I much prefer Racine and
Shakespeare; the one from the point of view of aesthetic sensation, the
other from that of psychological sensation. The southern theater can
never free itself from masks. Comic masks are bearable, but in the case
of tragic heroes, the abstract type, the mask, make one impatient. I can
laugh with personages of tin and pasteboard: I can only weep with the
living, or what resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to caricature;
it is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets.
It is psychology of the first degree--elementary psychology--just as the
colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all
this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just
as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly
vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it
that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with
true grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole dramatic
development of monarchical France was to spring? Genius is there, but it
is hemmed round by a conventional civilization, and, strive as he may,
no man wears a wig with impunity.
January 13, 1863.--To-day it has been the turn of "Polyeucte" and "La
Morte de Pompee.
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