l aid of Fontenelle, was part of
that battle between Moderns and Ancients with which the literary
activity of the century had opened. The brilliant success of the
tragedies of Voltaire had restored the lustre of the conventional drama,
though Voltaire infused an element of the romantic under the severity of
the old forms. But the drama had become even less like Sophocles and
Euripides in _Zaire_ than in _Phedre_ or _Iphigenie_. Voltaire intended
to constitute the French drama into an independent form. He expected to
be told that he was not like Sophocles, and he did not abstain from some
singularly free railing against Euripides. The Greek pieces often
smacked too much of the tone of the fair to satisfy him; they were too
familiar and colloquial for a taste that had been made fastidious by the
court-pieces of Lewis XIV. Diderot was kept free from such deplorable
criticism as this by feeling that the Greek drama was true to the
sentiment of the age that gave it birth, and that the French drama, if
not in the hands of Racine, still even in the hands of Voltaire, and
much more in the hands of such men as Lagrange-Chancel and the elder
Crebillon, was true to no sentiment save one purely literary,
artificial, and barren. He insists on the hopelessness of the stage,
unless men prepared themselves at every part for a grand return to
nature. We have seen what is his counsel to the actor. He preaches in
the same key to the scene-painter and the maker of costumes.
Scene-painting ought to be more rigorously true than any other kind of
picture. Let there be no distraction, no extraneous suggestion, to
interfere with the impression intended by the poet. Have you a salon to
represent? Let it be that of a man of taste and no more: no ostentation
and no gilding, unless the situation expressly demands the contrary.

In the dresses the same rule holds good. Under robes that are overladen
with gold lace, I only see a rich man; what I want to see is a man.
Pretty and simple draperies of severe tints are what we need, not a
mass of tinsel and embroidery. "A courageous actress has just got rid of
her panier, and nobody has found her any the worse for it. Ah, if she
only dared one day to show herself on the stage with all the nobility
and simplicity of adjustment that her characters demand; nay, in the
disorder into which she would be thrown by an event so terrible as the
death of a husband, the loss of a son, and the other catastrophes of the