More detailed evidence of Voltaire’s utter lack of dramatic insight is to be found, of course, in his criticisms of Shakespeare.  Throughout these, what is particularly striking is the manner in which Voltaire seems able to get into such intimate contact with his great predecessor, and yet to remain as absolutely unaffected by him as Shakespeare himself was by Voltaire.  It is unnecessary to dwell further upon so hackneyed a subject; but one instance may be given of the lengths to which this dramatic insensibility of Voltaire’s was able to go—­his adaptation of Julius Caesar for the French stage.  A comparison of the two pieces should be made by anyone who wishes to realise fully, not only the degradation of the copy, but the excellence of the original.  Particular attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony’s funeral oration into French alexandrines.  In Voltaire’s version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole:—­

ANTOINE:  Brutus ... ou suis-je?  O ciel!  O crime!  O barbarie!’
Chers amis, je succombe; et mes sens interdits ... 
Brutus, son assassin!... ce monstre etait son fils! 
ROMAINS:  Ah dieux!

If Voltaire’s demerits are obvious enough to our eyes, his merits were equally clear to his contemporaries, whose vision of them was not perplexed and retarded by the conventions of another age.  The weight of a reigning convention is like the weight of the atmosphere—­it is so universal that no one feels it; and an eighteenth-century audience came to a performance of Alzire unconscious of the burden of the Classical rules.  They found instead an animated procession of events, of scenes just long enough to be amusing and not too long to be dull, of startling incidents, of happy mots.  They were dazzled by an easy display of cheap brilliance, and cheap philosophy, and cheap sentiment, which it was very difficult to distinguish from the real thing, at such a distance, and under artificial light.  When, in Merope, one saw La Dumesnil; ‘lorsque,’ to quote Voltaire himself, ’les yeux egares, la voix entrecoupee, levant une main tremblante, elle allait immoler son propre fils; quand Narbas l’arreta; quand, laissant tomber son poignard, on la vit s’evanouir entre les bras de ses femmes, et qu’elle sortit de cet etat de mort avec les transports d’une mere; lorsque, ensuite, s’elancant aux yeux de Polyphonte, traversant en un clin d’oeil tout le theatre, les larmes dans les yeux, la paleur sur le front, les sanglots a la bouche, les bras etendus, elle s’ecria:  “Barbare, il est mon fils!"’—­how, face to face with splendours such as these, could one question for a moment the purity of the gem from which they sparkled?  Alas! to us, who know not La Dumesnil, to us whose Merope is nothing more than a little sediment of print, the precious stone of our forefathers has turned out to be a simple piece of paste.  Its glittering was the outcome of no inward fire, but of a certain adroitness in the manufacture; to use our modern phraseology, Voltaire was able to make up for his lack of genius by a thorough knowledge of ‘technique,’ and a great deal of ‘go.’