Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/444

424 424 D R A M A [FRENCH. father of French stylo. The people continued to solace or distract its weariness and its sufferings with the help of the ministers of that half-cynical gaiety which has always lighted up the darkest hours of French popular life. In the troublous days preceding llichelieu s definitive accession to power (1624) the Tabarinadts a kind of street dialogue recalling the earliest days of the popular drama had made the Pont-Neuf the favourite theatre of the Parisian populace. Meanwhile the iufluene of Spain, which Henry IV. had overcome in politics, had throughout his reign and afterwards been predominant in other spheres, and not the least in that of literature. The stilo culto, of which Gougora was the native Spanish, Marino the Italian, and Lyly the English repiesentative, asserted its dominion over the favourite authors of French society ; the pastoral romance of Honore d Urfe the text-book of pseudo-pastoral gallantry was the parent of the romances of the Scuderys and De la Calprenede ; the Hotel de Rambouillet was in its glory; the true (not the false) prccieuses sat on the heights of intellectual society ; and Balzac (ridiculed in the earliest French dramatic parody) 1 and Yoiture were the dictators of its literature. Much of the French drama of this age is of the same kind as its romance-literature, like which it fell under the polite castigation of Boileau s satire. Heroic love (quite a technical passion), &quot; fertile in tender senti ments,&quot; seized hold of the theatre as well as of the romances; and Calprenede (1610-1663), G. de Scud^ry 2 (1601-1667) and his sister (1607-1701), and others were equally fashionable in both species. Meanwhile Spanish and Italian models continued to influence both branches of the drama. Everybody knew by heart Gongora s version of the story of &quot; young Pyramus and his love Thisbe &quot; as dramatized by Th. Viaud (1590-1626) ; and the sentiment of Tristan 3 (1601-1655) overpowered Herod on the stage, and drew tears from Cardinal Richelieu in the audience. Even Duryer s (1609-1659) style, otherwise superior to that of his contemporaries, is stated to have been Italian in its defects. A mixture of the forms of classical comedy with elements of Spauish and of the Italian pastoral was attempted with great temporary success by A. Hardi (1560-1631), a playwright who thanked Heaven that he knew the precepts of his art while preferring to follow the demands of his trade. The mixture of styles begun by him was carried on by llacan (1589-1670), Rotrou (1609-1650), and others ; and among these comedies of intrigue in the Spanish manner the earliest efforts of Corneille himself 4 are to be classed. Rotrou s notewortliier productions 5 are later in date than the event which marks an epoch in the history of the French drama, the appearance of Corneille s Cid (1636). icille. P. Corneille (1606-1684) is justly revered as the first, and in some respects the unequalled, great master of French tragedy, whatever may have been unsound in his edies. theories, or defective in his practice. The attempts of his predecessors had been without life, because they lacked really tragic characters and the play of really tragic passions ; while their style had been either pedantically imitative or a medley of plagiarisms. He conquered tragedy at once for the national theatre and for the national litera ture, and this not by a long tentative process of production, but by a few master-pieces, for in his many later tragedies he never again proved fully equal to himself. The French tragedy, of which the great age begins with the Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte, was not, whatever it professed to be, a copy of the classical tragedy of Greeks or Romans, or an imitation of the Italian imitations of these ; nor, though in 1 &quot; L. du Peschier&quot; (de Barry), La, Cmiiedie des Comedies. 2 L Amour Tyrannique. 3 Marianne. & Le Veritable Saint Gcnais; Vcnccslas. his later tragedies Corneille depended less and less upon characters, and more and more, after the fashion of the Spaniards, upon situations, were the forms of the Spanish drama able to assert their dominion over the French tragic stage. The mould of French tragedy was cast by Corneille; but the creative power of his genius was unable to nil it with more than a few examples. His range of passions and characters was limited ; he preferred, he said, the reproach of having made his women too heroic to that of having made his men effeminate. His actions inclined too much to the exhibition of conflicts political rather than broadly ethical in their significance. The defects of his style are of less moment ; but in this, as in other respects, he was, with all his strength and brilliancy, not one of those rarest of artists who are at once the example and the despair of their successors. In comedy also Corneille begins the first great original epoch of French dramatic literature ; for it was to him that Moliere owed the inspiration of the tone and style which he made those of the higher forms of French comedy. But Le Jleuteur (the parent of a numerous dramatic progeny ) was itself derived from a Spanish original, 7 which it did not (as was the case with the Cid) transform into somethii g new. French tragi-comedy Corneille can hardly be said to have invented ; and of the mongrel growth of sentimental comedy, domestic drama ordrame, he rather suggested than exemplified the conditions. The tragic art of Racine (1639-1699) supplements rather than surpasses that of his older contemporary. His works reflect the serene and settled formality of an age in which the sun of monarchy shone with an effulgence no clouds seemed capable of obscuring, and in which the life of a nation seemed reducible to the surroundings of a court. The tone of the poetic literature of such an age is not necessarily unreal, because the range of its ideas is limited, and because its forms seem to exist by an immutable authority. Madame de Sevigne said of Racine, whose plays so well suit themselves to the successive phases in the life of Louis XIV., that in his later years he loved God as he had formerly loved his mistresses ; and this sally at all events indicates the range of passions which inspired his tragic muse. His heroes are all of one type that of a gracious gloriousness ; his heroines vary in their fortune?, but they are all the &quot;trophies of love,&quot; 8 with the exception of the scriptural figures, which stand apart from the rest. 9 T. Corneille (1625-1709), Campistron, Duche, Lafosse, and Quinault (1637-1688) were mere followers of one or both of the great masters of tragedy, though the last-named achieved a reputation of his own in the bastard species of the opera. The form of French tragedy thus established, like everything else which formed part of the &quot; age of Louis XIV.,&quot; proclaimed itself as the definitively settled model of its kind, and was accepted as such by a submis sive world. Proud of its self-imposed fetters, French tragedy dictatorially denied the liberty of which it had deprived itself to the art of which it claimed to furnish the highest examples. Yet, though calling itself classical, it had not caught the essential spirit of the tragedy of the Greeks. The elevation of tone which characterizes the serious drama of the age of Louis XIV. is a real eleva tion, but its heights do not lose themselves in a sphere peopled by the myths of a national religion. Its per sonages are conventional like its themes, but the conven tion is with itself only ; Orestes and Iphigenia have not brought with them the cries of the stern goddesses and the flame on the altar of Artemis ; their passions like their 6 Steele, The Lying Lover; Foote, The Liar; Goldoni, II Bugiardo. 7 Ruiz de Alarcon, La Verdad Sospechotsa. 8 Andromaque; Phedre; Berenice. &c. &quot; Esther; Ixa-.-ir.e, of Cor- ne-ille u Charack istics of French classical tragedy.
 * Melite; Clitandre, &c.