Setting out with the principle that good poetry was only good prose, with the addition of measure and rhyme, he was frequently prosaic and negligent in his verses. He had few of those bold forms of expression, those original turns, and those bold images, which form the accent of poetry. He was not less rigorously faithful to the etiquette of our theatre. He even exaggerated its habitual pomp, and its periphrases of politeness, without correcting them by those naive turns which Corneille found in the language of his day, and which Racine dexterously mingled with that of the court. Thus he was at once less poetical, less simple, and less true, than his great predecessors."
It is impossible, we think, to claim for Voltaire even an equality with Corneille and Racine. Compare the impressions left on the mind by the perusal of the works of the three great dramatists, and the inferiority of the third is at once perceptible. "Corneille," says St Beuve,[1] "with his great qualities and defects, produces on me the effect of one of those great trees, naked, rugged, sombre in the trunk, and adorned with branches and a dusky verdure only towards the summit. They are strong, gigantic, scantily leaved; an abundant sap circulates through them, but we are not to expect from them shade, shelter, or flowers. They bud late, begin to shed their foliage early, and live a long time half shorn of their leaves. Even after their bare heads have surrendered their leaves to the autumnal wind, the vivacity of their nature still throws out here and there scattered branches and suckers; and when they fall, they resemble, in their crash and groans, that trunk covered with armour to which Lucan has compared the fall of Pompey."
This fanciful comparison which St Beuve has applied to the old age of the great Corneille, is applicable to his poetical character generally, only in so far as it expresses not inaptly the idea of irregular grandeur, which is the characteristic of Corneille's mind; for, amidst the conventional limitations of the French stage, the genius of the poet obviously drew its nourishment from an imagination naturally highly poetical—still further excited by the romantic and occasionally extravagant tone of the Spanish drama, which had been his favourite study. That union of the spirit of the romantic drama with the classical, which Voltaire vainly laboured to effect, because in truth he felt not the inspiration of either, is attained so far as such a union was practicable (for we have already said, that in its full extent it is impossible) in the plays of Corneille. His dramas remind us of some ancient Roman monument, like the tomb of Cecilia Metella—some "stern round tower of ancient days"—converted, during the middle ages, into a place of defence; exhibiting feudal outworks and barbaric ornaments embossed upon, a classic fabric, but so harmonized and blended with the original structure, by the softening touch of time and the growth of vegetation, that the whole possesses a sombre and stately unity of effect. The effect of Racine's dramas, again, very much resembles that of the architecture of Palladio; it exhibits a purely classic framework, internally and with some difficulty accommodated to modern usages, but yet so graceful in its outward proportions, so finished and polished within, that the limited accommodation of the edifice is forgotten in the compactness and proportion and elegance of the apartments. But Voltaire, without any real feeling for the classic drama, as his contemptuous style of treating Sophocles in the preface to the Œdipus shows, and equally incapable of appreciating any thing of the spirit of the romantic stage, or of borrowing from it any thing but a few hints for theatrical effect and a more lively dialogue—has merely put together incoherent fragments from antiquity and feudalism—"To make a third he joined the other two," but without real blending of parts or unity of spirit. His compositions might be appropriately compared to an artificial ruin, in which the modern aspect of the materials is in contradiction to the form and architecture of the edifice.
Of his great works, Brutus, the Orphan of China, Zaire, and the Death of Cæsar—the two latter owed their very existence, and almost their whole dramatic merit, to the inspiration of Shak-
- ↑ Critiques et Portraits Litéraires. Première Série—Corneille.
