ories, or defective in his practice. The attempts of
his predecessors had been without life, because they lacked really
tragic characters and the play of really tragic passions; while their
style had been either pedantically imitative or a medley of plagiarisms.
He conquered tragedy at once for the national theatre and for the
national literature--and this, not by a long tentative process of
production, but by a few masterpieces, which may be held to be
comprehended within the ten years 1636 to 1646; for in his many later
tragedies he never again proved fully equal to himself. The French
tragedy, of which the great age begins with the _Cid_, _Horace_,
_Cinna_, _Polyeucte_ and _Rodogune_, was not, whatever it professed to
be, a copy of the classical tragedy of Greeks or Romans, or an imitation
of the Italian imitations of these; nor, though in his later tragedies
Corneille depended less and less upon characters, and more and more,
after the fashion of the Spaniards, upon situations, and even upon
spectacle, were the forms of the Spanish drama able to assert their
dominion over the French tragic stage. The mould of French tragedy was
cast by Corneille; but the creative power of his genius was unable to
fill it with more than a few examples. His range of passions and
characters was limited; he preferred, he said, the reproach of having
made his women too heroic to that of having made his men effeminate. His
actions inclined too much to the exhibition of conflicts political
rather than broadly ethical in their significance. The defects of his
style are of less moment; but in this, as in other respects, he was,
with all his strength and brilliancy, not one of those rarest of artists
who are at the same time the example and the despair of their
successors. The _examens_ which he printed of all his plays up to 1660
show how much self-criticism (though it may not always be as in this
case conscious) contributes to the true fertility of genius.

In comedy also Corneille begins the first great original epoch of French
dramatic literature; for it was to him that Moliere owed the inspiration
of the tone and style which he made those of the higher forms of French
comedy. But _Le Menteur_ (the parent, with its sequel, of a numerous
dramatic progeny[103]) was itself derived from a Spanish original,[104]
which it did not (as was the case with the _Cid_) transform into
something new. French tragi-comedy Corneille can hardly be said to ha