- Racine et Shakespeare (1818-1825) et autres textes de théorie romantique
Michel Crouzet is unquestionably the most acute and scholarly critic of Stendhal since Georges Blin. Famous for the number, length and detail of his studies, this copiousness is the result of a passionate refusal to write himself elegantly out of the corners which Stendhal so frequently creates, as some rivals do. No one tackling the challenges set by this writer can afford to overlook the nine volumes and many articles published by Crouzet between 1981 and 1987 on Stendhalian reason, grace, esthetics, language, nature, italianité, treacherous protagonists, the Vie de Henry Brulard and Lucien Leuwen. Nor does Crouzet's latest offering disappoint. The two pamphlets of 1823 and 1825 which make up Racine et Shakespeare are here republished in the first full critical edition since 1925 (reprinted in the Cercle du Bibliophile edition), and Crouzet has not only brought Pierre Martino's work richly up to date but also framed it usefully with the three Romantic pamphlets which Stendhal wrote earlier in Milan, his brief notes of 1823 towards [End Page 229] a theory of laughter and his reply to Louis-Simon Auger's attack in 1824 on romanticism in the Academy. The introduction to each of these works is precise and pertinent, and the annotations wide-ranging, but the editor also gives us two long essays on Stendhal's views on laughter and on the reforms desirable in the theatre. Both of these are outstandingly well-informed and the second especially original. No one has brought out so precisely the roots of Stendhal's ideas on the theatre in the eighteenth century and how close he was in his ideas to Marmontel, Mercier and even (in spite of demurrals) to Staël and A. W. Schlegel. No one has seen how precisely focused his thinking was on the specific pleasures of theatrical illusion and on the intrusive reminders of manipulative authors and sclerotic traditions which tended to destroy these in neoclassical theatre: the artificial plots from myth, the declamation of pompous verse, the mannered, self-conscious styles of acting. Stendhal would have none of all this, but even so he refused to resort either to the pettiness and pessimism of the bourgeois drama of earlier reformers or to that bald juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy sought by Hugo and his friends. Stendhal did agree with them that history best supplied the subjects liable to involve a now more diverse audience, but he wished to maintain the generic separation of tragedy and comedy, and sought, instead of their fusion in the Romantic drame, a subtle cross-fertilization of each, as suggested by Shakespeare. In tragedy, more ordinary people would speak in prose and be depicted with marked irony. In comedy, characters would be handled with more touching sympathy than Molière could muster in his despair. Ideally, the world was to be mocked and bewailed elegantly, from that consoling distance which Stendhal himself finally achieved in La Chartreuse de Parme. This essay by Crouzet alone makes the volume worth buying, quite apart from the exemplary presentation of the texts. [End Page 230]