ifold harmonies, the
pleasure of our ear, to accompany, so to say, with their rich
orchestration in English, German, Swedish, Arabic, Italian and French,
the music of our pure Attic. You will imagine nothing more fascinating
than this renaissance and transfiguration of forgotten idioms, once the
glory of antiquity. As for our dramas and our poems which are often at
once the collective and individual work of a school, incarnate in its
chief and animated with a single idea like the sculptures of the
Parthenon, there is nothing comparable in the masterpieces of Sophocles
or Homer. What the extinct species of nature formerly alive are to our
painters and sculptors, the no less extinct sentiments of former human
nature are to our dramatists. Jealousy, ambition, patriotism,
fanaticism, the mad lust of battle, the exalted love of family, the
pride of an illustrious name, all the vanished passions of the heart
when called up upon the stage, no longer cause tears or terror in a
single soul, any more than the heraldic tigers and lions painted up on
our public squares frighten our children. But in a new accent with quite
a different ring, they speak to us their ancient language; and to tell
the truth, they are only a grand piano on which our new passions play.
Now there is but a single passion for all its thousand names, as there
is above but a single sun. It is love, the soul of our soul and source
of our art. That is the true sun which will never fail us, which is
never weary of touching and reanimating with the light of its
countenance its lower creations of yore, the first-born incarnations of
the heart, in order to make them young once more, in order to re-gild
them with its dawns, and reincarnadine them with its setting splendours;
almost in the same fashion as it sufficed the other sun to compass with
a single ray that august summons to deck the earth, addressed to every
ancient plant of the field, awakening it to bloom anew, that grand
yearly transformation scene, so deceptive and entrancing, which they
named the Spring, when there was still a Spring to name!

And so for our highly refined writers, all that I have just praised a
moment ago has no value if their heart is left untouched. They would
give for one true and personal note all these feats of skill and sleight
of hand. What they look for under the most grandiose conceptions and
stage effects, and under the most audacious novelties in rhyme; what
they adore on bende