written for her, Rachel at first refused to play it; but after the success of the drama at the Odéon she consented. The mood of the audience the first time she appeared in it has been described to me by an eye-witness. "We sat waiting in breathless expectation for the curtain to rise. It rose, and we saw Rachel as Lucretia sitting at her spinning-wheel among her maidens. The silence had been complete enough before; but when she raised her head and opened her lips to say the first words (to one of the slaves): _Lève-toi, Laodice!_ there was such utter stillness that the fruit-sellers were heard crying their oranges in the market-place."

In their enthusiasm for Rachel the public did not realise that the Classic style in art was not really alive because a single genius for a time breathed life into the great works of a bygone age; and in their rejoicing over Ponsard they failed to understand how short his triumph must inevitably be. The Common-sense School, as its name prognosticates, never developed any vigorous originality. Ponsard himself was a writer of only second-rate talent. The youthful dramas of his gifted follower, Émile Augier (who dedicated his poems to him), imitate his sober spirit and style; but Augier's style changed as time went on.[5] Though the school, most praiseworthy in its intentions, by no means deserved the contemptuous attacks made on it by some of the irreconcilable younger Romanticists, including Vacquerie and Théodore de Banville, yet its historical significance is no more than this--it indicates the period when Romantic drama had outlived itself.

[1] Told me by an eye-witness of the scene, Philarète Chasles.

[2] In the list of personages we find the following directions to the actor for the rendering of the part of Borgia. Observe how all the qualities beloved of Romanticism are enumerated as if in a catalogue, and how in all essentials the directions might serve for Victor Hugo's young heroes, or indeed for Antony: "Montagnard brusque et bon. Vindicatif et animé par la vendetta comme par une seconde âme: conduit par elle _comme par la destinée_. Caractère vigoureux, triste et profondément sensible. Haïssant et aimant avec violence. Sauvage par nature, et civilisé comme malgré lui par la cour et la politesse de son temps."

[3] See the characteristic introduction to _Chatterton_, "Dernière nuit de travail, du 29 au 30 Juin 1834."

[4] _Cf_. Madame de Girardin: _Lettres parisiennes_, ii 31.

[5] Augier's _Gabrielle_ is perhaps the prettiest play which the Common-sense School produced. His dramas, _La Jeunesse_ and _La Pierre de Touche_, were evidently inspired by Ponsard's _L'Honneur et l'Argent_.