ower before our eyes. The sensuous being must
be profoundly and strongly affected, passion must be in play, that the
reasonable being may be able to testify his independence and manifest
himself in action.

It is impossible to know if the empire which man has over his affections
is the effect of a moral force, till we have acquired the certainty that
it is not an effect of insensibility. There is no merit in mastering the
feelings which only lightly and transitorily skim over the surface of the
soul. But to resist a tempest which stirs up the whole of sensuous
nature, and to preserve in it the freedom of the soul, a faculty of
resistance is required infinitely superior to the act of natural force.
Accordingly it will not be possible to represent moral freedom, except by
expressing passion, or suffering nature, with the greatest vividness; and
the hero of tragedy must first have justified his claim to be a sensuous
being before aspiring to our homage as a reasonable being, and making us
believe in his strength of mind.

Therefore the pathetic is the first condition required most strictly in a
tragic author, and he is allowed to carry his description of suffering as
far as possible, without prejudice to the highest end of his art, that
is, without moral freedom being oppressed by it. He must give in some
sort to his hero, as to his reader, their full load of suffering, without
which the question will always be put whether the resistance opposed to
suffering is an act of the soul, something positive, or whether it is not
rather a purely negative thing, a simple deficiency.

The latter case is offered in the purer French tragedy, where it is very
rare, or perhaps unexampled, for the author to place before the reader
suffering nature, and where generally, on the contrary, it is only the
poet who warms up and declaims, or the comedian who struts about on
stilts. The icy tone of declamation extinguishes all nature here, and
the French tragedians, with their superstitious worship of decorum, make
it quite impossible for them to paint human nature truly. Decorum,
wherever it is, even in its proper place, always falsifies the expression
of nature, and yet this expression is rigorously required by art. In a
French tragedy, it is difficult for us to believe that the hero ever
suffers, for he explains the state of his soul, as the coolest man would
do, and always thinking of the effect he is making on others, he never
lets nature