Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/340

320 verse. Corneille's poetry is not lyrical and it is not picturesque, and in both these respects differs from that of Garnier and Montchrestien. It is in closely-reasoned, eloquent declamation, in sonorously cadenced lines, that he has perhaps no rival. Dryden is our nearest parallel in English, and Corneille strikes a higher note than Dryden: his eloquence is less colloquial, and though his style varies with his inspiration, he was a more careful workman. In spirit Corneille stands closer to Jonson, even to Milton, than to Dryden. He is a characteristically French product of the same epoch, the early seventeenth century, with its high if somewhat narrow, somewhat pedantic, somewhat conventional ideals, religious, civic, and literary. Greatly as they differ from one another, there are links of community between the poet of Paradise Regained and the poet of Polyeucte. Both alike idealise the power and independence of the will. There is nothing of which man's will is not capable, no poetry too elevated and sonorous to portray its sublimity; and for both the highest and purest manifestation of this power and freedom is its consecration to the service of God. With Racine French tragedy draws closer to ordinary human nature with all its passions and frailties.

The movement towards regular tragedy, which was begun by Mairet's Sophonisbe, was accelerated by Le Cid. All the dramatists whose names are given on an earlier page turned more and more from tragi-comedy to tragedy. La Calprenède's Mort de Mithridate (1635) and Comte d'Essex (1639),