Racine and the Stage •
BESIDE Lytton Strachey, Racine's first wholehearted advocate in this country and in our day, Dr. Brereton will appear unexciting, over-temperate, even timid. The contrast is much like that between a recent convert and a man born in the faith. Strachey cannot praise Berenice without crabbing Antony and Cleopatra; Brereton is content to put air objective case for Racine, and by so doing he entirely discredits Strachey's melodramatic over-simplifica- tion of the great Frenchman's story. " A revulsion of feeling, the exact causes of which are to this day a mystery led Racine," says Strachey in describing the events that followed the demonstrations against Phedre on its first night, "suddenly to renounce the world, to retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon his art." But this revulsion of feeling, when examined with the careful scholarship of Geoffrey Brereton, turns out to be entirely mythical. The true facts are that.Racine quitted the theatre partly in order to secure a less undependable means of livelihood, as official historian to the king, and partly because Phedre marked the furthest stage along the road of psychological realism that his audience would permit him to travel. He could not go on to write a Medea or an Oedipus Rex ; les premieres loges would not accept themes of such barbaric starkness. He had with difficulty made his public listen to Phedre, but after it he would have had to retrace his steps, to give them a more mellifluous repetition of 1phigenie, a quelque chose de rien more delicate and more tenuous than Berenice. The post of Historiographer Royal carried with it a security that Racine the playwright had never known.
Not only the "revulsion of feeling " was a legend, however ; " the solitude of religious meditation " into which Strachey would have him retire stands up no better to Brereton's examination. Among Racine's new duties was that of riding out in the king's campaigns to witness his victories—certainly no occupation for a recluse. He may have had a passing desire to enter the religious life, but what in fact he did was to marry. In his later years, indeed, far from becoming more austere, he seems somewhat to have mellowed in the company of fellow civil servants, lawyers and others more sympathetic to him, in the long run, than the courtiers and theatrical riff-raff he had frequented as a youth. He had moved from a profession which still carried with it some stigma of disrepute into one duller but respected.
The Racine whom Dr. Brereton gives us is a-shrewd man who did not allow himself to be carried away by the violent passions with which be endowed his characters. " The greatest of his inno- vations," he states, " was to regard the passion of love as a disease and to write of it in that light. His attitude is that of a physician observing the course of an illness." Here Dr. Brereton comes near to the position taken up by Martin Turnell. But he is far less one-sided in his judgements ; psychological analysis is only one of his methods of investigation. Nor has he Mr. Turnell's habit of detecting decay where others find ripeness ; for Dr. Brereton the years.between Andromaque and Phedre mark the summit of French civilisation. Moreover for him Racine is a dramatist before he is an anatomist of society. It is in its treatment of the theatre and of the swiftly changing fortunes of the various theatrical companies. in its references to stagecraft and to the actor's art, that this book is particularly strong.
It is, according to the short bibliography at the end of his book, the eighth study of Racine to be written in the last ten years. Strachey's picture (or—among orthodox French critics—Brunetiere's) of Racine as a spoilt child, "paten par sous ses sens," turning in disgust from mankind after the intrigues against Phedre may prove to be a downright forgery. But even when presented in cool and realistic colours Racine has something very important to say to our decade. For his deliberate economy, the extreme narrowness of his vocabulary, the flatness of his imagery, his refusal to embellish or to introduce any detail not bearing directly upon his plot: all these are virtues doubly impressive in our times of relaxed rules, of diffuseness and over-production. For Racine achieved that unity of effect that Yeats was striving after in his Plays for Dancers and that Eliot has perhaps achieved in Family Reunion.
Again, as an objective artist, Racine was able to divorce his art and his life in a way that contemporary writers have, for the most part, failed to rediscover. Dr. Brereton's book, therefore, may be of interest to many not specifically concerned with the French drama. It offers the essential background material, free from sectarian bias, and some very sound insights into the poetry itself.
J. M. Cones.
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