f Seneca,--plays of which the typical
representative is the _Cleopatre_ of 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,