12 January 1863 – 18 January 1863

To-day it has been the turn of “Polyeucte” and “La Morte de Pompée.” Whatever one’s objections may be, there is something grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is the dramatic genre which is false. His heroes are rôles rather than men. They pose as magnanimity, virtue, glory, instead of realizing them before us. They are always en scène, studied by others, or by themselves. With them glory—that is to say, the life of ceremony and of affairs, and the opinion of the public—replaces nature—becomes nature. They never speak except ore rotundo, in cothurnus, or sometimes on stilts. And what consummate advocates they all are! The French drama is an oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing parties, on a day which is to end with the death of somebody, and where all the personages represented are in haste to speak before the hour of silence strikes. Elsewhere, speech serves to make action intelligible; in French tragedy action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the procedure calculated to extract the finest possible speeches from the persons who are engaged in the action, and who represent different perceptions of it at different moments and from different points of view. Love and nature, duty and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, who makes them fall into all the tragic attitudes. What is really curious and amusing is that the people of all others the most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have always understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic fashion. But it was inevitable.