POLYEUCTE, pOle-ekts. Polyeucte was an Armenian Christian who suffered for his faith under the persecutions of the Emperor Decius and was afterward canonized, his day being the 9th of January. His name would no doubt to-day be no more widely known than that of the obscurest of the noble army of martyrs had not Pierre Corneille chanced to see in the story of his conversion and martyr dom the material for a tragedy and created from it a masterpiece, with the result that, as he said, 'tmany have learned the name of Polyeucte rather in the theatre than at church.° It was a bold venture to use the language and senti ments of Christian faith on the stage, where the prestige of classical models had estab lished the mythology of antiquity. They were held to be too sacred for such profane use. Corneille's friends of the inner circle of taste of the Hotel de Rambouillet remonstrated with him and predicted the failure of his play. But they were wrong. His picture of the triumph of faith in the heart of the new convert and of the serene and joyful courage with which it is confessed, more still perhaps the appealing figure of Pauline, one of the noblest of Corneille's women, so steadfast in her wifely duty in the shock of the unexpected return of the lover mourned for dead, so surely after the manner of the Cornelian hero, the 'captain of her soul) won the applause of the public.
It proved to be one of the most successful of his plays, as it is one of the best. It is the one that is perhaps the most wholly his own crea tion, the most happily constructed dramatically, the most noble and at the same time most simple in thought and language. The critics continued to disapprove its use of religion, and the 18th century quite discredited it as of fensive both to its taste and to its opinions. But the 19th century restored it to the rightful place of honor, which it continues to hold.