from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart.  Nevertheless, he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere.  He blames Schiller for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner’s “Luther” as nearer to the masterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller’s tragedies are.  He wants the new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modern conditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, without having the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes.

In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionary of the French language, happened to arrive at the new word romanticism which needed defining.  This was the signal for a heated debate in that venerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare a manifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of the Institute on the 24th of April next.  It was in response to this manifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his “Racine et Shakspere” (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled “Qu’est ce que le Romanticisme?” [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intended to explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist their sympathies on the romantic side.  “Shakspere,” he says, “the hero of romantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrote for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age questi tempi della virtu sconosciutta.”  Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and effeminate court.  The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on the Italians.  The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the footprints of Racine.  In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau.  He says that English poetry since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious, more passionate.  It needed other subjects than those required by the witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians.  It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the higher classes of society to have passions.  The Greek and Latin classics could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as artificial, and as far removed from the naive presentation of the passions, as the eighteenth century itself.  The court of Augustus was no more natural than that of Louis XIV.  Accordingly the most successful poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of bel esprit.