Jodelle.  Corneille’s achievement was based upon a combination of what was best in these two movements.  The work of Jodelle, written with a genuinely artistic intention, was nevertheless a dead thing on the stage; while Hardy’s melodramas, bursting as they were with vitality, were too barbaric to rank as serious works of art.  Corneille combined art with vitality, and for the first time produced a play which was at once a splended piece of literature and an immense popular success.  Henceforward it was certain that French drama would develop along the path which had been opened out for it so triumphantly by the Cid.  But what was that path?  Nothing shows more strikingly the strength of the literary opinion of that age than the fact that it was able to impose itself even upon the mighty and towering spirit of Corneille.  By nature, there can be little doubt that Corneille was a romantic.  His fiery energy, his swelling rhetoric, his love of the extraordinary and the sublime, bring him into closer kinship with Marlowe than with any other writer of his own nation until the time of Victor Hugo.  But Corneille could not do what Marlowe did.  He could not infuse into the free form of popular drama the passion and splendour of his own genius, and thus create a type of tragedy that was at once exuberant and beautiful.  And he could not do this because the literary theories of the whole of the cultivated society of France would have been opposed to him, because he himself was so impregnated with those very theories that he failed to realize where the true bent of his genius lay.  Thus it was that the type of drama which he impressed upon French literature was not the romantic type of the English Elizabethans, but the classical type of Senecan tragedy which Jodelle had imitated, and which was alone tolerable to the French critics of the seventeenth century.  Instead of making the vital drama of Hardy artistic, he made the literary drama of Jodelle alive.  Probably it was fortunate that he did so; for he thus led the way straight to the most characteristic product of the French genius—­the tragedy of Racine.  With Racine, the classical type of drama, which so ill befitted the romantic spirit of Corneille, found its perfect exponent; and it will be well therefore to postpone a more detailed examination of the nature of that type until we come to consider Racine himself, the value of whose work is inextricably interwoven with its form.  The dominating qualities of Corneille may be more easily appreciated.

He was above all things a rhetorician; he was an instinctive master of those qualities in words which go to produce effects of passionate vehemence, vigorous precision, and culminating force.  His great tirades carry forward the reader, or the listener (for indeed the verse of Corneille loses half its value when it is unheard), on a full-flowing tide of language where the waves of the verse, following one another in a swift succession of ever-rising power, crash down at