Those who escaped were consumptive poets, considered too feeble to undertake soldiers' duties, who died young, like Casimir Delavigne and Soumet. These were bridges thrown across the ravine of which we have just spoken, but quite unequal to the task allotted them.
Napoleon, with his eighteen years of warfare and his ten years' reign, the re-constructor of religion, the re-builder of society, he who established legislation on a firm basis, was foiled in the matter of poetry. Had it not been for the two men whom we have named—Soumet and Casimir Delavigne—the thread of continuity would have been broken.
So it came about that Casimir Delavigne, the connecting link between the old and the new schools, showed always in his poetry a little of that anæmic quality which was evident in his person; in any work by Casimir (which never exceeded the limits of one, three or five acts ordained by the old theatrical régime) there was always something sickly and airless; his plays lacked breath, as did the man; his work was as consumptive as the poet.
No one ever made three acts out of his one; no one ever made five acts out of his three; no one ever made ten acts out of his five. But it was a simple task to reduce five of his acts to three; three of his acts to one.
When imagination failed him, and he appealed to Byron or Shakespeare, he could never attain their sublime heights; he was obliged to stop short a third of the way up, midway at the very utmost, like a child who climbs a tree to gather apples and finds he cannot reach the ripest, which always grow on the highest branches, and are the most beautiful because they are nearest the sun, save at the risk of breaking his neck—a risk he is wise enough not to venture to take.
We will make our meaning clearer by a couple of instances: Marino Faliero and the Enfants d'Édouard.
In Byron's Marino Faliero, the doge plots to revenge himself on the youthful satirist, who has insulted him by writing on his chair "Marin Falier, the husband of the fair wife; others kiss her, but he keeps her." This was a calumny: the fair Angiolina is as pure as her name implies, in spite of being but eighteen and her husband eighty. It is therefore to defend a spotless wife, and not to avenge the husband's outraged honour, that Byron's Marino Faliero conspires, and we hardly need say that the play gains in distinction by the passage across it of a sweet and lofty figure, inflamed with devotion, rather than suffused with repentance.
Now, in Casimir Delavigne's imitation, on the contrary, the wife is guilty. Héléna (for the poet, in degrading her, has not ventured to keep her heavenly name) deceives her husband, an old man! She deceives him, or rather she has deceived him, before the rising of the curtain. The first lines of the tragedy are concerned with a scarf that she is embroidering for her lover—a serious blunder in our opinion; for there could be only one means of making Héléna interesting, if she were to be made guilty, and that would be to show the struggle in her between passion and virtue, between love and duty; in short, to have done, only more successfully, what we did in Antony.
But we reiterate that it was far better to make the wife innocent, as Byron does; far better to put a faithful wife alongside the old man than an adulterous one; far better in the fifth act, where the wife seeks out her husband, to let him find devotion and not repentance when his prison doors are opened. When Christ was bowed down under His bloody agony, God chose the purest of His angels, not a fallen one, to carry Him the cup of bitterness!
We will pass over the conspiracy which takes place in Venice at midnight, in the middle of the square of Saint Mark, where fifty conspirators cry in eager emulation, "Down with the Republic!" In Venice and at midnight! in Venice, the city of the Council of Ten! in Venice, the city that never really sleeps, where at least half the populace is awake while the other half sleeps!