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 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