Jean Racine
By MARTIN TURNELL FRANCOIS MAURIAC observes in one of his critical essays that, of all French writers, Racine is the least accessible to foreigners. 'His realm,' he writes, 'is that borderland between the head and the heart where no one can penetrate who does not belong to the French family. When a foreigner tells us that he is fond of Racine and recites a few lines in a certain tone, we know that he has nothing left to learn about France.' Racine is certainly one of the most elusive of the great European masters, and he has proved singularly difficult for a people brought up on Shakespeare who have found his language colourless and his diction stilted. It was scarcely an accident that D. H. Lawrence made him one of Sir Clifford Chatterley's favourite authors, or that when the. Comedic Frangaise visited these shores between the wars, they thought we were too backward or too uncivilised for anything but Moliere's simpler plays and the insufferable Musset.
Although M. Mauriac regards Racine as the most repre- sentative, the most French of French writers, the difficulties have not been confined to our side of the Channel. Professor Antoine Adam remarked last year that it is only today that we are in a position to understand to the full Racine's range and 'complexity. This may explain, though it does not alto- gether excuse, the lack of really illuminating criticism of Racine in French or the fact that he has often been trounced by his own compatriots. Mme de Sevignes 'Racine passera comme le café' was simply one of the earliest of a number of unhappy judgements, but Taine's teaucoup plus ecrivain que poete' was not by any means the last.
'His profound understanding of love only goes into the actions of his characters; they express the extremes of passion in a style which is abstract, frigid and diplomatic.'
This is not the voice of Anglo-Saxon intransigence. It is the voice of a man whom Mr. Eliot once called 'the critical con- sciousness of a generation.' It provoked an interesting comment from an Englishman who borrowed the title of Remy de Gourmont's book as well as his words : 'Read any single page of Racine,' said Mr. Middleton Murry in The Problem of Style, 'arid (unless you are a very good French scholar) it seems very like a page of any other French dramatist before the Romantic movement. But read appeared in French four years ago and is now excellently translated by Professor Mansell Jones. `No task,' he writes, 'is more delicate than to search for the originality of a writer who claims to have none. Racine enters . the literary life of his time with the determination to respect its conventions and usages; for thirteen years he participates in it as a disciple rather than as an innovator; his language • and art seem to conform to a type already consecrated, as if his one concern were to do as others have done before him and to match his productions with principles firmly established.'
No writer can make a complete break with the conventions of his age, but it is the sign of the master that he goes beyond them, that he changes the pattern of experience and modifies the means of expression. Giraudoux detected something of Racine's ruthlessness and caught the echo of his voice in the Liaisons Dan gereuses. 'The novels of other peoples are puerile beside this one,' he said of the Liaisons. It is the perennial claim of the French to be more adult, more mature, than their neighbours, but none of the masters has been more sure of himself or more clearly ,a master than Racine. The miracle lies less in overcoming obstacles than in transforming the obstacles—the formidable 'rules,' the limited vocabulary, the seemingly rigid alexandrine--into a source of strength. For it was, after all, the 'rules,' which were a decided trial to the turbulent genius of Corneille, that helped to give Racine's plays the compactness, the linear perfection, which make him the most supremely actable of the great European dramatists.
Take the unity of place. The 'place' is a room in a palace or the seraglio or the Temple, but in a few lines we have an oppressive physical awareness of the vast, gloomy palace, the sultry atmosphere of the seraglio, or the charged atmosphere of the Temple. There are times when this oppressiveness rises to a claustrophobic intensity. The room becomes a trap, its walls filled with eyes : Ces murs memes, Seigneur, peuvent avoir des yeux; Et jamais l'Empereur n'est absent de ces lieux. gist of the passions,' but we know today that he is something far more than this. He offers us a new and profound vision of man at grips with the evil in his heart, creates a world of violence in which men are the victims of a blind urge to destroy self and others. His achievement is not simply inseparable from language, it is a function of language, and those critics are surely right who insist on the supreme greatness of the poet. It is to Racine's language that Professor Vinaver devotes his most arresting pages. French grammarians have found it necessary to apologise for the conventional vocabulary, but like all great poets Racine sets his personal stamp on the simple words. The language may look 'abstract, frigid and diplomatic,' but when Racine uses them, terms like cruel, haine and perfide acquire an hallucinatory power. Cruelty pervades Racine's world, and is contagious. Peguy described the word cruel as 'a real "conductor" word, a "conductor" motif, that is to say not a device, an external appliance, but a word, a movement which is truly central and profoundly in- ward, and which recurs every time it is really necessary.' The characters need only mention the words haine or perfide to shatter their opponents' moral and emotional stability. This language can be splendidly evocative: Dans l'Orient desert quel devint mon ennui.
It can be savagely vituperative or casual with a deadly casualness: Bajazet est sans vie.
L'ignoriez-vous?
And of course it is 'diplomatic.' What M. Mauriac calls the formules protocolaires intensify the naked, shameless feelings, as the external regularity of the verse-form intensifies the internal discords.
For all this would have been vain without the new flexi- bility which emptied the alexandrine of rhetoric and brought it surprisingly close to the spoken word. A writer who entered the literary life of his time 'with the determination to respect its conventions and usages' was bound to respect the cmsura which Malherbe had finally brought to rest at the hemistich, but he introduced a variety of coupes or lesser pauses that transformed the instrument: Deja] je ne vois plusliqu'a traverslun nuage Et le ciel[et Pepouxlique ma presence outrage; Et la mort,la mes yeux Ilderobant la clarte, Rend au jourl qu'ils souillaientll toutle sa purete.
The very cadence of these lines, as Professor Vinaver well says, 'retraces the image of Pliedre dying.'
The French language, as we know, underwent a remark- able process of expansion in the nineteenth century, but the example of Racine remains. Without it Baudelaire could scarcely have written A une Madone, which is one of the metrical triumphs of the century. Or this: Sur le fond de mes nuitsIlDieulde son doigt savant Dessinel un cauchemarll multiforme let sans treve.
The coupe in the first line turns Dieu into the focal word— the unseen power irresistibly propelling the speaker into the nightmare; those in the second isolate the three essential words. The shapes of the nightmare fan out in multiforme, and the final coupe makes the process endless—and hopeless.
Inevitably, there is a debit side to the account. When we see how magnificently Racine succeeded in making the com- monplace words his own by stripping them of their banality, we cannot help seeing how signally the greatest poet of the nineteenth century failed to do the same with the Romantic clichés which were an unenviable part of his inheritance and a perpetual blot on some of his loveliest poems.
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