A History of French Literature

CHAPTER III

THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE)

The classical and Italian drama of the sixteenth century was literary, oratorical, lyrical; it was anything but dramatic. Its last representative, ANTOINE DE MONTCHRESTIEN (1575-1621), a true poet, and one whose life was a series of strange adventures, wrote, like his predecessors, rather for the readers of poetry than for the theatre. With a gift for style, and a lyrical talent, seen not only in the chants of the chorus, but in the general character of his dramas, he had little feeling for life and movement; his personages expound their feelings in admirable verse; they do not act. He attempted a tragedy—L'Écossaise—on the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, a theme beyond his powers. In essentials he belonged rather to the past, whose traditions he inherited, than to the future of the stage. But his feeling for grandeur of character, for noble attitudes, for the pathetic founded on admiration, and together with these the firm structure of his verse, seem to warrant one in thinking of him as in some respects a forerunner of Corneille.

At the Hôtel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the Confrères de la Passion still exhibited the mediæval drama. It passed away when their theatre was occupied by the company of Valleran Lecomte, who had in his pay a dramatist of inexhaustible fertility—ALEXANDRE HARDY (c. 1560 to c. 1630). During thirty years, from the opening of the seventeenth century onwards, Hardy, author of some six or seven hundred pieces, of which forty-one remain, reigned as master of the stage.20 A skilful improvisor, devoid of genius, devoid of taste, he is the founder of the French theatre; he first made a true appeal to the people; he first showed a true feeling for theatrical effects. Wherever material suitable for his purposes could be caught at—ancient or modern, French, Italian, or Spanish—Hardy made it his own. Whatever form seemed likely to win the popular favour, this he accepted or divined. The Astrée had made pastoral the fashion; Hardy was ready with his pastoral dramas. The Italian and Spanish novels were little tragi-comedies waiting to be dramatised; forthwith Hardy cast them into a theatrical mould. Writing for the people, he was not trammelled by the unities of time and place; the mediæval stage arrangements favoured romantic freedom. In his desire to please a public which demanded animation, action, variety, Hardy allowed romantic incident to predominate over character; hence, though he produced tragedies founded on legendary or historical subjects, his special talent is seen rather in tragi-comedy. He complicated the intrigue, he varied the scenes, he shortened the monologues, he suppressed or reduced the chorus—in a word, the drama in his hands ceased to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at length dramatic. The advance was great; and it was achieved by a hack playwright scrambling for his crusts of bread.

But to dramatic life and movement it was necessary that order, discipline, regulation should be added. The rules of the unities were not observed by Hardy—were perhaps unknown to him. But they were known to others. Jean de Schelandre (the pseudonym formed from the letters of his name being Daniel d'Anchères), in his vast drama in two parts, Tyr et Sidon, claimed all the freedom of the mysteries in varying the scene, in mingling heroic matter with buffoonery. In the edition of 1628 a preface appears by François Ogier, a learned churchman, maintaining that the modern stage, in accordance with altered circumstances, should maintain its rights to complete imaginative liberty against the authority of the Greeks, who presented their works before different spectators under different conditions. Ogier's protest was without effect. Almost immediately after its appearance the Sophonisbe of Jean de Mairet was given, and the classical tragedy of France was inaugurated on a popular stage. In the preface to his pastoral tragi-comedy Sylvanire, Mairet in 1631 formulated the doctrine of the unities. The adhesion of Richelieu and the advocacy of Chapelain insured their triumph. The "rules" came to be regarded as the laws of a literary species.

The influence of the Spanish drama, seen in the writings of Rotrou and others, might be supposed to make for freedom. It encouraged romantic inventions and ambitious extravagances of style. Much that is rude and unformed is united with a curiosity for points and laboured ingenuity in the dramatic work of Scudéry, Du Ryer, Tristan l'Hermite. A greater dramatist than these showed how Spanish romance could coalesce with French tragedy in a drama which marks an epoch—the Cid; and the Cid, calling forth the judgment of the Academy, served to establish the supremacy of the so-called rules of Aristotle.

PIERRE CORNEILLE, son of a legal official, was born at Rouen in 1606. His high promise as a pupil of the Jesuits was not confirmed when he attempted to practise at the bar; he was retiring, and spoke with difficulty. At twenty-three his first dramatic piece, Mélite, a comedy, suggested, it is told, by an adventure of his youth, was given with applause in Paris; it glitters with points, and is of a complicated intrigue, but to contemporaries the plot appeared less entangled and the style more natural than they seem to modern readers. The tragi-comedy, Clitandre, which followed (1632), was a romantic drama, crowded with extravagant incidents, after the manner of Hardy. In La Veuve he returned to the style of Mélite, but with less artificial brilliance and more real vivacity; it was published with laudatory verses prefixed, in one of which Scudéry bids the stars retire for the sun has risen. The scene is laid in Paris, and some presentation of contemporary manners is made in La Galerie du Palais and La Place Royale. It was something to replace the nurse of elder comedy by the soubrette. The attention of Richelieu was attracted to the new dramatic author; he was numbered among the five garçons poètes who worked upon the dramatic plans of the Cardinal; but he displeased his patron by his imaginative independence. Providing himself with a convenient excuse, Corneille retired to Rouen.

These early works were ventures among which the poet was groping for his true way. He can hardly be said to have found it in Médée (1635), but it was an advance to have attempted tragedy; the grandiose style of Seneca was a challenge to his genius; and in the famous line—

"Dans un si grand revers, que vous reste-t-il? Moi!"

we see the flash of his indomitable pride of will, we hear the sudden thunder of his verse. An acquaintance, M. de Chalon, who had been one of the household of Marie de Médicis, directed Corneille to the Spanish drama. The Illusion Comique, the latest of his tentative plays, is a step towards the Cid; its plot is fantastical, but in some of the fanfaronades of the braggart Matamore, imported from Spain, are pseudo-heroics which only needed a certain transposition to become the language of chivalric heroism. The piece closes with a lofty eulogy of the French stage.

The sun had indeed risen and the stars might disappear when in the closing days of 1636 the Cid was given in Paris at the Théâtre du Marais; the eulogy of the stage was speedily justified by its author. His subject was found by Corneille in a Spanish drama, Las Mocedades del Cid, by Guilhem de Castro; the treatment was his own; he reduced the action from that of a chronicle-history to that of a tragedy; he centralised it around the leading personages; he transferred it in its essential causes from the external world of accident to the inner world of character; the critical events are moral events, victories of the soul, triumphs not of fortune but of the will. And thus, though there are epic episodes and lyric outbreaks in the play, the Cid definitely fixed, for the first time in France, the type of tragedy. The central tragic strife here is not one of rival houses. Rodrigue, to avenge his father's wrong, has slain the father of his beloved Chimène; Chimène demands from the King the head of her beloved Rodrigue. In the end Rodrigue's valour atones for his offence. The struggle is one of passion with honour or duty; the fortunes of the hero and heroine are affected by circumstance, but their fate lies in their own high hearts.

The triumph of Corneille's play was immense. The Cardinal, however, did not join in it. Richelieu's intractable poet had glorified Spain at an inconvenient moment; he had offered an apology for the code of honour when edicts had been issued to check the rage of the duel; yet worse, he had not been crushed by the great man's censure. The quarrel of the Cid, in which Mairet and Scudéry took an embittered part, was encouraged by Richelieu. He pressed the Academy, of which Corneille was not a member until 1647, for a judgment upon the piece, and at length he was partially satisfied by a pronouncement, drawn up by Chapelain, which condemned its ethics and its violation of dramatic proprieties, yet could not deny the author's genius. Corneille was deeply discouraged, but prepared himself for future victories.

Until 1640 he remained silent. In that illustrious year Horace and Cinna were presented in rapid succession. From Spain, the land of chivalric honour, the dramatist passed to antique Rome, the mother and the nurse of heroic virtue. In the Cid the dramatic conflict is between love and filial duty; in Horace it is between love, on the one side, united with the domestic affections, and, on the other, devotion to country. In both plays the inviolable will is arbiter of the contention. The story of the Horatii and Curiatii, as told by Livy, is complicated by the union of the families through love and marriage; but patriotism requires the sacrifice of the tenderer passions. It must be admitted that the interest declines after the third act, and that our sympathies are alienated from the younger Horace by the murder of a sister; we are required to feel that a private crime, the offence of overstrained patriotism, is obliterated in the glory of the country. In Cinna we pass from regal to imperial Rome; the commonwealth is represented by Augustus; a great monarchy is glorified, but in the noblest way, for the highest act of empire is to wield supreme power under the sway of magnanimity, and to remain the master of all self-regarding passions. The conspiracy of Cinna is discovered; it is a prince's part to pardon, and Augustus rises to a higher empire than that of Rome by the conquest of himself. In both Horace and Cinna there are at times a certain overstrain, an excess of emphasis, a resolve to pursue heroism to all extremities; but the conception of moral grandeur is genuine and lofty; the error of Corneille was the error of an imagination enamoured of the sublime.

But are there not heroisms of religion as pure as those of patriotism? And must we go back to pagan days to find the highest virtue? Or can divine grace effect no miracles above those of the natural will? Corneille gives his answer to such a challenge in the tragedy of Polyeucte (1643). It is the story of Christian martyrdom; a homage rendered to absolute self-devotion to the ideal; a canticle intoned in celebration of heavenly grace. Polyeucte, the martyr, sacrifices to his faith not only life, but love; his wife, who, while she knew him imperfectly, gave him an imperfect love, is won both for God and for her husband by his heroism; she is caught away from her tenderness for Sévère into the flame of Polyeucte's devout rapture; and through her Sévère himself is elevated to an unexpected magnanimity. The family, the country, the monarchy, religion—these in turn were honoured by the genius of Corneille. He had lifted the drama from a form of loose diversion to be a great art; he had recreated it as that noblest pastime whose function is to exercise and invigorate the soul.

The transition from Polyeucte to Le Menteur, of the same year, is among the most surprising in literature.21 From the most elevated of tragedies we pass to a comedy, which, while not belonging to the great comedy of character, is charmingly gay. We expect no grave moralities here, nor do we find them. The play is a free and original adaptation from a work of the Spanish dramatist Alarcon, but in Corneille's hands it becomes characteristically French. Young Dorante, the liar, invents his fictions through an irresistible genius for romancing. His indignant father may justly ask, Has he a heart? Is he a gentleman? But how can a youth with such a pretty wit resist the fascination of his own lies? He is sufficiently punished by the fact that they do not assist, but rather trouble, the course of his love adventure, and we demand no further poetical justice. In Corneille's art, tragedy had defined itself, and comedy was free to be purely comic; but it is also literary—light, yet solid in structure; easy, yet exact in style. The Suite du Menteur, founded on a comedy by Lope de Vega, has a curious attraction of its own, half-fantastic as it is, and half-realistic; yet it has shared the fate of all continuations, and could not attain the popularity of its predecessor. It lacks gaiety; the liar has sunk into a rascal, and we can hardly lend credence to the amendment in his mendacious habit when he applies the art of dissimulation to generous purposes.

These are the masterpieces of Corneille. Already in Pompée, although its date is that of Polyeucte, while the great dramatist is present throughout, he is not always present at his best. It should not surprise us that Corneille preferred Lucan to Virgil. Something of the over-emphasis of the Pharsalia, his original, has entered into the play; but the pomp of the verse is no vulgar pomp. A graver fault is the want of a dramatic centre for the action, which tends too much towards the epic. Pompey is the presiding power of the tragedy; his spirit dominates the lesser characters; but he does not appear in person. The political interest develops somewhat to the subordination of the personal interest. Corneille's unhappy theory of later years, that love is unworthy of a place in high tragedy, save as an episode, is here exemplified in the passion of Cæsar for Cleopatra; but, in truth, love is too sovereign a power to admit of its being tagged to tragedy as an ornament.

Until 1636 Corneille was seeking his way. From 1636 to 1644 his genius soared on steady pinions. During the eight years that followed he triumphed, but he also faltered. Rodogune (1644), which he preferred to all his other plays, is certainly, by virtue of the enormity of the characters, the violence of the passions, the vastness of its crimes, the most romantic of his tragedies; it is constructed with the most skilful industry; from scene to scene the emotion is intensified and heightened until the great fifth act is reached; but if by incomparable audacity the dramatist attains the ideal, it is an ideal of horror. Théodore, a second play of martyrdom, fell far below Polyeucte. Heraclius is obscure through the complication of its intrigue. Don Sanche d'Aragon, a romantic tragi-comedy, is less admirable as a whole than in the more brilliant scenes. In the historical drama Nicomède (1651), side by side with tragic solemnities appears matter of a familiar kind. It was the last great effort of its author's genius. The failure of Pertharite, in 1652, led to the withdrawal of Corneille from the theatre during seven years. He completed during his seclusion a rendering into verse of the Imitation of Jesus Christ. When he returned to the stage it was with enfeebled powers, which were overstrained by the effort of his will; yet he could still write noble lines, and in the tragedy-ballet of Psyché, in which Quinault and Molière were his collaborators, the most charming verses are those of Corneille. His young rival Racine spoke to the hearts of a generation less heroic and swayed by tenderer passion, and the old man resented the change. Domestic sorrows were added to the grief of ill success in his art. Living simply, his means were narrow for his needs. The last ten years of his life were years of silence. He died in 1684, at the age of seventy-eight.

The drama of Corneille deals with what is extraordinary, but in what is extraordinary it seeks for truth. He finds the marvellous in the triumphs of the human will. His great inventive powers were applied to creating situations for the manifestation of heroic energy. History attracted him, because a basis of fact seemed to justify what otherwise could not be accepted as probable. Great personages suited his purpose, because they can deploy their powers on the amplest scale. His characters, men and women, act not through blind, instinctive passion, but with deliberate and intelligent force; they reason, and too often with casuistical subtlety, about their emotions. At length he came to glorify the will apart from its aims and ends, when tending even to crime, or acting, as it were, in the void. He thought much of the principles of his art, and embodied his conclusions in critical dissertations and studies of his own works. He accepted the rule of the unities of place and time (of which at first he was ignorant) as far as his themes permitted, as far as the rules served to concentrate action and secure verisimilitude. His mastery in verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed; his dialogue of rapid statement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short swords; in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of latent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action. His faults, like his virtues, are great; and though faults and virtues may be travestied, both are in reality alike inimitable.

Alone among Corneille's dramatic rivals, if they deserve that name—Du Ryer, Tristan, Scudéry, Boisrobert, and others—JEAN ROTROU (1610-50) had the magnanimity to render homage to the master of his art. While still a boy he read Sophocles, and resolved that he would live for the dramatic art. His facility was great, and he had the faults of a facile writer, who started on his career at the age of nineteen. He could not easily submit to the regulation of the classical drama, and squandered his talents in extravagant tragi-comedies; but his work grew sounder and stronger towards the close. Saint Genest (1645), which is derived, but in no servile fashion, from Lope de Vega, recalls Polyeucte; an actor of the time of Diocletian, in performing the part of a Christian martyr, is penetrated by the heroic passion which he represents, confesses his faith, and receives its crown in martyrdom. The tragi-comedy Don Bernard de Cabrère and the tragedy Venceslas of the following year exhibit the romantic and passionate sides of Rotrou's genius. The intemperate yet noble Ladislas has rashly and in error slain his brother; he is condemned to death by his father Venceslas, King of Poland, and he accepts his doom. The situation is such as Corneille might have imagined; but Rotrou's young hero in the end is pardoned and receives the kingdom. If their careless construction and unequal style in general forbade the dramas of Rotrou to hold the stage, they remained as a store from which greater artists than he could draw their material. His death was noble: the plague having broken out at Dreux, he hastened from Paris to the stricken town, disregarding all affectionate warnings, there to perform his duty as a magistrate; within a few days the inhabitants followed Rotrou's coffin to the parish church.

THOMAS CORNEILLE, the faithful and tender brother of "le grand Corneille," and his successor in the Academy, belongs to a younger generation. He was born in 1625, and did not die until near the close of the first decade of the eighteenth century. As an industrious playwright he imitated his brother's manner, and reproduced his situations with a feebler hand. Many of his dramas are of Spanish origin, comic imbroglios, tragic extravagances; they rather diverted dramatic art from its true way than aided its advance. Perhaps for this reason they were the more popular. His Timocrate (1656), drawn from the romance of Cléopâtre, and itself a romance written for the stage, had a success rarely equalled during the century. The hero is at once the enemy and the lover of the Queen of Argos; under one name he besieges her, under another he repels his own attack; he is hated and adored, the conquered and the conqueror. The languors of conventional love and the plaintive accents of conventional grief suited the powers of the younger Corneille. His Ariane (1672) presents a heroine, Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, who reminds us of one of Racine's women, drawn with less certain lines and fainter colours. In Le Comte d'Essex history is transformed to a romance. Perhaps the greatest glory of Thomas Corneille is that his reception as an Academician became the occasion for a just and eloquent tribute to the genius of his brother uttered by Racine, when the bitterness of rivalry was forgotten and the offences of Racine's earlier years were nobly repaired.

CHAPTER IV

SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS

Before noticing the theories of classical poetry in the writings of its master critic, Boileau, we must glance at certain writers who belonged rather to the world of public life and of society than to the world of art, but who became each a master in literary craft, as it were, by an irresistible instinct. Memoirs, maxims, epistolary correspondence, the novel, in their hands took a distinguished place in the hierarchy of literary art.

FRANÇOIS VI., DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Prince de Marsillac, was born in 1613, of one of the greatest families of France. His life is divided into two periods—one of passionate activity, when with romantic ardour he threw himself into the struggles of the Fronde, only to be foiled and disillusioned; and the other of bitter reflection, consoled by certain social successes, loyal friendships, and an unique literary distinction. His Maximes are the brief confession of his experience of life, an utterance of the pessimism of an aristocratic spirit, moulded into a form proper to the little world of the salon—each maxim a drop of the attar not of roses but of some more poignant and bitterly aromatic blossom. In the circle of Mme. de Sablé, now an elderly précieuse, a circle half-Epicurean, half-Jansenist, frivolously serious and morosely gay, the composition of maxims and "sentences" became a fashion. Those of La Rochefoucauld were submitted to her as to an oracle; five years were given to shaping a tiny volume; fifteen years to rehandling and polishing every phrase. They are like a collection of medals struck in honour of the conquests of cynicism. The first surreptitious edition, printed in Holland in 1664, was followed by an authorised edition in 1665; the number of maxims, at first 317, rose finally in 1678 to 504; some were omitted; many were reduced to the extreme of concision; under the influence of Mme. de la Fayette, in the later texts the indictment of humanity was slightly attenuated. "Il m'a donné de l'esprit," said Mme. de la Fayette, "mais j'ai réformé son coeur."