venture on the first step toward that goal of modern art at which it will be impossible to arrive in two hours, that profound, insatiable interest which results from a vast, lifelike and multiform plot.  “But,” someone will say, “this performance, consisting of a single play, would be monotonous, would seem terribly long”—­Not so.  On the contrary it would lose its present monotony and tediousness.  For what is done now?  The spectator’s entertainment is divided into two or three sharply defined parts.  At first he is given two hours of serious enjoyment, then one hour of hilarious enjoyment, these, with the hour of entr’ actes, which we do not include in the enjoyment make four hours What would the romantic drama do?  It would mingle and blend artistically these two kinds of enjoyment.  It would lead the audience constantly from sobriety to laughter, from mirthful excitement to heart breaking emotion, “from grave to gay, from pleasant to severe.”  For, as we have already proved, the drama is the grotesque in conjunction with the sublime, the soul within the body, it is tragedy beneath comedy.  Do you not see that, by affording you repose from one impression by means of another, by sharpening the tragic upon the comic, the merry upon the terrible, and at need calling in the charms of the opera, these performances, while presenting but one play, would be worth a multitude of others?  The romantic stage would make a piquant, savoury, diversified dish of that which, on the classic stage, is a drug divided into two pills.

The author has soon come to the end of what he had to say to the reader.  He has no idea how the critics will greet this drama and these thoughts, summarily set forth, stripped of their corollaries and ramifications, put together currente calamo, and in haste to have done with them.  Doubtless they will appear to “the disciples of La Harpe” most impudent and strange.  But if perchance, naked and undeveloped as they are, they should have the power to start upon the road of truth this public whose education is so far advanced, and whose minds so many notable writings, of criticism or of original thought, books or newspapers, have already matured for art, let the public follow that impulsion, caring naught whether it comes from a man unknown, from a voice with no authority, from a work of little merit.  It is a copper bell which summons the people to the true temple and the true God.

There is to-day the old literary regime as well as the old political regime.  The last century still weighs upon the present one at almost every point.  It is notably oppressive in the matter of criticism.  For instance, you find living men who repeat to you this definition of taste let fall by Voltaire:  “Taste in poetry is no different from what it is in women’s clothes.”  Taste, then, is coquetry.  Remarkable words, which depict marvellously the painted, mouchete, powdered poetry of the eighteenth century—­that literature in paniers, pompons and falbalas.  They give an admirable resume of an age with which the loftiest geniuses could not come in contact without becoming petty, in one respect or another; of an age when Montesquieu was able and apt to produce Le Temple de Gnide, Voltaire Le Temple du Gout, Jean-Jacques Le Devin du Village.