Racine 17 



Phedre 



lis s'aimeront toujours. . . . 

 Miserable! Et je vis! et je soiatiens le veue 

 De ce sacre Soleil dont je suis descendue ! 

 J'ay pour ayeul le pere et le maistre des dieux ; 

 Le ciel, tout I'univers est plein de mes ayeux : 

 Ou me cacher? Fuyons dans la nuit infernale. 

 Mais que dis-je? Mon pere y tient I'urne fatale; 

 Le Sort, dit-on, I'a mise en ses severes mains. 

 Minos juge aux enfers tous les pales humains.i'' 



This is the kind of thing that Racine is really capable of : it is not 

 only great tragedy, it is great poetry ; and it needs no commentary 

 of mine by way of reinforcement. 



In conclusion, I would not be understood to imply that Racine's 

 entire drama squares in every respect with the lines of Berenice 

 and Phedre. Of these two plays the one is too schematic, the 

 other too consummate to be thoroughly representative. One does 

 not repeat a Phedre or a Berenice — though for quite different 

 reasons. But for all that, they define the type. They exhibit — 

 all the more distinctly, if anything, for being exceptional in de- 

 tail — the characteristic originality which I have been trying to 

 vindicate for their author. They declare that simple or syn- 

 thetic action, the discovery or invention of which converted the 

 serious drama of Louis XIV from an artifice and made a modern 

 classic tragedy possible for once. And they reveal the means 

 whereby Racine accomplished this result by treating the plot as 

 a crise of passion — typically, of love and jealousy — of which the 

 characters were patients or sufferers, so harmonizing his action 

 with the " unities " of time and place, which the criticism of the 

 Academy and the example of Corneille had fastened upon his 

 stage. 



To be sure, his technical procedure was not that of the Greeks. 

 The latter, by the force of circumstances of which the choric 

 origin of their tragedy was undoubtedly the most influential, had 

 developed out of the natural limitations of their action a con- 

 gruous simplicity of treatment, from which the pragmatic crit- 

 ic IV, vi. 



189 



