He, somehow or other, without knowing it, was able to do
what none of the rest of them, though knowing it all too perfectly well,
could begin to do. Everybody seems to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaire
plays gentleman usher for him to his countrymen, and then, perceiving
that his countrymen find a flavor in him beyond that of _Zaire_ or
_Mahomet_, discovers him to be a _Sauvage ivre, sans le moindre etincelle
de bon gout, et sans le moindre connoissance des regles_. Goethe, who
tells us that _Goetz von Berlichingen_ was written in the Shakespearian
manner,--and we certainly should not have guessed it, if he had not
blabbed,--comes to the final conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, but
not a dramatist. Chateaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art. "If, to
attain," he says, "the height of tragic art, it be enough to heap
together disparate scenes without order and without connection, to
dovetail the burlesque with the pathetic, to set the water-carrier beside
the monarch and the huckster-wench beside the queen, who may not
reasonably flatter himself with being the rival of the greatest masters?
Whoever should give himself the trouble to retrace a single one of his
days, ... to keep a journal from hour to hour, would have made a drama in
the fashion of the English poet.
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