La Grande Mademoiselle, 1627-1652

We have now to determine how much of their false exalted sentiment and their false ambition the princes, the chevaliers of the Fronde, and all the gallants of the quality owed to the dramatic theatre of their day; that estimated, we shall have gained a fair idea of the chief elements of the social body idealised by Corneille,—of all the elements save one, the element of Religion; that was a thing apart, to be considered especially and in its own time.

CHAPTER III

La Grande Mademoiselle and her companions cherished the still existent passion for the theatre, which is a characteristic of the French people. The great received comedians, or actors, in their palaces; the palace had audience-rooms prepared to permit of the presentation of theatrical plays; in the summer, when the social world went into the country, the comedians accompanied or followed them to their châteaux. Society required the diversion of the play when it journeyed either for pleasure or for duty, and play-acting, whatever its quality and whatever the subject of its action, elicited the indulgent satisfaction and the applause that it elicits to-day, be its subject and its quality good or bad. At the end of the sixteenth century, play-actors superseded the magicians who until that time had afforded public amusement; the people hailed the change with enthusiasm; and the innovation prevailed. The courtiers loved the spectacle, and from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII. the Court and the comedy were inseparable. Louis XIII. had witnessed the play in early infancy. In 1614, when the King and the Court went upon a journey they lingered upon the road between Paris and Nantes six weeks, halting to witness the plays then being given in the cities along their route, and receiving their favourite actors in their own lodgings. The King was less than thirteen years old, yet it is stated in the journal kept by Hérouard, the King's physician, that the child was regaled with theatrical plays throughout his journey. At Tours he was taken to the Abbey of Saint Julian to witness the French comedy given by de Courtenvaut, who lodged at the abbey. At Paris the little King went to the palace with the Queen to see a play given by the pupils of the Jesuit Brothers. At Loudun the King ordered a play, and it was given in his own house; at La Flèche he attended three theatrical entertainments in one day. To quote from the doctor's (Hérouard's) journal:

The King attended mass and from mass he went to the Jesuits' college, where he saw the collegians play and recite a pastoral. After dinner he returned to the college of the Jesuits, where in the great hall, the tragedy of Godefroy de Bouillon was represented; then in the grand alley of the park, at four o'clock, the comedy of Clorínde was played before the Queen.

When Gaston d'Orléans took his young wife to Chantilly immediately after his marriage, he sent for a troupe of comedians, who went to the château with their band and with violins,—"thus," reports a contemporary, "rendering the little journey very diverting." On the occasion already mentioned, when the same Prince conducted his daughter to Tours so that he might present Louison Roger to her, he did not permit the little Princess to languish for the theatre. "Monsieur sent for the comedians," wrote Mademoiselle, "and we had the comedy nearly every day."[60] When Monsieur returned to his château in Blois his troupe followed him. When Mademoiselle returned to the Tuileries (November, 1637) she found a private theatre in every house to which she was invited.

Actors worked without respite; they had no vacations; they played in the French, in the Spanish, and in the Italian languages; and English comedy also, played by English actors, was seen in Paris. Richelieu's theatre in the Hôtel de Richelieu[61] "was provided with two audience halls,—one large, the other small. Both were luxuriously mounted. The decorations and the costumes of the actors displayed such magnificence that the audience murmured with delight."

The Gazette de France, which bestowed nothing but an occasional casual notice upon the royal theatre of the King's palace, dilated admiringly upon the Théâtre de Richelieu and the marvels with which the Cardinal regaled his guests. The Gazette reported the occasion of the presentation of "the excellent comedy written by Sieur Baro," and the ballet which followed it.

The ballet was interlaced by a double collation. One part of the collation was composed of the rarest and most delicious of fruits; the other part was composed of confitures in little baskets, which eighteen dancing pages presented to the guests. The baskets were all trimmed with English ribands and with golden and silvern tissue. The pages presented the baskets to the lords and then the lords distributed them among the ladies.

Mademoiselle was one of the company, and she received her basket with profound satisfaction. Three days after the first comedy of Baro was played the Court again visited the Cardinal's theatre to witness a second play by the same author. Baro was a well-known literary hack. He had been d'Urfé's secretary and had continued Astrée when d'Urfé laid down his pen. The success of the second representation was phenomenal.

The ornamentation of the theatre [commented the Gazette], the pretty, ingenious tricks invented by the author, the excellences of the verse ... the ravishing concert of the lutes, the harpsichords, and the other instruments, the elocution, the gestures, and the costumes of the actors compromised the honour of all the plays that have been seen either in past centuries or in our own century.

We consider Baro's plays insipid, but they were very successful in their day.

February 19th was a gala day at the Théâtre de Richelieu. A fête was given in honour of the Duke of Parma. First of all they gave a very fine comedy, with complete change of play, with interludes; lutes, spinnets, viols, and violins were played.

The Gazette de France tells us that there was a ballet, and then a supper, at which the guests saw "the fine buffet, all of white silver," which the Cardinal gave to the King some years later. Though the theatre was the chief amusement in 1636, the theatrical representations and ballets, "interlaced by collations" and by interludes, were considered a good deal of dancing and a good deal of play-acting for a priest, even when disseminated over a period of three weeks.

The conclusion of the report in the Gazette proved that Richelieu was conscious of his acts, and that he did not disdain to justify himself. "Without flattering his Eminence," said the Gazette, "it may be said that all which takes place by his orders is always in conformity with reason and with right, and that the duties which he renders to the State never conflict with those that all Christians owe—and which he, in particular, owes—to the Church." Mademoiselle attended all the fêtes, and she was less than ten years old. She, herself, gave a ball and a comedy in honour of the Queen in the palace of the Tuileries.

In that day children in their nurses' arms were taken to see the play. A contemporary engraving depicts the royal family at the theatre in Richelieu's palace. The "hall" is in the form of an immense salon much longer than it is broad; at one end is the stage, raised by five steps; along the walls are two ranks of galleries for the invited guests. The women sit in the lower gallery, the men sit above them; seats have been brought into the centre of the hall, and on them sit Louis XIII. and his family. In the picture Monsieur is sitting on the King's left hand. On Anne of Austria's right hand, in a little arm-chair made for a child, sits the Dauphin, who must have been three, or possibly four, years old at that time. On the right hand of the Queen, beyond the Dauphin, stands a woman holding a great doll-like infant, the brother of the Dauphin.

The playgoing infantine assiduity, the custom of carrying children in swaddling bands to the theatre to witness comedies of every species, good or bad, assured the theatre of a position in public education; the children of the aristocracy drank in the drama with eye and ear—if I dare express myself thus—and at an age when reason was not present to correct the effect of impressions. The repertory of the theatre was one of the most dramatically romantic and sentimental ever known to France and the one of all others best fitted to turn a generation from sound reality to false and fantastic visions.

The general movement of that day may be classed as an aberration due to the fact that the drama was a new pleasure; the inconveniences attendant upon its influences had not been recognised, but it is probable that some of the condemnations uttered by the moralists and by the preachers of the seventeenth century in the name of religion and of decency were called forth by the presence of children at the play; the men who were most bitter in denunciations which amaze us by the excess of their hostility spoke from experience and had reason for their bitterness. The Prince de Conti, the brother of the great Condé, might have furnished unique commentaries on the criticisms of the day, had he cared to recall a treatise which he wrote (The Plays of the Theatre, and Spectacles) when he was emerging from a youth far from edifying.

The treatise was written for the benefit of light-minded people, who saw no harm in playgoing. In the beginning of his work the Prince said: "I hope to prove that comedy in its present condition is not the innocent amusement that it is considered; I hope to prove that a true Christian must regard it as an evil." As his treatise progressed it became explicit; his arraignment was animated by Astrée; he declared that a play free from the sentimentality and the passions of love and from the thoughts and the actions of lovers was not acceptable to the public. Love forms the foundation of the play, and therefore it must be discussed freely from its first principles. Now a play, however fine its dramatic composition may be, can have no other effect than to disgust refined minds and to ruin the reputations of its actors, unless the love on which it is based is represented delicately, and in a tenderly impassioned manner. And as few actors are capable of producing a perfect representation of the most subtle and many-sided of passions, the general effect of our comedy is deteriorating. As its basis and its structure depend upon one single subject, it can have but one subject of interest. Our comedies are considered commendable according to their manners of discussing love; the divers beauties of our dramas consist in their various exposures of the intimate effects of love. Love is the theme, and the mind must either accept it and work upon it or rest unemployed; there is no choice; no other theme is given. When love is not the chief agent, it serves as an irritant to draw out some other passion and to make sensuous display not only possible but cogent, if not imperatively necessary; be the play what it may, love is represented as the "passion ruling the heart." Conti opposed to the popular "corruption of the drama" the grave lessons offered by the great tragedies. Segrais treated the subject in the same way; he said: "During more than forty years nearly all of the subjects of our plays have been drawn from Astrée, and, generally speaking, the dramatists have been satisfied with their work if they have changed to verse the phrases which d'Urfé put in the mouths of his characters in plain prose."

Segrais exaggerated. Astrée did not furnish "nearly all" of the subjects of the plays; but the extraordinary importance of stage love and of stage lovers was drawn from Astrée, and, despite the temporary reaction due to Corneille, Astrée persuaded the great body of French society that there was nothing pathetic in the world but love, and neither our dramatists nor our moralists have been able to break away from an error which singularly circumscribes their art. Love is now the subject of the romance and of the play, as it was in the early days of La Grande Mademoiselle.

Invitations to the Louvre or to the homes of the great were not too easy to procure, and there were many people who never entered the private theatres; but there were two "paying theatres," or theatres to which the public were admitted on paying a fixed price; one of the two houses was the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which stood in the rue Mauconseil, between the rue Montmartre and the rue Saint Denis; the other was the Théâtre du Marais, in the Veille rue du Temple. The Marais was then an out-of-the-way quarter, very dangerous after nightfall. I have not spoken of this place until now, because it was almost impossible for any one in the polite society of which I have written to visit it. No woman dared to enter the Marais unless she lived there. The woman of quality could not even think of entering it except on gala days, when the Court of France went in a body to visit the play-actors in their own quarter. At ordinary times the Hôtel de Bourgogne "was neither a good place nor a safe place." In form and arrangement the audience hall was like the hall of the Théâtre de Richelieu; two galleries, one above the other, ran the whole length of the walls, and in certain places the walls were connected with the gallery to form stalls or boxes. The parterre was a vast space in which people watched the play standing. In that part of the theatre there were no seats. An hour, or perhaps two hours, before the play began the great unclean space was filled with the most boisterous and ungovernable representatives of the dregs of Paris and with all the active members of the lesser classes[62]: students, pages, lackeys, artisans, drunkards, the scum of the canaille, and professional thieves; and there, on the floor of the parterre, they gambled, lunched, drank, and fought each other with stones, with swords, or with any weapon which came to hand; and as they gratified their appetites or abused their neighbours, all strove in the way best known to them to protect their purses and to keep the thieves from carrying off their cloaks. The air resounded with shouts, shrieks, songs, and obscene apostrophes. Contemporary writers regarded everything as fit for the record, and therefore in all our researches we come upon heartrending evidences of inenarrable depravity. The charivari of the assistants of the pit continued throughout the performance, ending only when the vociferous throngs were turned into the streets so that the theatre might be locked for the night. At their quietest the spectators of the parterre were noisy and obstreperous. To quote one of their chroniclers[63]:

"In their most perfect repose they continued to talk, to whistle, and to scream without ceasing; they did not care at all to hear what the comedians were saying." We differ from the chroniclers as to this last opinion; it is probable that they cared only too much; it was to please the rabble that abominably gross farces were played in the paying theatres. Tragedy was relished only by the higher classes.

An eye-witness, the Abbé d'Aubignac,[64] wrote: "We see that tragedies are liked better than comedies at the Court of France; while among the lesser people comedies, and even farces and unclean buffooneries are considered more amusing than tragedies." The same d'Aubignac wrote in or about the year 1666: "Fifty years ago an honest woman dared not go to the theatre."[65] Between the universally ardent desire to enjoy the fashionable form of pleasure and the efforts to make the stage less licentious the purification of the drama was accomplished.

The increasing delicacy of the public taste demanded a reform, and in deference to it the moral atmosphere of both of the popular theatres was renewed at the same time; a new and decent repertory was adopted, and the foul programme of the past was cast away. Popular feeling acclaimed the change and hastened the accomplishment of the reformation.

At the time when the Cid[66] was played the lower classes had ceased to rule the paying theatres; the masses went out of Paris for their pleasure; to the fairs of Saint Laurent and Saint Germain, and to the entertainments on the Pont-Neuf or the Place Dauphine; they crowded around the trestled planks, they hung about the stands of the charlatans, the buffoons, and the trick players. The paying theatres were filled by the upper middle classes. Women who had not dared to go to the play in 1620 attended the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne as freely as they would have attended or as they did attend the Luxembourg.[67] The fine world of the quality had found its way to the theatre of the Marais; the Cid was in course of representation when the stage of the Marais and the courtiers thronged to the obscure quarter to witness its marvels. The Cid was played in the private theatres as well as in the Hôtel de Bourgogne. M. Lanson tells us that the comedians were summoned to the Louvre three times and twice to the Hôtel de Richelieu, but the great were too impatient to wait for the play to come to them, they ran to meet it; every one longed to see it not at a future time but on the instant, and therefore they flocked to the Veille rue du Temple.

In 1637 (18th January) Mondory, the actor, who played the part of Rodrigue, wrote to Balzac:

Last night they who are usually seen in the Gold Room and on seats bearing the fleur-de-lys, were visible upon our benches not singly but in groups. At our doors the crowd was so great, and our place was so small, that the nooks which ordinarily serve as recesses for the pages, were reserved for the Knights of the Saint Esprit; and the whole scene was bedight with Chevaliers of the Order.

All women could attend the play at will; and they all ardently wished to attend it, not once but always. They who saw it at Court, or at the houses of the great, were none the less anxious to frequent the paying theatres, where, though the scene had been purged of many of its abuses, the spectacle differed essentially from that presented to the great. Many distinct peculiarities of the old plays had been retained; added to that was the novelty of the place, and the lack of courtly ceremony, and the diversion afforded two different spectacles: the play and the audience. Like the children of the great, the wives and the daughters of the inferior classes abused their privilege and visited the theatre incessantly and the rich and the poor suffered from the influences of the superficial amusement. The play tended to deceive the mind, and to give a false impression of the aims and the needs of life. The majority of women were ignorant; they had never learned anything. If they could read they read works of fiction, and their literature was calculated to foster illusions. Exaltedly idealistic as Astrée had been, the writings of La Calprenède, de Gomberville, and others of their school were still more sentimentally romantic; compared with his successors, Honoré d'Urfé was a realist. The influence of the theatre was shown in the intellectual development of woman, the imagination of all classes was encouraged, the more useful mental agents were neglected, and the minds of the people were visibly weak and ill-balanced; the general impulse was to seek adventures on any road and at any price. The thirst for unknown sensations was a fully developed desire in their day, so we cannot with justice class it as a "curiosity" emanating from the inventive imaginations of the decadents.

The writer, Pierre Costar, wilfully lingered three weeks in a tertian fever so that he might enjoy the sickly dreams which accompanied the recurrent paroxysms of the disease. In our day Pierre Costar would be an opium-eater, or a morphinomaniac.

II

La Grande Mademoiselle owed much of her turn of mind to the dramatic plays that she had watched from infancy. I doubt if she was given any lessons in history, or that she had any lessons of the kind before she reached her twenty-fifth year, when she acquired a taste for reading. All that she knew of history had been gleaned by her from the tragedies that she had seen at the theatre, and as she was refractory to the sentiment of Astrée, it cannot be inferred that she had learned much from d'Urfé; so it may be said that Corneille was her teacher in all branches of learning, that no one of that time was in deeper debt to the influence that he exerted over minds, and that no one so plainly manifested his influence. From the education afforded by Corneille came good and evil mingled. As we follow the course of Mademoiselle's life we are forced to admit that however high and noble were the ideas sown broadcast by Corneille, they were not always devoid of inconveniences when they fell among people whose experimental knowledge and practicality were inferior to their susceptibility to impressions.

In the years which followed the advent of the Cid Corneille was the literary head of France; he had discovered the French scene through the influence of d'Urfé, but his power was his own, and it was an inherent power; he was the creator of a tendency.

The unclean farce, which delighted the lockpickers and the gamblers of the Paris of those days, has no place here, because it has no place in literature. When "good company" invaded the paying theatres the farce followed the canaille and took its place upon the trestled stages of the Pont-Neuf. The farce played a part of its own, in a world unknown to Mademoiselle; but the pastoral demands our attention, not only because it was in high favour in Mademoiselle's society, but because Corneille exerted his influence against it.

In the pastoral, love took possession of the stage, as it had been announced to do, in the play which opened the way for its successors, Tasso's Aminta.[68] In the prologue the son of Venus appeared disguised as a shepherd, and declaimed, for the benefit of the other shepherds, a discourse which, little by little, became the programme of all imaginative literature:

To-day these forests shall he heard speaking of love in a new way.... I will inspire gross hearts with noble sentiments; I will subdue their language and make soft their voices; for, wherever I may be, I still am Love; in shepherds as in heroes. I establish, if so it please me, equality in all conditions, no matter how unequal; and my supreme glory, and the miracle of all my power, is to change the rustic musettes into sounding lyres.

Modern poets and novelists do not insist that all men are equal in passion as they are equal in suffering and in death; but the people of the nineteenth century fully believed in such equality. George Sand expresses her real feelings in La Petite Fadette; and Pouvillon meant all that he said in Les Antibel. The contemporaries of Louis XIII. looked askance upon such theories; in their opinion the love, like the suffering, of the inferior was below the conception of the quality, a thing as hard for the noble mind to grasp as the invisible movement of life in an atom; to be ignorant of the needs, the hopes, the anguish of inferiors was one of the first proofs of exalted nobility. But the nobles knew that the shepherds of the dramatic stage were gentlemen travestied, and, therefore, they bestowed the interest formerly accorded to the heroes of the heroic drama upon the woes of the mimic Celadons of the comedy. Love would have become the dramatic pivot had it not been for Corneille's plays; d'Urfé's characters were "sighing like a furnace" when Corneille took command and gave the posts of honour to "the manly passions"; but not even Corneille could reach such a point at a bound; he attained it by strenuous effort. He began his literary career by writing comedies in verse. Before he produced the Cid, between the years 1629 and 1636, he wrote six plays; an inferior serio-comedy, Clitandre; or, Innocence Delivered, and a tragedy, Médée. To quote M. Lemaître:

We now enter a world which is superficial, because its people have but one object in living: their only occupation, their only pleasure, their only interest is love; all else, all the interests of social life are eliminated.... To love.... To be loved, ... this is the only earthly object, according to the teachings of the drama, and truly, in the long run it becomes tiresome! Such a world must be impossible, because it is artificial; in it hearts are the subjects of all the quarrels; men fight for them, lose them, find them; they are stolen, they are restored to their owners, they are tossed like shuttlecocks through five acts of a play. As they "chassay" to and fro before the reader he loses all sense of their identity, and takes one for the other; in the end the mind is wearied. Excessive handling exhausts the vitality of the subject, and leaves an impression as of something vapid and unsavoury. But Corneille was Cornélien even when he wrote rhymed comedy—he could not have been anything else—and he never would have fallen into rhyme had he not wished to make concessions to the prevailing fashion.[69]

Even when engaged in the most absorbing of intrigues his lovers pretend that they are their own masters, and that they feel only such sentiments as they have elected to feel. At that early day—when Médée and Clitandre were written—the culte of the will had germinated; and time proved that it was predestined to become the chief director of Corneille's work. In La Place Royale Alidor says of Clitandre[70]:

In Corneille's plays young girls are raised to believe that they can love, or cease to love, at will; and their pride is interested. Ambition demands that they remain in command of their affections. When old Pleirante perceives that his daughter Célidée is fond of Lysandre he lets her know that he has divined her secret and that he approves of her choice, but Célidée answers proudly:

Another ingenuous daughter answers, in an offended tone, when her mother intimates that she seems to be in love with Alcidon, that she

"Knows that appearances are against her! But," she adds, "my heart has gone only as far as I willed that it should go. It is always free; and it holds in reserve a sincere regard for everything that my mother prescribes for me.... My wish is yours, do with me what you will."—La Veuve.

The public approved this language. It commended people who married their daughters without consulting their hearts. And who shall say that this way was not the one best fitted for their times? Faith added to necessity engenders miracles, and miracles are what morality demands.

In the great world, the world of the great and the noble, love was mentioned only as Corneille regarded it in his plays. Every one was in love,—or feigned to be in love; on all hands were heard twitterings as of birds in the springtime; but the pretty music ceased when marriage was suggested, for no one had thought of founding a domestic hearth on a sentiment as personal and as ephemeral as love. It was understood that the collective body came first, that the youth—man or maid—belonged to the family, not to self. Contrary to our way of looking at things, it was considered meet and right for the individual to subject himself to a species of public discipline in everything relating to the essential actions of private life; the demand for the public discipline of individuals was based upon the interests of the community. This law—or social tyranny, if you will—covered marriage, and upon occasion Parliament did police duty and enforced it. Parliament forbade the aged Mme. de Pibrac to marry a seventh time—although her six marriages had all been accomplished under normal conditions—because it was supposed that a seventh marriage might entail ridicule. The reason given by Parliament when it forbade Mme. de Limoges to permit her daughter to marry a very honourable man of whom she was fond, and who was supposed to be fond of her, was this: that her guardian and tutor "did not approve of the marriage." The history of this subject of marriage shows us that our great grandmothers did not bear malice against destiny; they were truly Cornéliennes in their conviction that a decorous control of the will constrained the sentiments of an high-born soul, and they married their daughters without scruple, and without anxiety, as freely and as carelessly as they had married themselves. Religion was always close at hand, waiting to staunch the wounds which social exigencies and family selfishness made in the hearts of the unfortunate lovers.

The understanding between Corneille and his readers was perfect; all that he did pleased the playgoers, and when, as he was searching for what we should call "the realistic," he came upon the idea that he might tempt the public taste by presenting a play with a Spanish setting, his critics were well pleased. He wrote the Cid and it was an unqualified success; but its exotic sentiments and the generous breadth of its morals excited vigorous protestations; the piece was met by resistance like that which greeted the appearance of Ibsen's Doll's House.

It is known [said Jules Lemaître] that despite the fact that the popular enthusiasm was prodigious the critics were implacable. Perhaps the criticisms were not all inspired by base envy of the author. I believe in the good faith of the Academy, and to my mind, it seems possible that the criticisms of the Academy were not considered either partial or unjust by every one in France; it may be that there were many thinkers who shared the opinions of Cardinal de Richelieu and the majority of the Academy.

These lines are truth itself; the Cid was an immoral play because it was the apotheosis of passionate love, whose rights it proclaimed at the expense of the most imperious duties. There was enough in the Cid to shock any social body holding firmly fixed opinions adverse to the public exhibition of intimate personal feelings; there were such bodies—the Academy was one of them—they made their own conditions, and the license of the prevailing morals was insignificant to them. The national idea of the superior rights of the family was well-grounded, and when the Academy reproached Chimène because she was "too sensible of the feelings of the lover—too conscious of her love ... too unnatural a daughter"—it did no more than echo a large number of voices.

Until he wrote the Cid Corneille was more exigeant than the Academy. The only thing required of lovers by the Academy was that they, the lovers, should govern their feelings and love, or not love, according to the commands of their families or their notaries. The Academy asked nothing of them but to control their actions regardless of their hearts; surely that was indulgence; beyond that there remained but one thing more,—to suppress the mind.

We do not consider it essential [said Sentiments Sur le Cid] to condemn Chimène because she loved her father's murderer; her engagement to Rodrigue had preceded the murder, and it is not within the power of a person to cease loving at will. We blame her because, while she was pursuing Rodrigue, ostensibly to his disadvantage, she was making vows and besieging Heaven in his favour; this was a too evident betrayal of her natural obligations in favour of her passion; it was too openly searching for a cloak to cover her wishes, and making less of the daughter than of the daughter's power to love her lover; in other words, it was cheapening the natural character of the daughter to the advantage of the lover.

The example was especially pernicious, because the genius of the author had rendered it seductive, and because the part which Chimène played assured her of the sympathy of the audience. Corneille was very sensitive to the criticisms of the Academy, and after the Cid appeared something more serious than synthetic form was placed under the knives of the literary doctors; either because the denunciations of his friends bore fruit, or because, in the depths of his heart, he harboured the feelings which the unbridled ardour of the Cid had aroused in the Academy and in the other honest people "who upbraided him, he retreated from the field of sentimental romanticism, and turned his talents in another direction.... Nature's triumph over a social convention was never given another occasion to display its graces or to celebrate its truths under his auspices and the love passion was not heard of again until it came forth in Horace (Camille), to be very severely dealt with."

We are led to believe that had Corneille met the subject of the Cid fifteen years later, he would never have granted Chimène and Rodrigue a marriage license.[71] Nor is this all. Having reformed, he was as fanatical as the rest of the reformers; having become Catholic, he was more Catholic than the Pope. He disclaimed love, and would have none of it; he affirmed that it was unworthy of a place in tragedy. In his own words, written some time later:

The dignity of tragedy demands for its subject some great interest of the State, ... or some passion more manly than love; as, for instance, ambition or vengeance. If fear is permitted to enter such a work it should be a fear less puerile than that inspired by the loss of a mistress. It is proper to mingle a little love with the more important elements, because love is always very pleasing, and it may serve as a foundation for the other interests and passions that I have named. But if love is permitted to enter tragedy it must be content to take the second rank in the poem, and to leave the first places to the capital passions.

Having chosen his bone in this high-handed fashion, Corneille gnawed at it continually; he could never get enough of it. Love had triumphed in the Cid, but that day was past; in Horace it struggled for existence; in Polyeucte it was vanquished, though not before it had opposed sturdy resistance. It was weak enough in Cinna. After the arrival of Pompée it gave up the struggle, though it was heard piteously murmuring at intervals. When Pompée appeared the ladies disappeared from the drama as if by magic; hardly a woman worthy of the name could be found in literature: a few beings there were draped with the time-worn title, but they were as virile as wild Indians.

A little hardness sets so well upon great souls!

Nothing could be seen but ambition, blood, thirst for power, and Fury, cup-bearer to the God of Vengeance. There was no more love-passion, the manly passions ramped upon the stage like lions, and, with few exceptions, all, male and female, were monsters of the Will.

Long years passed before anything but the Will was heard of. After a long reign the "monsters" disappeared. But they have reappeared in the literature of our century. The worship of the Will, which originated with Corneille, was recently revived by Nietzsche, whose famous "Sur-homme" bears a very strong family resemblance to the Cornélien heroes. "Life," said Nietzsche, "is that which ought always to surpass and to exceed itself." Corneille's personages kept all the springs of their will well in hand. They intended to succeed, to surpass, and to get ahead of themselves if the thing was to be done; and when they were convinced that to surpass themselves was impossible their future looked very dark, and they sold their lives at cut prices,—or threw them in for nothing—letting them go to any one who would carry them away. In the fifth act of the play Horace became very anxious to die because, as he expressed it, he feared that, after what he had done, he should be unable to "surpass himself."

The analogy between the "Sur-homme" and the Cornélien heroes does not end here; logic would not permit that; nothing weakens and enslaves the firm and exalted will as effectually as the sentiment of pity, and both Corneille and Nietzsche enfranchised their ideal humanity. Corneille makes some one assure Horace that there is no great merit in exposing himself to death, but that concession to weakness is of an early period; the advanced man—the man out of the common order—is easily recognised by the fact that he does not hesitate to bring the greatest sufferings upon the beings who are dearest to him.

The lines which follow were written by Nietzsche, and they seem a paraphrase of the discourse of Horace:

To know how to suffer is nothing; feeble women, even slaves, may be past masters in this art. But to stand firm against the assaults of the pain of doubt, to withstand the weakness of remorse when we inflict torment,—this is to be a hero; this is the height of courage; in this lies the first condition of all grandeur.

Corneille's contempt for pity was shared by his contemporaries, and so were his views of marriage as expressed in his first comedies. The seigniors whom he met at the Hôtel de Rambouillet would have blushed to feel compassion. They left the womanish weakness of pity to the inferior beings of the lower orders. The great had always been convinced that elevation in rank raised man above the consciousness of the sufferings of beings of an inferior order; and in the day of Corneille they were fully persuaded that noblemen ought to find higher reasons for justice and for generosity than the involuntary emotions which we of this later day have learned to recognise as symptoms of "nervous disturbance."

I am very little sensible of pity [wrote La Rochefoucauld], and I would prefer not to feel it at all. Nevertheless there is nothing that I would not do for the afflicted, and I believe that I ought to do what I can for them—even to expressing compassion for their woes, for the wretches are so stupid that it does them the greatest good in the world to receive sympathy; but I believe that we ought to confine ourselves to expressing pity; we ought to take great care not to feel it; pity is a passion which is good for nothing in a well-made soul; when entertained it weakens the heart, and therefore we ought to relegate it to beings who need passions to incite them to do things because they are incapable of acting by reason.

The manly characters in Corneille's heroic comedies never lower themselves to the plane of the common people, nor to a plane where they can think as the people think. Corneille was "of the Court" by all his feelings and by all his prejudices, and he shared Mademoiselle's belief that there is a natural difference between the man of quality and the man below the quality, because generous virtues are mingled with the blood which runs in noble veins, while the blood of the man of lower birth is mingled with lower passions. Being a true courtier, Corneille believed that above the two varieties of the human kind—the quality and the lesser people—Providence set the order of Princes who are of an essence apart, elect, and quasi-divine.

In Don Sancho d'Aragon Carlos did his best to prove that he was the son of a fisherman. His natural splendour gave the lie to his pretence. "Impossible that he could have sprung from blood formed by Heaven of nothing but clay."

Don Lope affirms that it cannot be true.