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.
In his preface to the "_Barbier de Seville_," which he published eight years later, he thus alludes to these earlier productions: "I had the weakness, Monsieur, to present to you at different times two poor dramas, monstrous productions as is very well known, because between tragedy and comedy no one is any longer ignorant that nothing exists, that is a point settled.... As for myself, I am so completely convinced of the truth of this that if I wished again to bring on the scene, a mother in tears, a betrayed wife, a forlorn sister, a son disinherited, in order to present them decently to the public, I should begin by placing them in a beautiful kingdom where they had done their best to reign, and I should situate it near one of the archipelagoes, or in some remote corner of the world.... The spectacle of men of medium condition, crushed and suffering, how absurd! Ridiculous citizens and unhappy kings, there is nothing else the theatre will permit."