And the names of the dead are always thrown at the
heads of the living—Corneille stoned with
Tasso and Guarini (Guarini!), as, later, Racine will
be stoned with Corneille, Voltaire with Racine, and
as to-day, everyone who shows signs of rising is stoned
with Corneille, Racine and Voltaire. These tactics,
as will be seen, are well-worn; but they must be effective
as they are still in use. However, the poor devil
of a great man still breathed. Here we cannot
help but admire the way in which Scuderi, the bully
of this tragic-comedy, forced to the wall, blackguards
and maltreats him, how pitilessly he unmasks his classical
artillery, how he shows the author of Le Cid
“what the episodes should be, according to Aristotle,
who tells us in the tenth and sixteenth chapters of
his Poetics"; how he crushes Corneille, in
the name of the same Aristotle “in the eleventh
chapter of his Art of Poetry, wherein we find
the condemnation of Le Cid”; in the name
of Plato, “in the tenth book of his Republic”;
in the name of Marcellinus, “as may be seen
in the twenty-seventh book”; in the name of
“the tragedies of Niobe and Jephthah”;
in the name of the “Ajax of Sophocles”;
in the name of “the example of Euripides”;
in the name of “Heinsius, chapter six of the
Constitution of Tragedy; and the younger
Scaliger in his poems”; and finally, in the name
of the Canonists and Jurisconsults, under the title
“Nuptials.” The first arguments were
addressed to the Academy, the last one was aimed at
the Cardinal. After the pin-pricks the blow with
a club. A judge was needed to decide the question.
Chapelain gave judgment. Corneille saw that he
was doomed; the lion was muzzled, or, as was said at
the time, the crow (Corneille) was plucked.
Now comes the painful side of this grotesque performance:
after he had been thus quenched at his first flash,
this genius, thoroughly modern, fed upon the Middle
Ages and Spain, being compelled to lie to himself
and to hark back to ancient times, drew for us that
Castilian Rome, which is sublime beyond question,
but in which, except perhaps in Nicomede, which
was so ridiculed by the eighteenth century for its
dignified and simple colouring, we find neither the
real Rome nor the true Corneille.
Racine was treated to the same persecution, but did not make the same resistance. Neither in his genius nor in his character was there any of Corneille’s lofty asperity. He submitted in silence and sacrificed to the scorn of his time his enchanting elegy of Esther, his magnificent epic, Athalie. So that we can but believe that, if he had not been paralyzed as he was by the prejudices of his epoch, if he had come in contact less frequently with the classic cramp-fish, he would not have failed to introduce Locuste in his drama between Narcisse and Neron, and above all things would not have relegated to the wings the admirable scene of the banquet at which Seneca’s pupil