Corneille, PIERRE, the greatest tragic dramatist of France, and the forerunner of Molière in genuine comedy, was born at Rouen on June 6,
1606. The son of a legal official, he was trained for the bar, and for some time tried with but slight success to obtain a practice in his birthplace. In 1629 he removed to Paris, where his comedy Mélite, which had already been performed at Rouen, proved so successful as to be run at the same time in two theatres, the Marais and the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It was followed by Clitandre, La Veuve, La Galerie du Palais, La Suivante, and La Place Royale. In these early pieces intricate and extravagant plots are handled with considerable ingenuity, but the writer's poetic genius only flashes out in occasional verses. For some time Corneille was numbered among Richelieu's 'five poets,' the others being Rotrou, Colletet, Bois-Robert, and L'Étoile. These writers were engaged to compose plays on lines laid down by the cardinal. Each of the five wrote an act, which was then criticised, altered, and paid for by their employer; among the pieces thus produced being Les Tuileries, L'Aveugle de Smyrne, and La Grande Pastorale. Corneille, however, was too independent to retain Richelieu's favour, and his dismissal followed at once on his proposing to alter a plot of the cardinal's devising. Médée, a tragedy which appeared in 1635, showed a marked advance on his earlier works, both in dramatic power and in style; and in 1636 the Cid, his most famous if not his best play, took Paris by storm. Richelieu ordered his literary retainers to write down the piece, and Scudéry called on the Academy to vindicate French letters in the eyes of Europe by passing formal censure on Corneille. The Academy, which had lately been founded by Richelieu, thereupon issued a hostile examen of the play; but adverse criticism was powerless against the general enthusiasm, and the phrase beau comme le Cid passed into the language. The result of the struggle between the minister and the dramatist is happily summed up in Boileau's famous couplet:
En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue,
Tout Paris pour Chimène a les yeux de Rodrigue.
The story of the play was taken from Las Mocedades del Cid, a Spanish work by Guillem de Castro (q.v.), but Corneille's treatment of the subject was thoroughly original. With the appearance of the Cid the poetic drama took possession of a stage hitherto occupied by broad and shapeless farces, wooden imitations of Seneca, and the extravagant and off-hand pieces of Hardy. The graceful and heroic figures of the lovers, Rodrigue and Chimène, the nobility of the sentiments, the power and harmony of the verse, justify the enthusiasm which the play excited. It may not be its author's greatest effort, but there is a charm in the spirit of youthful ardour and tenderness which animates it such as is hardly to be felt again in Corneille's work, until we come to the exquisite lyric love-scene which he contributed in his old age to the opera of Psyché.
The Cid was followed in 1639 by Horace, a play which was founded on the story of the Horatii and Curiatii as told by Livy, and which contains, in the tirade spoken before her death by Camille, the most magnificent burst of invective in the French classical drama. Cinna appeared in 1639; Polyeucte, one of Corneille's noblest tragedies, in 1640; and La Mort de Pompée in 1641. Le Menteur, which was produced in 1642, entitles Corneille to be called the father of French comedy as well as of French tragedy. The play is a masterpiece. The character of Dorante, the liar, is drawn with admirable humour and insight, and the style, at once easy, graceful, and pointed, reaches a level of excellence which Molière did not surpass in his earlier works. Théodore was brought out in 1645, and Rodogune, perhaps the most impressive and thrilling of Corneille's tragedies, in 1646. Between 1647—when he was made an academician—and 1653 Corneille produced Héraclius, Don Sanche d'Aragon (an imitation of Lope de Vega's Palacio Confuso), Andromède, Nicomède, and Pertharite. These pieces, of which the last named was damned, show a decline in dramatic and poetic power. After the failure of Pertharite in 1653, Corneille ceased for a time to write plays, and occupied himself with making a verse translation of the Imitatio Christi. He returned to the stage in 1659 with Édipe, which had considerable success, and which was followed by La Toison d'Or, Sertorius, Sophonisbe, Othon, Agésilas, Attila, and Tite et Bérénice (1670). In 1671 he joined Molière and Quinault in writing the opera of Psyché, and the loveliest verses which he ever penned are to be found in the scene between Psyche and Cupid (act iii. scene 3). His last works were Pulchérie (1672) and Suréna (1674).
His work did not bring him wealth, for he never received more than 200 louis for a piece. His private fortune was not large, and the pension which was granted him was not regularly paid. After his marriage in 1640 he lived habitually in Rouen until 1662, when he settled in Paris. His domestic life seems to have been a happy one. He and his brother Thomas married two sisters, and dwelt for a long time in contiguous houses. During his later years he had to compete with Racine, an inferior poet but a more dexterous playwright, and one who could cater more shrewdly for the public taste. The veteran dramatist spoke contemptuously of his rival's 'sighs and flames,' but his popularity waned before that of the younger writer, whose cause was espoused by Boileau and the king. Corneille died in Paris in the Rue d'Argenteuil on October 1, 1684.
Corneille and Racine are the chief dramatists of the classical school which held command of the French tragic stage from the middle of the 16th century down to the Romantic movement of 1830. The works of this school were modelled on the plays of Seneca—that is to say, on plays cast in the mould of Greek tragedy, but having even less action and more diffuse moralising. The writer who adopts this form of drama is bound down by a set of rigid rules which allow him to present only a few idealised personages in certain stereotyped situations. He cannot exhibit the development of character and the interaction of human passions. He is almost denied the use of incident, and the slow progress of his play to its climax is mainly brought about through the agency of messengers and confidants. Before Corneille the classic school had failed to produce a single good acting play; its adherents, nevertheless, succeeded in diverting him from the path on which he had entered when he produced the Cid, and in thereby cramping his rich and vigorous genius. 'Corneille,' says Mr Walter Pollock, 'was one of the first to make a move in the direction of the romantic drama, and wanted nothing but courage and self-sacrifice to carry out his intention.' (See his admirable articles on Victor Hugo and Romanticism in French Poets, 1879). Unfortunately, instead of disregarding the academic criticism of his day, Corneille turned from Spain to a 'Castilian Rome,' remote from the world of romance, and set himself to compose plays of so severe and uneventful a type that he failed, save in one or two cases, to invest them with a strong sustained interest. In reading these plays we yield alternately to admiration and fatigue. The characters have a simplicity and grandeur which recall the work of the sculptor, but they have also something of its immobility. We can grasp them at once; they are not developed in the course of the drama. Corneille's heroes bear their fate with an inflexible self-reliance which seems more than human, and therefore moves us the less. His heroines, his 'adorable furies,' resemble one another closely. 'Their love,' says Sainte-Beuve, 'springs from the head rather than the heart. We feel that Corneille knew little of women.' Where he excels his rivals is in the grandeur of his morality, in the eloquence and passion of certain scenes and speeches, in the splendid flashes of poetry with which he illumines the pale world of classic tragedy, in the power and music of his verse. Victor Hugo alone has made the Alexandrine move with the same swelling harmony and variety of cadence. The monotony which so often weighs on Corneille's readers was not due to any coldness or narrowness inherent in his genius. To be convinced of this it is enough to recall the brilliant comedy of the Menteur, the martial stir and glowing passion of the Cid, the lyric grace and chastened ardour of the central love-scene in Psyché. But his powers were in a measure misdirected. His place in literature must always be a very high one; but readers—other than French readers, at least—can hardly doubt that it would have been still higher had he been free to select and develop his characters at will, to exercise his humorous faculty and give full scope to his tragic powers in the fields of romantic drama.
See Guizot's Corneille et son Temps (1852; Eng. trans. 1857); Jules Taschereau's Histoire de P. Corneille (1828; new ed. 1855); Sainte-Beuve's Portraits Littéraires (tome i.) and Port Royal (tome i.); Bouquet, Points obscurs de la Vie de Corneille (1888); Trollope, Corneille and Racine (1881); and Prof. Lodge, A Study in Corneille (Balt. 1891). The best editions are those by Lefèvre (12 vols. 1854) and Marty-Laveaux (12 vols. 1862-67). See M. E. Picot's Bibliographie Cornélienne (1875).