Cornélie, the earlier and less successful of the pair, written in Garnier’s twenty-eighth year, was performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1573, and was published in 1574. The young author was not altogether unpractised in his art, for already in 1568 he had written a drama on the subject of Portia, but he has not yet advanced beyond his predecessors, and like them, or perhaps more obviously than they, is at the stage of regarding the tragedy “only as an elegy mixed with rhetorical expositions.” The episode that he selected lent itself to such treatment.
Cornelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio, had after the loss of her first husband, the younger Cassius, become the wife of Pompey the Great, of whose murder she was an eye-witness. Meanwhile her father still made head against Caesar in Africa, and the play deals with her regrets and suspense at Rome till she learns the issue of this final struggle. In the first act Cicero soliloquises on the woes of the country, which he traces to her lust of conquest; and the chorus takes up the burden at the close. In the second Cornelia bewails her own miseries, which she attributes to her infidelity in marrying again: Cicero tries to comfort her and she refuses his comfort, both in very long harangues; and the chorus describes the mutability of mortal things. In the third act she narrates an ominous dream in which the shade of Pompey has visited her. Scarcely has she left the stage when Cicero enters to announce the triumph of Caesar and the death of Scipio. Cornelia re-enters to receive the urn with Pompey’s ashes, the sight of which stirs her to new laments for herself and imprecations against Caesar. The chorus dwells on the capriciousness of fortune. In the fourth act the resentment against Caesar is emphasised by Cassius in discourse with Decimus Brutus, and the chorus sings of Harmodios and Aristogeiton; but after that Caesar and Antony come in and discuss the means to be taken for Caesar’s safety, Antony advocating severity and caution, Caesar leniency and confidence. This act is closed by a chorus of Caesar’s friends, who celebrate his services and virtues. The fifth act is chiefly occupied with the messenger’s account of Scipio’s last battle and death, at the end of which Cornelia at some length declares that when she has paid due funeral rites to husband and father, she will surrender her own life.
From this analysis it will be seen that Cornélie as a play is about as defective as it could be. The subject is essentially undramatic, for the heroine—and there is no hero—has nothing to do but spend her time in lamentations and forebodings, in eulogies and vituperations. Yet the subject is more suitable than the treatment. There is no trace of conflict, internal or external; for the persons maintain their own point of view throughout, and the issue is a matter of course from the first. There is no entanglement or plot; but all the speakers, as they enter in turn, are affected with a craving to deliver their minds either in solitude or to some congenial listener: and their prolations lead to nothing. Even the unity of interest, which the classicists so prized, and over-prized, is lacking here, despite the bareness of the theme. Cicero has hardly less to say than Cornelia, and in two acts she does not so much as appear, while in one of them attention is diverted from her sorrows to the dangers of Caesar. The heroine no doubt retains a certain kind of primacy, but save for that, M. Faguet’s description would be literally correct: “The piece in the author’s conception might be entitled Thoughts of various persons concerning Rome at the Date of Thapsus.”[55] The Cornélie is by no means devoid of merit, but that merit is almost entirely rhetorical, literary, and poetical. The language is never undignified, the metres are carefully manipulated; the descriptions and reflections, many of them taken from Lucan, though sometimes stilted, are often elevated and picturesque. But the most dramatic passages are the conversations in the fourth act, where the inter-locuteurs, as Garnier calls the characters with even more reason than Grévin calls those of his play entre-parleurs, are respectively Decimus Brutus and Cassius, Caesar and Mark Antony: and this is typical for two reasons. In the first place, these scenes have least to do with the titular subject, and are, as it were, mere excrescences on the main theme. In the second place, they are borrowed, so far as their general idea is concerned, from Grévin, as Grévin in turn had borrowed them from Muretus; and even details have been transmitted to the cadet in the trinity from each and both of his predecessors. Thus in the Cornélie Decimus not very suitably replaces or absorbs Marcus Brutus, but the whole tone and movement of the interview with Cassius are the same in all the three plays, and particular expressions reappear in Garnier that are peculiar to one or other of his elder colleagues or that the later has adapted from the earlier. For example, Garnier’s Cassius describes Caesar as
un homme effeminé
Qui le Roy Nicomede a jeune butiné.[56]
There is no express reference to this scandal in Muretus, but it furnishes Grévin’s Decimus with a vigorous couplet which obviously has inspired the above quotation:
N’endurons plus sur nous regner un Ganimede
Et la moitié du lict de son Roy Nicomede.
Here, on the other hand, is an instance of Garnier getting a phrase from Muretus that Grévin passed over. Decimus says in excuse of his former patron:
Encor’ n’est il pas Roy portant le diadême: