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SHAKSPEARE'S STYLE OF WRITING HAS CORRUPTED

TASTE-WRITING IS AN ART.

SHAKSPEARE plays, at one and the same moment, the tragedy in the palace, and the comedy at the door. He does not paint a particular class of men; he mingles, as they are mingled in real life, the sovereign and the slave, the patrician and the plebeian, the warrior and the peasant, the illustrious and the obscure. He makes no distinction between classes! he does not separate the noble from the ignoble, the serious from the comic, the gay from the grave, laughter from tears, joy from grief, or good from evil. He sets in motion the whole of society, as he unfolds at full length the life of a man. The great poet knew that the incidents of a single day cannot present a picture of human existence, and that there is unity from the cradle to the tomb. He takes up a youthful head; and

if he does not strike it off, he gives it you back whitened by age; Time has invested him with his own power.

But this universality of Shakspeare's talent has, by the authority of example and the abuse of imitation, tended to corrupt dramatic literature, and founded the erroneous notion on which, unfortunately, the new school is established. If to attain the sublimity of tragic art it were only requisite to jumble together a succession of incongruous and disconnected scenes, to place the burlesque and the pathetic side by side, to bring the beggar in contact with the king, who might not reasonably hope to rival the greatest poets? Any one who may take the trouble to retrace the incidents of one day of his life, his conversations with men of different conditions, the varied objects that have passed before his eyes, the ball, the funeral, the banquet of the rich, and the distress of the poor; in short, if only this were wanting, any one who writes his journal from hour to hour will produce a drama in the style of the English poet.

Writing is an art. This art has various styles, and each style has its rules. The styles and rules are not arbitrary; they have their origin in nature. Art has merely separated that which nature has blended; and has selected the

finest points without departing from the resemblance of the model. Perfection does not destroy truth. Racine, in all the refinement of his art, is more natural than Shakspeare, just as the Apollo, in all his divinity, is more human in his form than an Egyptian colossus.

The privilege which a writer may take of saying and representing every thing, the bustle of the scene, and the multitude of characters, may produce an imposing effect; but after all there is little merit in it. Nothing is easier than to amuse and to excite interest by a tale ; in this respect a child may possess as much skill as the ablest writer of fiction. Would it not have been easy for Racine to reduce to action those incidents which his good taste induced him to leave to description? Racine has retrenched from his tragedies all that writers of ordinary genius would have thrown into them. Otherwise, in Phædra, the wife of Theseus would have made amorous advances to Hippolytus on the stage; instead of the fine description of Theramenes, we should have had Franconi's horses, and a terrific wooden monster; in Britannicus, Nero would have offered violence to Junia on the stage; in Bajazet we should have seen the combat of the brother of the Sultan with the eunuchs, &c. The most

wretched melo-drama may draw forth more tears than the most sublime tragedy. Genuine tears are those which are drawn forth by beautiful poetry, which flow at the sound of the lyre of Orpheus; they have their source in mingled admiration and grief. The ancients endowed even the Furies with personal beauty ; because there is moral beauty in remorse.

That love of the hideous which has seized us, that horror of the ideal, that passion for lame and hunchbacked heroes, that sympathy with things that are loathsome, trivial, and vulgar, result from a depravity of feeling, which we have not received from Nature, of which we talk so much. Even when we love that which is in a certain degree ugly, it is because we see in it a certain degree of beauty. We naturally prefer a beautiful woman to a plain one, a rose to a thistle, the bay of Naples to the plain of Montrouge, the Parthenon to a pig-sty. It is the same in things figurative and moral. Away then with that animalized and materialized world which would lead us, even in the effigy of the object, to prefer our likeness copied with all its defects, by a machine to our portrait painted by the pencil of Raphael.

Still I do not pretend to deny the forced changes which time and revolutions produce in

literary as well as in political opinion; but these changes do not justify the corruption of taste, they only enable us to scorn one of its causes. It is perfectly natural that changes of manners should vary the forms of our pleasures and our pains.

Internal silence prevailed during the absolute monarchy of the reign of Louis XIV and also during the drowsy listlessness of the reign of Louis XV. Wanting emotions within, our dramatic poets sought them from without. They borrowed catastrophes from Greece and Rome, to excite the sympathy of auditors, who were so unfortunate as to have among themselves only subjects of laughter. The French public were in those days so unaccustomed to tragic events that a writer could not venture to present even fictitious scenes of a very sanguinary nature. Horrors would have excited disgust, even had they been three thousand years old, and consecrated by the genius of Sophocles.

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But now that the people having risen into importance, and play a part in the government, like the chorus in Greek tragedy; when real spectacles of terror have occupied us for the space forty years, the impulse communicated to society has a tendency to communicate itself to the drama. The classic tragedy, with its unities

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