speare. With a warm admiration for Zaire, Villemain candidly admits, that in all which evinces deep and profound insight into the heart, or the power of artfully indicating and preparing remote future effects, in which perhaps, more than any thing else, dramatic skill is evinced, Shakspeare in his Othello has infinitely the advantage over Voltaire. Nay, even in regard to mere art of narration or exposition, the very point on which Voltaire and the French dramatists have piqued themselves most, he seems inclined to give the preference to Othello's speech to the Venetian Senate over the corresponding explanation of Orosmane, in which he communicates his position and designs to Zaire. He concludes, however, by observing, with a natural wish to do justice to a very talented imitation, which in some respects almost borders on genius, "If in the subject itself, which is borrowed from Shakspeare, that of jealousy and murder, Voltaire is inferior in pathos and even in art—if he is less energetic, less natural, less probable—he has, notwithstanding, infused into Zaire an unequalled (?) charm and interest. What he has created makes amends for what he has feebly imitated; and although Voltaire was probably in jest when he compared this piece to Polyeucte, it is the Christian episode—it is Lusignau and the Crusade—which constitute the immortal beauty of Zaire."
In Zaire, Voltaire had conformed to his original, and, on the French stage, prescriptive plan of making love the moving power of the piece. In his Death of Cæsar, all the best points of which plainly were suggested by the Julius Cæsar of Shakspeare, he reverted to an idea he had long entertained of a tragedy constructed on a more austere and patriotic principle. He determined to compose a tragedy, as he says, in the English taste, banishing not merely love intrigues, but almost all interference on the part of women; though, where he found the authority for this novel kind of unity—the unity of sex—we are at a loss to imagine. Not in Shakspeare certainly; for in Julius Cæsar, Portia, slightly as she is brought into view, is felt to be, and not undeservedly, a personage of strong interest and influence. Still less in the Cato of his friend Addison, where, if we remember rightly, "the noble Martia towers above her sex," and no less than three separate love stories are interwoven with the "fate of Cato and of Rome." If the remarks of Villemain contain little that is absolutely new so far as regards the peculiar excellencies of Shakspeare's play, they have at least a species of novelty in the mouth of a French critic, from their candour and impartiality, unmixed with extravagance; for, to confess the truth, we would in most cases rather put up with the sneers of Voltaire, or the cold and niggard approbation of La Harpe, than the rhapsodical and indiscriminating admiration of many modern French critics, bestowed as it is without reason or intelligible principle, and practically exemplified and illustrated by extravagant and revolting caricatures of the peculiarities of Shakspeare's age, without the least approach to the redeeming qualities of his genius.
Shakspeare has taken the Roman history as he found it; he has invented nothing—he has retrenched little. In the costume and the language he may have erred occasionally, from ignorance of classical minutiæ; but in the numerous and contrasted characters of the piece, particularly in that of the philosophical Brutus uniting the firmness and unshaken dignity of the Stoic with the gentlest affections, Shakspeare shows his usual mastery. When the spirit of human nature is to be divined, such as it exists in all ages and countries among ambitious nobles, interested demagogues, and an idle, heartless, and vacillating populace, Shakspeare is never mistaken.
Voltaire, on the contrary, has chosen to step beyond history, and his invention marks the real want of dramatic refinement which is observable in his plays, disguised as they are in a drapery of pompous morality. The vague suspicion founded on some tale of scandal, that Brutus was the son of Cæsar, becomes with him the nodus, and constitutes the main interest of the piece. Patriotism, it would seem, according to French ideas, is presented in its most imposing form when accompanied by parricide. The conjugal scenes between Brutus and Portia, which, by their homefelt beauty, so finely relieve the republican hardness of the political interest, Voltaire has entirely banished; and we are left without a glimpse into domestic life, or one tranquil conversation in which the Stoic and the politician relaxes into the man.
