and negotiation between the Cardinal and the academicians, who dreaded official frowns if they wholly acquitted, and public disgust if they condemned against evidence. If it be considered that this infant institution owed its birth to Richelieu, and depended on him for its future growth, the verdict is highly honourable to the individuals, and creditable to the literary character, even when disadvantageously circumstanced by being entangled in the trammels of a court.
Our limits will not permit the examination of insulated passages, nor even individual tragedies: but independently of the splendour of the execution, other circumstances attending the career of the Cid produced a strong impression on the remainder of Corneille’s dramatic life. The Cid was taken from two Spanish plays, and several passages were actual translations; but not in sufficient number to invalidate the author’s claim to a large share of originality. To set that question at rest, in the editions published by himself, he gave the passages taken from the Spanish at the bottom of the page. Yet it was objected by his rivals and libellers, that the author of Medea and the Cid could only imitate or translate: that he had stolen the first of his tragedies from Seneca, the second from Guillen de Castro: a clever borrower, without a spark of tragic genius or invention! Unluckily for this bold assertion, among other European languages, this French play was translated into Spanish; and the nation, whence the piece was professedly derived, thought it worth while to recover it in the dress given to it by an illustrious foreigner. Against such unfounded censures it will be sufficient to quote the authority of Boileau, who speaks of the Cid as a merveille naissante.
Having achieved his first great success on a Spanish subject and after a Spanish model, it is not improbable that, had all gone smoothly, he would have continued to draw his resources from the same fountain. But vexation and resentment, usually at variance with good policy, now conspired with it; and put him on seeking a new road to fame. He had, as it should seem, intended to transplant a succession of Spanish histories and fables, with all the entanglement of Spanish contrivance in the weaving of plots. But in weighing the objections started against his piece, he found that they applied rather to his Spanish originals than to his own adaptation; he therefore determined to cut the knot of future controversy, by adopting the severity of the classical model. To this we owe Horace, Pompée, Cinna, and Polyeucte;—masterpieces which his more polished but more feeble successors in vain aspired to emulate. Thus did this eager war of criticism produce a crisis in the dramatic history of France. Its stage would probably, but for this, have been heroic and chivalrous, not, as it is, Roman, and after the manner of the ancients. It might even have rivalled our own in tragicomedy;—that monster stigmatized by Voltaire as the offspring of barbarism, although, and perhaps because, he “pilfered snug” from it; and might hope, by undervaluing the article, to escape detection as the purloiner.
At the end of three years, devoted to the study of the ancients, the injured author avenged the injuries levelled against the Cid by the production of Horace. Although the impetuous poet had not yet subdued his genius to the trammels of just arrangement, unity of action, and the other severe rules of the classic drama, such was the originality of conception, the force of character, and grandeur of sentiment displayed in this performance, that new views of excellence were opened to the astonished audience. Voltaire, with all the pedantry of mechanical criticism, objects to Horace, that in it there are three tragedies instead of one. Whatever may be the force of this objection with the French, it will weigh little with a people inured to the irregular sublimity and unfettered splendour of Shakspeare. Cinna redeemed many of the errors of Horace, and improved upon its various merits. The suffrages of the public were divided between it and Polyeucte, as the author’s masterpiece. But Dryden considered the Cid and China as his two best plays; and speaks of Polyeucte sarcastically, as “in matters of religion, as solemn as the long stops upon our organs.”
Before the performance of Polyeucte, Corneille read it at the Hotel de Rambouillet. That tribunal affected sovereign authority in affairs of wit. Even the reputation of the author, now in all its splendour, could no further command the civilities of the critics, than to “damn with faint praise.” Some days afterwards, Voiture called on Corneille, and, after much complimentary circumlocution, took the liberty of just hinting, that its success was not likely to answer expectation: above all, that its Christian spirit was calculated to give offence. Corneille, much alarmed, was about to withdraw it from rehearsal: the persuasions of an inferior player spirited him up to risk the consequences of avowing himself a Christian in an infidel court. Thus, probably, a hanger-on of the theatre had the honour of preventing a repetition of that malice, by which rival wits attempted to arrest the career of the Cid.
The winter of 1641–42 produced La Mort de Pompée and Le Menteur.
The opening of La Mort de Pompée has been frequently commended for grandeur of conception and originality; and the skill cannot be denied, by which the enunciation of the circumstances producing the interest of the piece is rendered consistent with the dignity of the subject and characters. The same praise cannot be conceded to the inflation of the dialogue and the intolerable length of the speeches. But the concluding speech of Cæsar to the second scene of the third act, and the whole of the fourth act, notwithstanding the censure of Dryden, both on this tragedy and the Cinna, that “they are not so properly to be called plays, as long discourses of reason and state,” may be selected as favourable specimens of the style and power of French dialogue.
A short notice will be sufficient for the comedy of Corneille; and the production of Le Menteur, his most celebrated piece, affords the fittest opportunity. As the Cid was imitated from Guillen de Castro, Lopé de Vega furnished the groundwork of Le Menteur. It is considered to be the first genuine example of the comedy of intrigue and character in France; for Melite was at best but a mere attempt. Before this time, there was no unsophisticated nature, no conventional manners, no truth of delineation. Mirth was raised by extravagance, and curiosity by incidents bordering on the impossible. Corneille appealed to nature and to truth: however imperfect the execution, in comparison with that of his next successor in comedy, he proved that he knew how Thalia as well as Melpomene ought to be drawn. The greatest compliment, perhaps, that can be paid to his genius is, that he pointed out the road both to Racine and Moliere.
The year 1645 gave birth to Rodogune, in which, having before touched the springs of wonder and pity, he worked on his audience by the more powerful engine of terror. His subsequent pieces were below his former level, and betrayed, not so much the decay of genius from the growing infirmities of nature, as that fatal mistake in writing themselves out, so common to authors in the province of imagination. The cold reception of Pertharite disgusted the poet, and he renounced the stage in a splenetic little preface to the printed play, complaining that “he had been an author too long to be a fashionable one.” The turmoil of the court and the gaiety of the theatre had not effaced his early sentiments of piety and religion; he therefore betook himself to the translation of Kempis’s Imitation of Jesus Christ, which he performed very finely. This gave rise to a ridiculous and unfounded story, that the first book was imposed on him as a penance; the second, by the Queen’s command; and the third, by the terrors of conscience during a severe illness.
As the mortification of failure faded away with time, his passion for the theatre revived. Notwithstanding some misgivings, he was encouraged by Fouquet Destrin in 1659, after six years’ absence. He began again, with more benefit to his popularity than to his true fame, with Œdipus;—the noblest and most pathetic subject, most nobly treated, of ancient tragedy. La Toison d’Or came next; a spectacle got up for the King’s marriage;—a species of piece in which the poet always plays a subordinate part to the scene-painter and the dressmaker. Sertorius is to be noticed as having given scope to the fine declamatory powers of Mademoiselle Clairon, the Siddons of the French stage.
Berenice rose to an unenviable fame, principally in consequence of the following circumstances. Henrietta of England, then Duchess of Orleans, whom Fontenelle had the good manners to compliment as “a princess who had a high relish for works of genius, and had been able to call forth some sparks of it even in a barbarous country,” privately set Corneille and Racine to work on the same subject. Their pieces were represented
