“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 arm of the actor who was playing Othello. “Eh bien, this soldier had illusion:  he believed that the action which was passing on the stage was true.”

Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy:  “It is written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to the eyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in different places.”  He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do not make any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic rather than dramatic.  He advises his readers to go and see Kean in “Richard” and “Othello”; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he has a great contempt for the French critics.  He appeals to the usages of the German and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and cites the great popularity of Walter Scott’s romances, which, he says, are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptions interspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy; for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, and especially