Then what was Talma? Himself, his century and antiquity. He had the deep and concentrated passions of love and of patriotism; they burst from his breast with the force of an explosion. He had the baleful inspiration, the deranged genius of the Revolution through which he had passed. The terrible spectacles with which he was once surrounded were renewed in his talent with the lamentable and distant accents of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides. His grace, which was not conventional grace, took hold of you like misfortune. Dark ambition, remorse, jealousy, melancholy of soul, physical pain, madness produced by the gods and adversity, human affliction: those were what he knew. His mere entrance upon the stage, the mere sound of his voice were mightily tragic. Suffering and thought were mingled on his brow, breathed in his immovability, in his poses, his gestures, his steps. As a Greek, he would arrive, panting and ominous, from the ruins of Argos, an immortal Orestes, tormented for three thousand years by the Eumenides; as a Frenchman, he would come from the solitudes of Saint-Denis, where the Parcæ of 1793 had cut the thread of the sepulchral life of the Kings. The very picture of sorrow awaiting something unknown, but decreed by an unjust Heaven, he went his way, the galley-slave of fate, inexorably chained between fatality and terror. Time casts an inevitable obscurity over the older dramatic masterpieces: its projected shadow changes the purest Raphaëls into Rembrandts[418]; but for Talma, a part of the marvels of Corneille and Racine would have remained unknown. Dramatic talent is a torch: it fires other half-extinguished torches and revives geniuses which enrapture you with their renewed splendour. We owe to Talma the perfection of the actor's dress. But are stage realism and rigour of costume so necessary to art as is supposed? Racine's characters derive nothing from the cut of their clothes: in the pictures of the first painters, the back-grounds are neglected and the costumes incorrect. The "furies" of Orestes, or the "prophecies" of Joad, read in a drawing-room by Talma in a dress-coat, made as great an impression as when declaimed upon the stage by Talma in a Greek mantle or a Jewish robe. Iphigenia was attired like Madame de Sévigné, when Boileau addressed those fine verses to his friend: Jamais Iphigénie en Aulide immolée N'a coûté tant de pleurs à la Grèce assemblée Que, dans l'heureux spectacle à nos yeux étalé, N'en a fait sous son nom verser la Champmeslé[419].