PIERRE CORNEILLE
[CHAPTER XIII]
CRITICISM OF THE CRITICISM
There is no longer any necessity for a criticism of Corneille's tragedies in a negative sense, for it is already to be found in several works. Further, if there exists a poet, who stands outside the taste and the preoccupations of our day (at least in France), it is Corneille. The greater number of lovers of poetry and art confess without reserve that they cannot endure his tragedies, which "have nothing to say to them." The fortune of Corneille has declined more and more with the growth of the fame of Shakespeare, which has been correlative to the formation and the growth of modern aesthetic and criticism; and if the fame of Shakespeare seemed strange and repugnant to classicistic elegance, the same fate has befallen the French dramatist, as the result of Shakespeareanism in relation to the appreciation of art which has now penetrated everywhere. Corneille once represented "la profondeur du jugement" as opposed to "les irrégularités sauvages et capricieuses" of the Englishman, decorum against the lack of it, calm diffused light against shadows pierced at rare intervals with an occasional flash. Lessing had selected for examination and theme the Rodogune, which he held to be a work, not of poetical genius, but of an ingenious intellect, because genius loves simplicity, and Corneille, after the manner of the ingenious, loved complications. Schiller, when he had read the most highly praised works of Corneille, expressed his astonishment at the fame which had accrued to an author of so poor an inventive faculty, so meagre and so dry in his treatment of character, so lacking in passion, so weak and rigid in the development of action, and almost altogether deprived of interest. William Schlegel noted in him, in place of poetry, "tragic epigrams" and "airs of parade," pomp without grandeur—he found him cold in the love scenes—his love was not as a rule love, but, in the words of the hero Sertorius, a well calculated aimer par politique—intricate and Machiavellian and at the same time ingenuous and puerile in the representation of politics. He defined the greater part of the tragedies as nothing but treatises on the reason of State in the form of discussions, conducted rather in the manner of a chess-player than of a poet. Even the most temperate De Sanctis could not succeed in enjoying this writer, as is to be gathered from his lectures upon dramatic literature delivered in 1847. He found that he does not render the fullness of life, but only the extreme points of the passions in collision, and that he prefers eloquence to the development of tragedy, so that he often unconsciously turns tragedy into comedy. The confrontation of Corneille's Cid with its Spanish original, Las mocedades of Guillén de Castro, has however prevailed above all others as the text upon which to base arguments against the French dramaturge. Shack declared that the work of Corneille was altogether negative, that he reduced and reëlaborated his original, losing the poetical soul of the Spanish poet in the process and destroying the alternate and spontaneous expression of tenderness and of violent passion. He found that he substituted oratorical adornments and a swollen phraseology for the pure language of sentiment, coquetry for the struggle of the affections, to which it is directly opposed, and a boastful charlatan for the heroic figure of Rodrigo. Klein, passing from severe criticism into open satire, described the Cid to be a "commentary in Alexandrines" upon the poem of the Mocedades, comparing the Spanish Jimena to a fresh drop of dew upon "a flower that has hardly bloomed," and the French Chimène on the contrary to a "muddy drop, which presents a tumultuous battle of infusorians to the light of the sun": the "infusorians" would represent the antithesis to the "Alexandrine tears" (Alexandrinerthränen), which she pours forth.
But these negative judgments were not restricted altogether and at first to foreigners and romantics. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire (who for that matter sometimes lifts his eyes to the dangerous criterion of Shakespeare in his notes upon Corneille) did not refrain from criticising his illustrious predecessor for the frequent froideur observable in his dramatic work, as well as for his constant habit of speaking himself as the author and not allowing his personages to speak, for his substitution of reflections for immediate expressions, and for the artifices, the conventions and the padding, in which he abounds. Vauvenargues showed himself irreconcilable (Racine was his ideal). He too blamed the heroes of Corneille for uttering great things and not inspiring them, for talking, and always talking too much, with the object of making themselves known—whereas great men are rather characterised by the things they do not say than those they do say—and in general for ostentation, which takes the place of loftiness, and for declamation, which he substitutes for true eloquence. Gaillard allowed the influence of the generally unfavorable verdict or the verdict full of retractations and cautions in respect of its theme, to colour the eulogy which he composed in 1768. It used to be said of Corneille that he aimed rather at "admiration" than at "emotion," and that he was in fact "not tragic." This insult (declared Gaillard) was spoken, but not written down, "because the pen is always wiser than the tongue." But the accusation of "coldness" had made itself heard on the lips of Corneille's contemporaries in the second half of the seventeenth century, particularly when the tragedies of Racine, with their very different message to the heart, had appeared to afford a contrast.
The defenders of Corneille have often yielded to the temptation of accepting Shakespeare's dramas or at least the tragedies of Racine as a standard of comparison and a reply to criticism. They have attempted to prove that Corneille should be read, judged and interpreted in the spirit of those poets. They have claimed to discover in Corneille just that which their adversaries failed to discover and of which they denied the existence: this they call truth, reality and life, meaning thereby, passion and imagination. Thus we find Sainte-Beuve lamenting that not only foreigners, but France herself, had not remarked and had not gloried in the possession of Pauline (in Polyeucte), one of the divine poetical figures, which are to be placed in the brief list containing the Antigones, the Didos, the Francescas da Rimini, the Desdemonas, the Ophelias. More recently others have elevated the Cleopatra (of Rodogune) to the level of Lady Macbeth, and the Cid, on account of the youthful freshness of his love-making, to the rank of Romeo and Juliet, while they have discovered in Andromède nothing less than that kind of féerie poétique "to which the English owe a Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest." They also declare that the Horace is a tragedy in which reigns a sort of "savage Roman sanctity," culminating in the youthful Horace, "intransigent and fanatical, ferociously religious"; while his sister Camilla is "a creature of nerves and flesh, who has strayed into a family of heroes" and rises up in revolt against that hard world. For them Camilla is an "invalid of love," "one possessed by passion," a "neurotic," of an altogether modern complexion. Polyeucte represents "a drama of nascent Christianity," and its protagonist, a "mystical rebel," recalls at once "Saint Paul, Huss, Calvin and Prince Krapotkine," arousing the same curiosity as a Russian nihilist, such as one used to see some years ago in the beershops, with bright eyes, pale and fair, the forehead narrow about the temples and of whom it was whispered that he had killed some general or prefect of police at Petersburg. Severus seems to them to be similar in some respects to "a modern exegete," who is writing the history of the origin of Christianity. There exists no play "which penetrates more profoundly into the human soul or opens a wider perspective of untrodden paths." Cinna represents in the tragedy of Augustus another neurotic after the modern manner. Augustus, ambitious and without scruples, has attained to the summit of his desires and is weary and tired of power. He negates the man who ordered the proscriptions that is in himself and his generosity is due almost to satiety for too easy triumphs and vengeances. Attila, in the tragedy of that name, springs out before us as "a monster of pride, cruel, emphatic and subtle, conscious of being the instrument of a mysterious power, an ogre with a mission": this "stupendous" conception is worthy to stand side by side with the gigantic figures of the Légende des Siècles.
These are all fantastic embroideries, metaphors, easel pictures, which sometimes do honour to the artistic capacity of the eulogists, but have no connexion whatever with the direct impression of Corneille's tragedies. Spinoza would have said that they have as much connexion with them as the dog of zoology with the dog-star. An obvious instance of this is the strange comparison of the character Polyeucte with the "Russian nihilist"—but it is little less evident in the other instances, because it is altogether arbitrary to interpret the Augustus of the Cinna as though he were a Shakespearean Richard II or Henry IV and to attribute to him the psychology of what Nietzsche describes as the "generous man."
Fancy for fancy, as well admit Napoleon's comment. He declared himself persuaded that Augustus was certainly not changed in a moment into a "prince débonnaire," into a poor prince exercising "une si pauvre petite vertu" as clemency, and that if he holds out to Cinna the right hand of friendship, he only does this to deceive him and in order to revenge himself more completely and more usefully at the propitious moment. It is an amusement like another to take up the personages of a play or of a story and refashion them in our own way by the free use of the fancy, or to weave a new mode of feeling out of the facts concerning certain cases and characters. Camilla can thus be quite well transformed even into a nymphomaniac; but unfortunately criticism insinuates itself into the folds of fancy and causes the fancier himself (Lemaître) to note that Camilla sacrifices her love to her duty "délibérément," that she certainly resembles a character of Racine, but "non certes par la langue," and that she would show us what she really is "si elle parlait un langage moins rude at moins compact." As though the speech and the inflection were an accident and not the whole of a poetic creation, the beating of its heart! The demoniacal, the neurotic Camilla, it is true, speaks in this way:
"Il vient, préparons-nous a montrer constamment
Ce que doit une amante à la mort d'un amant."
Here Voltaire's unconquerable good sense could not refrain from remarking: "'Préparons-nous' adds to the defect. We see a woman who is thinking how she can demonstrate her affliction and may be said to be rehearsing her lesson of grief."
The same fantastic and anticritical method of comparison has been adopted with De Castro's play, with the object of obtaining a contrary result: this comparison, whenever it is conducted with the criterion of realistic art, or of art full of passion, cannot but result in a condemnation of Corneille's reëlaboration of the theme. This has been frankly admitted by more than one French critic (Fauriel for example), who contrived to loosen somewhat the chains of national preconceptions and traditional admirations. Indeed it was already implied in the celebrated judgment of the Academy, which is not the less just and acute for having been delivered by an academy and written by a Chapelain. Guillen de Castro's play, which is epical and popular in tone, celebrates the youthful hero Rodrigo, the future Cid, strong, faithful and pious, admired by all, and looked upon with love by princesses. An anecdote is recounted, with the object of celebrating him, describing how he was obliged to challenge and to slay the father of the maiden he loved. Bound to the same degree as himself by the laws of chivalry, she is held to be obliged to provide for the vendetta required by the death of her father. She performs her duty without hatred and solely as a legal enemy, an "ennemie légitime" (to employ a phrase of the same Corneille in the Horace). She does not cease to love, nor does she feel any shame in loving. Finally, his prowess and the favour of heaven, which he deserves and which ever accompanies him, obtain for Rodrigo the legal conquest of his loving beloved, who is also his enemy for honour's sake. De Castro's play is limpid, lively, full of happenings. Corneille both simplifies and complicates it, reducing it to series of casuistical discussions, vivified here and there with echoes of the passionate original, softened with moments of abandonment, as in the vigorous scene of the challenge, which is an echo of the Spanish play, or in the tender sigh of the duet, "Rodrigue, qui Veut cru?... Chimène, qui l'eût dit?..." which is also in De Castro. After this, it can be asserted that Corneille "has made a human drama, a drama of universal human appeal, out of an exclusively Spanish drama"; it will also be declared that "the most beautiful words of the French language find themselves always at the point of the pen, when one is writing about the Cid; duty, love, honour, the family, one's native land," because "everything there is generous, affectionate, ingenuous, and there never has been breathed a livelier or a purer air upon the stage, the air of lofty altitudes of the soul." But this is verbiage. It is also possible to revel in the description of "the fair cavalier, protected of God and adored by the ladies, who carries his country about with him wherever he goes, and along with it everybody's heart; in the beautiful maiden with the long black veil, so strong and yet so weak, so courageous and so tender; in the grand old man, so majestic and yet so familiar, the signor so rude and so hoary, yet with a soul as straight and as pure as a lily, in whom dwells the ancient code of honour and all the glory of times past; in the king, so good-natured and ingenuous, yet so clever, like the good king one finds in fairy stories; in the gentle little infanta, with her precious soliloquies, so full of gongorism and knightly romances ..."; but as we have previously observed, this will be merely drawing fancy pictures. It suffices to read the Cid, to see that it contains nothing of this and nothing of this is to be found among the tragedies of Corneille.
The vanity of such criticisms, which attempt to alter Corneille by presenting him as that which he is not and does not wish to be, a poet of immediate passions, would at once be apparent, were it to be realised that no such attempts are made in the case of Racine, whose passionate soul makes its presence at once felt through literary and theatrical conventions, in the affection which he experiences for the sweet, for what is tremendous and mysterious with religious emotion, which palpitates in Andromache, in Phaedra, in Iphigenia and Eriphylis in Joad and in Attila. But it confutes itself by becoming modified, sometimes among the very critics whom we have been citing, into the thesis that Corneille is the poet of the "reason," or of "the rational will." And we say modified, because the reason or the rational will is in poetry itself a passion, and he would be correctly described as a poet of that kind of inspiration, who should accentuate the rational-volitional moment in the representation of the passions, by creating types of wise and active men, such as are to be found in the epic, in many dramatic masterpieces, in high romance and elsewhere. But not even this exists in Corneille, so much so that the very persons who maintain the thesis, remark that he isolates a principle and a force, the reason and the will, and seeks out how the one makes the other triumph. To this, they declare, we must attribute the "character of stiffness" proper to the heroes of Corneille, who are necessarily bound to lack "the seductive flexibility, the languors, the perturbations, which are to be observed in those moved by sentiment." Now this is not permissible in art, because art, in portraying a passion, even if it be that of inflexible rationality and inflexible will and duty, never "isolates" it, in the fashion of an analyst in a laboratory, or a physicist, but seizes it in its becoming, and so together with all the other passions, and together with the "languors" and "disturbances." Thus Corneille, described as they describe him by isolating the reason and the will, would be a slayer of life, and so of the will and the reason themselves. And when he is blamed for having given so small and so unhappy a place to love, "to the act by which the race perpetuates itself, to the relations of the sexes and to all the sentiments that arise from them, and which, by the nature of things form an essential part of the life of the human race," it is not observed that beneath this reproof, which is somewhat physiological and lubricious and lacks seriousness of statement, there is concealed the yet more serious and more general reproof that Corneille suffocates and suppresses the quiver of life. La Bruyère was probably among the first to give currency to the saying, which has been repeated, that Corneille depicts men not "as they are," but "as they ought to be," and leads to a like conclusion, though expressed in an euphemistic form; because poetry in truth knows nothing of being or of having to be, and its existence is a having to be, its having to be a being.
This critical position, which desires to explain and to justify Corneille as poet of the reason and of the rational will (although, as we shall see further on, it contains some truth), is indeed equivocal, because it seems to assert on the one hand that he possesses a particular form of passion, and on the other takes it away from him with its "isolation," its "having to be," and with its assertion that his personages "surpass nature," with its boasting of his "Romans being more Roman than Romans," his "Greeks more Greek than Greeks" and the like, that is to say, by making of him an exaggerator of types and of abstractions, the opposite of a poet. The passage, then, is easy from this position to its last thesis or modification, by means of which Corneille is exalted as an eminent representative of a special sort of poetry, "rationalistic poetry," which is held to coincide with poetry that is especially "French." The theory here implied is to be found both among the French and those who are not French, among classicists and romantics, sometimes being looked upon among both as a merit, that is to say, it is recognised by them that this sort of poetry is legitimate. In the course of his proof that French rationalistic tragedy excludes the lyrical element and demands the intrigue of action and the eloquence of the passions, Frederick Schlegel indicated "the splendid side of French tragedy, where it evinces lofty and incomparable power, fully responding to the spirit and character of a nation, in which eloquence occupies a dominant position, even in private life." A contemporary writer on art, Gundolf, blames his German conationals for the prejudices in which they are enmeshed, and for their lack of understanding of the great rationalistic poetry of France, so logical, so uniform, so ordered and subordinated, so regular and so easily to be understood. It is the natural and spontaneous expression of the French character, in the same way as is the monarchy of Louis XIV, differing thereby from the narrow convention or imitation, which it became in the hands of Gottsched and others of Gallic tendencies, in other countries. Sainte-Beuve, alluding in particular to Corneille, argued that in French tragedy "things are not seen too realistically or over-coloured, since attention is chiefly bestowed upon the saying of Descartes:—I think, therefore I am: I think, therefore I feel;—and everything there happens in or is led back to the bosom of the interior substance," in the "state of pure sentiment, of reasoned and dialogued analysis," in a sphere "no longer of sentiment, but of understanding, clear, extended, without mists and without clouds." Another student of Corneille opposes the different and equally admissible system of the French tragedian, "a constructor and as it were an engineer of action," to that of Shakespeare, portrayer of the soul and of life. Thus, while all the most famous plays of Shakespeare are drama, but lyrical drama, "hardly one of the most beautiful and popular plays of Corneille is essentially lyrical." What are we to think of "rationalistic" or "intellectualistic," or "logical" or "non-lyrical" poetry? Nothing but this: that it does not exist. And of French poetry? The same: that it does not exist; because what is poetry in France is naturally neither intellectualiste nor essentially French, but purely and simply poetry, like all other poetry that has grown in this earthly flower-bed. And if the old-fashioned romanticism, which sanctifies and gives substance to nationality and demands of art, of thought and of everything else, that it should first be national, is reappearing among French writers in the disguise of anti-romanticism and neo-classicism, this is but a proof the more of the spiritual dulness and mental confusion of those nationalists, who embrace their presumed adversary.
The only reality that could be concealed in "rationalistic poetry," for which Corneille is praised, as shown above, would be one of the categories in old-fashioned books of literary instruction, known as "didactic poetry," which was not too well spoken of, even there. Corneille is admired from this point of view, among other things, for his famous political dissertations in the China and in the Sertorius, where Voltaire considers that he is deserving of great praise for "having expressed very beautiful thoughts in correct and harmonious verse." In this connexion are quoted the remarks of the Maréchal de Grammont about the Othon, that "it should have been the breviary of kings," or of Louvois, "an audience of ministers of state would be desirable for the judgment of such a work." It is indeed only in "didactic poetry," which is versified prose, that we find "thoughts" that are afterwards "versified." The method employed by another man of letters would also make of the tragedies of Corneille masked didactic poetry. He is an unconscious manipulator of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in the manner of Hegel, and describes it as "the alliance of the individual with the species, of the particular with the general," which were separate in the medieval "farces" and "moralities," the former being all compact of individuals and actions, the latter of ideas, which Corneille was able to unite, being one of those great masters who proceed from the general to the particular and vivify the abstractions of thought with the power of the imagination.
The justification of the tragedies of Corneille, as based upon the foundations of French society and history in the time of Corneille, is certainly more solid than that which explains them as based upon a mystical French "character," or "race," or "nation." Do conventions and etiquette govern and embarrass the development of dialogue and action in every part of those tragedies? But such was life at court, or life modelled upon life at court, in those days. Do the characters rather reason about their sentiments than express them? But such was the custom of well-bred men of that day. And do they always discuss matters according to all the rules of rhetoric and with perfect diction? But to speak well was the boast of men in society and diplomatists at that time. Do the women mingle love and politics, and rather make love for political reasons than politics for love? But the ladies of the Fronde did just this; indeed Cardinal Mazarin, in conversation with the Spanish ambassador, gave vent to the opinion that in France "an honest woman would not sleep with her husband, nor a mistress with her lover, unless they had discussed affairs of State with them during the day." And so discussions continue and are to be found continuing in Taine and many others, without explaining anything, because they pass over the poetry and the problem of the poetry, which is not, as Taine held, "the expression of the genius of an age" or "the reflection of a given society" (society reflects and expresses itself in its own actions and customs), but "poetry, that is to say, one of the free forces of every people, society and time, which must be interpreted with reasons contained in itself."[1] It is superfluous to add that the poetry is lost sight of in the delight of finding the personages and social types of the French seventeenth century, beyond the verses and the ideal conceptions of character; for example, we find them declaring their own affectionate sympathy for "Christian Theodora," for "this martyr, of the dress with the starched collar and the equally proudly starched sentiments, "for this proud martyr, in the grand style of Louis XIII," altogether forgetting the reality of the art of Corneille and the critical problems suggested by the Théodora. This is certainly very prettily and gracefully said, but it misses the point.
There remains to mention but one last form of defence, which however is not a justification of the art of Corneille, but a eulogy of him as an ingenious man, who deserved well of culture and possessed refinement of manners, particularly as regards theatrical representations. To him belongs the "great merit" (said Voltaire in concluding his commentary) of "having found France rustic, gross and ignorant, about the time of the Cid, and of having changed it 'by teaching it not only tragedy and comedy, but even the art of thinking." And his rival Racine, in his praise of Corneille before the Academy at the time of his death, had recorded "the debt that French poetry and the French stage owed to him." He had found it disordered, irregular and chaotic, and after having sought the right road for some time and striven against the bad taste of his age, "he inspired it with an extraordinary genius aided by study of the ancients, and exhibited reason (la raison) on the stage, accompanied with all the pomp and all the ornaments, of which the French language is capable." All the historians of French literature repeat this, beginning by bowing down before Corneille, the "founder," or "creator" of the French theatre. Such praise as this means little or nothing in art, because non-poets, or poets of very slender talents, even pedants, are capable of exercising this function of being founders and directors of the culture and the literature of a people. An instance of this in Italy was Pietro Bembo, "who removed this pure, sweet speech of ours from its vulgar obscurity, and has shown us by his example what it ought to be."
He was not a poet, yet was surrounded with the gratitude, and with the most sincere reverence on the part of poets of genius, among whom was Ariosto, to whom belong the verses cited above.
That other merit accorded to Corneille, of having accomplished a revolution, cleared the ground and "raised the French tragic system upon it," the "classical system," is without poetical value. We shall leave it to others to define as they please, precisely of what this work consisted, the introduction of the unities and of the rules of verisimilitude, the conception and realisation of tragic psychological tragedy, or the tragedy of character, of which actions and catastrophes should form, the consequences, the fusing and harmonising in a single type of sixteenth century tragedy, which starts from "the tragic incident," with that of the seventeenth century, which ends with it, and so on. We prefer to remark, with reference to this and to so many other disputes that have taken place since the time of Calepio and Lessing onward, and especially during the romantic period, with regard to the merits and the defects of the "French system," as compared with the "Greek system" and with the "romantic" or "Shakespearean," that "systems" either have nothing to do with poetry, or are the abstract schemes of single poems, and therefore that such disputes are and always have been, sterile and vain. Here too it should be mentioned that a "system" may be the work of non-poets or of mediocre poets, as was the case in Italy with the system of "melodrama," of which (to employ the figure of De Sanctis), Apostolo Zeno was the "architect" and Pietro Metastasio the "poet." In England too, the system of the drama was not fixed by Shakespeare, but by his predecessors, small fry indeed as compared with him. We would also observe that death or life may exist in one and the same system, for indeed a system is a prison, with bolts and bars. Note in this respect, that although the romantics had boasted the salvation that lay in the Shakespearean system, a new dramatic genius springing therefrom was vainly awaited. There appeared only semigeniuses and a crowd of strepitous works, not less cold and empty than those that had been condemned in the opposing "French system."
We may therefore conclude that the arguments of the admirers and apologists of Corneille, which have been passed in review, do not embrace the problem, but leave the judgments of negative criticism free to exercise their perilous potency. They find in Corneille intellectual combinations in place of poetical formations, abstractions in place of what is concrete, oratory in place of lyrical inspiration and shadow in place of substance.
[1] "Est-ce que la critique moderne n'a pas abandonné l'art pour l'histoire? La valeur intrinsèque d'un livre n'est rien dans l'école Sainte-Beuve-Taine. On y prend tout en considération, sauf le talent." (Flaubert, Correspondence, IV, 81.)
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE IDEAL OF CORNEILLE
Nevertheless, when all this has been said and the conclusion drawn, there remains the general impression of the work, which has in it something of the grandiose, and brings back to the lips the homage that the next generations rendered to the author, when they called him "the great Corneille." It is to be hoped that no one has been deceived as to the intention of our discourse up to this point, which has been directed not against Corneille, but against his critics, nor among them against those who have written many other things both true and beautiful on the subject; we have but to refer to the acute Lemaître among the most recent, to the diligent and loving Dorchain, and to the most solid of all, Lanson. We shall avail ourselves of them in what follows, but shall oppose their particular theories and presuppositions, which are misrepresentations of the subject of their judgments itself. For the negative criticism, which we have recapitulated, does not win our confidence, but rather shows itself to be erroneous or (which amounts to the same thing) incomplete, exaggerated and one-sided, for the very reason that it does not account for that impression of the grandiose. Conducted as it has been, it would very well suit a writer who was a rhetorician with an appearance of warmth, a writer able to make a good show before the public and in the theatre, while remaining internally unmoved himself, superficial and frivolous. But Corneille looks upon us and upon those critics with so serious and severe a countenance, that we lose the courage to treat him in so unceremonious and so expeditious a manner.
Whence comes that air of severity, which we find not only in his portraits but in every page of his tragedies, even in those and in those parts of them, in which he fails to hit the mark, or appears to be tired, to have lost his way, and to be making efforts?
From this fact alone: that Corneille had an ideal, an ideal in which he believed, and to which he clung with all the strength of his soul, of which he never lost sight and which he always tended to realise in situations, rhythms, and words, seeking and finding his own intimate satisfaction, the incarnation of his ideal, in those brave and solemn scenes and sounds.
His contemporaries felt this, and it was for this reason that Racine wrote that above all, "what was peculiar to Corneille consisted of a certain force, a certain elevation, which astonishes and carries us away, and renders even his defects, if there be found some to reprove him for them, more estimable than the virtues of others"; and La Bruyère also summed it up in the phrase that "what Corneille possessed of most eminent was his soul, which was sublime."
The most recent interpreters have found Corneille's ideal to reside in will for its own sake, the "pure will," superior or anterior to good and evil, in the energy of the will as such, which does not pay attention to particular ends. Thus the false conception of him as animated with the ideal of moral duty or with that of the triumph of duty over the passions has been eliminated, and agreement has been reached, not only with the reality of the tragedies, but also with what Corneille himself laid down in his Discours as to the dramatic personage. Such a personage may indeed be plunged in all sorts of crimes, like Cleopatra in the Rodogune, but in the words of the author, "all his actions are accompanied with so lofty a greatness of soul that we admire the source whence his actions flow, while we detest those actions themselves."
On the other hand, the concept of the pure will runs some risk of being perverted at the hands of those who proceed to interpret it by identification with that other "will for power" of Nietzsche, who understood the French poet in this hyperbolical manner and referred to him with fervent admiration on account of this fancy of his. The ideal of the will for power has an altogether modern origin, in the protoromantic and romantic superman, in over-excited and abstract individualism. It did not exist at the time of Corneille, or in the heart of the poet, who was very healthy and simple. The figures of Corneille's tragedies must be looked at through coloured and deforming glasses, as supplied by fashionable literature, in order to see in them such attitudes and gestures.
The further definition, which, while it renders the first conception more exact and more appropriate, at the same time shuts the door on these new fancies, is this: that Corneille's ideal does not express the pure will at the moment of violent onrush and actuation, but of ponderation and reflection, that is to say, as deliberative will. This was what Corneille truly loved: the spirit which deliberates calmly and serenely and having formed its resolution, adheres to it with unshakeable firmness, as to a position that has been won with difficulty and with difficulty strengthened. This represented for him the most lofty form of strength, the highest dignity of man. "Laissez-moi mieux consulter mon âme," says one of Corneille's personages, and all of them think and act in the same way. "Voyons," says the king of the Gepidi to the king of the Goths in the Attila, "—voyons qui se doit vaincre, et s' il faut que mon âme. A votre ambition immole cette flamme. Ou s'il n'est point plus beau que votre ambition. Elle-même s'immole a cette passion."
Augustus hesitates a long while, and gives vent to anguished lamentations, when he has discovered that Cinna is plotting against his life, as though to clear his soul and to make it better capable of the deliberation, which begins at once under the influence of passion, in the midst of anguish and with anguish. Has he the right to lament and to become wrathful? Has he not also made rivers of blood to flow? Does he then resign himself in his turn? Does he forsake himself as the victim of his own past? Far from it: he has a throne and is bound to defend it, and therefore will punish the assassin. Yes, but when he has caused more blood to flow, he will find new and greater hatreds surrounding him, new and more dangerous plots. It is better, then, to die? But wherefore die? Why should he not enjoy revenge and triumph once again? This is the tumult of irresolution, which, while felt as a hard, a desperate torment, and although it seems to hold the will in suspense, in reality sets it in motion, insensibly guiding it to its end. "O rigoureux combat d'un cœur irrésolu!..." The more properly deliberative process enters his breast with the appearance upon the scene of Livia, to whose advice he is opposed, for he disputes and combats it, yet listens and weighs it, seeming finally to remain still irresolute, yet he has already formed hi:; resolve, he has decided in his heart to perform an act of political clemency, so thunderous, so lightning-like in quality, as to bewilder his enemy and to hurl him vanquished at his feet.
The two brother princes in Rodogune are conversing, while they await the announcement as to which is the legitimate heir to the throne. Upon this announcement also depends which shall become the happy husband of Rodogune, whom they both love with an equal ardour. How will they face and support the decision of fate? One of the two, uncertain and anxious about the future, proposes to renounce the throne in favour of his brother, provided the latter renounces Rodogune; but he is met with the same proposal by the other. Thus the satisfaction of both, by means of mutual renunciation, is precluded. But the other course is also precluded, that of strife and conflict, for their brotherly affection is firm, and so is the sentiment of moral duty in both. This also forbids the one sacrificing himself for the other, because neither would accept the sacrifice. What can be saved from a collision, from which it seems that, nothing can be saved? One of the two brothers, after these various and equally vain attempts at finding a solution, returns upon himself, descends to the bottom of his soul, finds there a better motive and is the first to formulate the unique resolution: "Malgré l'éclat du trône et l'amour d'une femme, Faisons si bien régner l'amitié sur notre âme, Qu'étouffant dans leur perte un regret suborneur, Dans le bonheur d'un frère on trouve son bonheur...." And the other, who has not been the first to see and to follow this path asks: "Le pourriez, vous mon frère?" The first replies: "Ah; que vous me pressez! Je le voudrais du moins, mon frère, et c'est assez; Et ma raison sur moi gardera tant d'empire, Que je désavoûrai mon cœur, s'il en soupire." The other, firm in his turn replies: "J'embrasse comme vous ces nobles sentiments...."
Loving as he did, in this way, the work of the deliberative will (we have recorded two only of the situations in his tragedies, and we could cite hundreds), Corneille did not love love, a thing that withdraws itself from deliberation, a severe illness, which man discovers in his body, like fire in his house, without having willed it and without knowing how it got there. Sometimes the deliberative will is affected by it and for the moment at least upset, and then we hear the cry of Attila: "Quel nouveau coup de foudre! O raison confondue, orgueil presque étouffé...." as he struggles against its enchantments: "cruel poison de l'âme et doux charme des yeux." But as a general rule, he promptly drives it away from him, coldly and scornfully; or he subdues it and employs it as a means and an assistance in far graver matters, such as ambition, politics, the State; or he accepts it for what it contains of useful and worthy, which as such is the object and the fruit of deliberation. "Ce ne sont pas les sens que mon amour consulte: Il hait des passions l'impétueux tumulte...." Certainly, this attitude is intransigent, ascetic and severe: but what of it? "Un peu de dureté sied bien aux grandes âmes." Certainly love comes out of it diminished and humiliated: "D'Amour n'est pas le maître alors qu'on délibère;" love deserves its fate and almost deserves the gibe: "La seule politique est ce qui nous émeut; On la suit et l'amour s'y mêle comme il peut: S'il vient on l'applaudit; s'il manque on s'en console...." It manages as best it can and becomes less powerful and wonderfully ductile beneath this pressure, ready to bend in whatever direction it is commanded to bend by the reason. Sometimes it remains suspended between two persons, like a balance, which awaits the addition of a weight in order to lean over: "...Ce cœur des deux parts engagé, Se donnant à vous deux ne s'est point partagé, Toujours prêt d'embrasser son service et le vôtre, Toujours prêt à mourir et pour l'un et pour l'autre. Pour n'en adorer qu'une, il eût fallu choisir; Et ce choix eût été au moins quelque désir, Quelque espoir outrageux d'être mieux reçu d'elle ...." On another occasion, although there might be some inclination or desire, rather toward the one than the other side, it is yet kept secret, beneath the resolve to suffocate it altogether, should reason ordain that love must flow into a contrary channel. Not only are Corneille's personages told to their face: "Il ne faut plus aimer," an act of renunciation to be asked of a saint, but they are also bidden thus: "Il faut aimer ailleurs," an act worthy of a martyr.
He did not love love, not because it is love, but because it is passion, which carries one away and which, if it be allowed to do so, will not consent to state the terms of the debate clearly, and engage in deliberation. His dislike for the inebriation of hatred and of anger, which blind or confound the vision, and which, as passion, is also foreign to his ideal, also appears in confirmation of this view. "Qui hait brutalement permet tout à sa haine, Il s'emporte où sa fureur l'entraîne.... Mais qui hait par devoir ne s'aveugle jamais; c'est sa raison qui hait ...." His ideal personages sometimes declare, when face to face with their enemy: "je te dois estimer, mais je te dois haïr." On the other hand, we perceive clearly why Corneille was led to admire the will, even when without moral illumination, even indeed when it is actively opposed to or without morality; for it has the power of not yielding to and of dominating the passions, of not being violent weakness, but strength, or as it was called during the Renaissance, "virtú." In that sphere of deliberation there existed a common ground of mutual understanding between the honest and dishonest man, between the hero of evil and the hero of good, for each pursued a course of duty, in his own way and both agreed in withstanding and despising the madness of the passions.
And we also see why the domain towards which Corneille directed his gaze and for which he had a special predilection, was bound to be that of politics, where "virtú," in the sense that it possessed during the period of the Renaissance, found ample opportunity for free expansion and for self-realisation. In politics, we find ourselves continuously in difficult and contradictory situations, where acuteness and long views are of importance and where it is necessary to make calculations as to the interests and passions of men, to act energetically upon what has been decided after nice weighing in the balance, to be firm as well as prudent. It has been jocosely observed by William Schlegel that Corneille, the most upright and honest of men, was more Machiavellian than any Machiavelli in his treatment and representation of politics, that he boasted of the art of deceiving, and that he had no notion of true politics, which are less complicated and far more adroit and adaptable. Lemaître too admits that in this respect he was "fort candide." But who is not excessive in the things that he loves? Who is not sometimes too candid regarding them, with that candour and simplicity which is born of faith and enthusiasm? His very lack of experience in real politics, his simplicism and exaggeration in conceiving them, is there to confirm the vigour of his affection for the ideal of the politician, as supremely expressed by the man who ponders and deliberates. He always has la raison d'état and les maximes d'état upon his lips. We feel that these words and phrases move, edify and arouse in him an ecstasy of admiration.
It was free determination and complete submission to reason, duty, objective utility, to what was fitting—and not a spirit of courtly adulation—that led him to look with an equal ecstasy of admiration upon personages in high positions and upon monarchs, the summit of the pyramid. He did not therefore admit them because they can do everything, still less because they can enjoy everything, but on the contrary, because, owing to their office, their discipline and tradition, they are accustomed to sacrifice their private affections and to conduct themselves in obedience to motives superior to the individual. Kings too have a heart, they too are exposed to the soft snares of love; but better than all others they know what is becoming behaviour: "Je suis reine et dois régner sur moi: Je rang que nous tenons, jaloux de notre gloire, Souvent dans un tel choix nous défend de nous croire, Jette sur nos désirs un joug impérieux, Et dédaigne l'avis et du cœur et des yeux." And elsewhere: "Les princes out cela de leur haute naissance, Leur âme dans leur rang prend des impressions Qui dessous leur vertu rangent leurs passions; Leur générosité soumet tout à leur gloire ...." They love, certainly, as it happens to all to love, but they do not on that account yield to the attractions of the senses. "Je ne le cèle point, j'aime, Carlos, oui, j'aime; Mais l'amour de l'état plus fort que de moi-même, Cherche, au lieu de l'objet le plus doux à mes yeux, Le plus digne héros de régner en ces lieux." His predilection for history, especially for Roman history, has the same root, and had long been elaborated as an ideal—even in the Rome of the Empire, yet more so at the time of the Renaissance and during the post-Renaissance, and even in the schools of the Jesuits. It was thus transformed into a history that afforded examples of civic virtues, such as self-sacrifice, heroism, and greatness of resolve. We spare the reader the demonstration that this tendency was altogether different from, and indeed opposed to historical knowledge and to the so-called "historical sense," because questions of this sort and the accompanying eulogies accorded to Corneille as a historian, are now to be looked upon as antiquated.
The historical relations of Corneille's ideal are clearly indicated or at any rate adumbrated in these references and explanations, as also its incipience and genesis, which is to be found, as we have stated, in the theory and practice of the Renaissance, concerning politics and the office of the sovereign or prince, and for the rest in the ethics of stoicism, which was so widely diffused in the second half of the sixteenth century, and not less in France than elsewhere. The image of Corneille is surrounded in our imagination with all those volumes, containing baroque frontispieces illustrative of historical scenes, which at that time saw the light every day in all parts of Europe. They were the works of the moralists, of the Machiavellians, of the Taciteans, of the councillors in the art of adroit behaviour at court, of the Jesuit casuists Botero and Ribadeneyra, Sanchez and Mariana, Valeriano Castiglione and Matteo Pellegrini, Gracian and Amelot de la Houssaye, Balzac and Naudée, Scioppio and Justus Lipsius. They might be described as comprizing a complete and conspicuous section of the Library of the Manzonian Don Ferrante, the "intellectual" of the seventeenth century.
Such literature as this and the history of the time itself have been more than once given as the source of the poetical inspiration proper to Corneille, and indeed they appear spontaneously in the mind of anyone acquainted with the particular mode of thought and of manners that have prevailed during the various epochs of modern society. It is therefore unpleasant to find critics intent on fishing out other origins for it, in an obscure determinism of race and religion, almost as if disgusted with the obvious explanation, which is certainly the only true one in this case, pointing out for instance in Corneille "an energy that comes from the north," that is to say from the Germany that produced Luther and Kant, or from the country that was occupied for a time by their forefathers the Normans, those Scandinavian pirates who disembarked under the leadership of Rollo (if this fancy originated with Lemaître, they all repeat it); or they discover the characteristic of his poetry in the subtlety and litigious spirit of the Norman, and in the lawyer and magistrate whose functions he fulfilled.
The customary association of his ideal with the theory of Descartes is also without much truth. Chronological incompatibility would in any case preclude derivation or repercussion from this source, the utmost that could be admitted being that both possessed common elements, since they were both descended from a common patrimony of culture, namely the stoical morality already mentioned, and from the cult of wisdom in general. In Descartes, as later in Spinoza, the tendency was towards the domination of the passions by means of the intellect or the pure intelligence, which dissipates them by knowing and thinking them, while with Corneille the domination was all to be effected by means of an effort of the will.
The historical element in the ideal of Corneille does not mean that its value was restricted to the times of the author and should be looked upon as having disappeared with the disappearance of those customs and doctrines, because every time expresses human eternal truth in its forms that are historically determined, laying in each case especial stress upon particular aspects or moments of the spirit. The idea of the deliberative will has been removed in our day to the second rank, indeed it has almost been lost in the background, under the pressure of other forces and of other more urgent aspects of reality. Yet it possesses eternal vigour and is perpetually returning to the mind and soul, through the poets and philosophers and through the complexities of life itself, which make us feel its beauty and importance. The history of the manners, of the patriotism, of the moral spirit, of the military spirit of France, bears witness to this, for one of its mainstays in the past as in the present has been the tragedies of Corneille. The heroic, the tragic Charlotte Corday gave reality in her own person to one of Corneille's characters, so full of will power and ready for any enterprise: she was one of those aimables furies, nourished like the tyrannicides of the Renaissance on the Lives of Plutarch, whom her great forefather had set on paper with such delight.
It is inconceivable that such heroines as she, sublime in their meditated volitional act, should have been audaciously classed and confounded with those weak and impulsive beings extolled by the philosophers and artists of the will for power, from Stendhal to Nietzsche, who freely sought their models among the degenerates of the criminal prisons.
The whole life of Corneille, the whole of his long activity, was dominated by the ideal that we have described, with a constancy and a coherence which leaps to the eye of anyone who examines the particulars. As a young man, he touched various strings of the lyre, the tragedy of horrors in the manner of Seneca (Médée,) eccentric comedy in L'Illusion comique, the romantic drama of adventures and incidents in Clitandre, the comedies of love; but we already find many signs in these works and especially in the comedies, of the tendency to fix the will in certain situations, as will for a purpose and choice. After his novitiate (in which period is to be comprehended the Cid, which is rather an attempt than a realisation, rather a beginning than an end) he proceeded in a straight line and with over increasing resolution and self-consciousness. It is due to a prejudice, born of extrinsic or certainly but little acute considerations, that an interval should be placed between the Cid and the later works, though this was done by Schlegel, by Sainte-Beuve and by many others, both foreigners and French. They deplored that Corneille should have abandoned the Spanish mediaeval and knightly style, so in harmony with his generous, grandiose and imaginative inclinations, so full of promise for the romantic future, and should have restricted himself to the Graeco-Roman world and to political tragedy. It is impossible (as we have shown in passing), to assert the originality and the beauty of the Cid, when it is compared with and set in opposition to the model offered to Corneille by Guillen de Castro. Now if there is not to be found beauty, there is certainly to be found a sort of originality in the personality of Corneille, who eats into the popular epicity of the model and substitutes for it the study of deliberative situations. The harmonious versification of these explains in great part the success which the play met with in a society accustomed to debate "questions of love" (as they had been called since the period of the troubadours at the Renaissance), and those of honour and knighthood, of challenges and duels. But on the other hand, the reason of its success was also to be found in what persisted scattered here and there of the ardour and tenderness of the original play, which moved the spectators and made them love Chimène: "Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue." Yet these words of tenderness and strong expressions, though beautiful in themselves, show themselves to be rather foreign to the new form of the drama, and there is some truth in the strange remark of Klein: that "there is not enough Cidian electricity, enough material for electro-dramatic shocks in that atmosphere full of the exhalations of the antichambre, to produce a slap in the face of equally pathetic force and consequence" with the bofetada which Count Lozano applied to the countenance of the decrepit Diego Laynez in the Spanish drama. And there is truth also in the judgment of the Academy, that the subject of the Cid is "defective in the essential part" and "lacking in verisimilitude"; of course not because it was so with Guillen de Castro, or that a subject, that is to say, mere material, can be of itself good or bad, verisimilar or the reverse, poetic or unpoetic, but because it had become defective and discordant in the hands of Corneille, who elaborated and refined it. Rodrigue, Jimena the lady Urraca, are simple, spontaneous, almost childlike souls, in the mould of popular heroes. Chimène and Rodrigue and the Infanta are reflective and dialectical spirits, and since their novel psychological attitude does not chime well with the old-fashioned manner of behaviour, Rodrigue and the father sometimes appear to be charlatans, Chimène sometimes even a hypocrite, the Infanta insipid and superfluous. Also, when Corneille returned to the "Spanish style," in Don Sanche d'Aragon, he charged it with reflections and ponderations and deliberative resolutions, without aiming at the picturesque, as the romantics did later, but at dialectic and subtlety. It must however be admitted that all this represents a superiority, if viewed from another angle: but this superiority does not reside in the artistic effect obtained; it is rather mental and cultural and represents a more complex and advanced humanity.
Thus the Cid is to be looked upon as really a work of transition, a transition to the Horace, which has seemed to a learned German, to be substantially the same as the Cid, the Cid reconstructed after the censures passed upon it by his adversaries and in the Academy, which Corneille inwardly felt to be, in a certain measure at any rate, just. But another prejudice creates a gap between what are called the four principal tragedies, the Cid, the Horace, the China and the Polyeucte—"the great Cornelian quadrilateral" eulogised by Péguy in rambling prose,—and the later tragedies, as though Corneille had changed his method in these and begun to pursue another ideal, "political tragedy." Setting aside for the time being the question of greater or lesser artistic value, it is certain that he never really changed his method. In the Horace, there is no suggestion of the ferocious national sanctity of a primitive society, in the Cinna, there is no trace of the imagined tragedy of satiety or of the lassitude, which the sanguinary Augustus is supposed to have experienced. The Polyeucte does not contain a shadow of the fervour, the delirium, the fanaticism, of a religion in the act of birth, but as Schlegel well expressed it, "a firm and constant faith rather than a true religious enthusiasm." In the four tragedies above mentioned, le cœur is not supreme, any more than l'esprit is supreme in the later tragedies, but "political tragedy" is present more or less in all of them, in the intrinsic sense of a representation of calculations, ponderations and resolutions, and often too in the more evident sense of State affairs. He pursues these and suchlike forms of representation, heedless, firm and obstinate, notwithstanding the disfavour of the public and of the critics, who asked for other things. They divest themselves of extraneous elements and attain to the perfection at which they aimed. This may be observed in one of the very latest, the Pulchérie. The author congratulated himself upon its half-success or shadow of success, declaring that "it is not always necessary to follow the fashion of the time, in order to be successful on the stage." Just previously, he was pleased with Saint-Évremond for his approbation of the secondary place to be assigned to love in tragedy, "for it is a passion too surcharged with weaknesses to be dominant in a heroic drama." Voltaire was struck with this constancy to the original line of development, for he felt bound to remark at the conclusion of his commentary, not without astonishment and in opposition to the current opinion, that "he wrote very unequally, but I do not know that he had an unequal genius, as is maintained by some; because I always see him intent, alike in his best and in his inferior works, upon the force and the profundity of the ideas. He is always more disposed to debate than to move, and he reveals himself rich in finding expedients to support the most ungrateful of arguments, though these are but little tragic, since he makes a bad choice of his subjects from the Oedipe onwards, where he certainly does devise intrigues, but these are of small account and lack both warmth and life. In his last works he is trying to delude himself." But Corneille did not delude himself; rather he knew himself, and he himself the author was a personage who had deliberated and had made up his mind, once and for all.
The vigour of this resolution and the compactness of the work which resulted from it, are not diminished, but are rather stressed by the fact that Corneille possessed other aptitudes and sources of inspiration, which he neglected and of which he made little or no use. Certainly, the poet who versified the delicious Psyche, in collaboration with Molière, would have been able, had he so desired, to enter into the graces of those "doucereux" and "enjoués," whom he despised. There are witty, tender and melancholy poems among his miscellaneous works, and in certain parts of the paraphrase of the Imitation and other sacred compositions, there is a religious fervour that is to seek in the Polyeucte. His youthful comedies contain a power of observation of life, replete with passionate sympathy, which foreshadows the coming social drama. We refer especially to certain personages and scenes of the Galerie du Palais, of the Veuve and of the Suivante; to certain studies of marriageable girls, obedient to the resolve of their parents, and to mothers, who still carry in their heart how much that submission cost them in the past and do not wish to abuse the power which they possess over their daughters. There are also certain tremulous meetings of lovers, who had been separated and are annoyingly interrupted by the irruption of prosaic reality in the shape of their relations and friends ("Ah! mère, sœur, ami, comme vous m'importunez!") and certain odious and painful psychological cases, like that of Amaranthe, the poor girl of good family, who is made companion of the richer girl, not superior to her either in attractiveness, or spirit, or grace, or blood. She envies and intrigues against her, attempts to carry off her lover and being finally vanquished, hurls bitter words at society and distils venomous maledictions.
"Curieux," "étonnant," "étrange," "paradoxal," "déconcertant," are the epithets that the critics alternately apply to the personage of Alidor, in the Place Royale, and Corneille himself calls him "extravagant" in the examination of his work that he wrote later. All too have held that uncompromising lover of his own liberty to be very "Cornelian" or "pure Cornelian," who although in love, is afraid of love, because it threatens to deprive him of his internal freedom. He therefore tries to throw the woman he loves and who adores him, into the arms of others, by stratagem. Failing in this endeavour, and being finally abandoned by the lady herself, who decides to enter a convent, instead of sorrowing or at least being mortified at this, he rejoices at his good fortune. Indeed, Corneille, despite the tardy epithet of "extravagant," which he affixes to this personage, does not turn him to ridicule in the comedy, nor does he condemn or criticise him. On the contrary, in the dedicatory epistle, addressed to an anonymous gentleman, who might be the very character in question, he approves of the theory, which Alidor illustrates. "I have learned from you"—he writes—"that the love of an honest man must always be voluntary; that he must never love in one way what he cannot but love; that if he should find himself reduced to this extremity, it amounts to a tyranny and the yoke must be shaken off. Finally, the loved one must have by so much the more claim to our love, in so far as it is the result of our choice and of the loved one's merit and does not derive from blind inclination imposed upon us by a heredity which we are unable to resist." But the disconcertion and perplexity caused by the play in question, have their origin in this; that Corneille had not yet succeeded in repressing and suppressing the spontaneous emotions, and therefore throws his ideal creation into the midst of a throng of beings, whose limbs are softer, their blood warmer and more tumultuous, who love and suffer and despair, like Angélique. This would render that ideal personage comic, ironical and extravagant, if the poet did not for his part think and feel it to be altogether serious. A subtle flaw, therefore, permeates every part of the play, which lacks fusion and unity of fundamental motive. This is doubtless a grave defect, but a defect which adds weight to the psychological document that it contains, proving the absolute power which the ideal of the deliberative will was acquiring in Corneille.
[CHAPTER XV]
THE MECHANISM OF THE CORNELIAN TRAGEDY
The ideal of the deliberative will, then, formed the real, living passion of this man devoid of passions; for no one that lives can withhold himself from passion: he is only able to change its object by passing from one to the other. The judgment that holds Corneille to be an intrinsically prosaic, ratiocinatory and casuistical genius is therefore to be looked upon as lacking of penetration. Had he been a casuist, it seems clear that he would have composed casuistical works. Nor did he lack of requests and encouragement in that direction in the literature that was admired and sought after in his time. Instead, however, of acceding to them, he dwelt ever in the world of poetry and was occupied throughout his life, up to his seventieth year, with the composition of tragedies. He was not a casuist, although he loved casuistry: these two things are as different as the love for warlike representations and accounts of wars and the being actually a soldier, the perpetual dwelling of the imagination upon matters of business, commerce and speculation (like Honoré de Balzac for instance), and being really a man of business. Nor can his gift be described as merely that of a didactic poet, although he often gives a dissertation in verse, because he was not inspired with the wish to teach, but rather to admire and to present the power and the triumphs of the free will for admiration. Those philologists who have patiently set to work to reconstruct Corneille's conception of the State into a Staatsidee have not understood this. Corneille's conception of the State, of absolute monarchy, of the king, of legitimacy, of ministers, of subjects, and so on, were not by any means in him political doctrine, but just forms and symbols of an attitude of mind, which he caressed and idolised.
The enquiry as to the nature and degree and tone of that passion differs altogether from the fact of Corneille's powerful passionality, as to which there can be no doubt. The problem, that is to say, is, whether passion, which is certainly a necessary condition for poetry, was so shaped and found in him such compensations and restraints as to yield itself with docility to poetry and to give it a fair field for expression. It is well known that the sovereign passion, the pain that renders mute, the love that leads to raving, impede the dream of the poet, they impede artistic treatment, the cult of perfect form and the joy in beauty. There is too a form of passion, which has in it something of the practical: it is more occupied with embodying its favourite dreams, in order to obtain from them stimulus and incentive, than with fathoming them poetically and idealising them in contemplation.
It seems impossible to deny that something of this sort existed in the case of Corneille, for as we read his works, while we constantly receive the already mentioned impression of seriousness and severity, there is another impression that is sometimes mingled with these and suggests the disquieting presence of men firmly fixed and rooted in an ideal. When faced with his predilection for deliberation and resolution, the figure of the Aristophanic Philocleon sometimes returns to the memory. This Philocleon was a "philoheliast," that is to say he was the victim of a mania for judging, τοὔ δικάζειν. His son locked him up, but he climbed out of window, in order to hasten to the tribunal and satisfy his vital need of administering justice!
The consequences of this excess of practical passionality in the case of Corneille, of its exclusive domination in him, was that he either did not love or refused to allow himself to love anything else in the world, and lost interest in all the rest of life. He did not surpass it ideally, in which case he would have remained trembling and living in its presence, although it was combated and suppressed, but he drove it out or cut it off altogether. He acted as one, who for the love of the human body, should eliminate from his picture, landscape, sky, air, the background of the picture, upon and from which the figure rises and with which it is conj nected, although separated from it in relief, and should limit himself to the delineation of bodies and attitudes of bodies. Corneille, having abolished all other forms of life, found nothing before him but a series of situations for deliberation, vigorously felt, warmly expressed, sung with full voice, and illustrated with energetic yet becoming gestures.
What tragedy, what drama, what representation, could emerge from such a limitation of volitional attitudes? How could the various tonalities and affections and so the various personages, unite and harmonise among themselves with all their shades and gradations? The bridge that should give passage to this full and complete representation was wanting or had been destroyed. All that was possible was a suite of deliberative lyrics, of magnificent perorations, of lofty sentiments, sometimes standing alone, sometimes also taking the form of a duet or a dialogue, a theory of statues, draped in solemn attitudes, of enormous figures, rigid and similar as Byzantine mosaics. Here and there a writer such as Lanson has to some extent had an inkling of this intrinsic impossibility when, writing about the Nicomède, he remarked that Corneille "in his pride at having founded a new kind of tragedy, without pity or terror, and having admiration as its motive, did not perceive that he was founding it upon a void; because the tragedy will be the less dramatic, the purer is the will, since it is defeats or semi-defeats that are dramatic, the slow, difficult victories of the will, incessant combats." But he held on the other hand that Corneille had once constructed, in Nicomède, a perfect tragedy, on the single datum of the pure will, par un coup de génie; but this was the only one that ever could be written, the reason that it could not be repeated being "that all the works of Corneille are dramatic, precisely to the extent that the will falls short in them of perfection and in virtue of the elements that separate it from them." The beauty, he says, of the Cid, of Polyeucte and of Cinna, "consists in what they contain of passion, cooperating with and striving against the will of the heroes." But "strokes of genius" are not miracles and they do not make the impossible possible and the other dramas of Corneille that we have mentioned do not differ substantially from the Nicomède, for in them passionate elements are intruded and felt to be out of harmony (as in the Cid), or they are apparent and conventional.
Apparent and conventional: because the lack of the bridge for crossing over forbade Corneille to construct poetically out of volitional situations representations of life, to which they did not of themselves lead. It did not however prevent another kind of construction, which may be called intellectualistic or practical. He deduced other situations and other antitheses from the volitional situations and their antitheses that he had conceived, and thus he formed a sort of semblance of the representation of life. At the same time he reduced it to the dimensions of the drama that he was originating mentally, partly through study of the ancients and above all Seneca, partly from the Italian writers of tragedy of the sixteenth century, partly from that of the Spanish writers and of his French predecessors, but not without consulting, following or modifying the French and Italian casuists and regulating the whole with his own sense for theatrical effect and for the forms of it likely to suit the taste of the French public of his day.
This structure of tragedy, with its antitheses and parallelisms, its expedients for accelerating and arresting and terminating the action has been qualified with praise or blame as possessing great "logical" perfection. Logic, however, which is the life of thought, has nothing to do with the balancing and counter-balancing of mechanical weights, whose life lies outside them, in the head and in the hand that has constructed and set them in motion. It has been also compared to architecture and to the admirable proportions of the Italian art of the Renaissance. But here too, we must suspect that the true meaning of the works thus characterised escapes us, for attention is paid only to the external appearance of things, in so far as it can be expressed in mathematical terms. We have said exactly the same thing, without having recourse to logic or to architecture, when we noted that the structure of Corneille's tragedies did not derive from within, that is, from his true poetical inspiration, but rose up beside it, and was due to the unconscious practical need of making a canvas or a frame upon which to stretch the series of volitional situations desired by the imagination of the poet. Thus it was poetically a cold, incoherent, absurd thing, but practically rational and coherent, like every "mechanism." This word is not pronounced here for the first time owing to our irreverence, but is to be found among those who have written about Corneille and have felt themselves unable to refrain from referring to his "mécanique théâtrale" and to the "système fermé" of his tragedies, where "s'opère par un jeu visible de forces, la production d'un état définitif appelé dénouement."
When this has been stated, it is easy to see that anyone who examines this assemblage of thoughts and phrases with the expectation of finding there a soft, rich, sensuous and passionate representation of life, full of throbs, bedewed with tears, shot through with troubles and enjoyments, such as are to be found in Shakespearean drama and also in Sophoclean tragedy, is disappointed, and thereupon describes Corneille's art as false, whereas he should perhaps describe his own expectation as false. But it is strange to find, as counterpoise to that delusion, the attempt to demonstrate that the apparatus is not an apparatus, but flesh and blood, that the frame is not a frame but a picture, like one of Titian's or Rembrandt's, and now setting comparisons aside, that the pseudo-tragedy and the pseudo-drama of Corneille is pure drama or tragedy, that his intellectualistic deductions, his practical devices, are lyrical motives and express the truth of the human heart. Such, however, is the wrong-headedness of the criticisms that we have reviewed above. The mode of procedure is to deny what is evident, for example that Corneille argues through the mouths of his characters, instead of expressing and setting in action his own mode of feeling, in such a way as the situations would require, were they poetically treated. Faguet answers Voltaire's remarks upon the famous couplet of Rodogune: "Il est des nœuds secrets, il est des sympathies..." to the effect that "the poet is always himself talking and that passion does not thus express itself," by saying that people are accustomed to express themselves in this way, that is to say, in the form of general ideas, when they are calm, as though the question could be settled with an appeal to the reality of ordinary life, whereas on the contrary it is a question of poeticity, that is to say, of the tragic situation, which by its own nature, excludes couplets in certain cases, however well turned they be.
Yet the very same critics, who are thus guilty of sophistry in their attempts to defend Corneille, are capable of observing on another occasion that if not all, at any rate many or several of Corneille's tragedies are "melodramas," and that the author tended more and more to melodrama, in the course of his development or decadence, as we may like to call it. Perhaps in so saying, they are making a careless use of the word "melodrama," and mean by it a drama of intrigue, of surprises, of shocks and of recognitions. If on the contrary they have employed it in its true sense, or if their tongue has been instinctively more correct than their thought, since "melodrama" means precisely a melodrama, that does not exist for itself, but for the music, and is a canvas or frame, they have again declared the extrinsic character of the Cornelian tragedy.
Another confirmation of this character of the tragedies is to be found in that suspicion of I comicality, which lurks so frequently in the background as we read them, and occasionally makes itself clearly audible in the course of development of their pseudo-tragic action. It has been asked whether the Cid were a tragedy or a comedy and inquiry has resulted in no satisfactory answer being arrived at, because involuntary comicality is present there, akin to what is to be found in certain of the pompous and emphatic melodramas of Metastasio. It is true that Don Diego's reply to the king has been cited as sublime, when he does not wish the new duel to take place at once, in order that the Cid may have a little rest, after the great battle that he has won against the Moors, which he has described triumphantly and at great length: "Rodrigue a pris haleine en vous la racontant!" But are we then to regard as sinful the smile that gradually dawns upon the lips of those who are not pledged to admire at all costs? And consider the case of the furious Emilia, who at the end of the Cinna gets rid in the twinkling of an eye, of all the convictions anchored in her breast, of that hatred that burned her up, much in the same manner as a stomach-ache disappears upon the use of a sedative, and declares that she has all of a sudden become the exact opposite of what she was previously? "Ma haine va mourir, que j'ai cru immortelle; elle est morte et ce cœur devient sujet fidèle, Et prenant désormais cette haine en horreur, L'ardeur de vous servir succède à sa fureur." And Curiace, who finds himself in such a situation as to deliver the following madrigal to his betrothed: "D'Albe avec mon amour j'accordais la querelle; je soupirais pour vous, en combattant pour elle; Et s'il fallait encor que l'on en vint aux coups, Je combattrais pour elle en soupirant pour vous."? But we will not insist upon this descent into the comic, for it is not always to be avoided, being a natural effect of the "mechanicity" of the Cornelian drama and is for the rest in conformity with the theory which explains the comic as "l'automatisme installé dans la vie et imitant la vie" (Bergson).
Another form of the comic, discoverable in him, must also be insisted upon; but this is not involuntary and blameworthy, but coherent and praiseworthy. The form in question is that which led to the comedy of character and of costume, to psychological and political comedy. Brunetière even said between jest and earnest: "The Cid, Horace, Cinna and Polyeucte, give me much trouble. Were it not for these four, I should say that Corneille is fundamentally and above all a comic poet, and an excellent comic poet; and this is perfectly true; but how are we to say it, when the Cid, Horace, Cinna and Polyeucte are there? These four tragedies embarrass me exceedingly!" And he proceeds to note and illustrate the "family scenes" scattered among his tragedies, the prosaic and conversational phraseology, which so displeased Voltaire, and the complete absence in some of them of tragic quality, even of the external sort, that is, scenes of blood and death, and the prevalence of the ethical over the pathetic representation, in the manner of the comedy of Menander and of Terence. Despite all this, his definition of Corneille as a comic poet will be admired as acute and ingenious, but will never carry conviction as being true: none of those tragedies is a comedy, because none is accentuated in that manner. For the same reason that Corneille could not attain to the poetical representation of life, because he was not able to pass beyond the one-sidedness of his ideal, by merging it in the fulness of things, he was unable to present the comic or ethical side of them, because he did not pass beyond the spectacle of life and so of his ideal, by viewing it sub specie intellectus, in its external and internal limitations. The attempt to do so in the Alidor of the Place Royale had not been successful, and it never was successful, even assuming that he attempted it. He did not indeed attempt it, and the ethos that so often took the place of the pathos in the structure of his tragedies, was itself a natural consequence of their mechanicity. Owing to this, when they had lost the guidance of the initial poetic motive, they often fluctuated between emphasis and cold observation, between eloquence and prose, between stylisation of the characters and certain realistic determinations.
This hybridism, which has sometimes led to the belittling of Corneille to the level of a poet of observation and of comicality, has more often led, from another point of view, to his being increased in stature and importance, to his being belauded and acclaimed as possessing "romantic tendencies," or as a "French Shakespeare," although but "a Shakespeare in trammels." There is really nothing whatever in him of the romantic, in the conception, that is to say, and in the sentiment of life; and there is less than nothing in him of Shakespeare, whose work had its origins in a far wider and certainly a very different sphere of spiritual interests. But since "romanticism" and "Shakespeare" perhaps stand here simply for poetry, it must be admitted that he is a poet, who does not explain himself fully, or explains himself badly, without the liberty, the sympathy, the abandonment of self necessary for poetry. He harnesses his inspiration to an apparatus of actions and reactions, of parallelisms and of conventions, which may be well described as "trammels," when compared with poetry.
But they are in any case trammels which he sets in his own way, trammels which he creates and fixes in his soul and are not imposed upon him by the rules, conventions and usages, which were in vogue at the time he wrote, as is erroneously maintained, coupled with lamentations as to the unfavorable period for the writing of poetry, which fell to his lot. What poet can be trammeled from without? The poet sets such obstacles aside, or he passes through them, or he goes round them, or he feigns to bow to them, or he does bow to them, but only in secondary matters that are almost indifferent. For this reason, disputes and doctrines as to the three unities, as to the characters of tragedy, as to the manner of obtaining the catharsis or purgation, have considerable importance for anyone investigating the history of aesthetic and critical ideas, of their formation, growth and progress, by means of struggles that seem to us now to be ridiculous, though they were once serious; but they have no importance whatever as an element in the judgment of a poem. Corneille did not rebel against the so-called rules, because he did not feel any need for rebellion; he accepted or accustomed himself to them, because, having treated tragedy mechanically, it suited him, or did him no harm, to take heed of the mechanical rules, laid down by custom and literary and theatrical precepts.
For this reason, his method of theatrical composition was not only susceptible of being tolerated, but even of pleasing and receiving the praise, the applause and the admiration of the contemporary public, which did not seek in them the joy of poetic rapture, but a different and more or less refined pleasure, answering to its spiritual needs and aspirations. It could later and can now prove insupportable, because the delight of a certain period in dexterity, expedients and clever devices, in the fine phrases of the courtier, in certain actions that were the fashion, in the gallantries of pastoral and heroic romance, in epigrams, antitheses and madrigals, are no longer our delights. Passionate or realistic art, as it is called, flourishes everywhere, in place of the old scholastic, academic and court models. But for us, everything that concerns Corneille's composition and the technique of his work is indifferent, since we are viewing the problem from the point of view of poetry. We shall not therefore busy ourselves with discriminating those parts of it that are well from those that are ill put together, nor his clever from his unsuccessful expedients, his well-constructed "scenes" from those that suffer from padding, his "acts" that run smoothly from those that drag, the more from the less happy "endings," as is the habit of those critics, who nourish a superstitious admiration for what Flaubert would have called "l'arcane théâtral." We care nothing for the canvas, but only for what of embroidery in the shape of poetry there is upon it.
[CHAPTER XVI]
THE POETRY OF CORNEILLE
The poetry of Corneille, or what of poetry there is in him, is all to be found in the lyrical quality of the volitional situations, in those debates, remarks, solemn professions of faith, energetic assertions of the will, in that superb admiration for one's own personal, unshakable firmness. Here it is that we must seek it, not in the development of the dramatic action or in the character of the individual personages. For it is only an affection for life, that is to say, penetration of it in all its manifestations, which is capable of generating those beings, so warm with passion, who insinuate themselves into us and take possession of our imagination, who grow in it and eventually become so familiar to us that we seem to have really met them: the creations of Dante, of Shakespeare, or of Goethe. Certainly, Corneille's lyricism, which seems to be exclusive and one-sided, would not be lyricism and poetry, if it were really always exclusive and one-sided and although it cannot give us drama in the sense we have described, owing to its driving away the other passions, yet it does not succeed in doing so in such a complete and radical manner that we fail to perceive their fermentation, however remote, in those severe and vigorous assertions of the will. The loftiness itself of the rhythm indicates the high standard of the vital effort, which it represents and expresses. To continue the illustration above initiated, Corneille's situations may be drawings rather than pictures, or pictures in design rather than in colour; but these pictures also possess their own qualities as pictures, they too are works of love and must not be confounded with drawings directed to intellectual ends, with illustration of real things, or concepts with prosaic designs.
And indeed everyone has always sought and seeks the flower of the spirit of Corneille, the beauty of his work, in single situations, or "places." The commentators who busy themselves with the exposition and the dégustation of his works have but slight material for analysis of the sort that is employed by them in the case of other poets, whose fundamental poetic motive furnishes a basis for the rethinking of the characters and of their actions. Here on the contrary they feel themselves set free from an obstruction, when they pass to the single passages, and at once declare with Faguet, one of the latest "Il y a de beaux vers à citer" The actors too, who attempt to interpret his tragedies in the realistic romantic manner, fail to convince, while those succeed on the other hand who deliver them in a somewhat formal style. In thus listening to the intoned declamations of the monologues, exhortations, invectives, sentiments and couplets, one feels oneself transplanted into a superior sphere, exactly as happens with singing and music.
Corneille's characters are not to be laid hold of in their full and corporate being. It is but rarely that they allow us a glimpse of their human countenance, or permit us to catch some cry of scorn, and then rapidly withdraw themselves into the abstract so completely that we do not succeed in taking hold of even a fold of their fleeting robes, although a long-enduring echo of their lightning-like speech remains in the soul. The old father of the Horatii strengthens his sons in their conflict between family affection and their imperious duty to their country, with the maxim: "Faites votre devoir et laissez faire aux Dieux." The youthful Curiace murmurs with tears in his voice, to the youthful Horace, his friend and brother-in-law "Je vous connais encore et c'est ce qui: me tue," but Horace is as inflexible as a syllogism, having arrived at the conclusion that the posts assigned to them in the feud between Rome and Alba have made enemies of them, and therefore that they must not know one another in future. Curiace, when at last he has become bitterly resigned to their irremediable separation and hostility, exclaims: "Telle est nôtre misère ..."—Emilia, another being with nerves like steel springs, reveals her proud soul in a single phrase; when Maximus suggests flight to her, she exclaims as she faces him, in a cry that is like a blow: "Tu oses m'aimer et tu n' oses mourir!" She is perhaps more deeply wounded here in her pride as a woman, who fails to receive the tribute of heroism, which she expects, than in her moral sentiment. The noble Suréna holds it an easy thing, a thing of small moment, to give his life for his lady: he wishes "toujours aimer, toujours souffrir, toujours mourir!"; and Antiochus, in Rodogune, when he discovers that he is surrounded with ambushes, decides to die and in doing so directs his thought to the sad shade of his brother, who has been slain in a like manner: "Cher frère, c'est pour moi le chemin du trépas..."; and Titus feels himself penetrated with the melancholy of the fleeting hour, the sense of human fragility:
Oui, Flavian, c'est affaire à mourir.
La vie est pen de chose; et tôt ou tard qu'importe
Qu'un traître me l'arrache, ou que l'âge l'emporte?
Nous mourrons a toute heure; et dans le plus doux sort
Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort.
Words expressive of death are always those whose accent is clearest and whose resonance is the most profound with Corneille. It is perhaps as well to leave the Moi of Medea and the Qu'il mourrait of the old Horace to the admirative raptures of the rhetoricians; but let us repeat to ourselves those words of the sister of Heraclius (in the Heraclius), mortified by fate, ever at the point of death and ever ready to die:
Mais à d'autres pensers il me faut recourir:
Il n'est plus temps d'aimer alors qu'il faut mourir....
And again:
Crois-tu que sur la foi de tes fausses promesses
Mon âme ose descendre à de telles bassesses?
Prends mon sang pour le sien; mais, s'il y faut mon cœur,
Périsse Héraclius avec sa triste sœur!
And when she stays the hand of the menacing tyrant suddenly and with a word:
... Ne menace point, je suis prête a mourir.
Or, finally, those sweetest words of all, spoken by Eurydice in the Suréna:
Non, je ne pleure pas, madame, mais je meurs.
These dying words form as it were the extreme points of the resolute will, of the will, fierce usque ad mortem. But the others, in which the volitional situations are fixed and developed and determination to pursue a certain course is asserted, are, as we have said, the proper and normal expression of the poetry of Corneille, which can be fully enjoyed, provided that we do not insist upon asking whether they are appropriate in the mouths of the personages, who should act and not analyse and define themselves, or whether they are or are not necessary for the development of the drama. Their poetry consists of just that analysis, that passionate self-definition, that arranging of the folds of their own decorous robes, that sculpturing of their own statues.
Let us examine a few examples of it, taking them from the least known and the least praised tragedies of Corneille, for it is perhaps time to have done with the so-called decadence or exhaustion of Corneille, with his second-childhood (according to which, some would maintain that he returned to his boyish, pre-Cidian period in his maturity), and with the excessive and to no small extent affected and conventional exaltation of the famous square block of stone representing the four faces of honour (the Cid), of patriotism (Horace), of generosity (Cinna) and of sanctity (Polyeucte). There is often in those four most popular tragedies a certain pomposity, an emphasis, an apparatus, a rhetorical colouring, which Corneille gradually did away with in himself, in order to make himself ever more nude, with the austere nudity of the spirit. It was perhaps not only constancy and coherence of logical development, but progress of art on the road to its own perfection, which counselled him to abandon too pathetic subjects. In any case, unless we wish to turn the traditional judgment upside down, we must insist that those four tragedies, like those that followed them, are not to be read by the lover of poetry otherwise than in an anthological manner, that is to say, selecting the fine passages where they are to be found, and these occur in no less number and in beauty at least equal in the other tragedies also, some of which are more and some less theatrically effective.
Pulchérie is the last and one of the most marvellous Cornelian condensations of force in deliberation. She thus manifests her mode of feeling to the youthful Léon whom she loves:
Je vous aime, Léon, et n'en fais point mystère:
Des feux tels que les miens n'out rien qu'il faille taire.
Je vous aime, et non point de cette folle ardeur
Que les yeux éblouis font maîtresse du cœur;
Non d'un amour conçu par les sens en tumulte,
A qui l'âme applaudit sans qu'elle se consulte,
Et qui, ne concevant que d'aveugles désires,
Languit dans les faveurs et meurt dans les plaisirs:
Ma passion pour vous généreuse et solide,
A la vertu pour âme et la raison pour guide,
La gloire pour objet et veut, sous votre loi,
Mettre en ce jour illustre et l'univers et moi.
Here we have clearly the lyricism of a soul which has achieved complete possession of itself, of a soul overflowing with affections, but knowing which among them are superior and which inferior, and has learned how to administer and how to rule itself, steering the ship with a steady and experienced hand through treacherous seas, and feeling its own nobility to lie in just what others would call coldness and lack of humanity. Note the expressions "folle ardeur" and "sens en tumulte" and the contempt, not to say the disgust, with which they are uttered and the hell that is pointed out as lying in that soul which allows itself to be carried away "sans qu' elle se consulte." Note too the vision of the sad effeminacy of those affections, so blind and so egotistic, which consume and corrupt themselves in themselves, and how he enhances it by contrast with her own rational passion, so "généreuse et solide," with those solemn words of "vertu," of "raison," of "gloire," and the final apotheosis, which lays at the feet of the man she loves and loves worthily, her person and the whole world.
And Pulchérie, when she has been elected empress, again takes counsel with herself and recognises that this love of hers for Léon is still inferior, not yet sufficiently pure, and decides to slay it, in order that it may live again as something different, as something purely rational:
Léon seul est ma joie, il est mon seul désir;
Je n'en puis choisir d'autre, et je n'ose le choisir:
Depuis trois ans unie à cette chère idée,
J'en ai l'âme à toute heure en tous lieux obsédée;
Rien n'en détachera mon cœur que le trépas,
Encore après ma mort n'en répondrai-je pas,
Et si dans le tombeau le ciel permet qu'on aime,
Dans le fond du tombeau je l'aimerai de même.
Trône qui m'éblouis, titres qui me flattez,
Pourriez-vous me valoir ce que vous me coûtez?
Et de tout votre orgueil la pompe la plus haute
A-t-elle un bien égal à celui qu'elle m'ôte?
She thus concedes to human frailty the relief of a lament, such a lament as can issue from her lips, full of strength and charged with resolution in passion, but at the same time noble, measured and dignified. After this, she follows the direction of her will with inexorable firmness. Léon shall not be her spouse, because her choice must be and seem to be dictated by the sole good of the State, and fall upon a man whom she will not love with love, but who will be for Rome an emperor to be feared and respected. A conflict had been engaged between one part of herself and another, between the whole and a part, and she has again subjected the part to the whole and has assigned to it its duty, that of obedience.
Je suis impératrice et j'étais Pulchérie.
De ce trône, ennemi de mes plus doux souhaits,
Je regarde l'amour comme un de mes sujets;
Je veux que le respect qu'il doit à ma couronne
Repousse l'attentat qu'il fait sur ma personne;
Je veux qu'il m'obéisse, au lieu de me trahir;
Je veux qu'il donne à tous l'exemple d'obéir;
Et, jalouse déjà de mon pouvoir suprême,
Pour l'affermir sur tous, je le prends sur moi-même.
Thus love is subjected to the mind, or as it used to be expressed in the language of the time, which was of Stoic origin, to the "hegemonic potency." She would desire to raise her youthful beloved to the lofty level of her intent, by removing him from the sphere of weak lamentations and assuring his union with herself in a mystic marriage of superior wills. What contempt is hers for sentimentalism, which wishes to insinuate itself where it is not wanted, for "tears," for "the shame of tears"!
La plus ferme couronne est bientôt ébranlée
Quand un effort d'amour semble l'avoir volée;
Et pour garder un rang si cher à nos désirs
Il faut un plus grand art que celui des soupirs.
Ne vous abaissez pas à la honte des larmes;
Contre un devoir si fort ce sont de faibles armes;
Et si de tels secours vous couronnaient ailleurs,
J'aurais pitié d'un sceptre acheté par des pleurs.
When we read such verses as these, our breast expands, as it does when we are in the company of men whose gravity of word and deed induce gravity, whose superiority over the crowd makes you forget the existence of the crowd, transporting you to a sphere where the non-accomplishment of duty would appear, not only vile, but incomprehensible. On another occasion our admiration is about to shroud itself in pity, but soon shines forth again and displays itself triumphant, as in the young princess Hiedion of the Attila, who is accorded to the abhorred king of the Huns by a treaty of peace—were she to refuse the union, immeasurable calamities would fall upon her family and people. She too observes a sorrowful attitude but hers is an erect and combative sorrow:
Si je n'étais pas, seigneur, ce que je suis,
J'en prendrais quelque droit à finir mes ennuis:
Mais l'esclavage fier d'une haute naissance,
Où toute autre peut tout, me tient dans l'impuissance;
Et, victime d'état, je dois sans reculer
Attendre aveuglement qu'on daigne m'immoler.
The heart trembles and restrains itself at the same moment before that "esclavage fier," that proud and sarcastic "qu'on daigne m'immoler" the victim has already scrutinised the situation in which she finds herself, the duty which is incumbent upon her, the prospect of vengeance which opens itself before her and her race, and has already conceived her terrible design. In like manner with Queen Rodolinde in the Pertharite, when she is solicited and implored by the usurper Grimoalde, who wished to espouse her and promises to declare himself tutor to her son and to make him heir to the throne,—suspecting that in this way he will deprive her of the honour of marriage faith and may then put her son to deatii—she decides upon a horrible course of action, proposing to him that he should put her son to death on the spot:
Puisqu'il faut qu'il périsse, il vaut mieux tôt que tard;
Que sa mort soit un crime, et non pas un hazard;
Que cette ombre innocente à toute heure m'anime,
Me demande à toute heure une grande victime;
Que ce jeune monarque, immolé de ta main,
Te rende abominable à tout le genre humain;
Qu'il t'excite par tout des haines immortelles;
Que de tous tes sujets il fasse des rebelles.
Je t'épouserai lors, et m'y viens d'obliger,
Pour mieux servir ma haine et pour mieux me venger,
Pour moins perdre des vœux contre ta barbarie,
Pour être à tous moments maîtresse de ta vie,
Pour avoir l'accès libre à pousser ma fureur,
Et mieux choisir la place où te percer le cœur.
Voilà mon désespoir, voilà ses justes causes:
A ces conditions, prends ma main, si tu l'oses.
Her husband Pertharite, who had been believed to be dead, is alive: he returns and is made prisoner by Grimoalde, and Rodolinde, fearing ruin, decides to avenge him or to perish with him. But he sees the situation in which he finds himself with his consort in a different light objectively: he sees it as a conquered king, who bows his head to the decision of destiny, recognises the right of the conqueror and holds ever aloft in his soul the idea of regal majesty. So he asserts it with firmness and serenity, going beyond all personal feelings, in order that he may consider only what appertains both to the rights and duties of a king:
Quand ces devoirs communs out d'importunes lois,
La majesté du trône en dispense les rois;
Leur gloire est au-dessus des règles ordinaires,
Et cet honneur n'est beau que pour les cœurs vulgaires.
Sitôt qu'un roi vaincu tombe aux mains du vainqueur,
Il a trop mérité la dernière rigueur.
Ma mort pour Grimoald ne peut avoir de crime:
Le soin de s'affermir lui rend tout légitime.
Quand j'aurai dans ses fers cessé de respirer,
Donnez-lui votre main sans rien considérer;
Epargnez les efforts d'une impuissante haine,
Et permettez au Ciel de vous faire encor reine.
The courageous and sagacious Nicomède speaks kingly words of a different sort, well calculated to arouse him and make him lift up his head, to the vacillating father, who wishes to content both Rome and the queen, establish agreement between love and nature, be father and husband:
—Seigneur, voulez-vous bien vous en fier à moi?
Ne soyez l'un ni l'autre.—Et que dois-je être?—Roi.
Reprenez hautement ce noble caractère.
Un véritable roi n'est ni mari ni père;
Il regarde son trône, et rien de plus. Régnez;
Rome vous craindra plus que vous ne la craignez.
Malgré cette puissance et si vaste et si grande,
Vous pouvez déjà voir comme elle m'appréhende,
Combien en me perdant elle espère gagner,
Parce qu'elle prévoit que je saurai régner.
Let us listen also for a moment to the Christian Theodora, who has been granted the time to choose between offering incense to the gods and being abandoned to the soldiery in the public brothel:
Quelles sont vos rigueurs, si vous les nommez grâce!
Et que choix voulez-vous qu'une chrétienne fasse,
Réduite à balancer son esprit agité
Entre l'idolâtrie et l'impudicité?
Le choix est inutile où les maux sont extrêmes.
Reprenez votre grâce, et choisissez vous-mêmes:
Quiconque peut choisir consent à l'un des deux,
Et le consentement est seul lâche et honteux.
Dieu, tout juste et tout bon, qui lit dans nos pensées,
N'impute point de crime aux actions forcées;
Soit que vous contraigniez pour vos dieux impuissans
Mon corps à l'infamie ou ma main à l'encens,
Je saurai conserver d'une âme résolue
À l'époux sans macule une épouse impollue.
She really does balance herself mentally at the parting of the ways placed before her, analyses it and formulates her determination, rejecting as cowardly both the choice of the sacrilege and of the shameful punishment and casting it in the teeth of her unworthy oppressors. It is the only answer that befits the Christian virgin, firm in her determination of saving her constancy in the faith and modesty, which resides not only in the will, but also in desire itself. The expression of her intention has just such a tone and adopts just the formulae of a theologian speaking by her mouth—"le consentment," "l'époux sans macule," "l'épouse impollue."
In Theseus of the Oedipe the poet himself protests against a conception that menaces the foundation of his spirit itself, because it offends the idea of free choice and makes unsteady the consciousness that man has of being able to determine upon a line of conduct according to reason. He is protesting against the ancient idea of fate, or rather against its revival in modern form, as the Jansenist doctrine of grace:
Quoi! la nécessité des vertus et des vices
D'un astre impérieux doit suivre les caprices,
Et Delphes, malgré nous, conduit nos actions
Au plus bizarre effet de ses prédictions?
L'âme est donc toute esclave: une loi souveraine
Vers le bien ou le mal incessamment l'entraîne;
Et nous ne recevons ni crainte ni désir
De cette liberté qui n'a rien à choisir,
Attachés sans relâche à cet ordre sublime,
Vertueux sans mérite et vicieux sans crime.
Qu'on massacre les rois, qu'on brise les autels,
C'est la faute des dieux et non pas des mortels:
De toute la vertu sur la terre épandue
Tout le prix à ces dieux, toute la gloire est due:
Ils agissent en nous quand nous pensons agir;
Alors qu'on délibère, on ne fait qu'obéir;
Et notre volonté n'aime, hait, cherche, évite,
Que suivant que d'en haut leur bras la précipite!
D'un tel aveuglement daignez me dispenser.
Le Ciel, juste à punir, juste à récompenser,
Peur rendre aux actions leur perte ou leur salare,
Doit nous offrir son aide et puis nous laisser faire....
What indignation, what a revolt of the whole being against the thought that "quand on délibère, on ne fait qu' obéir"! How he defends the liberty, not only of the "virtus," but also of the "vices," the liberty "de nous laisser faire!" This eloquence of the will and of liberty, this singing declamation, is the true lyricism of Corneille, intimate and substantial, and not the so-called "lyrical pieces," which he inserted into his tragedies here and there. These are lyrical in the formal and restricted scholastic sense of the term, but they are often as affected as the monologue of Rodrigue, which is accompanied by a refrain. Others have demonstrated in an accurately analytical manner that he lacks lyricism or poetry of style; that the construction of his phrase is logical, with its "because," its "but," its "then," that he over-abounds in maxims and altogether ignores metaphor, the picturesque and musicality. But the same writer who has maintained this, has also declared that his poetry is to be found, if not in the coloured image and in the musical sound, then certainly "in the rhythm, in the wide or rapid vibration of the strophe, which extends or transports the thought" (Lanson): that is to say, in making this admission, he has confuted his previous mean and narrow theory concerning poetry and lyricism. The other judgment is to the effect that Corneille is not a poet by style, but by the conception and meaning of his works—that he is a latent poet or one who dressed up his thought in prose. But it is unthinkable that there should exist latent poets, who do not manifest themselves in poetic form. The truth of the matter is that where Corneille felt as a poet, he expressed himself as a poet, without many-coloured metaphors, without musical trills and softnesses of expression, but with many maxims, many conjunctive particles, declaratory and expressive of opposition. He employed the latter rather than the former, because he had need of the latter and not of the former. His rhythm too, which has been so much praised and owing to which his alexandrine rings out so differently from the mechanical alexandrines of his imitators, the rhetoricians, is nothing but his spirit itself, noble and solemn, debating and deliberating, resolute, unafraid and firm in its rational determinations.
Corneille's keenest adversaries have always been compelled to recognise in him a residuum, which withstood their destructive criticism. Vauvenargues said that "he sometimes expressed himself with great energy and no one has more loftly traits, no one has left behind him the idea of a dialogue so closely compacted and so vehement, or has depicted with equal felicity the power and the inflexibility of the soul, which come to it from virtue. There are astonishing flashes that come forth even from the disputes and upon which I commented unfavourably, there are battles that really elevate the heart, and finally, although he frequently removes himself from nature, it must be confessed that he depicts her with great directness and vigour in many places, and only there is he to be admired." Jacobi, in an essay which is an indictment, was however, compelled to excogitate or to beg for the reason of such fame; he found himself obliged to praise the many vivacious scenes, the depth of discourse, the loftiness of expression, to be found scattered here and there in those tragedies. Although Schiller did not care for him at all, he made an exception for "the part that is properly speaking heroic," which was "felicitously treated," although he added that "even this vein, which is not rich in itself, was treated monotonously." Schlegel was struck with certain passages and with the style which is often powerful and concise and De Sanctis observed that Corneille was in his own field, when he portrayed greatness of soul, not in its gradations and struggles, but "as nature and habit, in the security of possession." A German philologist, after he has run down the tragedies of the "quadrilateral," judges Corneille to be "a jurist and a cold man of intellect, although full of nobility and dignity of soul, but without clearness as to his own aptitudes, and without original creative power." This writer declares that "nowhere in his works do we feel the breath of genius that laughs at all restraints," but he goes on to make exception for the splendour of his "language." It seems somewhat difficult to make an exception for the language, precisely when discussing the question of poetical genius!
NOTE. [Schiller, etc...] I draw attention to it in this note, because I have never seen it mentioned: it is to be found in the Charactere der vornehmsten Dichter aller Nationen.... von einer Gesellschaft von Gelehrten (Leipzig, 1796), Vol. V, part I, pp. 38-138.
We certainly find monotony present in the figures that he sets before us, repetitions of thoughts and of schemes, analogies in the matter of process. A concordantia corneliana, explicatory of this side of his genius could be constructed and perhaps the sole reason that this has not been done is because it would be too easy. Steinweg, whom we have quoted above, has provided a good instance of this. But even the monotony of Corneille must not be looked upon altogether as a proof of poverty, or a defect, but rather as an intrinsic characteristic of his austere inspiration, which was susceptible of assuming but few forms.
I cannot better close this discussion of Corneille than with the citation of a youthful page of Sainte-Beuve, which contains nothing but a fanciful comparison, but this comparison has much more to say to us, who have now completed the critical examination of his works, than Sainte-Beuve was himself able to say in his various critical writings relative to the poet, for he there shows himself to be at one moment inclined to be uncertain and to oscillate, at another inclined to yield to traditional judgments and conventional enthusiasms. This affords another proof, if such be necessary, that it is one thing to receive the sensible impression aroused by a poem and another to understand and to explain it. "Corneille"—wrote Sainte-Beuve,—"a pure genius, yet an incomplete one, gives me, with his qualities and his defects, the impression of those great trees, so naked, so gnarled, so sad and so monotonous as regards their trunk, and adorned with branches and dark green leaves only at their summits. They are strong, powerful, gigantic, having but little foliage; an abundant sap nourishes them; but you must not expect from them shelter, shade or flowers. They put forth their leaves late, lose them early and live a long while half dismantled. Even when their bald heads have abandoned their leaves to the winds of autumn, their vital nature still throws out here and there stray boughs and green shoots. When they are about to die, their groans and creakings are like that trunk, laden with arms, to which Lucan compared the great Pompey."
INDEX
Action, [226]; Shakespeare and, [200], [206].
Adonis, [192].
Aesthetic theory, [300].
Affinities, [112], [113], [114].
Alexandra, [20].
Alexandrines, [426].
Alidor, [387], [388], [403].
All's Well, [169].
Amaranthe, [387].
Angelica, [108], [168].
Anthony, [244], [249], [258].
Anthony and Cleopatra,[193], [242].
Ariosto, Lodovico, as poet of harmony, [45];
autobiography, [27]; character of his love, [52];
character of his poetry, [8], [9];
circumstances, character and associates, [18], [22];
comedies, [23]; comparisons with other poets, [95];
content, [13], [15]; epicity, [80]; eroticism, [26];
feeling toward the Estes, [60], [61];
harmony which he attains, [94]; heart of his heart, [29];
humanism, [37]; irony, [70], [75]; Italian poems, [25];
jealousy, [53]; Latin poems, [24], [26]; love of harmony, [48];
love of women as his single passion, [20]; minor works, [67];
naturalism, objectivism, [76], [78], [79]; need of love, [30];
negative qualities, [21]; octaves, [71], [82];
pains taken with Orlando Furioso,[30];
philosophy, [48], [65]; political sentiments, [59];
principal accent of his art, [46]; reflection, [75];
religious outlook, [64]; satires, [27];
Shakespeare compared with, [145], [154], [165];
style, [69]; wisdom of life, [15].
Art, essence, [39], [40]; for art's sake, [10], [11], [12];
futile and material, [12]; in its idea, [35], [38];
musical character, [277]; of Shakespeare, [274].
Artist, end or content, [35]; poet and, [41], [44].
As You Like It, [170], [198].
Astolfo, [109].
Attila, [344].
Attila, [419].
Augustus, [343], [344], [345], [366]. Baconian hypothesis, [131].
Balzac, Honoré de, [391].
Barnadine, [265].
Beatrice (Dante's), [178].
Beatrice and Benedick, [170].
Beauty, [39].
Bembo, Pietro, [359].
Bentivoglio, Hercules, [20].
Bibbivena, Cardinal, [190].
Biography, details of poets', [133]; Shakespeare, [157].
Boiardo, M. M., [95], [97], [106], [112]; Orlando Innamorato, [105].
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, [86].
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, [207], [208].
Brandes, G. M. C, [126], [127], [134]
Brunello, [109].
Brunetière, Ferdinand, [402].
Brutus, [248], [258], [317].
Burlesque in Shakespeare, [198].
Caesar, Julius, [249].
Calandria, [190].
Caliban, [261].
Camilla, [343], [345].
Canello, U. A., [7].
Canova, Antonio, [36].
Cantù, Cesare, [7].
Carducci, Giosnè, [7], [10], [30].
Carlyle, Thomas, [302].
Cassius, [249].
Castro, Guillen de, [339], [346], [347], [380].
Casuistry, [390].
Catherine (Shakespeare's), [168].
Cervantes, Saavedra Miguel de, [95].
Characters, Ariosto's, [80], [82];
Corneille's, [410].
Chasles, Michel, [136].
Chateaubriand, F. A. R., on Shakespeare, [285].
Chimène, [382].
Chivalry, Ariosto and, [13], [14], [15]; poets and poems of, [95].
Cid, [339], [340], [342], [348], [380], [402], [414].
Cinna, [343], [344], [355], [383], [402], [414].
Cinque Canti, [88], [90].
Cinzio, Giraldi, [31], [41], [87].
Classicists, [35], [37].
Claudio, [264].
Cleopatra, [242].
Coleridge, S. T., on Shakespeare, [174], [287], [297], [303], [331].
Comedies, Ariosto's, [23].
Comedy of Errors, [189].
Comedy of love in Shakespeare, [163].
Comic, [214], [216]; in Corneille, [400].
Complexity, [222].
Concepts in Shakespeare, [149], [151].
"Confidential air," [69].
Conflict, [38], [39]; in Shakespeare, [148], [155].
Constance, Queen, [213].
Corday, Charlotte, [378].
Cordelia, [230].
Coriolanus, [212], [218].
Coriolanus, [294].
Corneille, Pierre, basis of tragedies, [356]; characters, [410];
critic and defenders, [337]; deliberative will, [366], [369], [389], [390], [423];
eulogy, [358]; ideal, [362]; love, [350], [369], [371], [387], [388], [416], [417], [418];
mechanism of his tragedy, [390], [397]; miscellaneous works, [386];
monotony, [428]; politics, personages, history, [372], [373], [375], [378];
practical passionality and its results, [393]; rational will, [349], [351];
reputation, [337]; source of inspiration, [376]; suppression of life, [393];
where his poetry lies, [408], [413], [425]
Cosmic poetry, [146].
Cressida, [180].
Criticism, office, [146], [147]; see also Shakespearean criticism.
Curiace, [411].
Cymbeline, 196, [199], [294].
Dante, [ 41], [151], [156], [178], [324].
Davenant, William, [123].
Death, [178], [210], [242], [263], [411], [412].
De Sanctis, Francesco, [10], [11], [13], [21], [40], [41], [82], [93], [96], [339], [428].
Descartes, René, [353], [377].
Desdemona, [238], [282], [308], [316], [317].
Discord, [226], [227].
Don Quixote, [189].
Dorchain, Auguste, [362].
Dream, [172].
Dualism, [42]; in Shakespeare, [155], [287], [288].
Duty, [372]; in Hamlet, [248]; in Macbeth, [225].
Emerson, R. W., on Shakespeare, [298].
Emilia, [401], [411].
Epicity, Ariosto's, [80]; Shakespeare's, [202], [204].
Eroticism in Ariosto, [26].
Ethics, Shakespeare's, [155].
Eurydice, [413].
Evil, as perversity in Othello, [237]; in Macbeth, [223].
Fagnet, Emile, [398], [410].
Falstaff, Sir John, [214], [309], [317].
Fate, [424]; in Shakespeare, [155].
Fauriel, C. C, [346].
Faust [84].
Ferdinand and Miranda, [184], [261].
Ferrara, [21], [24], [62].
Ferrara, Duke of, [22].
Ferrarese Homer, [114].
Fiordiligi, [55], [58], [91].
Fitton, Mary, [123], [129], [152].
Florence, [25], [96].
Form and content, in Shakespeare, [274].
Fragility, [258].
France, military spirit, [378]; misunderstanding of Shakespeare, [321].
French Shakespeare, [404].
French theatre, [359].
Friar Laurence, [175].
Friendship, [57].
Furnivall, F. J., [304].
Gaillard, G. H., on Corneille, [341].
Galilei, Galileo, [80], [98].
Garfagnana, [21].
Garofalo, the Ferrarese, [53].
German criticism of Shakespeare, [139], [306], [323], [325].
Gerstenberg, H. W. von, [320].
Gervinus, G. G., [156], [307], [308], [309], [323].
Gerusalemme [6].
God in Shakespeare, [143], [154], [162].
Goethe, J. W. von, [16], [85]; on Shakespeare, [136], [149], [331].
Goneril, [231].
Good and evil, tragedy of, in Shakespeare, [221].
Goodness, in King Lear, [230];
in Macbeth,229; in Shakespeare, [143], [162];
material world and, [235].
Greatness, [223].
Grillparzer, Franz, [318].
Gundolf (writer on art), [353].
Hamlet, [193], [194], [248], [314], [318].
Hamlet, [248].
Hamlet-Litteratur, [313].
Harmony, Ariosto as poet of, [45]; Ariosto's attainment, [94];
concept, [34], [48]; cosmic, [39], [42]; realisation, [69].
Harrington, Sir John, [21].
Harris, Frank, [129], [134], [297].
Hazlitt, William, on Shakespeare, [142], [303].
Hegel, G. W. F., [13], [174], [177], [355].
Heine, Heinrich, on Shakespearean comedy, [166].
Henry V, [209].
Henry Fill, [259].
Héraclius, [412].
Herder, J. G. von, [302].
Hero, [211].
Historical plays, Shakespeare's, [202], [293];
Shakespeare's, personages, [211].
Historical romance, [205].
Historicity, in Shakespeare, [156], [159].
History, Corneille and, [375], [378]; Shakespeare and, [206].
Horace (Corneille's), [411].
Horace, [342], [383], [402], [414].
Hotspur, [211], [218].
Humanists, [35], [37].
Humboldt, K. W. von, [43].
Hugo, Victor, [302].
Humour, [145].
Hyacinth, [196], [199].
Iago, [236], [316], [330].
Ideals, in Shakespeare, [139].
Idyll, [187].
Imagination, [291].
Improvisation, [189].
Indulgence, in Shakespeare, [260], [263].
Innamorato, [105].
Inspiration, [112].
Irony, Ariosto's, [70], [75].
Isabella, Ariosto's octaves on the name, [93].
Italy, Shakespeare's indebtedness to, [325].
Jacobi, [427].
Jealousy, Ariosto's, [53].
Jessica and Lorenzo, [180].
Jew, [216], [217].
Juliet, [175].
Julius Caesar, [248].
Jussurand, J. A. A. J., on Shakespeare, [285].
Justice, [393]; in Shakespeare, [258].
King Lear, [230], [282], [286], [295], [303].
Kings, [209], [307], [374], [421].
Klein, J. L., on Corneille, [340].
Knightly romance, [62].
Kreyssig, Friedrich, [307], [323].
La Bruyère, Jean de, [351], [364].
Lanson, Gustave, [362], [394], [425].
Laurence, Friar, [175].
Lemaître, Jules, [362], [373].
Leopardi, Giacomo, [312].
Leopold Shakespeare, [304].
Lessing, G. E., [83]; on Corneille, [338].
Liberty, [425].
Life, in Corneille, [50], [351], [393];
love of life in Shakespeare's characters, [263];
Shakespeare's sense of, [141], [147].
Literary style, [305].
Literature in Shakespeare's time, [188], [192].
Logic, [396].
Love, [255]; Ariosto's love of woman, [20]; Ariosto's need, [30];
character of Ariosto's, [52]; comedy of, in Shakespeare, [163];
Corneille, [350], [369], [371], [387], [388], [416], [417], [418];
highest, [34]; Orlando Furioso matter, [55], [56].
Ludwig, Otto, on Shakespeare, [147], [275].
Lyricism. See Poetry.
Macbeth, [310], [315].
Macbeth, [134], [135], [222], [280].
Macbeth, Lady, [315].
Macduff, [281], [310].
Machiavelli, Niccolô, [24], [60], [79], [157], [373].
Maeterlinck, Maurice, [321].
Malvolio, [169].
Mandragola of Machiavelli, [24].
Manzoni, Alessandro, [16], [85]; on Shakespeare, [161].
Marfisa, [109].
Margutte, [102].
Marino, Giambattista, [191], [192], [194].
Marlowe, Christopher, [184], [191].
Material of the Orlando Furioso, [50], [52], [66].
Matrimony, [53].
Mazzini, Giuseppe, on Shakepeare, [296].
Measure for Measure, [197], [264], [294].
Mechanism, Corneille's, [390], [397].
Medoro, [58], [78], [91].
Melodrama, [399].
Menander, [165].
Mental presumptions, Shakespeare's, [152], [157], [160].
Merchant of Venice, [180], [217], [295].
Midsummer Night's Dream, [171].
Miranda, [184], [261].
Mocedades, [339], [340].
Moderation, [292].
Monotony, in Corneille, [428].
Montaigne, M. E., [136], [157].
Monti, Vincenzo,
[36].
Morf, Heinrich, [7].
Morgante, [98].
Much Ado About Nothing, [170].
Music, [43], [149], [179], [180], [243].
Mystery, in Shakespeare, [148].
Names, Ariosto's use, [74].
Naturalism, Ariosto's, [76], [78], [79].
Nature, in Ariosto, [83]; in Shakespeare, [319].
Neoplatonism, [40].
Nicomède, [422].
Nicomède, [394], [395].
Nietzsche, Friedrich, [365], [379].
Oberon, [172].
O'Brien, Florence, [303].
Octaves, Ariosto's, [71].
Oedipe, [423].
Olympia, [72], [77].
Ophelia, [255], [314], [315].
Orlando, [101], [109]; madness, [81].
Orlando Furioso, character and personages, [80], [82];
critical problem, [3]; emotional passages, [91];
frivolity and seriousness, [85]; languid parts, [89];
love matter, [55], [56]; material, [50], [52], [66];
obsolete problems, [7]; reading, methods of, [84];
relation to Ariosto's minor works, [28]; restraint, [93];
scrupulous attention of its author, [30]; spirit which animates, [34];
toning down, [90].
Orlando Innamorato, [105].
Othello, [238], [288], [316], [317].
Othello, [236], [282], [308].
Othon, [355].
Ovid, [112].
Painting, [43].
Pandarus, [181].
Parrizzi, Antonio, [7].
Passions, [349], [371], [372], [377], [390], [391], [392].
Past, love of, [36], [37]; nostalgia for, [205].
Pastiche, [37].
Pauline, [342].
Pellissier, G. J. M., [284].
Pembroke theory as to Shakespeare's Sonnets, [122].
Pertharite, [420], [421].
Petrarch, Francesco, [41], [112].
Petruchio, [168].
Philiberta of Savoy, [25].
Philocleon, [392].
Philologism, [50], [78], [121], [132], [133].
Philosophy, Ariosto's, [48], [65]; Shakespeare's, [149], [159], [252].
Picaresque romance, [100].
Place Royale, [387], [403].
Platen, August, [296], [298].
Plautus, [190].
Pleasure, [242].
Poet and artist, [41], [44].
Poetry, [276], [278], [305], [307], [351], [357], [404];
Corneille's, [408], [413], [425]; cosmic, [146];
didactic, [355]; latent poets, [426]; non-lyrical, [354];
rationalistic, [352], [354].
Politian, Angelo, [36], [99], [112], [113], [194].
Politics, in Ariosto, [59]; in Corneille, [372];
in Shakespeare, [156].
Polyeucte, [342], [343], [383], [402], [414].
Pontano, G. G., [36].
Portia, [179].
Power, will for, [365], [379].
Pre-philosophy, Shakespeare's, [160].
Promessi Sposi, [84], [85].
Prospero, [260], [273].
Puck, [172].
Pulchérie, [415], [416].
Pulchérie, [384].
Pulci, Luigi, [95], [98], [112]; Morgante, [98].
Quickly, Mistress, [220].
Quixote, Don, [187].
Rabelais, François, [76], [181].
Racine, Jean, [341], [349], [358], [364].
Rajna, Pio, [7], [97].
Rape of Lucrèce, [191].
Reason, in Corneille, [349], [351].
Reflections of Ariosto, [75].
Regan, [231].
Religious beliefs, in Ariosto, [64].
Renaissance, [65]; Shakespeare and, [158], [298], [325].
Rhythm, in Corneille, [426]; of the universe, [42], [43].
Richard II, [208].
Richard III, [213], [307].
Rinaldo, [101], [109].
Rio (Shakespearean critic), [152].
Rodogune, [338], [342], [364], [367].
Rodolinde, Queen, [420], [421].
Rodrigo, [347].
Rodrique, [382].
Romance, in Corneille, [404]; in Shakespeare, [261];
Shakespeare's romantic plays, [185].
Romances, [95].
Romeo and Juliet, [174], [288].
Rümelin, Gustav, [137], [286], [287], [308].
Rutland, Earl of, [131].
Sadoleto, Cardinal, [85].
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., on Corneille, [429]; on French tragedy, [353].
St. John, Ariosto's representation, [77].
Salvemini, Signor, [96].
Sannazaro, Jacopo, [36].
Sarcasm, [231].
Schack, A. F., on Corneille, [339].
Schiller, J. C. F. von, [297]; on Corneille, [338], [427].
Schlegel, A. W., on Corneille, [338], [373];
on Shakespeare, [139].[174], [321], [384], [428].
Schlegel, Frederick, on French tragedy, [352].
Scientific study, [8].
Scott, Walter, [205].
Sculpture, [43].
Seneca, [191], [379], [396].
Sentiment, Shakespearean, [138], [143], [149].
Seriousness, Ariosto's[85].
Sertorius, [355].
Shakespeare, William, analysis and eulogy of plays, [280];
as a German poet, [319], [320], [323], [325];
Ariosto compared with, [145], [154], [165];
art of, [274]; biographical problem, [157];
biography, useless labours and conjectures, [122];
chronology of plays, [119], [121]; classical, [291];
comedy of love, [163]; comparisons with certain painters, [147];
conceptions, [149], [151]; conflict, [155]; Corneille and, [404];
distinction of lesser and greater Shakespeare, [221];
dualism, [155], [287], [288]; English indifference to, in former times, [322];
errors and defects, [289], [295]; ethics, [155];
excellence long disputed, [284]; Fate, [155];
fidelity to Nature, [319]; French judgments on his art, [284];
goodness and God, [143], [154], [162]; historical plays, [293];
historicity, [156], [159]; ideal development and chronological series, [266];
idealism, [139]; interest in practical action, and his historical plays, [200];
justice and indulgence as motives in his plays, [258];
life of his time, [158]; literary education, [325];
literature of his time and his literary plays, [188], [192];
mass of work devoted to, [333]; mental presuppositions, [152], [157], [160];
models, [130]; moderation, [292]; motives and development of his poetry, [163];
mystery, [148]; order of plays, [266]; ourselves and, [328];
philosophy, [149], [159], [252]; political faith, [156];
practical personality and poetical personality, [117];
pre-philosophy, [160]; reading, Shakespeare's course of, [136], [157];
religion, [152]; Renaissance and, [158], [298], [325]; romance, [261];
romance as a motive and the romantic plays, [185];
sense of life, [141], [147]; sentiment, [138], [143], [149];
society of the time, [135]; Sonnets, [192];
Sonnets, theories about, [122]; soul of his poetry, [306];
strife, conflict, war, [147], [148]; taste, [291];
theatrical representation, [330]; universality, [138], [150];
useless conjectures about plays, [123]; useless philology, [121].
Shakespearean criticism, [300]; criticism by images, [302];
exclamatory criticism, [301]; French and Italian, [321], [324];
German school, [306], [320], [322]; objectivistic, [312];
philological, [303]; present age, [333]; rhetorical, [305].
Shylock, [216].
Sleep, [227].
Sonata form, [277].
Sonnets, Shakespeare's, [122], [192].
Sources, [50].
Southampton, Earl of, [122], [131].
Southampton theory as to Shakespeare's Sonnets, [122].
Stanley, William, [132].
State, [391].
Steinweg (philologist), [428], [429].
Stoveisus, [375], [418].
Stories of knightly romance, [62].
Strife, [38], [39]; in Shakespeare, [146], [147].
Sturm und Drang, [320].
Styles of writing, [305]; Ariosto's style, [69].
Sulzer, J. G., [10], [86].
Suréna, [411].
Suréna, [413].
Swinburne, A. C, on Shakespeare, [270], [301].
System, [359], [360], [361].
Taine, H. A., [135];[357]; on Shakespeare, [142].
Taming of the Shrew, [168].
Tasso, Torquato, [90], [98], [114], [199].
Tears, [418].
Technique, [275].
Tempest, [184], [260], [307].
Theseus, [423].
Timon of Athens, [294].
Titania, [172].
Titus Andronicus, [190].
Tolomei, Claudio, [32].
Tolstoi, Leo, on Shakespeare, [139], [285].
Toning down, in Ariosto, [90].
Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, [99].
Tragedy, Corneille's mechanism, [390], [397];
French rationalistic, [352]; of character, [360];
of good and evil, in Shakespeare, [221]; of the will, [241].
Trammels, [404].
Troilus and Cressida, [180], [295].
Twelfth Night, [169], [190].
Two Gentlemen of Verona, [167].
Ulrici, Hermann, [156], [307], [310].
Unity, [39].
Universal, in Shakespeare, [138], [150].
Universe, rhythm of, [42], [43].
Unreality, [196].
Vauvenargues, L. de C., [340], [427].
Venus and Adonis, [191], [194].
Verdi, Giuseppe, [330].
Vico, Giambattista, [290].
Virtue, in Shakespeare, [162].
Vischer, F. T. von, [10], [43], [139], [307].
Voltaire, J. F. M. A., on Corneille, [340], [346], [355],
358, [385], [398]; on Shakespeare, [284], [321].
Voluptuousness, [241].
War, in Shakespeare, [148].
Will, [425]; deliberative, [366], [369], [378], [389], [390], [423];
pure, [364]; rational, in Corneille, [349], [351];
resolute, [413]; sophistry of, [226]; tragedy of, [241];
"will for power,"[365], [379].
Winckelmann, J. J., [43].
Winter's Tale, [198], [199], [294].
Wisdom of life, in Ariosto, [15].
Wölfflin, Heinrich, [49].
Woman, as object of Ariosto's love, [20]; love and politics, [356].
Zerbino, [58], [91].