and the true through the great—such, is, therefore, according to the author of this drama, the proper end of the poet on the stage,—always, be it said, upholding such other ideas as he may have developed elsewhere touching these matters. And those two words, great and true, contain everything. Truth contains morality, the great contains the beautiful.
This end it will not be supposed that he has the presumption to believe that he has ever attained; but he may be permitted to do himself the justice to say thus publicly that he has never sought any other end on the stage down to this day. The new drama that has recently been performed is a further effort toward that radiant goal. What is, in truth, the thought that he has tried to represent in "Mary Tudor?" It is this: a queen who is a woman. Great as queen; true as woman.
As he has already said elsewhere, the drama as he conceives it, the drama as he would like to see it created by a man of genius, the drama according to the nineteenth century, is not the lofty, impossible, sublime, Spanish tragi-comedy of Corneille; it is not the abstract, amorous, imaginative, and discreetly elegiac tragedy of Racine; it is not the profound, sagacious, keen-sighted, too pitilessly satirical comedy of Molière; it is not the philosophically inclined tragedy of Voltaire; it is not the revolutionary comedy of Beaumarchais; it is no more than all these, but it is all these at the same time; or, to speak more truly, it is none of them. It is not, as in the works of these great men, a single aspect of things constantly and persistently placed before the eyes, but it is everything considered at once in all its aspects. If there were a man living to-day who could reconstruct the drama as we understand it, that drama would be the human heart, the human brain, human passion, the human will; it would be the past revived for the behoof of the present; it would be the history that our fathers made placed side by side with the history that we are making; it would be a commingling on the stage of all things that are commingled in life; it would be an émeute here, and a love-talk there, and in the latter a lesson for the people, and in the former a cry for the heart; it would be laughter and tears; it would be good, evil, the high, the low, fatality, provi-
