[Brereton is an English scholar who has written extensively on French literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In the following excerpt, he examines specifically the poetry of Racine's dramas.]

Racine is considered here almost exclusively as a poet. He was, in fact, a dramatic poet and any division is necessarily artificial. But any attempt to do justice to the dramatist would lead us far beyond the bounds of our subject and we must be content with illustrating this side of his genius with a single example. To go further in that direction might obscure a truth which English readers sometimes find it difficult to accept—that, apart from the requirements of the stage, Racine was a supreme verbal artist. His verse, as verse, has been admired by poets of such radically different temperaments as Voltaire and Valéry and has influenced them profoundly.

An admirer himself of Malherbe, no rebel against the conventions of préciosité, an imitator of the Greeks and a respecter of contemporary good taste, his verse should have been well-mannered and slightly dull. Possibly it even appears so on a first acquaintance, but to be halted by this surface impression is to turn back on the brink of a new world—an alien world, perhaps, but one full of power, subtlety and beauty. That such qualities should have emerged from the influences current in Racine's day, and which he did not reject but fulfilled and reconciled, is one of the perennial surprises of literature. Is there, after all, a virtue in the French classical formula, as applied to poetry, which can inspire work of the highest kind, given the artist to execute it? Or can the great artist transform any formula, however unpromising, into a recipe for excellent work?

Faced with the incompatibility between 'classical' theory (words should be tailored to fit sense) and Racinian performance (words and meaning coalesce, and are impregnated in addition with a seemingly natural poetic perfume), some critics have been driven into supposing a Racine who slipped into greatness by accident and never fully realized what he was achieving. If, as a conscious artist, he followed Boileau, how could he have written as he did? The explanation is sometimes sought in the historical moment—but a moment which somehow eluded the Malherbe-Boileau hour-hand. For Jean Giraudoux, writing of Racine's extraordinary psychological penetration, Racine was perhaps only a 'supreme talent'; the 'genius' was in the age which produced him and which gave him 'an inborn knowledge of great hearts and great moments'. For Marcel Raymond, writing more specifically of the poet,

he had the good fortune to appear at one of the mature stages of a culture and a language; he had mastered his technique; and an infallible intuition, a feeling of continuous beauty, enabled him to create—as though just at the emergence from sleep, in the white light of the first morning—that potent instrument, that royal language which still holds us enthralled.

This second appreciation is the more acceptable. It imputes no more to the age than can be readily conceded. One would allow the debt of almost any poet to the culture and idiom of his time. Yet even Marcel Raymond, while rightly refusing to see Racine as an unconscious operator, places him as near to the unconscious as possible—at the emergence from sleep, when the dream may still be in possession of the mind.

There should be nothing remarkable about such a process. No one is surprised when a revolutionary poet like Rimbaud produces, part consciously, part unconsciously, a highly original body of work from the books read in the classroom and in the municipal library at Charleville—and from the particular nature of his lived experience. But when Racine, who was not in appearance revolutionary, follows the same road, the need for some explanation seems to be felt. Either he was moving with some cultural current different from that of which he was aware; or perhaps he was deceiving his contemporaries into accepting at its face-value work which he knew perfectly well had another significance. Either Racine misunderstood himself, or his age misunderstood him.

Much has been written on this point and more could be. But, whatever the complexity of Racine's art and psychology, this particular difficulty need never have arisen. If Racine had been studied first as an individual case, one contradiction at least would have disappeared. But instead—as with the 'baroque' writers—a picture has been built up of 'classicism' based partly on literary theory, partly on a simplification of the historical background. Racine does not entirely fit into this picture. Hence the artificial 'paradox' of a classic who transcends classicism. Much confusion could be avoided if it were recognized that it is the picture, or rather the map, which is out of scale, not the individual writer. The first is always expendable and can be redrawn if necessary. The second, whether more or less well explored, is a landmark which certainly exists. It would continue to exist if all the maps were lost….

For all his apparent simplicity, Racine is a difficult poet. The best approach to him is to follow what was certainly his own approach and to begin by considering his dramatic verse in its functional aspect.

It is functional because it is always suited to the character who is speaking and renders every shade of his reactions to the situation in which he finds himself. At the same time, it explores for the audience, sometimes with a closely controlled irony, all the implications of that situation. It does this without becoming out of character, or rather without going beyond character to state some general truth. Racine is never the moralist that Shakespeare often is. When Gloucester observes:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport,

or Macbeth soliloquizes

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …

they are moving outside their immediate situation, or at least enlarging it. Racine's characters do not do this. They keep strictly to the point—to the particular circumstances which bear on their dilemma. What is lost is the more strikingly 'poetic' quality of what might possibly be called Shakespeare's baroque style—the rhetorical extension which becomes, in the right hands, a link between the particular and the universal. Racine denies himself this kind of poetry. His characters are turned inward so that all their discoveries are made in the depths of their own natures and expressed in terms of themselves. Psychologically, therefore, his plays appear self-sufficing and self-contained—which in theory is one of the attributes of French classicism. Poetically, an element is lost. This element may be called the impingement of the infinite on the finite, the association of the macrocosm with the microcosm, or simply the metaphysical imagination. In its absence, what remains but the small change of poetry—the minor and technical qualities? To this highly difficult question no wholly satisfactory answer has ever been given, yet it is a matter of experience that Racine's verse, whether read or heard in the theatre, is 'poetic'. It delights the ear, stirs the feelings, fascinates the intellect and even—both occasionally and in its total effect—excites the imagination, though along lines deliberately traced by the poet. With no justification at all could it be described as merely rhymed prose.

This is true even when it is most 'functional'.

In the fourth act of Britannicus, the Dowager Empress of Rome, Agrippina, is attempting to bring to heel her son Nero. He has been made emperor by her intrigues—in plainer words, her crimes—and is now beginning to defy her. Struggling to regain her influence, the unscrupulous old woman recalls how, as a widow, she had made a second marriage with the late emperor Claudius; how she had persuaded him to set aside Britannicus, his own son by a former marriage, and to adopt her own son, Nero, as his heir; and how, when Claudius was about to die and at last realized the true position, she consummated her plan:

Cependant Claudius penchait vers son déclin.
Ses yeux, longtemps fermés, s'ouvrirent à la fin:
Il connut son erreur. Occupé de sa crainte,
Il laissa pour son fils échapper quelque plainte,
Et voulut, mais trop tard, assembler ses amis.

The tone is factual, brisk, completely ruthless in its context. The dying Claudius, whom she had married, is envisaged purely as an instrument which must be discarded before it causes complications:

Ses gardes, son palais, son lit m'étaient soumis.
Je lui laissai sans fruit consumer sa tendresse;
De ses derniers soupirs je me rendis maîtresse.

The second line—'I let him fret out his affection fruitlessly'—must be one of the cruellest ever spoken on the stage, unless it is surpassed by the third: 'I took control of his last sighs.'

Her business now was to keep the disinherited Britannicus away from his father until the latter was dead. The death is noted in two words, the rumour that she had caused it by poison is shrugged off in seven:

Mes soins, en apparence épargnant ses douleurs,
De son fils, en mourant, lui cachèrent les pleurs.
Il mourut. Mille bruits en courent à ma honte.

It will be noticed that no relevant feature of the material situation or the physical scene has been blinked. Nothing is veiled or inflated. Yet, while the reader has everything necessary to reconstruct the scene realistically in his imagination, if he so wishes, the language used is largely figurative. The figures are conventional, but instead of hanging limply they are recharged with their full literal meaning and more, so that they acquire the elastic strength of the understatement. When Claudius was 'drawing towards his end', suddenly 'his eyes were opened'. 'He realized his mistake—but too late,' adds his widow laconically. He was completely in her power: 'Ses gardes, son palais, son lit m'étaient soumis.' 'Sans fruit' is almost a cliché. So is 'derniers soupirs', but here they are completely apt expressions. 'Mes soins'—an abstract word which might be translated here as 'ministrations'—has, of course, a double edge. This colourless word, whose associations range from the petits soins of the salon lover to the soins officieux of the poisoner Locusta who a little later in Racine's play 'zealously' provides a poison after first demonstrating its efficacy on a slave, gives an effect comparable to Lady Macbeth's:

What cannot you and I perform
On the unguarded Duncan?

But Agrippina, a more hardened criminal than Lady Macbeth and certainly no sleep-walker, has not finished her recital. She had to conceal the death of Claudius until the army had taken an oath of allegiance to Nero as his successor. Meanwhile the Roman people, on her orders, had been offering prayers to the gods for the recovery of the old emperor, until the moment came when it was safe for him to be shown to them, already dead. In these narrative lines can be detected—again if one wishes—Agrippina's sardonic pleasure in the situation. On a more open level is her insistence on her own role in the affair—'conduit sous mes auspices'—'mes ordres trompeurs'—underlined now to stress Nero's present indebtedness to her:

J'arrêtai de sa mort la nouvelle trop prompte;
Et tandis que Burrhus allait secrètement
De l'armée en vos mains exiger le serment,
Que vous marchiez au camp, conduit sous mes auspices,
Dans Rome les autels fumaient de sacrifices;
Par mes orders trompeurs tout le peuple excité
Du prince déjà mort demandait la santé.
Enfin des légions l'entière obéissance
Ayant de votre empire affermi la puissance,
On vit Claude; et le peuple, étonné de son sort,
Apprit en même temps votre règne et sa mort.

These, concludes Agrippina (with much else previously related), were all my crimes. The tone is that of an injured lover excusing himself for having been perhaps too attentive:

C'est le sincère aveu que je voulais vous faire:
Voilà tous mes forfaits.

This single example must suffice to suggest the force and subtlety which lie in Racine's apparently conventional use of imagery and metre. In the same verse-form he can be ironic, vigorous, brutal, or even flat, as the situation demands:

Est-il juste, après tout, qu'un conquérant s'abaisse
Sous la servile loi de garder sa promesse?
(Andromaque)

or:

Mais je m'étonne enfin que, pour reconnaissance,
Pour prix de tant d'amour, de tant de confiance,
Vous ayez si longtemps, par des détours si bas,
Feint un amour pour moi que vous ne sentiez pas.
(Bajazet)

or simply—the depth of utility:

Madame, tout est prêt pour la cérémonie.
(Iphigénie)

In using and perfecting the alexandrine—his almost exclusive medium—Racine mastered it completely. It was his vehicle both for the 'Roman' tone of Britannicus and for the comic effects of Les Plaideurs:

Voilà votre portier et votre secrétaire;
Vous en ferez, je crois, d'excellents avocats:
Ils sont fort ignorants.

On occasion he broke most of the technical rules laid down by his less gifted contemporaries and which the Romantics flung overboard so noisily a hundred and fifty years later. But his infringements were discreet and never wanton, dictated always by an impeccable ear. He observed Boileau's pedestrian prescription for the alexandrine.

—Que toujours, dans vos vers, le sens, coupant les mots,
Suspende l'hémistiche, en marque le repos—

sufficiently often for his verse to pass as 'regular' until it is carefully probed.

While the functional kind of verse just examined is poetic in its compression, its economy and rightness in the choice of words, and its inconspicuous rhythms which lead the speaking voice to follow the most effective sound-patterns relative to the sense, it would hardly be enough to mark Racine as a great poet. The verse of Britannicus and of Bajazet, which were written roughly midway through his career, is perfectly dramatic and basically Racinian. But, using always the same basis, he could build higher.

In the earlier Andromaque, purely human passion is fanned (as in the character of Hermione) to white heat and the tone rises in places almost to a scream. It still does not break the finite barrier, but goes as close as is possible without doing so.

In Bérénice, the music of the Racinian line comes into play and produces some of those tirades which have been aptly compared to arias in which the voice can take wing on the subtly varied rhythm of the alexandrines:

Le temps n'est plus, Phénice, où je pouvais trembler.
Titus m'aime; il peut tout: il n'a plus qu'à parler.
Il verra le sénat m'apporter ses hommages,

Et le peuple de fleurs couronner ses images.
De cette nuit, Phénice, as-tu vu la splendeur?
Tes yeux ne sont-ils pas tout pleins de sa grandeur?
Ce flambeau, ce bûcher, cette nuit enflammée,
Ces aigles, ces faisceaux, ce peuple, cette armée,
Cette foule de rois, ces consuls, ce sénat,
Qui tous de mon amant empruntaient leur éclat …

Or the still more famous:

Je n'écoute plus rien; et pour jamais, adieu.
Pour jamais! Ah! Seigneur, songez-vous en vousmême
Combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?
Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrironsnous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?
Que le jour recommence, et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice,
Sans que de tout le jour je puisse voir Titus?
Mais quelle est mon erreur, et que de soins perdus!
L'ingrat, de mon départ consolé par avance,
Daignera-t-il compter les jours de mon absence?
Ces jours si longs pour moi lui sembleront trop courts.

Both these passages are also 'functional', though in a less immediate way than the scene quoted from Britannicus. The first renders the elation of Berenice when she feels confident that her lover will marry her; the second, the pathos of her distress when she sees that they must separate. The tone, the musical quality, correspond to her feelings at those particular points in the drama. But they can be quoted apart from the drama and still retain a certain life. This becomes truer still of the last two plays which Racine wrote before his retirement: Iphigénie and—to a greater degree—Phèdre. Both were based on the Greek mythology which had persisted in Racine's mind since his schooldays and which seems to have fired his normally disciplined imagination as no other subject did. Phèdre in particular furnished the critic Henri Bremond, writing in the 1920s, with examples for his theory of 'pure poetry', according to which there is an autonomous language of poetry, valid in itself, as music and some painting can be argued to be valid in themselves, without reference to external associations. Just as you cannot adequately transcribe the theme of a piece of music in words, so 'pure poetry' exists independently of rational meaning and of emotions connected with the lived experience of the reader. Such a line as

La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé

becomes a self-contained creation, having its own beauty and originating its own overtones quite apart from its significance in the mouth of a stage-character or its evocation of Greek legend. Bremond even went further and likened the language of 'pure poetry' to the language of prayer.

This theory, with its streak of mysticism, was certainly too extreme. In view of the predominantly functional qualities of Racinian verse, it would seem astonishing that it should have been applied to this particular poet at all. But he does, as we have seen, comply with one half of the requirements. By his concentration on the matter in hand he eliminates the external associations which in 'pure' poetry are worse than irrelevant: they are a distraction. It only remains to persuade oneself that he fulfills the second condition—that his verse can be detached from its dramatic context without essential loss—and he becomes the supreme example of poetic purity.

This can be done in a limited number of instances, though it may safely be said that it was never Racine's conscious intention and that the impact of his lines is always stronger when they are left in their context. Outside it, however, there is still an incantatory quality in, for example, the opening scene of Iphigénie, which occurs just before dawn:

A peine un faible jour vous éclaire et me guide.
Vos yeux seuls et les miens sont ouverts dans l'Aulide.
Avez-vous dans les airs entendu quelque bruit?
Les vents nous auraient-ils exaucés cette nuit?
Mais tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune.

This is poetry at the opposite extreme to Hamlet's:

But look, the Morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

So is:

Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessée,
Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!

Or Phèdre's querulous:

Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent!
Quelle importune main, en formant tous ces nœuds,
A pris soin sur mon front d'assembler mes cheveux?
Tout m'afflige et me nuit et conspire à me nuire.

Yet all these lines, perfect though they are, betray a certain conscious virtuosity on the poet's part. Just as Shakespeare, one feels, may have paused with a certain satisfaction after composing the 'russet mantle' image, so Racine must have experienced a small moment of triumph when he had written the words 'et Neptune'. No doubt he had even planned for it. The beautiful modulation of the 'Ariane' quotation, with the management of the vowels in the second line (ou-ou-u-(e)-o-o / ou-ou-u-(e)-è-é) seems hardly fortuitous. Neither does the discreet alliteration in the last passage quoted and least of all the insistent i sound in:

Tout m'afflige et me nuit et conspire à me nuire.

These are nearer to what Valéry termed 'calculated lines' than to 'given lines'. It is the 'given lines', simpler and apparently spontaneous, that represent Racinian poetry in its purest state.

They are so simple that they easily pass unnoticed. What is noticeable is less their presence in Racine than their absence in other poets. They seem to have been produced without effort—to occur rather than to have been composed. Such are the lines which immediately follow [a] passage from Iphigénie… :

Heureux qui, satisfait de son humble fortune,
Libre du joug superbe où je suis attaché,
Vit dans l'état obscur où les dieux l'ont caché.

Or, from Athalie:

Promettez sur ce livre, et devant ces témoins,
Que Dieu fera toujours le premier de vos soins;
Que, sévère aux méchants, et des bons le refuge,
Entre le pauvre et vous, vous prendrez Dieu pour juge;
Vous souvenant, mon fils, que caché sous ce lin,
Comme eux vous fûtes pauvre et comme eux orphelin.

Or, from Phèdre:

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.

And, perhaps the most perfect of all:

Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon cœur.

In these lines there is no ostentation of any kind. Imagery, rhetoric, and the musical effects that can be drawn from alliteration and assonance are either excluded or reduced to a minimum. Denying himself even the barest 'ornaments', the artist has come face to face with his basic materials, with less than which he cannot work at all: words and syntax. To shape them, he has allowed himself only his auditory sense, a feeling for sounds and rhythm which enables him to produce the most delicately varied effects within an apparently rigid framework. In this sense one can say—without subscribing to the whole of Bremond's, or even Valéry's, theory of 'pure poetry'—that Racine's verse sometimes becomes 'the language of poetry itself.

Anything approaching a 'baroque' Racine is of course unthinkable. But it must be remembered that not all his verse is so perfectly distilled as that just described. His earliest known poems, odes describing the country round Port-Royal, were modelled on the 'libertine' poets Théophile de Viau and Saint-Amant, who did not conform to Malherbe's principles. They contain numerous fanciful metaphors…. Butterflies are 'ces vivantes fleurs'. Birds' nests are 'ces cabinets si bien bâtis'. Oaktrees are 'ces géants de cent bras armés'. There is the pompous image of the great trees which seem to prop up the skies and 'lend their powerful backs to the thrones of the sun':

But perhaps what Racine wrote at the age of about seventeen and never published is not evidence. Or evidence only of a strain capable of development but deliberately suppressed. Yet it crops out again in a more temperate form in Esther and Athalie the few sacred songs of his later years. The influence of the Bible, with the bold images and picturesque idioms of Hebrew poetry, is now perceptible. The English reader will feel more at home when he comes upon some violent nightmare like the dream of Athalie, or reads such lines as

La nation entière est promise aux vautours,

or

Et de Jérusalem l'herbe cache les murs;
Sion, repaire affreux de reptiles impurs …

which are evocative in the last degree, and the opposite of 'pure' poetry. Or he will hear Racine—echoing the Psalmist and the Book of Job—speak with the authentic voice of Jehovah out of the whirlwind:

This is also Racine, writing a stanza so perfectly constructed that it floats with its own lightness…. The technical reasons for Malherbe's greater heaviness would require a long analysis, but it is really unnecessary. It is enough to read the two poets aloud. Some of the difference is due to the greater variety of Racine's metrical scheme. In this one stanza he uses lines of 10, 10, 6, 12, 10 and 12 syllables.

Yet Racine had learnt something from Malherbe, just as he took something from Corneille (particularly in Britannicus). His verse as a whole, considered over the whole of his mature period, is a compound made from these two poets, from fashionable courtly speech with the slightest touch of the précieux, from colloquial speech and from the Greek and Latin poets whom he read and adapted so assiduously. These various elements are so perfectly synthesized that the amalgam (unlike Ronsard's) appears as one clear, consistent material and can be held up, deservedly if paradoxically, as the model of classical purity.

The factor so far omitted from the analysis—since analysis would not show it—is Racine's personal way of approaching and handling his material. This all-important personal quality cannot of course exist in a vacuum, i.e. without the material to work on. But neither can the material exist in any coherent form without it. It is the beginning and end of art: the beginning because it provides the artist with his original bias, the end because it conditions the impression which his work will make on the reader. In both aspects it can be called his idiom. Racine's idiom, with its peculiar intonations, its mannerisms, its vocabulary, and of course its defects, is less a variety of French poetry than a poetic branch of the French language, as—though with directly contrasting qualities—Abbey-Theatre Irish is a poetic branch of English. The comparison, overlooking all other differences, can be used to explain the fascination of Racinian verse for Frenchmen. It is a delightful and irresistibly flattering idealization of his ordinary speech. So he might talk in dreams, if he were perfectly eloquent and perfectly lucid. (The Englishman, on the contrary, dreams of perfect eloquence allied to perfect intoxication, that is, freedom from inhibitions.)

In this language of the lucid dream, characters endowed with a precision of feeling which assimilates them more to passionate machines than to the untidy attempts at gods of the Shakespearian tradition speak their minds with a frankness which embraces every subtlety of perception of which they and their author are capable. Hence both the clarity which immediately strikes an audience and their interest for the modern psychologist, who has to admit the deeper accuracy of their findings. Here the dramatist joins the poet and any further division along these lines becomes unprofitable.

For Racine's immediate successors, he was the poet who had demonstrated that verse could be dignified, elegant, harmonious, supple and clear, and at the same time wholly French. He had at last realized Du Bellay's old ambition of a French literary tongue as civilized and expressive as Greek and Latin. He could therefore be quoted as a proof of national excellence and a model for imitation.

It was perhaps unfortunate. Racine is no easier to imitate than to translate. In spite of his prestige in the eighteenth century, none of his disciples surpasses the second-rate. The great Racinian scholar Paul Mesnard once listed Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and Fontanes as the sole approximate successes. What a fall is here, and how dangerous it is to single out certain qualities which one finds congenial in a poet and then to believe that one holds the formula for composing similar poetry. Racine was richer than his age and, although it is unlikely that without him the poets of the next century would have followed a much different course, it is a pity that his example could be used at all to justify their mediocrity.

With time, the matter appears in better perspective. A 'classic' or not, Racine remains a great poet in his own right, to whom poets completely emancipated from the classical tradition as formulated by Boileau look back as a master. Even those Romantics who abominated it always respected him.

Sur le Racine mort, le Campistron pullule,

wrote Hugo, conceiving the great dramatist as a dead lion infested by lice. But it is obvious today that Racine, with his lucid, wiry talent, is by no means dead. In fact, he has survived in better shape than the more massive Hugo.