Combattre un ennemi pour le salut de tous, Et contre un inconnu s'exposer seul aux coups, D'une simple vertu c'est l'effet ordinaire ... Mais vouloir au public immoler ce qu' on aime, S'attacher au combat contre un autre soi-même ... Une telle vertu n'appartenait qu' à nous.
The lines which follow were written by Nietzsche, and they seem a paraphrase of the discourse of Horace:
To know how to suffer is nothing; feeble women, even slaves, may be past masters in this art. But to stand firm against the assaults of the pain of doubt, to withstand the weakness of remorse when we inflict torment,--this is to be a hero; this is the height of courage; in this lies the first condition of all grandeur.
Corneille's contempt for pity was shared by his contemporaries, and so were his views of marriage as expressed in his first comedies. The seigniors whom he met at the Hôtel de Rambouillet would have blushed to feel compassion. They left the womanish weakness of pity to the inferior beings of the lower orders. The great had always been convinced that elevation in rank raised man above the consciousness of the sufferings of beings of an inferior order; and in the day of Corneille they were fully persuaded that noblemen ought to find higher reasons for justice and for generosity than the involuntary emotions which we of this later day have learned to recognise as symptoms of "nervous disturbance."
I am very little sensible of pity [wrote La Rochefoucauld], and I would prefer not to feel it at all. Nevertheless there is nothing that I would not do for the afflicted, and I believe that I ought to do what I can for them--even to expressing compassion for their woes, for the wretches are so stupid that it does them the greatest good in the world to receive sympathy; but I believe that we ought to confine ourselves to expressing pity; we ought to take great care not to feel it; pity is a passion which is good for nothing in a well-made soul; when entertained it weakens the heart, and therefore we ought to relegate it to beings who need passions to incite them to do things because they are incapable of acting by reason.
The manly characters in Corneille's heroic comedies never lower themselves to the plane of the common people, nor to a plane where they can think as the people think. Corneille was "of the Court" by all his feelings and by all his prejudices, and he shared Mademoiselle's belief that there is a natural difference between the man of quality and the man below the quality, because generous virtues are mingled with the blood which runs in noble veins, while the blood of the man of lower birth is mingled with lower passions. Being a true courtier, Corneille believed that above the two varieties of the human kind--the quality and the lesser people--Providence set the order of Princes who are of an essence apart, elect, and quasi-divine.