The French Academy, an organised aristocracy of letters, expressed the growing sense that anarchy in literature must end, and that discipline and law must be recognised in things of the mind. It is one of the glories of RICHELIEU that he perceived that literature has a public function, and may indeed be regarded as an affair of the State. His own writings, or those composed under his direction--memoirs; letters; the _Succincte Narration_, which sets forth his policy; the _Testament_, which embodies his counsel in statecraft--belong less to literature than to French history. But he honoured the literary art; he enjoyed the drama; he devised plots for plays, and found docile poets--his Society of five--to carry out his designs.

In 1629 Valentin Conrart, secretary to the King, and one of the frequenters of the Hotel de Rambouillet, was accustomed to receive weekly a group of distinguished men of letters and literary amateurs, who read their ma.n.u.scripts aloud, discussed the merits of new works, and considered questions of criticism, grammar, and language.

Tidings of these reunions having reached Richelieu, he proposed that the society should receive an official status. By the influence of Chapelain the objections of certain members were overcome. The _Academie Francaise_ held its first sitting on March 13, 1634; three years later the letters patent were registered; the number of members was fixed at forty; when vacancies occurred, new members were co-opted for life. Its history to the year 1652 was published in the following year by Pellisson, and obtained him admission to a chair. The functions of the learned company were to ascertain, as far as possible, the French language, to regulate grammar, and to act as a literary tribunal if members consented to submit their works to its examination.

There were hopes that authoritative treatises on rhetoric and poetics might be issued with its sanction; but these hopes were not fulfilled.

A dictionary, of which Chapelain presented the plan in 1638, was, however, undertaken; progressing by slow degrees, the first edition appeared in 1694. Its aim was not to record every word of which an example could be found, but to select those approved by the usage of cultivated society and of the best contemporary or recent authors.

Thus it tended to establish for literary use an aristocracy of words; and while literary expression gained in dignity and intellectual precision, gained as an instrument of reason and a.n.a.lysis, such regulation created a danger that it might lose in elements that have affinities with the popular mind--vivacity, colour, picturesqueness, variety. At its commencement no one was more deeply interested in the dictionary than Vaugelas (1585-1650), a gentleman of Savoie, whose concern for the purity of the language, as determined by the best usage, led him to resist innovations and the invasion of foreign phraseology. His _Remarques sur la Langue Francaise_ served as a guide to his fellow-members of the Academy. Unhappily he was wholly ignorant of the history of the language. With the erudite Chapelain he mediated between the scholarship and the polite society of the time. But while Vaugelas was almost wholly occupied with the vocabulary and grammar, Chapelain did much to enforce the principles of the cla.s.sical school upon literary art. The Academy took up the work which the _salons_ had begun; its spirit was more robust and masculine than theirs; it was freer from pa.s.sing fashions, affectations, prettinesses; it leaned on the side of intellect rather than of sentiment.

In what may be called the regulation of French prose the influence of JEAN-LOUIS GUEZ DE BALZAC (1594-1654) was considerable. He had learnt from Malherbe that a literary craftsman should leave nothing to chance, that every effect should be exactly calculated. It was his task to apply to prose the principles which had guided his master in verse. His _Lettres_, of which a first series appeared in 1624, and a second twelve years later, are not the spontaneous intercourse of friend with friend, but rather studious compositions which deal with matters of learning, literature, morals, religion, politics, events, and persons of the time. Their contents are of little importance; Balzac was not an original thinker, but he had the art of arranging his ideas, and of expressing them in chosen words marshalled in ample and sonorous sentences. A certain fire he had, a limited power of imagination, a cultivated judgment, a taste, which suffered from bad workmanship; a true affection for rural life. These hardly furnished him with matter adequate to support his elevated style. His letters were regarded as models of eloquence; but it is eloquence manufactured artificially and applied to subjects, not proceeding from them. His _Prince_, a treatise on the virtues of kings, with a special reference to Louis XIII., was received coldly. His _Aristippe_, which dealt with the manners and morals of a court, and his _Socrate Chretien_, a study in ethics and theology, were efforts beyond his powers. His gift to literature was a gift of method and of style; others who worked in marble learned something from his studious modellings in clay.

To regulate thought required an intellect of a different order from that of Balzac, "emperor of orators." It was the task of RENe DESCARTES (1596-1650). A child of delicate health, born at La Haye, near Tours, he became, under Jesuit teachers, a precocious student both in languages and science. But truth, not erudition, was the demand and the necessity of his mind. Solitary investigations in mathematics were for a time succeeded by the life of a soldier in the Netherlands and Holland. The stream of thought was flowing, however, underground.

Suddenly it emerged to light. In 1619, when the young volunteer was in winter quarters at Neuburg, on the Danube, on a memorable day the first principles of a new philosophical method presented themselves to his intellect, and, as it were, claimed him for their interpreter.

After wanderings through various parts of Europe, and a period of studious leisure in Paris, he chose Holland for his place of abode (1629), and though often shifting his residence, little disturbed save by the controversies of philosophy and the orthodox zeal of Dutch theologians, he gave his best hours during twenty years to thought.

An invitation from Queen Christina to the Swedish court was accepted in 1649. The change in his habits and the severity of a northern winter proved fatal to the health which Descartes had carefully cherished; in February of 1650 he was dead.

The mathematical cycle in the development of Descartes' system of thought preceded the metaphysical. His great achievements in a.n.a.lytical geometry, in optics, in physical research, his explanation of the laws of nature, and their application in his theory of the material universe, belong to the history of science. Algebra and geometry led him towards his method in metaphysical speculation.

How do all primary truths verify themselves to the human mind? By the fact that an object is clearly and distinctly conceived. The objects of knowledge fall into certain groups or series; in each series there is some simple and dominant element which may be immediately apprehended, and in relation to which the subordinate elements become intelligible. Let us accept nothing on hearsay or authority; let us start with doubt in order to arrive at cert.i.tude; let us test the criterion of cert.i.tude to the uttermost. There is one fact which I cannot doubt, even in doubting all--I think, and if I think, I exist--"Je pense, donc je suis." No other evidence of this is needed than that our conception is clear and distinct; in this clearness and distinctness we find the principle of cert.i.tude.

Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking substance. But the idea of an infinite, perfect Being is also present to our intellect; we, finite, imperfect beings, could not have made it; unmake it we cannot; and in the conception of perfection that of existence is involved. Therefore G.o.d exists, and therefore the laws of our consciousness, which are His laws, cannot deceive us. We have seen what mind or spirit signifies--a thinking substance. Reduce our idea of matter to clearness and distinctness, and what do we find?

The idea of an extended substance. Our complex humanity, made up of soul and body, comprises both kinds of substance. But thought and extension have nothing in common; their union can only be conceived as the collocation at a single point of a machine with that which raises it above a mere machine. As for the lower animals, they are no more than automata.

Descartes' _Principia_ and his _Meditationes_ were written in Latin.

The _Discours de la Methode_ (1637) and the later _Traite des Pa.s.sions_ showed how the French language could be adapted to the purposes of the reason. Such eloquence as is found in Descartes is that of thought illuminating style. The theory of the pa.s.sions antic.i.p.ates some of the tendencies of modern psychology in its physical investigations. No one, however, affirmed more absolutely than Descartes the freedom of the will--unless, indeed, we regard it as determined by G.o.d: it cannot directly control the pa.s.sions, but it can indirectly modify them with the aid of imagination; it is the supreme mistress of action, however the pa.s.sions may oppose its fiat. Spiritualist as he was, Descartes was not disposed to be the martyr of thought. Warned by the example of Galileo, he did not desire to expose himself to the dangers attending heretical opinions.

He separated the province of faith from that of reason: "I revere our theology," he said; but he held that theology demanded other lights than those of the unaided powers of man. In its own province, he made the reason his absolute guide, and with results which theologians might regard as dangerous.

The spirit of Descartes' work was in harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought for general truths by the light of reason; he made clearness a criterion of truth; he proclaimed man a spirit; he a.s.serted the freedom of the will. The art of the cla.s.sical period sought also for general truths, and subordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries; it was essentially spiritualist; it represented the crises and heroic victories of the will.

Descartes' opponent, Pierre Ga.s.sendi (1592-1655), epicurean in his physics, an empiricist, though an inconsistent one, in philosophy, chose the Latin language as the vehicle for his ideas. A group of writers whose tendencies were towards sensualism or scepticism, viewed him as their master. Chapelle in verse, La Mothe le Vayer in prose, may serve as representatives of art surrendering itself to vulgar pleasures, and thought doubting even its doubts, and finding repose in indifference.

The true successor of Descartes in French philosophy, eminent in the second half of the century, was NICOLAS DE MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715).

Soul and body, Descartes had shown, are in their very nature alien each from the other. How then does the soul attain a knowledge of the external world? In G.o.d, the absolute substance, are the ideas of all things; in G.o.d we behold those ideas which matter could never convey to us, and which we could never ourselves originate; in G.o.d we see and know all things. The _Recherche de la Verite_ (1674-75) was admirably written and was widely read. The theologians found it dangerous; and when six years later Malebranche published his _Traite de la Nature et de la Grace_, characterised briefly and decidedly by Bossuet as "pulchra, nova, falsa," at Bossuet's request both Arnauld and Fenelon attempted to refute "the extravagant Oratorian."

His place in the evolution of philosophy lies between Descartes and Spinoza, who developed and completed the doctrine of Descartes. In the transition from dualism to monism Malebranche served as a mediator.

Religious thought in the seventeenth century, wedded to an austere morality, is expressed by the writers of Port-Royal, and those who were in sympathy with them. They could not follow the flowery path of piety--not the less the narrow path because it was cheerful--pointed out by St. Francois de Sales. Between nature and grace they saw a deep and wide abyss. In closest connection with them was one man of the highest genius--author of the _Provinciales_ and the _Pensees_--whose spiritual history was more dramatic than any miracle-play or morality of the Middle Ages.

BLAISE PASCAL was born at Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. His father, a president of the Court of Aids at Clermont, a man of intellect and character, guided his education in languages, natural science, and mathematics. The boy's precocity was extraordinary; at sixteen he had written a treatise on Conic Sections, which excited the astonishment of Descartes. But the intensity of study, preying upon a nervous const.i.tution, consumed his health and strength; at an early age he suffered from temporary paralysis. When about twenty-three he fell under the religious influences of certain disciples of St.

Cyran, read eagerly in the writings of Jansen and Arnauld, and resolved to live for G.o.d alone. But to restore his health he was urged to seek recreation, and by degrees the interests and pleasures of the world took hold upon him; the master of his mind was the sceptical Montaigne; he moved in the mundane society of the capital; and it has been conjectured from hints in his _Discours sur les Pa.s.sions de l'Amour_ that he loved the sister of his friend, the Duc de Roannez, and had the vain hope of making her his wife.

The spirit of religion, however, lived within his heart, and needed only to be reawakened. The reawakening came in 1654 through the persuasions of his sister, Jacqueline, who had abandoned the world two years previously, and entered the community of Port-Royal. The abbey of Port-Royal, situated some seven or eight miles from Versailles, was presided over by Jacqueline Arnauld, the Mere Angelique, and a brotherhood of solitaries, among whom were several of the Arnauld family, had settled in the valley in the year 1637.

With this unvowed brotherhood Pascal, though never actually a solitary, a.s.sociated himself at the close of 1654. An escape from sudden danger in a carriage accident, and a vision or ecstasy which came to him, co-operated in his conversion. After his death, copies of a fragmentary and pa.s.sionate writing referring to this period--the so-called "amulet" of Pascal--were found upon his person; its words, "renonciation totale et douce," and "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie," express something of his resolution and his rapture.

The affair of the _Provinciales_, and the design of an apology for Christianity with which his _Pensees_ are connected, together with certain scientific studies and the deepening pa.s.sion of religion, make up what remained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, but in his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted by his ascetic practices and the inward flame of his soul, Pascal died on August 19, 1662. "May G.o.d never leave me" were his last words.

With Pascal's work as a mathematician and a physicist we are not here concerned. In it "we see," writes a scientific authority, "the strongest marks of a great original genius creating new ideas, and seizing upon, mastering, and pursuing further everything that was fresh and unfamiliar in his time. After the lapse of more than two hundred years, we can still point to much in exact science that is absolutely his; and we can indicate infinitely more which is due to his inspiration."

Jansenism and Jesuitism, opposed as they were, have this in common, that both were movements in that revival of Roman Catholicism which was stimulated by the rivalry of the Protestant Reformation. But the Jesuits sought to win the world to religion by an art of piety, in which a system of accommodation was recognised as a means of drawing worldlings to the Church; the Jansenists held up a severe moral ideal, and humbled human nature in presence of the absolute need and resistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like the Jesuits, but in a different spirit, the Port-Royalists devoted themselves much to the task of education. They honoured cla.s.sical studies; they honoured science, dialectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry were substantial additions to the literature of pedagogy. Isaac le Maistre de Sacy and others translated and annotated the Bible. Their theologian, moralist, and controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of _Essais de Morale_ (1671), if not profound or brilliant, was the possessor of learning, good sense, good feeling, and religious faith. Under the influence of St. Cyran, the Port-Royalists were in close sympathy with the teaching of Jansen, Bishop of Ypres; the writings of their great theologian Antoine Arnauld were vigorously anti-Jesuitical. In 1653 five propositions, professedly extracted from Jansen's _Augustinus_, were condemned by a Papal bull. The insulting triumph of the Jesuits drew Arnauld again into controversy; and on a question concerning divine grace he was condemned in January 1656 by the Sorbonne. "You who are clever and inquiring" (_curieux_), said Arnauld to Pascal, "you ought to do something." Next day was written the first of Pascal's _Lettres a un Provincial_, and on 23rd January it was issued to the public; a second followed within a week; the success was immense. The writer concealed his ident.i.ty under the pseudonym "Louis de Montalte."

The _Lettres Provinciales_ are eighteen in number. The first three and the last three deal with the affair of Arnauld and the Sorbonne, and the questions under discussion as to the nature and the need of divine grace. In the opening letters the clearest intellectual insight and the deepest seriousness of spirit are united with the finest play of irony, and even with the temper of comedy. The supposed Louis de Montalte, seeking theological lights from a doctor of the Sorbonne, finds only how hopelessly divided in opinion are the opponents of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel with speech. In the twelve letters intervening between the third and the sixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive, and deploys an incomparably skilful attack on the moral theology of the Jesuits. For the rigid they may have a stricter morality, but for the lax their casuistry supplies a pliable code of morals, which, by the aid of ingenious distinctions, can find excuses for the worst of crimes. With force of logic, with fineness of irony, with energy of moral indignation, with a literary style combining strength and lightness, Pascal presses his irresistible a.s.sault. The effect of the "Provincial Letters" was to carry the discussion of morals and theology before a new court of appeal--not the Sorbonne, but the public intelligence and the unsophisticated conscience of men. To French prose they added a masterpiece and a model.

The subject of the _Provinciales_ is in part a thing of the past; the _Pensees_ deal with problems which can never lose their interest.

Among Pascal's papers were found, after his early death, many fragments which his sister, Madame Perier, and his friends recognised as of rare value; but the editors of the little volume which appeared in 1670, imagining that they could safeguard its orthodoxy, and even amend its style, freely omitted and altered what Pascal had written.

It was not until 1844 that a complete and genuine text was established in the edition of M. Faugere. We can hardly hope to arrange the fragments so as to exhibit the design of that apology for Christianity, with which many of them were doubtless connected, but the main outlines of Pascal's body of thought can be clearly discerned.

The intellect of Pascal, so powerful in its grasp of scientific truth, could find by its own researches no cert.i.tude in the sphere of philosophy and religion. He had been deeply influenced by the sceptical mind of Montaigne. He found within him a pa.s.sionate craving for cert.i.tude; man is so const.i.tuted that he can never be at rest until he rests in knowledge of the truth; but man, as he now exists, is incapable of ascertaining truth; he is weak and miserable, and yet the very consciousness of his misery is evidence of his greatness; "Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the dogmatist;" "Man is but a reed, the feeblest of created things, but a reed which thinks." How is this riddle of human nature to be explained? Only in one way--by a recognition of the truth taught by religion, that human nature is fallen from its true estate, that man is a dethroned king. And how is the dissonance in man's nature to be overcome? Only in one way--through union with G.o.d made man; with Jesus Christ, the centre in which alone we find our weakness and the divine strength.

Through Christ man is abased and lifted up--abased without despair, and lifted up without pride; in Him all contradictions are reconciled.

Such, in brief, is the vital thought from which Pascal's apologetic proceeds. It does not ignore any of the external evidences of Christianity; but the irresistible evidence is that derived from the problem of human nature and the essential needs of the spirit--a problem which religion alone can solve, and needs which Christ alone can satisfy. Pascal's "Thoughts" are those of an eminent intelligence.

But they are more than thoughts; they are pa.s.sionate lyrical cries of a heart which had suffered, and which had found more than consolation; they are the interpretation of the words of his amulet--"Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie." The union of the ardour of a poet or a saint with the scientific rigour of a great geometer, of wit and brilliance with a sublime pathos, is among the rarest phenomena in literature; all this and more is found in Pascal.

CHAPTER III THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE)

The cla.s.sical 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'ecossaise--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 n.o.ble att.i.tudes, 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 Hotel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the Confreres de la Pa.s.sion still exhibited the mediaeval drama. It pa.s.sed 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.[1] 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 _Astree_ 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 mediaeval 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.

[Footnote 1: Or thirty-four pieces, if _Theagene et Cariclee_ be reckoned as only one.]

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'Ancheres), 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 Francois Ogier, a learned churchman, maintaining that the modern stage, in accordance with altered circ.u.mstances, 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 cla.s.sical 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 Scudery, 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, _Melite_, 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, _c.l.i.tandre_, 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 _Melite_, but with less artificial brilliance and more real vivacity; it was published with laudatory verses prefixed, in one of which Scudery 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 _garcons poetes_ 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 _Medee_ (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 Medicis, 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 Theatre 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 Chimene; Chimene 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 pa.s.sion with honour or duty; the fortunes of the hero and heroine are affected by circ.u.mstance, 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 Scudery 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 p.r.o.nouncement, 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 ill.u.s.trious year _Horace_ and _Cinna_ were presented in rapid succession. From Spain, the land of chivalric honour, the dramatist pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sions. 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 pa.s.s from regal to imperial Rome; the commonwealth is represented by Augustus; a great monarchy is glorified, but in the n.o.blest 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 pa.s.sions. 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?