Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/41

THE STA GE IN THE TIME OF ALFRED DE MUSSET. 29 de la Halle draws the enchantment and the disenchantment of husband and wife, or the petty jealousies of neighbours, he not only takes very much the same subjects as M. Pailleron and M. Sardou at the present day; but, with due allowance made, he treats them in by no means a very different manner. There is the progress of manners, refinement, and language, the change of society, the experience of six centuries in play- writing to be taken account of, but there is very little else : certainly there is infinitely less than is the case in other departments of literature. III. The Stage in the Time of Alfred DE MUSSET. The stage of Musset’s time— not, be it noted, the stage on which Musset’s best work was produced— was, broadly speaking, the stage of what is known as the 1830 period. In the year 1830 Musset was twenty years old, and in that year, as we have already seen, he had for the first time a piece— the Nait Venitienne — produced upon the boards of the theatre. It was not successful, the public was not yet ripe for it. The revolt against the pedantries of ’ classicism ’ had indeed been making progress for a longer time than is generally supposed. But as the production of Hernani in the very same year roused an unparalleled storm of opposi- tion and excitement, it was scarcely to be expected that a genius and method so new as Musset’s should find accept- ance and popularity. At the great national theatre, the Frangais, the player who held the leading position, Mile Mars, was as much opposed as the extreme section of the classicists to M. Hugo’s innovations, and Talma, who had always clamoured for a natural— that is a romantic— part, had disappeared. At the melodramatic theatres, at the Porte St. Martin for instance, where Mme Dorval and M. Bocage, who had succeeded to the place of the great Fre’ddrick