CORNEILLE, k5entey', PIERRE (1606-S4). One of the greatest tragic poets of France. Ile was born at Rouen, June 6, 1606, the son of a lawyer and magistrate of worth, ennobled in 1637. He was trained by the Jesuits, took the advocate's oaths in 1624, and held minor legal offices until 1650. His first play, MOite, pre sented in Paris (1629), was popular. and was followed by Clitandre La reurc (1633), his first comedy; La quiet-le do palais and La suirante, both comedies (1634). In 1634 he met Richelieu, composed a Latin elegy on his visit to Rouen, and was enrolled among the five poets of the cardinal statesman, of whom Rotrnu alone was at all worthy of his company. He soon incurred Richelieu's displeasure for too frank criticism of his literary work, and wrote, uninfluenced by the Minister's favor, La place royale, Meshes (both 1635), and L'il/usion emu ique ( 1636). But all this earlier work was completely cast in the shade by the triumph of his epoch-making Cid (1636), though we may not leave these earlier dramas without recording that they are far superior to anything that had preceded them in vigor and in truth to nature, and that to them we owe the happy in vention of the soubrette. Such promise as they gave, however, pointed less to the field of Co• neille's great achievement than to the drama of intrigue and to the comedy of contemporary society, for some of them are full of rather coarse stage business and a battledore and shuttlecock repartee, and are written in a style that he felt needed apology for its familiar simplicity.
The tragicomedy of Le Cid was so different from Corneille's earlier dramas that it hardly seems the work of the same hand. It gave him a preininence over contemporaries and prede cessors, questioned only by interested rivals and the Academy, which Richelieu summoned to sup port them, and which it did with stunned half heartedness. Among the conservative critics passion ran as high as in the famous battle over Hermini. Scuday, a critic of repute, asserted, and seems to have believed, that Le Cid's subject was ill-chosen, its structure un pardonable, its action clumsy, its verification had, and that its undeniable beauties were stolen from a Spanish play by Guilien de Castro, which was indeed its acknowledged source. But
the public spoke with no uncertain voice, and though Le Cid may lack the ethical depth and tragic force of *ome of Corneille's later dramas, it was and has remained the most popular on the stage of them all. Modern French drama dates from Le Cid.
In the controversy that raged around Le Cid, Corueille's position was delicate. He was not by nature a tactful disputant, being indeed in clined to arrogance, as lie showed on this occa sion by his Excuse a Ariste; he could not afford to lose the favor that Richelieu continued to show him, and be could not secure a full hearing without imperiling it. He therefore withdrew for three years to Rouen. When he returned in 1639 to Paris it was with a matured genius that almost immediately asserted itself in un paralleled splendor and fecundity. Yet the theme of Le Cid, the struggle between honor and love in the hero, between duty and love in the heroine, remains typical of the later tragedies. Typical of them all are also the five acts and the three `unities:' the time limited to twenty-four hours, the scene to a single town, and the action to a central interest—self-imposed fetters worn with even greater complacency by Racine. The Spaniards knew nothing of these unities, and the effort to force their romantic drama, into this rigid mold had by the improbabilities, mate rial and psychic, that it involved, given occasion for most of the criticism that had befallen Le Cid. Corneille, therefore, in 1639, turned to classical subjects that would lend themselves more readily to the episodical treatment which the unities demanded. What survived of romance in him was the invariable intermingling of love with sterner themes.