Peter Corneille was born at Rouen, on the 6th of June, 1606. His father was in the profession of the law, and held an office of trust under Louis XIII. Young Corneille was educated in the Jesuits’ College at Rouen; and, while there, formed an attachment to that society, which he maintained unimpaired in after-life. He was destined for the bar, at which he practised for a short time, but had no turn for business; and with better warrant than the many, who mistake a lazy and vagabond inclination for genius and the muse, he quitted the path of ambition and preferment for a road to fame, shorter, and therefore better suited to an aspiring, but impatient mind. A French writer congratulates his country, that he who would have made an obscure and ill-qualified provincial barrister, became, by change of place and pursuits, the glory and ornament of a great empire in its most splendid day. Corneille “left his calling for an idle trade,” without having bespoken the favour of the public by any minor specimens of poetical talent. He seems indeed to have hung loose upon society, till a petty affair of gallantry discovered the mine of his natural genius, though not in his purest and richest vein. The story is told by Fontenelle, and has been related of many others with nearly the same incidents; being the common-place of youthful adventure. One of Corneille’s friends had introduced him to his intended wife; and the lady, without any imputation of treachery on the part of the supplanter, took such a fancy to him, as induced her to play the jilt towards his introducer. Corneille moulded the embarrassment into a comedy entitled Melite. The drama had hitherto been at a low ebb among the French. Their tragedy was flat and languid: to comedy, properly so called, they had no pretensions. The theatre therefore had hitherto been little attended by persons of condition. Racine describes the French stage when Corneille began to write, as absolutely without order or regularity, taste or knowledge, as to what constituted the real merits of the drama. The writers, he says, were as ignorant as the spectators. Their subjects were extravagant and improbable; neither manners nor characters were delineated. The diction was still more faulty than the action; the wit was confined to the lowest puns. In short, all the rules of art, even those of decency and propriety, were violated. This description gives us the history of the infant drama in all ages and countries; of Thespis in his cart, and of Gammer Gurton’s needle.
While the French theatre was in this state of degradation, Melite appeared. Whatever its faults might be, there was something in it like originality of character; some indications of a comic vein, and some ingenious combinations. The public hailed the new era with delight, and the poet was astonished at his own success. The stage seemed all at once to flourish and to have taken its proper station among the elegant arts and rational amusements. On the strength of this acquisition, a new company of actors was formed; and the successful experiment was followed up by a series of pieces of the same kind, between the years 1632 and 1635. Imperfect as they were, we may trace in them some sketches of new character, which the more methodical and practised dramatists of a later period filled out with more skill and higher colouring, but with little claim to invention.
We owe to Corneille one of the most entertaining personages in modern comedy,—the Chambermaid; who has succeeded to the office of the Nurse in the elder drama. This change was partly, perhaps principally, produced by that great revolution in the modern stage which introduced women upon the boards. While female characters were consigned to male representatives, the poet took every opportunity of throwing his heroines into breeches to slur over the awkwardness of the boys; and the subordinate instruments of the plot were duly enveloped in the hoods and flannels of decrepit age, while the hard features of the adult male were easily manufactured into wrinkles. But when once real women were brought forward, they had their own interests to manage as well as those of the author; and the artificial disguise of their persons would ill have accorded with those speculations, of which personal beauty formed a main ingredient. It was their business therefore, while they conducted the love-affairs of their mistresses, to interweave an underplot between themselves and the valets. Less attractive perhaps than their young ladies in outward show, they obtained compensation in the piquancy of wit intrusted to their delivery, and thus divided the interest among the spectators in no disadvantageous proportion.
Corneille was also the first who brought the dialogue of polished society upon the French stage, which had hitherto been confined to the vulgarities of low comedy or the bombast of inflated tragedy. But it is time to rescue him from the obscurity of his own early compositions.
His first tragedy was Medea, copied principally from the faulty model of Seneca, whose prolix declamation, thus early adopted, probably exercised an unfavourable influence on the after fortunes of the national tragedy. His nephew Fontenelle, indeed, says that “he took flight at once, and soared instantly to the sublime.” But this sentence has not been confirmed by more impartial critics. The Continent has condemned the witchcraft; but we are bound to uphold it in defence of our own Shakspeare, who has clothed his hags with more picturesque and awful attributes than the magnificent and imperial sorceries of Corneille, Seneca, or even Euripides himself have exhibited.
The year 1637 was the era of the production of the Cid; the play not only of France, but of Europe, for it has been translated into most languages. But a sudden reputation involves its possessor in many vexations. Poets were in those days compelled to be courtiers, if they would prosper. At the Hotel de Rambouillet, an assembly was held, consisting of courtly and fashionable authors, who wasted their time in composing thèses d’amour and other fopperies of romantic literature. Over this society, as well as over the politics of Europe, Richelieu chose to be umpire. He was also the founder of the French Academy, and the avowed patron of its members. With this hold upon their good manners, he kept four authors in pay, for the purpose of filling out his own dramatic and poetical skeletons. Corneille consented to be one of the party, and was so ignorant of the ways of courts as to fancy that he might exercise his judgment independently. He was even simple enough to be astonished that the well-meant liberty of making some alterations in the plot of one of these ministerial dramas should give offence: but as he was too proud to surrender his own judgment, or to risk future affronts from the revulsion of the Cardinal’s goodwill, he withdrew from the palace, and abandoned himself to uncontrolled intercourse with the Muse. Richelieu therefore became the principal instigator of a cabal, which the envy of the wits sufficiently inclined them to form. Under such auspices, they entered into a conspiracy against the uncourtly offender. The prime minister could not endure that the successful intriguer in political life should be taxed with failure in unravelling the intricacies of a fictitious interest: he therefore looked at the real defects in a performance approved by the public with a jaundiced eye, and with but a half-opened one at its unrivalled beauties. As universal patron, he had settled a pension on the poet; but he levelled insidious and clandestine shafts against his fame. The “irritable tribe” willingly ran to arms, with Scuderi at their head, who wrote hostile remarks on the Cid, addressed to the Academy in the form of an appeal, in the course of which he quaintly termed himself the evangelist of truth. According to the statutes of the Academy, that august body could not take upon itself the decision, without the consent of both parties. Corneille, however indignant professionally, was under too many personal obligations to the Cardinal to spurn the authority of a tribunal erected by him. He therefore gave his assent to the reference, but in terms of considerable haughtiness. The Academy drew up a critique, to which they gave the modest title of “Sentiments of the French Academy on the tragicomedy of the Cid.” In the execution of this delicate commission, the learned members contrived to reconcile the demands of sound taste and criticism with the tact and suppleness of courtiers. They gratified the splenetic temper of the minister by censures, the justice of which could not be gainsayed: but they praised the beauties of the great scenes with a nobleness of panegyric, which took from the author all right to complain of partiality. This solemn judgment was given after five months of debate and negotiation between the Cardinal and the academicians, who dreaded official frowns if they wholly acquitted, and public disgust if they condemned against evidence. If it be considered that this infant institution owed its birth to Richelieu, and depended on him for its future growth, the verdict is highly honourable to the individuals, and creditable to the literary character, even when disadvantageously circumstanced by being entangled in the trammels of a court.
Our limits will not permit the examination of insulated passages, nor even individual tragedies: but independently of the splendour of the execution, other circumstances attending the career of the Cid produced a strong impression on the remainder of Corneille’s dramatic life. The Cid was taken from two Spanish plays, and several passages were actual translations; but not in sufficient number to invalidate the author’s claim to a large share of originality. To set that question at rest, in the editions published by himself, he gave the passages taken from the Spanish at the bottom of the page. Yet it was objected by his rivals and libellers, that the author of Medea and the Cid could only imitate or translate: that he had stolen the first of his tragedies from Seneca, the second from Guillen de Castro: a clever borrower, without a spark of tragic genius or invention! Unluckily for this bold assertion, among other European languages, this French play was translated into Spanish; and the nation, whence the piece was professedly derived, thought it worth while to recover it in the dress given to it by an illustrious foreigner. Against such unfounded censures it will be sufficient to quote the authority of Boileau, who speaks of the Cid as a merveille naissante.
Having achieved his first great success on a Spanish subject and after a Spanish model, it is not improbable that, had all gone smoothly, he would have continued to draw his resources from the same fountain. But vexation and resentment, usually at variance with good policy, now conspired with it; and put him on seeking a new road to fame. He had, as it should seem, intended to transplant a succession of Spanish histories and fables, with all the entanglement of Spanish contrivance in the weaving of plots. But in weighing the objections started against his piece, he found that they applied rather to his Spanish originals than to his own adaptation; he therefore determined to cut the knot of future controversy, by adopting the severity of the classical model. To this we owe Horace, Pompée, Cinna, and Polyeucte;—masterpieces which his more polished but more feeble successors in vain aspired to emulate. Thus did this eager war of criticism produce a crisis in the dramatic history of France. Its stage would probably, but for this, have been heroic and chivalrous, not, as it is, Roman, and after the manner of the ancients. It might even have rivalled our own in tragicomedy;—that monster stigmatized by Voltaire as the offspring of barbarism, although, and perhaps because, he “pilfered snug” from it; and might hope, by undervaluing the article, to escape detection as the purloiner.
At the end of three years, devoted to the study of the ancients, the injured author avenged the injuries levelled against the Cid by the production of Horace. Although the impetuous poet had not yet subdued his genius to the trammels of just arrangement, unity of action, and the other severe rules of the classic drama, such was the originality of conception, the force of character, and grandeur of sentiment displayed in this performance, that new views of excellence were opened to the astonished audience. Voltaire, with all the pedantry of mechanical criticism, objects to Horace, that in it there are three tragedies instead of one. Whatever may be the force of this objection with the French, it will weigh little with a people inured to the irregular sublimity and unfettered splendour of Shakspeare. Cinna redeemed many of the errors of Horace, and improved upon its various merits. The suffrages of the public were divided between it and Polyeucte, as the author’s masterpiece. But Dryden considered the Cid and China as his two best plays; and speaks of Polyeucte sarcastically, as “in matters of religion, as solemn as the long stops upon our organs.”
Before the performance of Polyeucte, Corneille read it at the Hotel de Rambouillet. That tribunal affected sovereign authority in affairs of wit. Even the reputation of the author, now in all its splendour, could no further command the civilities of the critics, than to “damn with faint praise.” Some days afterwards, Voiture called on Corneille, and, after much complimentary circumlocution, took the liberty of just hinting, that its success was not likely to answer expectation: above all, that its Christian spirit was calculated to give offence. Corneille, much alarmed, was about to withdraw it from rehearsal: the persuasions of an inferior player spirited him up to risk the consequences of avowing himself a Christian in an infidel court. Thus, probably, a hanger-on of the theatre had the honour of preventing a repetition of that malice, by which rival wits attempted to arrest the career of the Cid.