The brilliant success of Le Cid evoked the fierce jealousy of Corneille's fellow-dramatists,[1] and led to The Quarrel
over the Cid. a pamphlet warfare in which Mairet and Georges de Scudéry (1601-1667)—the brother of Madeleine and a prolific writer of high-flown tragi-comedies—took the lead. There were the usual accusations of plagiarism—all the dramatists of the day were in greater or less measure indebted to the Spanish playwrights—but the important question raised was that of the Unities. Corneille had in fact evolved the type of tragedy for which a close approximation to the unities of time and place—in the skilful hands of Racine their complete acceptance—had internal justification. He had adhered, at the expense of some improbability, to the twenty-four hours (Rodrigue's defeat of the Moors occurs in the night between the first and second days), but he had not maintained a pedantic fixity of scene. Scudéry,
- ↑ Like Jouson with his prologues and epilogues, Corneille intensified this ill-will by the arrogant self-laudation of the lines entitled Excuse à Ariste, published shortly after the Cid, where he declares, "Je ne dois qu'à moi seul toute ma renommée." Armande Gaste, La Querelle du Cid, Paris, 1898, reprints all the documents, with introduction.
epics and tragedy. It was an aristocratic ideal heightened by the emancipation of the Renaissance and the study of Seneca, and intensified by religious and political warfare. What was new and striking in Corneille was the union of this will with the argumentative subtlety of a Norman avocat and a pupil of the Jesuits. Characteristically the ideal is not found in the Dutch literature sketched in an earlier chapter. Yet no one could accuse the Dutch of the War of Independence of weakness of will. But the source of that strength was not aristocratic egotism and pride. It was duty; and duty—obedience to God and loyalty to country—is the ideal of Hooft and Vondel, of Huyghens and Cats.
