Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille

by Benedetto Croce

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.