Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/286

266 Polexandre retains much of the wilder improbabilities of the Amadis type, which, with the Greek romances and the fabulous geography still prevalent, was its principal source. The style is swollen and affected. Cytherée is even more indebted to the Greek, and equally wild and confused. It was La Calprenède and the Scudérys who gave the heroic romance the form which was most closely in touch with the predilections of the age. La Calprenède, a Gascon by birth and temper, and a successful dramatist, in his Cassandre (1642-45) and Cléopâtre (1647) and Faramond (1661) eliminated the supernatural marvels of the Polexandre, and interwove his stories of exalted love and heroism with historical names and events. They are endlessly long, one love-story passing into another in the most bewildering fashion, and all of a monotonous sameness; but his episodes are woven, as had never been done before, into a converging series, which ends in not one but a group of happy weddings. Honour and gallantry are the sole motives which in La Calprenède's romances, as in his own and other contemporary tragi-comedies and tragedies, determine the course of history. Occasionally, it has been pointed out, the heroes are involved in something of the same conflict of motives which forms the dramatic centre of Corneille's tragedies, but the conflict is developed on purely conventional and heroic lines.

La Calprenède's scheme was followed by the Scudérys, Georges and Madeleine, of whom the latter was the principal partner. In Ibrahim ou l'Illustre