Iphigenia Phaedra Athaliah Read online

  In Phaedra, the same tendency is noticeable, although it is completely subordinated to the Jansenist anguish that suffuses the play. Thus, in his Preface, Racine expresses the view that ‘calumny was somewhat too low and foul to be put in the mouth of a princess whose sentiments were otherwise so noble and virtuous. This baseness seemed to me more appropriate to a nurse, who might well have more slave-like inclinations…’ It has rightly been pointed out that Phaedra might tremble on the verge of incest and adultery, but could never be guilty of an affair with a stableboy.

  Yet, whether in these or in the earlier plays, the baroque traits in Racine are always tempered by a restraint, an ease and naturalness of tone, that sets them apart from the declamatory and grandiose style of the earlier dramatists. We are already in the modern world, with its sobriety, its understatement, its realization that the cruel complexities of life are not to be disposed of by eloquence, theatrical gestures, and emotional clichés.

  Louis’ support and the new climate of tolerance created by his policies not only made it possible for Racine’s amoralism to find its audience, but also provided an opening for the poet’s tragic vision to assert itself in an age that had been brought up on a diet of tragi-comedies – that is, plays on elevated subjects but with a happy ending. As Butler has observed (op. cit., p. 210), there is a profound incompatibility between baroque and tragedy. For the baroque writers, the powers that governed the world were just, and it was sacrilege to complain. Animated by this conviction, Corneille had succeeded in making almost a tragi-comedy out of the sombre stuff of the legend of Oedipus. Racine lived and moved in another climate. In his plays, passion, circumstance, and the Gods combine to send the main protagonists to their downfall. Even in Berenice, where the young Emperor Titus and the foreign queen who gives her name to the play are passionately in love with each other, the two ultimately feel obliged to part, condemned to a lifetime of despair. ‘A mad play’, it was termed, understandably enough, by that ardent admirer of Corneille, Madame de Sévigné.

  But why did Racine have to compose tragedies in a highly untragic age? Neither Louis’ policies nor Racine’s personal situation provided the slightest grounds for such pessimism. Nor is it enough to assert that Racine preferred to write tragedies. The explanation lies elsewhere. The passage from Butler quoted above on Racine’s love of the truth gives us a clue. It is defined as ‘a form of… intellectual Jansenism’, and, Butler goes on (pp. 290–1), it usually appears as a concern to present things in their worst light, as a strange determination to close every way of escape.

  And this is not all. The only other tragic writer of roughly the same period is Pascal. And Pascal, it will be remembered, was a Jansenist, though an unorthodox one. Can it be just a coincidence that Racine, too, was brought up as a Jansenist, even though he soon fell out with his masters? A closer look at the dogmas of this sect reveals its close connexions with the world of tragedy. The Jansenists regarded man as fundamentally corrupt, whereas the baroque writers, basically optimists, took a positive view of humanity, or, more exactly, regarded the nobility (which was the only section of society that counted) as not only socially but morally noble. If God’s grace was lacking, the desire for virtue and the human will were but a weak bulwark against the lures of the flesh and the world. The Jansenists may have denied that they believed in predestination. But they were obsessed with the concept, and their whole outlook inevitably drove them close to a position in which men and women were damned or saved for all eternity. Nevertheless, someWhat inconsistently, every believer was expected to conform to the most severe moral standards, and, in the view of the extremists, to retire altogether from an utterly wicked world.

  The Jansenists disliked Louis’ policies, and even more his love of pleasure, women, and fêtes, including theatrical performances; and their dislike was heartily reciprocated. But the sect was even more bitterly at odds with the optimism of the feudal outlook. It was not therefore necessary for the anti-baroque Racine to jettison everything that he had learned at Port Royal in order to achieve greatness in tragedy. On the contrary, the theory that man had small chance of salvation if unaided by divine grace was admirably suited to that art form.

  It has been objected that the poet had lost his faith before he started to compose his plays and indeed, since Jansenism was so fiercely opposed to the stage, could not have become Racine without doing so. But there is surely no lack of men in any age who have been brought up in a severe faith, have drifted away from it but retained its imprint, and in some cases (as in that of Racine himself) have eventually returned to the fold. It is quite possible, therefore, that Racine retained certain habits of thought imprinted on his mind at an early, impressionable age and not basically inconsistent with his new ideas.

  Naturally, it is pointless to look for a systematic exposition of the dramatist’s attitude to his former faith in his plays. A work of art is not a religious tract. In any case, he was to a great extent debarred, either by his new, presumably sceptical beliefs, or by the contemporary conventions, from dealing with Christian dogma openly and critically.

  In such circumstances, the obvious vehicle for the treatment of the tragic issues of life was Greek mythology, and the obvious models were the ancient Greek playwrights – Sophocles and Euripides. By a fortunate chance, Racine had enjoyed a thorough grounding in these masters’ language. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his first play, The Thebaid, deals with a Greek subject – the trials of the children of Oedipus. Racine’s work, as Butler has shown (op. cit., pp. 215–16), goes far beyond his sources (Greek or French) in its grim horror. The two sons of Oedipus (already punished for his involuntary incest) hate each other even in their mother’s womb – a detail, like most other particularly appalling touches in Racine, invented by the author himself. This hatred, ‘the outward sign of divine malediction’ (Butler), drives them to war against each other and finally to kill each other. Even Oedipus’s innocent daughter, and indeed her fiancé as well, are caught up in the general contagion, and they too expire before the final curtain. Small wonder that Jocasta (Oedipus’s widow) declaims against the Gods who have decreed this massacre:

  This is the justice of the mighty gods:

  They lead us to the edge of the abyss;

  They make us sin, but do not pardon us.

  This conception of the viciously and arbitrarily cruel gods (working, however, against a chosen family), and of the revolt on the part of their victims, is new in French literature. But it can easily be traced back to Jansenism, even if it betrays a note of hostility towards the poet’s erstwhile faith. The central theme is that the cruel gods incline men to crime, and then make them pay for it. Moreover, the sins of the fathers are visited on the children and even on their fiancés. The latter doctrine (minus the fiancés) clearly stems from the Old Testament, although misfortunes run in certain families in the Greek legend too. As to the central idea of the play, Racine, while retaining the Jansenist idea of man’s inherent weakness, has omitted divine grace as a remedial feature, and made God directly responsible for human sinfulness, whereas, for the believers, it was the fruit of ‘man’s first disobedience’ in the garden of Eden. The cruel gods are pilloried. Yet they are to reappear, with the doctrines underlying The Thebaid, in Phaedra, written when Racine was groping his way back to his religion, and even in Athaliah, when he had been practising his faith devoutly for fourteen years.

  In the plays immediately following The Thebaid, fate becomes anonymous and is ensconced in the hearts of men. But it is none the less vindictive. If we omit Alexander, the weakest of his plays, we come to Andromache, the work in which the real Racine emerges. The tragedy unfolds within a triangle of absolute political power, irresistible passion, and another absolute – death. In this terrifying scheme of things, there is no respite from the hounds of destiny, no margin for compromise, no way out of the fatal labyrinth in which the predestined victims of the tragedy are trapped.

  Yet in Andromache, the first of his gr
eat tragedies, Racine hesitated to apply his grim formula in full. In his later works, the disaster was to derive from the initial situation with rigorous precision. In Andromache, the poet is not quite so merciless. Orestes loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromache, who loves her dead Hector. But Andromache is prepared to compromise. To save her infant son, the widow devises ‘an innocent stratagem’ whereby she will marry Pyrrhus, but kill herself after leaving the altar. As it turns out, this stratagem does not save the situation. It touches off a murder: Orestes kills Pyrrhus and goes mad as a result. Later, Racine was to rule out any suggestion of ‘transigence’ in his main characters. Everything was devised solely to give a further turn of the screw to the instruments of catastrophe.

  But the tragic outcome is already ensured by the basic ingredients of his formula. The kings and queens are all-powerful. And they are usually savage, ruthless, or imprudent. Roxana has but to say one word to send Bajazet to a horrible death at the hands of the deaf-mutes. Nero can casually issue instructions for the poisoning of Britannicus, in the certainty that he will be obeyed. And Theseus, even better equipped, can call on the services of the seagod Neptune to rid the world of his son Hippolytus.

  The evils of absolute power are redoubled by absolute love. For the baroque writers, passion was noble and ennobling. The knight was obliged to conform to his lady’s will and to perform great deeds in order to win her favour. Pyrrhus (and the same could be said of most of Racine’s characters) ‘had not read our [highly romantic] novels. He was violent by nature.’ Thus Racine, in the Preface to Andromache. Pyrrhus in fact is prepared to blackmail the woman he loves into marrying him on pain of seeing her son surrendered to the Greeks, and almost certainly put to death. Mithridates has no hesitation in stooping to deceit in order to extract from his fiancée, Monime, the secret of her love for Xiphares, Mithridates’ son. The gentle Atalide naïvely admits to Bajazet that she would at times prefer to see him dead than married to another. And Roxana, having discovered that Bajazet does not love her, but Atalide, revels in the thought of confronting him with the dead body of his sweetheart.

  Love is at bottom represented as more akin to hate than to devotion or affection. ‘Can I not know whether I love or hate?’ asks Hermione in Andromache; and most of the characters in love swing violently and irresolutely between these two poles, largely because passion in Racine is almost always unreciprocated. But, even when (as in Berenice) there is no emotional obstacle, outside forces come between the lovers. There are, it is true, a few couples that escape the final holocaust – Achilles and Iphigenia, Xiphares and Monime. Hippolytus and Aricia are less fortunate. And it is certainly not true that Racine could conceive only of a brutishly sensual and possessive type of love. Yet he does seem to have been at case only when his lovers are unhappy, inhibited, or placed under the shadow of death. Hippolytus and Aricia, who lack some of these qualifications, are for most of the time colourless and precious. The poet’s gifts called for more sombre stuff.

  For him, the vanity of love and its darker sides are matched by an insistence on its intensity which at times reaches almost religious fervour. When Roxana pleads with Bajazet

  On you my joy, my happiness depends, (556)

  the line raises strange echoes of Tartuffe’s pseudo-religious courtship:

  On you my suffering or my bliss depends.

  And one is reminded of Madame de Sévigné’s quip that, after his conversion, ‘Racine loved God as he loved his mistresses’ – and hence, one assumes, that, before he was touched by grace, he had loved his mistresses with fervent devotion. Not for nothing did Boileau define his friend’s character as ‘mocking, uneasy, jealous, and voluptuous’. Is it being too fanciful to suggest that Racine, an orphan from his earliest years, and endowed with a quivering sensitiveness, brought to love a particular intensity, sharpened by the transfer of a lost religious faith to earthly objects? Whatever the truth of the matter, Venus is usually in Racine ‘the goddess of love and death’, to use his own words.

  But circumstance, too, makes its contribution to the final disaster. It may be a compromising letter found in Atalide’s bosom when she faints (Bajazet), the unexpected return of Theseus after a false report of his death (Phaedra), or (in Iphigenia) the failure of the mission undertaken by Arcas, sent out by Agamemnon to warn the King’s daughter to return home, since death awaits her at the Greek army’s camp in Aulis. Whatever the means chosen, all roads lead to death. The dice are weighted against humanity from the start. The only difference between this new type of fate and the gods of The Thebaid is that there is no equation between crime and punishment. Indeed, one can say that the innocent or guileless fall most readily. And when Narcissus, Nero’s crafty adviser, is done to death in Britannicus, we can be sure that the episode is added merely to satisfy the conventional need for retribution. These plays are in a word amoral.

  In Iphigenia (1674), Racine turned to Euripides and Greek mythology for inspiration, and the gods return. They are just as cruel as in The Thebaid, though not, this time, the avengers of crime. On the contrary, King Agamemnon emphasizes that he does not know why the gods are angry. (Yet there was a simple explanation in the Greek original.) All that is clear is that Diana, by an oracle, demands the blood of a human sacrifice if she is to allow the winds to carry the Greek fleet to Troy. And in fact a victim is sacrificed (though not the one thought to be designated by the oracle), and the winds blow immediately. The outcome is not tragic, though it might easily have been so. Racine was beginning a new cycle, and, as in the case of Andromache which began the previous series, the first play in it shows signs of hesitation.

  With Phaedra (1677), on the contrary, he takes the decisive step. This time, the play is profoundly and utterly tragic. And it is the gods who drive the action forward. Venus makes Hippolytus inspire a guilty passion in the heroine’s heart, and again, as in Iphigenia, no reason is given for the goddess’s hatred. Thus, the gods incline men to sin – just as in The Thebaid. And, just as in that play, they punish the sinner. Only, in Phaedra, punishment does not consist in death, but in dishonour, and above all in the torments of the afterworld, where the heroine’s own ancestor, Minos, will sit in judgement on her. From being the final curtain in the tragedy, death has become a factor in a moral drama. The whole play is pivoted on the fierce struggle raging in Phaedra’s soul. However, her heroic resistance to temptation, her obsession with guilt (new in Racine) avail her nothing. She is defeated by the combined forces of Venus and a malicious fate which weights the scales against her even more heartlessly than in the earlier plays. No wonder she was defined by an eminent Jansenist theologian as ‘one of the just to whom grace was not vouchsafed’. The play is a perfect demonstration of the Jansenist doctrine that the human will, unaided, can never stand up to temptation. But, if grace is absent (as it had been hitherto in Racine), there is no trace of revolt (as in The Thebaid). The poet was moving towards Jansenism, not away from it.

  After his conversion, the picture naturally changes. The Jansenist God is no longer concealed behind the Greek façade. In Athaliah (1691), the ‘cruel Jewish God’ tracks down the old pagan queen, just as Venus had encompassed Phaedra’s downfall. But, as against this, Jehovah not only strikes down his enemies, he also raises up those whom he has chosen as his instruments. Even the chosen ones, however, are corrupt – just as much as the ‘wicked’ pagans. The absolute corruption of mankind is only equalled by the unwavering fanaticism of Jehoiada, the high priest of Jehovah – a faith which we can be fairly certain was not too dissimilar from Racine’s own. Only in one respect does the play fall short of being the perfect exemplar of Jansenism. And this weakness is due precisely to Racine’s excess of devotion. The miracles through which God weakens Athaliah are very palpably such, whereas Jansenist doctrine demanded that they should appear natural to the sceptic, and their supernatural origin be clear only to the orthodox. From this point of view, Phaedra is much more in line with the pure doctrine. For there the spectator has
no difficulty in believing that the heroine’s infatuation has been caused by the physical splendour of the young ephebus, Hippolytus, and not necessarily only by divine intervention.

  Such, then, is the curve of Racine’s plays, which follows closely that of his waning and waxing faith. This evaluation would seem to follow four main phases. First, in The Thebaid, the attitude is one of conscious revolt. Then come the middle plays, where religion is dormant. Thirdly, in Phaedra, it awakens. And in Athaliah, after his conversion, it is full-blooded and explicit.

  It should be clear, therefore, that there is no dichotomy, as is so often alleged, between Racine the man and Racine the writer. The fallacy goes back to an essay of Giraudoux.* That piece of analysis is magnificent, but it is not serious criticism. In part, too, the view rests on the curious romantic belief that a work of art must be either a personal declaration of faith or a purely technical construction. For, it is argued, Racine is such a conscious, consummate craftsman, he subordinates his personal feelings so completely to the exigencies of play writing, that it is pointless to look for the man in his work. On the contrary, the spirit that informs his tragedies and that makes them so different from those of his contemporaries tallies exactly with what little is known of his outlook and character. His close association with Louis and Colbert and with their anti-feudal policy, his intellectual ruthlessness, his Jansenist-inspired pessimism, and, it would seem, his conception of love – all these are common to both the plays and the poet. If we go further, we can add a cruelty towards his characters amounting almost to sadism. This may be equated with his pessimism, an overwrought sensitiveness, especially to criticism, a savageness towards his enemies in his epigrams and in his Prefaces, and a brilliance both as a courtier and as a business man who knew the value of money. All these suggest a character that would be able to construct a technically perfect but poetically intense tragedy in which all the main aspects of life were searchingly examined and in which, perhaps with a certain detached pleasure, the author scanned the depths of human passion, frailty, and folly.