[Sainte-Beuve is considered the foremost French literary critic of the nineteenth century. Of his extensive body of critical writings, the best known are his "lundis"—weekly newspaper articles which appeared over a period of several decades, in which he displayed his knowledge of literature and history. While Sainte-Beuve began his career as a champion of Romanticism, he eventually formulated a psychological method of criticism. Asserting that the critic cannot separate a work of literature from the artist and from the artist's historical milieu, Sainte-Beuve considered an author's life and character integral to the comprehension of his work. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1855, he provides a capsule overview of Corneille's career and discusses his dramatic style, influences, and characterizations, among other concerns.]

From 1629, the period when Corneille first came to Paris, to 1636, when The Cid was first acted, he completed his literary education, which was merely sketched-out in the provinces. He put himself into connection with the wits and poets of his time, especially with those of his own age, Mairet, Scudéry, Rotrou: he learned then what he had not known hitherto, that Ronsard was a little out of fashion, that Malherbe, dead within a year, had dethroned him in public opinion; that Théophile, also dead, had disappointed all hopes and left but a questionable memory behind him; that the stage was growing nobler and purer under the care of Cardinal de Richelieu; that Hardy was no longer by any means its sole supporter, for a troop of young rivals were judging him, to his great displeasure, rather freely, and disputing his heritage. Above all, Corneille learned that there were rules of which he had never dreamed in Rouen, but about which the brains of Paris were keenly excited: such as keeping five acts in one place or getting out of it; to be, or not to be within the space of twenty-four hours, etc. The learned men and the rule-lovers made war on these points against the lawless and the ignorant. Mairet held with the former; Claveret declared against them; Rotrou cared little; Scudéry discussed emphatically.

In the various plays that Comeille composed during this space of five years, he applied himself to understand thoroughly the habits of the stage and the taste of the public; I shall not try to follow him in this tentative course….

During this time, Corneille made frequent excursions to Rouen. In one of these journeys he visited the house of a M. de Châlons, former secretary of the queen-mother, now retired from old age:

"Monsieur," the old man said to him, "the style of comedy which you have taken up can give you only ephemeral fame. You can find among the Spaniards subjects which, if treated according to our taste by hands like yours, would produce great effects. Learn their language, it is easy; I offer to teach you all I know of it, and, until you are able to read for yourself, I will translate to you parts of Guillen de Castro."

This meeting was great good luck for Corneille; no sooner had he set foot into the noble poesy of Spain than he felt at ease, as if in a country of his own. Loyal spirit, full of honour and morality, walking with uplifted head, he could not fail to feel a sudden and deep affection for the chivalrous heroes of that brave nation. His impetuous warmth of heart, his childlike sincerity, his inviolable devotion in friendship, his melancholy resignation in love, his religion of duty, his nature wholly unveiled, naively grave and sententious, noble with pride and prud' homie—all inclined him strongly to the Spanish style. He embraced it with fervour, adapted it, without much considering how, to the taste of his nation and his age, and created for himself a unique originality in the midst of the commonplace imitations that were being made around him. No more tentatives, no slow progressive advance, as in his preceding comedies. Blind and rapid in his instinct, he went at one stroke to the sublime, the glorious, the pathetic, as if to things familiar; producing them in splendid, simple language that all the world can understand, and which belongs to him alone. From the night of the first representation of The Cid our theatre was truly founded; France possessed the great Corneille; and the triumphant poet, who, like his own heroes, spoke openly of himself as he thought, had the right to exclaim, without fear of denial:

"I know what I am; I believe what is said of me."

The dazzling success of The Cid and the very legitimate pride felt and shown by Corneille raised all his past rivals and all the authors of tragedy, from Claveret to Richelieu, against him. I shall not dwell here on the details of this quarrel, which is one of the best-illuminated spots in our literary history. The effect produced on the poet by this outbreak of criticism was such as might be expected from the character of his talent and his mind. Corneille, as I have said, was a pure, instinctive, blind genius, of free, spontaneous impulse, and well-nigh devoid of those medium qualities which accompany, and second efficaciously, the gift divine in a poet. He was neither adroit nor skilful in details, his taste was little delicate, his judgment not sure, his tact obtuse, and he gave himself small account of his methods as an artist; he piqued himself, however, on his shrewdness and reserve. Between his genius and his good sense there was nothing, or nearly nothing; and that good sense, which did not lack subtlety or logic, had to make strong efforts, especially if provoked, to goad itself up to the level of the genius, to grasp it in hand, comprehend it, and train it. If Corneille had come earlier, before the Academy and Richelieu, in place of Alexandre Hardy, for example, he would doubtless not have been exempt from falls, errors, and mistakes; perhaps, indeed, other enormities might be found in him than those against which our present taste revolts in certain of his worst passages; but at least his failures would have been solely according to the nature and trend of his genius; and when he rose out of them, when he obtained sight of the beautiful, the grand, the sublime, he would have rushed to it as into his own region, without dragging after him the baggage of rules, cumbersome and puerile scruples, and a thousand petty hindrances to a vast and soaring flight. The quarrel of The Cid, arresting him at his first step, forcing him to return upon himself and confront his work with rules, disturbed for the future that prolonged growth, full of chances, that sort of potent, unconscious vegetation, so to speak, for which nature seemed to have destined him. He took umbrage, he was indignant at first at the cavillings of criticism; but he inwardly reflected on the rules and precepts imposed upon him, and ended, finally, by adapting himself to them, and believing them.

The mortifications that followed closely on the triumph of The Cid carried him back to his family in Rouen, which place he did not leave again until 1639, when he returned to Paris with Horace and Cinna in hand. To quit Spain the instant he had set foot in it, to push no farther that glorious victory of The Cid, to renounce, in gaiety of heart, all those magnanimous heroes who stretched their arms to him, and turn aside to fasten upon a Castilian Rome on the faith of Lucan and Seneca, Spanish burghers under Nero, was, for Corneille, not to profit by his advantages and to misinterpret the voice of his genius at the very moment when it spoke so clearly. But at that time fashion, vogue, carried minds more toward ancient Rome than toward Spain. Besides the amorous gallantries and noble, conventional sentiments attributed to those old republicans, special occasion was given, by producing them on the stage, to apply the maxims of State, and all the political and diplomatic jargon that we find in Balzac and in Gabriel Naudé, and to which Richelieu himself gave currency. Probably Corneille allowed himself to be seduced by these reasons of the moment; nevertheless, out of his very error came masterpieces.

I will not follow him through the various successes that marked his career during its fifteen finest years. Polyeucte, Pompée, Le Menteur, Rodogune, Héraclius, Don Sanche, and Nicomède are its enduring landmarks. He returned to imitation of the Spanish in Le Menteur, a comedy in which the comic (which Corneille did not understand) is much less to be admired than the imbroglio, the movement, and the fancy. Again he returned to the Castilian genius in Héraclius, but above all in Nicomède and Don Sanche, those two wonderful creations, unique upon our stage, which, coming in the midst of the Fronde, with their singular mixture of romantic heroism and familiar irony, stirred up innumerable malignant or generous allusions, and won universal applause. Yet it was shortly after these triumphs, in 1653, that Corneille, wounded by the non-success of Pertharite, and touched perhaps by Christian sentiments and remorse, resolved to renounce the theatre. He was then forty-seven years of age; he had just translated in verse the first chapters of the Imitation of Jesus Christ, and he desired henceforth to devote the remainder of his vigour to pious subjects….

Corneille imagined, in 1653, that he renounced the stage. Pure illusion! That withdrawal, could it have been possible, would no doubt have been better for his peace of mind, and perhaps for his fame. But he had not the kind of poetic temperament that could impose upon itself at will a continence of fifteen years—as Racine did later. Encouragement and a gratuity from Fouquet sufficed to bring him back to the stage, where he remained a score of years longer, till 1674, waning, day by day, under numberless mistakes and cruel griefs….

Corneille's dramatic form has not the freedom of fancy that Lope de Vega and Shakespeare gave themselves; neither has it the exactly regular severity to which Racine subjected himself. If he had dared, if he had come before d'Aubignac, Mairet, or Chapelain, he would, I think, have cared very little for graduating and marshalling his acts, connecting his scenes, concentrating his effects on a single point of space and duration; he would have written haphazard, tangling and untangling the threads of his plot, changing the locality as it suited him, delaying on the way, and pushing his personages pell-mell before him to marriage or death. In the midst of this confusion beautiful scenes, admirable groups would have detached themselves here and there; for Corneille understands grouping very well, and, at essential moments, he poses his personages most dramatically. He balances one against the other, defines them vigorously with a brief and manly saying, contrasts them by cutting repartees, and presents to the spectator's eye the masses of a skilful structure. But he had not a genius sufficiently artistic to extend over an entire drama that concentric configuration which he has realized in places; at the same time, his fancy was not free or alert enough to create for itself a form, moving, undulating, diffuse, multiplied, but not less real, less beautiful than the other, such as we admire in certain plays of Shakespeare, such as the Schlegels admire so much in Calderon. Add to these natural imperfections the influence of a superficial and finical poetic art, about which Corneille overconcerned himself, and you will have the secret of what is ambiguous, undecided, and incompletely reckoned in the making of his tragedies.

His Discours and his Examens give us numerous details on this point, in which we find revealed the most hidden recesses of his great mind. We see how the pitless unity of place frets him, and how heartily he would say to it: "Oh! you hamper me!" and with what pains he tries to combine it with "decorum." He does not always succeed. "Pauline," he writes, "comes to an antechamber to meet Severus whose visit she ought to await in her private apartment." Pompey seems to disregard the prudence of the general of an army, when, trusting to Sertorius, he goes to confer with him in a town where the latter is master; "but it was impossible," says Corneille, "to keep the unity of place without making him commit this blunder." But when there was absolute necessity for the action to be carried on in two different places, the following is the expedient that Corneille invents to evade the rule:

These two places have no need of different scenery, and neither of the two should ever be named, but only the general region in which both are situated, such as Paris, Rome, Lyons, Constantinople, etc. This will help to deceive the audience, who, seeing nothing to mark the diversity of place, will not perceive it—unless by malicious and critical reflection, of which few are capable; most of them attending eagerly to the action they see represented before them.

He congratulates himself like a child on the complexity of Héraclius because "that poem is so involved it re quires marvellous attention"; and requests us to notice in Othon that "never was a play seen in which so many marriages were proposed and none concluded."

Corneille's personages are grand, generous, valiant, frank, lofty of head, and noble of heart. Brought up for the most part under austere discipline, the maxims by which they rule their lives are for ever on their lips; and as they never depart from those maxims we have no difficulty in recognising them; a glance suffices: which is almost the contrary of Shakespeare's personages and of human beings in life. The morality of his heroes is spotless: as fathers, lovers, friends, or enemies, we admire and honour them; in pathetic parts their tone is sublime, it lifts the soul and makes us weep. But his rivals and his husbands have sometimes a tinge of the ridiculous: so has Don Sancho in The Cid, also Prusias and Pertharite. His tyrants and his step-mothers are all of a piece like his heroes, wicked from one end to the other; nevertheless, at sight of a fine action it sometimes happens that they face about suddenly to virtue, like Grimoald and Arsinoé.

Corneille's men have formal and punctilious minds: they quarrel about etiquette; they argue at length and wrangle loudly with themselves, even in their passions. There is something of the Norman in them. Auguste, Pompée and others seem to have studied logic at Salamanca, and to have read Aristotle with the Arabs. His heroines, his "adorable furies," nearly all resemble one another; their love is subtle, over-refined, with a purpose; coming more from the head than the heart. We feel that Corneille knew little of women. Nevertheless, he succeeded in expressing in Chimène and Pauline that virtuous power of self-sacrifice that he himself had practised in his youth. Strange as it may seem, after his return to the theatre in 1659, and in all the numerous plays of his decadence—Aitila, Bérénice, Pulchérie, Suréna,—Corneille had a mania for mingling love in everything, just as La Fontaine had for introducing Plato. It seems as though the successes of Quinault and Racine enticed him to that ground, and that he wanted to read a lesson to "those tender ones" as he called them. He imagined that in his day he had been still more gallant and amorous than those "young flaxen wings," and he never spoke of other times without shaking his head like an elderly swain.

Corneille's style is, to my thinking, the merit by which he excels. Voltaire, in his commentary, exhibits on this point, as on others, a sovereign injustice, and also what may be called great ignorance of the origins of our language. He blames his author at every turn for having neither grace nor elegance nor clearness; he measures, pen in hand, the height of the metaphors, and when they exceed somewhat he calls them gigantic. He translates and disguises in prose Corneille's lofty and sonorous phrases, which suit so finely the bearing of his heroes, and asks if that is speaking and writing French. He churlishly calls "solecism" what he ought to describe as "idiom"—namely the construction, or form of speech peculiar to a special language; a thing that is completely lacking to the narrow, symmetrical, abbreviated French language of the eighteenth century. Corneille's style, with all its negligences, seems to me one of the greatest manners of the century that had Molière and Bossuet. The touch of the poet is rough, severe, vigorous. I compare him to a sculptor, who, working the clay to express heroic portraiture, employs no instrument but his thumb, and, kneading thus his work, gives it a supreme character of life itself with all the jostling incidents that accompany and complete it; but all such proceeding is incorrect, it is not polished, not "proper," as they say. There is little painting or colour in Corneille's style; it is warm rather than brilliant; it turns willingly to the abstract; imagination and fancy give way to thought and to reasoning. It ought to please statesmen, geometricians, soldiers, and others who enjoy the styles of Demosthenes, Pascal, and Caesar.

In short, Corneille, pure genius but incomplete, with his lofty aspects and his defects, gives me the impression of those great trees that are bare, rugged, sad, monotonous as to their trunk, with brunches and sombre foliage at their summit only. They are strong, powerful, gigantic, with little verdure; sap in abundance rises; but expect neither shelter, shade, nor bloom. They leaf out late, their leaves fall early, yet they live on, half-despoiled; but when their hoary brow has cast its last leaves to the autumn wind their perennial nature puts out, here and there, belated branches and green twigs. And when at last they die, their groans, the cracking of their fissures, remind one of that armoured trunk to which Lucan compared the great Pompey.