Mimesis (67 page)

Here we may observe a very general contrast to the practice of antiquity. In the works of the ancients love is but rarely a subject for the elevated style; with them it occurs as the major theme—that is, not in conjunction with other motifs, divine or fatal—only in works on the intermediate level; but whenever it does appear—even though in a sublime epic or tragic work—its physical aspects are mentioned without qualms. In the case of French tragedy, the situation is exactly reversed. French tragedy took over the sublime conception of love which the Middle Ages had developed in courtly culture, not without the collaboration of mysticism, and which Petrarchism had carried still further. Already in Corneille it is a tragic and sublime motif. Under the influence of the
romans galants
it displaces almost all other higher themes, and Racine gives it the overwhelming power which precipitates men from their courses and annihilates them. But in all this there is hardly a trace of the physical and sexual, which the taste of the time considered base and improper.

The seclusion and isolation of the tragic process to which we have referred was also considerably enhanced by the rules of unity. These reduce the contacts of the action with its milieu to a minimum. When the place remains one and the same, when the time is restricted to a brief span of twenty-four hours, while the action is completely detached from its secondary implications, it becomes impossible to do more than allude in the most general way to the historical, social, economic, and regional determinants of the occurrence. It is marvelous how Racine nevertheless succeeds—with the most meager devices and entirely by means of the action proper—in creating an atmosphere.
However, his most felicitous achievements in this respect are
Phèdre
and
Athalie
, in which place and time—in the latter case Old Testament, and in the former from Greek mythology—come close to being absolute and extrahistorical. Scenes in which a specific moment reveals its identity in terms of time of day and landscape are very rare. One might cite the passage in
Britannicus
(2, 2) where Nero describes Junie’s arrival at night. It is masterly and proves—as does another passage to which we shall come in a moment—that it was no poetic poverty which caused Racine to produce so few pictures of this kind, expressing the content of a moment; but it is fully incorporated into the psychological structure of the principal action and bears the stamp of the generalizing and periphrasing style of the times, especially in the lines which describe Junie’s nightgown:

The other passage I have in mind is the landscape at dawn, modeled after Euripides, in the first scene of
Iphigénie
. It contains the magnificent line:

and is unique in its kind by virtue of its realistic “content of the moment”: the king waking a sleeping servant. But it too is entirely grounded in the psychological development of the principal action; its content of atmosphere and color is not an end in itself; and its verbal expression contains no trace of realistic spontaneity. The language is sublime and full of metaphors. On the whole it is possible to say that the unity of time and place lifts the action out of time and place. The reader or listener has the impression of an absolute, mythical, and geographically unidentifiable locality. It is no longer the adventurous nowhere of the
romans galants
with its pedantic and ridiculous abundance of lovers. From that Racine had early emancipated himself. It is an exalted and isolated locality in which tragic personages, raised high above all everyday occurrences and speaking in sublime stylization, abandon themselves to their passionate emotions.

The classic tragedy of the French represents the ultimate extreme in the separation of styles, in the severance of the tragic from the everyday and real, attained by European literature. Its conception of the tragic individual and its linguistic expression are the product of a special aesthetic refinement which is rooted in a very complicated
and multilayered tradition and remains aloof from the average life of any period whatever. This, however, is a modern interpretation, even though not a very recent one. The aesthetic theory of Racine’s era did not know it. To justify, praise, or defend the tragedies of Racine and similar works, it used such terms as nature, reason, common sense, and probability. In Racine’s works, his own and the following centuries saw the realization of
le naturel, la raison, le bon sens
, and
la vraisemblance
, together with
la bienséance
and the most perfect imitation of antiquity, at times indeed going beyond its models. Such a judgment requires interpretation, because it fails to strike us as immediately admissible. Is it reasonable and natural to exalt human beings in so extreme a fashion and to make them speak in so extremely stylized a language? Is it probable that crises mature in so short a time and with so little disturbance; and can we admit as probable that all their momentous phases shall occur in the same room? The impartial observer, that is, anyone who has not grown up with these masterpieces from childhood and early school days, so that he accepts even their most astonishing peculiarities as a matter of course, will answer in the negative.

The fact that the seventeenth century considered Racine’s art not only masterly and overpoweringly effective but also reasonable, in accord with common sense, natural, and probable, can only be understood in terms of the period’s own perspective. It had other standards than ours for the reasonable and natural. Judging Racine’s art implied comparing it with that of the immediately preceding generation. This led to the observation that Racine’s tragedy consists of a few simple and clearly interrelated events, while his predecessors had piled up an excessive number of extraordinary and adventurous occurrences; that, further, the psychological situations and conflicts in which Racine’s characters are involved possess an exemplary and generally valid simplicity, whereas during the immediately preceding generation the fashion was for excessively heroic, subtle, and improbable conflicts (this through the influence of Corneille) and, through the influence of the Précieux, for the extravagances of a sentimental and pedantic gallantry. The echo of the revolt against these earlier trends is still perceptible in Boileau’s polemics, in Molière’s first comedies, and in Racine’s prefaces, especially those he wrote for
Andromaque, Britannicus
, and
Bérénice
; and from Boileau and Racine we may also learn to what extent and in what way the poets of antiquity were revered as models. It is the simplicity of action and the polish of expression in
the drama of the Greeks which charmed the elite among Racine’s contemporaries. Several decades earlier, when Corneille was young and the court and the better circles of urban society were becoming interested in the theater, the rules of the three unities had been adopted, principally because of a conception of probability which is no longer current with us: it was felt to be improbable that during the few hours required to perform a play, and on a spatially limited stage only a few steps away from the spectator, occurrences far removed from one another in space and time should take place. This sort of probability, then, is not concerned with the occurrences themselves but with their rendition on the stage; it is concerned with the possibility of stage illusion. And indeed the technical situation of the French theater, especially during the first half of the century, was such that important changes of scene could hardly be suggested convincingly. But once these considerations and the endeavor to imitate the ancients had brought about the acceptance of the unity of place and the twentyfour-hour convention, the events of a play had to be organized in subservience to these premises, and this is precisely the realm in which Racine is a master. With him the action falls smoothly and naturally into the fixed pattern. And if he went further than anyone else in isolating the scene and secluding the action from everything low, extrinsic, and accessory, there is no doubt that, under the given conditions of the rules of unity, his doing so promotes the naturalness of the resulting effect.

In addition—and this may well be the most important point—we must realize that Racine’s period had a conception of what is natural different from that held by later epochs. The concept of the natural was not contrasted with that of civilization; it was not associated with ideas of primitive culture, pure folkdom, or free and open countrysides; instead it was identified with a well-developed and well-educated type of human being, decorous in conduct and able to adjust with ease to the most exacting situations of social living; just as today we sometimes praise the naturalness of a person of great culture. To call something natural was almost tantamout to calling it reasonable and seemly. In this respect the age, rightly or wrongly, felt itself to be in accord with the golden ages of antique civilization, which were supposed to have possessed these qualities of a harmonious, rational, natural culture in exemplary measure. Under Louis XIV the French had the courage to consider their own culture a valid model on a par with that of the ancients, and they imposed this view upon the rest of Europe.
Building on the basis of this conception, which interprets the natural as a product of culture and intensive training, it became possible to consider natural what at all times and under all conditions move men’s hearts: their feelings and passions. The natural was at the same time the eternally human. It seemed the highest mission of the art of literature to render a pure expression of the eternally human. And it was thought that the eternally human appeared clearer and less contaminated on isolated heights of life than in the base and confused turmoil of history. But this at the same time implied a restriction within the concept of the eternally human: only the “great” passions remained as possible subjects, and love too could be represented only in those forms which were in keeping with the contemporary concepts of the highest seemliness.

In any event the natural in the age of Louis XIV is something purely psychological, and within the limits of the psychological it is an immutable datum; it is the quintessence of what is immutably human. In expressing it in the forms of its own civilization, the age meant to stamp the latter as a valid model, a civilization exemplarily representing the eternally human, so that no other age except the golden ages of the cultures of antiquity could have greater or equal validity. Another characteristic of the civilization of the time was the Baroque exaltation of princely personages. From the sixteenth century on, the metaphorics of antiquity and of medieval courtly culture promoted the spread of absolutistic trends, and during the era of the Baroque the superman of the Renaissance crystallized in the current idea of the monarch. The court of Louis XIV marks the climax in the development of absolutism in essence as well as in external form. The person of the king, surrounded by the carefully hierarchized society of the former feudal nobility which, deprived of its power and original function, has come to be nothing but the King’s entourage, is the perfect picture of the absolute ruler in Baroque exaltation. And indeed, the court was continued by the “town,” for the
grande bourgeoisie
of Paris also considered the king its social center, and the line of demarcation between “court” and “town” was not clearly drawn. The exaltation also affected the princes and princesses of the royal family and to a lesser extent the king’s representatives in the highest military and administrative positions. As an ideal model to be emulated in less distinguished spheres, the king and his court gained general validity both in France and outside it. The unintermitting publicness of the king’s life, the perpetual observance of his exalted position in every word and
every gesture, the fixed rules which governed the relations between the king and his entourage and which custom and training had made so natural, constitute a social work of art which is mirrored in numerous contemporary documents and which has often been excellently described, especially in Taine’s article on Racine (
Nouveaux Essais de critique et d’histoire
, 109-163). The important and impressive aspect of it all is the correspondence between inner and exterior dignity which is always demanded of the persons concerned and always displayed by them, although they possess but a very limited degree of freedom. A perfect self-discipline, an unerring appraisal of every situation and the part one is to take in it, a subtly studied and yet spontaneous demeanor in every word and every gesture—these qualities have hardly ever been developed to such perfection as in the second half of the seventeenth century at the French court; and it is these qualities which manifested themselves in forms of style and life which in the late Baroque once again appeared in all their luster, at the same time attaining an elegance and warmth they had not possessed before. Such, then, is the society, such are the late Baroque forms filled with a new elegance, and such, above all, is the exaltation of princely figures, which are reflected in Racine’s tragedies. A gloria of dignity radiates from all his heroes.
Ma gloire
is a term they often use to refer to the inviolability of their physical or spiritual dignity; for their dignity is not merely something outward but an integral element of their being—a fact of which Racine’s women in particular (Monime for example) are the most admirable expression. All this has been well formulated by Taine in his penetrating way, although it seems to me that the verdict on Racine at which he arrives from such considerations is onesided. In any case, he was the first to employ the sociological method, which is indispensable for an appreciation of the literature of the great century in its historical perspective. Without taking into consideration the social situation it would not be possible for us to explain how the exalted level of style, and the Baroque flourishes of expression which characterize it, could acquire such validity as models at a period which, in so many respects and in so many domains—in philosophy, science, politics, economy, and even in social relations—has a character of modern rationalism and which actually laid the foundations for modern rationalistic methods in more than one instance. Nor could we explain how it is possible that the criticism of the period judges such Baroque and hyperbolic forms in terms of reason and common sense, admires some and condemns others, displaying in the
process a great deal of taste and artistic acumen without ever being aware of the discrepancy between the world of Baroque forms in general and a purely rational critique. This world of forms is the expression of a specific portion of society living under very special conditions, and the functional importance of this portion of society was far less than the prestige it enjoyed would lead one to suppose. It would not seem to have been the historical mission of complete absolutism to establish an exalted monarch surrounded by a great court. Its mission was rather to gather together the energies of the nation, to destroy centrifugal trends, and to impose a uniform organization upon politics, administration, and economy. The court is, as it were, a mere by-product of this process. It did not owe its existence to a function which had to be performed; on the contrary, the nobles gathered about the king because there was no longer any function for them to fulfill elsewhere. It was only from their new way of life as the king’s entourage that the function of serving at court developed for them. Even if, as is certainly necessary, we consider not only the court but also
la ville
as the support and medium of classical French culture, we are again dealing with a small minority which to be sure was not without a diversifying influence upon the taste of the times but which nevertheless possessed no positive bourgeois consciousness either in politics or in aesthetics. In two very important features
la ville
and
la cour
coincide: their members were cultivated—that is, they were neither learned like professionals nor crude and ignorant like the people, but well-bred and equipped with the fund of knowledge required to make judgments in matters of taste; and secondly, they strove after the unspecialized, nonprofessional ideal of the
honnête homme
, they regarded bourgeois descent too as
un rang qu’on tient dans le monde
—we discussed this at the beginning of the present chapter (pp. 367-370).