SOURCE: "Approach to Racine," in Jean Racine: Dramatist, Hamish Hamilton, 1972, pp. 3-25.

[Turnell has written widely on French literature and has made significant translations of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Guy de Maupassant, Blaise Pascal, and Paul Valèry. In the following excerpt, he quotes several critics contra Racine, using them as a springboard to his thesis that "when properly performed, Racine is still the greatest French tragic dramatist" and that the negative pronouncements of Racine's critics speak more to the issue of access than to that of dramatic accomplishment.]

'Of all our authors', François Mauriac once said, 'Racine is one of the least accessible to the peoples of other countries'.

Racine presents special difficulties for foreigners. They are by no means confined to foreigners. There are at present two generally accepted approaches to the French classic dramatists. You can either wipe away the veneer which has accumulated with the passage of time and obscures the work of the master and try to think yourself back into the seventeenth century, or you can argue that no great writer belongs exclusively to a particular period and insist on the importance of the plays as dramatic experience. The first of these approaches is the safer, the second the more rewarding and also the more dangerous.

The dangers are illustrated by a controversy which began in France some fifteen years ago and is perhaps still not ended. In 1955 the Compagnie Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Louis Barrault decided to mount a production of Bérénice at the Théâtre Marigny and to mark the event by the publication of a special number of the company's Cahiers devoted to Racine. Henry de Montherlant was invited to write the introduction to it. He called his article 'Racine Langouste'. He drew a comparison between the conventions of seventeenth-century drama and the lobster's shell. If you scrape and prod long enough and hard enough, you may get a few tasty morsels from the animal. In the same way you may extract a few fragments of poetry from Racine—Montherlant put the aggregate at twenty-seven lines for the twelve plays—if you are prepared to spend your time 'painfully and interminably removing the shell'.

Four years later Jean Vilar, who had consistently opposed all attempts to persuade him to add Racine to the repertoire of the Théâtre National Populaire on the grounds that he was not suitable for 'popular' consumption, yielded to public pressure and produced Phèdre with Maria Casarès in the name part. It was Roland Barthes' turn to enter the lists. In an article published in Théâtre Populaire, the TNP's own journal, he declared that the production was a misfortune for Casarès who 'had risked a lot and lost a lot'. The dramatist did not escape. If we go to see Phèdre, said Barthes, 'it is on account of a particular actress, a certain number of felicitous lines, some famous tirades set against a background of obscurity and boredom. We tolerate the rest.' 'I do not know,' he concluded, 'whether it is still possible to perform Racine today. It may be that on the stage his work is three-quarters dead.' …

It cannot be too often repeated that the true test of a dramatist is his effectiveness, or his continuing effectiveness, on the stage. Racine's critics were not suggesting that owing to a lean period among the sociétaires of the Comédie Française Racine should be given a rest. They were saying that though he had undoubted merits as a poet, the plays themselves were no longer actable, that they should be removed permanently from the theatre to the study, that Racine should in fact be treated like Robert Garnier, the great sixteenth-century writer, whose works are almost certainly no longer actable because they are dramatic poems rather than plays.

The thesis I am going to defend is that when properly performed, Racine is still the greatest French tragic dramatist and that the pronouncements of the critics from Montherlant to Barthes and Dutourd are perfect examples of Mauriac's problem of access.

One way of tackling the problem is to take a look at Racine's imagery. The setting of eight of the tragedies is a palace. In Athalie it is a temple with a palace not far away; in Alexandre and Iphigenie a military camp. This means that at the start of nine of the tragedies we, the public, find ourselves metaphorically speaking outside a stately building, separated by a formidable array of masonry from a world which, as one critic put it, does seem 'far from us'. Our job is to secure 'access' to the palaces and the temple, to find out what is going on behind those walls and to merge ourselves in palace life. Racine himself provides a clue—we might almost call it a 'pass'—in the opening scenes of three of the plays.

In Bérénice Antiochus says to his confidant:

Arrêtons un moment. La pompe de ces lieux,
Je le vois bien, Arsace, est nouvelle à tes yeux.

In Bajazet the vizir asks his confidant to follow him into the palace and report on the mission he has just completed. The confidant replies:

Et depuis quand, Seigneur, entre-t-on dans ces lieux
Dont l'accès était même interdit à nos yeux?

Finally, in Esther the queen's confidant says to her mistress:

De ce palais j'ai su trouver l'entrée.
O spectacle! O triomphe admirable à mes yeux,
Digne en effet du bras qui sauva nos aïeux!

In each of the plays a person who knows the way round introduces a confidant or servant into a palace which is totally unknown to him or her. Their reactions are different. In Bérénice the accent falls on novelty and grandeur; in Bajazet on the difficulties and dangers of 'access'; in Esther on the staggering sight which greets the confidant's eyes.

In every case it is an ordinary person who is admitted or finds a way into the palace and is confronted by what seems an entirely new mode of life. That is the position of the audience. It is not enough to watch a production of Racine as though it were a faintly remote spectacle and cavil at the way in which it is mounted. We have to identify ourselves with the newcomer, follow him into the palace, listen to the explanation that the guide offers, which is Racine's exposition, and then see for ourselves.

The moment we enter we are conscious of a marked change of atmosphere. We have somehow been translated to a different plane. On the surface everything looks, sounds, feels different from the world we know. Next, we have the contradictory feeling that life in the palace has a strange dualism about it. It is at once very unlike and very like our world: unlike because of the setting; like because of the human frailty of its occupants. We are aware from the first of an almost suffocating tension in the air combined with a desperate effort to maintain some sort of control which frequently breaks down. The tension is pervasive; it is also contagious. It is the atmosphere which produces fascinating and frightening revelations about human nature—about ourselves. It is only by surrendering to it that we gain psychological as well as physical access to Racine's world and that we come to share his vision.

The palaces vary considerably in style. Three are Greek, two Roman, three oriental. They have one thing in common. There is something of the prison about them. We have the impression that the community is somehow confined within their walls, that while 'access' may be difficult, once you are in it is almost impossible to get out again. The sense of confinement is partly psychological, but in some of the palaces we shall find that one or two members of the community are literally prisoners. Some of the palaces are more disturbing than others. They are huge, dark, claustrophobic. They give the occupants the alarming impression that they are constantly being watched, that their lives are in danger and that disaster may overtake them at any moment.

The situation of the palaces is important. Four of them stand by the sea; most of the others are within reasonable distance of it. One of the palaces looks out on a sunlit sea which seems, tantalizingly, to beckon to the prisoners, inviting them to abandon their troubles, to leave the claustrophobic palace and enjoy freedom in the open air—to live instead of to languish. In another we hear the waves beating, a trifle ominously, against the walls of the building. In still another the waves merely 'lap' against the palace walls. The occupants of most of the palaces are acutely aware of the proximity of the sea. They mention it repeatedly in their conversation; their language contains what on the face of it appears to be a surprising number of nautical images. There are references to storms at sea, to shipwrecks, to people flinging themselves or being flung into the sea and drowning, and in one instance to a phenomenal calm at sea which actually determines the unfolding of the drama. At the same time their attitude is decidedly ambivalent. The sea does, indeed, offer a prospect of escape from their prison and their troubles, but in their heart of hearts they know that it is an illusion, that the hope will never be realized, or if it is their escape will turn out to be not freedom but separation from the loved one, or they themselves will be dead by the time their henchmen, who have survived a palace massacre, make a bolt by way of the sea.

If the prospect of escape is an illusion, there is nothing illusory about the threat from the sea. It is in a sense a two-way traffic. For practical purposes the outward journey is never accomplished; the inward journey from the sea invariably is. It is the sea which brings all sorts of people to the palace who have a dangerous and disrupting effect on life inside: the outsider posing as an ambassador who provokes disaster; the return of a tyrannical father, reported missing believed dead; the murderous slave who stabs nearly every occupant of the palace to death.

It is time to turn from the buildings to their inmates.

The palaces are royal in every sense. The inhabitants are for the most part kings, queens, princes, princesses, and their retainers. The structure of society is a simple one. There are strictly speaking only two classes: masters and servants, the rulers and the ruled, royalty and 'the people'. Yet the combination of the two, as we shall see, plays an important part in the development of the drama.

We are not merely inside a palace; we are at court. The court is a small one. There are two or three people belonging to the same family. They are joined on occasion by some one from outside: a prince seeking the hand of one of the royal daughters, or a princess who is betrothed to a member of the family as well as by the dangerous outsiders and unwanted relatives who arrive by sea.

The protocol plays a large and important part in the life of the court. The members know one another intimately, but their deportment strikes the visitor as curious. Parents, to be sure, address their children familiarly except when a monarch loses his temper and switches from 'enfant' to 'Prince'. So do brothers and sisters. In a moment of euphoria a young man may call his girl 'Belle Monime!' Or an angry woman may scrap all titles and simply call the man who has rebuffed her by his name. In most other cases, whether they are husband and wife, engaged couples or simply servants speaking to masters and mistresses, they use, or begin by using, the standard form of address: 'Seigneur', 'Madame', 'Prince', 'Princesse'.

This sounds at first like mere convention. In these palaces it is a good deal more. It is a sign of the occupants' status certainly; it is also a sign of their state of mind from moment to moment. It serves to some extent as a safety device. As long as the standard forms of address are in use the speakers retain some degree of control over their emotions. When they go, everything goes. They are in fact the life line. The life line snaps. This produces the tragedy.

It is obvious from the moment we enter the building that this is no ordinary day in the life of the palace, that we have arrived in the middle of a major crisis. As we watch the expressions on the faces of the occupants and listen to what they are saying, we realize that they are intelligent, civilized, sensitive, perceptive, but that they are also incredibly highly strung, 'touchy' in the extreme. They are visibly making prodigious efforts to control themselves, to maintain some sort of balance, but the artificial restraint does nothing to diminish the growing tension. It simply intensifies to an almost unheard of degree the violence of the outbursts and the final explosions when they come.

There are only two people in the room: a young prince and his father's middle-aged confidant. The prince is telling the confidant that he has just heard that the army of the king, his father, has been routed by the Romans and the king himself killed in the battle. He goes on to speak of his bad relations with his half-brother who is suspected of plotting a sell-out to Rome. It is the first news of the family feud which is characteristic of palace life. Then comes the most serious thing of all which the prince describes, significantly, as his 'secret'. He is deeply in love with his father's youthful fiancée and believes that the treacherous half-brother is after her too. The prince suddenly catches sight of the fiancée and hurriedly dismisses the confidant. She has in fact come to enlist his help against his half-brother who is 'importuning' her. This is too much for the prince who plunges into a declaration of love. The half-brother joins them. The argument begins. Then the fiancée's confidant rushes breathlessly into the room with the worst news of all. The king is not dead. He had just landed at the port—'come in from the sea'. All three are badly shaken. The fiancée and her confidant depart, leaving the half-brothers to discuss the situation. The potential traitor proposes a pact. He gets no response. They leave. The fiancée returns with her confidant and proceeds to disclose her 'secret'. She is in love with the young prince. They leave. The king makes his entry with his two sons. He sends them away and remains alone with his confidant. He explains that he is still desperately in love with his betrothed. He is suspicious of his sons' attitude and questions the confidant. The confidant ducks. The fiancée reappears. During our day at the palace we shall find that after several meetings the king very basely tricks her into revealing her 'secret'.

This sets the pattern and the pace. The word 'secret' is on everybody's lips. Nearly everyone has something to hide from some one else. The 'secrets', as we can see, are concerned with love and politics. They divide the community into factions, into pursuers and pursued, aggressors and victims.

The attempts of one party to hide and the other to discover its 'secrets' determine the pace of palace life. The palace is a hive of activity. The occupants are perpetually on the move. There are continual comings and goings: meetings, encounters, separations. Racine's casts are small. It is unusual for more than three of the principal characters to be present at the same time and this only happens occasionally. For the most part the activity consists of a rapid succession of couples, sometimes with and sometimes without their confidants: unhappy meetings of thwarted lovers; stormy encounters between pursuers and pursued; furious clashes between 'rivals'. They are interspersed with conversations between individuals and their confidants. Voices drop to a murmur as a problem is debated by a young man and a young woman, or by lovers and their confidants. Suddenly a voice rises in anguish or ends in a scream. With every meeting the crisis gathers momentum.

Although there is nothing comparable to the conferences which take place in the Cornelian palaces with most of the court assembled, some meetings are rather more formal than others. A king is receiving an ambassador or outlining plans for a military campaign. On other occasions a speaker makes highly provocative or even deeply wounding remarks, but though the people to whom they are addressed may be twitching with rage the situation is governed by the protocol. They do not interrupt; they hear him out and hold their fire until he has had his say. These occasions bring home to the visitor one important point. There is a basic language which is common to all the inhabitants of the palaces. It is simple, measured, dignified or, to borrow an expression used by Valbuena Prat of one of the Spanish seventeenth-century dramatists, it is the 'sober, elevated palace style'. It provides a background which underlines and throws into relief the contrast between the formal meetings and those scenes in which disappointed lovers and angry rivals let their hair well and truly down. For the meetings between the couples are usually highly emotional. That is the crux of the matter. It is not only what people say that counts; it is the tone in which it is said: the voice that goes straight to the heart and does more than almost anything to involve the visitor in the life of the palace. And here one might interject that one of the most important qualifications for the Racinian actor or actress is a rich, strong, vibrant voice. The content of the speech naturally determines the tone, but speaking for myself it is the tone that finally 'gets' me.

The palaces are massive; there are long winding corridors with innumerable rooms leading off them. But we, the visitors, are only admitted to a single room. The whole of the drama is concentrated inside it. In that one room every major decision is taken or, if not, it is duly reported there. Equally, almost every word of importance is spoken in our hearing and before our eyes. The drama is an internal one. What interests us most is what is happening inside the occupants' minds and comes out in their speech. Except for an occasional suicide, there is properly speaking

no action in the room: no duels or only furious verbal duels and threats; no lovemaking; simply word and gesture. At the same time, we are aware that the room, or more accurately, the palace, is a world within a world which it is trying to dominate. We hear people talking about 'the empire', 'the world' and even 'the universe'. Messengers come hurrying in and deliver terrifying reports of actions taking place in the outside world or in a distant part of the palace. A king has been assassinated; a lover has been done to death in a different room, or a mistress has committed suicide on the steps of an altar where her lover married a rival; rebellion by the army or the people is imminent. The message is nearly always: 'All is lost'.

Confinement to a single room contributes enormously to the claustrophobic atmosphere and greatly increases the tensions. There is no relaxation, or if there is it is illusory and a prelude to a vast storm. There is no escape either from pursuers who have a nasty way of turning up at precisely the wrong moment and finding a 'rival' slumped at the girl's feet. When they have discovered, or think they have discovered, the other party's 'secret' they denounce their behaviour in the most violent terms. This is the signal for an explosion.

The explosions are frequent, sudden, complete. The protocol goes by the board, producing an extraordinary contrast between past dignity and present violence. The last vestiges of civilized deportment vanish. There are no titles, only savage denunciation or agonized protest, or both. The Words 'perfide', 'infidèle', 'traître' and 'barbare' echo and re-echo all over the palace. There are switches from the polite 'vous' to the bitingly contemptuous 'tu'. The language of the courtier is replaced by the harangues of the fishwife. The ferocious denunciation turns into a verbal battle which will end in murder or suicide. The aggressors, who are not invariably male, behave like wild beasts determined to drag the victims into bed, or failing that, to tear them to pieces. The victims of the male aggressors are distraught women staggering through the rooms of the palace or falling to the ground and describing themselves as 'égarées' and 'éperdues'.

The contrast between the outward dignity of palace life and the ferocious passions unleashed is so extraordinary, the ending with reports of violent deaths pouring in and the sight of principals who have poisoned or stabbed themselves to death, intensified in one instance by the ranting of a madman, that we feel slightly dazed, wondering how it could all have happened, how people could have got themselves into quite such a mess. It is not difficult to explain. At the root of most of the trouble is the erotic instinct. A loves B who is in love with C who returns his or her love. This form of triangle is basic in palace life. We can anticipate by saying that A is usually the aggressor, B and C the victims. A father, as we have seen, returns defeated from the wars to find that not one, but both his sons are in love with his betrothed. An emperor is sick of his unexciting wife whom he was forced to marry against his will for political reasons, and is carried away by his half-brother's fiancée. He murders the half-brother and the fiancée takes the veil. A sultana is tired of being bedded by a lecherous sultan and is madly in love with the sultan's half-brother who is in love with his childhood sweetheart. She has the man murdered, is murdered herself by the sultan's slave and the girl commits suicide. Another father returns from a womanizing expedition to discover after endless misunderstandings that his wife has tried unsuccessfully to seduce her stepson and is nearly mad with jealousy because the stepson, too, has fallen for another girl. In still another case A loves B who is in love with C, but is prevented from marrying him by Roman law. This does for the lot of them as completely as the dagger or the poison cup.

Although the origins of several of the tragedies are sexual there is a close connection between public and private interests. Royalty are never free agents. They have naturally enough a public as well as a private role and their private actions have public repercussions. Unless the individual is subordinated to the public personage, there is bound to be trouble. The union of A and B or B and C may be open to moral, political or legal objections, or to all three. When the objections are disregarded, as they usually are, the consequences are catastrophic. They create divisions in public and private life. There is a danger of uprisings by the army or the people and of the awakening of homicidal impulses in the family, producing the family feud. War is often in the air. In one case the enemy is actually advancing on the capital in order to capture the monarch and probably to burn his palace to the ground. The sexual rivalry of a father and son leads to civil war with father and son on opposite sides. In another play there is a danger of a war which was supposed to be over and done with breaking out afresh, or of a preventive civil war to put a stop to it. In still another a sultan has defeated a foreign enemy and is on his way back home in order to put down a palace revolution only to find, on arrival, that the family feud has done the job for him.

It is evident that the crisis is caused mainly by the fact that, whatever the cost and even if it means that everybody will perish in the process, A is absolutely determined to get B. That is where the confidants come in.

Racine's confidants have been sweepingly dismissed as faceless individuals only fit to run errands, deliver messages and try to comfort masters and mistresses. This might be a possible comment on Corneille for the simple reason that his protagonists are usually too tough morally to need the sort of help confidants can offer. It cannot be accepted without considerable reservations in the case of Racine. It is true that some of his confidants are nonentities, but others have an important role. Although they are all born into the same class there are sub-divisions. A number have risen from the ranks, become commanders, governors or advisers to their masters. A few are more complex than the rest and look like projections of their masters' and mistresses' good and bad impulses. The bad confidants encourage the protagonists' weaknesses and hasten the disaster. The good ones adopt a much more positive attitude. They are simple people partly no doubt because the structure of the tragedies does not leave room for the elaborate characterization of confidants even if it were desirable, but mainly because what Racine needed in these parts were simple, honest, clearsighted, down-to-earth people. The right kind of confidant is the one who is class-conscious in a wholly laudatory sense, who sees himself as the representative of 'the people' and does his best to protect their interests against the vagaries of royalty. These confidants stand for common sense; they take an objective view of the situation; they weigh the pros and cons; they know which path the master ought to take and do everything they can to convince him of it. The fact that they nearly always fail is immaterial. It is they who help to provide a balance—the balance found in a single individual in Corneille—and enable us to see the actions of the protagonists in their true perspective.

We can perhaps summarize the function of the palaces in this way. They are not simply impersonal buildings which provide a setting for the tragedy or mere status symbols of the occupants. They represent a particular order. The drama centres round the fortunes of this order. It is in control at the beginning of the play, but its fate varies from one play to another and is of critical importance. In some plays it is preserved; in others it is destroyed. In others still there is a conflict between two orders which ends in the destruction of one and its replacement by the other.

The drama centred on order naturally has an immediate impact on the inmates of the palace and is largely responsible for dividing them into parties or factions: those who are trying to maintain the existing order and those who are trying to escape from its clutches or replace it by another order. I have said that there is something of the prison about the palaces, that their effect is partly physical and partly psychological. The inmates not only suffer from a sense of confinement; the palaces often isolate, and in some cases insulate, them from everyday life, cut them off from 'the people'. That is why many of them get their values so badly wrong and why I have emphasized the importance of the confidants.

The occupants are continually using a group of words expressing their sense of confinement: 'captif, 'captive', 'esclave', 'dompter', 'fers', 'lier', 'piège', 'joug', 'noeud'. They are the 'prisoners', 'captives' or 'slaves' of an order or a régime. In many cases they are equally the 'captives' or 'slaves' of their own impulses or the impulses of other people. They get caught in 'traps', are forced to submit to a 'yoke', are bound by 'fetters' or a 'knot'. Release is impossible unless they manage to dodge the 'trap', shed the 'yoke', or cut the 'knot'.

This shapes the action which on occasion takes the form of a palace intrigue or a palace revolution. 'Secret' is also one of a recurring group of words: 'cacher', 'dissimuler', 'déguisement', 'feindre', 'tromper', 'artifice', 'stratagème'. The drama is taken up with the attempts of the aggressors to wrest their victims' 'secrets' from them and the victims' efforts to safeguard their rights by preserving their 'secrets'. In order to do so they are obliged at times to resort to the same subterfuges—the 'artifices' and 'stratagèmes'—as the aggressors. This adds up to a desperate attempt to shed the 'yoke', cut the 'knot' or simply to 'escape'. 'Fuir' and its variants are used 165 times in the plays. They usually stand for frustration and failure. And that spells death and disaster, or at best a refuge in the sanctuary of the Vestal Virgins after the aggressor has poisoned your beloved.

I want to take a closer look at what I have called the erotic instinct. I was once scolded by an academic for speaking of the references to 'bed' in Racine. The truth of the matter is that he is a sexier writer than appears on the surface. He suffered from the inhibiting effect of the bienséances which left French dramatists with much less freedom than their English and Spanish contemporaries or even than contemporary French authors of prose fiction. It applies particularly to Spanish dramatists who did not mind a rape or two or a stepmother actually bedding her stepson though the penalties admittedly were devastating. It would no doubt be an exaggeration to describe Bajazet as Racine's X Certificate play, but he came as near in it as he dared to writing a sex play. He was still a long way off as we can see by comparing it with one of his sources—the novelist Segrais' story, 'Floridon ou L'Amour imprudent'. And whatever Louis XIV's relations with Marie Mancini, I always goggle at the idea of that five years' courtship in Bérénice without a single go!

Discussion of the erotic instinct brings us to some of the differences between Corneille and Racine. Corneille, as we know, was a pupil of the Jesuits, Racine a pupil of the Jansenists. There is a tendency at present to play down the influence of Jansenism on Racine's work. This seems to me to be a mistake. Jansenism was much more a matter of atmosphere than of doctrine. The Jesuits laid great stress on free-will. Jansenist teaching was strongly coloured by the Lutheran teaching on original sin. The Fall had led to the complete ruin of human nature which was incapable of any good action without the direct intervention of divine grace. The Jansenists also leaned towards the doctrine of predestination. This added to the gloom, but it fitted in quite neatly with the conception of destiny in those of Racine's plays which were Greek in inspiration.

Corneille's protagonists are fighters. They use their will power to the full in withstanding the ravages of original sin. When faced with a moral dilemma they stand back, take stock and decide on the right course of action. Even if they lose their lives in the process they end up as better men than they started. They have experienced the moment of truth: the transcendental moment when they see what they must do and know that they have the moral strength to do it. In Corneille the conflict is purgatorial: in Racine it is plain hell. The drama opens with the proverbial coup de foudre. A man catches sight of a girl or a girl of a man. The damage is done. They are predestined to disaster from that very moment. They at once become the victims of an irresistible impulse which sends them down the dizzy slope to destruction. The dagger or the poison cup which ends their lives is no more than consummation on the physical plane of the total ruin which has already taken place on the psychological plane.

This has sometimes created the impression that the conflict in Racine is not a moral conflict, but simply a clash of personalities who are determined to batter the beloved into submission or smash a rival. The short answer is that if this were so Racine would not be the master that he is. Violence is endemic in his work; there are times when will power scarcely seems to exist and his principal characters are certainly people of extremes. It does not mean that they are unaware of what they are doing or are devoid of all moral scruples. It depends on the nature of the erotic impulse.

We can best approach it by way of Corneille's celebrated pronouncement in the dedication of La Place Royale:

It was from you that I learnt that the love of a decent man (honnête homme) should always be voluntary; that we must never let things reach a stage at which we cannot stop loving; that if we go as far as that love becomes a tyranny whose yoke must be cast off; and that lastly, the person whom we love has much more reason to be grateful for our love when it is the result of our choice and her merit than when it comes from blind inclination (inclination aveugle).

Although the dedication was published two years before Racine was born, our reaction is obvious. It sounds, we say, like a commentary on Racine. It is a forthright statement of the 'rules' of love. Corneille's own greatness depends on the fact that his finest characters never fail to keep them; Racine's on the fact that his seldom fail to break them. We must, however, distinguish. I have spoken so far as though there were only one kind of love in Racine. This is not so. There is the frantic passion of the aggressors and the moderate and reasonable love of the victims. For simplicity therefore I shall call the first 'passion' and the second 'love'.

With this reservation, we may fairly describe the dedication as an intriguing account of Racinian passion. A number of phrases leap to the eye: 'voluntary', 'tyranny', 'cast off the yoke', 'blind inclination', as well as the references to 'choice' and the 'merit' of the loved one. In Racine passion is never 'voluntary'; it is always 'tyrannical'; the characters never manage to 'cast off the yoke'; it is invariably a 'blind inclination' which is never the result of reasoned 'choice' or the 'merit' of the beloved. Corneille's characters announce the victory of 'reason' over 'inclination'; Racine its total defeat. This is Corneille:

Une femme d'honneur peut avouer sans honte
Ces surprises des sens que la raison surmonte;
Ce n'est qu'en ces assauts qu'éclate la vertu,
Et l'on doute d'un coeur qui n'a point combattu.
(Polyeucte, I, 3)

Ma raison, il est vrai, dompte mes sentiments;
Mais quelque autorité que sur eux elle ait prise,
Elle n'y règne pas, elle les tyrannise;
Et quoique le dehors soit sans émotion,
Le dedans n'est que trouble et que sédition.
(Polyeucte, II, 2)

This is Racine:

Puisqu'après tant d'efforts ma résistance est vaine,
Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m'entraîne.
(Andromaque, I, 1)

Je me suis engagé trop avant.
Je vois que la raison cède à la violence.
(Phèdre, II, 2)

There are people who regard the moral conflict in Corneille with a certain degree of scepticism. What I want to stress here is its power and its authenticity. There is nothing facile or mechanical about it, no conventional adulation of 'reason'. In Corneille 'reason' is the faculty which imposes order and preserves the unity of the person. For Pauline its workings are decidedly painful as we can see from the contrast between the verbs 'régner' and 'tyranniser'. She is outwardly calm, but her mind is in a state of turmoil. In the present context—she is speaking to Sévère—'trouble' has a sexual undertone, but it is widely used and is a comparatively mild word. It is followed by the strong word, 'sédition', which matches 'tyrannise'. It will be observed that Pauline sees the conflict in political terms as a conflict between public and private interest. 'Reason' has to operate 'tyrannically' and repress by force an uprush of the senses which in moral terms are trying to violate the rights of the husband in favour of a rival and are therefore 'seditious'. The accent falls finally on words signifying victory: 'surmonte' and 'dompte'. In the passages from Andromaque and Phèdre the words 'livre', emphasized by 'aveugle' and 'cède', are the sign not merely of defeat, but of a rout. Corneille's characters accept 'reason' as a necessary discipline however painful its operation: the attitude of Racine's is usually one of unqualified hostility:

Pylade, je suis las d'écouter la raison.
Tant de raisonnements offensent ma colère.
(Andromaque, III, 1; IV, 3)

Although Racine's characters are inclined to treat 'reason' as an exasperating obstacle which keeps them out of the beloved's bed, it will be apparent that in both Racine and Corneille the conflict is basically the same: a conflict between public and private interests or between personal inclination and the rights of another human being. The difference lies in the result and there it is absolute.

The position becomes clearer still when we look at two other sets of words. They are 'trouble', 'agité', 'inquiet', 'transport', 'désordre', 'égaré', 'éperdu' and their opposites: 'repos', 'tranquillité', 'douceur', 'clarté', 'bornes', 'ordre'. They represent the two ways of life which offer themselves to the protagonists. For Corneille once again they are a positive goal. The use of the verbs 'surmonter', 'dompter', and in another place 'vaincre', show that it is not only attainable, but has been attained. In Racine the first set of words is the reality, the second the mirage.

Two of the lines I have quoted from Polyeucte deserve a second look:

Ce n'est qu'en ces assauts qu'éclate la vertu,
Et l'on doute d'un coeur qui n'a point combattu.

In spite of its painfulness, Pauline welcomes the conflict because it puts her to the test and demonstrates her integrity. This explains the difference in the moral weight of the words 'vertu', 'honneur' and 'gloire' in the two dramatists. In Corneille the victory of 'vertu' is a sign of 'honneur' or personal integrity which leads to 'gloire' or a public reputation for moral integrity. Except when used of victory on the battlefield, Racine's 'gloire' is a much more personal and much less moral affair, really amounting to little more than self-esteem. Racine's characters are very sensitive to their reputations which means that on occasion they are prepared to sacrifice 'vertu' to something which is no more than keeping up appearances, however deceptive. So we have Oenone's advice to Phèdre:

pour sauver notre honneur combattu,
II faut immoler tout, et même la vertu.

When we come to Bérénice, we shall find that even when reason or will power appears to triumph, the effects are destructive. We are back at the formula I once used in another place. Corneille's characters are people qui se construisent, Racine's people qui se défont. Corneille's moment of truth is matched in Racine by the moment of disintegration when the character begins to have doubts about his identity.

I have drawn a distinction between the 'passion' of the protagonists and the 'love' of the young couples who are sometimes known as the jeunes premiers. Although their love is doomed to disaster through the intervention of the protagonists, they stand for a virtuous and a balanced love which if satisfied would bring happiness without harming the rights of anybody. They have an obvious and a close link with the more impressive confidants. They provide perspective and contrast; they show that tragedy could have been avoided if the protagonists had possessed the same restraint, the same respect for the given word as themselves.

The reason why innocent love is only satisfied in two or the plays is explained by the word 'tyranny'. The protagonists, too, are convinced that success in love will bring them happiness, but their obsession has reached such an extreme degree that they are faced with the choice between union with the victim of their passion or death. Their peculiar helplessness in the throes of a passion which has turned into a malady is evident in one of Pyrrhus's pronouncements:

Je meurs si je vous perds, mais je meurs si j'attends.

The tyranny is twofold. The protagonists suffer from the tyranny of a passion which they are powerless to resist. It is because of their anguish that they themselves become tyrants. The word 'blackmail' has been used by more than one critic. In five of the plays A, whether a man or a woman, is a tyrant who is determined to blackmail B into breaking off relations with C and marrying him or her. The blackmailer holds the carrot, usually a crown, in one hand, and the dagger or the poison cup in the other. There is Néron's ultimatum to Junie which is disguised as an offer:

ne préférez point, à la solide gloire
Des honneurs dont César prétend vous revêtir,
La gloire d'un refus, sujet au repentir.

And when the unhappy Junie does precisely that Britannicus is handed the poison cup in the guise of a 'loving cup'.

The tragedy is the outcome of impassioned individuals who break all the rules, brush aside morality, the law, the claims of State and the rights of fellow human beings certainly; it is equally the outcome of the determination of the victims to preserve their integrity, to fulfil their pledges, to remain in a literal sense 'faithful unto death'.

I must return now to the criticisms that I mentioned at the outset and attempt a more specific assessment of Racine's relevance for the present age. They amount to two main charges, neither of them particularly original. The first is that Racine's tragedies are simply a reflection of seventeenth-century life, that his metaphorically periwigged figures are anachronisms and that his psychology is out of date. The second is that the rules of classical drama were so rigorous and so artificial that even if what he said were relevant, communication, at any rate on the stage, has become impossible.

Nobody doubts any longer that like Corneille Racine was very much a man of his time. One critic has gone to extreme lengths in trying to discover 'originals' for virtually every character in the secular plays except the confidants. There have been others who sought to establish a connection between the action of some of the plays and political events such as the English Revolution. I am not convinced myself that this kind of speculation does much to increase our appreciation of Racine's art, but it helps to situate him. No writer can be indifferent to contemporary events which even in a classical period are bound to leave some impression on his work or possibly provide him with inspiration. We shall see in due course that in some of the plays there are tributes to Louis XIV, and that Bérénice probably contains a reference to an early love affair, but we shall also see that the importance of the age is somewhat different.

What seems to me to matter is less the events and personalities than the ethos in which Racine lived and wrote. It is a change of ethos which goes a long way towards explaining the celebrated rivalry between Corneille and Racine and the differences in their work. Corneille's first masterpieces are heroic plays in the strict sense. One of the reasons for the failure, or comparative failure, of the plays of the middle period is that the heroic age was past, and that in trying to go on writing heroic plays Corneille was writing against the grain of the new age. It was a belated recognition of the situation which led to a changed approach, to what is known as 'the eclipse of the hero', in the last plays of all which show a move in the direction of Racine. Now Racine was the product of an unheroic age which is reflected in nearly all his plays from the first one to the last. There are no heroes in them in the Cornelian sense for the simple reason that, as I have said, one of his principal themes is the frailty of human nature. The ruler is always a tyrant; the society is aristocratic; there is a contrast between the polished surface and the internal corruption; the disaster is the result of the predatory designs of the tyrant. This was no doubt an accurate picture of the periods in which the tragedies are set; it is certainly a fair picture of Racine's own age. We may as well call things by their names. Racine lived under an absolute monarchy which was the seventeenth-century equivalent of the modern dictatorship; he moved in aristocratic circles; there was the same startling contrast between the outward splendour of 'the Golden Age' and its inner weaknesses and corruption. It was the century of unhappy love, the mariage de raison which so often went wrong with the most unfortunate consequences. Louis XIV himself is a good example. As a young man he was compelled for political reasons to abandon his projected marriage to Marie Mancini. It is a fair inference that if he had been in a position to decide for himself he would have done nothing of the sort, but would have set out to get the girl with the same ruthless determination, the same disregard of everybody else's interests as a Racinian protagonist. This was followed by the spectacle of a neglected queen weeping alone in her room; La Vallière departing in tears to a convent; the arrival of Mme de Montespan, a woman with the mentality of a Roxane; her eventual dismissal and replacement by the prudish Mme de Maintenon. There is one other resemblance between Louis and the Racinian protagonists. The Bourbons were a notoriously highly sexed family. In his later years the king still insisted on two goes a day with his morganatic spouse. She got no comfort when she complained to her confessors about the monarch's 'excessive demand'. They told her bluntly that she was bound to perform her wifely duties in order to prevent her husband from indulging in still more adulterous associations.

The parallels between past and present draw attention to one of the more curious contradictions between the man and the writer. From the first the ambitious young man set out to cultivate the king. When he abandoned the theatre to become one of the royal historiographers, he also became one of the most obsequious of courtiers. Although it was no doubt unconscious, it can hardly have been accidental that four of the plays are attacks on the kind of regime under which he was living. In Britannicus a tyrannical order is strengthened; in Bajazet it is preserved, and in Mithridate it is destroyed. We shall find that in Athalie he goes furthest of all. With the help of religion he not only delivers his most vigorous attack on despotism; he exposes the inherent dangers of absolute power.

One of the principal claims made by and for classical periods is finality. The writers are convinced that they see humanity sub specie aeternitatis, that it is basically unchanging and that what they see remains true for succeeding generations. There is a good deal of substance in the view that it was precisely because Racine was so much a man of his time that he was able to concentrate on aspects which are valid for all time. His contemporaries were right in arguing that his characters were not Greeks or Romans or Turks, but Frenchmen. They were wrong in holding it against him. The greatness of his work depends not only on his findings, but on the way in which they are integrated into their environment, on the matching of the inner and the outer man. Although integration is an artistic essential, we must recognize that the vision of a great writer transcends time. When we look into it, we can see that his interests and the reactions of his characters are remarkably like our own and would be the same if they found themselves in the twentieth century. What he shows bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the happenings of the present age: ruthless dictatorships; the horrors of wars in which all human standards go by the board; conflicts between public and private interests, between the desires of the individual and the rights of a fellow human being which today are consistently leading to murder and suicide; the spread of violence to every walk of life.

We have seen something of the workings of the erotic instinct in his work. Now the French theory of the femme fatale is not entirely moonshine. We have to admit, if we are honest with ourselves, that whatever our beliefs or principles, there exists somewhere in the world a man or a woman who would be fatal to us, would send us straight off the rails and make us behave in much the same fashion as Racine's protagonists if we had the misfortune to meet him or her as Racine's protagonists always do.

We must take a closer look at what might be called individual psychology. I mean by this, particular characters, the way in which they appear to us and the interpretations we put on them today. We must do so because the claim to universal validity is not restricted to Racine or to France. The criticisms I have been discussing could be, in some cases have been, applied to other dramatists in other countries; to Shakespeare in England, to Lope de Vega and Calderón in Spain.

Although she apparently supports the claim to universal validity, Annie Ubersfeld has observed in an illuminating essay on Andromaque that Pyrrhus is a seventeenth-century monarch and Hermione a seventeenth-century princess, and thinks that it would be difficult to envisage them in any other capacity. This was not exactly the view of the great Louis Jouvet. Here is what he said about Junie to one of the girls—her name was Viviane—attending his practical acting course at the Paris Conservatoire in 1939:

The characters of the classics are whatever one likes to make of them. According to the period, Junie has been a young virgin martyr, a young Christian, a young republican. A character in one of the classics is a revolving lighthouse. It all depends where you happen to be standing in relation to the lighthouse; you are caught by certain flashes which light you up. Junie will touch you by flashes which are sensitive and human and which you will receive from the character because you are you, Viviane.

The same might be said of Shakespeare. Hamlet is a seventeenth-century prince, an intellectual, an Elizabethan melancholic whose melancholy incidentally (metaphysics apart) has affinities with Oreste's. Without going so far as the late Ernest Jones, it is not difficult to see him as a twentieth-century neurotic with a touch of the Oedipus complex which wrecks his relations with poor Ophelia. Whichever way we look at him, his soliloquies do not cease to grip. And think of the interest the French took in him in the nineteenth century. What again could be more 'modern' than Shakespeare's Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, or more horrifying than the 'stratagem' he uses to defeat the gallant Hector in the field—an all-time dirty trick? …

The conclusion I reach is that in the case of the masters the claim to universal validity is justified and that it is precisely this which distinguishes the true master from the lesser figures: Shakespeare from a Webster or a Tourneur; Pierre Corneille and Racine from a Thomas Corneille or a Quinault.

The second criticism of Racine is a matter of pure artistic judgement. If one critic can only find an aggregate of twenty-seven lines of poetry in the whole of the plays; if another thinks that 99 per cent of the verse in Bajazet is rhetoric and only 1 per cent poetry, we are bound to suspect that they have failed signally to secure 'access'. But since these views have been expressed by sensitive and intelligent people, they cannot be dismissed out of hand. An attempt must be made to answer them briefly in general terms.

There is one factor which cannot be too strongly emphasized. Racine displays enormous skill in placing his characters in a virtually impossible situation which is a combination of temperament and circumstance. It is impossible in the sense that none of the characters can extricate themselves from it and live happy, peaceful lives without inflicting irreparable damage on other characters. The basic situation explains the immense impact of the greatest of the tragedies when properly presented to the right audience. It can only be communicated because the other qualities of the work match the dramatist's genius in devising the basic situation.

Although it is necessary for the purpose of analysis and appreciation to discuss versification, language, structure and psychology separately, the end-product naturally depends on a very close synthesis of all these elements. Versification and language are largely responsible for the formality which is characteristic of palace life. Together they have the effect of raising tragedy to the special plane which is proper to it. Structure, which is the method of presenting situations dramatically, is necessarily of the first importance: it makes or mars the play. Lytton Strachey once remarked that the technique of Elizabethan drama had been taken over by the novelists and that Racine's technique had been adopted by modern playwrights. Comparisons between Racine and modern dramatists must not be pushed too far, particularly as Strachey's comment was made nearly sixty years ago, but in substance it is correct. Racine's genius enabled him to turn even the rule of the three unities to his advantage. The essence of the tragedies is their intense concentration on emotional states. For this he relies on simplicity of action, tightness of structure—the way in which one scene leads to another, in which they fit into one another, contrast with or are parallel to one another, in which words and phrases from different scenes echo and answer one another—and above all the speed with which the drama unfolds, the couples come and go, which explains why Racine unlike Corneille is now always performed without an interval, as he should be. We are near boiling point at the start; we are carried along by the rising temperature and gathering momentum until we reach the tremendous ending.

It is hardly surprising in an age like our own that critics have tended to dwell on the psychology of his characters and to treat him primarily as a master psychologist. Their view has recently been attacked by Raymond Picard. 'The psychological depth which is commonly admired in Racine', he writes, 'is to a large extent an optical illusion.' This does not or should not mean that Racine's psychology is shallow or that the findings of a psychoanalytical critic like Charles Mauron are necessarily wrong. It simply means that the form of classic tragedy inevitably precluded a minute and leisurely examination of the characters' psychology and that the dramatist was mainly confined to the basic human emotions. Although Baudelaire once spoke of 'the power of Racinian analysis' the truth is that, as I have said in other places, there is no such thing in Racine as analysis. His characters do not brood over their feelings, argue about them, take them to pieces. Their discoveries are the result of intuition, the sudden insights into their own and other people's minds. The expression of emotion is spontaneous and immediate. It is something like 'instant' emotion: the direct presentation of the basic impulses unencumbered by the kind of detail that we find in the psychological novel. What I want to stress is that the closeness of the synthesis mentioned above depends to a large degree on this psychological simplicity of presentation.

I have discussed the importance for the final synthesis of four different but closely connected elements. It remains to add that there is one other which is difficult to define, which is something more than a combination of versification and language, something that transcends them. It is the poetry. For it is the poetry which provides the unifying element and transforms the play into an experience which has an immediate impact on the audience and is ultimately responsible for transmitting the dramatist's vision to them.

If there are grounds on which Racine is open to criticism, the main one is that though his insight into human nature often went deep the field is comparatively narrow and several tragedies are variations on the same theme. This takes us back to comparisons between Corneille and Racine. Corneille's supporters admired him because they found his plays uplifting. They criticized Racine's because they were not. 'Tendre' in its seventeenth-century sense was not a term of unqualified praise; it meant that Racine was sensitive, easily moved and that though his tragedies were moving, too, they were not exalting and did nothing to boost morale.

The answer is of course that their professional rivalry is a thing of the past, and that they are both 'constants' of the French genius who complete and possibly correct one another. They both give expression to something permanent in human nature. It is the sign of a master that he is irreplaceable. Corneille occupies a place that Racine could never have filled and the same is true of Racine. Their effect on us is entirely different. We love Racine because he speaks to us as man to man, exposes our weaknesses to our shocked and fascinated gaze. This should not prevent us from responding to the immense élan, the enormous 'lift', that comes from a good production or even a proper reading of Corneille. Speaking for myself, there are some moods in which I prefer Racine and others in which I prefer Corneille. But of one thing I am certain: they are both necessary to me.