[Sainte-Beuve is considered the foremost French literary critic of the nineteenth century. Of his extensive body of critical writings, the best known are his "lundis"—weekly newspaper articles which appeared over a period of several decades, in which he displayed his knowledge of literature and history. While Sainte-Beuve began his career as a champion of Romanticism, he eventually formulated a psychological method of criticism. Asserting that the critic cannot separate a work of literature from the artist and from the artist's historical milieu, Sainte-Beuve considered an author's life and character integral to the comprehension of his work. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1855, he surveys the career of Racine, offering high praise for his overall accomplishment, especially the religious dramas Esther and Athalie.]

The great poets, the poets of genius, independently of their class, and without regard to their nature, lyric, epic, or dramatic, may be divided into two glorious families which, for many centuries, have alternately intermingled and dethroned one another, contending for pre-eminence in fame: between them, according to periods, the admiration of men has been unequally awarded. The primitive poets, the founders, the unmixed originals, born of themselves and sons of their own works,—Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare,—are sometimes neglected, often preferred, but are always contrary to the studious, polished, docile geniuses of the middle epochs, essentially capable of being educated and perfected. Horace, Virgil, and Tasso are the most brilliant heads of this secondary family, reputed, and with reason, inferior to its elder, but, as a usual thing, better understood by all, more accessible, more cherished. In France, Corneille and Molière are detached from it on more sides than one; Boileau and Racine belong to it wholly and adorn it, especially Racine, the most accomplished of the class, the most venerated of our poets….

Racinian poesy is so constructed that at every height are stepping-stones, and places of support for weaklings. Shakespeare's work is rougher of approach; the eye cannot take it in on all sides; I know very worthy persons who toil and sweat to climb it, and after striking against crag or bush, come back swearing in good faith that there was nothing higher up; but, no sooner are they down upon the plain than that cursed enchantment tower appears to them once more in the distance, a thousand times more imperatively than those of Montlhéry to Boileau. But let us leave Shakespeare and such comparisons and try to mount, after many worshippers, a few of the steps, slippery from long usage, that lead to Racine's marble temple….

We find him, in 1660, in communication with the actors of the Marais about a play the name of which has not come down to us. His ode on the Nymphes de la Seine, written for the marriage of the king, was sent to Chapelain, who "received it with all the kindness in the world, and, ill as he was, kept it three days to make remarks upon it in writing." The most important of these remarks related to the Tritons, who never lived in rivers, only in the sea. This poem won for Racine the protection of Chapelain, and a gift in money from Colbert….

[His] ode on La Renommée aux Muses won him another gift of money, an entrance at Court, and the acquaintance of Boileau and Molière. The Thébaïde followed rapidly.

Until then, Racine had found on his path none but protectors and friends. But his first dramatic success awakened envy, and from that moment his career was full of perplexities and vexations which his irritable susceptibility more than once embittered. The tragedy of Alexandre estranged him from Molière and Corneille; from Molière, because he withdrew the play from him and gave it to the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne; with Corneille, because the illustrious old man declared to the young man, after listening to the reading of the piece, that it showed great talent for poesy in general, but not for the stage. When it was performed, the partisans of Corneille endeavoured to hinder its success. Some said that Taxile was not an honourable man; others that he did not deserve his fate; some that Alexandre was not lover-like enough; others that he never came upon the scene except to talk of love. When Andromaque appeared, Pyrrhus was reproached for a lingering of ferocity; they wanted him more polished, more gallant, more uniform in character. This was a consequence of Corneille's system, which made all his personages of one piece, wholly good or wholly bad from head to foot; to which Racine replied, with good judgment:

Aristotle, far from asking us for perfect heroes, wishes, on the contrary, that the tragic personages, that is to say, those whose misfortune makes the catastrophe of the tragedy, shall be neither very good nor very bad. He does not wish them to be extremely good, because the punishment of a good man would excite more indignation than pity in the spectators; nor that they be bad to excess, because no one can feel pity for a scoundrel. They should therefore have a mediocre goodness, that is to say, a virtue capable of weakness, so that they fall into misfortune through some fault that causes them to be pitied and not detested.

I dwell on this point, because the great innovation of Racine, and his incontestable dramatic originality, consist precisely in this reduction of heroic personages to proportions more human, more natural, and in a delicate analysis of the secret shades of sentiment and passion. That which, above all, distinguishes Racine, in the composition of style as in that of the drama, is logical sequence, the uninterrupted connection of ideas and sentiments; in him all is filled up, leaving no void, argued without reply; never is there any chance to be surprised by those abrupt changes, those sudden volte-faces of which Corneille made frequent abuse in the play of his characters and the progression of his drama.

I am, nevertheless, far from asserting that, even in this, all the advantage of the stage was on the side of Racine; but when he appeared, novelty was in his favour, a novelty admirably adapted to the taste of a Court in which were many weaknesses, where nothing shone that had not its shadow, and the amorous chronicle of which, opened by a La Vallière, was to end in a Maintenon. It will always remain a question whether Racine's observing, inquiring method, employed to the exclusion of every other, is dramatic in the absolute sense of the world; for my part, I think it is not; but it satisfied, we must allow, the society of those days which, in its polished idleness, did not demand a drama more agitating, more tempestuous, more "transporting"—to use Mme. de Sévigné's language; a society which willingly accepted Bérénice, while awaiting Phèdre, the masterpiece of Racine's manner.

Bérénice was written by command of Madame [Henriette], Duchesse d'Orléans, who encouraged all the new poets, and who, on this occasion, did Corneille the ill-turn of bringing him into the lists in contest with his young rival. On the other hand, Boileau, a sincere and faithful friend, defended Racine against the clamouring mob of writers, upheld him in his momentary discouragements, and excited him by wise severity to a progress without intermission. This daily supervision of Boileau would assuredly have been fatal to an author of freer genius, of impetuous warmth or careless grace, like Molière, like La Fontaine, for instance; it could not be otherwise than profitable to Racine, who, before he knew Boileau, was already following (save for a few Italian whimsicalities) that path of correctness and sustained elegance in which the latter maintained and confirmed him. I think, therefore, that Boileau was right when he applauded himself for having taught Racine "to write with difficulty easy verses"; but he went too far if he gave him, as it was asserted that he did, "the precept of writing the second line before the first."

After Andromaque, which appeared in 1667, ten years elapsed before Phèdre, the triumph of which came in 1677. …

For some time past, since the first fire of youth, the first fervours of mind and senses were spent, the memory of … [Port-Royal] had again laid hold upon Racine's heart; and the involuntary comparison forced upon him between his peaceful satisfaction in other days, and his present fame, so troubled and embitered, brought him to regret a life that once was regular. This secret feeling, working within him, can be seen in the preface to Phèdre, and must have sustained him, more than we know, in the profound analysis he makes in that play of the "virtuous sorrow" of a soul that sees evil and yet pursues it. His own heart explained to him that of Phèdre; and if we suppose, what is very probable, that he was detained in spite of himself at the theatre by some amorous attachment he could not shake off, the resemblance becomes closer, and helps us to understand all that he has put into Phèdre of anguish actually felt, and more personal than usual in the struggles of passion.

However that may be, the moral aim of Phèdre is beyond a doubt; the great Arnauld himself could not refrain from recognising it, and thus almost verifying the words of the author, who "hoped, by means of this play to reconcile a quantity of celebrated persons to tragedy, through their pity and their doctrine." Nevertheless, going deeper still in his reflections on reform, Racine judged it more prudent and more consistent to quit the theatre, and he did so with courage, but without too much effort. He married, reconciled himself with Port-Royal, prepared himself in domestic life for the duties of a father, and when Louis XIV appointed him, at the same time as Boileau, historiographer, he neglected none of his new duties: with these in view, he began by making excerpts from the treatise of Lucian on "The Manner of Writing History," and he applied himself to the reading of Mézeray, Vittorio Siri, and others.

From the little that we have now read of the character, the morals, and the habits of mind of Racine, it is easy to foretell the essential fine qualities and defects of his work, to perceive to what he might have attained and, at the same time, in what he was likely to be lacking. Great art in constructing a plot; exact calculation in its arrangement; slow and successive development rather than force of conception, simple and fertile; which acts simultaneously as if by process of crystallisation around several centres in brains that are naturally dramatic; presence of mind in the smallest details; remarkable skill in winding only one thread at a time; skill also in pruning and cutting down rather than power to be concise; ingenious knowledge of how to introduce and how to dismiss his personages; sometimes a crucial situation eluded, either by a magniloquent speech or by the necessary absence of an embarrassing witness; in the characters nothing divergent or eccentric; all inconvenient accessory parts and antecedents suppressed; nothing, however, too bare or too monotonous, but only two or three harmonising tints on a simple background; then, in the midst of all this, passion that we have not seen born, the flood of which comes swelling on, softly foaming, and bearing you away, as it were, upon the whitened current of a beauteous river: that is Racine's drama. And if we come down to his style and to the harmony of his versification, we shall follow beauties of the same order, restrained within the same limits; variations of melodious tones, no doubt, but all within the scale of a single octave.

A few remarks on Britannicus will state my thought precisely, and justify it, if, given in such general terms, it may seem bold. The topic of the drama is Nero's crime, the one by which he first escapes the authority of his mother and his governors. In Tacitus, Britannicus is shown to be a young lad fourteen or fifteen years of age, gentle, intelligent, and sad. One day, in the midst of a feast, Nero, who is drunk, compels him to sing in order to make him ridiculous. Britannicus sings a song in which he makes allusion to his own precarious fate, and to the patrimony of which he has been defrauded; instead of laughing and ridiculing him, the guests, much affected and less dissimulating than usual because they were drunk, compassionated him loudly. As for Nero, though still pure of shedding blood, his natural ferocity has long been muttering in his soul and watching for an occasion to break loose. He tries slow poison on Britannicus. Debauchery gets the better of him; he neglects his wife Octavia for the courtesan Actea. Seneca lends his ministry to this shameful intrigue. Agrippina is at first shocked, but she ends by embracing her son and lending him her house for the rendezvous. Agrippina, mother, granddaughter, sister, niece, and widow of emperors, a murderess, incestuous, and a prostitute, has no other fear than to see her son escape her with the imperial power.

Such is the mental situation of the personages at the moment when Racine begins his play. What does he do? He quotes in his preface the savage words of Tacitus on Agrippina: Quœ, cunctis malœ dominationis cupidinibus flagrans, habebat in partibus Pallantem, and adds: "I merely quote this one sentence on Agrippina, for there are too many things to say of her. It is she whom I have taken the most pains to express properly, and my tragedy is not less the downfall of Agrippina than the death of Britannicus." But in spite of this stated intention of the author, the character of Agrippina is inadequately expressed; as an interest had to be created in her downfall, her most odious vices are thrown into the shade; she becomes a personage of little real presence, vague, unexplained, a sort of tender and jealous mother; there is no question of her adulteries and her murders beyond an allusion for the benefit of those who have read her history in Tacitus. In place of Actea we have the romantic Junia. Nero in love is nothing more than the impassioned rival of Britannicus, and the hideous aspects of the tiger disappear, or are delicately touched when they must be encountered. What shall be said of the dénouement? of Junia taking refuge with the Vestals, and placed under the protection of the people?—as if the people protected any one under Nero! But what, above all, we have a right to blame in Racine, is the suppression of the scene at the feast. Britannicus is seated at the table; wine is poured out for him; one of his servants tastes the beverage, according to the custom of the day, so necessary was it to guard against crime. But Nero has foreseen all; the wine is too hot, cold water must be added, and it is that cold water which must be poisoned. The effect is sudden; the poison kills at once; Locuste was charged to prepare it under pain of death. Whether it were disdain for these circumstances, or the difficulty of expressing them in verse, Racine evades them; he confines himself to presenting the moral effect of the poisoning on the spectators, and in that he succeeds. But it must be owned that even on that point he falls below the incisive brevity, the splendid conciseness of Tacitus. Too often, when he translates Tacitus, as he translated the Bible, Racine opens a path for himself between the extreme qualities of the originals and carefully keeps to the middle of the road, never approaching the sides where the precipice lies.

Britannicus, Phèdre, Athalie, Roman, Greek, and Biblical tragedy, those are the three great dramatic claims of Racine, below which all his other masterpieces range themselves. I have already expressed my admiration for Phèdre, and yet one cannot conceal from one's self that the play is even less Greek in manners and morals than Britannicus is Roman. Hippolytus, the lover, resembles Hippolytus, the hunter, the favourite of Diana, even less than Nero, the lover, resembles the Nero of Tacitus. Phèdre, queen-mother and regent for her son, on the supposed death of her husband amply counterbalances Junia, protected by the people and consigned to the Vestals. Euripides himself leaves much to be desired as to truth; he has lost the higher meaning of the mythological traditions that Æschylus and Sophocles entered into so deeply; but in him we find, at any rate, a whole order of things—landscape, religion, rites, family recollections, all these constitute a depth of reality which fixes the mind and rests it. With Racine all that is not Phèdre and her passion escapes and disappears. The sad Aricia, the Pallantides, the divers adventures of Theseus, leave scarcely a trace in our memory.

This might lead us to conclude with Corneille, if we dared, that Racine had a far greater talent for poesy in general than for the drama in particular. Racine was dramatic, no doubt, but he was so in a style that was little so. In other times, in times like ours, when the proportions of the drama are necessarily so different from what they were then, what would he have done? Would he have attempted it? His genius, naturally meditative and placid, would it have sufficed for that intensity of action that our blasée curiosity demands? for that absolute truth in ethics and characters that becomes indispensable after a period of mighty revolution? for that higher philosophy that gives to all things a meaning, that makes action something else than mere imbroglio, and historical colour something better than whitewash? Had he the force and the character to lead all these parts of the work abreast; to maintain them in presence and in harmony, to blend, to link them into an indissoluble and living form, to fuse them one into the other in the fire of passion? Would he not have found it more simple, more conformable to his nature, to withdraw passion from the midst of these intricacies in which it might be lost as if poured into sand? to keep it within his own channel and follow singly the harmonious course of grand and noble elegy, of which Esther and Bérénice are the limpid and transparent reservoirs? Those are delicate questions, to which we can only reply by conjectures. I have hazarded mine, in which there is nothing irreverent towards the genius of Racine. Is it irreverent to declare that we prefer in him pure poesy to drama, and that we are tempted to ally him to the race of lyric geniuses, of religious and elegiac singers, whose mission here below is to celebrate Love—love as Dante and Plato saw it?

The life of retirement, of household cares, and study, which Racine led during the twelve years of his fullest maturity, seem to confirm these conjectures. Corneille also tried for some years to renounce the theatre; but, though already in declining years, he could not continue the attempt and soon returned to the arena. Nothing of this impatience or this difficulty of controlling himself appears to have troubled the long silence of Racine. His affections went elsewhere; he thought of Port-Royal, then so persecuted, and took delightful pleasure in memories of his childhood…

He woke with a start, at forty-eight years of age, to a new and wonderful career, taken in two steps: Esther for his first attempt, Athalie for his masterpiece. Those two works, so sudden, so unexpected, so different to the others, do they not confute our opinion of Racine, and escape all the general criticisms I have ventured to make upon his work?

Racine on Hebrew subjects is far otherwise at ease than on Greek and Roman subjects. Nurtured from childhood on sacred books, sharing the beliefs of the people of God, he keeps strictly to the Scripture narrative; he does not think himself obliged to mingle the authority of Aristotle in the action of the play, nor, above all, to place at the heart of his drama an amorous intrigue (and love is of all human things the one which, resting on an eternal basis, varies most in its forms according to the ages, and consequently leads the poet more surely into error). Nevertheless, in spite of the relationship of religions, and the communion of certain beliefs, there is in Judaism an element apart, inward, primitive, oriental, which it is important to grasp and put forward prominently, under pain of being tame and unfaithful; and this fundamental element, so well understood by Bossuet in his Politique Sacrée, by M. de Maistre in all his writings, and by the English painter, Martin, in his art, was not accessible to the sweet and tender poet who saw the Old Testament solely through the New, and had no other guide to Samuel than Saint Paul.

Let us begin with the architecture of Athalie; with the Hebrews all was figurative, symbolical; the importance of forms was part of the spirit of the law. Vainly do I look in Racine for that temple wondrously built by Solomon, in marble, in cedar, overlaid with pure gold, the walls gleaming with golden cherubim and palm-trees. I am in the vestibule, but I see not the two famous columns of bronze, eighteen cubits high, one named Jachin, the other Boaz; nor the sea of brass, nor the brazen oxen, nor the lions; neither can I imagine within the tabernacle the cherubim of olive-wood, ten cubits high, their wings stretched out and touching one another until they encircled the arch of the dome. The scene in Racine takes place under a Greek peristyle, rather bare, and I am much less disposed to accept the "sacrifice of blood" and "immolation by the sacred knife" than if the poet had taken me to the colossal temple, where King Solomon offered unto Jehovah, for a peace-offering, two-and-twenty thousand oxen and one hundred and twenty thousand sheep. Analogous criticism may be made upon the characters and speeches of the personages.

In short, Athalie is an imposing work as a whole, and in many parts magnificent, but not so complete nor so unapproachable as many have chosen to consider it. In it Racine does not penetrate into the very essence of Hebraic oriental poesy; he steps cautiously between its naïve sublimity on the one hand, and its naïve grace on the other, carefully denying himself both.

Shall I own it? Esther, with its charming gentleness and its lovely pictures, less dramatic than Athalie, and with lower aims, seems to me more complete in itself and leaving nothing to be desired. It is true that this graceful Bible episode is flanked by two strange events, about which Racine says not a single word: I mean the sumptuous feast of Ahasuerus, that lasted one hundred and eighty days, and the massacre of their enemies by the Jews, that lasted two whole days, at the formal request of the Jewess Esther. With that exception, and perhaps by reason of that omission, this delightful poem, so perfect as a whole, so filled with chastity, with sighs, with religious unction, seems to me the most natural fruit that Racine's genius has borne. It is the purest effusion, the most winning plaint of his tender soul, which could not be present where a nun took the veil without being melted to tears—an incident of which Mme. de Maintenon wrote: "Racine, who likes to weep, is coming to the profession of Sister Lalie."

About this time, he composed for Saint-Cyr four spiritual canticles, which should be numbered among his finest works. Two are after Saint Paul, whom Racine treats as he has already treated Tacitus and the Bible; that is to say, by encircling him with suavity and harmony, but sometimes enfeebling him. It is to be regretted that he did not carry this species of religious composition farther, and that in the eight years that followed Athalie he did not cast forth with originality some of the personal, tender, passionate, fervent sentiments that lay hidden in his breast. Certain passages in his letters to his eldest son, then attached to the embassy in Holland, make us conscious of an inward and deep-lying poesy which he has nowhere communicated, which he restrained within himself for long years; inward delights incessantly ready to overflow, but which he never poured out except in prayer at the feet of God, and with tears that filled his eyes…

From his own time until ours, and through all variations of taste, Racine's renown continues, without attack and constantly receiving universal homage, fundamentally just, and deserved as homage, though often unintelligent in its motives. Critics of little compass have abused the right of citing him as a model; they have too often proposed for imitation his most inferior qualities; but, for whoso comprehends him truly, there is enough, in his work and in his life, to make him for ever admired as a great poet and cherished as a heart-friend.