The fact is, then, that the grotesque is one of the supreme beauties of the drama.  It is not simply an appropriate element of it, but is oftentimes a necessity.  Sometimes it appears in homogeneous masses, in entire characters, as Daudin, Prusias, Trissotin, Brid’oison, Juliet’s nurse; sometimes impregnated with terror, as Richard III, Begears, Tartuffe, Mephistopheles; sometimes, too, with a veil of grace and refinement, as Figaro, Osric, Mercutio, Don Juan.  It finds its way in everywhere; for just as the most commonplace have their occasional moments of sublimity, so the most exalted frequently pay tribute to the trivial and ridiculous.  Thus, often impalpable, often imperceptible, it is always present on the stage, even when it says nothing, even when it keeps out of sight.  Thanks to it, there is no thought of monotony.  Sometimes it injects laughter, sometimes horror, into tragedy.  It will bring Romeo face to face with the apothecary, Macbeth with the witches, Hamlet with the grave-diggers.  Sometimes it may, without discord, as in the scene between King Lear and his jester, mingle its shrill voice with the most sublime, the most dismal, the dreamiest music of the soul.

That is what Shakespeare alone among all has succeeded in doing, in a fashion of his own, which it would be no less fruitless than impossible to imitate—­Shakespeare, the god of the stage, in whom, as in a trinity, the three characteristic geniuses of our stage, Corneille, Moliere, Beaumarchais, seem united.

We see how quickly the arbitrary distinction between the species of poetry vanishes before common sense and taste.  No less easily one might demolish the alleged rule of the two unities.  We say two and not three unities, because unity of plot or of ensemble, the only true and well founded one, was long ago removed from the sphere of discussion.

Distinguished contemporaries, foreigners and Frenchmen, have already attacked, both in theory and in practice that fundamental law of the pseudo-Aristotelian code.  Indeed, the combat was not likely to be a long one.  At the first blow it cracked, so worm eaten was that timber of the old scholastic hovel!

The strange thing is that the slaves of routine pretend to rest their rule of the two unities on probability, whereas reality is the very thing that destroys it.  Indeed, what could be more improbable and absurd than this porch or peristyle or ante-chamber—­vulgar places where our tragedies are obliging enough to develop themselves; whither conspirators come, no one knows whence, to declaim against the tyrant, and the tyrant to declaim against the conspirators, each in turn, as if they had said to one another in bucolic phrase—­

  Alternis cantemus, amant alterna Camenae.