Racine

“ The stranger who had attracted Racine's attention was a tall thin man, with a high aquiline nose, stern fierce gray eyes, peeping out from under tufted brows, and a countenance so lined and marked by age, care, and stress of weather that it stood out amid the prim courtier faces which surrounded it as an old hawk might in a cage of birds of gay plumage. ”

“ Such revelations, no doubt, come closer to reality than the poignant epigrams of Racine. In life, men's minds are not sharpened, they are diffused, by emotion; and the utterance which best represents them is fluctuating and agglomerated rather than compact and defined. But Racine's aim was less to reflect the actual current of the human spirit than to seize upon its inmost being and to give expression to that. One might be tempted to say that his art represents the sublimed essence of reality, save that, after all, reality has no degrees. ”

“ Yet in France Racine has been the object of almost universal admiration; his plays still hold the stage and draw forth the talents of the greatest actors; and there can be no doubt that it is the name of Racine that would first rise to the lips of an educated Frenchman if he were asked to select the one consummate master from among all the writers of his race. Now in literature, no less than in politics, you cannot indict a whole nation. ”

“ Is there not a vision? Is there not a flow of lovely sound whose beauty grows upon the ear, and dwells exquisitely within the memory? Racine's triumph is precisely this—that he brings about, by what are apparently the simplest means, effects which other poets must strain every nerve to produce. The narrowness of his vocabulary is in fact nothing but a proof of his amazing art. ”

“ The presentment, it is true, is not a detailed one; the accidents of character are not shown us—only its essentials; the human spirit comes before us shorn of its particulars, naked and intense. Nor is it—as might, perhaps, have been expected—in the portrayal of intellectual characters that Racine particularly excels; it is in the portrayal of passionate ones. His supreme mastery is over the human heart—the subtleties, the profundities, the agonies, the triumphs, of love. ”

“ But there is a higher game of criticism than this, and this game Racine does not attempt to play. He does not even attempt the highest poetry at all. His greatest achievements in pure passion-the foiled desires of Hermione and the jealous frenzy of Phédre-are cold, not merely beside the crossed love of Ophelia and the remorse of Lady Macbeth, but beside the sincerer if less perfectly expressed passion of Corneille’s Cléopatre and Camille. In men’s parts he fails still more completely. ”

“ Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared by no other poetry in the world. To have grown familiar with the voice of Racine, to have realised once and for all its intensity, its beauty, and its depth, is to have learnt a new happiness, to have discovered something exquisite and splendid, to have enlarged the glorious boundaries of art. ”

“ Nero, Agrippina, Narcissus, and Burrhus, are so accurately sketched, and finished with such light touches and such delicate colouring, that, in respect to character, it yields, perhaps, to no French tragedy whatever. Racine has here possessed the art of giving us to understand much that is left unsaid, and enabling us to look forward into futurity. I will only notice one inconsistency which has escaped the poet. He would paint to us the cruel voluptuary, whom education has only in appearance tamed, breaking loose from the restraints of discipline and virtue. ”

“ Judging by quality alone, it is difficult to say whether his work stands higher or lower in the scale of human achievement than that of Racine—whether the breadth of vision, the diversity, and the humanity of his comedies do or do not counterbalance the poetry, the intensity, and the perfect art of his friend's tragedies; at least it seems certain that the difference between the reputations of the two men with the world in general by no means corresponds with the real difference in their worth. It is by his very perfection, by the very completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. ”

“ He kept Racine constantly spurred to his best endeavors in art. Racine was congratulating himself to his friend on the ease with which he produced his verse. "Let me teach you to produce easy verse with difficulty," was the critic's admirable reply. Racine was a docile pupil. He became as painstaking an artist in verse as Boileau would have him.
It will always be a matter of individual taste, and of changing fashion in criticism, to decide which of the two is, on the whole, to be preferred to the other. Racine eclipsed Corneille in vogue during the lifetime of the latter. ”

“ Pious sentiments ever smouldering in his heart, the horror felt for the theatre by Port-Royal, and penitence for the sins he had been guilty of against his friends there, revived within him; and Racine gave up profane poetry forever. “The applause I have met with has often flattered me a great deal,” said he at a later period to his son, “but the smallest critical censure, bad as it may have been, always caused me more of vexation than all the praises had given me of pleasure.” ”

“ The highest distinction of the drama of Racine is its truth to nature—truth, that is, in its interpretation and rendering of human passion. Historical accuracy and local colour concerned him as far as they were needful with his courtly spectators for verisimilitude. The fluctuations of passion he studies to most advantage in his characters of women. ”

“ Racine was not born to paint heroes, but he paints admirably man with his natural passions, and the most natural as well as the most touching of all, love. So he particularly excels in feminine characters. For men he has need of being sustained by Tacitus or holy Scripture. [129] With woman he is at his ease, and he makes them think and speak with perfect truth, set off by exquisite art. Demand of him neither Emilie, Cornélie, nor Pauline; but listen to Andromaque, Monime, Bérénice, and Phèdre! There, even in imitating, he is original, and leaves the ancients very far behind him. ”

“ It was extremely popular, and Racine could hardly have lodged a more triumphant diploma piece. His next attempt, Iphigénie, was a long step backwards and upwards in the direction of Andromaque. It is not that the characters are eminently Greek, but that Greek tragedy gave Racine examples which prevented him from flying in the face of the propriety of character as he had done in Bérénice, Bajazet, and Mithridate, and that he here called in, as in Andromaque, other passions to the aid of the mere sighing and crying which form the sole appeal of these three tragedies. ”

“ He was piqued by the attack, but his conscience sided with his censurers; and the degraded state to which clerical influence brought French actors in those days might well cause a devout catholic to doubt the innocence of the drama. A higher tone of feeling would have caused Racine to perceive that the fault lay with the persecutors, not the persecuted; but though an amiable and upright man, and a man of genius, he was in nothing beyond his age. ”

“ He had an inclination for raillery, which, through the advice of Boileau, he carefully restrained: he was fond of pleasure; religion caused him to prefer the quiet of his home: and, as the same friend said, "Reason brings most men to faith—faith has brought Racine to reason." Fearful of pain himself, he was eager to avoid causing it to others. In society he was pliant; striving to draw others out rather than endeavouring to shine himself. ”

“ Racine, men of eminent rank. In reading his plays, I can always figure to myself the poet as living at a splendid court, with a great king before his eyes, in constant intercourse with the most distinguished persons, and penetrating into the secrets of human nature, as it works concealed behind the gorgeous tapestry of palaces. ”

“ The confidential confession of RACINE to his son is remarkable:—"Do not think that I am sought after by the great for my dramas; Corneille composes nobler verses than mine, but no one notices him, and he only pleases by the mouth of the actors. I never allude to my works when with men of the world, but I amuse them about matters they like to hear. My talent with them consists, not in making them feel that I have any, but in showing them that they have." Racine treated the great like the children of society ”

“ Jean Racine was Pierre Corneille reduced to rule. The younger was to the elder somewhat as Sophocles or Euripides was to Æschylus, as Virgil was to Lucretius, as Pope was to Dryden. Nature was more in Corneille, art was more in Racine. Corneille was a pathfinder in literature. He led the way even for Molière still more for Racine. But Racine was as much before Corneille in perfection of art as Corneille was before Racine in audacity of genius. Racine, accordingly, is much more even and uniform than Corneille. ”

“ Who can affirm that the wild ambiguities of our hearts and the gross impediments of our physical existence are less real than the most pointed of our feelings and 'thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls'?
It would be nearer the truth to rank Racine among the idealists. The world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.' It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out ”

“ To such mutations is subject the fame of an author.
Jean Racine was early left an orphan. His grandparents put him, after preparatory training at another establishment, to school at Port Royal, where during three years he had the best opportunities of education that the kingdom afforded. His friends wanted to make a clergyman of him; but the preferences of the boy prevailed, and he addicted himself to literature. The Greek tragedists became familiar to him in his youth, and their example in literary art exercised a sovereign influence over Racine’s development as author. ”

“ Close to the door, Racine, with his handsome face wreathed in smiles, was chatting with the poet Boileau and the architect Mansard, the three laughing and jesting with the freedom which was natural to the favourite servants of the king, the only subjects who might walk unannounced and without ceremony into and out of his chamber.
"What is amiss with him this morning?" asked Boileau in a whisper, nodding his head in the direction of the royal group. "I fear that his sleep has not improved his temper."
"He becomes harder and harder to amuse," said Racine, shaking his head. ”

“ I only know that Louis Racine was not the judge or jury, but the avocat only, whose duty it was to do as he did. That he did it the more gladly because he was a Frenchman and you an Englishman, is not his fault or yours either. Louis Racine’s people came here two hundred years ago, yours not sixty years ago. You, the great business man, have had practical power which gave you riches. You have sacrificed all for power. Louis Racine has only genius, and no practical power. ”

“ He had besides a real and saving vein of truth to nature, which preserved him from tricks pure and simple. He would be, and he was, as much a poet as prevalent taste would let him be. The result is that such plays as Phédre and Andromaque are supreme in their own way. If the critic will only abstain from thrusting in tierce, when according to the particular rules he ought to thrust in quart, Racine is sure to beat him. ”

“ Some justice, some meaning, France must have when she declares with one voice that Racine is not only one of the greatest of dramatists, but also one of the greatest of poets; and it behoves an Englishman, before he condemns or despises a foreign writer, to practise some humility and do his best to understand the point of view from which that writer is regarded by his own compatriots. No doubt, in the case of Racine, this is a particularly difficult matter. There are genuine national antipathies to be got over—real differences in habits of thought and of taste. ”

“ Twice again did the Seigneur's weapon draw blood, once from the shoulder and once from the leg of his opponent, and the blood was flowing from each wound. After the second injury they stood panting for a moment. Now the outside world was shut out from Fournel's senses, as it was from Louis Racine's. The only world they knew was this cool room, whose oak floors were browned by the slow searching stains of Time, and darkened by the footsteps of six generations that had come and gone through the old house. ”

“ The female characters of Racine are of the greatest beauty; they have the ideal grace and harmony of ancient sculpture, and bear somewhat of the same analogy to those of Shakspeare which that art does to painting. Andromache, Monimia, Iphigénie, we may add Junia, have a dignity and faultlessness neither unnatural nor insipid, because they are only the ennobling and purifying of human passions. They are the forms of possible excellence, not from individual models, nor likely perhaps to delight every reader, for the same reason that more eyes are pleased by Titian than by Raphael. ”

“ I fear it is supremely egotistical,—so jealously sensitive that it writhes at the touch of a rival. Racine was the happiest of husbands; his wife adored his genius, but could not understand his plays. Would Racine have been happy if he had married a Corneille in petticoats? I who speak have loved an artist, certainly equal to myself. I am sure that he loved me. That sympathy in pursuits of which you speak drew us together, and became very soon the cause of antipathy. To both of us the endeavour to coalesce was misery.
I don’t know your M. Rameau. Savarin has sent me some of his writings ”