twenty-four hours, beginning one day and ending the next, the bridal night intervening. The action of the first three acts—the defeat of Syphax, followed by the marriage of his wife Sophonisba to the victorious Massanissa—is got into the twenty-four hours only at the expense of improbability, and that of the kind that jars upon our feelings; but the fourth and fifth acts contain just the kind of incident which Corneille was to make the typical plot of tragedy—a rapid, because intense, conflict between the passion of Massanissa and Roman policy embodied in Scipio. Mairet is not capable of the splendid and sustained eloquence with which Corneille, in his best days, would have elaborated the situation; but even Corneille did not disdain, when he wrote Horace, to borrow from the dying speech of Sophonisba.
With Sophonisbe Mairet's work culminated. His later plays need not detain us. The further development of comedy, the final crystallisation of classical French tragedy, and the purification and heightening of dramatic style were the work of a young dramatist who had begun to write some five years earlier, and who, after experiments by no means devoid of interest in the direction of comedy, received from Mairet's Sophonisbe an impetus which, after a little preliminary stumbling, carried him into the path that he and French tragedy were to follow henceforward.
Pierre Corneille[1] (1606-1684) was, like Malherbe, a
- ↑ Œuvres, ed. M. Marty-Laveaux, 12 vols., Paris, 1862-68 (Grands Écrivains de la France). Felix Hémon, Le Théâtre de Corneille, 4 vols., Paris, 1887. Studies in the histories and by the writers
