Philippiques_, directed against the
Regent) followed him in tragedies on classical subjects. If any piece
deserves to be distinguished above the rest, it is the _Manlius_
(1698) of La Fosse, a work--suggestive rather of Corneille than of
Racine--which was founded on the _Venice Preserved_ of Otway. The
art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The eighteenth century,
while preserving its form, thought to reanimate it by the provocatives
of scenic decoration and more rapid and more convulsive action.

PROSPER JOLYOT DE CREBILLON (1674-1762), a diligent reader of
seventeenth-century romances, transported the devices of romance,
its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its disguises, its surprises,
its discoveries, into the theatre, and substituted a tragedy of
violent situations for the tragedy of character. His _Rhadamiste et
Zenobie_ (1711), which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism,
notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult to follow,
was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To be atrocious within the
rules was to create a new and thrilling sensation. Torrents of tears
flowed for the unhappy heroine of La Motte's _Ines de Castro_ (1723),
secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned only when
the fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire's effort to renovate
classical tragedy was that of a writer who loved the theatre, first
for its own sake, afterwards as an instrument for influencing public
opinion, who conceived tragedy aright as the presentation of
character and passion seen in action. His art suffered from his
extreme facility, from his inability (except it be in _Zaire_) to
attain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to conquer his
spectators in the readiest ways, by striking situations, or, at a
later date, by the rhetoric of philosophical doctrine and sentiment.

There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside Voltaire. Piron
and Gresset are remembered, not by their tragedies, but each by a
single comedy. Marmontel's Memoirs live; his tales have a faded glory;
as for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed as the
curtain fell on his _Cleopatre_, was a sound critic of their
mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, wrote ill; as the
love of spectacle grew, he permitted his William Tell to shoot the
apple, and his widow of Malabar to die in flames upon the stage.

Saurin in _Spartacus_ (1760) declaimed and dissertated in the manner
of Voltaire. De