nd the attempts to explain this inequality, in reference
to his own and other theories, leave the fact untouched. Producing, as
he certainly has produced, work which classes him with the greatest
names in literature, he has also signed an extraordinary quantity of
verse which has not merely the defects of genius, irregularity,
extravagance, _bizarrete_, but the faults which we are apt to regard as
exclusively belonging to those who lack genius, to wit, the dulness and
tediousness of mediocrity. Moliere's manner of accounting for this is
famous in literary history or legend. "My friend Corneille," he said,
"has a familiar who inspires him with the finest verses in the world.
But sometimes the familiar leaves him to shift for himself, and then he
fares very badly." That Corneille was by no means destitute of the
critical faculty his _Discourses_ and the _Examens_ of his plays (often
admirably acute, and, with Dryden's subsequent prefaces, the originals
to a great extent of specially modern criticism) show well enough. But
an enemy might certainly contend that a poet's critical faculty should
be of the Promethean, not be Epimethean order. The fact seems to be that
the form in which Corneille's work was cast, and which by an odd irony
of fate he did so much to originate and make popular, was very partially
suited to his talents. He could imagine admirable situations, and he
could write verses of incomparable grandeur--verses that reverberate
again and again in the memory, but he could not, with the patient
docility of Racine, labour at proportioning the action of a tragedy
strictly, at maintaining a uniform rate of interest in the course of the
plot and of excellence in the fashion of the verse. Especially in his
later plays a verse and a couplet will crash out with fulgurous
brilliancy, and then be succeeded by pages of very second-rate
declamation or argument. It was urged against him also by the party of
the _Doucereux_, as he called them, that he could not manage, or did not
attempt, the great passion of love, and that except in the case of
Chimene his principle seemed to be that of one of his own heroines:--

"Laissons, seigneur, laissons pour les petites ames
Ce commerce rampant de soupirs et de flammes."

(Aristie in _Sertorius_.)

There is perhaps some truth in this accusation, however much some of us
may be disposed to think that the line just quoted is a fair enough
description of the admired ecstasies