THE STA GE IN THE TIME OF ALFRED DE MUSSET. 33 is no longer obliged to turn to a group of dandies and say, " Pray, gentlemen, let me pass ; I have to go and kill Pyrrhus." This is why we have found out that these tragedies drag, and are surprised that no one uses the palace’s open doors to come in and give some touch of life to the play.’ This was a reason, but it certainly was not all the reason, nor can Musset have thought that it was all the reason, for the sudden or gradual discernment of narrowness and pedantry in the idea of the severely classical drama being the only supreme poetical drama. He went on to speak of the strict rules of this drama. ’Certainly,’ he said, ’no writer is obliged to follow them, the rules of tragedy only concern those who choose to write tragedy. A poet may write something quite different, and if he likes he may call it a tragedy, but he can hardly make us believe that it is one.’ Then he went on to defend the rules as being, instead of things designed to hamper the poet, machines or levers made for his help ; and said that the thing for young writers to do was to apply the spirit of ancient tragedy to modern or comparatively modern times. This is what in one sense M. Victor Hugo did, and in another sense what the great Dumas did — the former with such plays as Lfernani, Marion Delorme, Lucrece Borgia, and the latter with such plays as Antotiy, La Tour de Nesle, and Maison-Rouge. For such plays, for the poetic and for the prose melodrama there were apt audiences and apt actors in the time between 1830 and 1850. Mile Mars, Mile Georges, Mile Rachel, Firmin, Ligier, Leroux, Bressant, Samson, Beauvallet at the Frangais, Mme Dorval, Mine Doche, Frederick Lemaitre, Melingue, Bocage at the other theatres, were players thoroughly capable of dealing in their own ways with Hugo and Dumas. But it may be doubted if any of them could have dealt with Musset, and with that doubt in one’s mind, one need regret the less that his plays waited long to be heard on the stage. If in- deed they waited for actors who could comprehend and render them with a spirit akin to the poet’s, if they waited for such players as Mmes Favart, Madeleine Brohan, Victoria Lafon- taine, Croizette, Reichemberg, Broisat, Jouassain, Provost- Ponsin, MM. Delaunay, Coquelin, Coquelin cadet, Got, Chery, D
