dscape; it can
only be looked at from in front. The curtain rises, and his villains and
his heroes, his good old men and his exquisite princesses, display for a
moment their one thin surface to the spectator; the curtain falls, and
they are all put back into their box. The glance which the reader has
taken into the little case labelled _Alzire_ has perhaps given him a
sufficient notion of these queer discarded marionettes.

Voltaire's dramatic efforts were hampered by one further unfortunate
incapacity; he was almost completely devoid of the dramatic sense. It is
only possible to write good plays without the power of
character-drawing, upon one condition--that of possessing the power of
creating dramatic situations. The _Oedipus Tyrannus_ of Sophocles, for
instance, is not a tragedy of character; and its vast crescendo of
horror is produced by a dramatic treatment of situation, not of persons.
One of the principal elements in this stupendous example of the
manipulation of a great dramatic theme has been pointed out by Voltaire
himself. The guilt of Oedipus, he says, becomes known to the audience
very early in the play; and, when the _denouement_ at last arrives, it
comes as a shock, not to the audience, but to the King. There can be no
doubt that Voltaire has put his finger upon the very centre of those
underlying causes which make the _Oedipus_ perhaps the most awful of
tragedies. To know the hideous truth, to watch its gradual dawn upon one
after another of the characters, to see Oedipus at last alone in
ignorance, to recognise clearly that he too must know, to witness his
struggles, his distraction, his growing terror, and, at the inevitable
moment, the appalling revelation--few things can be more terrible than
this. But Voltaire's comment upon the master-stroke by which such an
effect has been obtained illustrates, in a remarkable way, his own sense
of the dramatic. 'Nouvelle preuve,' he remarks, 'que Sophocle n'avait
pas perfectionne son art.'

More detailed evidence of Voltaire's utter lack of dramatic insight is
to be found, of course, in his criticisms of Shakespeare. Throughout
these, what is particularly striking is the manner in which Voltaire
seems able to get into such intimate contact with his great predecessor,
and yet to remain as absolutely unaffected by him as Shakespeare himself
was by Voltaire. It is unnecessary to dwell further upon so hackneyed a
subject; but one instance may be given of the lengt