Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/312

292 motives are presented distinctly if without any shading, and are at times dignified and impressive—more impressive in their crude truthfulness than the high-flown gallantry which is the sole motive at work in the tragi-comedies of most of Hardy's successors.

The damning fault of Hardy's tragedies, as of all his work, is the execrable style. He claimed to be a disciple of Ronsard, and permitted himself all the licences which the latter demanded for poetic diction. But Hardy was not, like Ronsard, a poet. He was an improviser without taste. His style is painfully obscure, abounding in ellipses, inversions, archaisms, and coinages. It is ungrammatical and undistinguished, and at the same time affected and bombastic.

Hardy's tragedies were not the most immediately popular and influential part of his work, but they preserved and handed on to later writers, as Mairet, Tristan, and Corneille, the main features of the tragic tradition established by Jodelle and his followers. These features are the historical subject, the grave and heightened style, and the concentrated action. Though Hardy allows himself the complete liberty, as regards the imaginary place and duration of the action, which was traditional on the popular stage, he dramatises in his tragedies not a whole story but a final crisis. In Coriolan, for example, which, like Shakespeare's play, is based on Plutarch, Hardy begins with the banishment of Coriolanus and his interview with Aufidius. Thereafter Hardy selects for presentation much the same