f the age of Louis XIV. is a true elevation, but its
heights do not lose themselves in a sphere peopled by the myths of a
national religion, still less in the region of great thoughts which ask
Heaven to stoop to the aspirations and the failures of man. The
personages of this drama are conventional like its themes, but the
convention is with itself only; Orestes and Iphigenia have not brought
with them the cries of the stern goddesses and the flame on the altar of
Artemis; their passions like their speech are cadenced by a modern
measure. In construction, the simplicity and regularity of the ancient
models are stereotyped into a rigid etiquette by the exigencies of the
court-theatre, which is but an apartment of the palace. The unities of
time and place, with the Greeks mere rules of convenience, French
tragedy imposes upon itself as a permanent yoke. The Euripidean prologue
is judiciously exchanged for the exposition of the first act, and the
lyrical element essential to Greek tragedy is easily suppressed in its
would-be copy; lyrical passages still occur in some of Corneille's early
masterpieces,[108] but the chorus is consistently banished, to reappear
only in Racine's latest works[109] as a scholastic experiment
appropriate to a conventual atmosphere. Its uses for explanation and
comment are served by the expedient, which in its turn becomes
conventional, of the conversations with _confidants_ and _confidantes_,
which more than sufficiently supply the foil of general sentiments. The
epical element is allowed full play in narrative passages, more
especially in those which relate parts of the catastrophe,[110] and,
while preserving the stage intact from realisms, suit themselves to the
generally rhetorical character of this species of the tragic drama. This
character impressed itself more and more upon the tragic art of a
rhetorical nation in an age when the loftiest themes were in the pulpit
receiving the most artistic oratorical treatment, and developed in the
style of French classical tragedy the qualities which cause it to become
something between prose and poetry--or to appear (in the phrase of a
French critic) like prose in full dress. The force of this description
is borne out by the fact that the distinction between the versification
of French tragedy and that of French comedy seems at times
imperceptible.

Voltaire.

The universal genius of Voltaire found it necessary to shine in all
branches of literat