Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/336

316 plays, such as Sertorius, Sophonisbe, Bérénice, the treatment of the feelings is frigid and unreal to the last degree, with the result that it is impossible to follow with any interest the high and subtle volitions they inspire. Bérénice sacrifices herself in much the same language as Chimène.

"C'est à force d'amour que je m'arrache au vôtre,        Et je serais à vous si j'aimais comme une autre,"

is very like

"Tu t'es, en m'offensant, montré digne de moi,        Je me dois, par ta mort, montrer digne de toi."

But the old ardour is gone, and Bérénice leaves us cold. At the same moment Racine was tracing the movements of the heart with a beauty and force of which Corneille had never at his best been capable. It was not to be wondered that his star declined. But this was the case only as regards the plays he was producing. His masterpieces still held the stage. He still had his champions, who preferred the moral grandeur of his characters to the impassioned frailty of Racine's. In one work of his old age, too, Corneille showed an unexpected capacity for delineating tender feeling. The little ballet play of Psyche, which he finished for Molière, has a freshness and charm hardly to be expected in the work of an old man. It was by deliberate choice, not from want of ability, that Corneille refused to become the rival of Quinault, to make "tendresse" the principal motive of tragedy, but remained faithful to the higher and more romantic traditions of his youth.