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Updated: June 22, 2025
The very best tragedy of, Corneille's, if well spoken and acted, interests, engages, agitates, and affects your passions. Love, terror, and pity alternately possess you. But, if ill spoken and acted, it would only excite your indignation or your laughter. Why? It is still Corneille's; it is the same sense, the same matter, whether well or ill acted.
Dumont read out one evening one of Corneille's plays, "Le Florentin," which is beautiful, and was beautifully read. We asked for one of Moliere, but he said to Lord Lansdowne that it was impossible to read Moliere aloud without a quicker eye than he had pour de certains propos: however, they went to the library and brought out at last as odd a choice as could well be made, with Mr.
If we were entitled to say what, in our opinion, the style of dramatic poetry should be, we would declare for a free, outspoken, sincere verse, which dares say everything without prudery, express its meaning without seeking for words; which passes naturally from comedy to tragedy, from the sublime to the grotesque; by turns practical and poetical, both artistic and inspired, profound and impulsive, of wide range and true; verse which is apt opportunely to displace the caesura, in order to disguise the monotony of Alexandrines; more inclined to the enjambement that lengthens the line, than to the inversion of phrases that confuses the sense; faithful to rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our metre; verse that is inexhaustible in the verity of its turns of thought, unfathomable in its secrets of composition and of grace; assuming, like Proteus, a thousand forms without changing its type and character; avoiding long speeches; taking delight in dialogue; always hiding behind the characters of the drama; intent, before everything, on being in its place, and when it falls to its lot to be beautiful, being so only by chance, as it were, in spite of itself and unconsciously; lyric, epic, dramatic, at need; capable of running through the whole gamut of poetry, of skipping from high notes to low, from the most exalted to the most trivial ideas, from the most extravagant to the most solemn, from the most superficial to the most abstract, without ever passing beyond the limits of a spoken scene; in a word, such verse as a man would write whom a fairy had endowed with Corneille's mind and Molière's brain.
To this court of Napoleon and Josephine, to this majestic court, resplendent with glory, wealth, and fame, may well be applied Corneille's lines: "All your happiness Subject to instability In a moment falls to the ground, And as it has the brilliancy of glass It also has its fragility."
Virgil was another of his favourites; his biographer, Phillips, saying that he once saw him reading the 'Aeneid' in the cabin of a Holyhead packet, while every one about him was prostrate by seasickness. Of the poets, Dante's favourite was Virgil; Corneille's was Lucan; Schiller's was Shakspeare; Gray's was Spenser; whilst Coleridge admired Collins and Bowles.
They prove their horror in dreadful syllogisms; every inference plunges them farther into the abyss; and their intelligence flames upward to its highest point, when they are finally engulfed. Such is the singular passion that fills Corneille's tragedies. The creatures that give utterance to it are hardly human beings: they are embodiments of will, force, intellect and pride.
Madame Rachel has made the characters of Racine familiar to all France, and has revived all his blemishes as well as beauties. The poet met with much severe criticism after the representation of the last mentioned of his plays. Madame Sevigne was one of Corneille's warmest admirers, and did not join the company of Racine worshipers.
In the Cid alone the text of the Spanish poet is frequently cited, and that only because Corneille's claim to originality had been called in question. We should certainly derive much instruction from a discovery of the prototypes, when they are not among the more celebrated, or already known by their titles, and thereupon instituting a comparison between them and their copies.
It was printed in 1635, and the title-page informs us that it was 'Written by J. R., initials which there is satisfactory evidence for regarding as those of Joseph Rutter, the translater of Corneille's Cid, who appears to have been in some way attached to the households both of Sir Kenelm Digby and the Earl of Dorset. The play was acted before Charles and his queen at Whitehall.
"We have borrowed nothing from them. Our Plots are weaved in English looms. We endeavour, therein, to follow the variety and greatness of Characters, which are derived to us from SHAKESPEARE and FLETCHER, The copiousness and well knitting of the Intrigues, we have from JOHNSON. And for the Verse itself, we have English precedents, of elder date than any of CORNEILLE's plays.
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