C’est ce meme guerrier dont la main tutelaire,
    De Gusman, votre epoux, sauva, dit-on, le pere,

or as

    Qui les font pour un temps rentrer tous en eux-memes,

or

    Vous comprenez, seigneur, que je ne comprends pas.

Voltaire’s most striking expressions are too often borrowed from his predecessors.  Alzire’s ‘Je puis mourir,’ for instance, is an obvious reminiscence of the ‘Qu’il mourut!’ of le vieil Horace; and the cloven hoof is shown clearly enough by the ‘O ciel!’ with which Alzire’s confidante manages to fill out the rest of the line.  Many of these blemishes are, doubtless, the outcome of simple carelessness; for Voltaire was too busy a man to give over-much time to his plays.  ’This tragedy was the work of six days,’ he wrote to d’Alembert, enclosing Olympie.  ‘You should not have rested on the seventh,’ was d’Alembert’s reply.  But, on the whole, Voltaire’s verses succeed in keeping up to a high level of mediocrity; they are the verses, in fact, of a very clever man.  It is when his cleverness is out of its depth, that he most palpably fails.  A human being by Voltaire bears the same relation to a real human being that stage scenery bears to a real landscape; it can only be looked at from in front.  The curtain rises, and his villains and his heroes, his good old men and his exquisite princesses, display for a moment their one thin surface to the spectator; the curtain falls, and they are all put back into their box.  The glance which the reader has taken into the little case labelled Alzire has perhaps given him a sufficient notion of these queer discarded marionettes.

Voltaire’s dramatic efforts were hampered by one further unfortunate incapacity; he was almost completely devoid of the dramatic sense.  It is only possible to write good plays without the power of character-drawing, upon one condition—­that of possessing the power of creating dramatic situations.  The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, for instance, is not a tragedy of character; and its vast crescendo of horror is produced by a dramatic treatment of situation, not of persons.  One of the principal elements in this stupendous example of the manipulation of a great dramatic theme has been pointed out by Voltaire himself.  The guilt of Oedipus, he says, becomes known to the audience very early in the play; and, when the denouement at last arrives, it comes as a shock, not to the audience, but to the King.  There can be no doubt that Voltaire has put his finger upon the very centre of those underlying causes which make the Oedipus perhaps the most awful of tragedies.  To know the hideous truth, to watch its gradual dawn upon one after another of the characters, to see Oedipus at last alone in ignorance, to recognise clearly that he too must know, to witness his struggles, his distraction, his growing terror, and, at the inevitable moment, the appalling revelation—­few things can be more terrible than this.  But Voltaire’s comment upon the master-stroke by which such an effect has been obtained illustrates, in a remarkable way, his own sense of the dramatic.  ‘Nouvelle preuve,’ he remarks, ’que Sophocle n’avait pas perfectionne son art.’