The psychology of the other historical plays of Dumas' youth (Napoléon Bonaparte, Charles VII chez ses grands Vassaux, &c.) is equally superficial. It was not until he lit upon an age the spirit of which he understood and could master, that he succeeded in giving such excellent representations of past days as we have in the interesting and effective dramas, Un Mariage sous Louis XV and Gabrielle de Belle-Isle, both of which (and especially the latter, with its slightly idealised picture of the manners and customs of the Regency) possess real literary value. But before this, in 1831, it had fallen to Dumas' lot to present the young Romantic generation with one of the typical figures which it recognised as representative of itself. He wrote Antony.
With all its faults, there is something in this play which makes it better than even the best of Dumas' other works. There is warmer blood, more human nature in it than in the others. And the reason why, with all its naïveté, it makes a really powerful impression on us is, that in it Dumas has flung his own ego, himself, with his wild passion, his youthful enthusiasm, and chivalrous instincts, on to the stage. Antony is an 1830 hero, of the same type as all of Hugo's—broad-shouldered, lion-maned, enthusiastic and despairing, capable of living without food or sleep, ready at any moment to blow out his own or any one else's brains. But the sensation produced by Antony was due to the fact that Dumas had done what Hugo never would or could do, namely, laid the action of his play in 1830, and put his hero on the stage dressed in the fashion of the day, in the very same black coat as the male members of the audience wore. Hitherto Romanticism had voluntarily restricted itself on the stage to the Middle Ages. Now it revealed itself in undisguised modernity.
We come upon a vindication of this step in the play itself. A conversation on the subject of the literary disputes of the day is introduced into the fourth act. During the course of it a poet, who is defending the Romanticists' practice of going back to the Middle Ages for their themes, says:
"The drama of passion must necessarily be historical drama. History bequeaths to us the passionate deeds which were really done. If in the midst of our modern society we were to attempt to lay bare the heart which beats under our ugly short black coats, the resemblance between the hero and the public would be too great; the spectator who was following the development of a passion would desire to have it arrested exactly where it would have stopped in his own case. He would cry: 'Stop! that is wrong; that is not how I feel. When the woman whom I love deceives me I suffer, certainly, but I neither kill her nor myself.' And the outcry against exaggeration and melodrama would drown the applause of the few who feel that the passions of the nineteenth century are the same as those of the sixteenth, and that the blood can course as hotly beneath a cloth coat as beneath a steel corselet."
We can imagine the applause which followed this speech. All wished to show that they belonged to these few. Passion was the order of the day, and they proved themselves to be passionate by applauding. And Antony truly is a symphony of raging passions, the like of which it would be difficult to find. After several years of travel the hero returns to Paris and finds that the woman he loves is married. He saves her life at the risk of his own by stopping her runaway horses; the shaft of the carriage has pierced his breast; he is carried into her house. Antony is an illegitimate child and a foundling; hence as a lover he is a rebel against the laws of society. "Other men," he says to the woman he loves, "have a father, a mother, a brother—arms which open for them when they are in trouble; I have not so much as a tombstone upon which I can read my name and weep. Other men have a country; I have none, for I belong to no family. One name meant to me everything that I possessed, and that name, your name, I am forbidden to pronounce." The lady reminds him of social obligations: "Call them duties or call them prejudices; such as they are, they exist." "Why," he replies, "should I submit to these laws? Not one among those by whom they were made has spared me a suffering or done me a service. I have received nothing but injustice, and I owe nothing but hatred. My unfortunate mother's shame has been branded on my forehead."
Adèle loves Antony, but avoids him. In the course of a journey she takes, she has to spend a night at an inn; he surprises her there and takes possession of her with violence. In spite of this dastardly act she continues to love him. We meet the couple again in Paris. Their story is known. We hear hypocritical women, who manage to combine secret leanings to the forbidden with irreproachable outward behaviour, destroying Adèle's reputation. Their attacks on her evoke outbursts of indignation from the really worthy, indignation against society and its hypocrisies. But the drama is drawing to a close. The husband, Colonel d'Hervey, returns from a journey; Antony tries in vain to persuade Adèle to escape with him; the step of the injured husband is heard in the anteroom; the lover draws his Romantic dagger and plunges it into Adèle's breast; to save her honour he meets d'Hervey with the cry: "Elle me résistait; je l'ai assassinée!"
What chiefly strikes us now on reading the play is its preposterous absurdity. We feel that if we were to see it acted, as a new play, we should not be able to refrain from smiling at the parts intended to touch us. We can hardly understand to-day how it happened that on the night of its first performance in 1831 a select audience were excited by it to the wildest enthusiasm. They applauded, shed tears, sobbed, shouted Bravo! The effect of the play was heightened by the splendid acting of Bocage and Marie Dorval. Dumas tells that a handsome green coat he was wearing was positively torn off his back and into scraps, which were preserved as relics by the enthusiastic youths who formed a large proportion of the audience; and even if we do not take this anecdote quite literally, there is no doubt of the unboundedness of the enthusiasm. The explanation is, that men never laugh at a work which gives expression to their own moods and feelings. Antony was not merely the impersonation of passion verging on savagery, in combination with a tenderness so great that it would rather take upon itself the responsibility of a murder than expose the beloved one to insult and scorn; he was also the Byronic, mysterious young hero, who is predestined to struggle against the injustice of fate, and is greater than his fate. But even in those days there were not wanting critics who saw the weaknesses of the play. Bocage, who acted Antony, considered the closing speech so foolish, that he would have omitted it if he could. He did omit it one evening, and the curtain fell without it, but only with the result that the audience began to shout and scream as if possessed. They would not be defrauded of their speech. Bocage had gone; but Madame Dorval, who was still lying dead upon the stage, had the presence of mind to order the curtain to be raised again, upon which, holding up her head, she said with a smile and a transposition of the pronouns, "Je lui résistais, il m'a assassinée!"[1] One sharply satirical voice was raised within the precincts of the Romantic camp. Let any one interested turn up the long and excellent criticism of Antony in Jules Janin's Histoire de la littérature dramatique, undoubtedly the best piece of criticism its author ever wrote, and he will have the pleasure of beholding delirious Romanticism overwhelmed with ridicule.
Whilst Antony may be described as the Romantic fit of hysterics, Chatterton, the one play of Alfred de Vigny's which was a success on the stage, may be designated the Romantic dirge. These two favourite dramas of the generation of 1830 complement each other; the one represents the cult of genius, the other the cult of passion; the one sympathy with the suffering, the other admiration for energetic action; or, to go deeper, the one the Teutonic, the other the Latin side of Romanticism.
Alfred de Vigny (born 1799) had failed to win the approbation of the theatre-going public by his excellent historical drama, La Maréchale d'Ancre, which was put on the stage in 1834. The reason probably was, that in everything essential its characters belonged to those types with which the public had already become familiar in other Romantic historical tragedies. Borgia, the lover, for instance, is of exactly the same species as Victor Hugo's lovers, and is not even very different from the lover of Dumas' plays, in spite of the widely different characters of the two authors. This shows us the power of a school to set its stamp upon writers of the most varied individualities.[2]
Chatterton, on the other hand, is a work peculiarly characteristic of De Vigny. This play, which was performed in 1835, is based on an idea to which its author had already given expression, in three different forms, in a volume of tales entitled Stello, published two years previously—the idea of the true poet's unhappy and neglected position in modern society. De Vigny, to begin with, regarded the poet from the Romantic standpoint, regarded him, that is to say, as a superior being, nay, as the noblest of all beings (the idea with which the German Romanticists, too, were so thoroughly impregnated); and a feeling of strong compassion had been aroused in him by the poet's fate, especially the fate of the young poet who, when he stands most in need of help and appreciation, so seldom finds hearts that understand him and patrons who prevent his life being a struggle for existence. What lent a certain charm to De Vigny's constant appeal to the public on behalf of the poet, was the fact that he was not pleading his own cause; for he was a man of good family, who had always been in comfortable circumstances. According to his idea, the poet is a poor unfortunate who is entirely in the power of his own imagination. He is "incapable of everything except fulfilling his divine mission," and especially incapable of earning money; it is possible for him, indeed, to make a living by writing, but if he does so it is probably at the cost of his noblest gifts; he develops his critical faculty at the expense of his imagination; and the divine spark which burns in him is extinguished. Therefore this heavenly messenger ought not to be allowed to degrade himself by common work; his brain is a volcano, from which the "harmonious lava" (laves harmonieuses) can only issue when he is in a position to be idle as long as he pleases.[3]