Between 1664 and 1676, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-seven, a space of twelve years, Racine wrote ten plays. During this next twelve years, between the ages of thirty-seven and forty-nine, he wrote nothing for the stage. Then, in his last period, he was persuaded to write the two Biblical plays, Esther and Athalie. Any critic of Racine's work is confronted with the twelve years' silence following the twelve years of continuous dramatic activity. However we explain his long retirement from the stage we can be sure that there was more than one reason, and it is not difficult to guess that the reasons were interrelated. In the first place, he gave up the irregularities of his sexual life, as many men do on the threshold of middle age, and married a pious woman who seems to have disapproved of the stage, the more heartily because one of Racine's discarded mistresses had taken the leading role in his tragedies. Second, Racine became reconciled to his former teachers at Port Royal, who objected to most secular literature and disliked plays as violently as the Puritans of Shakespeare's day. Nicole, who taught Racine Latin, declared in a pamphlet that plays and novels were horrible when considered according to the principles of Christianity. A dramatist, he said,

is a public poisoner, not of the bodies but of the souls of the faithful; who ought to regard himself as guilty of an infinity of spiritual murders. … The more care he takes to cover with a veil of respectability the criminal passions which he describes, the more dangerous he has made them, and the more capable of surprising and corrupting guileless and innocent souls. Such sins are all the more dreadful, in that these books do not perish, but they continue to spread their venom amongst those who read them.

Racine was aware of Nicole's views on the immorality and profaneness of the stage and, it would seem, increasingly uneasy about his profession. In the preface to Phèdre, the last of the secular plays, Racine is careful to point out how scrupulous he has been to depict virtue in a favorable light, to punish severely the smallest faults, to regard the very idea of a crime with as much horror as the actual deed:

The passions are presented only to show all the disorder of which they are the cause; and vice is everywhere depicted in such colors as to make people recognize it and hate its deformity. That, indeed, is the aim which every man who works for the public should propose for himself.

Racine had, of course, always held the view that tragedy has a moral function; but in this preface he was particularly anxious to claim that, in spite of Phèdre's incestuous desires, and in spite of the sympathy aroused for her, the moral tone of the play is unexceptionable.

But Racine could not be reconciled to Port Royal so long as he was writing for the stage, and the desire on his part to be reconciled was one cause of his retirement from the stage. Another factor, perhaps, was the failure of Phèdre, when it was first performed, through the intrigues of his enemies. They got to hear that he was writing a play about Phaedra and Hippolytus and they commissioned a second-rate poet to write a play on the same subject. They filled the theatre of his rival with an enthusiastic audience and boycotted Racine's play.

The last cause of Racine's retirement from the stage was his appointment as historiographer royal, and this appointment was made on the understanding that he would sever his connection with the theatre. He seems to have regarded the post as more respectable than that of being the greatest poet of the century, and even in his youth he seems to have looked on his genius as a means of social advancement. Before we condemn Racine we should recall that Shakespeare had moods when he disliked the theatre and that he was anxious to obtain the right to call himself a gentleman.

The various motives I have mentioned reacted one upon the other. Like Jason in Anouilh's play, Racine wished to lead a more orderly life, to marry, to settle down; he wanted to make his peace with his religious advisers and to escape from the bitter conflicts of the theatre; and his official appointment provided him with a suitable opportunity.

In spite of which, the twelve years of silence were not without problems for the poet. On the one hand, he loved, admired, almost worshipped Louis XIV; on the other, he had become reconciled to his old teachers who were persecuted by the King: so that Racine was inevitably torn between his love for Port Royal and his desire for advancement at court. Giraudoux, indeed, in his brilliant essay on Racine, suggests that the two Biblical plays may be explained by the Catholicism of the King, rather than by that of the author, and that his

period of dissipation had never been a period of impiety; he was reconciled not with God, but with his aunt; he had himself buried not at the feet of a saint, but at the feet of the man who had taught him Greek verbs.

This is witty; but, like most witty remarks, it is not entirely true. It is part of Giraudoux's argument that Racine's inspiration was wholly literary. In fact, his conversion, his reconciliation with Port Royal, was genuine, and it was a landmark in his life. He had written the greatest tragedies in the French language, but he was still profoundly dissatisfied. As Giraudoux puts it, "The purest French that had been written was no longer the perfect language for Racine but the dialect of a country he had deserted." During the next twelve years Racine translated seventeen hymns from the Breviary, as Milton, during the years before he began to compose Paradise Lost, versified a number of Psalms. Racine's hymns are not so feeble as Milton's psalms, but no one would suspect that they were written by a great poet.

Madame de Sevigné observed that Racine loved God as he had formerly loved his mistresses. She might have added that whereas his mistresses had inspired Andromache and Phèdre, God seemed, at first, to be less fortunate in the work he inspired. In 1688, however, a way was found to reconcile poetry and piety. Racine was invited by Madame de Maintenon to write a Biblical play to be performed by pupils of a girls' school of which she was the patron. Somewhat unwillingly, Racine accepted the invitation; and the play, Esther, was a great success. Madame de Maintenon asked him for another religious play; but the King stipulated that there should be no dresses or scenery, and the first performance of Athalie was little more than a recitation in an ordinary room. It was afterwards performed at court. There was one performance before the exiled James II, who must have viewed the overthrow of Athalie with mixed feelings. There is good reason to believe that Racine chose his subject partly with the Glorious Revolution in mind; but, of course, he did not regard the revolution as glorious. Although the play shows a successful rebellion against a reigning monarch, both he and his audience would identify Athalie not with James II, but with the usurper, William III; and they would identify Joas with the infant son of James II, who had escaped from England with his mother. The restoration of this boy to the throne would not merely involve the overthrow of the usurper, it would restore the true religion in place of the worship of Baal, or Protestantism. Yet Louis did not approve of the play. Nor is this surprising: Joad, the High Priest, might reasonably be regarded as a Jansenist; and Mathan, the renegade, had gained his sovereign's ear by arts which resembled in some ways those by which the Jesuits were thought to control Louis XIV:

My soul
Attached itself entirely to the court,
Till by degrees I gained the ear of kings,
And soon became an oracle. I studied
Their hearts and flattered their caprice. For them
I sowed the precipice's edge with flowers.

François Mauriac suggests that Louis might have used of Arnault, the head of Port Royal, the phrase which Athalie addresses to Joad in the last act of the play: "Eternal enemy of absolute power." Indeed, the picture painted by Racine of the corruption of absolute power in the Queen's entourage was, however unconsciously, an attack on the whole principle of absolutism, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Although Racine could declare, in prose, that Louis was "the wisest and most perfect of all men," he put into the mouth of the chorus a description of Athalie's court:

Within a court where Justice is unknown,
And all the laws are Force and Violence,
Where Honor's lost in base obedience,
Who will speak up for luckless Innocence?

No intelligent tyrant could listen to such sentiments without seeing that the cap fitted. These lines were either omitted from the first edition of the play—either by accident or because Racine realised that they were dangerous—or else they were added in the second edition. But there were plenty of others on the dangers of absolute power which apply as accurately to the reign of Louis XIV. One of Joad's speeches, in the scene in which he reveals to the boy Eliacin that he is the lawful king, is a most moving account of the evils, and the dangers, of absolutism.

My son—1 still dare call you by that name—
Suffer this tenderness; forgive the tears
That flow from me in thinking of your peril.
Nurtured far from the throne, you do not know
The poisonous enchantment of that honor.
You do not know yet the intoxication
Of absolute power, the bewitching voice
Of vilest flattery. Too soon they'll tell you
That sacred laws, though rulers of the rabble,
Must bow to kings; that a king's only bridle
Is his own will; that he should sacrifice
All to his greatness; that to tears and toil
The people are condemned and must be ruled
With an iron sceptre; that if they're not oppressed,
Sooner or later they oppress—and thus,
From snare to snare, and from abyss to abyss,
Soiling the lovely purity of your heart,
They'll make you hate the truth, paint virtue for you
Under a hideous image. Alas! the wisest
Of all our kings was led astray by them.
Swear then upon this book, and before these
As witnesses, that God will always be
Your first of cares; that stern towards the wicked,
The refuge of the good, you'll always take
Between you and the poor the Lord for judge,
Remembering, my son, that, in these garments,
You once were poor and orphaned, even as they.

It is significant that nearly a hundred years later, on the eve of the French Revolution, this speech was interrupted at almost every line by enthusiastic applause. It is still more significant that Fouché, the head of Napoleon's secret police, compelled the actors to omit it. Poets, as Plato realised long ago, are dangerous people in a totalitarian state; for even when they consciously desire, as Racine apparently did, to gain the favor of a tyrant by flattery, they are impelled by forces stronger than themselves to tell the truth. Racine, when he wrote Athalie, was certainly doing his best to please Madame de Maintenon and the King; he had no wish to intrude Jansenist and, still less, disloyal sentiments; but all great poets are George Washingtons in spite of themselves—they cannot tell a lie. Racine's conception of the good king was constant throughout his career. In Berenice Titus declares that he undertook the happiness of a thousand who were unhappy and later asks, "What tears have I dried? In what satisfied eyes have I savored the fruit of my good deeds?" In Esther the chorus distinguishes between a victorious king, who triumphs through his valor, and the wise king who hates injustice, prevents the rich from grinding the faces of the poor, who is the protector of the fatherless and the widow, and to whom the tears of the righteous suitor are precious. It must have been difficult to identify Louis XIV with such a monarch, though such is the mystique of royalty that many probably did. …

[We] do Racine a great injustice if we regard him as a tyrant's laureate. Athalie is not only a great tragedy, a great work of art, it is also a precious manifesto in the history of human freedom, and as Voltaire said, a masterpiece of the human spirit.

On the other hand, religious people have not always been judicious in their praise of the play. The Abbé Bremond, for example, says that Athalie should be studied in the chapel rather than in the classroom. Either fate seems to me undeserved for what is after all a great dramatic masterpiece. Just as misguided critics have argued that King Lear cannot be acted, so some French critics have said that to act Athalie is as sacriligious as to touch the Ark of the Covenant.

There is a long doctoral thesis on Racine's use of the Bible in the play. We are not likely to get much illumination from that angle. The use Shakespeare made of his sources in one possible road to an understanding of his genius; but the story of Athaliah in the Bible is so brief, and Racine takes such liberties with it, that we can learn very little about his genius from this kind of approach. But one thing does emerge from a study of the Bible which explains in part why Racine chose this particular story. Joas was in the direct line of descent between David and Jesus. That is why his preservation, both in his infancy and during the course of the play, is of cosmic importance. On his safety depends, one might almost say, the redemption of man. That is why Joad's prophecy about the Messiah is perfectly appropriate, and why Maulnier says that in Athalie the celebration of fate is associated with the celebration of faith. "The unity of action is established here, by divine command, the unity of place by the sanctuary, the unity of time by the sacrifice."

One of the most remarkable things about Athalie arises from the poet's consciousness of the significance in religious history of the action of the play. He contrives in the two hours' traffic of the stage, in incidents which take no longer than the time of representation, to show both the past and the future. Jezebel's death is described by Joad in Act I, twice by Athalie herself in Act II, and there is a reference to it in the last act. The murder of Ahaziah's children and the escape of Joas are described by Josabeth in the first act, by Athalie in the second act, by Joad in Act IV, and there are continual references to it throughout the play. The long feud between Athalie's family and the priests makes her a victim of circumstances. We have for her something of the pity Thomas Hardy evokes for Jezebel in the poem describing the "proud Tyrian woman who painted her face":

Faintly marked they the words "Throw her down" rise from time eerily,
Spectre-spots of the blood of her body on some rotten wall,
And the thin note of pity that came, "A King's daughter is she,"
As they passed where she trodden was once by the chargers' footfall.

Racine was prevented by his artistic conscience from making Athalie merely detestable, and indeed from making Joad entirely sympathetic—Voltaire regarded the character as fanatical and superstitious. Athalie not merely gives her name to the play: she is the dominating character, and she is depicted not without sympathy. Over and over again we are reminded of the savage way in which her mother had been murdered. She tells Josabeth:

Yes, my just fury—and I boast of it—
Avenged my parents' deaths upon my sons.
I saw my father and my brother butchered,
My mother cast down from her palace window,
And in one day (what a spectacle of horror!)
Saw eighty princes murdered! For what reason?
To avenge some prophets whose immoderate frenzies
My mother justly punished.

Even more striking, and more calculated to arouse sympathy for Athalie, is her famous dream, in which Jezebel appears to her and warns her that the God of the Jews will soon prevail over her also:

In uttering these frightful words,
Her ghost, it seemed, bent down towards my bed;
But when I stretched my hands out to embrace her,
I found instead a horrible heap of bones,
And mangled flesh, and tatters soaked in blood
Dragged through the mire, and limbs unspeakable
For which voracious dogs were wrangling there.

I am not, of course, suggesting that Racine was, as Blake asserted that Milton was, of the Devil's party without knowing it. It was simply that, like every good poet, Racine believed in giving the Devil his due. Shakespeare (as Keats declared) took as much delight in depicting an Iago as an Imogen; and Racine took as much delight in depicting an Athalie as a Joad. Indeed, the greatness of the play depends partly on the tension in the poet's mind between his artistic integrity and his religious feelings and, in the play itself, on the tension between the drama as a work of art and the drama as an act of worship. Racine on his knees and Racine in his study were not quite the same in their thoughts and feelings.

In her last speech Athalie prophecies that the innocent child, Joas, will do that which is evil in the sight of the Lord, profaning his alter, and so avenging Ahab, Jezebel and Athalie. Although Joas prays that the curse shall not be accomplished, we know from the Bible that he afterwards turned against the priests, thereby fulfilling the curse. Athalie was, in fact, triumphant after her own death, even though David's line—the line of descent between David and Jesus—was preserved. The knowledge of Joas' subsequent fall, which Racine could assume in his audience, makes some passages in the play unbearably poignant in their irony.

The scene in Act II where Athalie questions the boy about his life in the temple shows the haggard old queen, corrupted equally by her power and her crimes, face to face with innocence. The boy is later described by the chorus by the use of imagery which stresses this quality:

The irony of the scene depends not only on the fact that we know Joas will be corrupted, but also on the strange tenderness which Athalie feels for the boy who, in her dream, had stabbed her to the heart and who was eventually to be the cause of her death. For her love of Joas is the love of an old woman for her lost innocence, the maternal love which she had repressed at the bidding of vengeance. The weakness which blinds and destroys Athalie is the pity she thought she had conquered in herself. She is destroyed by the milk of human kindness, by the small residue of her virtue.

According to Aristotle, the most moving thing in tragedy is when a course of action intended to produce a certain result produces the reverse. So Athalie, by demanding from Joad the treasure of David and the boy Eliacin, and by threatening to destroy the temple if her demands are refused, is herself delivered into Joad's hands. What she thinks will be her final triumph over Jehovah turns out to be his final triumph over her. She asks for the child and for David's treasure, and she discovers that the child is the treasure and is the treasure precisely because he is her own successor. Her recognition of the truth is a good example of another of Aristotle's points:

Although I have stressed the fairness with which Racine depicts Athalie, it would be quite wrong to pretend that there is nothing to choose, morally, between the two parties and the two religions. All through the play there is a contrast between the worldly glory of the court and the service of righteousness in the temple; between the time-serving, hypocritical, treacherous Mathan, who does not believe in the religion he professes, and the austere and noble Joad; between the low standards of morality accepted by the worshippers of Baal, and the righteousness demanded by the worshippers of Jehovah. Some critics, it is true, have condemned the equivocation of Joad in the last act of the play, when he pretends to Abner that he will hand over to Athalie the treasure she had demanded. He does not tell a lie, though he deceives Abner by a calculated ambiguity. Racine, in the notes he jotted down on the play, defends Joad's prevarication by Biblical and Patristic precedents. But since Athalie is being lured into the temple so that she can be assassinated, it is needless to complain of Joad's deceit which is necessary for the purpose. The art of war consists very largely in making the enemy believe something which you wish him to believe. The prevarication, moreover, is necessary if Abner's integrity is to be preserved.

It will be noticed that in spite of the significance of the plot as a means of preserving David's line, and in spite of Joad's prophecy about the Messiah and the New Jerusalem,

In spite of this passage the general spirit of the play is Hebraic rather than Christian. In this Racine was wiser than some of his critics, for the intrusion of a Christian spirit into the more primitive story of Jezebel and Athaliah would have been unhistorical. Though Racine was probably more consciously religious after his conversion than Shakespeare had ever been, and though his last two plays were written on Biblical subjects, the plays of Shakespeare's last period, with their emphasis on reconciliation and forgiveness, seem to me to be much more Christian in spirit than either Esther or Athalie.

It is significant that whereas Shakespeare was treating afresh in his last years themes which had exercised him before—jealousy, treachery, the reunion of those who had been separated, the forgiveness of sins—Racine moved away from the themes with which he had formerly been concerned. This was partly due to the fact that as the plays were being performed by school-girls, he had been asked to avoid the subject of love. They had performed Andromache with its murderous jealousies and suicidal loves, and Madame de Maintenon was afraid the girls might imbibe feelings of the wrong sort. Most of Racine's heroines are unsuitable models for well brought-up young ladies. Hermione incites Orestes (who loves her) to murder Pyrrhus (whom she loves but who prefers Andromache). Roxane first makes Bajazet choose between marriage to her and death; and when he wisely chooses death she gives him a final opportunity of watching the strangling of the woman he loves:

Follow me instantly
And see her die by the mutes' hands. Set free
Then, from a love fatal to glory's quest,
Plight me thy troth. Time will do all the rest.

Phèdre, on being repulsed by her stepson, allows him to be accused of having attempted to ravish her. Agrippine is a murderess. Beside these furies, the virtuous heroines appear very colorless. Aricie is unwilling to elope with a man whose life is in deadly danger until she has her marriage certificate in her pocket; Junie is merely pathetic; and Andromache derives all her interest from the tragic situation in which she is placed.

Although both Racine's Biblical plays illustrate the workings of Providence, it has been said that he found in Athalie a fate more pitiless than that of the ancients. Instead of the Greek destiny he had used in Andromache and Phèdre he showed a Jehovah who "with more native cruelty than Zeus ordained a precise destiny for man." Josabeth, a sympathetic figure, filled with maternal love, hails with delight the murder of the old queen. Perhaps Maulnier exaggerates when he says that there is more ferocity in Athalie than in the tragedies of sexual passion:

Between the fate which orders the murder and the murder itself the body and its lover no longer serve as intermediaries; the road of crime no longer passes through the territory of desire and exaltation.

The supernatural ferocity of the play, however much we may wish to modify Maulnier's views, is dependent on Racine's deliberate restriction of the action to those scenes which God himself, as it were, had prepared. "The different moments of the action are no other than the different moments of His thought." The divine action is substituted for the human action.

Neither does the actor suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
In an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.
(T. S. Eliot)

Of course, in a sense, in Shakespeare's last plays the divine action supersedes the human action or interpenetrates it. But whereas the villains in Esther and Athalie are destroyed, in Cymbeline and The Tempest Iachimo and the three men of sin are brought to repentance, and even Caliban decides to be wise hereafter and seek for grace. The spirit of Athalie is nearer to the spirit of Samson Agonistes than to that of The Tempest. Milton's Old Testament tragedy, though ending avowedly with "calm of mind, all passion spent," has as its climax the destruction of the Philistines, both innocent and guilty, by the champion of the Lord, and the chorus, with Milton's approval, sings a hymn of triumph. This, like the concluding sentiments of Athalie, is in accordance with the spirit of the stories on which the plays are based; but, of course, it is significant that both Racine and Milton should choose such subjects out of all the possible ones in the Old Testament.

The characteristics which have been found in Athalie by modern critics—brutality, ferocity, frenzy, murderous rage, religious exaltation—do not suggest the marmoreal calm of classic art. The classical form serves as a dam which controls and utilises an enormous pressure of emotion. Primitive passion and violent hatreds are combined with a passion for righteousness; and all are expressed with the deceptive clarity and simplicity of great art.

There is, I suppose, some prejudice amongst Englishspeaking readers against French classical tragedy, just as many Frenchmen, at the bottom of their hearts, regard Shakespeare as an "erring barbarian." It is unfortunate that typical English classical tragedies have been written by scholars for scholars. Daniel's Cleopatra and Philotas, with all their delicacy and charm, seem deliberately designed to avoid arousing any excitement: they are the ideal plays for people who have already had one attack of coronary thrombosis. Even All for Love is a decorous affair compared with Antony and Cleopatra; and the Victorian lady who remarked at a performance of Shakespeare's play, "How unlike the life of our own dear queen!" would not have been upset by Dryden's. Addison's Cato is a byword for laudable dullness; and no one, I suppose, has read Arnold's Merope more than once. But Racine's plays possess the intensity which Keats rightly demanded of a work of art, and this intensity is increased rather than diminished by the rigid classical form. Racine, unlike Corneille, obeys the rules so easily that the audience is unconscious of them. In Athalie, as I have mentioned, we live as much in the past as in the present; and we are made to realise that we are witnessing one episode in the continuous war between idolatry and righteousness.

The eloquence and order which the older critics found in Racine's work are, of course, to be found there. But recent critics have tended to stress the chaos and frenzy on which the order is superimposed, the terror which is never far beneath the surface. A scene in his plays has been described as "the explanation which closes for the time a series of negotiations between wild beasts." Racine's heroes "confront each other on a footing of terrible equality, of physical and moral nudity…. It is an equality and truth of the jungle." His plays are often terrifying. Beneath the civilised surface there is a volcano of passion. The characters, periwigged and elegant as they are, are often frenzied creatures plotting violent crimes. They address each other as "Seigneur" and "Madame," but they recall often the animal imagery of King Lear and Othello:

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come—
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.

In fact the perverted passions of Racine's characters are more horrifying than the straightforward violence of the jungle, and the order which is imposed on chaos at the end of the play is more often the quiet of exhaustion than the conscious restoration of an order which has been overturned by human passion.

I have mentioned Giraudoux's theory that Racine's inspiration was entirely literary and that it dated from his reading of the classics: his true liaisons were with the heroines of Greek plays, and the experience embodied in his tragedies was derived from the literary passions he had experienced in adolescence with the complicity of his schoolmasters. This is all very well, and it is a useful corrective to the theory that the tragedies may be explained by his love of Marquise du Parc and Mlle. Champmeslé; or the recent theory of René Jasinski that Agrippine, in Britannicus, is a symbol of Port Royal, the devouring mother from which Racine is unable to free himself. It is unnecessary to accept either the theory that the plays were purely literary in their inspiration or that they were symbolic representations of events in the dramatist's life. There have been hundreds of writers who studied Greek drama at school without afterwards being obsessed with the passions therein displayed; and we may suppose that Racine found in Greek plays something that combined with later experience.

It is a pity that after English critics have exploded what Charles Jasper Sisson calls "the mythical sorrows of Shakespeare" French critics should now try and explain the more classical plays of Racine as the reflection of his personal experience, in any narrow autobiographical sense. But it is probably true that in a broad sense they do reflect his own experience of life. He chose to write on sexual passion and power. It is significant that he was apparently never tempted to write on Oedipus or Antigone, and that although he started a scenario of the Iphigenia in Tauris he never progressed beyond the first act. Phèdre already reveals the conflict in his mind which led to his abandonment of the theatre; and his last two plays reveal both what Mauron calls the regressive form of religion into which he relapsed in his later years and his views on the corruption of the court.

Although no one would pretend that The Winter's Tale and The Tempest are greater works of art than King Lear or Macbeth, it is arguable that they display a ripeness of wisdom and a sense of reconciliation with life which was not present in the great tragedies. They do not repudiate the tragic sense of life: they recollect it in tranquillity. In Racine's last plays, on the other hand, partly because the subject-matter is different, he seems rather to have turned away from his former themes and obsessions. He has not subsumed them under his new religious outlook in which forgiveness plays very little part. It is significant that the converted poet should refer in contemptuous terms to a woman he had loved for years, the actress who had created Phèdre. There are, however, some positive values expressed in Esther and Athalie.

M. Raymond Picard calls Esther "a spiritual canticle in action," and it is, except for Bérénice, the most immediately attractive of Racine's plays. The choruses, however, which carry the chief burden of religious sentiment, seem to me be little more than a pleasant libretto, of small poetical importance:

O sweet Peace!
O eternal Light!
Beauty ever bright!
Happy the heart which thou dost please!
O sweet Peace!
O eternal Light!
Happy the heart which loves thee without cease!

We have already touched on the positive values in Athalie—the stern sense of righteousness, the lofty courage of Joad, the loving-tenderness of Josabeth, the puzzled integrity of Abner, the faith and innocence of the chorus. The lyrical interludes of the chorus are excellent poetry in their own right and are the best answer to the corruption of Athalie's court and Mathan's false religion. But perhaps the scene which best expresses the unspoiled innocence of life in the temple is the scene between Eliacin and Athalie. Shakespeare when he wishes to symbolize the age of innocence usually presents two young lovers—Perdita and Florizel, Miranda and Ferdinand—or a pastoral life such as that led by Imogen's brothers. Once, at the beginning of The Winter's Tale—in lines I quoted in my last lecture—he speaks of the boyhood of Polixenes and Leontes and their denial of hereditary guilt, original sin. But Shakespeare, whether because of the pagan settings of The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline or for some other reason, avoids any overt religious reference. He seems to express a faith in the natural goodness of man when not corrupted by society. Racine, on the other hand, emphasizes the religious basis of Eliacin's innocence. The life Eliacin led in the temple is perhaps an indirect tribute to the atmosphere of Racine's schooldays at Port Royal.

Athalie asks Eliacin (Joas) who looked after him in his infancy. He replies:

Has God ever left
His children in want? He feeds the tiniest birds;
His bounty stretches to the whole of nature.
I pray to him daily, and with a father's care
He feeds me with the gifts placed on his altar.

Athalie's fear and hostility gradually change to love. She asks Joas what he does with his time:

I worship the Lord and listen to his law.
I have been taught to read his holy book,
And I am learning now to copy it.

The law states

that God demands our love;
That he takes vengeance, soon or late, on those
Who take his name in vain; that he defends
The timid orphan; that he resists the proud
And punishes the murderer.

Athalie asks what his pleasures are; Joas answers:

Sometimes to the High Priest at the altar
I offer salt or incense. I hear songs
Of the infinite greatness of Almighty God;
I see the stately order of his rites.

She invites him to live in the palace and tells him that there are two gods; he retorts that his god is the only true god and that

The happiness of the wicked passeth away
Even as a torrent.

It will be noticed that there is some justification for Athalie's complaint that the boy has already been indoctrinated and taught to hate her and all she stands for. Racine's innocent already has been taught to distinguish between good and evil; but one is bound to believe that Racine would not have been able to dally with the innocence of love.

Great as Athalie is as a play, it represents not the natural culmination of Racine's work but rather an achievement in a totally new field of drama. The long conflict in his mind between the secular and the religious, which had begun in his schooldays, could not be resolved by compromise. At Port Royal he had defiantly read the Greek romances which his teachers had regarded as pernicious. After his initial failures as a poet, he had dallied with the idea of becoming ordained. Then he had broken with Port Royal and written plays which had shocked them more than his sexual irregularities. When he turned his back on the stage and became reconciled to Port Royal he could consecrate his poetry to his jealous God, but he could not interfuse the emotions of his past life with spiritual significance—he could only repudiate them altogether.