Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/307

Rh and circumstances. A few situations in a familiar story are presented in a statuesque manner—a long monologue, or a dialogue which is simply an interchange of balanced "sentences," very different from the rapid play of Corneille's dialogue instinct with purpose and passion. At the end of each scene the chorus deploys in grave and harmonious stanzas its reflections on the fleetingness of life, the inexorableness of fate, the beauty and dignity of virtue,—

"Si tu n'aperçois rien d'éternelle durée,          Et si tout ce grand Tout n'attend que le trépas,           Suis toujours la vertu seule au monde assurée           Qui nous fait vivre au Ciel en mourant ici-bas.           O l'honneur immortel des âmes généreuses,           Fort bien considéré vous avez eu raison           De rendre vos esprits en vos mains valeureuses,           Pour sortir par la mort d'une double prison."

These plays, it is clear, were never written for the popular stage at all. Their observance—vague as it often is—of the Unities of place and time implies as much, for the conventions of the popular theatre included a permissible duration of the action from the creation to the Day of Judgment, as well as the simultaneous representation of different places—what Corneille calls "ce horrible derèglement qui mettait Paris, Rome, et Constantinople sur le même théâtre"—and that not successively and ideally, as on the English stage described by Sidney, but at one and the same time with distinct decorations. The Senecan tragedies might be performed at schools and colleges—to add to the sufferings of the much-enduring students of