Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/277

Rh its best escape from frigidity and tediousness in the confessedly humorous extravagance of social compliment and badinage: unredeemed by the salt of wit, it soon cloyed and disgusted. But the decay of the lyric spirit, of which "préciosité" and the measured eloquence of Malherbe were both alike symptoms, proved complete. Artificiality was expelled from French poetry not by the reawakening of a purer and deeper poetic inspiration, but by the growing respect for good sense, logic, and order, and the consequent development in the drama of a style lucid and rhetorical rather than picturesque and lyrical. Of this style the great perfecter and master in the first half of the century was Pierre Corneille, of whose dramatic work we shall speak at length in the next chapter. Corneille's non-dramatic verse consists of a complete paraphrase of the De Imitatione Christi, which he composed during the years that he had abandoned the stage, similar paraphrases of other hymns and religious poems, and some occasional verses. The sonorous eloquence of Corneille's poetry is not in harmony with the deep and quiet inwardness of the Imitation, and he gives too often merely a flamboyant paraphrase. But when the poet's imagination is moved, Corneille's verse, as in the drama, has an incomparable élan, an elevation of soul as well as style and rhythm, which raises it far above the level of Malherbe's—

"Parle, parle, Seigneur, ton serviteur écoute;      Je dis ton serviteur, car enfin je le suis;       Je le suis, je veux l'être, et marcher dans ta route                           Et les jours et les nuits.         .     .      .      .      .      ..