This Melpomene, as she is called, would shudder at the thought of touching a chronicle.  She leaves to the costumer the duty of learning the period of the dramas she writes.  In her eyes history is bad form and bad taste.  How, for example, can one tolerate kings and queens who swear?  They must be elevated from mere regal dignity to tragic dignity.  It was in a promotion of this sort that she exalted Henri IV.  It was thus that the people’s king, purified by M. Legouve, found his “ventre-saint-gris” ignominiously banished from his mouth by two sentences, and that he was reduced, like the girl in the old fabliau, to the necessity of letting fall from those royal lips only pearls and sapphires and rubies:  the apotheosis of falsity, in very truth.

The fact is that nothing is so commonplace as this conventional refinement and nobility.  Nothing original, no imagination, no invention in this style; simply what one has seen everywhere—­rhetoric, bombast, commonplaces, flowers of college eloquence, poetry after the style of Latin verses.  The poets of this school are eloquent after the manner of stage princes and princesses, always sure of finding in the costumer’s labelled cases, cloaks and pinchbeck crowns, which have no other disadvantage than that of having been used by everybody.  If these poets never turn the leaves of the Bible, it is not because they have not a bulky book of their own, the Dictionnaire de rimes.  That is the source of their poetry—­fontes aquarum.

It will be seen that, in all this, nature and truth get along as best they can.  It would be great good luck if any remnants of either should survive in this cataclysm of false art, false style, false poetry.  This is what has caused the errors of several of our distinguished reformers.  Disgusted by the stiffness, the ostentation, the pomposo, of this alleged dramatic poetry, they have concluded that the elements of our poetic language were incompatible with the natural and the true.  The Alexandrine had wearied them so often, that they condemned it without giving it a hearing, so to speak, and decided, a little hastily, perhaps, that the drama should be written in prose.

They were mistaken.  If in fact the false is predominant in the style as well as in the action of certain French tragedies, it is not the verses that should be held responsible therefore, but the versifiers.  It was needful to condemn, not the form employed, but those who employed it:  the workmen, not the tool.

To convince one’s self how few obstacles the nature of our poetry places in the way of the free expression of all that is true, we should study our verse, not in Racine, perhaps, but often in Corneille and always in Moliere.  Racine, a divine poet, is elegiac, lyric, epic; Moliere is dramatic.  It is time to deal sternly with the criticisms heaped upon that admirable style by the wretched taste of the last century, and to proclaim aloud that Moliere occupies the topmost pinnacle of our drama, not only as a poet, but also as a writer. Palmas vere habet iste duas.