From this derives another consequence: Shakespeare has been loudly praised for his portentous fidelity to nature and reality, but at the same time the critics, as quoted above, have placed obstacles of various sorts in the way of those who would understand him so it has been freely stated that Shakespeare is certainly a great poet, but that his method is not that of "fidelity," to nature, on the contrary, he violates "reality" at every turn, creating characters and situation, "which are not found in nature." It would be better to say simply that Shakespeare, like every poet, is neither in accordance nor in disaccordance with external reality (which for that matter is what each one of us likes to make and to imagine in his own way), for the reason that he has nothing to do with it, being intent upon the creation of his own spiritual reality.
The third great misadventure that has befallen Shakespeare, after those of the moralising and psychological-objectivistic critics, is his transference, we will not call it his promotion, to the position of aGerman,opposed to that ofaLatinor neo-Latin poet. It is not difficult to trace the origin of this transference, when we remember that Shakespeare was looked upon, both by his contemporaries and yet more so when rediscovered in the eighteenth century, as a spontaneous, rough, natural, popular poet, just the opposite of the cultured, mannered school, in which, however, he had shown evidence of prowess with the lesser poems and the sonnets.
This conception of his as a natural poet is found in the first school of the new German literature, known as theSturm und Drang,which cultivated the idea of "genius"; and from this arose the idea of Shakespeare as the expression of "pure virgin genius, ignorant of rules and limits, a force as irresistible as those of nature" (Gerstenberg). And since the new German poets and men of letters greatly admired him, and as has been said, the new Aesthetic understood him much better than the old Poetic had done or been able to do, instead of this better sympathy and intelligence being attributed to the spiritual dispositions of the Germans of that period and to the progress that they were effecting in the life of thought, it was attributed to affinity and relationship, whichwas supposed to connect the German spirit with that of Shakespeare. It is true that this theory was soon found to lack foundation, because the best German critics, among whom were August William Schlegel, proved that there was as much art and regularity in Shakespeare as in any other poet, although they were not the same in him as in others, and he did not obey contingent and arbitrary rules.
It is also true that to a Frenchman was due the first revelation of Shakespeare outside his own country: Voltaire, with hisodi et amo,has always been blamed and held up to ridicule for the negative side of his criticism, but the positive side of it, the mental courage, the freshness of mental impressions, which his interest in Shakespeare, his admiration for his sublimity, deserved, have not been sufficiently remarked. But it is likewise true that France has never understood Shakespeare well, owing to her classical tradition in literature and her intellectualist tradition in philosophy, though we do not forget her fugitive enthusiasms for the poet. Even to-day, Maeterlinck notes "la profonde ignorance" that still reigns "de l'œuvre shakespearienne," even among "les plus lettrés." This afforded an opportunityfor underlining the antithesis between "German" and "French" taste, which was soon, but without any justification, expanded into "Latin" taste.
The English of that period, both in speech and literature, were almost as indifferent to Shakespeare as were the French. This was observed and commented upon in a lively manner, among others by Schlegel, Tieck, Platen and Heine. However, the new methods of German criticism soon made their influence felt in England (Coleridge, Hazlitt), and it seemed to the Germans that these writers had preserved the true tradition of the race and had reillumined the fire that was languishing or had been altogether extinguished among their brethren of the same race, and that they had dissipated the heavy cloud of classical, French and Latin taste, which was hanging over England. To their real merit in recognising the fame of Shakespeare and their profound study of the poet, and to the false interpretation that they gave of these merits by attributing them to the virtue of their race, were added, for well known political reasons, German pride and self-conceit, which did the rest. All the moralising critics, to whom we have referred, were alsocritics imbued with the German spirit. They united the austere morality, which they discovered in Shakespeare and his heroes, to celebration of the German nature of these qualities and of the poet. They set in opposition the genuine, rude, realistic quality of Shakespeare's poetry, to the artificial, cold, schematic poetry of the Latins. They celebrated the Germanism of a Henry IV (his wild youth is just that of a German youth, says Gervinus; it is the genius of the German race, with its incorruptible health, its strength of marrow, its infinite depths of feeling, beneath a hard and angular exterior, its childlike humility, its wealth of humour, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, says Kreyssig), of a Hamlet (naturally, because he is represented as a student of Wittenberg) and so on, through the Ophelias and the Cordelias, and even the characters of the comedies, such as Benedick and Biron (this last "possessing a character entirely German," "with the harshness of a Saxon," humorous, remote from sentimentality and affectation, and therefore "out of place among the gallantries of Latin society"—all the above is taken from Gervinus).
Shakespeare's place "is in the Pantheon of the Germanic people, in the sanctuary richlyadorned with all the gods and demons of this race, the most vigorous in life, the best capable of development, the most widely diffused of all races." He stands, either beside Durer and Rembrandt, or on a spur of Parnassus, facing Homer and Aeschylus on another spur, sometimes permitting Dante to stand at his side—Dante was of German origin—, while the impotent crowd of the poets of Latin race seethes at his feet. For Carrière, he is the mouthpiece of the German spirit in England, while for another, he is England's permanent ambassador to Germany, accredited to the whole German people.
Both French and Italian critics also gave credence to this boasting, sometimes echoing the theory of difference between the two different arts, that of the north and that of the south, romantic and classic, realistic and idealistic or abstract, passionate or rhetorical, while others bowed reverently before the superiority of the former. In the recent war took place a rapid change of style, but not of mental assumptions. Both French and Italians mocked and expressed their contempt for the rough and violent poetry of Germany, and even Shakespeare did not haveune bonne presseon the occasionof his centenary, which took place during the second year.
But return to serious matters, it seems undeniable that the historical origin of Shakespeare is to be found in the Renaissance, which is generally admitted to have been chiefly an Italian movement. Shakespeare got from Italy, not only a great part, both of his form and of his material, but what is of greater moment, many thoughts that went to form his vision of reality. In addition to this, he obtained from Italy that literary education, to which all English writers of his time submitted. One may think, however, what one likes as to the historical derivation of Shakespeare's poetical material and of his literary education: the essential point to remember is that the poetry had its origin solely in himself; he did not receive it from without, either from his nation, his race, or from any other source. For this reason, divisions and counter-divisions of it, into Germanic and Latin poetry, and similar dyads, based upon material criteria, are without any foundation whatever. Shakespeare cannot be a Germanic poet, for the simple reason that in so far as he is a poet, he is nothing but a poet and does not obey the law of his race, whether it belex salica, wisigothica,langobardica, anglicaor any otherbarbarorum,nor does he obey theromana—he obeys only the universally humanlex poetica.
That a more profound and a better understanding of Shakespeare should have been formed and be steadily increasing, in the midst of and because of these and other errors, is a thing that we are so ready to admit as indubitable and obvious that we take it as understood, because it always happens thus, in every circle of thought and in literary history and criticism in general, and so in the particular history and criticism of Shakespeare.
Our object has not been, however, to give the history of that criticism, but rather to select those points in it, which it was advisable to clear up, in order to confirm the judgment that we propose and defend. If erroneous positions of criticism serve by their opposition to arouse correct thoughts relating to the poet, others, which are not erroneous, lead directly to them. In addition to the pages of older writers, always worthy of perusal (though devoted to problems of different times), such as those of Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge and Manzoni, the student will find among those with whom he will like to think among theDowdens, the Bradleys, the Raleighs of to-day. These will inspire in him the wish to continue thinking on his own account about the nature of the great poetry of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare (and this applies to every individual work) had a history, but has one no longer. He had a history, which was that of his poetical sentiment, of its various changing notes, of the various forms in which it found expression. He had also (we must insist), an individual history which it is difficult to identify united with that of the Elizabethan drama, to which he belongs solely as an actor and provider of theatrical works. The general traits, which, among many differences, he shares with his contemporaries, predecessors and imitators (even when these are more substantial than theatrical imitations, conventions and habits) form part of the history of the Renaissance in general and of the English Renaissance in particular, but do not of themselves constitute the history that was properly speaking his own.
But he no longer has this, because what happened afterwards and what happens in the present, is the history of others, is our history,no longer his. Indeed, the histories of Shakespeare, which have been composed, considered in the light of later times—and they are still being written—have been and are understood, in a first sense, as the history of the criticism of his works; and it is clear that in this case, it is the history of us, his critics, the history of criticism and of philosophy, no longer that of Shakespeare. Or they are understood as the history of the spiritual needs and movements of different periods, which now approach and now recede from Shakespeare, causing either almost complete forgetfulness of his poetry, or causing it to be felt and loved. In this case too, it is the history, not of Shakespeare, but of the culture and the mode of feeling of other times than his. Or they are understood in a third sense, as the history of the literary and artistic works, in which the so-called influence of Shakespeare is more or less discernible; and since this influence would be without interest, if it produced nothing but mere mechanical copies, and on the contrary has interest only because we see it transformed in an original manner by new poets and artists, it is the history of the new poets and artists and no longer that of Shakespeare.
As regards the last statement, it will not be out of place to remark that the accounts which have been given of the representations of his plays are altogether foreign to Shakespeare; because theatrical representations are not, as is believed, "interpretations," but variations, that is to say "creations of new works of art," by means of the actors, who always bring to them their own particular manner of feeling. There is never atertium comparationis,in the sense of a presumably authentic and objective interpretation, and here the same criterion applies as to music and painting suggested by plays, which are music and painting, and not those plays. Giuseppe Verdi, who for his part composed anOthello,wrote to the painter Morelli, who had conceived a painting of Iago (in a letter of 1881, recently published): "You want a slight figure, with little muscular development, and if I have understood you rightly, one of the cunning, malignant sort ... But if were I an actor and wished to represent Iago, I should prefer a lean, meagre figure, with thin lips, and small eyes close to the nose, like a monkey's, a high retreating forehead, with a deal of development at the back of the head; absent andnonchalantin manner, indifferent toeverything, incredulous, sneering, speaking good and evil lightly, with an air of thinking about something quite different from what he says ..." They might have entered into a long discussion as to the two different interpretations, had not Verdi, with his accustomed good sense, hastened to conclude: "But whether Iago be small or big, whether Othello be Venetian or Turk,execute them as you conceive them: the result will always be good. But remembernot to think too much about it."
The insurmountable difference that exists between the most studiously poetic theatrical representation and the original poetry of Shakespeare, is the true reason why, contrary to the general belief in Shakespeare's eminent "theatricality," Goethe considered that "he was not a poet of the theatre and did not think of the stage, which is too narrow for so vast a soul, that the visible world is too narrow for it." Coleridge too held that the plays were not intended for acting, but to be read and contemplated as poems, and added sometimes to say laughingly, that an act of Parliament should be passed to prohibit the representation of Shakespeare on the stage.
Certainly, Lear and Othello, Macbeth andHamlet, Cordelia and Desdemona are part of our souls, and so they will be in the future, more or less active, like every part of our souls, of our experiences, of our memories. Sometimes they seem inert and almost obliterated, yet they live and affect us; at others they revive and reawaken, linking themselves to our greatest and nearest spiritual interests. This latter was notably the case in the epoch that extends from the "period of genius" at the end of romanticism, from the criticism of Kant to the exhaustion of the Hegelian school. At that time, poets created Werther and Faust, as though they were the brothers of Hamlet, Charlotte and Margaret and Hermengarde, as though sisters of the Shakespearean heroines, and philosophers constructed systems, which seemed to frame the scattered thoughts of Shakespeare, reducing his differences to logical terms, and crowning them with the conclusion that he either did not seek or did not find. At that time persisted even the illusion that the spirit of Shakespeare had transferred itself from the Elizabethan world to the new world of Europe, was poetising and philosophising with the mouths of the new men and directing their sentiments and actions.
Perhaps after that period, love of Shakespeare, if not altogether extinguished, greatly declined. The colossal mass of work of every sort devoted to Shakespeare, cannot be brought up against this judgment, for this mass, in great part due to German, English and American philologists, proves rather the sedulity of modern philology, than a profound spiritual impulse. This was more lively, when Shakespeare was far less investigated, rummaged and hashed up, and was read in editions far less critically correct. How could he be truly loved and really felt in an age which buried dialectic and idealism beneath naturalism and positivism, for the former of which he stood and which he represented in his own way? In this age, the consciousness of the distinction between liberty and passion, good and evil, nobility and vileness, fineness and sensuality, between the lofty and the base in man, became obscured; everything was conceived as differing in quantity, but identical in substance, and was placed in a deterministic relation with the external world. In such an atmosphere artistic work became blind, diseased, gloomy, instinctive; struggling for expression amid the torment of sick senses, no longer amidpassionate, moral struggles of the soul; confused writers, half pedantic, half neurasthenic, were taken for and believed themselves to be, the heirs of Shakespeare. Even when one reads some of the most highly praised pages of the critics of the day upon Shakespeare, so abounding in exquisite refinements, a sort of repugnance comes over one, as though a warning that this is not the genuine Shakespeare. He was less subtle, but more profound, less involved, but more complex and more great than they.
This is not a lamentation directed against the age, which is perhaps now drawing to a close and perhaps has no desire to do so, and will continue to develop its own character for a greater or lesser period. It is simply an observation of fact, which belongs to that history, which is not the history of William Shakespeare. He continues to live his own history, in those spirits alone, who are perpetually making anew that history which was truly his, as they read him with an ingenuous mind and a heart that shares in his poetry.
There is no longer any necessity for a criticism of Corneille's tragedies in a negative sense, for it is already to be found in several works. Further, if there exists a poet, who stands outside the taste and the preoccupations of our day (at least in France), it is Corneille. The greater number of lovers of poetry and art confess without reserve that they cannot endure his tragedies, which "have nothing to say to them." The fortune of Corneille has declined more and more with the growth of the fame of Shakespeare, which has been correlative to the formation and the growth of modern aesthetic and criticism; and if the fame of Shakespeare seemed strange and repugnant to classicistic elegance, the same fate has befallen the French dramatist, as the result of Shakespeareanism in relation to the appreciation of art which has now penetrated everywhere. Corneille once represented "laprofondeur du jugement" as opposed to "les irrégularités sauvages et capricieuses" of the Englishman, decorum against the lack of it, calm diffused light against shadows pierced at rare intervals with an occasional flash. Lessing had selected for examination and theme theRodogune,which he held to be a work, not of poetical genius, but of an ingenious intellect, because genius loves simplicity, and Corneille, after the manner of the ingenious, loved complications. Schiller, when he had read the most highly praised works of Corneille, expressed his astonishment at the fame which had accrued to an author of so poor an inventive faculty, so meagre and so dry in his treatment of character, so lacking in passion, so weak and rigid in the development of action, and almost altogether deprived of interest. William Schlegel noted in him, in place of poetry, "tragic epigrams" and "airs of parade," pomp without grandeur—he found him cold in the love scenes—his love was not as a rule love, but, in the words of the hero Sertorius, a well calculatedaimer par politique—intricate and Machiavellian and at the same time ingenuous and puerile in the representation of politics. He defined the greater part of the tragedies asnothing but treatises on the reason of State in the form of discussions, conducted rather in the manner of a chess-player than of a poet. Even the most temperate De Sanctis could not succeed in enjoying this writer, as is to be gathered from his lectures upon dramatic literature delivered in 1847. He found that he does not render the fullness of life, but only the extreme points of the passions in collision, and that he prefers eloquence to the development of tragedy, so that he often unconsciously turns tragedy into comedy. The confrontation of Corneille'sCidwith its Spanish original,Las mocedadesof Guillén de Castro, has however prevailed above all others as the text upon which to base arguments against the French dramaturge. Shack declared that the work of Corneille was altogether negative, that he reduced and reëlaborated his original, losing the poetical soul of the Spanish poet in the process and destroying the alternate and spontaneous expression of tenderness and of violent passion. He found that he substituted oratorical adornments and a swollen phraseology for the pure language of sentiment, coquetry for the struggle of the affections, to which it is directly opposed, and a boastful charlatan for theheroic figure of Rodrigo. Klein, passing from severe criticism into open satire, described theCidto be a "commentary in Alexandrines" upon the poem of theMocedades,comparing the Spanish Jimena to a fresh drop of dew upon "a flower that has hardly bloomed," and the French Chimène on the contrary to a "muddy drop, which presents a tumultuous battle of infusorians to the light of the sun": the "infusorians" would represent the antithesis to the "Alexandrine tears" (Alexandrinerthränen), which she pours forth.
But these negative judgments were not restricted altogether and at first to foreigners and romantics. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire (who for that matter sometimes lifts his eyes to the dangerous criterion of Shakespeare in his notes upon Corneille) did not refrain from criticising his illustrious predecessor for the frequentfroideurobservable in his dramatic work, as well as for his constant habit of speaking himself as the author and not allowing his personages to speak, for his substitution of reflections for immediate expressions, and for the artifices, the conventions and the padding, in which he abounds. Vauvenargues showed himself irreconcilable (Racine was hisideal). He too blamed the heroes of Corneille for uttering great things and not inspiring them, for talking, and always talking too much, with the object of making themselves known—whereas great men are rather characterised by the things they do not say than those they do say—and in general for ostentation, which takes the place of loftiness, and for declamation, which he substitutes for true eloquence. Gaillard allowed the influence of the generally unfavorable verdict or the verdict full of retractations and cautions in respect of its theme, to colour the eulogy which he composed in 1768. It used to be said of Corneille that he aimed rather at "admiration" than at "emotion," and that he was in fact "not tragic." This insult (declared Gaillard) was spoken, but not written down, "because the pen is always wiser than the tongue." But the accusation of "coldness" had made itself heard on the lips of Corneille's contemporaries in the second half of the seventeenth century, particularly when the tragedies of Racine, with their very different message to the heart, had appeared to afford a contrast.
The defenders of Corneille have often yielded to the temptation of accepting Shakespeare'sdramas or at least the tragedies of Racine as a standard of comparison and a reply to criticism. They have attempted to prove that Corneille should be read, judged and interpreted in the spirit of those poets. They have claimed to discover in Corneille just that which their adversaries failed to discover and of which they denied the existence: this they call truth, reality and life, meaning thereby, passion and imagination. Thus we find Sainte-Beuve lamenting that not only foreigners, but France herself, had not remarked and had not gloried in the possession of Pauline (inPolyeucte), one of the divine poetical figures, which are to be placed in the brief list containing the Antigones, the Didos, the Francescas da Rimini, the Desdemonas, the Ophelias. More recently others have elevated the Cleopatra (ofRodogune) to the level of Lady Macbeth, and the Cid, on account of the youthful freshness of his love-making, to the rank ofRomeo and Juliet,while they have discovered inAndromèdenothing less than that kind offéerie poétique"to which the English owe aMidsummer Night's Dreamand theTempest." They also declare that theHoraceis a tragedy in which reigns a sort of "savage Roman sanctity,"culminating in the youthful Horace, "intransigent and fanatical, ferociously religious"; while his sister Camilla is "a creature of nerves and flesh, who has strayed into a family of heroes" and rises up in revolt against that hard world. For them Camilla is an "invalid of love," "one possessed by passion," a "neurotic," of an altogether modern complexion.Polyeucterepresents "a drama of nascent Christianity," and its protagonist, a "mystical rebel," recalls at once "Saint Paul, Huss, Calvin and Prince Krapotkine," arousing the same curiosity as a Russian nihilist, such as one used to see some years ago in the beershops, with bright eyes, pale and fair, the forehead narrow about the temples and of whom it was whispered that he had killed some general or prefect of police at Petersburg. Severus seems to them to be similar in some respects to "a modern exegete," who is writing the history of the origin of Christianity. There exists no play "which penetrates more profoundly into the human soul or opens a wider perspective of untrodden paths."Cinnarepresents in the tragedy of Augustus another neurotic after the modern manner. Augustus, ambitious and without scruples, has attained to the summit of hisdesires and is weary and tired of power. He negates the man who ordered the proscriptions that is in himself and his generosity is due almost to satiety for too easy triumphs and vengeances. Attila, in the tragedy of that name, springs out before us as "a monster of pride, cruel, emphatic and subtle, conscious of being the instrument of a mysterious power, an ogre with a mission": this "stupendous" conception is worthy to stand side by side with the gigantic figures of theLégende des Siècles.
These are all fantastic embroideries, metaphors, easel pictures, which sometimes do honour to the artistic capacity of the eulogists, but have no connexion whatever with the direct impression of Corneille's tragedies. Spinoza would have said that they have as much connexion with them as the dog of zoology with the dog-star. An obvious instance of this is the strange comparison of the character Polyeucte with the "Russian nihilist"—but it is little less evident in the other instances, because it is altogether arbitrary to interpret the Augustus of theCinnaas though he were a Shakespearean Richard II or Henry IV and to attribute to him the psychology of what Nietzsche describes as the "generous man."
Fancy for fancy, as well admit Napoleon's comment. He declared himself persuaded that Augustus was certainly not changed in a moment into a"prince débonnaire,"into a poor prince exercising "une si pauvre petite vertu" as clemency, and that if he holds out to Cinna the right hand of friendship, he only does this to deceive him and in order to revenge himself more completely and more usefully at the propitious moment. It is an amusement like another to take up the personages of a play or of a story and refashion them in our own way by the free use of the fancy, or to weave a new mode of feeling out of the facts concerning certain cases and characters. Camilla can thus be quite well transformed even into a nymphomaniac; but unfortunately criticism insinuates itself into the folds of fancy and causes the fancier himself (Lemaître) to note that Camilla sacrifices her love to her duty"délibérément,"that she certainly resembles a character of Racine, but "non certes par la langue," and that she would show us what she really is "si elle parlait un langage moins rude at moins compact." As though the speech and the inflection were an accident and not the whole of a poetic creation, the beating of its heart! Thedemoniacal, the neurotic Camilla, it is true, speaks in this way:
"Il vient, préparons-nous a montrer constammentCe que doit une amante à la mort d'un amant."
Here Voltaire's unconquerable good sense could not refrain from remarking: "'Préparons-nous' adds to the defect. We see a woman who is thinking how she can demonstrate her affliction and may be said to be rehearsing her lesson of grief."
The same fantastic and anticritical method of comparison has been adopted with De Castro's play, with the object of obtaining a contrary result: this comparison, whenever it is conducted with the criterion of realistic art, or of art full of passion, cannot but result in a condemnation of Corneille's reëlaboration of the theme. This has been frankly admitted by more than one French critic (Fauriel for example), who contrived to loosen somewhat the chains of national preconceptions and traditional admirations. Indeed it was already implied in the celebrated judgment of the Academy, which is not the less just and acute for having been delivered by an academy and written by a Chapelain. Guillen de Castro's play,which is epical and popular in tone, celebrates the youthful hero Rodrigo, the future Cid, strong, faithful and pious, admired by all, and looked upon with love by princesses. An anecdote is recounted, with the object of celebrating him, describing how he was obliged to challenge and to slay the father of the maiden he loved. Bound to the same degree as himself by the laws of chivalry, she is held to be obliged to provide for the vendetta required by the death of her father. She performs her duty without hatred and solely as a legal enemy, an"ennemie légitime"(to employ a phrase of the same Corneille in theHorace).She does not cease to love, nor does she feel any shame in loving. Finally, his prowess and the favour of heaven, which he deserves and which ever accompanies him, obtain for Rodrigo the legal conquest of his loving beloved, who is also his enemy for honour's sake. De Castro's play is limpid, lively, full of happenings. Corneille both simplifies and complicates it, reducing it to series of casuistical discussions, vivified here and there with echoes of the passionate original, softened with moments of abandonment, as in the vigorous scene of the challenge, which is an echo of the Spanish play,or in the tender sigh of the duet, "Rodrigue, qui Veut cru?... Chimène, qui l'eût dit?..." which is also in De Castro. After this, it can be asserted that Corneille "has made a human drama, a drama of universal human appeal, out of an exclusively Spanish drama"; it will also be declared that "the most beautiful words of the French language find themselves always at the point of the pen, when one is writing about theCid;duty, love, honour, the family, one's native land," because "everything there is generous, affectionate, ingenuous, and there never has been breathed a livelier or a purer air upon the stage, the air of lofty altitudes of the soul." But this is verbiage. It is also possible to revel in the description of "the fair cavalier, protected of God and adored by the ladies, who carries his country about with him wherever he goes, and along with it everybody's heart; in the beautiful maiden with the long black veil, so strong and yet so weak, so courageous and so tender; in the grand old man, so majestic and yet so familiar, the signor so rude and so hoary, yet with a soul as straight and as pure as a lily, in whom dwells the ancient code of honour and all the glory of times past; in the king, so good-natured and ingenuous, yet so clever, likethe good king one finds in fairy stories; in the gentle little infanta, with her precious soliloquies, so full of gongorism and knightly romances ..."; but as we have previously observed, this will be merely drawing fancy pictures. It suffices to read theCid,to see that it contains nothing of this and nothing of this is to be found among the tragedies of Corneille.
The vanity of such criticisms, which attempt to alter Corneille by presenting him as that which he is not and does not wish to be, a poet of immediate passions, would at once be apparent, were it to be realised that no such attempts are made in the case of Racine, whose passionate soul makes its presence at once felt through literary and theatrical conventions, in the affection which he experiences for the sweet, for what is tremendous and mysterious with religious emotion, which palpitates in Andromache, in Phaedra, in Iphigenia and Eriphylis in Joad and in Attila. But it confutes itself by becoming modified, sometimes among the very critics whom we have been citing, into the thesis that Corneille is the poet of the "reason," or of "the rational will." And we say modified, because the reason or the rational will is in poetry itself a passion, and he would be correctlydescribed as a poet of that kind of inspiration, who should accentuate the rational-volitional moment in the representation of the passions, by creating types of wise and active men, such as are to be found in the epic, in many dramatic masterpieces, in high romance and elsewhere. But not even this exists in Corneille, so much so that the very persons who maintain the thesis, remark that he isolates a principle and a force, the reason and the will, and seeks out how the one makes the other triumph. To this, they declare, we must attribute the "character of stiffness" proper to the heroes of Corneille, who are necessarily bound to lack "the seductive flexibility, the languors, the perturbations, which are to be observed in those moved by sentiment." Now this is not permissible in art, because art, in portraying a passion, even if it be that of inflexible rationality and inflexible will and duty, never "isolates" it, in the fashion of an analyst in a laboratory, or a physicist, but seizes it in its becoming, and so together with all the other passions, and together with the "languors" and "disturbances." Thus Corneille, described as they describe him by isolating the reason and the will, would be a slayer of life, and so of the will and the reasonthemselves. And when he is blamed for having given so small and so unhappy a place to love, "to the act by which the race perpetuates itself, to the relations of the sexes and to all the sentiments that arise from them, and which, by the nature of things form an essential part of the life of the human race," it is not observed that beneath this reproof, which is somewhat physiological and lubricious and lacks seriousness of statement, there is concealed the yet more serious and more general reproof that Corneille suffocates and suppresses the quiver of life. La Bruyère was probably among the first to give currency to the saying, which has been repeated, that Corneille depicts men not "as they are," but "as they ought to be," and leads to a like conclusion, though expressed in an euphemistic form; because poetry in truth knows nothing of being or of having to be, and its existence is a having to be, its having to be a being.
This critical position, which desires to explain and to justify Corneille as poet of the reason and of the rational will (although, as we shall see further on, it contains some truth), is indeed equivocal, because it seems to assert on the one hand that he possesses a particularform of passion, and on the other takes it away from him with its "isolation," its "having to be," and with its assertion that his personages "surpass nature," with its boasting of his "Romans being more Roman than Romans," his "Greeks more Greek than Greeks" and the like, that is to say, by making of him an exaggerator of types and of abstractions, the opposite of a poet. The passage, then, is easy from this position to its last thesis or modification, by means of which Corneille is exalted as an eminent representative of a special sort of poetry, "rationalistic poetry," which is held to coincide with poetry that is especially "French." The theory here implied is to be found both among the French and those who are not French, among classicists and romantics, sometimes being looked upon among both as a merit, that is to say, it is recognised by them that this sort of poetry is legitimate. In the course of his proof that French rationalistic tragedy excludes the lyrical element and demands the intrigue of action and the eloquence of the passions, Frederick Schlegel indicated "the splendid side of French tragedy, where it evinces lofty and incomparable power, fully responding to the spirit and character of a nation, in whicheloquence occupies a dominant position, even in private life." A contemporary writer on art, Gundolf, blames his German conationals for the prejudices in which they are enmeshed, and for their lack of understanding of the great rationalistic poetry of France, so logical, so uniform, so ordered and subordinated, so regular and so easily to be understood. It is the natural and spontaneous expression of the French character, in the same way as is the monarchy of Louis XIV, differing thereby from the narrow convention or imitation, which it became in the hands of Gottsched and others of Gallic tendencies, in other countries. Sainte-Beuve, alluding in particular to Corneille, argued that in French tragedy "things are not seen too realistically or over-coloured, since attention is chiefly bestowed upon the saying of Descartes:—I think, therefore I am: I think, therefore I feel;—and everything there happens in or is led back to the bosom of the interior substance," in the "state of pure sentiment, of reasoned and dialogued analysis," in a sphere "no longer of sentiment, but of understanding, clear, extended, without mists and without clouds." Another student of Corneille opposes the different and equally admissible system of theFrench tragedian, "a constructor and as it were an engineer of action," to that of Shakespeare, portrayer of the soul and of life. Thus, while all the most famous plays of Shakespeare are drama, but lyrical drama, "hardly one of the most beautiful and popular plays of Corneille is essentially lyrical." What are we to think of "rationalistic" or "intellectualistic," or "logical" or "non-lyrical" poetry? Nothing but this: that it does not exist. And of French poetry? The same: that it does not exist; because what is poetry in France is naturally neither intellectualiste nor essentially French, but purely and simply poetry, like all other poetry that has grown in this earthly flower-bed. And if the old-fashioned romanticism, which sanctifies and gives substance to nationality and demands of art, of thought and of everything else, that it should first be national, is reappearing among French writers in the disguise of anti-romanticism and neo-classicism, this is but a proof the more of the spiritual dulness and mental confusion of those nationalists, who embrace their presumed adversary.
The only reality that could be concealed in "rationalistic poetry," for which Corneille is praised, as shown above, would be one of thecategories in old-fashioned books of literary instruction, known as "didactic poetry," which was not too well spoken of, even there. Corneille is admired from this point of view, among other things, for his famous political dissertations in theChinaand in theSertorius,where Voltaire considers that he is deserving of great praise for "having expressed very beautiful thoughts in correct and harmonious verse." In this connexion are quoted the remarks of the Maréchal de Grammont about theOthon,that "it should have been the breviary of kings," or of Louvois, "an audience of ministers of state would be desirable for the judgment of such a work." It is indeed only in "didactic poetry," which is versified prose, that we find "thoughts" that are afterwards "versified." The method employed by another man of letters would also make of the tragedies of Corneille masked didactic poetry. He is an unconscious manipulator of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in the manner of Hegel, and describes it as "the alliance of the individual with the species, of the particular with the general," which were separate in the medieval "farces" and "moralities," the former being all compact of individuals and actions, the latter of ideas, whichCorneille was able to unite, being one of those great masters who proceed from the general to the particular and vivify the abstractions of thought with the power of the imagination.
The justification of the tragedies of Corneille, as based upon the foundations of French society and history in the time of Corneille, is certainly more solid than that which explains them as based upon a mystical French "character," or "race," or "nation." Do conventions and etiquette govern and embarrass the development of dialogue and action in every part of those tragedies? But such was life at court, or life modelled upon life at court, in those days. Do the characters rather reason about their sentiments than express them? But such was the custom of well-bred men of that day. And do they always discuss matters according to all the rules of rhetoric and with perfect diction? But to speak well was the boast of men in society and diplomatists at that time. Do the women mingle love and politics, and rather make love for political reasons than politics for love? But the ladies of the Fronde did just this; indeed Cardinal Mazarin, in conversation with the Spanish ambassador, gave vent to the opinion that in France "an honestwoman would not sleep with her husband, nor a mistress with her lover, unless they had discussed affairs of State with them during the day." And so discussions continue and are to be found continuing in Taine and many others, without explaining anything, because they pass over the poetry and the problem of the poetry, which is not, as Taine held, "the expression of the genius of an age" or "the reflection of a given society" (society reflects and expresses itself in its own actions and customs), but "poetry, that is to say, one of the free forces of every people, society and time, which must be interpreted with reasons contained in itself."[1]It is superfluous to add that the poetry is lost sight of in the delight of finding the personages and social types of the French seventeenth century, beyond the verses and the ideal conceptions of character; for example, we find them declaring their own affectionate sympathy for "Christian Theodora," for "this martyr, of the dress with the starched collar and the equally proudly starched sentiments, "for this proudmartyr, in the grand style of Louis XIII," altogether forgetting the reality of the art of Corneille and the critical problems suggested by theThéodora.This is certainly very prettily and gracefully said, but it misses the point.
There remains to mention but one last form of defence, which however is not a justification of the art of Corneille, but a eulogy of him as an ingenious man, who deserved well of culture and possessed refinement of manners, particularly as regards theatrical representations. To him belongs the "great merit" (said Voltaire in concluding his commentary) of "having found France rustic, gross and ignorant, about the time of theCid,and of having changed it 'by teaching it not only tragedy and comedy, but even the art of thinking." And his rival Racine, in his praise of Corneille before the Academy at the time of his death, had recorded "the debt that French poetry and the French stage owed to him." He had found it disordered, irregular and chaotic, and after having sought the right road for some time and striven against the bad taste of his age, "he inspired it with an extraordinary genius aided by study of the ancients, and exhibited reason (la raison)on the stage, accompanied with all the pomp and all the ornaments, of which the French language is capable." All the historians of French literature repeat this, beginning by bowing down before Corneille, the "founder," or "creator" of the French theatre. Such praise as this means little or nothing in art, because non-poets, or poets of very slender talents, even pedants, are capable of exercising this function of being founders and directors of the culture and the literature of a people. An instance of this in Italy was Pietro Bembo, "who removed this pure, sweet speech of ours from its vulgar obscurity, and has shown us by his example what it ought to be."
He was not a poet, yet was surrounded with the gratitude, and with the most sincere reverence on the part of poets of genius, among whom was Ariosto, to whom belong the verses cited above.
That other merit accorded to Corneille, of having accomplished a revolution, cleared the ground and "raised the French tragic system upon it," the "classical system," is without poetical value. We shall leave it to others to define as they please, precisely of what this work consisted, the introduction of the unitiesand of the rules of verisimilitude, the conception and realisation of tragic psychological tragedy, or the tragedy of character, of which actions and catastrophes should form, the consequences, the fusing and harmonising in a single type of sixteenth century tragedy, which starts from "the tragic incident," with that of the seventeenth century, which ends with it, and so on. We prefer to remark, with reference to this and to so many other disputes that have taken place since the time of Calepio and Lessing onward, and especially during the romantic period, with regard to the merits and the defects of the "French system," as compared with the "Greek system" and with the "romantic" or "Shakespearean," that "systems" either have nothing to do with poetry, or are the abstract schemes of single poems, and therefore that such disputes are and always have been, sterile and vain. Here too it should be mentioned that a "system" may be the work of non-poets or of mediocre poets, as was the case in Italy with the system of "melodrama," of which (to employ the figure of De Sanctis), Apostolo Zeno was the "architect" and Pietro Metastasio the "poet." In England too, the system of the drama was not fixed byShakespeare, but by his predecessors, small fry indeed as compared with him. We would also observe that death or life may exist in one and the same system, for indeed a system is a prison, with bolts and bars. Note in this respect, that although the romantics had boasted the salvation that lay in the Shakespearean system, a new dramatic genius springing therefrom was vainly awaited. There appeared only semigeniuses and a crowd of strepitous works, not less cold and empty than those that had been condemned in the opposing "French system."
We may therefore conclude that the arguments of the admirers and apologists of Corneille, which have been passed in review, do not embrace the problem, but leave the judgments of negative criticism free to exercise their perilous potency. They find in Corneille intellectual combinations in place of poetical formations, abstractions in place of what is concrete, oratory in place of lyrical inspiration and shadow in place of substance.