We have spoken already of Beaumarchais’s natural aversion to the heroic in literature, all his instincts led him toward the new dramatic school which was then appearing in France, and whose master was Diderot. In this school the old heroic tragedy was replaced by a domestic tragedy in which the ordinary events of daily life formed the theme. By the side of this, there was to be a serious comedy, not clearly defined from the tragic element, but which was to take the place of the “gay comedy” of the past. More than a century of democratic ideas has so far removed the present generation from the ideas of the past, that it is difficult for us to appreciate the magnitude of the innovation made by this new style of literature when it first appeared in France. It was, however, but the natural outgrowth of that new order of things which was year by year becoming more pronounced, in which the bourgeoisie of France rises to a state of self-consciousness which demands expression. The splendor of the monarchy as upheld by Louis XIV had faded from men’s minds. The people were beginning to realize that they themselves, with their joys and sorrows, their loves and hates, belonged to the realm of art. Beaumarchais forcibly expresses the new ideas when in his essay “_Sur le Genre Sérieux_,” he says, “If our heart enters into the interest taken in tragic personages, it is less because they are heroes and kings than because they are human beings and miserable. Is it the Queen of Messina that touches me in Méropé? No, it is the mother of Égiste. Nature alone has right over our hearts.--The true relation of the heart is, therefore, always from man to man, and never from man to king. The brilliancy of rank far from augmenting the interest which we feel in a tragic personage, on the contrary destroys it. The nearer to mine the condition of him who suffers, the more touched am I by his woes. It belongs to the essence of the serious drama to offer a more pressing interest, a more direct morality than that of the heroic tragedy, and there should be something more serious than mere gay comedy.” After developing this theme for a considerable length he terminates thus, “The morality of comedy is nil, the reverse of what should be in the theater.” Beaumarchais, a few years later, yielding with his usual suppleness to the inevitable, when he found the public refusing to be interested in his serious mediocrities, abandoned the _genre sérieux_, which in the beginning he so warmly defended. He did not leave it, however, without a last thrust at his critics.