" Whatever one's objections may be, there is something
grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to
his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is
the dramatic _genre_ which is false. His heroes are roles rather than
men. They pose as magnanimity, virtue, glory, instead of realizing them
before us. They are always _en scene_, studied by others, or by
themselves. With them glory--that is to say, the life of ceremony and of
affairs, and the opinion of the public--replaces nature--becomes nature.
They never speak except _ore rotundo_, in _cothurnus_, or sometimes on
stilts. And what consummate advocates they all are! The French drama is
an oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing parties, on a day
which is to end with the death of somebody, and where all the personages
represented are in haste to speak before the hour of silence strikes.
Elsewhere, speech serves to make action intelligible; in French tragedy
action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the procedure calculated
to extract the finest possible speeches from the persons who are engaged
in the action, and who represent different perceptions of it at
different moments and from different points of view. Love and nature,
duty and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the limbs moved
by the wire of the dramatist, who makes them fall into all the tragic
attitudes.
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