and accompaniments of a man, remain outside of the classic theory.  To secure the admission of some of them required the genius of Molière, the fullness of his conception, the wealth of his observation, the extreme freedom of his pen.  It is equally true again that he often omits them, and that, in other cases, he introduces only a small number of them, because he avoids giving to these general characters a richness and complexity that might interfere with the story.  The simpler the theme the clearer its development, the first duty of the author throughout this literature being to clearly develop the restricted theme of which he makes a selection.

There is, accordingly, a radical defect in the classic spirit, the defect of its qualities, and which, at first kept within proper bounds, contributes towards the production of its purest master-pieces, but which, in accordance with the universal law, goes on increasing and turns into a vice through the natural effect of age, use, and success.  Contracted at the start, it is to become yet more so.  In the eighteenth century the description of real life, of a specific person, just as he is in nature and in history, that is to say, an undefined unit, a rich plexus, a complete organism of peculiarities and traits, superposed, entangled and co-ordinated, is improper.  The capacity to receive and contain all these is wanting.  Whatever can be discarded is cast aside, and to such an extent that nothing is left at last but a condensed extract, an evaporated residuum, an almost empty name, in short, what is called a hollow abstraction.  The only characters in the eighteenth century exhibiting any life are the off-hand sketches, made in passing and as if contraband, by Voltaire, Baron de Thundertentronk and Milord Watthen, the lesser figures in his stories, and five or six portraits of secondary rank, Turcaret, Gil Blas, Marianne, Manon Lescaut, Rameau, and Figaro, two or three of the rough sketches of Crébillon the younger and of Collé, all so many works in which sap flows through a familiar knowledge of things, comparable with those of the minor masters in painting, Watteau, Fragonard, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, Lancret, Pater, and Beaudouin, and which, accepted with difficulty, or as a surprise, by the official drawing room are still to subsist after the grander and soberer canvases shall have become moldy through their wearisome exhalations.  Everywhere else the sap dries up, and, instead of blooming plants, we encounter only flowers of painted paper.  What are all the serious poems, from the “la Henriade” of Voltaire to the “Mois” by Roucher or the “l’Imagination” by Delille, but so many pieces of rhetoric garnished with rhymes?  Examine the innumerable tragedies and comedies of which Grimm and Collé gives us mortuary extracts, even the meritorious works of Voltaire and Crébillon, and later, those of authors of repute, Du Belloy, Laharpe, Ducis, and Marie Chénier?  Eloquence, art, situations, correct verse, all exist