which delighted
our grandmothers, illuminated from within so as to present a charming
tinted picture with varying degrees of shadow and of light. Voltaire was
able to make the transparency, but he never could light the candle; and
the only result of his efforts was some sticky pieces of paper, cut into
curious shapes, and roughly daubed with colour. To take only one
instance, his diction is the very echo of Racine's. There are the same
pompous phrases, the same inversions, the same stereotyped list of
similes, the same poor bedraggled company of words. It is amusing to
note the exclamations which rise to the lips of Voltaire's characters in
moments of extreme excitement--_Qu'entends-je? Que vois-je? Ou suis-je?
Grands Dieux! Ah, c'en est trop, Seigneur! Juste Ciel! Sauve-toi de ces
lieux! Madame, quelle horreur_ ... &c. And it is amazing to discover
that these are the very phrases with which Racine has managed to express
all the violence of human terror, and rage, and love. Voltaire at his
best never rises above the standard of a sixth-form boy writing
hexameters in the style of Virgil; and, at his worst, he certainly falls
within measurable distance of a flogging. He is capable, for instance,
of writing lines as bad as the second of this couplet--

C'est ce meme guerrier dont la main tutelaire,
De Gusman, votre epoux, sauva, dit-on, le pere,

or as

Qui les font pour un temps rentrer tous en eux-memes,

or

Vous comprenez, seigneur, que je ne comprends pas.

Voltaire's most striking expressions are too often borrowed from his
predecessors. Alzire's 'Je puis mourir,' for instance, is an obvious
reminiscence of the 'Qu'il mourut!' of le vieil Horace; and the cloven
hoof is shown clearly enough by the 'O ciel!' with which Alzire's
confidante manages to fill out the rest of the line. Many of these
blemishes are, doubtless, the outcome of simple carelessness; for
Voltaire was too busy a man to give over-much time to his plays. 'This
tragedy was the work of six days,' he wrote to d'Alembert, enclosing
_Olympie_. 'You should not have rested on the seventh,' was d'Alembert's
reply. But, on the whole, Voltaire's verses succeed in keeping up to a
high level of mediocrity; they are the verses, in fact, of a very clever
man. It is when his cleverness is out of its depth, that he most
palpably fails. A human being by Voltaire bears the same relation to a
real human being that stage scenery bears to a real lan