Note 8 — Chapter IV

It is especially against tragedies in verse that the umpires of good taste to-day protest. Their repugnance in respect of poetry ever outweighs their love for romanticism. If, in that series of chapters—entitled scenes—whose whole forms a novel called a drama, which is sold under the title of Louis XI.; if, in Louis XI., the Scottish prose of Sir Walter Scott had been put into rhymed verse; that drama would not have been more kindly received by them than a posthumous tragedy of Racine, although common sense would be scarcely more respected there than in a melodrama. It is to the absence of rhyme also that Émilia owes the favour with which these gentlemen have honoured it. When he had heard the reading of that work, one of the most influential members of the tribunal by which it had been judged, exclaimed: "The problem is solved! The problem is solved! We have at last a tragedy in prose!" The Comédiens Français formerly gave a hundred louis to Thomas Corneille for putting a comedy of Molière's, Le Festin de Pierre, into verse. The Comédiens Français will, it is said, to-day give a thousand louis to an academician for putting the tragedies of Corneille, Racine and of Voltaire into prose. Is it indeed necessary that they should address themselves to an academician for that? Do not a good many of them perform that parody every day of their lives?

Verse and rhyme are not natural, say lovers of nature. Clothes, gentlemen, are not natural, and yet you wear them to distinguish yourself from the savage; furthermore, you wear clothes of fine materials to distinguish yourselves from the rabble, and, when you are rich enough to enable you to do so, you adorn them with trimmings to distinguish yourself even from well-to-do people. That which one does for the body permit us to do for the intellect; allow us to do for the mind that which you do for matter.