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and the Misantrope, by its extreme depth, and, if I may so express myself, by its melancholy, approximates to the seriousness of tragedy.

There are two modes of exciting laughter; the one is to exhibit faults first, and then to relieve them by good qualities. This sort of comic humour sometimes leads to the pathetic. The other mode consists in first bestowing praise, and then covering the object praised with so much ridicule that we cannot help relinquishing the esteem we had conceived for noble talents or exalted virtues. This sort of comic humour is the blighting nihil mirari.

The predominant characteristics of the founder of the English drama are nationality, eloquence, and observations, ideas, and maxims derived from knowledge of the human heart, and applicable to the various conditions of man. There is another remarkable quality which pervades the writings of Shakspeare, and that is the life which pervades them throughout. Some one compared the genius of Racine to the Apollo Belvedere, and the genius of Shakspeare to the equestrian statue of Philip IV. in Notre Dame. "Be it so," replied Diderot; "but what would think were the wooden statue to draw down his helmet, shake his gantlets, brandish his sword, and prance about in the cathedral?" The

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poet of Albion, endowed with creative power, animates even inanimate objects. The scenes, the stage, a branch of a tree, a blade of grass, the bones in a churchyard, all speak: under his magic touch there is nothing dead, not even death itself.

Shakspeare makes great use of contrasts: he loves to mingle diversions and acclamations of joy with funeral pomp and the wailings of grief. Thus, for example, the musicians summoned to the nuptials of Juliet, arrive just in time to attend her remains to the grave; and, indifferent to the grief which prevails in the house of mourning, they indulge in jests, and discourse of matters the most foreign to the catastrophe. Who does not recognise in this the reality of life? who does not feel all the bitterness of the picture, and who is there that has not witnessed similar scenes? These effects were not unknown to the Greeks. We find in Euripedes those simple touches of nature which Shakspeare intermingles with his loftiest tragic sublimity. An example of this occurs in Phædra, where the princess has just expired, and the chorus know not whether they shall enter her apartment. In Alceste, Death and Apollo exchange pleasantries. Death wishes to seize Alceste while she is young, because he is not anxious to have a

wrinkled victim. These contrasts verge on the terrible; but then a single shade too strong or too faint in the expression renders them low or ridiculous.

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

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