the value of whose work is inextricably
interwoven with its form. The dominating qualities of Corneille may be
more easily appreciated.

He was above all things a rhetorician; he was an instinctive master of
those qualities in words which go to produce effects of passionate
vehemence, vigorous precision, and culminating force. His great
_tirades_ carry forward the reader, or the listener (for indeed the
verse of Corneille loses half its value when it is unheard), on a
full-flowing tide of language where the waves of the verse, following
one another in a swift succession of ever-rising power, crash down at
last with a roar. It is a strange kind of poetry: not that of
imaginative vision, of plastic beauty, of subtle feeling; but that of
intellectual excitement and spiritual strength. It is the poetry of
Malherbe multiplied a thousandfold in vigour and in genius, and
expressed in the form most appropriate to it--the dramatic Alexandrine
verse. The stuff out of which it is woven, made up, not of the images of
sense, but of the processes of thought, is, in fact, simply argument.
One can understand how verse created from such material might be
vigorous and impressive; it is difficult to imagine how it could also be
passionate--until one has read Corneille. Then one realizes afresh the
compelling power of genius. His tragic personages, standing forth
without mystery, without 'atmosphere', without local colour, but simply
in the clear white light of reason, rivet our attention, and seem at
last to seize upon our very souls. Their sentences, balanced, weighty
and voluble, reveal the terrors of destiny, the furies of love, the
exasperations of pride, with an intensity of intellectual precision that
burns and blazes. The deeper these strange beings sink into their
anguish, the more remorseless their arguments become. They prove their
horror in dreadful syllogisms; every inference plunges them farther into
the abyss; and their intelligence flames upward to its highest point,
when they are finally engulfed.

Such is the singular passion that fills Corneille's tragedies. The
creatures that give utterance to it are hardly human beings: they are
embodiments of will, force, intellect and pride. The situations in which
they are placed are calculated to expose these qualities to the utmost;
and all Corneille's masterpieces are concerned with the same
subject--the combat between indomitable egoism and the forces of Fate.
It is in the mee