Voltaire--Tragedies on Greek Subjects: _Oedipe_, _Merope_, _Oreste_--
Tragedies on Roman Subjects: _Brute_, _Mort de César_, _Catiline_, _Le
Triumvirat_--Earlier Pieces: _Zaire_, _Alzire_, _Mahomet_, _Semiramis_,
and _Tancred_.
To Voltaire, from his first entrance on his dramatic career, we must give
credit both for a conviction that higher and more extensive efforts
remained to be made, and for the zeal necessary to accomplish all that was
yet undone. How far he was successful, and how much he was himself blinded
by the very national prejudices against which he contended, is another
question. For the more easy review of his works, it will be useful to
class together the pieces in which he handled mythological materials, and
those which he derived from the Roman history.
His earliest tragedy, _Oedipe_, is a mixture of adherence to the Greeks
[Footnote: His admiration of them seems to have been more derived
from foreign influence than from personal study. In his letter to the
Duchess of Maine, prefixed to _Oreste_, he relates how, in his early
youth, he had access to a noble house where it was a custom to read
Sophocles, and to make extemporary translations from him, and where there
were men who acknowledged the superiority of the Greek Theatre over the
French. In vain, in the present day, should we seek for such men in
France, among people of any distinction, so universally is the study of
the classics depreciated.] (with the proviso, however, as may be supposed,
of improving on them,) and of compliance with the prevailing manner. The
best feature of this work Voltaire owed to Sophocles, whom he nevertheless
slanders in his preface; and in comparison with whose catastrophe his own
is flat in the extreme. Not a little, however, was borrowed from the
frigid _Oedipus_ of Corneille; and more especially the love of Philoctetus
for Jocaste, which may be said to correspond nearly with that of Theseus
and Dirce in Corneille. Voltaire alleged in his defence the tyranny of the
players, from which a young and unknown writer cannot emancipate himself.
We may notice the frequent allusions to priestcraft, superstition, &c.,
which even at that early period betray the future direction of his mind.
The _Merope_, a work of his ripest years, was intended as a perfect
revival of Greek tragedy, an undertaking of so great difficulty, and so
long announced with every note of preparation. Its real merit is the
exclusion of the customary love-scenes (of which, however, Racine had
already given an example in the _Athalie_); for in other respects
German readers hardly need to be told how much is not conceived in the
true Grecian spirit. Moreover the confidants are also entirely after the
old traditional cut. The other defects of the piece have been
circumstantially, and, I might almost say, too severely, censured by
Lessing. The tragedy of _Merope_, if well acted, can hardly fail of
being received with a certain degree of favour. This is owing to the
nature of its subject. The passionate love of a mother, who, in dread of
losing her only treasure, and threatened with cruel oppression, still
supports her trials with heroic constancy, and at last triumphs over them,
is altogether a picture of such truth and beauty, that the sympathy it
awakens is beneficent, and remains pure from every painful ingredient.
Still we must not forget that the piece belongs only in a very small
measure to Voltaire. How much he has borrowed from Maffei, and changed--
not always for the better--has been already pointed out by Lessing.
Of all remodellings of Greek tragedies, _Oreste_, the latest, appears
the farthest from the antique simplicity and severity, although it is free
from any mixture of love-making, and all mere confidants are excluded.
That Orestes should undertake to destroy Aegisthus is nowise singular, and
seems scarcely to merit such marked notice in the tragical annals of the
world. It is the case which Aristotle lays down as the most indifferent,
where one enemy knowingly attacks the other. And in Voltaire's play
neither Orestes nor Electra have anything beyond this in view:
Clytemnestra is to be spared; no oracle consigns to her own son the
execution of the punishment due to her guilt. But even the deed in
question can hardly be said to be executed by Orestes himself: he goes to
Aegisthus, and falls, simply enough it must be owned, into the net, and is
only saved by an insurrection of the people. According to the ancients,
the oracle had commanded him to attack the criminals with cunning, as they
had so attacked Agamemnon. This was a just retaliation: to fall in open
conflict would have been too honourable a death for Aegisthus. Voltaire
has added, of his own invention, that he was also prohibited by the oracle
from making himself known to his sister; and when carried away by
fraternal love, he breaks this injunction, he is blinded by the Furies,
and involuntarily perpetrates the deed of matricide. These certainly are
singular ideas to assign to the gods, and a most unexampled punishment for
a slight, nay, even a noble crime. The accidental and unintentional
stabbing of Clytemnestra was borrowed from Crebillon. A French writer will
hardly venture to represent this subject with mythological truth; to
describe, for instance, the murder as intentional, and executed by the
command of the gods. If Clytemnestra were depicted not as rejoicing in the
success of her crime, but repentant and softened by maternal love, then,
it is true, her death would no longer be supportable. But how does this
apply to so premeditated a crime? By such a transition to littleness the
whole profound significance of the dreadful example is lost.
As the French are in general better acquainted with the Romans than the
Greeks, we might expect the Roman pieces of Voltaire to be more
consistent, in a political point of view, with historical truth, than his
Greek pieces are with the symbolical original of mythology. This is,
however, the case only in _Brutus_, the earliest of them, and the
only one which can be said to be sensibly planned. Voltaire sketched this
tragedy in England; he had there learned from _Julius Caesar_ the
effect which the publicity of Republican transactions is capable of
producing on the stage, and he wished therefore to hold something like a
middle course between Corneille and Shakspeare. The first act opens
majestically; the catastrophe is brief but striking, and throughout the
principles of genuine freedom are pronounced with a grave and noble
eloquence. Brutus himself, his son Titus, the ambassador of the king, and
the chief of the conspirators, are admirably depicted. I am by no means
disposed to censure the introduction of love into this play. The passion
of Titus for a daughter of Tarquin, which constitutes the knot, is not
improbable, and in its tone harmonizes with the manners which are
depicted. Still less am I disposed to agree with La Harpe, when he says
that Tullia, to afford a fitting counterpoise to the republican virtues,
ought to utter proud and heroic sentiments, like Emilia in _Cinna_.
By what means can a noble youth be more easily seduced than by female
tenderness and modesty? It is not, generally speaking, natural that a
being like Emilia should ever inspire love.
The _Mort de César_ is a mutilated tragedy: it ends with the speech
of Antony over the dead body of Caesar, borrowed from Shakspeare; that is
to say, it has no conclusion. And what a patched and bungling thing is it
in all its parts! How coarse-spun and hurried is the conspiracy! How
stupid Caesar must have been, to allow the conspirators to brave him
before his face without suspecting their design! That Brutus, although he
knew Caesar to be his father, nay, immediately after this fact had come to
his knowledge, should lay murderous hands on him, is cruel, and, at the
same time, most un-Roman. History affords us many examples of fathers in
Rome who condemned their own sons to death for crimes of state; the law
gave fathers an unlimited power of life and death over their children in
their own houses. But the murder of a father, though perpetrated in the
cause of liberty, would, in the eyes of the Romans, have stamped the
parricide an unnatural monster. The inconsistencies which here arise from
the attempt to observe the unity of place, are obvious to the least
discerning eye. The scene is laid in the Capitol; here the conspiracy is
hatched in the clear light of day, and Caesar the while goes in and out
among them. But the persons, themselves, do not seem to know rightly where
they are; for Caesar on one occasion exclaims, "_Courons au Capitole!_"
The same improprieties are repeated in _Catiline_, which is but a little
better than the preceding piece. From Voltaire's sentiments respecting the
dramatic exhibition of a conspiracy, which I quoted in the foregoing
Lecture, we might well conclude that he had not himself a right
understanding on this head, were it not quite evident that the French
system rendered a true representation of such transactions all but
impossible, not only by the required observance of the Unities of Place
and Time, but also on account of a demand for dignity of poetical
expression, such as is quite incompatible with the accurate mention of
particular circumstances, on which, however, in this case depends the
truthfulness of the whole. The machinations of a conspiracy, and the
endeavours to frustrate them, are like the underground mine and counter-
mine, with which the besiegers and the besieged endeavour to blow up each
other.--Something must be done to enable the spectators to comprehend the
art of the miners. If Catiline and his adherents had employed no more art
and dissimulation, and Cicero no more determined wisdom, than Voltaire has
given them, the one could not have endangered Rome, and the other could
not have saved it. The piece turns always on the same point; they all
declaim against each other, but no one acts; and at the conclusion, the
affair is decided as if by accident, by the blind chance of war. When we
read the simple relation of Sallust, it has the appearance of the genuine
poetry of the matter, and Voltaire's work by the side of it looks like a
piece of school rhetoric. Ben Jonson has treated the subject with a very
different insight into the true connexion of human affairs; and Voltaire
might have learned a great deal from the man in traducing whom he did not
spare even falsehood.
The _Triumvirat_ belongs to the acknowledged unsuccessful essays of his
old age. It consists of endless declamations on the subject of
proscription, which are poorly supported by a mere show of action. Here we
find the Triumvirs quietly sitting in their tents on an island in the
small river Rhenus, while storms, earthquakes, and volcanoes rage around
them; and Julia and the young Pompeius, although they are travelling on
terra firma, are depicted as if they had been just shipwrecked on the
strand; besides a number of other absurdities. Voltaire, probably by way
of apology for the poor success which the piece had on its representation,
says, "This piece is perhaps in the English taste."--Heaven forbid!
We return to the earlier tragedies of Voltaire, in which he brought on the
stage subjects never before attempted, and on which his fame as a dramatic
poet principally rests: _Zaire_, _Alzire_, _Mahomet_, _Semiramis_, and
_Tancred_.
_Zaire_ is considered in France as the triumph of tragic poetry in
the representation of lore and jealousy. We will not assert with Lessing,
that Voltaire was acquainted only with the _legal_ style of love. He
often expresses feeling with a fiery energy, if not with that familiar
truth and _naïveté_ in which an unreserved heart lays itself open.
But I see no trace of an oriental colouring in Zaire's cast of feeling:
educated in the seraglio, she should cling to the object of her passion
with all the fervour of a maiden of a glowing imagination, rioting, as it
were, in the fragrant perfumes of the East. Her fanciless love dwells
solely in the heart; and again how is this conceivable with such a
character! Orosman, on his part, lays claim indeed to European tenderness
of feeling; but in him the Tartar is merely varnished over, and he has
frequent relapses into the ungovernable fury and despotic habits of his
race. The poet ought at least to have given a credibility to the
magnanimity which he ascribes to him, by investing him with a celebrated
historical name, such as that of the Saracen monarch Saladin, well known
for his nobleness and liberality of sentiment. But all our sympathy
inclines to the oppressed Christian and chivalrous side, and the glorious
names to which it is appropriated. What can be more affecting than the
royal martyr Lusignan, the upright and pious Nerestan, who, though in the
fire of youth, has no heart for deeds of bloody enterprise except to
redeem the associates of his faith? The scenes in which these two
characters appear are uniformly excellent, and more particularly the whole
of the second act. The idea of connecting the discovery of a daughter with
her conversion can never be sufficiently praised. But, in my opinion, the
great effect of this act is injurious to the rest of the piece. Does any
person seriously wish the union of Zaire with Orosman, except lady
spectators flattered with the homage which is paid to beauty, or those of
the male part of the audience who are still entangled in the follies of
youth? Who else can go along with the poet, when Zaire's love for the
Sultan, so ill-justified by his acts, balances in her soul the voice of
blood, and the most sacred claims of filial duty, honour, and religion?
It was a praiseworthy daring (such singular prejudices then prevailed in
France) to exhibit French heroes in _Zaire_. In _Alzire_ Voltaire went
still farther, and treated a subject in modern history never yet touched
by his countrymen. In the former piece he contrasted the chivalrous and
Saracenic way of thinking; in this we have Spaniards opposed to Peruvians.
The difference between the old and new world has given rise to
descriptions of a truly poetical nature. Though the action is a pure
invention, I recognise in this piece more historical and more of what we
may call symbolical truth, than in most French tragedies. Zamor is a
representation of the savage in his free, and Monteze in his subdued
state; Guzman, of the arrogance of the conqueror; and Alvarez, of the mild
influence of Christianity. Alzire remains between these conflicting
elements in an affecting struggle betwixt attachment to her country, its
manners, and the first choice of her heart, on the one part, and new ties
of honour and duty on the other. All the human motives speak in favour of
Alzire's love, which were against the passion of Zaire. The last scene,
where the dying Guzman is dragged in, is beneficently overpowering. The
noble lines on the difference of their religions, by which Zamor is
converted by Guzman, are borrowed from an event in history: they are the
words of the Duke of Guise to a Huguenot who wished to kill him; but the
glory of the poet is not therefore less in applying them as he has done.
In short, notwithstanding the improbabilities in the plot, which are
easily discovered, and have often been censured, _Alzire_ appears to
be the most fortunate attempt, and the most finished of all Voltaire's
compositions.
In _Mahomet_, want of true singleness of purpose has fearfully avenged
itself on the artist. He may affirm as much as he pleases that his aim was
directed solely against fanaticism; there can be no doubt that he wished
to overthrow the belief in revelation altogether, and that for that object
he considered every means allowable. We have thus a work which is
productive of effect; but an alarmingly painful effect, equally repugnant
to humanity, philosophy, and religious feeling. The Mahomet of Voltaire
makes two innocent young persons, a brother and sister, who, with a
childlike reverence, adore him as a messenger from God, unconsciously
murder their own father, and this from the motives of an incestuous love
in which, by his allowance, they had also become unknowingly entangled;
the brother, after he has blindly executed his horrible mission, he
rewards with poison, and the sister he reserves for the gratification of
his own vile lust. This tissue of atrocities, this cold-blooded delight in
wickedness, exceeds perhaps the measure of human nature; but, at all
events, it exceeds the bounds of poetic exhibition, even though such a
monster should ever have appeared in the course of ages. But, overlooking
this, what a disfigurement, nay, distortion, of history! He has stripped
her, too, of her wonderful charms; not a trace of oriental colouring is to
be found. Mahomet was a false prophet, but one certainly under the
inspiration of enthusiasm, otherwise he would never by his doctrine have
revolutionized the half of the world. What an absurdity to make him merely
a cool deceiver! One alone of the many sublime maxims of the Koran would
be sufficient to annihilate the whole of these incongruous inventions.
_Semiramis_ is a motley patchwork of the French manner and mistaken
imitations. It has something of _Hamlet_, and something of _Clytemnestra_
and _Orestes_; but nothing of any of them as it ought to be. The passion
for an unknown son is borrowed from the _Semiramis_ of Crebillon. The
appearance of Ninus is a mixture of the Ghost in _Hamlet_ and the shadow
of Darius in Aeschylus. That it is superfluous has been admitted even by
the French critics. Lessing, with his raillery, has scared away the Ghost.
With a great many faults common to ordinary ghost-scenes, it has this
peculiar one, that its speeches are dreadfully bombastic. Notwithstanding
the great zeal displayed by Voltaire against subordinate love intrigues in
tragedy, he has, however, contrived to exhibit two pairs of lovers, the
_partie carrée_ as it is called, in this play, which was to be the
foundation of an entirely new species.
Since the _Cid_, no French tragedy had appeared of which the plot was
founded on such pure motives of honour and love without any ignoble
intermixtures, and so completely consecrated to the exhibition of
chivalrous sentiments, as _Tancred_. Amenaide, though honour and life
are at stake, disdains to exculpate herself by a declaration which would
endanger her lover; and Tancred, though justified in esteeming her faith
less, defends her in single combat, and, in despair, is about to seek a
hero's death, when the unfortunate mistake is cleared up. So far the piece
is irreproachable, and deserving of the greatest praise. But it is
weakened by other imperfections. It is of great detriment to its
perspicuity, that we are not at the very first allowed to hear the letter
without superscription which occasions all the embarrassment, and that it
is not sent off before our eyes. The political disquisitions in the first
act are extremely tedious; Tancred does not appear till the third act,
though his presence is impatiently looked for, to give animation to the
scene. The furious imprecations of Amenaide, at the conclusion, are not in
harmony with the deep but soft emotion with which we are overpowered by
the reconciliation of the two lovers, whose hearts, after so long a mutual
misunderstanding, are reunited in the moment of separation by death.
In the earlier piece of the _Orphelin de la Chine_, it might be considered
pardonable if Voltaire represented the great Dschingis-kan in love. This
drama ought to be entitled _The Conquest of China_, with the conversion of
the cruel Khan of Tartary, &c. Its whole interest is concentrated in two
children, who are never once seen. The Chinese are represented as the most
wise and virtuous of mankind, and they overflow with philosophical maxims.
As Corneille, in his old age, made one and all of his characters
politicians, Voltaire in like manner furnished his out with philosophy,
and availed himself of them to preach up his favourite opinions. He was
not deterred by the example of Corneille, when the power of representing
the passions was extinct, from publishing a host of weak and faulty
productions.
Since the time of Voltaire the constitution of the French stage has
remained nearly the same. No genius has yet arisen sufficiently mighty to
advance the art a step farther, and victoriously to refute, by success,
their time-strengthened prejudices. Many attempts have been made, but they
generally follow in the track of previous essays, without surpassing them.
The endeavour to introduce more historical extent into dramatic
composition is frustrated by the traditional limitations and restraints.
The attacks, both theoretical and practical, which have been made in
France itself on the prevailing system of rules, will be most suitably
noticed and observed upon when we come to review the present condition of
the French stage, after considering their Comedy and the other secondary
kinds of dramatic works, since in these attempts have been made either to
found new species, or arbitrarily to overturn the classification hitherto
established.