United States or France ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Hernani, a drama in verse, had been accepted from the pen of Victor Hugo, the brilliant and exuberant master of the new Romantic school of poets who had determined to emancipate themselves from the traditions, long since hardened into dogmas, of the great dramatists of the siècle de Louis Quatorze.
Went to rehearsal at half-past ten for John Mason, who is to come out in Romeo to-night; he had caught a dreadful cold and could hardly speak, which was terribly provoking, poor fellow! After my theater rehearsal of "Romeo and Juliet" drove to Bridgewater House to rehearse "Hernani." In the evening the house was very good at Covent Garden; I played well.
The king himself was appealed to, and confirmed the decision of his officer, and it appeared after his fall. This was the play which Dumas stole. When this play was rejected by the censor, Hugo wrote another for the theatrical manager who had engaged it, entitled Hernani, which had a splendid success.
There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm much of what has been since seen in "Hernani". There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.
Louis Napoleon, entering like the cut-purse King in Hamlet, who stole a crown and put it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason of Gorgei, the coup d'état of December, 1851, shattered these airy imaginings. Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the Girondins or the poet of Hernani.
But they could not have accused us of the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning the same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove Hugo to writing his Hernani, and Gautier to wearing his red waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of shocking the bourgeois.
The day before, after a matinee of Andromaque at the Theatre-Francais, in a moment of rebellion and reaction against all things classical, they had both thrown themselves upon Hernani. She had read it aloud to him in a green corner of the Bois, having a faculty that way, and bidding him take it as a French lesson.
His breath was coming quick and his eyes aglow with the memory of that evening. “Never, never have I lived through such an evening. Victor Hugo’s greatest triumph, the first night of Hernani, was the only theatrical event that can compare to it. It, however, was injured by the enmity of a clique who persistently hissed the new play.
The wild days at Weimar which Klopstock looked at askance, and not without good reason; the excess of passion and action in Schiller's "Robbers;" the turbulence of the young Romanticists, with long hair and red waistcoats, crowding the Theatre Francais to compel the acceptance of "Hernani," these stormy dawns of the new day in art are always captivating to the imagination.
Being an Englishman, he was incontestably right in doing so. I gave for the last performance, on December 25, Christmas Day, Hernani. The Bishop of Montreal again thundered against me, against Scribe and Legouve, and the poor artistes who had come with me, who could not help it. I do not know whether he did not even threaten to excommunicate all of us, living and dead.
Word Of The Day