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.