Shakespeare and Voltaire

Front matter

^I)a^0pearean Marsf

I

SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Voltaire in England l

II. Voltaire's Knowledge OF English Literature 17

Chapter I

On the second of May, 1726, Voltaire was released from the Bastille on the condition that he should repair at once to England. On the following morning he set out for Calais. Either from fear that he would miss the road, or to guard against a momentary lapse of memory which might lead him to wander in another direction, a government official was commissioned to accompany him on the journey to that port. The instructions given to the attendant were, to remain with the released prisoner until he saw him safely on board of the vessel and on his way to England. At Calais Voltaire remained a few days, much irritated at the surveillance to which he was subjected. At last he embarked. In a short time he found himself in a land separated from his own by a few leagues of water, but in opinions, in feelings, in tastes, divided by immeasurable distances.

The country to which he was exiled welcomed him

cordially. To both the great Whig and Tory houses he

had access. He came into personal contact with no

small nmnber of the men most renowned in literature

1 1 and politics. The new edition of his epic, published at London in the second year after his arrival, had on the list of its subscribers many of the most noted names of the English aristocracy, and was dedicated to the Queen of England herself. For him the barriers did not exist which divided the people into classes hostile to each other where they were not indiiferent. His insatiable curiosity led him to seek the society of men of all creeds, of all ranks, of all parties. Much of his time was spent at Wandsworth, a now outlying suburb of the great city, in the home of Everard Falkener, an English merchant trading with the East. He dined at the house of the prime minister, Walpole ; he lived in familiar intercourse with Walpole's bitter enemy, Bolingbroke, whom he had come to know long before in France. He made the acquaintance of patrons of literature like Lyttelton and Bubb Dodington, of philosophers like Clarke and Berkeley, of men of letters like Pope, Swift, Gay, Congreve, Thomson, and Young. Nearly three years he remained. It was long enough for him to learn to read English with ease, to speak it with a tolerable degree of fluency, and to write it with what his enemies chose to consider suspicious accuracy. It was long enough, furthermore, for him to become an ardent admirer of English philosophy and science as embodied in the works of Locke and Newton, and to form a limited acquaintance with English literature. To the immense majority of his countrymen this last was then not only an unknown, but an unheard-of land. It was while in England that Voltaire became acquainted with the works of Shakespeare. It is more correct to say he became acquainted with some of them. Of many of the plays of the great dramatist he pretty certainly lived and died in profoundest ignorance. He unquestionably had them in his library; he never had them in his mind. From the various criticisms which, from time to time during the rest of his life, he poured forth upon the English stage, no one would get the slightest inkling of the fact that Shakespeare ever wrote a single comedy. It was not entirely Voltaire's fault. His knowledge of plays was derived largely from seeing them acted. During the time he was in England, it was mainly the tragedies of Shakespeare that were brought upon the stage. The two or three of his comedies which were performed at all were not only vilely altered, but even in their mutilated state were then performed but rarely. The English works of this sort which Voltaire heard of were the composition of men who belonged to the period following the Restoration. The principal writers of them whom he knew about were Congreve, Wycherley, and Vanbrugh ; it is of them alone he speaks with any fulness.

Ignorant as he was of Shakespeare's comedies, his knowledge of many of the other works of the dramatist was none too remarkable. The way in which he subsequently referred to some of them will clear him from the charge of any undue familiarity with their contents. ' Hamlet,' ' Lear,' ' Othello,' ' Macbeth,' ' Julius Csesar,' ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ' Romeo and Juliet,' ' Richard II.,' 'Richard III.,' 'Henry IV.,' 'Henry V.,' and 'Troilus and Cressida,' comprise the plays which he at various times mentioned. The list would be a sufficiently satisfactory one, were it not that his remarks upon some of the number tend to establish his ignorance of them instead of indicating his knowledge. Of certain of these he really knew little more than the names. The blunders he made in discussing them amply acquit him of intentional perversion of the meaning he misunderstood. The two pieces with which he was bestacquainted were ' Hamlet ' and ' Julius Csesar.' The latter, excellent as it is, is ranked by no one among the greatest of Shakespeare's productions ; but for some reason it made upon Voltaire a particularly vivid impression. It may be that he had seen it acted with peculiar power. It may be that the absence from it of a love intrigue, which he hated in tragedy, reconciled him in a measure to its total disregard of the dramatic laws which he held so precious. But to whatever cause his interest in it was due, it is the one of Shakespeare's works which on the whole plays the most prominent part in both his critical and creative writings, so far as his relations with its author are concerned. It is the one to which he most frequently refers for the sake of conveying either praise or blame. Even when it did not inspire direct imitation, it suggested scenes and plots and portrayals of character to pieces of his own. There was one recommendation which these two plays possessed. Both of them had been saved from the hands of the spoiler. Both continued to be presented in their original purity, or, as Voltaire would have considered it, in their original impurity. In them consequently Shakespeare was seen at his best or at his worst, according to the way one was disposed to regard his art. There was, furthermore, no question as to the favor with which these phiys, as well as others of the dramatist, were received. To the popularity of the great Elizabethan, Voltaire himself bore frequent witness. For the period of his residence in England it is conclusive. Excellent translations of the best French tragedies, excellent productions of native writers, exemplars in both cases of chastened and refined art, were never able, he observed, to draw to their representation audiences such as thronged the theatre whenever it was announced that one of Shakespeare's plays was to be performed.

One reason, outside of the character of the works themselves, ought to be added here for the steady hold which Shakespeare continued to retain over the men of the eighteenth century. To the excellence of the matter was generally added a well-sustained excellence of performance. All dramatic writings are in danger of suffering from having one part acted finely, and the others inadequately or meanly. This too common condition of things has frequently wrought havoc with the pieces of Shakespeare, crowded as they usually are with several characters of first importance. The London which Voltaire saw possessed but two playhouses. In them was largely concentrated all the theatrical talent to which the British isles had given birth. In the hands of a capable manager an opportunity was thus afforded for the adequate performance of great productions, which can hardly be said to exist now, when those who would give most effective representation to its various parts are scattered over the entire land, or dispersed in the dozen different houses of a single city. This opportunity was not always improved, to be sure ; but during the whole century it existed. Garrick, for instance, was a host in himself. The English stage has never witnessed any one so amply endowed as he to fulfil all parts of a star, either in comedy or tragedy. Yet when in 1747 he undertook the management of Drury Lane, his avowed aim was to secure for it all the best performers that could be found. For his first season he assuredly succeeded. What should we think now of a single playhouse which should contain on its rolls, as his did then, about forty performers of greater or less distinction, with Garrick at their head, and including among them such actresses as Mrs. Gibber, Mrs. Glive, Mrs. Pritchard, and Peg Woffington ?

The remark of Voltaire, which has just been cited, shows that not even the later works, which he regarded as representatives of refined art, were able then to hold their own against the overwhelming popularity of Shakespeare. This is not the only contribution he makes to the sentiment of that age in regard to the dramatist. His visit to England furnishes additional confirmation of the truth of a view which, however well-known, is not sufficiently well-known to keep it from being occasionally controverted. This is the general concession of Shakespeare's superiority not only to the playwrights of later times, but to the playwrights of his own time. Both the popular and the critical estimate agreed in recognizing his supremacy. How completely he had come at this period to outrank all his contemporaries in public opinion is made conspicuous by the fact that he is the only one of the Elizabethans whom Voltaire knows. Of the dramatists of that earlier period, Fletcher had been for a while the favorite with theatre-goers after the Restoration. Jonson also had then stood side by side with Shakespeare, at least among the critics. But with neither of these two had Voltaire any real acquaintance. Of one of them he had probably never heard ; he certainly never spoke of him. Of the other it would have been just as well had he never spoken ; for what he said establishes not his knowledge but his ignorance.

By Shakespeare Voltaire was both attracted and repelled. As a Frenchman, trained in the strictest rules of the classicists, and disposed to render those rules even more rigid, he was shocked beyond measure by the irregularities, the gross improprieties, or rather indecencies, as he looked upon them, in which the greatest English dramatist had indulged with no apparent consciousness that his course was anything but perfectly proper. A man who could in all sincerity assert, as did Voltaire, that in the three unities, all other laws, that is to say, all other beauties of the drama, are comprised, was not likely to be impressed favorably by the persistent disregard of them which Shakespeare had manifested. He shuddered furthermore at the mixture of the comic and the tragic in the same production ; at the low characters which were brought upon the stage, and the low language in which they indulged ; at the scenes of violence, of horror, and of carnage which were enacted in full view of the audience. Such practices ran counter to all his personal tastes and prejudices, as well as to the traditions of the one theatre which he believed, or tried to believe, surpassed not only that of all modern nations, but that of the Greeks themselves.

With these views of his he found plenty of sympathizers in the land to which he came. Had he himself been disposed to hesitate about the justice of his conclusions, the men he met would have stood ready to assure him of their correctness. There existed then a large number of Englishmen who continued to feel deeply pained at the failure of Shakespeare to conform to the canons of art pure and undefiled. Their admiration of particular passages did not blind their eyes to his defects, or hinder their perception of his failure to reach their own exalted standard of taste. The attitude of condescension was invariably maintained by the professed arbiters of public opinion. Besides the common ruck of critics, who always make it a point to re-echo the prevalent cant of the day, there were men possessing abilities of no mean order who entertained and expressed sentiments of this sort. Some of them too had occupied or were still occupying high station in society. Earlier in the century Shaftesbury had given utterance to the then not uncommon opinion that the British muses were as yet in their mere infant state. They lisp in their cradles, he told us. They had scarcely arrived at anything of shapeliness of person. This was true of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Milton. Yet upon the great dramatist he was willing to bestow a good deal of praise for the justness of his moral and for his skill in characterization, which caused him to be relished in spite of " his natural rudeness, his unpolished style, his antiquated phrase and wit, his want of method and coherence, and his deficiency in almost all the graces and ornaments of this kind of writinjT." i

With this estimate Chesterfield, for a long time the arbiter of taste in the fashionable world, did not differ materially. To his son he wrote that a gentleman should make it a point to know the classics of every language. In the list he gave of English authors entitled to that distinction Shakespeare did not appear ; though in the corresponding one in French, Corneille, Racine, and Moliere were to be found,^ He had no disposition, however, to proscribe the dramatist. To a female friend in France he sent as a present the works of four writers as ambassadors from his own country. In the number Shakespeare was included. But with the announcement of the gift he felt it incumbent to put in a qualifying statement, lest it should be supposed that he condoned the irregularities of the playwright, or failed to recognize his errors. He told his correspondent that she should give to Shakespeare the precise sort of reception which she deemed fitting, inasmuch as he sometimes merited the best and sometimes the worst.^ This guarded approbation was the utmost which the thoroughly superior people of that time felt that they could properly give. From Bolingbroke, with whom Voltaire spent much of his time, he learned that the English stage did

1 Advice to an Author, Part II. sec. 1 and sec 3 (1710).

2 Letter to his son, March 2, 1752.

3 Letter to Madame du Boccage, March 4, 1752.

not possess a single good tragedy. Let us be just. By this was meant one good tragedy as a whole. The existence of admirable scenes was conceded ; it was as a complete work of art that every play failed.

But besides being a Frenchman, Voltaire was a man of genius. As a man of genius he could not help being impressed by certain qualities which the English dramatist exhibited. They affected him, they influenced him to an extent of which he was hardly conscious, and which at a later period he was little disposed to acknowledge. He was willing, at least at first, to pardon much that Shakespeare did, on account of that assumed rude and unpolished age in which he flouiished. If as you say, he wrote to Bolingbroke, you do not possess a single good tragedj^ there are nevertheless some most admirable scenes in those wild pieces which go under that name. While, therefore, Voltaire could not approve the barbarous irregularities with which the play of 'Julius Csesar,' for illustration, abounds, he told the man he was addressing that he was only astounded that there were not more irregularities in pieces produced in an age of ignorance by a writer who did not understand Latin, and who had no instructor but his own genius. These pieces lacked indeed the correctness, the purity, the elegance, for which the French stage was distinguished. But however deficient in taste, they unmistakably possessed power. They held the attention, they stirred the heart. This was what Voltaire said then. Long afterward, when his criticism of Shakespeare had begun to assume a peculiarly depreciatory tone, he did not refuse to acknowledge the strength that lay in these dramas, bizarre and savage as he both deemed and termed them. "I have seen ' Julius Csesar' played," he wrote in 1764, " and I confess that from the first scene, when I heard the tribunes reproaching the Roman populace for its ingratitude to Pompey and its attachment to Pompey's conqueror, I began to be interested, to be excited. I did not see afterwards any conspirators upon the stage who did not arouse my curiosity ; and in spite of the large number of its absurd improprieties, I felt that the piece impressed me." ^

No student of Voltaire's life needs to be told of the profound influence which his residence in England exercised over his later activities, both literary and political. The account he gives of his experiences there is not indeed to be always received with the trusting faith we exhibit towards a divine revelation. He was never a man to spoil a good story by insisting upon a slavish adherence to inconvenient details merely because they happened to be true. Accuracy, if it conflicted with an effect he was aiming to produce, was treated by him with more than indifference ; he had for it what may be termed a fine scorn. Doubtless he would always have preferred to have his facts just as he said they were ; but if they were not, it was their misfortune, not his. It was his business to be interesting ; and if interest was lacking in the events he narrated, he was ready to supply it from his own inexhaustible invention. The danger under which we all lie is to accept Voltaire's account of a given occasion, or of anything in a given

1 Observations sur le Jules Cesar de Shakespeare in Commentaires sur Corneillt.

work, as an exact relation of what was then done or there said.

In the edition of Voltaire's complete writings which was brought out a few years after his death — the one published at Kehl — there appeared among the miscellanies a short piece in the form of a letter.^ It purported to give an account of his first experiences in England. It was assigned by the editors to 1727, the year after his arrival in that country. As it ojDens with an account of some views which he had been reading in a work of Dennis's, it must have been written some time after he had become reasonably familiar with the language. It is an interesting and brilliant description of the scenes he saw, or said he saw, upon his first landing, which, according to the account here given, was at Greenwich. Everything was bright and animated. The weather was delightful ; the sky was without a cloud ; a gentle west wind added to the happiness of every one ; for it appears from his description to have been the day of the fair. He met in the crowd some men of business to whom he had letters of introduction. They were exceedingly cordial ; they put themselves out in every way to contribute to his enjoyment. He was transported with pleasure at everything which he saw and in which he took part. So passed the first day.

On the day follomng he met at an ill-appointed, ill-managed coffee-house the same men, who were no longer the same men. They scarcely recognized his existence. He could hardly get from any one of them

1 Vol. xlix. pp. 10-21 (1785). It is headed simply " A. M. . . ."

anything more than the monosyllabic yes or no. As he could not recall a single thing he had said or done which could properly give them offence, he tried to discover the reason of this strange behavior. From one of them he wrung at last the all-sufficient reply, " The wind is in the east." Pretty soon a person came in who informed the assembled company with a good deal of indifference that a woman of their acquaintance, young, beautiful, and rich, and just on the point of being happily married, had been found dead in her chamber by her lover. She had cut her throat with a razor. Her friends who heard the news received it with the same indifference as had been exhibited by the friend who had communicated it. The single inquiry made was about the lover. What had become of him ? " He has bought the razor," said coldly one of the company.

Voltaire discovered that the strange conduct of the men, the suicide of a happy girl were due to the one single fact that the wind was in the east. This account of events was supplemented by a number of similar details and observations written to harmonize with the prepossessions and beliefs existing on the Continent as to the character of the English. It requires a faith capable of removing mountains to believe that man}^ of the incidents narrated ever took place, or could have taken place. The very fact that this epistle was not printed in Voltaire's lifetime seems to indicate that he regarded its publication as too much of a tax upon human credulity, if not upon English patience. At all events it was clearly an impression he was seeking to convey by it, not a recital of occurrences he was setting out to give. As a circumstantial account of what really happened, one might as well go the ' ^Eneid ' for an exact picture of what took place at the founding of Carthage. This portrayal of English sentiment and behavior constitutes, with its striking and in many instances impossible incidents, an entertaining story, entertainingly told. But there is about it nothing so amusing as the way in which it has been taken. It has been treated as veritable history. Its details have been carefully scrutinized; its errors have been solemnly pointed out.

As long as Voltaire was disposed to embellish his own experiences for the sake of making a good story, he in one sense had no right to complain that others would deal in extravagant fictions about him in turn. Only, his were pleasant inventions, and little calculated to deceive. Those of which he was made the subject were often malignant. After he had succeeded in shocking the religious sentiment of his time, more especially after he had cowed the persecuting rage of religious bigotry, there was little limit to the fabrications that went on of false statements about his life and actions. There is no mendacity more unscrupulous than that which sets out to calumniate those whom its utterers choose to deem the enemies of God. France furnished many baseless stories about Voltaire's conduct and career ; but in meanness they were fully equalled by the smaller crop which sprang up in England. There too they were fathered by dignitaries of the church, and were spread far and wide by the agency of professed moralists. The most widely circulated of them is the stoiy that Voltaire, the cultivated and polished mau of the world, indulged in conversation so gross, when dining with Pope, that the poet's mother was obliged to leave the room. For the origin of this absurdest of stories Warburton seems to have been remotely responsible, but its extensive currency has been due to Dr. Johnson. Another is that he, the intimate personal friend of Bolingbroke, played the part of a spy upon that nobleman in the interests of the English ministry. Long after all the parties were in their graves, another peculiarly ridiculous falsehood was evolved by an anonymous slanderer. It represented Voltaire as having defrauded deliberately and in a specially mean way his friend, the Earl of Peterborough ; and in order to escape the wrath of the justly incensed nobleman, eager to kill him, as having fled precipitately to his own country.^

These lies correspond closely to Prince Hal's description of Falstaff's : they are gross as a mountain, open, palpable. Voltaire had plenty of faults. Many of them will be constantly displayed in the course of this volume. In trickiness he was in certain ways unrivalled. In the war which he waged in behalf of freedom of thought he was forced to resort to crafty devices of all kinds to foil the efforts of those determined to prevent the circulation of his writings. When it came to the denial of tlie authorship of his owii works, rarely has there been found a more versatile and intrepid liar. No criminal ever appeared under more aliases. But

1 For a full account of these stories, see Ballantyne's valuable " Voltaire's Visit to England" (1893), pp. 74-86, and pp. 231-234.

stories such as those just mentioned, lack that decent degree of probability which belongs to the most extravagant fiction. The acts recorded are senseless and motiveless. We are asked to believe that the most brilliant man of letters of his time, who associated during his whole life with the highest and most refined society of all lands, was not only guilty of violating the decencies of ordinary behavior, but in addition could descend to the practices of a common cheat. This of itself is hard enough to accept ; it may be granted that it is not actually impossible. We are further asked to believe that in so doing he acted the part of an unconscionable fool. There is a point at which credulity stops.

CHAPTER II Voltaire's knowledge of English literature

Accuracy is a very useful quality in a writer, but it never tends of itself to make him interesting. In the equipment of a man of genius, it is at best but a virtue of secondary importance. In works of imagination who but a pedant cares whether facts have been misstated, whether chronology has been defied, whether the manners of one age have been transferred to those of another? It is the truth of life at which the great artist aims, not at the truth of detail. Furthermore, if the man of genius be a very prolific author, accuracy is for him a simple impossibility. That demands leisure and vigilance and painstaking on matters of minor importance. The time and toil necessary to secure it are wasted in the case of him who aims at results which are independent" of any consonance with the actual course of events. What he gains on one side he loses on the other. If the mistakes of the man of genius are of importance in themselves, it becomes the duty of the humble gleaner who follows in his footsteps to point out things as they were, and not as in the glowing imagination of the writer they were supposed to be ; to correct the errors arising from carelessness or ignorance, or to indicate the artistic skill which can overleap the 2 17 restraints of fact in order to produce thereby a profounder impression.

It lias been intimated in the preceding chapter that Voltaire never concerned himself about exactness in the details of any story which he sought to make interesting. This is not brought against him as a reproach. Like all men of genius, he had many qualities far higher than accuracy. How indeed could he have been accurate ? How could a writer who treated of almost every topic in which the human race is interested expect to be correct in every little detail ? Here was a man whose life was spent in bringing beliefs of all sorts to the bar of reason ; who was fighting continuously against time-honored abuses in church and state ; who was constantly engaged in promulgating new views on every subject, or new ways of looking at old views ; who, further, in the midst of these occupations, was throwing off year after year poems, plays, tales, treatises without number, besides carrying on an immense correspondence with persons in every grade of society, ranging from crowned heads to the humble friends of his youth. How could such a person find the leisure to master the petty details which are necessary to make his statements accord with precise fact? What time had he at his command to spend in verifying dates, establishing exactness of quotation, justifying correctness of assertion? This may not have been the view he took of himself and of his statements : but it must be the view of his advocates. For his vindication they must rely upon the truth of his generalities, not upon the truth of his details.

Not only did Voltaire, in the multifarious activities of his life, have no leisure to attain accuracy, he may almost be said to have felt, if not a contempt for it, a contempt for its importance. It would be unjust to say that he looked upon it with detestation whenever regard for it interfered with any impression he was trying to produce ; but he certainly did witli indifference. He assuredly never considered how much it costs to tell the truth. As he had not the leisure, so he had not the disposition to spend much time in securing a product which struck him as in many respects of comparatively little value. He could never have been made a convert to the modern doctrine, sometimes taught as a theory, more often exemplified in practice, that in order to have history accurate, it must be rendered stupid. Strive for such a result as best he might, Voltaire could never have been dull. But along with dulness he neglected certain other things. Without doubt he honestly believed at times that he was engaged in making laborious researches ; but nothing could have been less to his taste than the Dryasdust method which painfully perplexes itself about exactness of dates and faithful representation of events. This he would have characterized as belonging to the letter which killeth, and not to the spirit which maketh alive.