Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/326

306 work in comedy than any of these early plays, but his first and most signal triumph was to be in tragedy.

Mairet's Sophonisbe made tragedy the fashion immediately. Scudéry's La Mort de César and Didon, Mairet's Marc Antoine, Benserade's Cléopâtre, the Mithridate of La Calprenède, and Corneille's Médée are not all that appeared in 1635. The common features of these tragedies are the historic subject, and the elevated declamatory style. The influence of Seneca and even of the Greek tragedies is obvious; but there is no return to the elegiac and lyrical Senecan tragedy of Montchrestien and Garnier. The interest of plot, of incident, and generally of love—the love of the romances and tragi-comedies—is retained. Corneille's idea of improving upon the Medea of Seneca is to complicate the intrigue. Rotrou, in his version of the same author's Hercules Furens, gives Iolé a lover to whom she is constant. There is more of character-drawing than in the tragi-comedies, attention being more fixed on the central persons. But this dramatic interest proper is still uncertain. There is no clear conception of the nature of a tragic conflict, of an action in which incident and eloquence alike are of interest only as they help to render intelligible and impressive the conflict of the soul. Corneille's Médée is an accumulation of horrors. There is no conflict in the soul of Medea—only a wild fury; and most of the finer touches, including the famous "Moi! et c'est assez," are Seneca's.

This was in 1635. At the end of the following year