Racine g 



tragedies in which the characters suffer their fate — in a single 

 word, they are tragedies of passion and the characters are 

 patients. 



And this is, I fancy, the explanation of that Christian passivity 

 ascribed to Racine's drama and referred by Sainte-Beuve to his 

 Jansenist education. ° While Corneille, it has been pointed out, 

 remains a pagan to the end, Racine manifests, as the saying is, a 

 genius naturally Christian. As compared with the softness and 

 infirmity of Racine's characters, there is about Corneille's some- 

 thing a little extravagant and demonic, even Titanic — 



Qu'il joigne a ses efforts le secours des enfers, 

 Je suis maistre de moy comme de I'univers.^ 



It is as though the former were concerned to point in them the 

 moral of original sin and efficient grace. In themselves they are 

 powerless for virtue — puppets of temptation like Phedre, re- 

 cipients of evil suggestion, possedes — without force or initiation 

 of their own. That such is the effect of his drama I have said 

 myself ; nor would I deny that his schooling at Port Royal may 

 have inclined his mind to such an interpretation of life and 

 humanity. But I would insist that such an interpretation con- 

 forms also to the formal obligations of his tragedy and is not so 

 very dift'erent after all from the tragic vision of the Greeks. 

 Whether they were naturally Jansenist is a question I should 

 hardly care to raise. But granted Racine's problem, he could 

 scarcely have found another solution of it so happy as that af- 

 forded him by this tragedy of pathos and infirmity. 



Nor is it without significance that so many of his dramas bear 

 the name of women — Andromaquc, Berenice, Iphigcnie, Phedre, 

 to say nothing of Esther and Athalie, which lie outside of my 

 cadre, as do also Alexandre and Lcs Frcres Enneniis. Of the ex- 

 ceptions — in Mifhridate alone does an heroic figure dominate the 

 stage, though even he is in his period of dcfaiUance and eclipse. 

 As for Bajazet it had much better been called after Roxane ; 

 while Britannicus too is something of a misnomer for a play that 



^Port-Royal, t. VI, p. 131. 

 '^ Cinna, V, iii. 



181 



