Mimesis (66 page)

(For three whole years what has he said, what has he done, which does not promise Rome a perfect emperor? Governed for these three years by his watchful care, Rome believes that she has returned to the days of her consuls; he rules her like a father…)

be it in the manner in which Titus’s ambition to be a good ruler is expressed:

(I undertook the happiness of a thousand who were unhappy; my benevolences were seen distributed everywhere…)

or

(Where are those happy days of which I awakened expectation? What tears have I dried? In what satisfied eyes have I savored the fruit of my good deeds? Has the universe seen its destinies changed?)

be it in the description of the good king:

(I admire a victorious king whose valor leads him to triumph everywhere: but a wise king, a king who hates injustice, who does not permit the poor man to groan under the law of the imperious rich, is the fairest gift of heaven. The widow trusts in his protection. He is the orphan’s father. And the tears of the just man imploring his support are precious before him.)

be it, finally, in the description of court flatterers:

(You do not know the intoxication of absolute power, nor the bewitching voice of unmanly flatterers. Soon they will tell you that the most sacred laws, mistresses of the vile people, are obedient to kings; that a king has no bridle but his own will; that he must sacrifice everything to his supreme greatness…)

As we have seen, this exclusively moralistic view of political matters, with its extreme simplification and neat distinction of black and white, is to be found not only in the plays destined for the young ladies of Saint-Cyr (in which it could be accounted for by their special purpose) but in the others too. In the Saint-Cyr tragedies it is more the moralism of the Bible, in the earlier tragedies more the moralism of late antiquity, which inspired this conception of things. But in both cases there is one outstanding motif which is either not voiced at all, or at least only much more faintly, in these sources: the motif of the ruler’s omnipotence, which is a leading motif of Baroque absolutism. On earth the prince is like God. We have already found them compared
in the passage from
Esther
quoted above (page 373). Correspondingly, we find God represented as a moralistic king of kings:

(The Eternal is his name, the world is his work; he hears the sighs of the humble when they are outraged, judges all mortals by equal laws, and, high on his throne, interrogates kings. …)

Similar ideas are found in the concluding chorus of the first act of
Athalie
, for example, and in connection with them one cannot help recalling Bossuet’s magnificently rolling periods at the beginning of his funeral oration for the Queen of England, Henriette-Marie de France, which close with a verse from the Psalms:
Et nunc, reges, intelligite; erudimini, qui iudicatis terram
. This oration was delivered in 1669, when both the King and Racine were in their first brilliance, twenty years before
Esther
.

In the tragedies of French classicism, as will be self-evident after all that has been said, the strictest seclusion of the tragic personages and the tragic action from everything below them prevails. Even the prince’s immediate entourage is drawn upon only for a few figures indispensable to the action, or confidants; everyone else is
on
. The people are referred to but rarely and only in the most general terms. Details of everyday living, references to sleeping, eating and drinking, the weather, landscape, and time of day are almost completely absent; and when they do occur they are fused into the sublime style. The fact that no common word, no current term for any object of daily use, is permitted, is generally known as a result of the violent polemic with which the Romanticists attacked this style and of which the most vigorous and witty expression is probably found in Victor Hugo’s poem,
Réponse à un acte d’accusation
(in the
Contemplations
). From the almost too eloquent verses in which Hugo describes his revolt against the classical ideal of the sublime I have always remembered one as especially characteristic:

Anything of the sort (it happens in Hugo’s
Hernani
) would in fact be completely incompatible with the sublime style of Racine.

In this sublimity which secludes and isolates them the tragic princes
and princesses abandon themselves to their passions. Only the most important considerations, freed from the turmoil of everyday life, cleansed of its odor and flavor, penetrate their souls, which are thus wholly free for the greatest and strongest emotions. The tremendous impact of the passions in Racine’s works, and in Corneille’s before him, is largely dependent upon the above-described atmospheric isolation of the action; it is comparable with the isolating procedure used in modern scientific experiments to create the most favorable conditions; the phenomenon is observed with no disturbing factors and in unbroken continuity. In the moral realm the trend toward a separation of styles in terms of class is carried so far that the practical considerations and reservations suggested by a given situation come from personages comparatively inferior in station. The princely heroes and heroines remain aloof from such things; their passionate sublimity scorns every kind of practical concern. In
Bérénice
it is the confidante Phénice who advises the queen not to discourage Antiochus completely because Titus has not yet fully declared himself (1, 5). In the same play it is Antiochus’ confidant Arsace who draws his king’s attention to the advantageous implications of the straits in which Bérénice finds herself; with Titus abandoning her—Arsace reasons—she must marry Antiochus (3, 2). Such considerations (one might fairly say, calculations), which view and judge a given situation in terms of its practical requirements, are too base to find room in the soul of a prince in the throes of sublime passions, and as a matter of fact they prove fallacious. The same sense of style induced Racine not to put the accusation against Hippolyte in Phèdre’s own mouth, as his source, Euripides’
Hippolytos
, does, but in her nurse Oenone’s. He explains this point in his
Préface
:

J’ai même pris soin de la rendre un peu moins odieuse qu’elle n’est dans les tragédies des anciens, où elle se résout d’elle-même à accuser Hippolyte. J’ai cru que la calomnie avait quelque chose de trop bas et de trop noir pour la mettre dans la bouche d’une princesse qui a d’ailleurs des sentiments si nobles et si vertueux. Cette bassesse m’a paru plus convenable à une nourrice, qui pouvait avoir des inclinations plus serviles…

(I have even been careful to make her a little less odious than she is in the tragedies of the ancients, where she herself resolves to accuse Hippolytus. I considered that calumny had something too base and too dark about it for me to put it in the mouth of a
princess who elsewhere has such noble and virtuous feelings. This baseness appeared to me more suitable to a nurse, whose inclinations could be more servile…)

But it seems to me that in this passage, where he is trying to defend the moral value of his tragedy against attacks made upon it in the name of Christian piety, Racine gives his thought too “virtuous” a turn; what is incompatible with the sublimity of his princely heroes is not so much the morally evil but rather the vulgar concern with practical advantages.

Another very essential and distinguishing characteristic of the sublimity of the tragic personages is their physical integrity: everything that happens to their bodies must happen in elevated style, and everything base and creatural must be omitted. Corneille still felt how far his age’s conception of style outdid all tradition in this respect, even that of the ancients. When his
Théodore
failed, its failure was partly ascribed to the circumstance that the threatened prostitution of the heroine is mentioned in the play. He says in his
Examen
(
Œuvres, Grands Écrivains
edition, volume 5, page 11):

Dans cette disgrace j’ai de quoi congratuler à la pureté de notre scène, de voir qu’une histoire qui fait le plus bel ornement du second livre de Saint-Ambroise, se trouve trop licencieuse pour y être supportée. Qu’eût-on dit, si, comme ce grand Docteur de l’Eglise, j’eusse fait voir cette vierge dans le lieu infâme. …

(In this disfavor, I have reason to congratulate the purity of our stage, since I see that a story which forms the fairest ornament of St. Ambrose’s second book proves too licentious to be tolerated there. What would people have said if, like that great Doctor of the Church, I had exhibited the virgin in the place of infamy. …)

Indeed every token of bodily-creatural infirmity is incompatible with the conception of the sublime entertained by French classicism. Only death, as pertaining to the elevated style, cannot be dispensed with. But no tragic hero may be old, ill, infirm, or disfigured. On this stage neither Lear nor Oedipus appears, or else they submit to adjust themselves to the prevailing sense of style. In the preface to his
Œdipe
Corneille says of his model Sophocles:

Je n’ai pas laissé de trembler quand je l’ai envisagé de près, et un peu plus à loisir que je n’avais fait en le choisissant. J’ai connu
que ce qui avait passé pour miraculeux dans ces siècles éloignés, pourrait sembler horrible au nôtre, et que cette éloquente et curieuse description de la manière dont ce malheureux prince se crève les yeux, et le spectacle de ces mêmes yeux crevés, dont le sang lui distille sur le visage, qui occupe tout le cinquième acte chez ces incomparables originaux, ferait soulever la délicatesse de nos dames … j’ai tâché de rémédier à ces désordres … (
Œuvres
, 6, 126).

(Yet I could not but tremble when I looked at him closely and with somewhat more leisure than I had done when I chose him. I understood that what had passed for miraculous in those distant ages might seem horrible to our own age, and that the eloquent and meticulous description of the way in which that unfortunate prince puts out his eyes, and the spectacle of those eyes themselves, gouged out, with their blood trickling over his face, which takes up the whole fifth act in the work of those incomparable originals, would provoke the fastidiousness of our ladies … I attempted to remedy these disorders. …)

The tone of both these quotations makes one feel that Corneille regarded the sense of style of the age Louis XIV not entirely without inner reservations. In his first and by far his most effective masterpiece,
le Cid
, we have Don Diègue, who gets slapped in the face and at least for a moment is a helpless old man; and in
Attila
, written in Boileau’s and Racine’s time, the hero dies of a nose-bleed (which was considered shocking in many quarters). In Racine’s tragedies such things are inconceivable. For his generation it went without saying that everything bodily and natural or even creatural could be tolerated only on the comic stage, and even there only within certain limits. In Racine’s tragedies we find an aged hero too, Mithridate. But he is a thoroughly sublime figure, and his age occasions stylistic effects in the manner of the following:

(This heart, nourished on blood and hungry for war, despite the burden of years and of fate which oppresses me, everywhere bears the love which binds it to Monimia. …)

Finally, there is also a sense of physical propriety which (although
from a modern point of view it contrasts strangely with the boundless fury of the all-pervading passion of love) caused Racine to tone down the accusation against Hippolyte (in
Phèdre
). In his preface he says:

Hippolyte est accusé, dans Euripide et dans Sénèque, d’avoir en effet violé sa belle-mère: vim corpus tulit. Mais il n’est ici accusé que d’en avoir eu le dessein. J’ai voulu épargner à Thésée une confusion qui l’aurait pu rendre moins agréable aux spectateurs.

(In Euripides and Seneca, Hippolytus is accused of having actually ravished his mother-in-law: “he took her by force.” But here he is accused of no more than having had that intention. I wished to spare Theseus a confusion which might have made him less agreeable to the audience.)