It was not his object to write great drama, but to please his audience:  he did please them; and, naturally enough, he has not pleased posterity.  His plays are melodramas—­the melodramas of a very clever man with a great command of language, an acute eye for stage-effect, and a consummate knowledge of the situations and sentiments which would go down with his Parisian public.  They are especially remarkable for their wretched psychology.  It seems well-nigh incredible that Voltaire’s pasteboard imitations of humanity should ever have held a place side by side with the profound presentments of Racine; yet so it was, and Voltaire was acclaimed as the equal—­or possibly the triumphant rival—­of his predecessor.  All through the eighteenth century this singular absence of psychological insight may be observed.

The verse of the plays is hardly better than the character-drawing.  It is sometimes good rhetoric; it is never poetry.  The same may be said of La Henriade, the National Epic which placed Voltaire, in the eyes of his admiring countrymen, far above Milton and Dante, and, at least, on a level with Virgil and Homer.  The true gifts displayed in this unreadable work were not poetical at all, but historical.  The notes and dissertations appended to it showed that Voltaire possessed a real grasp of the principles of historical method—­principles which he put to a better use a few years later in his brilliant narrative, based on original research, of the life of Charles XII.

During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying—­half unconsciously, perhaps—­to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius.  What was that quality?  Was he first and foremost a dramatist, or an epic poet, or a writer of light verse, or an historian, or even perhaps a novelist?  In all these directions he was working successfully—­yet without absolute success.  For, in fact, at bottom, he was none of these things:  the true nature of his spirit was not revealed in them.  When the revelation did come, it came as the result of an accident.  At the age of thirty he was obliged, owing to a quarrel with a powerful nobleman, to leave France and take up his residence in England.  The three years that he passed there had an immense effect upon his life.  In those days England was very little known to Frenchmen; the barrier which had arisen during the long war between the two peoples was only just beginning to be broken down; and when Voltaire arrived, it was almost in the spirit of a discoverer.  What he found filled him with astonishment and admiration.  Here, in every department of life, were to be seen all the blessings so conspicuously absent in France.  Here were wealth, prosperity, a contented people, a cultivated nobility, a mild and just administration, and a bursting energy which manifested itself in a multitude of ways—­in literature, in commerce, in politics, in scientific thought.  And all this had come into existence in a nation which had curbed