fixed.  The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.  Things are made so.  When the body changes, how could the coat not change?  The French of the nineteenth century can no more be the French of the eighteenth, than that is the French of the seventeenth, or than the French of the seventeenth is that of the sixteenth.  Montaigne’s language is not Rabelais’s, Pascal’s is not Montaigne’s, Montesquieu’s is not Pascal’s.  Each of the four languages, taken by itself, is admirable because it is original.  Every age has its own ideas; it must have also words adapted to those ideas.  Languages are like the sea, they move to and fro incessantly.  At certain times they leave one shore of the world of thought and overflow another.  All that their waves thus abandon dries up and vanishes.  It is in this wise that ideas vanish, that words disappear.  It is the same with human tongues as with everything.  Each age adds and takes away something.  What can be done?  It is the decree of fate.  In vain, therefore, should we seek to petrify the mobile physiognomy of our idiom in a fixed form.  In vain do our literary Joshuas cry out to the language to stand still; languages and the sun do not stand still.  The day when they become fixed, they are dead.—­That is why the French of a certain contemporary school is a dead language.

Such are, substantially, but without the more elaborate development which would make the evidence in their favour more complete, the present ideas of the author of this book concerning the drama.  He is far, however, from presuming to put forth his first dramatic essay as an emanation of these ideas, which, on the contrary, are themselves, it may be, simply results of its execution.  It would be very convenient for him, no doubt, and very clever, to rest his book on his preface, and to defend each by the other.  He prefers less cleverness and more frankness.  He proposes, therefore, to be the first to point out the extreme tenuity of the thread connecting this preface with his drama His first plan, dictated by his laziness, was to give the work to the public entirely unattended el demonio sin las cuernas, as Yriarte said It was only after he had duly brought it to a close, that at the solicitations of a few friends, blinded by their friendship, no doubt, he determined to reckon with himself in a preface—­to draw, so to speak, a map of the poetic voyage he had made, to take account of the acquisitions, good or bad, that he had brought home, and of the new aspects in which the domain of art had presented itself to his mind Someone will take advantage of this admission, doubtless to repeat the reproach already uttered by a critic in Germany, that he has written “a treatise in defence of his poetry.”  What does it matter?  In the first place he was much more inclined to demolish treatises on poetry than to write them.  And then, would it not he better always to write treatises