story at once; that cry of anguish is the resume of the drama and of
life.

It is a striking fact that all these contrasts are met with in the
poets themselves, taken as men. By dint of meditating upon existence,
of laying stress upon its bitter irony, of pouring floods of sarcasm
and raillery upon our infirmities, the very men who make us laugh so
heartily become profoundly sad. These Democrituses are Heraclituses as
well. Beaumarchais was surly, Moliere gloomy, Shakespeare melancholy.

The fact is, then, that the grotesque is one of the supreme beauties
of the drama. It is not simply an appropriate element of it, but is
oftentimes a necessity. Sometimes it appears in homogeneous masses, in
entire characters, as Daudin, Prusias, Trissotin, Brid'oison, Juliet's
nurse; sometimes impregnated with terror, as Richard III, Begears,
Tartuffe, Mephistopheles; sometimes, too, with a veil of grace and
refinement, as Figaro, Osric, Mercutio, Don Juan. It finds its way
in everywhere; for just as the most commonplace have their occasional
moments of sublimity, so the most exalted frequently pay tribute
to the trivial and ridiculous. Thus, often impalpable, often
imperceptible, it is always present on the stage, even when it says
nothing, even when it keeps out of sight. Thanks to it, there is no
thought of monotony. Sometimes it injects laughter, sometimes horror,
into tragedy. It will bring Romeo face to face with the apothecary,
Macbeth with the witches, Hamlet with the grave-diggers. Sometimes
it may, without discord, as in the scene between King Lear and his
jester, mingle its shrill voice with the most sublime, the most
dismal, the dreamiest music of the soul.

That is what Shakespeare alone among all has succeeded in doing, in
a fashion of his own, which it would be no less fruitless than
impossible to imitate--Shakespeare, the god of the stage, in whom,
as in a trinity, the three characteristic geniuses of our stage,
Corneille, Moliere, Beaumarchais, seem united.

We see how quickly the arbitrary distinction between the species of
poetry vanishes before common sense and taste. No less easily one
might demolish the alleged rule of the two unities. We say _two_ and
not _three_ unities, because unity of plot or of _ensemble_, the only
true and well founded one, was long ago removed from the sphere of
discussion.

Distinguished contemporaries, foreigners and Frenchmen, have already
attacked, both in theory and in practice