to be known to his contemporaries during the first sixty years
of his life (1694-1754). But to-day his poetry--the serious part of it,
at least,--is never read, and his tragedies--except for an occasional
revival--are never acted. As a dramatist Voltaire is negligible for the
very reasons that made him so successful in his own day. 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
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