CHAPTER 4 a New and Important Political and Artistic Battle Was

CHAPTER 4 A new and important political and artistic battle was brewing in Paris. Romanticism was exploding into being in France, thanks in part to the highly articulate, imaginative, and energetic Victor Hugo and to the more subdued and restrained Alfred de Vigny. Hugo toppled the rigid and outworn classical rules regulating French theater and poetry in the outspoken Préface to his drama Cromwell (1827). Not only did he make short shrift of France’s moth-eaten classical theatrical agenda, but introduced sweeping new literary concepts of his own. Art must be realistic, he maintained. It must be “a copy of nature,” for “everything that exists in nature exists in art.” Since nothing is static, he further maintained, language, like the human spirit, is fluid and continuously on the march. Almost overnight, Hugo’s Preface became the new school’s manifesto. The young Alphonse de Lamartine joined the Romantics on the move. While form-wise nothing was really new in his volume of poetic Méditations (1823), everything about it was different. Bereft of old guard dicta, his poignant, fluid, and incantatory voice stirred his readers deeply. He spoke to the heart, to emotions, to feelings. The more symbolic and philosophical Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826) by the reticent and highly introverted Alfred de Vigny, made their mark as well on readers of the day. Hugo had met Vigny in 1820 (Ernest Dupuy, Alfred de Vigny, et Victor Hugo, 226). He was impressed by his poetic talents, most particularly his translation into French of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He even defended his new friend’s work against an ever deprecating press (Dupuy, 229). During one of Vigny’s visits to Hugo and his wife, Adèle, it is believed that the leader of the Romantics read him his as yet unpublished volume of poems, Les Orientales, and fragments of his forthcoming drama, Marion Delorme (Dupuy, 271). Another Romantic, the handsome lady’s man, Alfred de Musset, recited his love poems unrestrainedly to the world at large. Many were directed to George Sand. The prolific novelist, Honoré de Balzac, was of a different ilk, offering his readers networks of types, ranging from the violently passionate, to the prudishly restrained, the 84 delight-fully kind and generous, to the insidiously evil. The poet, writer, and ballet librettist, Théophile Gautier, disclosed his penchant for the macabre and the fantastic in his short stories. As for Gérard de Nerval, the reticent poet, mystic, and future author of the otherworldly tale, Aurélia, he was more of a subtle listener. The flamboyant composer, Hector Berlioz, inspired by Scott, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Heine, among others, set the world of French music aflame with his tone poems, Waverley, Les Francs Juges, and King Lear. The painter Eugène Delacroix, foremost exponent of Romantic art, spoke poignantly, imagistically, and dramatically through his powerful subjects and colorations in The Massacre at Chios, which was so brutally attacked by classicists labeling it “monstrous, ugly, ignoble.” He was nothing but a “barbarian,” an “enraged maniac, who did not even know how to draw” (Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, 201). Romantics had faith in the future as they saw it. Each in his or her own way believed he would and could change the world. They cried out in unison, “Liberate the written word,” be it in the novel, theater, poetry, painting, or music, from its stodgy, restrictive, innocuous rules. “Speak your feelings!” “Let imagination and freedom of purpose reign!” These creative youths were only in the planning stage when a new battle began brewing in Paris. Censors took it upon themselves to close down plays. Freedom of expression was crushed. Young idealists began agitating. The ambiance in theatrical circles had become deleterious to innovation. Was the monarchy reverting to pre-Revolutionary antics, they asked? Victor Hugo’s new play, Hernani, starring Mlle Mars and Firmin, was scheduled to open at the Comédie-Française on the night of February 25, 1830. Few in the administration realized the degree of discontent and violence that was to strike the state-run theater on this occasion. Enraged by the changes and corrections the censors forced Hugo to make prior to allowing Hernani to be performed, the volatile author took up the cudgel. Hugo felt secure in the thought that his friends would not only side with him, but would come to the theater en masse to back him up. His growing reputation as poet and as the author of Cromwell gave him the courage to declare open warfare on the classicists. As chief proponent of the Romantic movement, he was .

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