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But it is to be noted that while the Elizabethan vitality would have made the drama great in spite of its audacity, the greatest productions are distinguished from the less great precisely by that peculiar sanity which stamped the master-spirits of the time. As it is with the dramatists, so is it with the rest.
I might have been a man of genius, if I had had the chance; ay, and have lived with the master-spirits of the land. But every thing has failed with me. I'd ambition once, and wrote plays, poems, music nobody would give me a hearing. I never loved a woman, but she laughed at me; and here I am in my old age alone alone! Don't take this girl from me, Mr. Pendennis, I say again.
No government trifles more with its army and navy than our own. So niggardly are the master-spirits at Washington of the honours justly earned by military men, that we have fleets still commanded by captains, and armies by officers whose regular duty it would be to command brigades.
This conventual prejudice has banished from our school-rooms the name of love, and presented to their youthful inmates fragments instead of books, cramped and puny publications instead of the works of master-spirits, lest the mind should be contaminated by any allusion to that passion contained in them.
A car comes forward driven by living thunder, "Creation shudders with sublime dismay, And in a blazing tempest whirls away." And this is fine poetry! This is what ranks its writer with the master-spirits of the age! This is what has been described, over and over again, in terms which would require some qualification if used respecting Paradise Lost!
I had already investigated with deep interest the histories of Greece and Rome; I now studied with ardour and success the languages of those high-minded nations; and, ere long, perused with insatiable delight the pages of those master-spirits whose glorious names blaze like constellations through the dark night of antiquity.
Let us point to him, unguarded by a parent's care from his third year, that parent one of the master-spirits of a great Revolution and ever absent in his fearful work, remarkable for his correct deportment and that perseverance in well-doing so strikingly shown by the fact that he, alone among his young contemporaries, finished his studies at college with the approbation of the faculty, and received the only degree conferred upon his class.
They are the two master-spirits of the stage in the nineteenth century. They are both of them consummate craftsmen, having assimilated every profitable device of their predecessors and having made themselves chiefs, each in his own art.
But how is it that foreign diplomats, that the purest of his former political friends, consider him to be now the savior of what he once persecuted in his speeches? At every step this noble people vindicates and asserts the vitality of self-government, continually jeopardized by the inexhaustible errors of the policy followed by the master-spirits in the administration.
Seductive, with irresistible fascination of manner, singular grace and animation; of pregnant wit, though quite uneducated; devoted to gallantry, and too high-spirited to heed propriety; obeying no control save that of honour; despising, for those she loved, danger, fortune, and opinion; rather restless than ambitious; risking willingly her own life as well as that of others; and after having passed the best part of her existence in intrigue of every kind thwarted more than one plot left more than one victim on her path traversed nearly the whole of Europe, by turns an exile and a conqueress who not unfrequently dazzled even crowned heads; after having seen Chalais lay his head on the block, Châteauneuf turned out of the ministry and imprisoned, the Duke de Lorraine well-nigh despoiled of his territories, Buckingham assassinated, the King of Spain embroiled in a war of ever-recurring disasters, Anne of Austria humiliated and overcome, and Richelieu triumphant; sustaining the struggle, nevertheless, even to its bitter end; ever ready, in that desperate game of politics become to her a craving and a passion to descend to the darkest cabals or adopt the rashest resolves; with an incomparable faculty of discerning the actual state of affairs or the predominant evil of the moment, and of strength of mind and boldness of heart enough to grapple with and destroy it at any cost; a devoted friend and an implacable enemy; and, finally, the most formidable foe that Richelieu and Mazarin, in their turn, encountered: such was the celebrated Duchess de Chevreuse whom we have seen alternately courted and dreaded by the two great political master-spirits of her time, the founders of monarchical unity in France.
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