distributed only to tried friends of the cause--sure men and true. The
tickets themselves were little squares of red paper, stamped in the
corner with a mysterious countersign--the Spanish word _hierro_, iron,
not only symbolizing the hero of the drama, but hinting that the
ticket-holder was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly,
bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recipient of these
tokens of confidence gave two of them to a couple of artists--ferocious
romantics, who would gladly have eaten an Academician, if necessary; two
he gave to a brace of young poets who secretly practised _la rime riche_,
_le mot propre_, and _la metaphore exacte_: the other two he reserved for
his cousin and himself. The general attitude of the audience on the
first nights was hostile, "two systems, two parties, two armies, two
civilizations even--it is not saying too much--confronted one
another, . . . and it was not hard to see that yonder young man with long
hair found the smoothly shaved gentleman opposite a disastrous idiot; and
that he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The
classical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish local
colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches
with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of
Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun--_de ta
suite, j'en suis_--which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were
captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equal
obstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the
enemy would retake the next day, and from which it became necessary to
dislodge them. What uproar, what cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes of
bravos, thunders of applause! The heads of parties blackguarded each
other like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. . . . For this
generation 'Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the contemporaries of
Corneille. All that was young, brave, amorous, poetic, caught the
inspiration of it. Those fine exaggerations, heroic, Castilian, that
superb Spanish emphasis; that language so proud and high even in its
familiarity, those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw us into an
ecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady poetry." The victory in the
end was with the new school. Musset, writing in 1838, says that the
tragedies of Corneille and Racine had disappeared from the French st