Corneille had announced his renunciation of the stage; he was translating into verse the Imitation of Christ. “It were better,” he had written in his preface to Pertharite, “that I took leave myself instead of waiting till it is taken of me altogether; it is quite right that after twenty years’ work I should begin to perceive that I am becoming too old to be still in the fashion. This resolution is not so strong but that it may be broken; there is every, appearance, however, of my abiding by it.”
Fouquet was then in his glory, “no less superintendent of literature than of finance,” and he undertook to recall to the stage the genius of Corneille. At his voice, the poet and the tragedian rose up at a single bound.
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“I feel the selfsame fire, the selfsame nerve I feel, That roused th’ indignant Cid, drove home Horatius’ steel; As cunning as of yore this hand of mine I find, That sketched great Pompey’s soul, depicted Cinna’s mind,”— |
wrote Corneille in his thanks to Fouquet. He had some months before said to Mdlle. du Pare, who was an actress in Moliere’s company, which had come to Rouen, and who was, from her grand airs, nicknamed by the others the Marchioness,
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“Marchioness,” if Age hath set On my brow his ugly die; At my years, pray don’t forget, You will be as—old as I. “Yet do I possess of charms One or two, so slow to fade, That I feel but scant alarms At the havoc Time hath made. “You have such as men adore, But these that you scorn to-day May, perchance, be to the fore When your own are worn away. “These can from decay reprieve Eyes I take a fancy to; Make a thousand, years believe Whatsoe’er I please of you. “With that new, that coming race, Who will take my word for it, All the warrant for your face Will be what I may have writ.” |
Corneille reappeared upon the boards with a tragedy called OEdipe, more admired by his contemporaries than by posterity. On the occasion of Louis XIV.‘s marriage he wrote for the king’s comedians the Toison d’or, and put into the mouth of France those prophetic words:—
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“My natural force abates, from long success alone; Triumphant blooms the state, the wretched people groan Their shrunken bodies bend beneath my high emprise; Whilst glory gilds the throne, the subject sinks and dies.” |
Sertorius appeared at the commencement of the year 1662. “Pray where did Corneille learn politics and war?” asked Turenne when he saw this piece played. “You are the true and faithful interpreter of the mind and courage of Rome,” Balzac wrote to him; “I say further, sir, you are often her teacher, and the reformer of olden times, if they have need of embellishment and support. In the spots where Rome is of brick, you rebuild it of marble; where you find a gap, you fill it with a masterpiece, and I take it that what you lend to history is always better than what you borrow from it. . . .” “They are grander and more Roman in his verses than in their history,” said La Bruyere. “Once only, in the Cid, Corneille had abandoned himself unreservedly to the reality of passion; scared at what he might find in the weaknesses of the heart, he would no longer see aught but its strength. He sought in man that which resists and not that which yields, thus giving his times the sublime pleasure of an enjoyment that can belong to nought but the human soul, a cherished proof of its noble origin and its glorious destiny, the pleasure of admiration, the appreciation of the beautiful and the great, the enthusiasm aroused by virtue. He moves us at sight of a masterpiece, thrills us at the sound of a noble deed, enchants us at the bare idea of a virtue which three thousand years have forever separated from us.” (Corneille et son temps, by M. Guizot.) Every other thought, every other prepossession, are strangers to the poet; his personages represent heroic passions which they follow out without swerving and without suffering themselves to be shackled by the notions of a morality which is still far from fixed and often in conflict with the interests and obligations of parties, thus remaining perfectly of his own time and his own country, all the while that he is describing Greeks, or Romans, or Spaniards.
