Let us dare to say what we think, that, in our opinion, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, together, do not equal Corneille; for none of them has known and expressed like him what is of all things most truly touching, a great soul at war with itself, between a generous passion and duty. Corneille is the creator of a new pathetic unknown to antiquity and to all the moderns before him. He disdains to address common and subaltern passions; he does not seek to rouse terror and pity, as demands Aristotle, who limits himself to erecting into maxims the practice of the Greeks. Corneille seems to have read Plato, and followed his precepts:—he addresses a most elevated part of human nature, the noblest passion, the one nearest virtue,—admiration; and from admiration carried to its culmination he draws the most powerful effects. Shakspeare, we admit, is superior to Corneille in extent and richness of dramatic genius. Entire human nature seems at his disposal, and he reproduces the different scenes of life in their beauty and deformity, in their grandeur and baseness. He excels in painting the terrible or the gentle passions. Othello is jealousy, Lady Macbeth is ambition, as Juliet and Desdemona are the immortal names of youthful and unfortunate love. But if Corneille has less imagination, he has more soul. Less varied, he is more profound. If he does not put upon the stage so many different characters, those that he does put on it are the greatest that can be offered to humanity. The scenes that he gives are less heart-rending, but at once more delicate and more sublime. What is the melancholy of Hamlet, the grief of King Lear, even the disdainful intrepidity of Cæsar, in comparison with the magnanimity of Augustus striving to be master of himself as well as the universe, in comparison with Chimène sacrificing love to honor, especially in comparison with Pauline, not suffering even at the bottom of her heart an involuntary sigh for the one that she must not love? Corneille always confines himself to the highest regions. He is by turns Roman and Christian. He is the interpreter of heroes, the chanter of virtue, the poet of warriors and politicians.[128] And it must not be forgotten that Shakspeare is almost alone in his times, whilst after Corneille comes Racine, who would suffice for the poetical glory of a nation.
Racine assuredly cannot be compared with Corneille for dramatic genius; he is more the man of letters; he has not the tragic soul; he neither loves nor understands politics and war. When he imitates Corneille, for example, in Alexander, and even in Mithridates, he imitates him badly enough. The scene, so vaunted, of Mithridates exposing his plan of campaign to his sons is a morsel of the finest rhetoric, which cannot be compared with the political and military scenes of Cinna and Sertorius, especially with that first scene of the Death of Pompey, in which you witness a counsel as true, as grand, as profound as ever could have been one of the counsels of Richelieu or Mazarin. Racine was not born to paint heroes, but he paints admirably man with his natural passions, and the most natural as well as the most touching of all, love. So he particularly excels in feminine characters. For men he has need of being sustained by Tacitus or holy Scripture.[129] With woman he is at his ease, and he makes them think and speak with perfect truth, set off by exquisite art. Demand of him neither Emilie, Cornélie, nor Pauline; but listen to Andromaque, Monime, Bérénice, and Phèdre! There, even in imitating, he is original, and leaves the ancients very far behind him. Who has taught him that charming delivery, those graceful troubles, that purity even in feebleness, that melancholy, sometimes even that depth, with that marvellous language which seems the natural accent of woman's heart? It is continually repeated that Racine wrote better than Corneille:—say only that the two wrote very differently, and like men in very different epochs. One has two sovereign qualities, which belong to his own nature and his times, a naïveté and grandeur, the other is not naïve, but he has too much taste not to be always simple, and he supplies the place of grandeur, forever lost, with consummate elegance. Corneille speaks the language of statesmen, soldiers, theologians, philosophers, and clever women; of Richelieu, Rohan, Saint-Cyran, Descartes, and Pascal; of mother Angélique Arnaud and mother Madeleine de Saint-Joseph; the language which Molière still spoke, which Bossuet preserved to his last breath. Racine speaks that of Louis XIV. and the women who were the ornament of his court. I suppose that thus spoke Madame, the amiable, sprightly, and unfortunate Henriette; thus wrote the author of the Princesse de Clèves and the author of Télémaque. Or, rather, this language is that of Racine himself, of that feeble and tender soul, which passed quickly from love to devotion, which uttered its complaints in lyric poetry, which was wholly poured out in the choruses of Esther and Athalie, and in the Cantiques Spirituels; that soul, so easy to be moved, that a religious ceremony or a representation of Esther at Saint-Cyr touched to tears, that pitied the misfortunes of the people, that found in its pity and its charity the courage to speak one day the truth to Louis XIV., and was extinguished by the first breath of disgrace.
Molière is, in comparison with Aristophanes, what Corneille is, in comparison with Shakspeare. The author of Plutus, the Wasps, and the Clouds, has doubtless an imagination, an explosive buffoonery, a creative power, above all comparison. Molière has not as great poetical conceptions: he has more, perhaps; he has characters. His coloring is less brilliant, his graver is more penetrating. He has engraved in the memory of men a certain number of irregularities and vices which will ever be called l'Avare (the Miser), le Malade Imaginaire (the Hypochondriac), les Femmes Savantes (the Learned Women), le Tartufe (the Hypocrite), and Don Juan, not to speak of the Misanthrope, a piece apart, touching as pleasant, which is not addressed to the crowd, and cannot be popular, because it expresses a ridicule rare enough, excess in the passion of truth and honor.
Of all fabulists, ancient and modern, does any one, even the ingenious, the pure, the elegant Phædrus, approach our La Fontaine? He composes his personages, and puts them in action with the skill of Molière; he knows how to take on occasion the tone of Horace, and mingle an ode with a fable; he is at once the most naïve, and the most refined of writers, and his art disappears in its very perfection. We do not speak of the tales, first, because we condemn the kind, then, because La Fontaine displays in them qualities more Italian than French, a narrative full of nature, malice, and grace, but without any of those profound, tender, melancholy traits, that place among the greatest poets of all time the author of the Two Pigeons (Deux Pigeons), the Old Man (Vieillard), and the Three Young Persons (Gens).
We do not hesitate to put Boileau among these great men. He comes after them, it is true, but he belongs to their company: he comprehends them, loves them, sustains them. It was he, who, in 1663, after the School of Women (l'Ecole des Femmes) and long before the Hypocrite (le Tartufe), and the Misanthrope, proclaimed Molière the master in the art of verse. It was he who, in 1677, after the failure of Phèdre, defended the vanquisher of Euripides against the successes of Pradon. It was he who, in advance of posterity, first put in light what is new and entirely original in the plays of Corneille.[130] He saved the pension of the old tragedian by offering the sacrifice of his own. Louis XIV. asking him what writer most honored his reign, Boileau answered, that it was Molière; and when the great king in his decline persecuted Port-Royal, and wished to lay hands on Arnaud, he encountered a man of letters, who said to the face of the imperious monarch,—"Your Majesty in vain seeks M. Arnaud, you are too fortunate to find him." Boileau is somewhat wanting in imagination and invention; but he is great in the energetic sentiment of truth and justice; he carries to the extent of passion taste for the beautiful and the honest; he is a poet by force of soul and good sense. More than once his heart dictated to him the most pathetic verses:
"In vain against the Cid a minister is leagued,[131]
All Paris for Chimène the eyes of Rodrique," etc.
* * * * *
"After a little spot of earth, obtained by prayer,
Forever in the tomb had inclosed Molière," etc.
And this epitaph of Arnaud, so simple and so grand:[132]
"At the feet of this altar of structure gross,
Lies without pomp, inclosed in a coffin vile,
The most learned mortal that ever wrote;
Arnaud, who in grace instructed by Jesus Christ,
Combating for the Church, has, in the Church itself,
Suffered more than one outrage and more than one anathema," etc.