32 PROLEGOMENA. with the leaf, ruminate with the ox, neigh with the horse ; in short, it was to take into its hand all things the world has to show ; to dominate, and, if I may use the expression, to "smash up" Nature.’ So in Dicpias et Cotonet, when the Romantic clerk is hard pressed for a definition of Romanticism, he answers : — ’ You ask what Romanticism is ? It is certainly not the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the tragic and the comic, nor anything else in the world that you can describe. You might as well try to catch the bloom on a butterfly’s wings. It is the tears of the stars, the moaning of the wind, the voice of the night, the flight of the bird, the angel, the pearl, the leaves of the willow. It is the starry infinite, the sober, the violent, the full, the round, the diametrical, the pyramidal, the oriental, the whirlwind — a whole new science ! It is a providential philosophy, reducing all things to geometry, then launching itself into the vast ocean of experience to follow up the hidden fibres’ — ’Sir! Sir!’ interrupts Cotonet, ’this is the most horrible nonsense. It makes me sweat to listen to you.’ These then were the extreme views of the two parties who made the stage a battle-ground when Musset first began to write plays ; and no doubt it may have been partly because he would not declare for either side that it was so long before his finest work was seen in the theatre. Of and upon the pretensions of the two he wrote something, which illustrates if it does not explain his own dramatic work, in an essay which he published in 1838. ’ How is it,’ he asked in this, ’that the tragedies of Racine, grand as they are, appear as they undoubtedly do, cold and formal, like stately statues half vivified ? It is because in 1759 the Count de Lauraguais procured the abolition of seats for the audience on the stage at a cost of thirty thousand francs. Nowadays Andromache and Monimia stand alone in their vast peristyles, and have an area of sixty feet to walk about in. There are no more marquises to crowd round the actress on the stage and try wits with her at the end of every tirade, to pick up Hermione’s fan and pass judgment on Theseus’s leggings. Orestes, sword in hand,
