La Mort de Solon, pièce attribuée by Elizabeth M. Fraser; Pierre CorneilleReview by: H. Carrington LancasterModern Language Notes, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Apr., 1950), pp. 282-283Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2909478 .

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282 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, APRIL, 1950

cerning Goethe and his works. A comparison with that of the Insel edition showed that under A, for instance, only three words were missing but given under different headings. On the other hand, 43 new entries were made, which mostly contain conceptual words like the following: Aberglaube, Alliteration, Assonanzen, Attraktiva, Aufklarung, Auge, Augenblick, Autoritiit, etc. Some of these are transferred from the Goethe part of the Insel index, to be sure, but we are, after all, concerned with Goethe's views whether here or there.

The only stricture that may be made is the lack of a period after the page reference, which is disturbing in so far as one is apt to forget whether this number belongs to the preceding or following entry.

Further volumes of this edition will be reviewed later.

ERNST FEisE

La Mort de Solon, piece attribue'e par ELIZABETH M. FRASER A

PIERRE CORNEILLE. Paris: Chez l'Editeur, 10, rue Sainte- Anne, 1949. Pp. 136.

In 1944 Miss Fraser discovered in Edinburgh the manuscript of a French pastoral play called Alidor which, in the next two years, she twice attributed to Corneille.' More recently she ran across in Paris the manuscript of a tragedy entitled la Mort de Solon, which she thinks Corneille composed about 1650. Not satisfied with these findings, she proposes to prove that Corneille wrote all the work of Moliere, Charles Sorel, Jacques Du Lorens, and Charles Robinet. He must have been a busy man!

Her arguments are based on handwriting and on what she con- siders Corneille's monopoly of certain stylistic devices, which she lists as repetition, antithesis, enumeration, invocation, and maxims. It would be unwise to call her attention to the fact that such characteristics are found in many seventeenth-century authors, for, if one did so, she might deprive these writers of their poems and assign them all to Corneille.

Now, as Alidor is certainly not written in Corneille's hand, as the rule for alternance is not respected in it, as un is often written ung, as guerir appears as guarir, as poison is made feminine, and as croire rimes with faire, I have come to the conclusion, though I have seen photostats of only a few pages of the manuscript, that the pastoral was written about 1600, before Corneille was born.

La Mort de Solon, on the contrary, seems to have been written long after Corneille's death. The tragedy is not, as Miss Fraser

' Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 29, 1945; MLR, April, 1946.

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REVIEWS 283

states, " inconnue." It was published in the Petite Bibliotheque des the&tres 2 and was listed by Paul Lacroix 3 and by Dr. C. D. Brenner.4 The page of the manuscript that Miss Fraser repro- duces 5 is written in what appears to me to be an eighteenth-cen- tury hand that bears no resemblance to Corneille's. No one who has any appreciation of Corneille as dramatist and poet could see in this forlorn production

la main qui crayonna L'ame du grand Pomp6e et l'esprit de Cinna.

Corneille, moreover, never counts dieux, suis, and meurtriers 6 as words of two syllables, nor does he or any author of tragedies in his time employ the modern construction avant de plus an infinitive in the way that the author of la Mort de So.,on uses it three times.7 This last fact amply supports Dr. Brenner in placing the tragedy among eighteenth-century productions. It is unfortunate that the only man who might have backed Miss Fraser in her literary ad- venture, Pierre Louys, is no longer living. With his assitance and the fact that she allows Corneille several kinds of handwriting,8 she might have recovered for Corneille the authorship of all French verse written between 1628, her date for Alidor,9 and 1684, the year of his death.'0

H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

2 Paris, Berlin, 1784-89. 3 Catalogue de la Biblioth?eque dramatique de M. de Soleinne, Mn, 38, no.

3127. 4A Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language, 1700-1789,

Berkeley, Calif., 1947, p. 17. 6 La Moort de Solon, p. 44. 8Verses 159, 253, 1133. 7Verses 265, 559, 1689. 8 Ibid., p. 10. Shall we call three of the hands prenatal, contemporary,

and post mortem? 9Although Corneille calls M6lite (1630) his "coup d'essai.." 10 A sample of Miss Fraser's effort to elucidate a text is given by her

note on a faulty couplet (vv. 543-4): Et que ce lasche amant, qu'elle scayt esblouir, Fasse une perdie, et n'en puisse jouir.

Her note reads (p. 132): "Fasse une perdie; locution de la langue du XVIe si6cle. Faire une perte." But one does not ordinarily enjoy a loss, and the line, if allowed to stand, gives an example, not only, as Miss Fraser admits (p. 28), of hiatus, but of coupe f6mrinine. The proper explanation is that perdie is a scribal error for perfidie, a word that makes good sense and corrects the prosody of the line.

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