66

dered against "les barbares" and "les welches." 'France," he cried, "is not the only country where tragedies are written; and our taste, or rather our custom, of bringing nothing on the stage but long conversations on love, does not delight other nations. In general, our stage is devoid of action, and deficient in subjects of exalted interest. The presence, too, of our petits maîtres crowding on the stage interferes with the action; and exalted subjects are banished because our nation dares not think on them. Politics were attractive in Corneille's time, on account of the Fronde; but nowadays no one goes to see his pieces. Had you but seen the piece of Shakespeare [Julius Cæsar] played, as I have seen it, and pretty nearly as I have translated it, our declarations of love and our confidantes would seem miserable in comparison."* This sentence might have been written by the most échévelé of the romanticists. Voltaire, no doubt, is here pleading in favor of his own translation; but lest too much stress should be laid on that circumstance, we will quote two lines from a letter only a few days previous. Shakespeare is "le Corneille de Londres—grand fou d'ailleurs, et resemblant plus à Gilles qu'à Corneille; mais il a des morceaux admirables." Thirty-three years afterwards, writing to Horace Walpole and defending himself from the charge of despising Shakespeare, he observes: "I said, it is true, long ago, that if Shakespeare had lived in the time of Addison, he would have united to his own genius the elegance and purity which render Addison so admirable. I said that his genius was his own; his faults those of his age. In my opinion he is precisely like Lope de Vega and Calderon. His genius is fine but uncultivated; no regularity, no bienséance, no art-but mingling vulgarity with grandeur, buffoonery with sublimity; he is the Chaos of tragedy, in which there are a hundred gleams of light."

In 1776, however, a man was found intrepid enough to translate Shakespeare, adroit enough to secure the subscription of royal personages, and comble d'horreur!-barbarian enough to proclaim Shakespeare "le dieu du théâtre!" This was too much for Voltaire; whose pretensions to be " le dieu du théâtre" himself, were considerable. His anger was now unappeasable; and it broke out in invectives of ludicrous vehemence. Le Tourneur, the translator, was "un misérable," an "impudent imbécile," and even "un faquin." The following outburst is amusing. "Have you read two volumes by that creature [Le Tourneur] in which he wishes to make us accept Shakespeare as the sole model of true tragedy? He calls him the god of the stage! He sacrifices all the French without exception to his idol, as in days of yore they sacrificed pigs to Ceres. . . . Do you not feel an intense hate towards this impudent idiot? Will you sit down to such an affront to France? . . . The horrible part of it is that the monster has follow

*Letter to the Abbé Desfontaines, November, 1735.

ers in France; and as the crown of this calamity and horror-I it was who first mentioned Shakespeare; I it was who showed France the pearls I had found on this enormous dung-heap! Little did I think that I should one day help to trample on the crowns of Racine and Corneille, and to ornament with them the brows of a barbaric player." A fortnight afterwards he resumes his wrath: "The abomination of desecration is in the Temple of the Lord. Lekain, who is as angry as you are, tells me that almost all the young men of Paris are for Le Tourneur. I have seen the end of the reign of reason and good taste. I shall die leaving France barbarian." To Laharpe he wrote about the same time: "I know very well that Corneille has great faults; I have said so but too often; but they are the faults of a great man; and Rymer might well say that Shakespeare was nothing but a miserable ape." "The Gilles and Pierrots of the St. Germain Fair, fifty years ago, were Cinna and Polyeucte in comparison with the persons of that drunkard Shakespeare, whom Le Tourneur calls the god of the stage! . . . It is impossible that any man not absolutely mad could in cool judgment prefer such a Gilles as Shakespeare to Corneille and Racine. Such an infamous opinion could only spring from sordid avarice running after the guineas!!"

The indignation thus exhaled was far from being exhausted in these private channels. Voltaire next addressed a remonstrance to the French Academy, in terms so violent that it was thought necessary to qualify the language before it could be read to the members. The delusion of the public was alleged to consist in an Anglomania, which, not content with placing "du rost bif" on French tables, dared to prefer Shakespeare to Corneille. Voltaire makes a poor appearance as a critic on this occasion. Instead of grasping the real subject, he merely notices some indecent and trivial expressions, and certain anachronisms, which were doubtless enormities in the eyes of the Forty. He opposes Boileau's dictum to Shakespeare's neglect of the unities. He compares the opening of Bajazet with the opening of Romeo and Juliet: two scenes which admirably illustrate the respective art of the two kinds of drama, but which Voltaire, overlooking the possibility of there being more than one kind of drama, satisfies himself with contrasting, and bids the Academy decide. "A Scotch judge," he adds, "who has published Elements of Criticism,' in three volumes, in which there are some delicate and judicious reflections, has nevertheless been unfortunate enough to compare the first scene of that monstrosity, Hamlet with the first scene of that chef-d'œuvre Iphigénie. He affirms that the beautiful verses of Arcas are not worth the reply of the sentinel, 'Not a mouse stirring.' Yes, a soldier may indeed reply thus in the guard-room; but not on the stage, before the highest persons in the kingdom, who express themselves nobly, and before whom we must express ourselves in the same style." This is a very

significant sentence: and we beg the reader to bear it in mind. Voltaire sums up as follows: "Let the Academy then decide whether the nation which has produced Iphigenie and Athalie ought to abandon them for men strangling women on the stage, for porters, for witches, buffoons, and drunken priests; whether our court, so long renowned for its politesse and taste, ought to be converted into an alehouse; and whether the palace of a virtuous sovereign ought to be a place for prostitution." The pamphlet which he published under the pseudonym of "Jerome Carré" is a lively examination of Hamlet and of the Orphan du tendre Otwai; but it is only a variation of the eternal theme about Shakespeare's vulgarity and want of art.

But the question at issue was illy argued on both the French and the English side; and the prov vevdos of the argument was a total forgetfulness of the differences of national taste, disposition, manners and education. The French did not speak more absurdly of the English drama than the English of that of France. Both set up an arbitrary standard. Thus, Voltaire, after giving a sarcastic account of Hamlet, says: "We cannot have a more forcible example of the difference of taste among nations. How shall we speak after this of the rules of Aristotle, and the three unities, and the bienséances, and the necessity of never leaving the scene empty, and that no person should go out or come in without a sensible reason! How talk after this of the artful arrangement of the plot, and its natural development; of the expressions being simple and noble; of making princes speak with the decency which they always have, or ought to have; of never violating the rules of language! It is clear that a nation may be enchanted without giving one's self such trouble.” This is, of course, irony. But if we take it seriously, much confusion will disappear for we will venture, very seriously, to ask: If a civilized and intelligent nation can be enchanted from age to age, in spite of the absence of certain conditions supposed to be necessary, does that not show the fallacy of supposing them to be necessary? Does it not prove these conditions to be accidental, not essential: to depend upon the tastes and manners of the nation, not upon the principles of dramatic art? All that Voltaire's objections amount to is this: in England people are interested at the theatre by dramatic effects; in France the people can only be delighted by effects more purely literary. Good but if the public be equally interested, the object of the dramatist is equally attained; and thus both French and English tragedy are, and ought to be, respectively admired.

Not to inquire too curiously to-day into the causes of the distinction, we may take it as a fact that the French are more sedulous in their attention to the elegancies and graces of life, and the English are more practical and earnest : the French have a more lively fancy, the English a richer imagination. If they excel in filigree, where we excel in ma

chinery, the reason must lie either in a radical difference of mental organization, or in Pascal's alternative—that, as habit is a second nature, nature may be only a first habit. Without drawing odious comparisons concerning different kinds of merit, we must admit that the French have at all times exhibited more culture and more regard for literature, as literature, than ourselves: and in the drama this has been remarkably the case. Something, no doubt, is owing to the way in which the drama originated in each country. In England it grew out of a popular amusement, and has always addressed itself to the nation at large. In France it owed its existence to the court; and has never ventured to suppose itself addressing any but highly cultivated audiences. If the theatre is now the property of all Frenchmen, not so is the tragic drama. What the classic performances by the templars in old days to scholarly audiences were to the popular performances of Ralph Royster Dayster and Gammer Gurton's Needle, which were open to all comers, such is the tragedy of Racine and Corneille, at the present day, to the drames of the Théâtre Français and the Odeon. The attempt to introduce Greek plays into England failed; for England, as Philarète Chasles (most piquant and erudite of French Shakespearian critics) said, “A fait de son théâtre un amusement populaire, et une représentation confuse, profonde, et forte, des actions de la vie humaine." In France, however, the scholarly attempt succeeded. Jodelle's Cléopatre captive, performed in the presence of Henry II., so captivated that monarch that he gave five hundred crowns to the author. Paris followed the King's taste; and the " Mysteries" were replaced by imitations of the antique drama. "C'est de cette source obscure et faible que remonte la tendance classique de notre théâtre."

A lettered audience of course demanded literary excellences which no popular audience would have cared for. And literature has ever been somewhat pedantic, or at least sensitive to the censure of pedants. Every spectator at a drama of Corneille or Racine was a critic, and had the "rules" by heart. Those who wonder how it is that the lively, volatile French patiently endured the tedium of the long tirades and longer dialogues in their classic plays, forget that they are, as Théophile Gautier happily expressed it, “la nation la plus sensée dans ses plaisirs, et la plus folle dans ses affaires." The importance they have attached to "rules" has in all ages been excessive. We may smile when we read Corneille's declaration that the rules of Aristotle are for all times and for all people; "et certes je serais le premier que condamnerais le Cid s'il péchait contre ces grandes et veraines maximes que nous tenons de ce philosophe :" and yet, in spite of our license, what English dramatist would dare to produce a tragedy in four acts, or a tragedy in rhyme?

Classical and imitative in its origin, the French drama in the end became national. Shakespeare is not more the darling and the

despair of English poets, than Corneille and Racine are of the French. Meanwhile, no two nations differ more widely in their artistic taste than the French and English; and this has made the criticism of each one-sided. French art is more conventional than English; for art is necessarily conventional in its forms: and a great part of poetry is a departure from the language of real life. All primitive poetry, including Homer, is rude and careless in its expression; it has a large admixture of the prosaic, and much of the language is only separated by rhythm from the language of ordinary life. So also in primitive music we find a preponderance of those ordinary intervals which characterize speech, and which are unmelodic. As nations advance in culture, poetry becomes more and more artistic, less and less simple and spontaneous, until at last refinement is carried to an excess which causes a reaction in favor of simplicity. Few person will now prefer the Æneid to the Iliad; yet no one conversant with the two can deny that the former is in one sense more a work of art than the latter. In the use of language Homer is often rude and prosaic; Virgil always delicately vigilant, though not always impressive. That he has employed more "art" to produce his effects than Homer found necessary, is as obvious as that a trim garden was fashioned by a different hand from that which created a wild and picturesque ravine. We do not say the garden is more enchanting-far from it; but it has the charm which labor, felicitously employed, always produces on the worker, man.

All poetry then being a departure from nature-otherwise it would be nature and not art-the very delicate question arises: How far is the departure allowable? The whole difference between the French and English schools lies in their different estimate of the degree. Our poetry is to theirs what our gardens are to theirs; a closer imitation of nature, with a greater disregard for mere technical excellences. In an English garden you have a sense of artistic arrangement; but man's share in the production of this effect is not intrusively forced on your attention. In a French garden you never for a moment lose the consciousness of man's labor and man's art.

The most extravagant criticism has proceeded from the want of something like a fixed principle in the great problem of imitation. Dr. Johnson has been applauded for his answer to Voltaire, who expressed his wonder that Shakespeare's extravagances should be endured by a nation which had seen Cato: "Let him be answered that Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare of men." But this epigram has really neither sense nor truth in it. Shakespeare did not speak the language of men, but of poets, and the greatest of poets; it was because his language, as poetry, was so superior to that of Addison that the effect it produced was so much greater. The secret of Shakespeare's success is, that his representations of nature are more