(1904.)

THE SUPREME LEADERS

In the fading annals of French Romanticism it is recorded that at the first performance of an early play of the elder Dumas at the Odeon, a band of enthusiasts, as misguided as they were youthful, were so completely carried away that they formed a ring and danced in derision around a bust of Racine which adorned that theater, declaring boisterously that the elder dramatist was disgraced and disestablished:  ’Enfonce Racine!’

This puerile exploit took place not fourscore years ago, and already has this play of Dumas disappeared beneath the wave of oblivion, its very name being recalled only by special students of the history of the French stage, while the Comedie-Francaise continues, year in and year out, to act the best of Racine’s tragedies, now nearly two centuries and a half since they were first performed.

Again, in the records of the British theater of the eighteenth century, we find mention of a countryman of John Home, who attended the first performance of the reverend author’s ‘Douglas.’  The play so worked upon the feelings of this perfervid Scot that he was forced to cry out triumphantly:  “Whaur’s your Wully Shakspere noo?”

And yet this Scottish masterpiece failed to establish itself finally on the stage; and it has long since past out of men’s memories, leaving behind it only a quotation or two and a speech for boys to spout.  So in every age the disinterested observer can take note of the rise and fall of some unlucky author or artist, painter or poet, widely and loudly proclaimed as a genius, only to be soon forgotten, often in his own generation.  He may have soared aloft for a brief moment with starry scintillations, like a rocket, only at last to come down like the stick, empty and unnoticed.

The echoes of the old battle of the Ancients and Moderns have not died away, even yet; and there is never a time when some ardent disciple is not insisting that his immediate master must be admitted as one of the immortals, and when some shrill youth is not ready to make room for the new-comer by ousting any number of the consecrated chiefs of art.  Now and again, of course, the claim is allowed; the late arrival is made welcome in the Pantheon; and there is a new planet on high.  But most of those who are urged for this celestial promotion prove to be mere shooting-stars at best, vanishing into space before there is opportunity to examine their spectrum and to compare it with that of the older orbs which have made the sky glorious thru the long centuries.