And to such titles of praise let us not dispute his right.  His vivacity, indeed, actually went so far as to make him something of an innovator.  He introduced new and imposing spectacular effects; he ventured to write tragedies in which no persons of royal blood made their appearance; he was so bold as to rhyme ‘pere’ with ‘terre.’  The wild diversity of his incidents shows a trend towards the romantic, which, doubtless, under happier influences, would have led him much further along the primrose path which ended in the bonfire of 1830.

But it was his misfortune to be for ever clogged by a tradition of decorous restraint; so that the effect of his plays is as anomalous as would be—­let us say—­that of a shilling shocker written by Miss Yonge.  His heroines go mad in epigrams, while his villains commit murder in inversions.  Amid the hurly-burly of artificiality, it was all his cleverness could do to keep its head to the wind; and he was only able to remain afloat at all by throwing overboard his humour.  The Classical tradition has to answer for many sins; perhaps its most infamous achievement was that it prevented Moliere from being a great tragedian.  But there can be no doubt that its most astonishing one was to have taken—­if only for some scattered moments—­the sense of the ridiculous from Voltaire.

NOTES: 

[Footnote 5:  April, 1905.]

VOLTAIRE AND FREDERICK THE GREAT

At the present time,[6] when it is so difficult to think of anything but of what is and what will be, it may yet be worth while to cast occasionally a glance backward at what was.  Such glances may at least prove to have the humble merit of being entertaining:  they may even be instructive as well.  Certainly it would be a mistake to forget that Frederick the Great once lived in Germany.  Nor is it altogether useless to remember that a curious old gentleman, extremely thin, extremely active, and heavily bewigged, once decided that, on the whole, it would be as well for him not to live in France.  For, just as modern Germany dates from the accession of Frederick to the throne of Prussia, so modern France dates from the establishment of Voltaire on the banks of the Lake of Geneva.  The intersection of those two momentous lives forms one of the most curious and one of the most celebrated incidents in history.  To English readers it is probably best known through the few brilliant paragraphs devoted to it by Macaulay; though Carlyle’s masterly and far more elaborate narrative is familiar to every lover of The History of Friedrich II.  Since Carlyle wrote, however, fifty years have passed.  New points of view have arisen, and a certain amount of new material—­including the valuable edition of the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick published from the original documents in the Archives at Berlin—­has become available.  It seems, therefore, in spite of the familiarity of the main outlines of the story, that another rapid review of it will not be out of place.