Pierre Corneille biography

Dromo's Den

Pierre Corneille Biography

CORNEILLE, PIERRE (1606-84). One of the greatest tragic poets of France. He 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, Mélite, presented in Paris (1629), was popular and was followed by Clitandre (1632), a tragi-comedy; La veuve (1633), his first comedy; La galerie du palais (1633) and La suivante (1634), both comedies. These early plays are full of the insipid love in fashion at the time, and the title of one of them will suffice alone to show their realism. 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 Rotrou 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, Médée, his first tragedy (both 1635), and L'Illusion comique (1636). But all this earlier work was completely eclipsed 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 invention of the soubrette. Such promise as they gave, however, pointed less to the field of Corneille'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. Still, we must admit that in them Corneille created the comedy of manners as well as the beginnings of character comedy.

The tragi-comedy 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 preeminence over contemporaries and predecessors, questioned only by interested rivals and the Academy, which Richelieu summoned to support them, and which it did with studied half-heartedness. Among the conservative critics passion ran as high as in the famous battle over Hugo's Hernani. Scudéry, a critic of repute, asserted that Le Cid's subject was ill chosen, its structure unpardonable, its action clumsy, its versification bad, and that its undeniable beauties were stolen from a Spanish play by Guillen 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 some 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 Corneille's position was delicate. He was not by nature a tactful disputant, being indeed inclined to arrogance, as he showed on this occasion by his Excuse à Artiste; he could not afford to lose the favor that Richelieu continued to show him, and he 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 unparalleled 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 24 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, material 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.

Horace (1640) sets the love of man and woman against the love of race and fatherland in fourfold treatment of a single theme. In the more modern Cinna passion twists love of fatherland to its purpose and is opposed at once to the magnanimity and the patriotism of Augustus. Polyeucte (1642) opposes Christian to marital duty in a story of Christian martyrdom, which was a bold venture, for many thought, with Boileau, that the mysteries of the faith should be kept out of literature. These three, with Le Cid, mark the height of Corneille's achievement -- the climax of the development of the elements of love and will -- save that he touches for a moment a greater intensity of terror in Rodogune (1646). The other tragedies are more or less pale imitations of the merits of these. Among them it is worth while to name: La mort de Pompée (1643), which is but a series of dialogues and narratives; Théodore (1645), an even more dubious venture in Christian martyrology than Polyeucte had been; Héraclius (1647), followed by Corneille's election to the Academy; Nicomède (1651); Pertharite (1652). The last was an unmistakable failure which led Corneille for a time to withdraw altogether from the stage.

During these years he had written also two comedies on Spanish models, Le menteur, the best comedy written in France before Molière, and Suite du menteur (1644-45), and a good tragi-comedy, Don Sanche d'Aragon (1650) , which, as the name implies, was Spanish also.

Disappointed by the failure of Pertharite, Corneille withdrew to Rouen, where he lived from 1652 to 1659, and turned his talent to versifying Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ (1656), and to the writing of very frank critical essays on his own plays and the drama, in general. He was recalled from this by a visit of Molière's company to Rouen in 1658, and between 1659 and 1674 wrote 11 tragedies of unequal mediocrity, though in each of them there were verses "with necks in thunder clothed and long resounding pace," such as he alone has known the art to create. The time to regret had passed, the tune to cry halt had come, when Boileau wrote his famous epigram, Après Angésilas hélas (1666); Mais après Attila holà (1667). A new conception of dramatic art had been introduced by Boileau and Racine, and when Corneille was beguiled into a contest for court favor, he was fated to see his young rival's Bérénice preferred to his Tite et Bérénice (1670). Other plays of this period are: Œdipe (1659); Lee toison d'or (1660); Sertorius (1662); Sophonisbe, (1663), after which he received an irregularly paid pension of 2000 livres; Othon (1664); Psyché (1671) , in collaboration with Molière and Quinault; Pulchérie (1672); and Suréna (1674). He had written some devotional poetry between 1665 end 1670, and among his last compositions were sonic beautiful verses of thanks addressed to Louis XIV in 1676. Corneille's last years were passed in pecuniary straits, "satiated with glory and hungry for money" as he said, and when, at the urgent request of Boileau, the King sent him 200 pistoles, it was already too late, He had no time to spend them, and two days after he was dead (Oct. 1, 1684).

Corneille's works show him, as his friends describe and as his portraits paint him, a man of serious, rugged, and almost stern temper, A pious churchman, he was ill at ease in society, and awkward and unsuccessful when he attempted to flatter. The only touches of romantic sentiment revealed in his verses are found in those addressed to an actress of Molière's company, Mlle. du Pare, who scorned his attentions. Whether from pride or shyness, he never curried favor, nor took his place with courtiers at a time when this was almost necessary to literary prosperity. His public manners were not gracious, though he was an affectionate husband and brother. His best work never lost popular favor, and the most eminent of his literary contemporaries always did him justice. The greatest of them, Molière, spoke of him as his master, and Racine pronounced at the Academy a eulogy on his rival at once just and generous, that later critics have in the main confirmed.

The first impression made by an attentive reading of Corneille's work is its remarkable; unevenness. Judged by his best, he ranks with the greatest. No dramatic poet rises to grander heights. Hence no poet is more quotable and few more quoted, for he has hundreds of lines that cling to the memory by their crash of sound and startling fullness of suggestion – "the most beautiful," says the French critic Faguet, "that ever fell from a French pen." And the same critic says of Corneille's language that it is "the most masculine, energetic, at once sober and full, that was ever spoken in France."

Corneille's tragedies arouse admiration rather than tragic fear. His interest is not in the fate of his characters, but in the unconquerable mind with which they meet it, their haughty disdain of destiny. He is of the school of the emphatics, delighting in extraordinary situations and subjects, in whatever will challenge the will to its utmost utterance. There is no fine-spun sentiment even in the love of Le Cid. But tragedy with the limitations of the "unities" involves much talk and little action, and Corneille's disdain of the endless subject of talk allows the interest to flag for scenes and even acts. There is monotony. even in his nobility, and that in spite of the lyric and epic elements which he found in the drama and from which Racine was to free it. Yet his declamations -- the tirades of Camilla, Augustus, Cornelia, and many another -- are supreme in their kind and will thrill audiences as long as the antinomies of love and patriotism, honor and duty, perplex men's souls.

The best edition of Corneille is Marty-Laveaux's (12 vols., 1862-68) . For bibliography, consult Picot's Bibliographie Cornélienne (1865), and Le Verdicr and Pelay, Additions à la Bibliographie Cornélienne (1908).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. VI (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 90-91.