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.