Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/42

30 PROLEGOMENA. Lemaitre, held sway, the players were ready enough, as might have been expected, to welcome the higher form of melo- drama which the new school brought with it ; but on such stages there would have been even less chance for Musset’s beautiful work, which did not rank exactly with either of the two schools, than there was on the boards of the Francais or the Gymnase. The new school (the thin end of its wedge had been put in by the production, in 1830, of Dumas’s prose drama Henri III et sa Cour at the Francais) did, as is well known, triumph in the end, but Musset, as has been said, was not precisely of it. He could not say with Reybaud’s Jerome Paturot, quoting Hugo, to every new romantic drama- tist, ’de ta suite j’en suis ;’ and, with a rare instance of the alliance of the critical with the creative faculty, he set forth his views on the two schools in an essay published several years after the first production of Hernani, Before going on to this it may be well to point out by one quotation how great was the change effected by the Romantic movement. ’It is difficult,’ wrote Theophile Gautier in 1872, ’now that what then passed for barbarously romantic extravagance has become in its turn and in its own way classical — it is difficult to describe the effect produced upon an audience by those strange lines [of Hernani} so powerful, so new, so curiously combining the beauties of Corneille and of Shakespeare.’ He went on to call attention to certain lines which, in 1830, were the never-failing signals for clamour and uproar. For instance the words — ’Est-il minuit? Minuit bientot’ were shocking to the ears of the classicists. In a dialogue between a king and a subject, the subject should, they thought, answer instead of ’minuit bientot,’ which was simple : — ’Du haut de ma demeure, Seigneur, l’horloge enfin sonne son douzieme heure,’ which would have been classical. So again, at the end of the great soliloquy at Charlemagne’s tomb, the king pauses in awe before entering with the words ’ Entrons !— Dieu ! s’il allait me parler a l’oreille!’