bey, "with a great procession, preceded at the College by a Latin oration, and by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music."

And so, if you like that sort of thing, there you have what you like; and if you have Dryden's talents, and are willing to sell them to the ruling classes, I can drive you over to Hollywood any day, and introduce you to the fellows who will start you off at twenty thousand a year, and raise you to two hundred thousand as soon as you have begun to deliver the goods.

CHAPTER XL

GLORY PROPAGANDA

In order to make a consecutive story we have followed the development of English art for a century and a half. We now go back to cover the same period on the Continent, where a new ruling class has acquired wealth and power and has ordered a supply of new artists.

The difference between France and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be summed up briefly. The English revolt against the Catholic machine was successful, therefore the spirit of the English race expanded, and new art forms were created. In France, on the other hand, the Catholic machine succeeded in crushing the Protestants; something over fifty thousand were slaughtered on St. Bartholomew's Eve; and therefore the art of France was held within the mold of the classical tradition. The Elizabethan drama grew out of the old miracle and mystery plays, a native product, crude, but popular and democratic. There existed such a native drama also in France; but it was scorned and repressed by authority, and cultured art followed the tragedies of Seneca, a Roman millionaire of the time of Nero, who had of course derived from the Greeks.

It may seem strange that Catholic absolutism should have made Greek and Latin art forms a part of its sacred dogma; but so it was. The doctors of the church in the Middle Ages had put together a theology, in part from the early Christian fathers, and in part from Athenian and Alexandrian philosophers. It was for denying Ptolemy's doctrine that the sun moved round the earth that

Galileo was forced to recant under threat of torture by the pope; and it was for denying the sacred "three unities," derived from Aristotle's "Poetics," that playwrights were critically tortured by the priests of orthodox culture.

These three dogmas of play-writing were unity of theme, unity of time, and unity of place. The first is, within reasonable limits, a natural requirement of any work of art; but unity of time, meaning that the play must happen within twenty-four hours, and unity of place, meaning that it must happen on one physical spot, are absurdities. It is hard for us to realize that such rules were compulsory upon any dramatist who wished to see his work upon the stage; it is harder yet for us to realize that such rules were used as weapons in the class struggle, along with the infallibility of the pope and the divine right of kings.

There arose in France a prelate of the grim and bloody kind, who became the king's minister, and directed the slaughtering of the Huguenots, and chopped off the heads of the rebellious nobles; he even forced the church to submit itself, and made his king the absolute ruler of France, so that a year after Richelieu's death it was possible for the king's son to ascend the throne, and to say, "I am the State," and have no one dispute him through his reign of seventy-two years. One of the engines of repression that Richelieu devised was the French Academy, to take charge of the language and art of the monarchy, and impose law and order by chopping off the literary heads of all rebels. This Academy became the ruling authority in cultured France, and has filled that rôle for three hundred years. Not merely has it served the ruling classes by maintaining tradition and discrediting every innovation in French letters; it has issued formal pronouncements against unorthodox social and political books—for example, Rousseau's "Social Contract." A list of the French men of letters who have been excluded from the "immortals" includes Descartes, Pascal, Molière, Saint-Simon, LeSage, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Diderot, Compte, Proudhon, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, Jaurès, Barbusse, Rolland.

The polite literature which reigned in Richelieu's time was known as "précieuse," and occupied itself in the making up of elaborate long similes, extending sometimes

through several pages. It was foppish and fantastic to the point of imbecility; and the makers of it were the darlings of Richelieu's Academy. There came up from the provinces a young lawyer by the name of Pierre Corneille, who began to write successful comedies, and received the high honor of being picked by Richelieu as one of five men to write dramas under his august direction. But Corneille, a man of genius, could not long submit himself to the head-chopping cardinal. He went his own way, and incurred the raging enmity of both Richelieu and his Academy.

He wrote a tragedy in Alexandrine verse called "The Cid," which was an enormous popular success. This Cid was a legendary hero of Spain, a "free captain"—that is, the head of an army of hired mercenaries, who went about fighting for anybody who would pay him. We are used to this system of "free captains" in the United States, where they are called private detective bureaus and strikebreaking agencies. They have armies of tens of thousands of fighting men, horse, foot and artillery, whom they move about from place to place for the crushing of union labor. So before long we shall see on Broadway or in Hollywood some young writer making a tremendous ruling-class drama out of the legendary career of Alan Pinkerton or William J. Burns. The great detective will be shown in love with the beautiful daughter of some labor leader, the tragedy coming when in the course of his duty the great detective has to kill the labor leader. That is the story which Corneille developed-except that of course, it was a rival prince whom the Cid was fighting. Needless to say, in order not to have his head chopped off by Richelieu, the playwright put his hero in the position of defending legitimacy.

But the poet had failed to respect the "three unities" in his tragedy; so, although acclaimed by audiences, he was viciously attacked by the academicians one of them even challenged him to a duel! The Academy as a body was afraid to attack the play, but Richelieu forced it to take action. Corneille was not strong enough to withstand opposition such as this; in his future work he conformed to the rules, and became a humble pensioner of the cardinal. It is interesting to note that his genius began quickly to decline, and he had the humiliation of

living to old age and seeing himself scorned and neglected by the new generation. Thus Richelieu's Academy fulfilled at the outset its function, destroying the greatest tragic dramatist that France had produced, and suppressing for two hundred years the romantic movement in the French theater.

It is important to get clear the difference between the real classical art of the Greeks, and this imitation classical art of French absolutism. The Greek stage rules had been made to fit the facts of the Greek stage. Their tragedies had been enacted in a large open-air theater, and to keep the actors from looking too small they had worn high shoes, almost stilts, and had shouted to the audience through a megaphone disguised as a mask. Needless to say, they could not move quickly, and could not do anything but talk. Their tendency was to talk at great length -like mighty ships, which, having got under way, were not easily to be stopped.

But in the time of Corneille and his successors all that was gone; plays were acted in small, indoor theaters, and the characters might have been human and real. But the critical authorities ordained that the Greek conventions were sacred; so the characters of Corneille are stiff and stately, and stalk about hurling long, impassioned tirades at one another.

Nevertheless, two thousand years have not failed to make an impression upon the minds of men. The dark, overshadowing fate of the Greeks is gone, its place as director of events being taken by human ambition. Corneille's characters are embodiments of this or that passion. They are, of course, always aristocrats, the mighty and powerful of the earth; they are intended to be morally sublime, but to us they seem monsters of egotism. They want what they want when they want it, they smite their breasts and exclaim: "Moi! Moi! Moi!" There is war, splendid war, in which they gain the admiration and attention known as "glory." The tragedy comes because they cannot get all they want; they have weaknesses, especially love, which get in the way, and paralyze the will of mighty princes engaged in prevailing over each other.

At this time the Thirty Years' War was devastating Europe. It had begun as a religious war, an effort of Catholic Austria to crush German Protestantism; but it

had now degenerated into a clash of rival dynasties, with Richelieu, master intriguer, using the Protestants to put down the enemies of the French monarchy. The mother of the French king had been an Austrian princess, Catherine de' Medici, and she was intriguing against her son's country. She had been driven into exile by Richelieu, and was raising up armies against him; so, all over Europe, the people were being led out to slaughter at the whim of this vicious old woman. They were led out for one greedy prince or another; they were led out because the mistress of some king had been snubbed by the wife of some emperor; they were led out for an endless tangle of royal jealousies and noble spites.

And the function of the dramas of Corneille is to take us into the souls of these lawless aristocrats; all the powers of genius, all the resources of the stage are expended in order that we may share their furies, may_strut the stage with them and deliver tumultuous tirades. For a time or two the experience is interesting; but then the novelty wears off, and we ask ourselves: Do I really care anything about these heroes? Do I want to share their feelings or do I want to change the world, so that there may be no corner where such dangerous and destructive creatures can lurk? And so ends the glory propaganda of Corneille.

CHAPTER XLI

UNBRIDLED DESIRES

Louis XIV, the "grand monarch," ascended the throne of France in the year 1643, while Cromwell's "Ironsides" were fighting their king, and only six years before they cut off his head. A greater difference between two kingdoms could scarcely be imagined; and this difference is completely reflected in French and English art.

All the life of France was centered at the court. The monarch who was "the State" withdrew himself from Paris, and built a magnificent play-ground at Versailles; aqueducts were constructed, a barren waste was turned into a pleasure-park, whole forests of trees being moved and replanted. Great palaces arose; the architects and landscape gardeners, the sculptors and painters poured