has been trained in the traditions of romantic and naturalistic art, or even not trained at all except in indolence and presumption, yawn over the French alexandrines, let them remember that Goethe at any rate thought it worth while to translate Mahomet and Tancrède. An eminent German writer on Voltaire has recently declared the secret of the French classic dramaturgy to be that the drama was a diversion of the court. ‘The personages have to speak not as befits their true feelings, their character, and the situation, but as is seemly in the presence of a king and a court; not truth, nature, and beauty, but etiquette, is the highest law of the dramatic art.’[113] This may partially explain how it was that a return to some features of the classic form, its dignity, elevation, and severity, came to take place in France, but no explanation can be at all satisfactory which reduces so distinct and genuine a manner of dramatic expression to a mere outside accident. Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, treated their tragic subjects as they did, with rigorous concentration of action, stately consistency of motive, and in a solemn and balanced measure, because these conditions answered to intellectual qualities of their own, an affinity in themselves for elegance, clearness, elevation, and a certain purified and weighty wisdom. It is true that they do not unseal those deep-hidden fountains of thought and feeling and music, which flow so freely at the waving of Shakespeare’s wand. We are not swiftly carried from a scene of clowns up to some sublime pinnacle of the seventh heaven, whence we see the dark abysses that lie about the path of human action, as well as all its sweet and shadowed places. Only let us not unjustly suppose that we are deciding the merits of the old French dramaturgy, its severe structure and stately measure, by answering the question, which no English nor German writer can ever seriously put, as to the relative depth and vision in poetic things of Shakespeare and Voltaire. Nor can we be expected to be deeply moved by a form of art that is so unfamiliar to us. It is not a question whether we ought to be so deeply moved. The too susceptible Marmontel describes how on the occasion of a visit to Ferney, Voltaire took him into his study and placed a manuscript into his hands. It was Tancrède, which was just finished. Marmontel eagerly read it, and he tells us how he returned to the author, his face all bathed in tears. ‘Your tears,’ said Voltaire, ‘tell me all that it most concerns me to know.’[114] The most supercilious critic may find this very Tancrède worth reading, when he remembers that Gibbon thought it splendid and interesting,[115] and that Goethe found it worth translating. One could hardly be convicted now of want of sensibility, if all Voltaire’s tragedy together failed to bathe one’s face in tears, but this is a very bad reason for denying that it has other merits than pathos.