Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/337

Rh Whatever place French classical tragedy holds in the history of the drama, Corneille was undoubtedly its creator. As we have said at the beginning of this chapter, it is only a superficial criticism which could bring under one name the tragedy of the sixteenth century and that of Corneille and Racine. Undoubtedly there was a continuous tradition handed on by Hardy and Mairet which made classical tragedy the model for French tragedy. But in that tragedy as it finally took shape, the influence of tragi-comedy, as it flourished during the early years of the century, is not less apparent than that of classical tragedy.

It was from tragi-comedy that French tragedy inherited the predominance of "l'amour" as a motive. Love had not been the principal moving passion in the sixteenth-century tragedies; it was rather revenge. And in Elizabethan tragedy, which grew up also under Senecan influence, love found its proper place in romance and comedy more often than in tragedy. It was because French tragedy sprang so directly out of plays the spirit of which was derived from Spanish tragi-comedies, Italian pastorals, and the romances of the day, that "l'amour" became its principal motive. In Corneille and his contemporaries the "amour" is still the high-flown conventional passion of the romances. Racine made it at once a more natural and a more essentially tragic passion, influenced doubtless by the study of Virgil and Euripides as well as of the human heart, but he did not depose love from its tragic supremacy.