Just as my rehearsals began, Alfred de Vigny's ended. Our relative partisans were exasperated with us, and with some reason. They demanded loudly that we should not be played, whilst we demanded with even louder outcries that we should be played.
The first representation of the More de Venise was introduced with every appearance of a battle. Mademoiselle Mars had gone over bag and baggage from the old style of comedy to the new modern school of drama; we had won over Joanny, Perrier and Firmin, and in short there was not an actor down to the excellent David, who had accepted the small part of Cassio, who would not be acting in the Shakespearian exhibition that was preparing. The rage of the men who for thirty years had monopolised the Théâtre-Français had to be seen, before an idea could be conceived of the howls and curses that were flung at us. These gentlemen only seemed acquainted with Shakespeare through what Voltaire had said about him, and Schiller by means of M. Petitot. When M. Lebrun and M. Ancelot had borrowed their Maria Stuart and Fiesque from the German Shakespeare, they decided that MM. Ancelot and Lebrun had done Schiller great honour thereby, and a host of articles had demonstrated that very indifferent works—works only fit for the stage of a fair—were real classical masterpieces! This time, the public was not going to see Shakespeare corrected, castrated and docked, but—save for the loss he must necessarily sustain from translation—the giant himself, who had kept the crowning place in England during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If these sacrilegious exhibitions continued, what could Zaïre say confronted with Desdemona, Ninus with Hamlet or the Deux Gendres with King Lear? Such pale and sickly counterfeits of nature and truth must fail and come to nothing or suffer by comparison!
I opened a paper by chance and in it I read:—
"The representation of the More de Venise is being prepared for as though there were going to be a battle to decide some great literary question. It is to settle whether Shakespeare, Schiller and Goethe are to drive Corneille, Racine and Voltaire from the French stage."
This was a delicious lapse from truth and exquisitely spiteful; for, thanks to the notion of the expulsion of the masters, it excited the bourgeois classes, and the question, which was entirely beside the mark, by the very form it took, gave justification to those who put it.
No! indeed no! These masters of art were no more driven from their time-honoured Parnassus than the bourgeoisie drove out the aristocracy from the positions they had occupied since the beginning of the monarchy. No, we did not say to these great masters, "Retire and give up your places to us!" but, "Allow us to aspire to the same rights with you, if we deserve to do so. The heathen Olympus was large enough to contain six thousand gods, make then a little space, ye gods of old France, for the Scandinavian and Teutonic gods. The religion of Molière, of Corneille and of Racine was ever that of the State; but let liberty for all religions be proclaimed!"
But they were too narrow and exclusive, and, instead of welcoming these new gods, instead of hailing all that was lofty in them and only criticising what was unworthy in them, the political exiles of yesterday wanted to-day to enforce a literary proscription. It seems incredibly strange and mysterious, but nevertheless so it was!
In spite of violent opposition, Othello succeeded. The groans of the jealous African were heard for the first time, and people were moved and shivered and trembled under the sobs of that terrible wrath. Joanny, carried away by his part, was often remarkable in his acting, and once or twice he was sublime. I never saw anything more picturesque than that great African figure as it strode the stage in the darkness of night, draped like a spectre in its large white burnous, whispering in a gloomy voice, with arms extended towards Desdemona's dwelling—
"... Get you to bed on the instant; I will be returned forthwith ..."