He never, it may be believed, forgot the cardinal's ill offices on this occasion, though his fear of offending caused him to dedicate his play of "Horace" to him in an adulatory address. [Sidenote: 1639. Ætat. 33.] This tragedy shows a considerable advance in the power of expressing noble and heroic sentiments. The framework is too slight, being the duel of the Horatii and the Curiatii, and the subsequent murder of his sister by the surviving Horatius, when she reproached him for slaying her betrothed. Such a subject in the hands of Shakspeare had not, indeed, been threadbare. He would have brought the jealousies of the states of Rome and Alba in living scenes before our eyes. We should have beheld the collision of turbulent, ambitious spirits, and felt that the world was not large enough for both. The pernicious rule of unity of time and place prevented this: the ambition of Rome could be displayed only in the single person of Horatius. All we have, therefore, are various scenes between him, his sister, his wife, and the Curiatius, betrothed to the former, and brother to the latter; and these scenes are, for the most part, repetitions one of another; for the same rules confining the time of action, restrict the whole play to the delineation of the catastrophe; variety of incident and feeling is excluded, and the art of the French dramatist consists principally in petty devices, to delay the catastrophe, and so to drag it through long _tête-à-tête_ conversations, till the fifth act: often they are unable to defer it beyond the fourth, and then the fifth is an appendix of little account.
"Horace" is, however, a masterpiece. Corneille could speak as a Roman, and the character of the hero is conceived with a simplicity and severity of taste worthy of his country.
In his next piece Corneille rose yet higher. "Cinna" is usually considered his _chef d'œuvre_. It contains admirable scenes, unsurpassed by any author. Did the scene in which Augustus asks the advice of Cinna and Maximus as to his meditated abdication pass between the personages (Mecænas and Agrippa) who really were called into consultation on the subject, it had been faultless. The mixture of admirable reasoning, covert and delicate flattery, forcible eloquence, and happy versification, is perhaps unequalled in any work that exists. It is, to a degree, spoiled as it stands; for the false part which the conspirators act, and the peculiarly base conduct of Cinna, deteriorate from the interest of the whole drama; and, although in subsequent portions of the play he appears in the more interesting light of a man struggling between remorse and love, we cannot recover from the impression, and thus the character wants that congruity and likelihood necessary for an ideal hero. As works of art, we may say, once for all, Corneille's tragedies are far from perfect. Very inferior poets have attained happier combinations of plot: but not one among his countrymen--few of any nation--have equalled him in scenes; in declamations full of energy and poetry; in single expressions that embody the truth of passion and the result of a life of experience; in noble sentiments, such as made the great Condé weep from admiration. In this play he did not happily confine himself to absolute unity of place. Such was his erroneous notion that he mentions this as a fault; while Voltaire drolly, yet seriously, observes that unity of place had been preserved had the stage represented two apartments at once. How far this would have helped the imagination it is impossible to say; but in real life no spectator commands a view of the interior of two separate rooms at once, except, indeed, in a penitentiary.
