of
his character. According to the incidents of the piece, each
passion might take the ascendant, none being represented as
irresistible; and the moral law which predominated over the
drama, did not prevent this play of the passions--it being
visibly suspended during the whole piece over the heads of
the personages, and receiving its fulfilment only at the
close. In the present day dramatic characters are composed
differently. Instead of representing the whole of the
character, and the struggle between its good and evil
passions, one only passion is selected, which is made
violent, irresistible, fatal, the absolute mistress of all
the others; that is to say, a part is taken instead of the
whole. At the same time the moral law which, in the ancient
drama, (_i.e._ the drama of Racine and Corneille,) sustained
also a struggle against the passions--this law which those
even avowed who transgressed it, which had always its place
in the piece, whether through virtue or remorse--this law
also disappears before the ascendency of the sovereign
passion. No counterpoise of any kind, whether on the side of
rival passions or on the side of duty. What remains, then,
to struggle against this arbitrary passion? Nothing but
chance--circumstance--the hazard of events. And thus it is
that, in the modern drama, the interest resides rather in
the strange complication of events than in the shock of
opposite passions. The poet has only the power of chance, a
power sovereignly capricious, to contend against the passion
he has chosen to represent. And thus it is that the modern
drama has something also of arbitrary and fantastic.
Incidents and theatrical effects are accumulated, but the
incidents do not spring from the natural movement of the
passions brought upon the stage; they have no longer their
cause in the characters of the drama; they issue from the
fancy of the poet, who, feeling the necessity of arousing
his spectators from time to time, complicates the action
after a strange fashion, and aims always at surprise.

M. Girardin has a lecture upon suicides, in which he attacks that
sentimentality--a mixture, in reality, of weakness and impatience--which
in modern literature, and in modern life, often conducts to suicide. The
following passage will be acknowledge