Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/339

Rh because we can never tell to what unexpected resolution subtle moral reasoning may lead a character of unusual strength and elevation. In Racine the same uncertainty attends the fluctuating course of violent and absorbing passion. Such a type of action is not Greek, no more than it is Shakespearean. French tragedy owes it to its evolution through tragi-comedy. And to the same cause it owes the frequent preference—almost universal in Corneille—for the happy close, the peril escaped. The adoption of the Unities was made possible by their suitability for an action of this peculiar character. Corneille, indeed, never escaped from a sense of restraint in their rigid application. The perfecting of tragedy under the limitations they imposed was left to Racine, who saw in them a signal not only for concentration of action, but for simplification, drawing closer thereby to the structure of Greek tragedy.

Corneille not only fixed the mould of French tragedy, he gave it also appropriate vesture. The language of the drama in the first years of the century had oscillated between the bald and tasteless barbarism of Hardy's plays and high-flown "préciosité." Corneille's poetry is not without a touch of the prevalent taste for conceit,—

"Son sang sur la poussière écrivait mon devoir."

But this is not characteristic. He carried forward the movement inaugurated by Malherbe towards poetry logical in structure, rhetorical in style and