A short time before this play of Dryden’s, Racine had taken the characters of the Trojan war in hand. His ‘Andromaque’ and ‘Iphigénie,’ however, afford us no new lights, and might very well have been conceived by a person who had never read a line of Homer, though in various passages there are imitations which must have filtered from the Homeric text. He was content in general to copy the traditions as given by Euripides; and it may provoke a smile to read an apology of one of his editors, Boisjermain, for the manner in which Ulysses is handled in the ‘Iphigénie.’ Appearing, near the outset of the piece, as a personage of very high importance, he notwithstanding plays in the plot a part wholly insignificant, instead of assuming, as he does in Euripides, the important function of urging the slaughter of Iphigenia for the honour and benefit of Greece. Speaking of the critics who blame this arrangement, the editor says, they have failed to observe that Racine has adopted the jealousy and intrigues of Hermione as the prime movers against Iphigenia, and that these produce the same result as might otherwise (forsooth) have been brought about by the reasonings of Ulysses. The work of literary profanation could hardly be carried further: it was not to be thus capriciously bandied about from pillar to post, that Homer constructed his deathless masterpieces. In the ‘Andromaque,’ much as it is praised, we miss, still more egregiously than in the ‘Iphigénie,’ all the simplicity and grandeur of the Greek heroic age, and find ourselves environed by the infinite littleness of merely passionate personal intrigues, which have self only for their pole and centre. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than to see these archaic Grecian characters dressed in the very last Parisian fashions, with speech and action accordingly. The total want of breadth and depth of character, and of earnestness and resolution, as opposed to mere violence, is such that at parts of the ‘Andromaque’ we are almost compelled to ask, whether we are reading a tragedy or a burlesque? As, for instance, when, with the Sixth Iliad yet lingering upon our mental vision, we hear Andromache say to her confidante,
Tu vois le pouvoir de mes yeux[1094];
and when Hermione threatens her pis-aller lover, Orestes, with respect to Pyrrhus,
S’il ne meurt aujourd’hui—je puis l’aimer demain[1095].
It is here, too, that we see carried perhaps to the very highest point of exaggeration the misstatement of the relative martial merits and performances of Hector and his adversaries. The Greeks Hermione, herself a Spartan, describes as
Des peuples qui dix ans ont fui devant Hector;
Qui cent fois, effrayés de l’absence de l’Achille,
Dans leur vaisseaux brûlants ont cherché leur asyle;
Et qu’on verroit encore, sans l’appui de son fils,
Redemander Hélène aux Troyens impunis[1096].