nts
and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals,
would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it were
otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose that we would have tried
Schiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter of
it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a
hundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_."

To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society
people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin.

"Sir," said the director, "your young society people don't go into the
parterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at the
theatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight."
Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found their
interest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of their
own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on the
classic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talma
should ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth,"
abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen,
28,000,000 men, _i.e._, 18,000,000 in England and 10,000,000 in America,
admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English,'
he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetry
truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived from
the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" A great part of "Racine et
Shakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unities
of time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramatic
illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhal
maintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragedies
than in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument,
which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge,
though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give a
freshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his little
treatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_
stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a
Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "It
shall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in my
presence," and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an