is in bad tone and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens who
swear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their royal dignity to
the dignity of tragedy. . . . It is thus that the king of the people
(Henri IV.) polished by M. Legouve, has seen his _ventre-saint-gris_
shamefully driven from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced,
like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from this royal
mouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires--all of them false, to say the
truth." It seems incredible to an Englishman, but it is nevertheless
true that at the first representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simple
question and answer

"Est il minuit?--Minuit bientot"

raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the opposing factions
of classics and romantics "fought three days over this hemistich. It was
thought trivial, familiar, out of place; a king asks what time it is like
a common citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, _midnight_.
Well done! Now if he had only used some fine periphrasis, _e.g._:

"----l'heure
Atteindra bientot sa derniere demeure.[16]

"If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they endured
very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poetic
words--lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, those
soarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetry
athwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in
our great authors of the eighteenth century." Gautier gives, as one
reason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, the
circumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed with
technical terms, the _mot propre_ had nothing shocking for them; while
their special education as artists having put them into intimate relation
with nature, "they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of the
new poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesque
details so disagreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine the
storms that broke out in the parterre of the Theatre Francais, when the
'Moor of Venice,' translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth,
reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (_mouchoir_) prudently
denominated _bandeau_ (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere
imitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called 'the sounding
brass'; the sea was 'the humid element,' or 'the liquid element,' and so
on.