y, him who writes these lines, the French tongue is not
_fixed_ and never will be. A language does not become 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