of allowing the author two shares in the profits during the first
run of the piece was observed, and even then revivals profited
him nothing. Thomas Corneille himself, who to his undoubted
talents united wonderful facility, untiring industry, and (gift
valuable above all others to the playwright) an extraordinary
knack of hitting the public fancy, died, notwithstanding his
simple tastes, “as poor as Job.” We know that Pierre received
for two of his later pieces two thousand livres each, and we do not
know that he ever received more.
But his reward in fame was not stinted. Corneille, unlike many of the great writers of the world, was not driven to wait for “the next age” to do him justice. The cabal or clique which attacked the Cid had no effect whatever on the judgment of the public. All his subsequent masterpieces were received with the same ungrudging applause, and the rising star of Racine, even in conjunction with the manifest inferiority of Corneille’s last five or six plays, with difficulty prevailed against the older poet’s towering reputation. The great men of his time—Condé, Turenne, the maréchal de Grammont, the knight-errant duc de Guise—were his fervent admirers. Nor had he less justice done him by a class from whom less justice might have been expected, the brother men of letters whose criticisms he treated with such scant courtesy. The respectable mediocrity of Chapelain might misapprehend him; the lesser geniuses of Scudéry and Mairet might feel alarm at his advent; the envious Claverets and D’Aubignacs might snarl and scribble. But Balzac did him justice; Rotrou, as we have seen, never failed in generous appreciation; Molière in conversation and in print recognized him as his own master and the foremost of dramatists. We have quoted the informal tribute of Racine; but it should not be forgotten that Racine, in discharge of his duty as respondent at the Academical reception of Thomas Corneille, pronounced upon the memory of Pierre perhaps the noblest and most just tribute of eulogy that ever issued from the lips of a rival. Boileau’s testimony is of a more chequered character; yet he seems never to have failed in admiring Corneille whenever his principles would allow him to do so. Questioned as to the great men of Louis XIV.’s reign, he is said to have replied: “I only know three,—Corneille, Molière and myself.” “And how about Racine?” his auditor ventured to remark. “He was an extremely clever fellow to whom I taught the art of elaborate rhyming” (rimer difficilement). It was reserved for the 18th century to exalt Racine above Corneille. Voltaire, who was prompted by his natural benevolence to comment on the latter (the profits went to a relation of the poet), was not altogether fitted by nature to appreciate Corneille, and moreover, as has been ingeniously pointed out, was not a little wearied by the length of his task. His partially unfavourable verdict was endorsed earlier by Vauvenargues, who knew little of poetry, and later by La Harpe, whose critical standpoint has now been universally abandoned. Napoleon I. was a great admirer of Corneille (“s’il vivait, je le ferais prince,” he said), and under the Empire and the Restoration an approach to a sounder appreciation was made. But it was the glory of the romantic school, or rather of the more catholic study of letters which that school brought about, to restore Corneille to his true rank. So long, indeed, as a certain kind of criticism was pursued, due appreciation was impossible. When it was thought sufficient to say with Boileau that Corneille excited, not pity or terror, but admiration which was not a tragic passion; or that
| “D’un seul nom quelquefois le son dur ou bizarre |
when Voltaire could think it crushing to add to his exposure of the “infamies” of Théodore—“après cela comment osons-nous condamner les pièces de Lope de Véga et de Shakespeare?”—it is obvious that the Cid and Polyeucte, much more Don Sanche d’Aragon and Rodogune, were sealed books to the critic.
Almost the first thing which strikes a reader is the singular inequality of this poet, and the attempts to explain this inequality, in reference to his own and other theories, leave the fact untouched. Producing, as he certainly has produced, work which classes him with the greatest names in literature, he has also signed an extraordinary quantity of verse which has not merely the defects of genius, irregularity, extravagance, bizarreté, but the faults which we are apt to regard as exclusively belonging to those who lack genius, to wit, the dulness and tediousness of mediocrity. Molière’s manner of accounting for this is famous in literary history or legend. “My friend Corneille,” he said, “has a familiar who inspires him with the finest verses in the world. But sometimes the familiar leaves him to shift for himself, and then he fares very badly.” That Corneille was by no means destitute of the critical faculty his Discourses and the Examens of his plays (often admirably acute, and, with Dryden’s subsequent prefaces, the originals to a great extent of specially modern criticism) show well enough. But an enemy might certainly contend that a poet’s critical faculty should be of the Promethean, not be Epimethean order. The fact seems to be that the form in which Corneille’s work was cast, and which by an odd irony of fate he did so much to originate and make popular, was very partially suited to his talents. He could imagine admirable situations, and he could write verses of incomparable grandeur—verses that reverberate again and again in the memory, but he could not, with the patient docility of Racine, labour at proportioning the action of a tragedy strictly, at maintaining a uniform rate of interest in the course of the plot and of excellence in the fashion of the verse. Especially in his later plays a verse and a couplet will crash out with fulgurous brilliancy, and then be succeeded by pages of very second-rate declamation or argument. It was urged against him also by the party of the Doucereux, as he called them, that he could not manage, or did not attempt, the great passion of love, and that except in the case of Chimène his principle seemed to be that of one of his own heroines:—
| “Laissons, seigneur, laissons pour les petites âmes (Aristie in Sertorius.) |
There is perhaps some truth in this accusation, however much some of us may be disposed to think that the line just quoted is a fair enough description of the admired ecstasies of Achille and Bajazet. But these are all the defects which can be fairly urged against him; and in a dramatist bound to a less strict service they would hardly have been even remarked. They certainly neither require, nor are palliated by, theories of his “megalomania,” of his excessive attention to conflicts of will and the like. On the English stage the liberty of unrestricted incident and complicated action, the power of multiplying characters and introducing prose scenes, would have exactly suited his somewhat intermittent genius, both by covering defects and by giving greater scope for the exhibition of power.
How great that power is can escape no one. The splendid soliloquies of Medea which, as Voltaire happily says, “annoncent Corneille,” the entire parts of Rodogune and Chimène, the final speech of Camille in Horace, the discovery scene of Cinna, the dialogues of Pauline and Sévère in Polyeucte, the magnificently-contrasted conception and exhibition of the best and worst forms of feminine dignity in the Cornélie of Pompée and the Cléopâtre of Rodogune, the singularly fine contrast in Don Sanche d’Aragon, between the haughtiness of the Spanish nobles and the unshaken dignity of the supposed adventurer Carlos, and the characters of Aristie, Viriate and Sertorius himself, in the play named after the latter, are not to be surpassed in grandeur of thought, felicity of design or appropriateness of language. “Admiration” may or may not properly be excited by tragedy, and until this important question is settled the name of tragedian may be at pleasure given to or withheld from the author of Rodogune. But his rank among the greatest of dramatic poets is not a matter of question. For a poet is to be judged by his best things, and the best things of Corneille are second to none.
The Plays.—It was, however, some time before his genius came to perfection. It is undeniable that the first six or seven of his plays are of no very striking intrinsic merit. On the other hand, it requires only a very slight acquaintance with the state of the drama in France at the time to see that these works, poor as they may now seem, must have struck the spectators as something
