Racine, Poet of Grace Author(s): Wallace Fowlie Source: The French Review, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Mar.

, 1939), pp. 391-400 Published by: American Association of Teachers of French Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/380766 Accessed: 30/03/2010 17:25
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RACINE, POET OF GRACE

RACINE, POET OF GRACE

WALLACE FOWLIE

Bennington College The Perfection of Racine It is a great pity that the word "perfection" is so over-used in literary criticism; it should be reserved for Racine alone. A Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe dominate the literature of their respective countries, but their writings contain tedious portions; a mass of critical and linguistic annotations are indispensable for a full understanding of their texts. But Racine is as simple and lucid today as he was in the seventeenth century. The reader who has discovered in Racine that perfect literary expression, that just equilibrium between the idea and the form, that transparent vision of man's destiny, will refrain from explaining the inexplicable. The initiated, the one who loves Racine and who by loving him has understood his art, knows that no words of his can communicate to the uninitiated a magic method of participating in this experience. The very simplicity of Racine is his difficulty. Particularly by a foreign public he will be the last of the great French writers whose work will be apprehended. But when the Frenchman and the foreigner finally behold plenitude and perfection in this art, they may feel certain that they have attained a communion with that which, paradoxically, is most ineffable in French literature. Sincere admiration for Racine will be followed not by exegesis but by silence! Whereas Villon was the mirror of his time, the voice of its misery and its dolorous aspiration; whereas Dante, in bitter exile, opposed his time and flayed its vices; Racine was welcomed by his century which had seemingly matured in order to make possible his advent. An entire society had reached an apogee of culture after having indoctrinated the laws of a great art during two generations fecund in geniuses. Corneille had founded the classic French tragedy on rules which, irksome to himself, were to become natural to Racine. Pascal, feverish and ill, echoed a spiritual renovation which was to take on its most artistic form in Racine's final tragedy. 391

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Racine not only completes his age; he surpasses it. With the force of a whole nation supporting him, he is the artist who remains superior to his work. What a contrasting fate with that of Villon whose work is the pathetic confession of his life; and with that of Dante whose work is lesson and reproval to a world which had banished him and which he still loved. Between 1660 and the end of the century, a few thousand people living in Paris and Versailles were the public which first listened to the poetry of Racine. It was the time when the French language had reached its classic form and when the French people had developed their national independance. For this public Racine becomes two characters: Racine the bourgeois and Racine the playwright. More rigorously than other contemporary writers, particularly Pascal and Moliere, he separates his life from his art. In his private life he knows no profound suffering; as an artist he is concerned solely with the suffering of man. In fact, at the one moment that he does experience disappointnent and disillusionment, he renounces his art. No great conversion, no great passion, no great sorrow change the course of a life which in its simplicity seems the representation of his poetry. The plays, then, of Racine are not the literary expression of his life; in fact they are not faithful to life itself. Their strange miracle is that they transmit the sombre horrors of life without in any way imitating life. During a performance of a Racinian tragedy, the spectator is during two hours conscious above all of continuous action. Yet there is no visible action on the stage. The action is all "said". A battle, a banquet, a sacrifice, a murder in the art of a Shakespeare would be enacted before the eyes of the spectator. All these may exist in Racine's play, but they are never shown; they are related. His art is of such a kind that they are not necessary pictorially. His art is successful because we are as truly conscious of them as if we had seen them. There is nothing in Racine's theatre to assure popularity, no setting, no action, no surprise, no spectacle. Nothing- except the poetry. No instrument-except language. The event in the play takes place in the soul of the character. No other action concerns Racine. All materialistic details which are assuming such 392

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importance in the modem theatre are omitted by Racine who is concerned with placing the lovers together or the enemies together and by their speech revealing the tragedy of their sentiments. Was there a force in the seventeenth century, a force more particularly in Racine's personal experience, a force which, beyond the mere exigencies of rules, aided in the birth of so chaste and so regular an art? What example and what love might have matured an innate tendency toward an art denuded of ornamentation, concentrated on the single passion in man which will inexorably lead him to tragedy ? Wasn't Racine nearly all his life closely assocated with a group of pious men and women, the monastic order of Port-Royal, who were fighting a losing battle over a great religious doctrine? And doesn't this doctrine of grace concern the relationship between man's individual soul and God: the tragedy of man outside a state of grace; the beatitude of man in grace?
PORT-ROYAL

In the valley Chevreutsenot far from Paris, the monastery of Port-Royal became the chief center of the men and women who gave themselves the name Jansenists. Among the Church authors who had treated the doctrine of grace, there was first St. Paul in his writings collected in the New Testament. The first Church Father to elaborate the doctrine was St. Augustine. The work of Jansenius which contained the theology dear to the Jansenists was a treatise on Augustinian grace. At the conclusion of the quarrel which this treatise elicited, it was condemned at Rome. The leaders of the Jansenists wished to bring about a reform in monastic life. Their austerity challenged the wordliness of their principal enemies, the Jesuits. The retreats of the Jansenists were governed by rigorous rules; they stressed the contemplative side of religious life. The striking difference between the simplicity and sobriety of the Jansenists and the elegance and wealth of the Jesuits can be observed in their churches in Paris of the seventeenth century. St. Jacques du Haut Pas is the Jansenist church bare and austere. St. Etienne-du-Mont, on the other hand, represents another type, the richly ornamented Catholic church. The theological issue at stake was the problem of grace. Broadly speaking the Jansenists taught that man when he was 393

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first created by God was free and in a state of grace; that is, he was without sin and was destined to eternal happiness in God. But through the exercise of his free will, man sinned by disobeying God. This blemish, this "original sin" is transmitted to each man. All his actions are sins because the source of his actions has been poisoned. The only remedy for this state is what the Church defines as grace, a gift which coming from God effaces the sinful state. But all do not possess this grace. God gives it to whomever He choses and those elected ones do not know themselves when they have it. Why God choses some and not others is a mystery known only to Himself. In a word, man is predestined to salvation or damnation. This harsh doctrine which is essentially that of Calvinism became the great subject of meditation in the schools and monasteries directed by the Jansenists. They were finally put down at the end of the century, but not before they had gijven to France two of her greatest writers: Pascal and Racine. There were innumerable alliances between Racine's family and Port-Royal. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen he lived there in company with scholarly priests who gave him his great love for Greek literature and who taught him their belief that man's fate rests completely in God's hands. He is an orphan; the Jansenists become his family. He is called by them "le petit Racine" and writes his first verses on their kindnesses and on the sanctified beauty of Port-Royal. Racine is the poet brought up by confessors, men who by their vocation know the heart of man, its mysteries and its profundities, better than others. He quarrels with them at the beginning of his career and severs connection with them for several years. But in disappointment at the opposition to his Phedre, he returns to them, asks for pardon and in peace with them composes his last two tragedies. The eleven tragedies of Racine deal with the misery of man and bear the unmistakable stamp of Jansenist pessimism. It is a work inspired by the violence of man's fate, of man overcome by a sentiment against which he by himself cannot fight. The very nudity of a Racinian tragedy, this art that is stripped of eloquence and lyricism, this poetry that springs from the plight itself of man 394

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in the throes of a fatal passion, is the perpetual image of Jansenist severity. The solemnity of Racine's theatre resembles a religious ritual, resembles a transposition of the fervor young Racine had witnessed in the "holy desert" of Port-Royal des Champs. Shakespeare also paints death and doom, but he permits his characters to dream, to forget themselves ,to laugh, to sing. A character of Racine never forgets himself. He can never efface from his mind the sentiment of impending fate which is pushing him toward the precipice. There is something of the Greek mask, a superhuman trait, added to the ordinary visage of a Racinian hero which emphasizes the single catastrophe and which gives an implacable unity to the disaster. Racine opens his play a few hours before the tragedy takes place. The characters know their fate and know that its accomplishment is at hand. Nothing will be allowed to deter the inevitable. There will be no interludes which Shakespeare uses in order to arrest the action or to develop subordinate plots and sentiments. From this dramatic art which depicts human suffering and human cruelty, a certain effect of human greatness is disengaged and at times seems flooded by a supernatural light. This comes from the absolute lucidity of Racine's heroes. They know themselves, but they know also their adversaries and their lovers. They are tenacious in their lust or in their love, knowing all the while that this lust or this love is forcing them to an imminent death. If there is a key to Racine's poetry (and one hesitates to define so imponderable a beauty), it is perhaps the revelation of the irremediable which traverses the five acts. If there is a key to Jansenist grace, it is the conviction, dramatically transcribed by Racine, that man's destiny has been ordained before his birth, that in the unfolding of his life, it is not within his power to alter the ultimate end. The true force in his life is the end toward which magnetically he is drawn.
PHEDRE

The most violent and the most tragic figure of Racine is Phedre. Basing his work on Greek mythology and on the tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, Racine paints in the character of Phedre an all-consuming passion. It is the striking case of love which has been aroused in the heart of Phedre by Venus for the sake 395

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of vengeance. The horror of this love comes from the fact that it is incestuous: Phedre loves her step-son, Hippolyte. At Phedre's first entrance in the first act, she not only voices her calamity and the furies of a love which possess her completely, but she gives every evidence of being the fated woman, the woman for whom there can exist no help. All i,s a conspiration for her fall, she says in one of the most beautiful lines of the play:
"Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire a me nuire."

Hers is the fate that has not been elected but that has been imposed. Phedre illustrates to an extreme degree the line of Thomas a Kempis: "Whensoever a man desires anything inordinately, he is presently disquieted within himself." Nothing exists for Phedre except a desire which is not only impossible to satisfy but which is abhorrent in itself. Her desire is similar to a malignant growth which disgusts her but whose reality and whose potency she cannot doubt. Her misery has two sources: first, the capacity she has to understand her passion and to judge it; and secondly, her incapacity to stifle it. These are the two themes she develops in her confession to Hippolyte in the second act:
"Connais done Ph&dreet toute sa fureur."

and
"Je m'abhorreencor plus que tu ne me detestes."

The very anguish of Phedre's love makes her regret her period of innocence, the calm which preceded this tempest of passion. What enhances her sensuality, for Phedre is predominantly the heroine motivated by sensual desire, is the absence in her memories of any satisfaction. This longing which has no previous happiness makes Phedre the pitiless lover. Her frenzy permits no relaxation. It is almost a dizziness she seems to be suffering from, which will cause her to fall all the more rapidly to destruction. The few "coups de theatre" in the tragedy, far from altering the course of the play, add shadings to the passion of Ph&dre which serve only to make it more uncontrolled. A cold indifferent Hippolyte was tragedy enough for Phedre to bear, but an Hippolyte in love with another woman brought forth a paroxysm of jealousy, a new grief for her to experience: 396

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"Ah! douleur non encore eprouvee! A quel nouveau tourment je me suis reservel Tout ce que j'ai souffert, mes craintes, mes transports, La fureur de mes feux, l'horreur de mes remords, Et d'un cruel refus l'insupportableinjure N'etait qu'un faible essai du tourment que j'endure."

If the tragedy of Phedre represents the life that is not free and if this marked existence seems to reflect the despotism of Jansenist grace, there is in the spirit and the color of the play an indefinable total effect that is not Christian, but Pagan. It would suffice to read a purely Christian text after reading the lines of Phedre, to see the difference not so much in the ultimate lesson but in the spiritual content. Take for example the following sentence from the Imitation of Christ: "It is then by resisting our passions, that we are to find true peace of heart, and not by being slaves to them." The spiritual directors of Port-Royal could with justice see in Phedre a great moral lesson, the picture of a woman outside the state of grace, and Chateaubriand could from this view-point call her a Christian. If one wishes, there is a spirit of Jansenism in Phedre, but it is above all a work inspired by Greek tragedy. The doctrine of Jansenist grace and Greek fatality meet in such delicate proportions that one can see in it both a Christian and Pagan work. Racine composed it at a moment when he was materially separated from any influence of Port-Royal. It is Venus and not God that casts the spell over Phedre and whose curse is the reason for such despair. The art of Racine in this play above all others is spent in painting luxury, in describing a relentless sensuality whose every call voices despair. But this despair of Phedre has not one instant of repentance. In her character Racine analyzes the force of passion. It will not be until his last tragedy, Athalie, the crowning achievement of his career, that he will substitute in his poetic material the blind rage of Phedre's lust for the prophetic transe of the high priest Joad.
ATHALIE

The production of Phidre in 1677 ended the ten years of uninterrupted success and glory Racine had known. The adulation of a rich and powerful court had fostered his genius ever since 397

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his Andromaque. But at the time of Phedre a rival appeared with a tragedy on the same subject. This Pradon, ignored today, attracted the public of Racine and as a result of the literary quarrel which ensued, was the immediate reason for Racine giving up the theatre and embarking upon a new life. Racine even contemplated at this moment the monastic life, but his confessor wisely deterred him from this choice for which he had no vocation, and Racine became an exemplary husband and father. One of his first desires after marriage was to reconcile himself with Port-Royal. Religious practices took on more significance for him as he felt more and more remorse for his harsh treatment of his earliest spiritual directors and for his estrangement from any religious milieu. The reconciliation was brought about largely through the effort of Boileau who arranged for the decisive meeting between Racine and le Grand Arnauld, the spiritual head of the community. When Racine entered the room which was crowded with people, he threw himself on his knees before Arnauld. Arnauld, greatly moved by this act of humility, threw himself on his knees before Racine and the two men embraced in this posture. The Jansenist historians have wondered which of the men, Racine or Arnauld, was nobler at this moment. Henceforth, Racine divides his time quite evenly between his family duties, his court obligations as royal historiographer with Boileau and his religious practices. He seems to have renounced all pursuit of worldliness, all interest in the world of the theatre where he had spent years if not of dissoluteness, at least of promiscuity. The latter part of Racine's life was undoubtedly passed in an atmosphere of piety. Yet at this time as throughout his life there was no indication of excess. His adolescence had been studious but not to an extreme; his early manhood had been worldly and ardent, but not too indiscreet; his period of maturity was pious but not mystical. Racine maintained in his life as in his poetic work, the classic ideal of equilibrium, the measure of harmonious proportions. Madame de Maintenon, consort of Louis XIV, had founded the school of Saint Cyr, where 250 girls were being educated. In the other girls' schools of the time only primary instruction was 398

RACINE, POET OF GRACE offered and lessons in comportment and household management. The program of Madame de Maintenon was more elaborate. She sought to form the judgment of her students. If they studied history, she would encourage discussion on lessons which historical events might evoke. Those girls who were gifted for music would be allowed to study music. The school had presented in dramatic form some of the plays of Racine, but Madame de Maintenon, particularly at the performance of Andromaque, was worried by the fervor with which the young actresses interpreted the passions and the sentiments in the play. She asked Racine to compose a play for her students which would not arouse profane passions. Twelve years had elapsed since Ph&dreand Racine had written no tragedies during that time. But a request from Madame de Maintenon was almost an order. He chose the Old Testament subject of Esther. The play was a triumph for Racine and Saint Cyr. The first performance was given before Madame de Maintenon, the king, the dauphin, Bossuet and some courtiers. Five performances, organized by the king himself were given during the first winter of 1689. An invitation to one of the performances was a marked honor. Racine had written choruses for Esther and music was composed by the court musician Moreau. Madame de Maintenon asked Racine for a second religious drama and within a year he produced Athalie. This time the performance of the girls of Saint Cyr harmed the play. They used no costumes, no scenery, no music. Moreover, the tragedy was too solemn and the poetry too subtle for their sensitivity. All the spectators failed to realize the true merit of the work with the exception of Boileau who acclaimed it Racine's masterpiece. During the period between his first tragedy and PhNdre Racine had been concerned with what was most ferocious and fatal in classical mythology. When he turns to Holy Scripture for dramatic material he chooses the story of Athalie related in Kings and Chronicles, one of the most cruel and most vigorous of the Old Testament. It is a story of wrath and vengeance and murder. The fatalistic divinities of ancient Greece have become the irate and all-powerful Jehovah of Israel. Yet if the conception of Greek fate has been replaced by the conception of a single omnipotent 399

THE FRENCH REVIEW God, Racine's dominant interest in the sweeping uncontrolled passions of man, is still visible. The scene of Racine's tragedy has changed from Pagan Greece to a vestibule in the temple at Jerusalem; what is most violent in the heart of man will again furnish the action; but there is in this last tragedy a new element: the sign of a power above human passions to which these passions must ultimately submit. Phedre is the poetic vision of what is most human (and therefore most tragic) in man; Athalie is the poetic vision of God's omniscience and omnipotence. From the very first two lines with their beautiful rhyme "Etemel-solennel" to the last lines which apostrophize the same Eternal One a,s the "severe judge of kings", the Divine Spirit directs the action, speaks in the prophetic voice of the high priest, troubles the foreign queen in her dreams and finally places the young child, who is the rightful descendant of David, upon the usurped throne. The new spirit which appears in Athalie is a spirit above the individual tragedies of men. It is the intense drama of a destined race, the maturing of a promise and an election, the continuity of a line of kings which must not be broken because of the foreordained mission of the last of those kings. The high priest at the end of the third act enters a transe in which he is permitted to see the future, to see the coming wickedness of the boy to whom he is consecrating his life and who is about to be placed on the throne of David. But he sees even beyond that, to the coming of a new Jerusalem. This is the key to the real poetry of Athalie: the revelation of the invisible will of God. Grace will be granted when the Almighty wills it. Athalie, in her Pagan palace, drunk with power and licenciousness, feels the presence of the exterminating angel. This last tragedy of Racine would seem to be the poetic expression of what Port-Royal stood for. His Greek tragedies were the poetry of carnal desire; Athalie has none of this poetry. It inhabits another sphere, one in which reigns the spirit which has perhaps been best defined in the Imitation: "From one word are all things."

400