From the nature of the language,
all French poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that
keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces the French
into much tautology, into bombast in its original meaning, the stuffing
out a thought with words till it fills the line. The rigid system of
their rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, has
accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock them in
prose. For example, in the "Cinna" of Corneille, as originally written,
Emilie says to Augustus,--
"Ces flammes dans nos coeurs des longtemps etoient nees,
Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre annees."
I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic surplusage
exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together of _ces, des, etoient,
nees, des,_ and _secrets_, but I confess that _nees_ does not seem to be
the epithet that Corneille would have chosen for _flammes_, if he could
have had his own way, and that flames would seem of all things the
hardest to keep secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the first
verse thus,--
"Ces flammes dans nos coeurs _sans votre ordre_ etoient nees."
Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order? Yet Voltaire, on
his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not notice
this in his minute comments on this play.
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