earts of a generation less heroic and swayed
by tenderer passion, and the old man resented the change. Domestic
sorrows were added to the grief of ill success in his art. Living
simply, his means were narrow for his needs. The last ten years of
his life were years of silence. He died in 1684, at the age of
seventy-eight.

The drama of Corneille deals with what is extraordinary, but in what
is extraordinary it seeks for truth. He finds the marvellous in the
triumphs of the human will. His great inventive powers were applied
to creating situations for the manifestation of heroic energy.
History attracted him, because a basis of fact seemed to justify what
otherwise could not be accepted as probable. Great personages suited
his purpose, because they can deploy their powers on the amplest scale.
His characters, men and women, act not through blind, instinctive
passion, but with deliberate and intelligent force; they reason, and
too often with casuistical subtlety, about their emotions. At length
he came to glorify the will apart from its aims and ends, when tending
even to crime, or acting, as it were, in the void. He thought much
of the principles of his art, and embodied his conclusions in critical
dissertations and studies of his own works. He accepted the rule of
the unities of place and time (of which at first he was ignorant)
as far as his themes permitted, as far as the rules served to
concentrate action and secure verisimilitude. His mastery in verse
of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed; his dialogue of rapid
statement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short swords;
in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of
latent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action.
His faults, like his virtues, are great; and though faults and virtues
may be travestied, both are in reality alike inimitable.

Alone among Corneille's dramatic rivals, if they deserve that
name--Du Ryer, Tristan, Scudery, Boisrobert, and others--JEAN ROTROU
(1610-50) had the magnanimity to render homage to the master of his
art. While still a boy he read Sophocles, and resolved that he would
live for the dramatic art. His facility was great, and he had the
faults of a facile writer, who started on his career at the age of
nineteen. He could not easily submit to the regulation of the
classical drama, and squandered his talents in extravagant
tragi-comedies; but his work grew sounder and stronger toward