Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/327

Rh appeared Le Cid; and French tragedy emerged from the confused scaffolding which had concealed and prepared its growth in clear and majestic proportions. Almost as by an accident Corneille had divined the right way, seen whither the centre of the interest must be transferred to produce great serious drama. From a Spanish play crowded with incongruous incident he constructed a tragedy, in which all the interest of suspense that the most skilfully woven tragi-comedy could evoke is sustained and intensified, not by elaborate intrigue and surprising recognitions, but by a moral dilemma, a conflict of the soul. What the élite of Paris crowded Mondory's theatre and waited breathless to see was not what would happen next, but what Rodrigue and Chimène would do. When Rodrigue entered Chimène's chamber to offer himself to her vengeance, "il s'élevait un certain frémissement dans l'assemblée, qui marquait une curiosité merveilleuse, et un redoublement d'attention pour ce qu'ils avaient à se dire dans un état si pitoyable." And the eloquence with which the play shines is subordinated to the same end. It does not deploy itself in irrelevant moral, and political "sentences." The description of Rodrigue's defeat of the Moors is in the approved classical style of the nuntius. The actors were not willing to forgo these oratorical opportunities. But otherwise the finest speeches exist not for their own sake, but to portray with subtlety and animation the war of motives, the conflict in Rodrigue and Chimène—less relevantly in the Infanta—between honour and passion.