He had always been wanting in a sense of the comic, and had always been inclined to confuse the sublime with the colossal. To this inclination he yielded more unrestrainedly than ever before in writing Les Burgraves. The very list of characters evokes a smile: Job, Burgrave of Heppenheff, aged 100; Magnus, son of Job, aged 80; Hatto, son of Magnus, aged 60; Gorlois, son of Hatto, aged 30. A Parisian caricature of the Burgraves, of about the same date as the play, represents them standing in a row, decreasing in height and quantity of beard according to age.
The centenarian is the most energetic of them all; he represents the good old days. He calls his son of eighty: "Young man!" but Hugo does not smile. All these old gentlemen vie in declamation with a beggar of ninety, who turns out to be no less a personage than Frederick Barbarossa, who has lived in concealment for twenty years, but has come to execute vengeance upon the eldest of the Burgraves, who as a youth had plotted against his life. The play teems with improbabilities and Romantic absurdities. For instance, in order to bring about a recognition scene, Hugo makes a soldier fight with a piece of red-hot iron, with which he sets a mark upon an opponent whom he wishes to be able to recognise again, and whom he cannot see rightly because it is dark.
When this monstrous production of an overstrained imagination was put upon the stage, in 1843, it proved a complete failure. On the first night, in the middle of the play, hissing began. One of Hugo's faithful henchmen rushed to tell him. Hugo who, like Napoleon, relied upon his guard, answered as usual: "Get hold of some young men!" It is said that the messenger answered despondently, with downcast eyes: "There are no more young men." The generation to which Romanticism had appealed thirteen years before was no longer young, and, what was worse, it had grown weary; more than one of its poets had made too heavy demands upon it.
A reaction was inevitable, and it set in that very year. It found its author and its histrionic genius.
A young man as yet unknown to fame had left the provincial town in which he had been brought up, and come to Paris with a manuscript in his pocket. He was a thoroughly high-principled young man, with no great gift of imagination, but with much refinement and taste, and of a nobly serious turn of mind. His name was François Ponsard, and the title of the manuscript was Lucrèce. It was a tragedy on an antique theme—the rape and death of the chaste Lucretia. The style was sober and severe; it recalled Racine's. The public was tired of the Romantic style. For long the quiet citizen had shaken his head over such phrases of Hugo's as "the tones purled from the organ like water from a sponge," or "the table-linen was white as pale grief's winding-sheet," or "the old woman walked with bent, slow back." But until now there had been no one capable of competing with Hugo. Here at last seemed to be a possible rival. At the first glance Ponsard's play appeared to be exactly on the lines of the old classical tragedy. In their eagerness its welcomers did not notice in what a modern manner the antique theme was treated, how much Ponsard had learned from the Romanticists, how much of its warm colouring his drama owed to Victor Hugo, and how small an amount of originality the new-comer really possessed.
All the public saw was that this drama was sane and simple. They saw that its heroine was Lucretia—not Hugo's horrible Lucrèce, that monster of bloodthirstiness and sensuality, but Rome's Lucretia, the emblem of chastity, another name for feminine purity. She represented marriage, the family, the poetry of home, as Antony and his kin had represented the morality of the foundling, and lawlessness. All Catholic and Classic France, all orthodox Switzerland, hymned the praises of the new dramatist and his play. At last Hugo had found his superior, Racine his equal. Even the critical Vinet joined in the great Hallelujah. He went into ecstasies over Ponsard's style: "This author spins gold as his Lucretia does wool &c."
Les Burgraves was hissed on the 7th of March 1843. On the 22nd of April of the same year Lucrèce was received on its first night with thunders of applause. So closely as this did the short-lived triumph of what went by the name of l'école du bon sens follow on the defeat of Romantic dramaticism. If the worthy Ponsard relied upon the verdict of his critics, Janin and the others (Théophile Gautier and Théophile Dondey alone protested), he must have believed that his fame was established for all time.
The Classic reaction had found its actress as well as its dramatist. In 1838 a young Jewess had made her début in the Theatre Français. She was then eighteen, an ignorant child who had played the harp and sung in the cafés and in the streets; but time proved Rachel to be a genius, the greatest actress France had ever known. And this great actress, as it happened, had a thorough distaste for the rôles with which the Romantic drama provided her, whilst she studied and played those of the old Classic repertory with such zeal and passion that she actually succeeded in doing what no one had believed possible namely, restoring their power of attraction to the tragedies which the Romantic School had disdainfully driven from the stage. Of what avail was it that Gautier wrung his hands! Iphigénie, Mérope, Émilia, Chimène, Phèdre, again trod the boards. And so nobly and naturally were they personated that an impressionable public was at times actually roused to a kind of fury with the authors and critics who had dared to throw contempt on these sacred national treasures. A nation is naturally rejoiced to learn that it has not been mistaken in the eminence of the men and works it has reverenced for centuries.
Although the title-rôle of Lucrèce had been written for her, Rachel at first refused to play it; but after the success of the drama at the Odéon she consented. The mood of the audience the first time she appeared in it has been described to me by an eye-witness. "We sat waiting in breathless expectation for the curtain to rise. It rose, and we saw Rachel as Lucretia sitting at her spinning-wheel among her maidens. The silence had been complete enough before; but when she raised her head and opened her lips to say the first words (to one of the slaves): Lève-toi, Laodice! there was such utter stillness that the fruit-sellers were heard crying their oranges in the market-place."
In their enthusiasm for Rachel the public did not realise that the Classic style in art was not really alive because a single genius for a time breathed life into the great works of a bygone age; and in their rejoicing over Ponsard they failed to understand how short his triumph must inevitably be. The Common-sense School, as its name prognosticates, never developed any vigorous originality. Ponsard himself was a writer of only second-rate talent. The youthful dramas of his gifted follower, Émile Augier (who dedicated his poems to him), imitate his sober spirit and style; but Augier's style changed as time went on.[5] Though the school, most praiseworthy in its intentions, by no means deserved the contemptuous attacks made on it by some of the irreconcilable younger Romanticists, including Vacquerie and Théodore de Banville, yet its historical significance is no more than this—it indicates the period when Romantic drama had outlived itself.