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 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 picturebooks, 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.