"De desseins en regrets et d'erreurs en desirs
Les mortals insenses promenent leur folie.
Dans des malheurs presents, dans l'espoir des plaisirs
Nous ne vivons jamais, nous attendons la vie.
Demain, demain, dit-on, va combler tous nos voeux.
Demain vient, et nous laisse encore plus malheureux.
Quelle est l'erreur, helas! du soin qui nous devore,
Nul de nous ne voudroit recommencer son cours.
De nos premiers momens nous maudissons l'aurore,
Et de la nuit qui vient nous attendons encore,
Ce qu'ont en vain promis les plus beaux de nos jours," &c.
It is in these detached passages that the English have hitherto excelled.
Their dramatic pieces, most of which are barbarous and without decorum,
order, or verisimilitude, dart such resplendent flashes through this
gleam, as amaze and astonish. The style is too much inflated, too
unnatural, too closely copied from the Hebrew writers, who abound so much
with the Asiatic fustian. But then it must be also confessed that the
stilts of the figurative style, on which the English tongue is lifted up,
raises the genius at the same time very far aloft, though with an
irregular pace. The first English writer who composed a regular tragedy,
and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it, was the
illustrious Mr. Addison. His "Cato" is a masterpiece, both with regard
to the diction and to the beauty and harmony of the numbers. The
character of Cato is, in my opinion, vastly superior to that of Cornelia
in the "Pompey" of Corneille, for Cato is great without anything like
fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends
sometimes to bombast. Mr. Addison's Cato appears to me the greatest
character that was ever brought upon any stage, but then the rest of them
do not correspond to the dignity of it, and this dramatic piece, so
excellently well writ, is disfigured by a dull love plot, which spreads a
certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it.
The custom of introducing love at random and at any rate in the drama
passed from Paris to London about 1660, with our ribbons and our
perruques. The ladies who adorn the theatrical circle there, in like
manner as in this city, will suffer love only to be the theme of every
conversation. The judicious Mr. Addison had the effeminate complaisance
to soften the severity of his dramatic character, so as to adapt it to
the manners of the age, and, from an endeavour to please, quite ruined a
masterpiece in its kind. Since his time the drama is become more
regular, the audience more difficult to be pleased, and writers more
correct and less bold. I have seen some new pieces that were written
with great regularity, but which, at the same time, were very flat and
insipid. One would think that the English had been hitherto formed to
produce irregular beauties only. The shining monsters of Shakspeare give
infinite more delight than the judicious images of the moderns. Hitherto
the poetical genius of the English resembles a tufted tree planted by the
hand of Nature, that throws out a thousand branches at random, and
spreads unequally, but with great vigour. It dies if you attempt to
force its nature, and to lop and dress it in the same manner as the trees
of the Garden of Marli.