Tyranne vitæ, fax temeraria,
Infide dux, ignobile vinculum,
Sidus dolosum, ænigma præsens,
Ingenui labyrinthe voti,
Assensus errans, invalidæ potens
Mentis propago, quam vetuit Deus
Nasci, sed ortæ principatum
Attribuit, regimenque sanctum, &c.
[999] Bouterwek.
Racine’s first tragedies. 2. Corneille belongs in his glory to the earlier period of this century, though his inferior tragedies, more numerous than the better, would fall within the later. Fontenelle, indeed, as a devoted admirer, attributes considerable merit to those which the general voice both of critics and of the public had condemned.[1000] Meantime, another luminary arose on the opposite side of the horizon. The first tragedy of Jean Racine, Les Frères Ennemis, was represented in 1664, when he was twenty-five years of age. It is so far below his great works, as to be scarcely mentioned, yet does not want indications of the genius they were to display. Alexandre, in 1665, raised the young poet to more distinction. It is said that he showed this tragedy to Corneille, who praised his versification, but advised him to avoid a path which he was not fitted to tread. It is acknowledged by the advocates of Racine that the characters are feebly drawn, and that the conqueror of Asia sinks to the level of a hero in one of those romances of gallantry which had vitiated the taste of France.
[1000] Hist. du Théâtre François, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, iii., 111. St. Evremond also despised the French public for not admiring the Sophonisbe of Corneille, which he had made too Roman for their taste.
Andromaque. 3. The glory of Racine commenced with the representation of his Andromaque in 1667, which was not printed till the end of the following year. He was now at once compared with Corneille, and the scales have been oscillating ever since. Criticism, satire, epigrams, were unsparingly launched against the rising poet. But his rival pursued the worst policy by obstinately writing bad tragedies. The public naturally compare the present with the present, and forget the past. When he gave them Pertharite, they were dispensed from looking back to Cinna. It is acknowledged even by Fontenelle that, during the height of Racine’s fame, the world placed him at least on an equality with his predecessor; a decision from which that critic, the relation and friend of Corneille, appeals to what he takes to be the verdict of a later age.
4. The Andromaque was sufficient to show that Racine had more skill in the management of a plot, in the display of emotion, in power over the sympathy of the spectator, at least where the gentler feelings are concerned, in beauty and grace of style, in all except nobleness of character, strength of thought, and impetuosity of language. He took his fable from Euripides, but changed it according to the requisitions of the French theatre and of French manners. Some of these changes are for the better, as the substitution of Astyanax for an unknown Molossus of the Greek tragedian, the supposed son of Andromache by Pyrrhus. “Most of those,” says Racine himself very justly, “who have heard of Andromache, know her only as the widow of Hector and the mother of Astyanax. They cannot reconcile themselves to her loving another husband and another son.” And he has finely improved this happy idea of preserving Astyanax, by making the Greeks, jealous of his name, send an embassy by Orestes to demand his life; at once deepening the interest and developing the plot.
5. The female characters, Andromache and Hermione are drawn with all Racine’s delicate perception of ideal beauty; the one, indeed, prepared for his hand by those great masters in whose school he had disciplined his own gifts of nature, Homer, Euripides, Virgil; the other more original and more full of dramatic effect. It was, as we are told, the fine acting of Mademoiselle de Champmelé in this part, generally reckoned one of the most difficult on the French stage, which secured the success of the play. Racine, after the first representation, threw himself at her feet in a transport of gratitude, which was soon changed to love. It is more easy to censure some of the other characters. Pyrrhus is bold, haughty, passionate, the true son of Achilles, except where he appears as the lover of Andromache. It is inconceivable and truly ridiculous that a Greek of the heroic age, and such a Greek as Pyrrhus is represented by those whose imagination has given him existence, should feel the respectful passion towards his captive which we might reasonably expect in the romances of chivalry, or should express it in the tone of conventional gallantry that suited the court of Versailles. But Orestes is far worse; love-mad, and yet talking in gallant conceits, cold and polite, he discredits the poet, the tragedy, and the son of Agamemnon himself. It is better to kill one’s mother than to utter such trash. In hinting that the previous madness of Orestes was for the sake of Hermione, Racine has presumed too much on the ignorance, and too much on the bad taste, of his audience. But far more injudicious is his fantastic remorse and the supposed vision of the Furies in the last scene. It is astonishing that Racine should have challenged comparison with one of the most celebrated scenes of Euripides in circumstances that deprived him of the possibility of rendering his own effective. For the style of the Andromaque, it abounds with grace and beauty; but there are, to my apprehension, more insipid and feeble lines, and a more effeminate tone, than in his later tragedies.
Britannicus. 6. Britannicus appeared in 1669; and in this admirable play Racine first showed that he did not depend on the tone of gallantry usual among his courtly hearers, nor on the languid sympathies that it excites. Terror and pity, the twin spirits of tragedy, to whom Aristotle has assigned the great moral office of purifying the passions, are called forth in their shadowy forms to sustain the consummate beauties of his diction. His subject was original and happy; with that historic truth which usage required, and that poetical probability which fills up the outline of historic truth without disguising it. What can be more entirely dramatic, what more terrible in the sense that Aristotle means (that is, the spectator’s sympathy with the dangers of the innocent), than the absolute master of the world, like the veiled prophet of Khorasan, throwing off the appearances of virtue, and standing out at once in the maturity of enormous guilt! A presaging gloom, like that which other poets have sought by the hackneyed artifices of superstition, hangs over the scenes of this tragedy, and deepens at its close. We sympathise by turns with the guilty alarms of Agrippina, the virtuous consternation of Burrhus, the virgin modesty of Junia, the unsuspecting ingenuousness of Britannicus. Few tragedies on the French stage, or indeed on any stage, save those of Shakspeare, display so great a variety of contrasted characters. None, indeed, are ineffective, except the confidante of Agrippina; for Narcissus is very far from being the mere confidant of Nero; he is, as in history, his preceptor in crime; and his cold villainy is well contrasted with the fierce passion of the despot. The criticisms of Fontenelle and others on small incidents in the plot, such as the concealment of Nero behind a curtain, that he may hear the dialogue between Junia and Britannicus, which is certainly more fit for comedy, ought not to weigh against such excellence as we find in all the more essential requisites of a tragic drama. Racine had much improved his language since Andromaque; the conventional phraseology about flames and fine eyes, though not wholly relinquished, is less frequent; and if he has not here reached, as he never did, the peculiar impetuosity of Corneille, nor given to his Romans the grandeur of his predecessor’s conception, he is full of lines wherein, as every word is effective, there can hardly be any deficiency of vigour. It is the vigour indeed of Virgil, not of Lucan.
7. In one passage, Racine has, I think, excelled Shakspeare. They have both taken the same idea from Plutarch. The lines of Shakspeare are in Antony and Cleopatra:
Thy demon, that’s the spirit that keeps thee, is
Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,
Where Cæsar’s is not; but near him, thy angel
Becomes a fear, as being o’erpowered.