Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/338

318 And if we turn from the spirit of French tragedy to its form, we can see equally clearly the influence of tragi-comedy with its highly-wrought interest of suspense and surprise. In the sixteenth-century tragedy there was little or no interest of plot. The story is taken as known. The play foreshadows it in dreams, describes it in the speeches of messengers, laments it in passionate and eloquent speeches, and moralises on it in choral odes. With the Cid all this is changed. Henceforward everything is made to help forward the action. All that is lyrical or elegiac in character is eliminated. On nothing does Corneille lay more stress than this in his theoretical writings. In no drama is there really so little idle declamation as in the French. Soliloquies occur in Shakespeare's tragedies which express character, and arise quite naturally from the action, but do not in any way further it. There are none such in French tragedy. Every soliloquy is a deliberation which ends in a choice. Every word from the beginning to the "Hélas!" at the close helps the action forward a step. And to the end the issue of the action remains uncertain. What differentiates this uncertainty from that of the story in a tragi-comedy is that it does not depend on elaborate intrigue and surprising recognitions,—at least, not in the best plays, —but on the evolution of character. We are kept in suspense as to the issue of a tragedy by