Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille

by Benedetto Croce

[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."