SOURCE: "Racine," in Contemporary Review, Vol. 156, December 1939, pp. 729-36.

In a broadcast for French schools dealing with Racine's place in the history of dramatic literature, the lecturer pronounced the significant words: "In spite of Racine's unquestionable superiority as poet and psychologist, the French nation will, during the time of a national crisis, always turn to Corneille." This statement seems to me to represent in a nutshell the historical and aesthetic valuation of the two greatest dramatists of French literature, and at the same time to emphasise the necessity of a comparison between them, without which an appreciation of the younger poet's position as innovator of French dramatic technique would be futile.

Corneille represents artistically and morally—the two terms are inseparable in French drama—the definite end of a period, Racine the beginning of a new era which has not yet reached its end. Corneille, the grand old man of French drama, wrote for an audience whose chief interest was politics, taking part as actors or spectators in the vicissitudes of the Fronde, a struggle in which unbending will-power turned ordinary mortals into heroes, but also their speech, as the Mémoires of the Cardinal of Retz show us, often into heroics. Corneille's art was in full accordance with his political background and with the moral spokesman of his time, Descartes, whose Traité des Passions had become the breviary of his contemporaries: "By the outcome of those struggles we can gauge the power or weakness of our soul." This strength of character can, of course, prove its mettle only in situations of great moment demanding weighty resolutions, patriotism, renunciation, uncompromising faith, etc. Corneille thus relegates love into the background, replacing the wavering, storm-driven impulses of sexual passion by the sublime and heroic, painting, according to La Bruyère's famous comparison between Corneille and Racine, "men as they ought to be." His characters, therefore, are often the outcome, not the creators, of the dramatic situation, ready-made moral abstractions, suffering from a hieratic hardness and rigidity, obsessed by an all-absorbing ethical idée fixe, looking in one direction only with the metallic stare of a Russian icon.

Compare with this attitude Racine's self-portrait in one of his Canticles:

Mon Dieu, quelle guerre cruelle!
Fe trouve deux hommes en moi:
L'un veut que, plein d'amour pour toi,
Mon cœur te soit toujours fidèle,
L'autre, à tes volontés rebelle,
Me révolte contre ta loi!

With Mazarin's death a new generation enters upon the political and social horizon. The young, temperamental and politically autocratic Louis XIV surrounds himself with a coterie vastly different from a La Rochefoucauld or a Madame de Longueville of the time of the stiffnecked Fronde. Madame Henriette d'Angleterre, Mademoiselle de La Vallière, Madame de Montespan now give rhythm and colour to the voluptuous symphonic poem composed and conducted by the Roi-Soleil. Politics has become too dangerous to be mentioned and is replaced by the multi-coloured carnival of pomp and circumstance and amorous intrigues before which Corneille's supermen are paling into oblivion. The stage clamours now for heroes less heroic, for heroines more human than Polyeucte or Chimène, briefly for the dramatic analysis of the tender passion. For a short time Quinault supplies this want, thus becoming the link between Racine and Corneille, who bitterly complains that now "la seule tendresse est toujours à la mode."

With Andromaque (1667) this "tendresse" became changed into "sentiment."

Quinault's delineation of love as a modish, somewhat affected descriptive programme to the lavender-scented clavecin music of his day (he was a really charming librettist), developed under Racine's magic wand into the powerful portrayal of a universal instinct. This new dramatic motive, evolving out of a mere safety-valve for the political passions of the day, no longer to be indulged in, became since Racine the corner-stone of French drama, conveniently labelled as "amour-passion." As such it forms the basic element of Racine's art and deserves therefore a closer study. The idea of love was, as most things in France, from the earliest times subject to fashion. The chevaleresque woman-worship of the medieval trouvères, the reckless passion of the learned ladies of the Renaissance, the metaphysical sentimentality of the Précieuses in the seventeenth century, tinged according to clerical influence at Court with religious fanaticism, the dissolute life of actors and actresses, all this forms a kaleidoscopic picture which might well tempt an artist of Racine's strong sensuous temperament.

But multiform and complex as his excursions into the Bluebeard chamber of erotic sensations were, he felt prevented from giving free play to his innate naturalist tendencies by three weighty considerations. First: by the ever-present religious background of the seventeenth-century society, second by his stern moral upbringing at Port-Royal, third by the philosophical training of French thought constantly directed towards the dissection and diagnosis of emotions. The first acted as a kind of invisible but rigorous censor, the second deeply coloured Racine's psychological and ethical treatment of human passions, the third provided him with the scientific insight into the last causes of the impulses and inhibitions of his heroines and heroes. But the most powerful influence in his artistic complex was his Jansenist education, an influence often apparently counteracted and even obliterated, owing to the worldly surroundings of his career as dramatic poet. In an age fettered by tradition and the double autocracy of an all-powerful Church and King, Racine represents youth in art and outlook on life. In the eyes of his teachers of Port-Royal he even became a heretic, owing to his unequivocal stand for separation of religious discipline from the dramatic expression of psychological facts. This becomes evident in Racine's virulent attack upon his old master Nicole, who had dared to rank dramatic poets amongst public poisoners of the soul. And yet the very characters in Racine's plays which most interest the modern reader, audience, actor and actress, are those in which the poet endeavours—and how subtly and successfully!—to apply the Jansenist tenets to the study of the human soul. Phèdre, Eriphile (Iphigénie), Athalie, Bérénice, Agrippine, Néron, they all are tormented, recalcitrant pupils of Port-Royal, analysing their own état d'âme, accepting reluctantly the fatality of their sinful passions, condemning them, and yet following their lure to the bitter end, for how can they resist, free will being denied to them?

And there Corneille's and Racine's ways part; the older poet rigidly establishing the moral law as legislator in his dramas, the younger, and this makes him almost our contemporary, letting our ethical conclusions arise out of the swaying, passion-ridden souls of his dramatis personœ. It is this monastic trait in Racine's character, which neither the sirens of the theatre nor the intoxicating splendour of the Court of Versailles could eradicate, that gives us the clue to the generally misunderstood reasons for his retirement from the theatre at the age of 38.

With the adaptability of his fluid nature, he followed the trend of events at Court. Military disasters, the growing misery of the people and the prevailing influence of the Jesuits upon Madame de Maintenon, who had become more and more the King's spiritual director, had plunged the Court into an atmosphere of gloom and depression, a veritable Ash Wednesday following the frenetic carnival of joie de vivre, unfavourable for the appreciation of Racine's dramatic genius, as displayed in his Phèdre, whose Jansenist spirit had reconciled him with Arnauld of Port-Royal, but had alienated the King's favour. To all that must be added the failure of his Phèdre (the affaire Pradori), the desertion of his mistress and best actress, La Champmeslé, the threat of assassination, owing to a brilliant but tactless sonnet written by the poet against the Duc de Nevers, brother of his arch-enemy, the Duchesse de Bouillon, and the general feeling of frustrated hopes and ideals. In a fit of Pascalian despair he intended becoming a monk, "un Amen continuel au fond du cœur" (Fénelon). Racine had started his spiritual education at Port-Royal, had flagrantly denied its teaching through the worldliness of his life, whilst subconsciously applying it to his dramatic work, and was finally rediscovering its soothing balm in the afterglow of a retrospective existence and in the statuesque grandeur of his swan-song, Athalie.

Racine foreshadowed with an almost prophetic power some problems which beset the spiritual life of our day: the instability of sexual relations, the craving for domination, the brittleness of moral and religious convictions, though all eventually corrected and settled by a theodicy whose high priest has received his training in Port-Royal. The fearless advocate of justice does not shun his sovereign's displeasure by scarcely veiled political allusions. Already in his second play, Alexandre le Grand, we find an outbreak of indignation against autocracy which could only have passed unnoticed in this early drama of the still little-known poet and which even to-day might give food for thought to present-day fascist demi-gods:

Porus: "Quelle étrange valeur qui, ne cherchant qu'd nuire,
Embrase tout sitôt qu'elle commence à luire:
Qui n'a que son orgueil pour règle et pour raison;
Qui veut que l'univers ne soit qu'une prison,
Et que, maître absolu de tous tant que nous sommes,
Ses esclaves en nombre égalent tous les hommes.
Plus d'états, plus de rois; ses sacrilèges mains
Dessous un même joug rangent tous les humains."
(Alexandre, ii, 2.)

In Bérénice, that moving dramatisation of Suetonius' "Invitus invitam dimisit," Racine's contemporaries were invited to draw a parallel between Titus-Bérénice and the young Louis XIV and Maria Mancini whom he too had to renounce: "invitus invitam"!

And Esther, Racine's first play in which la grande passion is replaced by racial patriotism and religious ecstasy, which made Madame de Sévigné exclaim: "Racine has surpassed himself! He loves God as he used to love his mistresses." Esther must have appealed to the elect audience of Saint-Cyr as an undisguised plea for the official recognition of Madame de Maintenon as Queen of France: Ahasuerus' command: "Soyez Reine" (i, I) sounded like a trumpet-call to King and nation.

But the poet's most courageous attack upon the King's autocratic indifference to justice is the High Priest's warning to Joas (Athalie, iv, 3), symbolising Fénelon's pupil, the little Duc de Bourgogne, heir-apparent to the thorne:

Loin du trône nourri, de ce fatal honneur,
Hélas! Vous ignorez le charme empoisonneur.
De l'absolu pouvoir vous ignorez l'ivresse,
Et des lâches flatteurs la voix enchanteresse.
Bientôt ils vous diront
Qu'un roi n'a d'autre frein que sa volonté même;
Qu'aux larmes, au travail le peuple est condamné.
Que, s'il n'est opprimé, tôt ou tard il opprime.

We need not be surprised that neither King nor Court savoured such home-truths and that Athalie was not granted a public performance. Nor is Schiller's Don Carlos performed in Hitler's Germany!

I believe that our current text-books emphasise too much Racine's insistence upon the sexual problems presented in his dramas. In two plays, Bérénice and Mithridate, he proved that he was able successfully to steal the thunder from his elder rival. "Renunciation and will-power," Corneille's slogans for his whole dramatic work, are acting also as levers in Bérénice, with the sole difference that in Racine's play the clash between duty and desire is never lost sight of. The most Corneillean of his tragedies is Mithridate, in which the poet's art makes the Pontian King's imposing personality, like Wotan in Gotterdämmerung, seem ever-present, even when bodily off the stage. The Racine, however, who claims the interest of the modern reader is the feminist whose field of psychological research is almost exclusively the emotional life of woman. His heroes, with the exception of Oreste (Andromaque), Néron, Mithridate and Joas (Athalie), occupy a second, or even third place in his gallery of character portraits. I single out Oreste as a curious study in Freudian inhibition, and as a romantic anachronism in the seventeenth century, a René (Chateaubriand) with a touch of Hamlet.

Fe ne sais de tout temps quelle injuste puissance
Laisse le crime en paix et poursuit Pinnocence.
(Andromaque, iii, I.)

and in the same scene:

Excuse un malheureux qui perd tout ce qu'il aime,
Que tout le monde hait, et qui se hait lui-même!

Racine's most sombre study in depravation is Néron. A sadist by nature,

Fe me fais de sa peine une image charmante
(ii, 8.)

he is the dramatic counterpart of Tacitus' verdict: "He was made by nature to hide his hatred under the cover of treacherous gentleness":

F'embrasse mon rival, mais c'est pour l'étouffer.
(iv, 3.)

But Racine's most complex characters will always remain his heroines. From the touching simplicity of unselfish love:

F'aimais, Seigneur, j'aimais, je voulais être aimée
(Bérénice, v, 7.)

to the outbursts of primitive passion, goaded on by the infuriated goddess, a terrifying picture of prehistoric, ritualist Greek life:

C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée
(Phèdre, i, 3.)

Racine has gone through the whole gamut of passions ravaging a woman's soul. Andromaque's self-sacrificing love for her child and mystic devotion to Hector's memory, Agrippine's thwarted craving for domination over Rome and her son:

Britannicus le gêne, Albine, et chaque jour
Fe sens que je deviens opportune à mon tour

culminating in Athalie's lurid personality, oriental in thought and speech, treacherous, despairing before the doom awaiting her, and, autocrat that she is to the end, tormented by feminine hysteria:

La peur d'un vain remords trouble cette grande âme;
Elle flotte, elle hésite, en un mot, elle est femme
(iii, 3.)

and at last, breaking down with the heart-rending confession of defeat, but still as equal to equal:

Dieu des Fuifs, tu l'emportes!
(v, 6.)

These three instances of heroic types chosen from the poet's plays show us that the "tendre" Racine knew very well when the situation arose, how to create heroines which could rival Shakespeare's greatest achievements. When drawing the sum-total of Racine's portraits of tragic women, Phèdre, "the incestuous queen, a Christian to whom divine grace is denied" (Arnauld), the sinner whom confession and penance lead out of the wilds of demon-haunted Greece into the precincts of Port-Royal, and Athalie, who, more than any of Racine's heroines, can claim to produce in the listener the Aristotelian reaction of cleansing terror and pity, these two figures will stand out as the poet's sublimest dramatic creations. With Racine woman has come into her own in French drama.

No appreciation of Racine's work can be adequate without an analysis of his technique; his language is based on the French of the seventeenth century, clipped, polished, but, also, impoverished and almost drained of all poetical possibilities by that "gratteur des syllabes" Malherbe. Words which may seem to us affected and stereotyped have to be understood in their original sense, e.g. Madame, Seigneur, ennui, aimant, gêner and that terrible word "tendre," which contributed so much to the misunderstanding of the poet's artistic personality. But once familiar with this aspect of Racine's idiom, we can only admire the supreme art with which he wielded the weapon handed on to him. Though writing verse, he was no versifier. His chief aim was the psychological development of his plot, and for that reason he sketched his plays first in prose; then he could safely say: "Now I have only to transcribe it in metre." In the use of the antithesis he went farther than Corneille, but with the difference that he always treated it as a vehicle of psychological significance. Two instances will show what I mean:

Hippolyte est sensible et ne sent rien pour moi.
(Phèdre, iv, 5.)

F'entendrai des regards que vous croirez muets.
(Britannicus, ii, 4.)

Racine developed his æsthetic views in his Préfaces, analytical studies of the poet's technique compared with that of Corneille and the Ancients. He was also an innovator in the treatment of the confidant(e), whom Corneille still accepts as a necessary evil. In Racine's plays they act the part of the modern raisonneur, frequently, as in the case of Oenone (Phèdre), rising to superb dramatic heights.

With regard to his metrical skill and infinite variety of musical shades, he is beyond praise or cavil. Jules Lemaître's words on his prose can be literally applied to the poet's verse: "Racine's prose is delicious. It is the most winged, most ethereal of the seventeenth century." But, I may add, for this very reason untranslatable. Racine is the only representative of French classical tragedy who has survived all the vicissitudes of schools and fashions. Inimitable craftsmanship, dramatic genius of the highest order, all crowned by lofty idealism and understanding for human frailties: these qualities alone will secure to Racine his place amongst the Immortals.