Let us repeat, verse on the stage should lay aside all self-love, all exigence, all coquetry.  It is simply a form, and a form which should admit everything, which has no laws to impose on the drama, but on the contrary should receive everything from it, to be transmitted to the spectator—­French, Latin, texts of laws, royal oaths, popular phrases, comedy, tragedy, laughter, tears, prose and poetry.  Woe to the poet whose verse does not speak out!  But this form is a form of bronze which encases the thought in its metre beneath which the drama is indestructible, which engraves it more deeply on the actor’s mind, warns him of what he omits and of what he adds, prevents him from changing his role, from substituting himself for the author, makes each word sacred, and causes what the poet has said to remain vivid a long while in the hearer’s memory.  The idea, when steeped in verse, suddenly assumes a more incisive, more brilliant quality.

One feels that prose, which is necessarily more timid, obliged to wean the drama from anything like epic or lyric poetry, reduced to dialogue and to matter-of-fact, is a long way from possessing these resources.  It has much narrower wings.  And then, too, it is much more easy of access; mediocrity is at its ease in prose; and for the sake of a few works of distinction such as have appeared of late, the art would very soon be overloaded with abortions and embryos.  Another faction of the reformers incline to drama written in both prose and verse, as Shakespeare composed it.  This method has its advantages.  There might, however, be some incongruity in the transitions from one form to the other; and when a tissue is homogeneous it is much stouter.  However, whether the drama should be written in prose is only a secondary question.  The rank of a work is certain to be fixed, not according to its form, but according to its intrinsic value.  In questions of this sort, there is only one solution.  There is but one weight that can turn the scale in the balance of art—­that is genius.

Meanwhile, the first, the indispensable merit of a dramatic writer, whether he write in prose or verse, is correctness.  Not a mere superficial correctness, the merit or defect of the descriptive school, which makes Lhomond and Restaut the two wings of its Pegasus; but that intimate, deep-rooted, deliberate correctness, which is permeated with the genius of a language, which has sounded its roots and searched its etymology; always unfettered, because it is sure of its footing, and always more in harmony with the logic of the language.  Our Lady Grammar leads the one in leading-strings; the other holds grammar in leash.  It can venture anything, can create or invent its style; it has a right to do so.  For, whatever certain men may have said who did not think what they were saying, and among whom we must place, notably, him who writes these lines, the French tongue is not fixed and never will be.  A language does not become