Racine 31 



citizenship altogether, as Aristotle explains clearly enough^^ — it 

 is Hippolytus' waywardness which makes the Greek subject: 



Ovdels fi'dpiffKe vvktI dav/xaffTos dewv.^^ 



To Euripides the woman is a malign influence, a calamity to 

 which Hippolytus' impudence exposes him. And if in the case of 

 Racine's heroine there is a trail of fatality lying across her house, 

 which simulates the immanence of divinity after the Greek 

 fashion, 



rd yap e/c rrpoT^pcov dTrXaKri/xaTa, viv 

 Trpbs Td(T5' aTrdyet.,^^ 



it does little more, in reality, than give depth to the tableau and 

 perspective to the picture. It is physiological — an heredity, not a 

 dispensation; a transmitted taint rather than a suspended judg- 

 ment re-incurred for himself by every new successor to the title. 

 Its moral, as distinguished from its aesthetic, effect would be, if 

 anything, to raise a doubt of her responsibility and throw sus- 

 picion upon the criminal rationale of her catastrophe. And while 

 it is hardly emphasized to that degree — being intended, I sup- 

 pose, toward holding the sympathy of the audience a little more 

 surely — still in the upshot, the whole affair, with respect to 

 Phedre as well as Hippolytus, comes in the modern version to 

 take on the appearance of an act of wantonness on the part of 

 Venus : 



Puis que Venus le veut, de ce sang deplorable 

 Je peris la derniere et la plus miserable. ^5 



Not that Racine's drama has no sense ; far from it. But it is not 

 the sense of the antique. And if I am perchance singular in pre- 

 ferring the thorough consequence and conclusiveness of the 

 latter's dialectic ; on the other hand, I believe that I am only 

 speaking in the spirit of my time when I add that I prefer the 

 former's interpretation of character for its inherent momentous- 

 ness and significance. In spite of the dubiety and indecision of 



32 Poetics, XIII, 2. 



33 Hippolytus, 106. 



3<- ^schylus' Eumemides, 935-6. 

 35 Phedre, I, iii. 



203 



