which is as characteristic of the times and country as the witches of Macbeth were of early Scotland; and a variety of other incidents, which the squeamishness of French taste could not tolerate. But what it could tolerate, because the unity of time demanded it, was that Chimène should, in twenty-four hours after her father had been killed in a duel, and before his funeral could in decency have taken place, be nearly reconciled to the champion under whose sword he fell. It is true this champion had, during that time, done many things to win a lady's heart; he had beaten the Moors; he had defeated a knight whom Chimène had promised to marry if he would avenge her father's death; and he had-to her great astonishment and satisfaction-payed her two very long morning visits in her own house. But the Spanish poet, whether it was that he regarded the unities less, or paid more respect to common sense, decency and probability, allowed his heroine longer time to relent; and gave his hero more than one Atlantean day to support his world of achievements. Ximena observes, about the middle of the play, that three months had elapsed since her father's death; consequently it may be assumed that the entire action took up five or six months; and thus the precipitancy of the lady was at least 150 times less. It is true she does not quite consent in Corneille; but the King answers for her to Rodrigo. 'Pour vaincre un point d'honneur qui combat contre toi, And thus the catastrophe is incomplete, for the fate of the lovers is not decided by any thing more positive than the promise of a third person, and their own silence. The marriage of Ximena with Rodrigo, at the end of several months, may be tolerated according to the manners which de Castro has given to his personages; but it is incompatible with Parisian manners, and the embroidered coats and hoops in which Corneille has dressed his actors; and, by altering the moral costume of his drama, he has made the denouement disgusting. The unity of place has brought the French poet into still greater difficulties; and, as it is rigidly observed in the representation, it gives rise to unspeakable absurdity. The confidential scenes of Chimena take place in the king's own room, as do her lover's clandestine visits to what she herself calls her house; and every other incident of the play occurs in the same spot. Corneille felt this inconvenience, and the contradictions to which it gave rise; but all France, its academy, its prime minister, were against him; and, in order to be French, academic, ministerial, in order to be in good taste, he was reduced to be absurd. The dramatic conceptions of Corneille, had he been left entirely to himself, were vast enough perhaps to have overcome the prepossession prepossession of his countrymen in favour of the unities. But there was no possibility of acting or of reasoning against them; and a poet, of a totally different mind from his, arose about the time when he began to decline; one who, by a much more finished execution, confirmed the national predilection, which made genius consist in surmounting difficulties of a petty order. Racine, indeed, seemed born to take away all hope that the doors of the French theatre might ever be thrown widely open, to give entrance to all mankind; and to admit the representation of the whole human heart without mutilation. He has overcome, with so much apparent ease and gracefulness, the obstacles which the unities created, his poetry is so chaste and faultless, his versification so smooth and flowing, and his whole composition so perfect in its kind, that, even with our British tastes, we can fully participate in the pleasure which the French receive from the representation of his tragedies; at the same time that, admitting their merit as elegant compositions, we must confess that, as pictures of human actions, characters or passions, they are among the most stinted productions of the art; and seem rather calculated to show how much might be omitted, than how much may be done, without endangering success. His boldness, if such it can be called, consists in restraining his fancy, in checking the flights of inspiration; and, while he has guarded himself against the minutiæ of criticism, he has laid himself bare to the more tremendous charge of having escaped from petty blemishes, by sacrificing the magnificent beauties, the splendid enthusiasm of exalted poetry and passion which sometimes touch the giddy verge of rapture. The poetic impulse, however, does not appear to have been naturally very intense in Racine, or of a very energetic complexion. He excelled in painting the tender passions; and that of which he always gives the truest picture is love; even though, in order to give it currency at Versailles, he was forced to mix it up with a large dose of gallantry, and to make Frenchmen of his Greeks. His female characters are delineated with more truth than his heroes. His Romans have less of their country sternness than the Romans of Corneille : but, indeed, all his personages are French; and French belonging to the time and court of Louis XIV. It is in vain that he gives them foreign names, that he makes them say they are in Aulis or Trezene, that he hands them over all the gods of mythology for their friends and intimates, and dresses them in Grecian armour : their minds and souls are still French, their moral costume is Parisian, and there is not one of them who, had he appeared in the Sallon d'Hercule, or the Gallerie de Diane at Versailles, might not have passed for a most exquisite courtier. His Achilles is Monsieur le Marquis d'Achille : d'Achille; his Agamemnon Monsieur le Duc d'Agamemnon; and his Nestor, had he ever introduced this prudent personage upon the stage, would, no doubt, have been a complete rhyming Président à Mortier. Yet such is the prepossession of the French critics, that La Harpe-one of the most pert and coxcomical of the race-has pronounced that the Achilles of Racine is more like the Achilles of Homer, than is the Achilles of Euripides! We remember once to have seen two English characters on the French stage, dressed as Englishmen still are, that is to say, in boots, a light green coat, edged with gold lace, and cocked hats, kiss each other, at meeting after a long absence; and, upon remonstrating against the incorrectness of the copy, we were told the actors must know better than we could. Eriphile in Iphigénie' is an intriguing subaltern, at most a discarded modern French dame d'atours; and even Phedre, notwithstanding her appeal to her father Minos, whom she describes, perhaps in the most brilliant passage of Racine, as holding the fatal urn, and sitting in judgment upon the pallid mortals who arrive in the nether world, is not Greek. It was not with vague traits that Shakspeare painted his men of every nation, and the passions of every man. It is for this very reason, perhaps, that our great poet has been so little appreciated in France. He drew mankind with so bold a pencil, that, to the timid, it appeared rash; he painted them with such full grown features, that, to dwarfish conceptions, they appeared gigantic. But, without the truth of his portraiture, its universality would have no merit; and only nations who are more skilled than the French in the deep mazes of the heart, can appreciate either. It is small praise to say that Shakspeare was the greatest poet of his country. He was the sublimest human philosopher the world has known; and not even Bacon had powers of mind which could be compared to his. But the philosophy of Bacon comes in its naked forms, and undisguised in any garb that might conceal it: the philosophy of Shakspeare, wrapt in the dress of poetry, and the pomps of scenic diction, becomes palpable only by reflection; and the emotion which this first master of the passions has excited must subside before the philosopher can be perceived. If neglect of the unities had been the only cause of the indifference which the French have shown toward Shakspeare, they might, whenever they condescended to imitate or translate him, have contented themselves with reducing his eccentricities into the pretended compass prescribed by Aristotle. But they have never failed to do much more than this. Too timid to express his grand strokes of nature, and to make his characters speak the language of their souls, they have brought his sentiments within the French French rules, excluding all that were not current in France. An early imitation, (in 1769,) as it is called, of one entire piece of Shakspeare, was the play of Hamlet' by Ducis, a poet endowed with greater energy of feeling than the bards of his country in general possess. The French Hamlet' opens with a scene between Claudius and Polonius, who, without any feature to distinguish him from the whole tribe of confidants, is no more a Dane than he is a Greek. Claudius, in a speech of eighty lines, tells him what he knew before, his projects of dethroning his nephew, and assures him that he is not in the least alarmed by the spectre which the people have seen. Gertrude appears, and he makes love to her, for they are not yet married; but, struck with remorse for her crime, she rejects his suit, though it seems they had been attached to each other before her marriage with her murdered husband. In the second act, Gertrude, in her turn, informs her confidant Elvire, that it was she who poisoned her husband, and the manner of it; and thus far all is recital, and useless recital. At this moment Norceste, Horatio, arrives from England, and an interview takes place between him and Hamlet; but how unlike the original! We can safely say that thus far not one of the beauties of Shakspeare but has been flung aside. But Norceste has returned from England, the land of crimes, where a king had just been poisoned, and Hamlet conceives the plan of making Norceste relate the murder in the presence of Gertrude and Claudius. His mother is much moved at the recital, but Claudius not at all. Ophelia is daughter to Claudius, and betrothed to her cousin Hamlet, who, when convinced of Claudius's guilt, breaks off his projected marriage. In the fourth act he resolves upon dying, and in his soliloquy is to be found the only reminiscence of Shakspeare that is discoverable in the whole play. 'Et qu'offre donc la mort à mon âme abattue? Un asile assuré; le plus doux des chemins, L'homme, au bord du cercueil, par le doute arrêté; Ressaisit l'existence, et s'attache à la terre.' Such is the imitation of To Be, or Not to Be!' It is useless to pursue the parallel any farther. But if Ducis had understood and felt his original, he might, even with his unities, have preserved some of the traits which have made Hamlet the most extraordinary and eccentric of all the personages of our bard; a compound of the most incompatible qualities, successively brought brought to light by unforeseen circumstances; gifted with the most exquisite sensibility, yet often reduced to act as if he had no feeling; with an energy of will, and an ardour in his first impressions, which a weight of vague anxiety and torpid sorrow immediately turns to languor; with the warmest general philanthropy, yet with unchristian hatred toward a few; with elements which make him dearer to the friends of his heart than men in general are; and contradictions which render him unintelligible to the vulgar. But not one clue to such a character could such poets possess. Their too polished souls cannot, like all else that is polished, reflect the images which stand before them. Madame de Staël has somewhere expressed her admiration of the French Hamlet, and of Talma, who usually performs the part. In our opinions it is altogether one of the most disgusting exhibitions we have ever witnessed. The actor understands the character of the prince as little as the translator; and both have made him a kind of gloomy frenetic, like any other gloomy frenetic, but without any of the traits which separate him from that entire class of men, and make him individually himself. The great spirit of our bard has been even more inhumanly treated in Romeo and Juliet' than in Hamlet.' Excepting the names of the lovers, of the two contending families, and of the town in which the scene passes, Ducis might as well have called it Titus Andronicus.' Romeo and Juliet are two common French gallants; the gentleman a hero, and the lady an admirer of captured trophies. The chief of the Montaigus is of the monster species; and the chief of the Capulets finds no moment so opportune for reconciliation as that immediately following the murder of his son by a Montaigu. In short, the whole is a tissue of absurdities. Friar Lawrence, the nurse, the exquisite Mercutio, our old friend the apothecary, are all omitted; and not a trace can be found of the unison of sentiment which thrills through the hearts of the lovers at first sight, as if they had been created one for the other, and as if their destinies must have remained incomplete if they had not met. Contrary to the opinion of many, we think the first passion of Romeo for Rosaline rather confirms their fitness for each other, for, at the first touching of Juliet's hand, it has flown. It is moreover in perfect harmony with his disposition. Hearts endowed with romantic sensibility have many fleeting passions before they settle into their true affection; and among such, he who finally loves the most is not unfrequently he who has loved the oftenest. Having mentioned the apothecary, we must add, that we consider Romeo's description of him as one of the most extraordinary examples of a thing which often occurs in Shakspeare: the embodying of thoughts and feelings which dwell most naturally |