pour forth freely. The kings, the princesses, and the heroes
of Corneille or Voltaire never forget their rank even in the most violent
excess of passion; and they part with their humanity much sooner than
with their dignity. They are like those kings and emperors of our old
picture-books, who go to bed with their crowns on.

What a difference from the Greeks and those of the moderns who have been
inspired with their spirit in poetry! Never does the Greek poet blush at
nature; he leaves to the sensuous all its rights, and yet he is quite
certain never to be subdued by it. He has too much depth and too much
rectitude in his mind not to distinguish the accidental, which is the
principal point with false taste, from the really necessary; but all that
is not humanity itself is accidental in man. The Greek artist who has to
represent a Laocoon, a Niobe, and a Philoctetes, does not care for the
king, the princess, or the king's son; he keeps to the man. Accordingly
the skilful statuary sets aside the drapery, and shows us nude figures,
though he knows quite well it is not so in real life. This is because
drapery is to him an accidental thing, and because the necessary ought
never to be sacrificed to the accidental. It is also because, if decency
and physical necessities have their laws, these laws are not those of
art. The statuary ought to show us, and wishes to show us, the man
himself; drapery conceals him, therefore he sets that aside, and with
reason.

The Greek sculptor rejects drapery as a useless and embarrassing load, to
make way for human nature; and in like manner the Greek poet emancipates
the human personages he brings forward from the equally useless
constraint of decorum, and all those icy laws of propriety, which put
nothing but what is artificial in man, and conceal nature in it. Take
Homer and the tragedians; suffering nature speaks the language of truth
and ingenuousness in their pages, and in a way to penetrate to the depths
of our hearts. All the passions play their part freely, nor do the rules
of propriety compress any feeling with the Greeks. The heroes are just
as much under the influence of suffering as other men, and what makes
them heroes is the very fact that they feel suffering strongly and
deeply, without suffering overcoming them. They love life as ardently as
others; but they are not so ruled by this feeling as to be unable to give
up life when the duties of honor or humanity call on them to do