Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/43

THE STA GE IN THE TIME OFALERED DE MUSSET. 3 1 In 1830 this was thought far too familiar, and the words were changed to ’ Dieu ! s’il allait me parler, s’il s eveille ! ’ which is incomparably weaker, but then appeared more respectable. Again, on a certain night of the play, M. Victor Hugo, talking with the company in the green-room, expressed his belief that every line in the piece had been hissed at one time or another. ’No,’ said one of the actresses, ’the two lines I have to speak have not been hissed.’ ' They will be,’ replied M. Victor Hugo. And they were that very night. These instances may perhaps serve to indicate the extremes to which the prejudices of the classical party carried them. The extremes and absurdities of the other party were capitally hit off by Musset in his Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, and by Reybaud in the person of Je’rome Paturot, an ex- romanticist turned tradesman. ’ Voltaire,’ said Paturot, ’ was demolished; Boileau was curtly dismissed as "Nicolas"; Corneille was an old pedant ; the authors of the past were rogues all. At the same time we announced that the day of true genius had dawned ; that we had but to stamp on the ground to call up works full of brilliancy and colour, where the beauty of form should exhibit itself in millions of Eastern arabesques. The moment had come for the grand style, the true style, the supreme style — a style at once ornate, caressing and flashing, a style which included the azure of the skies, the varying hues of the painter’s palette, the myriad fantasies of architecture, the warmth of love, the bitterness of jealousy, the calm smile of virtue, and the whole storm- field of human passion. The literature we should create was to be strident, chivalrous, blue, green, crimson; deep as the lake, serpentine as the Malay’s creese, keen as Toledo’s blades. It was to combine the pride of the Spanish grandee and the clowning of Punchinello ; it was to have the height of Stamboul’s minarets and the width of Venice’s marble pavements. It was to bring together Soliman and Faliero, the muezzin and the gondolier. It was to sing with the bird, whiten with the wave, grow green