Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/449

Rh CORNEILLE 419 we have seen, he gave up his offices, and the expression of Fontenelle that he practised &quot;sans gout et sans succe s &quot; are sufficient proof. His patrimony and his wife s dowry must have been both trifling. On the other hand, it was during the early and middle part of his career impossible, and during the later part very difficult, for a dramatist to live decently by his pieces. It was not till the middle of the century that the custom of allowing the author two shares in the profits during the first run of the piece was observed, and even then revivals profited him nothing. Thomas Corneille himself, who to his undoubted talents united wonderful facility, untiring industry, and (gift valuable above all others to the playwright) an extraordinary knack of hitting the public fancy, died, notwithstanding his simple tastes, &quot;as poor as Job.&quot; We know that Pierre received for tsvo of his later pieces 2000 livres each, and it would seem that this was the utmost he ever did receive, larity. But if his gains in money were small and insufficient, it must not be supposed that his reward in fame was stinted. Corneille, unlike many of the great writers of the world, was not driven to wait for &quot; the next age &quot; to do him justice. The cabal which attacked the Cid was a cabal of a purely cliquish character, and had, as we are assured on the amplest evidence, no effect whatever on the judgment of the public. All his subsequent masterpieces were received with the same ungrudging applause, and the rising star of Racine, even in conjunction with the manifest inferiority of the last five or six plays of the author of Cinna, with difficulty prevailed against the towering reputation of the latter. The great men of his time Conde&quot;, Tureune, the inarechal de Gram- mont, the knight-errant due de Guise were his fervent admirers. Nor had he less justice done him by a class from whom less justice might have been expected, the brother men of letters whose criticisms he treated with such scant courtesy. The respectable mediocrity of Cbapelain might misapprehend him ; the lesser geniuses of Scud6ri and Mairet might feel alarm at his advent ; the envious Claverets and D Aubignacs might snarl and scribble. But Balzac did him justice ; Rotrou, as we have seen, never failed in generous appreciation ; Moliere in conversation and in print recognized him as his own master and the foremost of dramatists. We have quoted the informal tribute of Racine ; but it should not be forgotten that Racine, in discharge of his duty as respondent at the Academical reception of Thomas Corneille, pronounced upon the memory of Pierre perhaps the noblest and most just tribute of eulogy that ever issued from the lips of a rival. Boileau s testimony is of a more chequered character; yet he seems never to have failed in admiring Corneille when ever his principles would allow him to do so. Of his con duct in the poet s dire necessity we have spoken already, and there is one story of the period of his extreme old age which must not be omitted. Questioned as to the great men of Louis XlV. s reign, he is said to have replied : &quot; I only know three, Corneille, Moliere, and myself. &quot; &quot; And how about Racine 1 &quot; his auditor ventured to remark. &quot; He was an extremely clever fellow whom I taught with great difficulty to write verse.&quot; It was reserved for the 18th century to exalt Racine above Corneille. Voltaire, who was prompted by his natural benevolence to comment on the latter (the profits went to a relation of the poet), was not altogether fitted by nature to appreciate Corneille, and moreover, as has been ingeniously pointed out, was not a little wearied by the length of his task. His partially unfavourable verdict was endorsed earlier by Yauvenargues, who knew little of poetry, and later by La Harpe, whose critical stand-point has now been universally abandoned. Napoleon I. was a great admirer of Corneille (&quot; s il vivait je le ferais prince,&quot; he said), and under the Empire and the Restoration an approach to a sounder appreciation was made. But it was the glory of the romantic school, or rather of the more catholic study of letters which that school brought about, to restore Corneille to his true rank, that of the greatest writer of France, perhaps tli2 only one who up to our own times can take rank with the Dantes and Shakespeares of other countries. So long, indeed, as a certain kind of criticism was pursued due appreciation was impossible. When it was thought sufficient to say with Boileau that Corneille excited, not pity or terror, but admiration which was not a tragic passion ; or that D un seul nom quelquefois le son dur ou bizarre Rend un poeme eutier ou burlesque ou barbare;&quot; when Voltaire could think it crushing to add to his ex posure of the &quot; infamies&quot; of Theodore &quot; apres cela comment osons nous condamner les pieces de Lope de Ve&quot;ga et de Shakespeare 1 &quot; it is obvious that the. Cid and Polyeucte, much more Don Sanche d Aragon and Rodogune, were sealed books, to the critic. Almost the first thing which strikes a reader is the sin- style and gular inequality of this poet. Producing, as he certainly has peculiar!- produced, work which classes him with the greatest names ties&amp;gt; in literature, he has also signed an extraordinary quantity of verse which has not merely the defects of genius, irregularity, extravagance, bizarrete, but the faults which we are apt to regard as exclusively belonging to those who lack genius, to wit, the dulness and tediousness of mediocrity. Moliere s manner of accounting for this is famous in literary history or legend. &quot; My friend Corneille,&quot; he said, &quot; has a familiar who inspires him with the finest verses in the world. But sometimes the familiar leaves him to shift for himself, and then he fares very badly.&quot; That Corneille was by no means destitute of the critical faculty his Discourses and the Examens (often admirably acute) of his plays show well enough. But an enemy might certainly contend that a poet s critical faculty should be of the Promethean, not the Epimethean order. The fact seems to be that the form in which Corneille s work was cast, and which by an odd irony of fate he did so much to originate and make popular, was very partially suited to his talents. He could imagine admirable situations, and he could write verses of incomparable grandeur verses that reverberate again and again in the memory. But he could not, with the patient docility of Racine, labour at strictly propor tioning the action of a tragedy, at maintaining a uniform rate of interest in the course of the plot and of excellence in the fashion of the verse. Especially in his later plays a verse and a couplet will crash out with fulgurous bril liancy, and then be succeeded by pages of very second- rate declamation or argument. It was urged against him also by the party of the Doucereux, as he called them, that he could not manage, or did not attempt, the great passion of love, and that except in the case of Chimene his prin ciple seemed to be that of one of his own heroines : &quot; Laissons, seigneur, laissons pour les petites ames Ce commerce rampant de soupirs et de llammes. ( Aristie in Sertorius. ) There is perhaps some truth in this accusation, however much some of us may be disposed to think that the line just quoted is a fair enough description of the admired ecstasies of Achille and Bajazet. But these are all the defects which can be fairly urged against him ; and in a dramatist bound to a less strict service they would hardly have been even remarked. On the English stage the liberty of unrestricted incident and complicated action, the power of multiplying characters and introducing prose scenes, would have exactly suited his somewhat intermit tent genius, both by covering defects and by giving greater scope for the exhibition of power. How great that power is can escape no one. The splen-