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1839.]

Setting out with the principle that
good poetry was only good prose, with
the addition of measure and rhyme, he
was frequently prosaic and negligent
in his verses. He had few of those
bold forms of expression, those origi-
nal turns, and those bold images,
which form the accent of poetry. He
was not less rigorously faithful to the
etiquette of our theatre. He even ex-
aggerated its habitual pomp, and its
periphrases of politeness, without cor-
recting them by those naive turns which
Corneille found in the language of his
day, and which Racine dexterously
mingled with that of the court. Thus
he was at once less poetical, less simple,
and less true, than his great predeces-
sors."

It is impossible, we think, to claim for Voltaire even an equality with Corneille and Racine. Compare the impressions left on the mind by the perusal of the works of the three great dramatists, and the inferiority of the third is at once perceptible. "Cor"with his neille," says St Beuve,

great qualities and defects, produces on
me the effect of one of those great trees,
naked, rugged, sombre in the trunk,
and adorned with branches and a
dusky verdure only towards the sum-
mit. They are strong, gigantic, scan-
tily leaved; an abundant sap circu-
lates through them, but we are not to
expect from them shade, shelter, or
flowers. They bud late, begin to shed
their foliage early, and live a long time
half shorn of their leaves. Even after
their bare heads have surrendered their
leaves to the autumnal wind, the viva-
city of their nature still throws out
here and there scattered branches and
suckers; and when they fall, they re-
semble, in their crash and groans, that
trunk covered with armour to which
Lucan has compared the fall of Pom-
pey."

This fanciful comparison which St
Beuve has applied to the old age of the
great Corneille, is applicable to his
poetical character generally, only in
so far as it expresses not inaptly the
idea of irregular grandeur, which is
the characteristic of Corneille's mind;
for, amidst the conventional limitations
of the French stage, the genius of the
poet obviously drew its nourishment
from an imagination naturally highly

poetical-still further excited by the
romantic and occasionally extravagant
tone of the Spanish drama, which
had been his favourite study. That
union of the spirit of the romantic dra-
ma with the classical, which Voltaire
vainly laboured to effect, because in
truth he felt not the inspiration of
either, is attained so far as such a union
was practicable (for we have already
His
said, that in its full extent it is impos.
sible) in the plays of Corneille.
dramas remind us of some ancient Ro-
man monument, like the tomb of Ce-
cilia Metella-some "stern round
tower of ancient days"-converted,
during the middle ages, into a place of
defence; exhibiting feudal outworks
and barbaric ornaments embossed upon
a classic fabric, but so harmonized and
blended with the original structure, by
the softening touch of time and the
growth of vegetation, that the whole
possesses a sombre and stately ur ity of
effect. The effect of Racine's dramas,
again, very much resembles that of the
architecture of Palladio; it exhibits a
purely classic framework, internally
and with some difficulty accommoda-
ted to modern usages, but yet so grace-
ful in its outward proportions, so
finished and polished within, that the
limited accommodation of the edifice is
forgotten in the compactness and pro-
portion and elegance of the apartments.
But Voltaire, without any real feeling
for the classic drama, as his contemp-
tuous style of treating Sophocles in the
preface to the Edipus shows, and
equally incapable of appreciating any
thing of the spirit of the romantic stage,
or of borrowing from it any thing
but a few hints for theatrical effect
and a more lively dialogue-has mere-
ly put together incoherent fragments
from antiquity and feudalism-" To
make a third he joined the other two,"
but without real blending of parts or
unity of spirit. His compositions might
be appropriately compared to an arti-
ficial ruin, in which the modern aspect
of the materials is in contradiction to
the form and architecture of the edi-
fice.

Of his great works, Brutus, the Orphan of China, Zaire, and the Death of Casar-the two latter owed their very existence, and almost their whole dramatic merit, to the inspiration of Shak

• Critiques et Portraits Litéraires. Première Série Corneille.

speare. With a warm admiration for Zaire, Villemain candidly admits, that in all which evinces deep and profound insight into the heart, or the power of artfully indicating and preparing remote future effects, in which perhaps, more than any thing else, dramatic skill is evinced, Shakspeare in his Othello has infinitely the ad. vantage over Voltaire. Nay, even in regard to mere art of narration or exposition, the very point on which Voltaire and the French dramatists have piqued themselves most, he seems inclined to give the preference_to Othello's speech to the Venetian Senate over the corresponding explanation of Orosmane, in which he communicates his position and designs to Zaire. He concludes, however, by observing, with a natural wish to do justice to a very talented imitation, which in some respects almost borders on genius, "If in the subject itself, which is borrowed from Shakspeare, that of jealousy and murder, Voltaire is inferior in pathos and even in art-if he is less energetic, less natural, less probable—he has, notwithstanding, infused into Zaire an unequalled (?) charm and interest. What he has created makes amends for what he has feebly imitated; and although Voltaire was probably in jest when he compared this piece to Polyeucte, it is the Christian episode-it is Lusignan and the Crusade-which constitute the immortal beauty of Zaire."

In Zaire, Voltaire had conformed to his original, and, on the French stage, prescriptive plan of making love the moving power of the piece. In his Death of Caesar, all the best points of which plainly were suggested by the Julius Caesar of Shakspeare, he reverted to an idea he had long entertained of a tragedy constructed on a more austere and patriotic principle. He determined to compose a tragedy, as he says, in the English taste, banishing not merely love intrigues, but almost all interference on the part of women; though, where he found the authority for this novel kind of unitythe unity of sex-we are at a loss to imagine. Not in Shakspeare certainly; for in Julius Cæsar, Portia, slightly as she is brought into view, is felt to be, and not undeservedly, a personage of strong interest and influence. Still less in the Cato of his friend Addison, where, if we remember rightly, "the noble Martia towers above her sex,"

and no less than three separate love stories are interwoven with the "fate of Cato and of Rome." If the remarks of Villemain contain little that is absolutely new so far as regards the peculiar excellencies of Shak speare's play, they have at least a species of novelty in the mouth of a French critic, from their candour and impartiality, unmixed with extravagance; for, to confess the truth, we would in most cases rather put up with the sneers of Voltaire, or the cold and niggard approbation of La Harpe, than the rhapsodical and indiscriminating admiration of many modern French critics, bestowed as it is without reason or intelligible principle, and prac tically exemplified and illustrated by extravagant and revolting caricatures of the peculiarities of Shakspeare's age, without the least approach to the redeeming qualities of his genius.

Shakspeare has taken the Roman history as he found it; he has invented nothing-he has retrenched little. In the costume and the language he may have erred occasionally, from ignorance of classical minutiæ; but in the numerous and contrasted characters of the piece, particularly in that of the philosophical Brutus uniting the firmness and unshaken dignity of the Stoic with the gentlest affections, Shakspeare shows his usual mastery. When the spirit of human nature is to be divined, such as it exists in all ages and countries among ambitious nobles, interested demagogues, and an idle, heartless, and vacillating populace, Shakspeare is never mistaken.

Voltaire, on the contrary, has chosen to step beyond history, and his invention marks the real want of dramatic refinement which is observable in his plays, disguised as they are in a drapery of pompous morality. The vague suspicion founded on some tale of scandal, that Brutus was the son of Cæsar, becomes with him the nodus, and constitutes the main interest of the piece. Patriotism, it would seem, according to French ideas, is presented in its most imposing form when accompanied by parricide. The conjugal scenes between Brutus and Portia, which, by their homefelt beauty, so finely relieve the republican hardness of the political interest, Voltaire has entirely banished; and we are left without a glimpse into domestic life, or one tranquil conversation in which the Stoic and the politician relaxes into the man.

The famous scene, in which the rival leaders pronounce their orations over the dead body of Cæsar, has been in many passages translated by Voltaire. In others he has attempted to improve upon it, with what success a few specimens will enable the reader to judge. The speech of Brutus, written with laconic brevity, and in prose, probably in order to raise it out of the ordinary level of the verse, and thus to give it more the appearance of a formal oration, Voltaire has placed less appropriately in the mouth of Cassius, and his version, we admit, is fairly execu ted. But how absurd the unanimous reply which he puts into the mouth of

the multitude:

"Aux vengeurs de l'état nos cœurs sont assurés !"

This is about as natural as the admiring antithesis which La Motte makes the Greek army repeat in chorus after the reconciliation of Achilles and Aga

memnon:

"Tout le camp s'écriait dans une joie extrême,

Que ne vaincra-t-il pas ; il s'est vaincu luimême !"

Shakspeare, says Villemain, has gone differently to work, in giving a soul to the crowd, and completing his drama by personages without a name. It is thus that his Roman people answer after the discourse of Brutus :

"Live, Brutus, live!

1st Plebeian. Bring him with triumph home unto his house.

2d Pleb. Give him a statue with his an

cestors.

3d Pleb. Let him be Cæsar." "Let him be Cæsar!" Such is the notion of a republic entertained by the mob of Rome. Their gratitude has no other form of homage but servitude..

Antony mounts the chair-at first stormfully received--bespeaking indulgence for Brutus' sake; then opening in a subdued and humbled tone, feeling his way, as if deprecating the idea that he came to praise Cæsar or to complain of his fate. Compare the respective commencements of Shakspeare and Voltaire :

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,

I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them-
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar! The noble Brutus
Has told you Cæsar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Cæsar answer'd it."

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Hélas! vous avez tous pensé comme moimême,

El lorsque de son front otant le diadème, Ce heros à vos lois s'immolait aujourd'hui, Qui de vous, en effet, n'eut expiré pour Jui?"

This is much too rapid, too unprepa red an apostrophe. The prejudices of the people had not been soothed, by reminding them, not only how deeply Cæsar had suffered for his fault, if he were ambitious, but also how much certhe supposition of his ambition. Before tain parts of his conduct contradicted introducing the declinature of the crown his audience how often the ransom of upon the Lupercal, Antony reminds Cæsar's captives had gone into the general coffers, and how," when the poor had cried, Cæsar had wept.” “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff!" Only when the way is thus prepared, he reminds them of the refusal of the crown, and asks, was this ambitious? Then first he recalls to their recollection their own love for Cæsar, which Voltaire so inartificially thrusts almost into the opening lines of his oration: "You all did love him once, not without

cause

What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?

O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason! Bear

with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Cæsar, And I must pause till it come back to me.'

The contrast is still more remark. able, in the way in which Brutus is spoken of by Shakspeare and by Voltaire. In the Mort de Cæsar, Antony bursts out against him in a torrent of abuse:

"Chers amis, je succombe, et messens sont interdits:

Brutus, son assassin! ce monstre était son fils,

Brutus où suis je? O ceil! O crime! O barbarie !"

Would the Romans have allowed language like this to be used as to Brutus? Shakspeare, who knew better, makes Antony's tone as to Brutus complimentary throughout. He is an honourable man; so are they all. Even when speaking of the assassina

tion, there is no strong epithet of invective used: a more poignant and effective reproach is contained in the word, the well-beloved Brutus," than in all the "monsters" and "assassins" with which the attack of Antony in Voltaire's play is eked out.

The superiority of Shakspeare is just as obvious in the artful delay of Antony to read the will, which he reserves to the last as the fit climax to be addressed to such an audience, as compared with the French version, where he hastens at once to proclaim its contents; and in the pretended moderation with which, after stirring up to an ecstacy of indignation the passions of the people, he affects to control the tempest he had raised, and which he knew to be ungovernable-precipitating the people into the career of vengeance, while affecting to restrain them; while in Voltaire's play, it is Antony himself who is the first to call for vengeance on Cæsar's murderers, and to urge on the crowd to rise and mutiny.

If the claims of Voltaire as a dramatist cannot be considered as standing very high, it is still less possible to consider him as entitled even to the name of an epic poet. Villemain has a long parallel between the Pharsalia and the Henriade: in which he gives the preference, on the whole, to the latter poem. We grant to Voltaire the merit of better taste, for he has no thing of the tumid and somewhat bombastic diction of Lucan: but, on the other hand, where in the Henriade shall we find passages like the contrasted characters of Cæsar and Pompey? or the pregnant beauty and truth of such brief traits as those by which the rival leaders are discriminated, and in which the secret of their fortunes may be said to be embodied? "Solusque pudor non vincere bello," the marking trait in the character of the first: the other, “ Magni nominis umbra," a man who had over-lived his greatness, which had always been exaggerated. "Voltaire in the Henriade," says Villemain, "is Lucan abridged, tempered, calmed downLucan without exaggerated figures, without declamation, but also less energetic, and less dazzling." "The French poet, like the Roman, has his

passion for controversy: Catholicism is for him what the empire was for the other. Both occasionally flatter their enemy; but they take pleasure in allusions which tend to discredit and degrade it. Thus the canto descriptive of the St Bartholomew is the finest in the Henriade. But the passion of the poet is little in harmony with the constrained denouement of his piece-the abjuration of Protestantism by Henry. And there is a similar contradiction between the sceptical maxims with which he has interspersed his poem, and the Christian marvels which he employs."

That the political and philosophical speculations of Voltaire exercised a strong influence over his own age, and tended greatly to accelerate those attacks upon all authority which heralded the Revolution, no calm observer can reasonably doubt. It may be very true that he himself had no very clear perception of their tendency. It may even be the case that the subversion of an established government was the last thing in his thoughts. But the aristocratic insult to which he had been subjected, and which had driven him to England, probably left on his mind no very pleasing impression in regard to hereditary rank; and the maxims of popular liberty, and the limitation of the monarchical power, which he was accustomed to hear from his Whig acquaintances in England, probably gave him as strong a leaning as he was capable of towards a popular form of government, or rather towards a government which was to be in the hands of an aristocracy of letters, over which he himself was to reign as the despotic sovereign.

The sincerity of his anti-religious views, and the zeal with which he discharged the apostolate of infidelity, are matters which admit of less question. He did not merely doubt or deny, but he detested, Christianity. He never speaks of it but with a feeling of personal hatred. "Je finis toutes mes lettres par dire écrasons l'enflame!" He writes to D'Alembert (25th Feb. 1768), "Comme Caton dit, delenda est Carthago." To the Count D'Argental he writes (3d Oct. 1761), "Ah! chiens de Chrêtiens, que je vous deteste! que mon mépris et ma haine

In revenge for an expression which Voltaire had launched against a man of rank, he received a sound drubbing, a few days after, at the gate of the Hotel Sully.

pour vous augmentent continuellement!" In his aversion to Christianity, therefore, he was admitted to come up to the true Holbachean and Helvetian standard; but as he wavered in regard to Atheism, and had not quite adopted the creed of the Système de la Nature, he was considered a weak and timorous reformer, whose ideas were still clouded by childish fears or narrow views, and consequently very scurvily treated by his brother apostles of what was called the Holy Philosophical Church. "The patriarch, poor man," says Baron de Grimm, who went all lengths, "still sticks to his Remunerateur-Vengeur, without whom he fancies the world would go on very ill. He is resolute enough for putting down the God of knaves and bigots, but is not for parting with that of the virtuous and rational. He reasons upon all this, too, like a baby; a very smart baby it must be owned, but a baby notwithstanding!"

But enough of Voltaire, whether as a poet or a philosopher. To us he appears to far more advantage in his Contés his graceful Vers de Société, and in his Romans, than in any of his more elaborate compositions. Whatever may be thought of the tendency of his romances, the ingenuity with which they are framed so as to bring out in comic relief the idea which he wishes to ridicule, is admirable. Epitre à Horace, and his Stances à Madame du Deffant, are more perfect in their way than the well-rounded declamation of his tragedy, or the laboured episodes of the Henriade.

His

While Voltaire was thus carrying the spirit of mockery, of universal disbelief, and contempt for established opinion, into every department of literature, for he essayed them all in turn, a remnant of the spirit of the 17th century was kept alive by the Chancellor D'Aguesseau, in the magistracy; by Rollin, in the literary and religious education of youth; and by the Duke de St Simon, at Court. Villemain's estimate of D'Aguesseau is somewhat lower than that to which we have been accustomed; even as a magistrate, a lawyer, and a man of business, he seems to think him somewhat timorous and time-serving, notwithstanding the excellence of his ordonnances or the irreproachable character of his life. To Rollin, on the other hand, we think the esprit de corps in favour of a brother

professor has led him to do rather more than justice; for, granting the high tone of morality and religion which it was the object of Rollin to infuse into his educational system, the cold correctness, the dryness, and, after all, the defect of real learning or comprehensive view which his Ancient History exhibits, are surely sufficient to exclude him from the list of great historians. To St Simon, the last of the Jansenist colony surviving amidst the eighteenth century, Villemain is peculiarly favourable. He seems almost disposed to concede to him the praise of genius. And there is no doubt that, as compared with Dangeau and the other annalists or keepers of Court diaries, the graphic spirit and caustic sketches of St Simon-a close observer, feeling strongly, writing from a full mind, tainted with strong prejudices, particularly in favour of aristocracy, and tinging every thing he wrote with the peculiarities of his own character-are most amusing. "The dead figures of the day," says Villemain, "are resuscitated in the pages of St Simon; his electrical expression gives motion to all this ossuary of a Court."

To the same school, in point of taste, belong the great novelists of the commencement of the eighteenth century-Le Sage, Prevôt, and Marevaux. The popularity of the two latter has, in all probability, for ever passed away; for the merits of Prevôt's Manon L'Escaut have been exaggerated, and, were they greater than they are, they would hardly make amends for the tediousness of Cleveland and the Dean of Coleraine; and, with all deference to French criticism, we cannot help regarding the Marianne and the Paysan parvenu as in the highest degree wearisome. On the other hand, the popularity of the first of these novelists, at the distance of two centuries remains undiminished, and without experiencing even a momentary fluctuation. In truth, the whole character of Gil Blas is so essentially popular—its beauties lie so much on the surface, and are so independent of all peculiarities of opinion, or deep and subtle enquiry

that we could almost as easily conceive a man tiring of the common air, or the cheerful sunlight, as of its lively, natural, and good-humoured pictures. Voltaire, however, and it is a great proof of his want of simple and

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