Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/331

Rh spirit of plays like Le Cid and Don Sanche d'Aragon,—much less so with more essentially tragic themes. But with this qualification it may be admitted that the next three tragedies which Corneille produced—Horace (1640), Cinna (1640), and Polyeucte (1643)—are the flower of his work in interest of situation and character. His heroes or heroines have not yet become monsters of will, following their perverted ideals through labyrinths of subtle and distorted reasoning. If they rise above the normal, it is in virtue of qualities that have their root in what is best in human nature, qualities on whose occasional manifestation the welfare of the race depends.

In Horace he sketches the fierce, almost monstrous, patriotism of a small state conscious of its great destinies, yet still in the throes of the first struggle for bare existence. The ideal Roman of the seventeenth century is not quite a real person, but in the light of more recent history it is difficult to say that excesses of patriotism, such as the older and younger Horace are guilty of, must be untrue to nature. The criticism which Corneille passes upon his own play, that it lacks unity because the life of the hero is twice exposed, is strangely pedantic. It is not the life or death of Horace which constitutes the crucial interest of the play, but the whole moral situation and its issue in action.

From Rome in the throes of birth he passed to the equally idealised period of the early empire. Transcendent virtue shines here in Augustus with a mellower light. The mutual