Chapter IV: The Age of Louis XIV (1)

When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower. In every branch of human activity--in war, in administration, in social life, in art, and in literature--the same energy was apparent, the same glorious success. At a bound France won the headship of Europe; and when at last, defeated in arms and politically shattered, she was forced to relinquish her dreams of worldly power, her pre-eminence in the arts of peace remained unshaken. For more than a century she continued, through her literature and her manners, to dominate the civilized world.

At no other time have the conditions of society exercised a more profound influence upon the works of great writers. Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic. Louis, with deliberate policy, emphasized the existing rigidity of class-distinctions by centralizing society round his splendid palace of Versailles. Versailles is the _clou_ to the age of Louis XIV. The huge, almost infinite building, so stately and so glorious, with its vast elaborate gardens, its great trees transported from distant forests, its amazing waterworks constructed in an arid soil at the cost of millions, its lesser satellite parks and palaces, its palpitating crowds of sumptuous courtiers, the whole accumulated mass of piled-up treasure and magnificence and power--this was something far more significant than the mere country residence of royalty; it was the summary, the crown, and the visible expression of the ideals of a great age. And what were these ideals? The fact that the conception of society which made Versailles possible was narrow and unjust must not blind us to the real nobility and the real glory which it brought into being. It is true that behind and beyond the radiance of Louis and his courtiers lay the dark abyss of an impoverished France, a ruined peasantry, a whole system of intolerance, and privilege, and maladministration; yet it is none the less true that the radiance was a genuine radiance--no false and feeble glitter, but the warm, brilliant, intense illumination thrown out by the glow of a nation's life. That life, with all it meant to those who lived it, has long since vanished from the earth--preserved to us now only in the pages of its poets, or strangely shadowed forth to the traveller in the illimitable desolation of Versailles. That it has gone so utterly is no doubt, on the whole, a cause for rejoicing; but, as we look back upon it, we may still feel something of the old enchantment, and feel it, perhaps, the more keenly for its strangeness--its dissimilarity to the experiences of our own days. We shall catch glimpses of a world of pomp and brilliance, of ceremony and decoration, a small, vital passionate world which has clothed itself in ordered beauty, learnt a fine way of easy, splendid living, and come under the spell of a devotion to what is, to us, no more than the gorgeous phantom of high imaginations--the divinity of a king. When the morning sun was up and the horn was sounding down the long avenues, who would not wish, if only in fancy, to join the glittering cavalcade where the young Louis led the hunt in the days of his opening glory? Later, we might linger on the endless terrace, to watch the great monarch, with his red heels and his golden snuff-box and his towering periwig, come out among his courtiers, or in some elaborate grotto applaud a ballet by Molière. When night fell there would be dancing and music in the gallery blazing with a thousand looking-glasses, or masquerades and feasting in the gardens, with the torches throwing strange shadows among the trees trimmed into artificial figures, and gay lords and proud ladies conversing together under the stars.

Such were the surroundings among which the classical literature of France came into existence, and by which it was profoundly influenced in a multitude of ways. This literature was, in its form and its essence, aristocratic literature, though its writers were, almost without exception, middle-class men brought into prominence by the royal favour. The great dramatists and poets and prose-writers of the epoch were in the position of artists working by special permission for the benefit and pleasure of a select public to which they themselves had no claim to belong. They were _in_ the world of high birth and splendid manners, but they were not of it; and thus it happened that their creations, while reflecting what was finest in the social ideals of the time, escaped the worst faults of the literary productions of persons of rank--superficiality and amateurishness. The literature of that age was, in fact, remarkable to an extraordinary degree for precisely contrary qualities--for the solidity of its psychological foundations and for the supreme excellence of its craftsmanship. It was the work of profound and subtle artists writing for a small, leisured, distinguished, and critical audience, while retaining the larger outlook and sense of proportion which had come to them from their own experience of life.

The fact, too, that this aristocratic audience was no longer concerned with the activities of political power, exercised a further influence upon the writers of the age. The old interests of aristocracy--the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war--faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization. The exquisite letters of Madame de Sévigné show us society assuming its modern complexion, women becoming the arbiters of taste and fashion, and drawing-rooms the centre of life. These tendencies were reflected in literature; and Corneille's tragedies of power were replaced by Racine's tragedies of the heart. Nor was it only in the broad outlines that the change was manifest; the whole temper of life, in all its details, took on the suave, decorous, dignified tone of good breeding, and it was impossible that men of letters should escape the infection. Their works became remarkable for clarity and elegance, for a graceful simplicity, an easy strength; they were cast in the fine mould of perfect manners--majestic without pretension, expressive without emphasis, simple without carelessness, and subtle without affectation. These are the dominating qualities in the style of that great body of literature, which has rightly come to be distinguished as the _Classical_ literature of France.

Yet there was a reverse to the medal; for such qualities necessarily involved defects, which, hardly perceptible and of small importance in the work of the early masters of the Classical school, became more prominent in the hands of lesser men, and eventually brought the whole tradition into disrepute. It was inevitable that there should be a certain narrowness in a literature which was in its very essence deliberate, refined, and select; omission is the beginning of all art; and the great French classicists, more supremely artistic, perhaps, than any other body of writers in the history of the world, practised with unsparing devotion the virtue of leaving out. The beauties of clarity, simplicity, and ease were what they aimed at; and to attain them involved the abandonment of other beauties which, however attractive, were incompatible with those. Vague suggestion, complexity of thought, strangeness of imagination--to us the familiar ornaments of poetry--were qualities eschewed by the masters of the age of Louis XIV. They were willing to forgo comprehensiveness and elaboration, they were ready to forswear the great effects of curiosity and mystery; for the pursuit of these led away from the high path of their chosen endeavour--the creation, within the limits they had marked out, of works of flawless art. The fact that they succeeded so well is precisely one of the reasons why it is difficult for the modern reader--and for the Anglo-Saxon one especially, with his different æsthetic traditions--to appreciate their work to the full. To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains. Nor is this our only difficulty: the classical tradition, like all traditions, became degenerate; its virtues hardened into mannerisms, its weaknesses expanded into dogmas; and it is sometimes hard for us to discriminate between the artist who has mastered the convention in which he works, and the artisan who is the slave of it. The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit behind. And indeed, in the work of the later classicists, there was too often no spirit to look for. The husk alone remained--a finicky pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long outworn. Every great tradition has its own way of dying; and the classical tradition died of timidity. It grew afraid of the flesh and blood of life; it was too polite to face realities, too elevated to tread the common ground of fact and detail; it would touch nothing but generalities, for they alone are safe, harmless, and respectable; and, if they are also empty, how can that he helped? Starving, it shrank into itself, muttering old incantations; and it continued to mutter them, automatically, some time after it had expired.

But, in the heyday of the age of Louis XIV, literature showed no signs of such a malady--though no doubt it contained the latent germs of the disease; on the contrary, the masterpieces of that epoch are charged to the full with vitality and force. We may describe them, in one word, as worldly--worldly in the broadest and the highest acceptation of the term. They represent, in its perfect expression, the spirit of this world--its greatness, its splendour, its intensity, the human drama that animates it, the ordered beauty towards which it tends. For that was an age in which the world, in all the plenitude of its brilliance, had come into its own, when the sombre spirituality of the Middle Ages had been at last forgotten, when the literatures of Greece and Rome had delivered their benignant message, when civilization could enjoy for a space its new maturity, before a larger vision had brought questionings, and an inward vision aspirations unknown before. The literature of those days was founded upon a general acceptance--acceptance both in the sphere of politics and of philosophy. It took for granted a fixed and autocratic society; it silently assumed the orthodox teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, compared with the literature of the eighteenth century, it was unspeculative; compared with that of the Middle Ages, unspiritual. It was devoid of that perception of the marvellous and awful significance of Natural phenomena which dominates the literature of the Romantic Revival. Fate, Eternity, Nature, the destiny of Man, 'the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come'--such mysteries it almost absolutely ignored. Even Death seemed to lie a little beyond its vision. What a difference, in this respect, between the literature of Louis XIV and the literature of Elizabeth! The latter is obsessed by the smell of mortality; its imagination, penetrating to the depths and the heights, shows us mankind adrift amid eternities, and the whole universe the doubtful shadow of a dream. In the former, these magnificent obscurities find no place: they have been shut out, as it were, like a night of storm and darkness on the other side of the window. The night is there, no doubt; but it is outside, invisible and neglected, while within, the candles are lighted, the company is gathered together, and all is warmth and brilliance. To eyes which have grown accustomed to the elemental conflicts without, the room may seem at first confined, artificial, and insignificant. But let us wait a little! Gradually we shall come to feel the charm of the well-ordered chamber, to appreciate the beauty of the decorations, the distinction and the penetration of the talk. And, if we persevere, that is not all we shall discover. We shall find, in that small society, something more than ease and good breeding and refinement; we shall find the play of passion and the subtle manifestation of the soul; we shall realize that the shutting out of terrors and of mysteries has brought at least the gain of concentration, so that we may discern unhindered the movements of the mind of man--of man, not rapt aloft in the vast ardours of speculation, nor involved in the solitary introspection of his own breast; but of man, civilized, actual, among his fellows, in the bright light of the world.

Yet, if it is true that a refined and splendid worldliness was the dominant characteristic of the literature of the age, it is no less true that here and there, in its greatest writers, a contrary tendency--faint but unmistakable--may be perceived. The tone occasionally changes; below the polished surface a disquietude becomes discernible; a momentary obscure exception to the general easy-flowing rule. The supreme artists of the epoch seem to have been able not only to give expression to the moving forces of their time, but to react against them. They were rebels as well as conquerors, and this fact lends an extraordinary interest to their work. Like some subtle unexpected spice in a masterly confection, a strange, profound, unworldly melancholy just permeates their most brilliant writings, and gives the last fine taste.

Before considering these supreme artists more particularly, it will be well to notice briefly the work of one who can lay no claim to such a title, but who deserves attention as the spokesman of the literary ideals of his age. BOILEAU, once the undisputed arbiter of taste throughout Europe, is now hardly remembered save as the high-priest of an effete tradition and as the author of some brilliant lines which have passed as proverbs into the French language. He was a man of vivid intelligence--courageous, independent, passionately devoted to literature, and a highly skilled worker in the difficult art of writing verse. But he lacked the force and the finesse of poetic genius; and it is not as a poet that he is interesting: it is as a critic. When the lines upon which French literature was to develop were still uncertain, when the Classical school was in its infancy, and its great leaders--Molière, Racine, La Fontaine--were still disputing their right to pre-eminence among a host of inferior and now forgotten writers whose works were carrying on the weak and tasteless traditions of the former age--it was at this moment that Boileau brought to the aid of the new movement the whole force of his admirable clear-sightedness, his dauntless pertinacity, and his caustic, unforgettable wit. No doubt, without him, the Classical school would have triumphed--ultimately, like all good things--but it would be hard to exaggerate the service which was rendered it by Boileau. During many years, in a long series of satires and epistles, in the _Art Poétique_ and in various prose works, he impressed upon the reading public the worthlessness of the old artificial school of preciosity and affectation, and the high value of the achievements of his great contemporaries. He did more: he not only attacked and eulogized the works of individuals, he formulated general principles and gave pointed and repeated expression to the ideals of the new school. Thus, through him, classicism gained self-consciousness; it became possessed of a definite doctrine; and a group of writers was formed, united together by common aims, and destined to exercise an immense influence upon the development not only of French, but of European literature. For these reasons--for his almost unerring prescience in the discernment of contemporary merit and for his triumphant consolidation of the classical tradition--Boileau must be reckoned as the earliest of that illustrious company of great critics which is one of the peculiar glories of French letters. The bulk of his writing will probably never again be read by any save the curious explorer; but the spirit of his work lies happily condensed in one short epistle--_À son Esprit_--where his good sense, his wit, his lucid vigour and his essential humanity find their consummate expression; it is a spirit which still animates the literature of France.

His teaching, however, so valuable in its own day, is not important as a contribution towards a general theory of æesthetics. Boileau attempted to lay down the principles universally binding upon writers of poetry; but he had not the equipment necessary for such a task. His knowledge was limited, his sympathies were narrow, and his intellectual powers lacked profundity. The result was that he committed the common fault of writers immersed in the business of contemporary controversy--he erected the precepts, which he saw to be salutary so far as his own generation was concerned, to the dignity of universal rules. His message, in reality, was for the France of Louis XIV; he enunciated it as if it was the one guide to literary salvation for all ages and in all circumstances; and it so happened that for about a century it was accepted at his own valuation by the majority of civilized mankind. Boileau detested--and rightly detested--the extravagant affectations of the _précieux_ school, the feeble pomposities of Chapelain, the contorted, inflated, logic-chopping heroes of Corneille's later style; and the classical reaction against these errors appeared to him in the guise of a return to the fundamental principles of Nature, Reason, and Truth. In a sense he was right: for it is certain that the works of Molière and Racine were more natural, more reasonable, and more truthful than those of l'Abbé Cotin and Pradon; his mistake lay in his assumption that these qualities were the monopoly of the Classical school. Perceiving the beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong. Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and beauty is often--perhaps more often than not--complex, obscure, fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity. He could write, for instance, an enthusiastic appreciation of the sublime sentence, 'God said, Let there be light, and there was light'; for there imagination is clothed in transparent beauty, and grandeur is achieved by the simplest means. More completely than any of his great contemporaries, Boileau was a representative of middle-class France.

Certainly the most famous, and perhaps the greatest, of the writers for whom Boileau acted as the apologist and the interpreter was MOLIÈRE. In the literature of France Molière occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national--it is universal. Gathering within the plenitude of his genius the widest and the profoundest characteristics of his race, he has risen above the boundaries of place and language and tradition into a large dominion over the hearts of all mankind. To the world outside France he alone, in undisputed eminence, speaks with the authentic voice of France herself.

That this is so is owing mainly, of course, to the power of his genius; but it is also owing, in some degree, to the particular form which his genius took. Judging by quality alone, it is difficult to say whether his work stands higher or lower in the scale of human achievement than that of Racine--whether the breadth of vision, the diversity, and the humanity of his comedies do or do not counterbalance the poetry, the intensity, and the perfect art of his friend's tragedies; at least it seems certain that the difference between the reputations of the two men with the world in general by no means corresponds with the real difference in their worth. It is by his very perfection, by the very completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that Molière gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often careless; the structure of some of his finest works was perfunctorily thrown together; the envelope of his thought--his language--was by no means faultless, his verse often coming near to prose, and his prose sometimes aping the rhythm of verse. In fact, it is not surprising that to the rigid classicists of the eighteenth century this Colossus had feet of clay. But, after all, even clay has a merit of its own: it is the substance of the common earth. That substance, entering into the composition of Molière, gave him his broad-based solidity, and brought him into kinship with the wide humanity of the world.

It was on this side that his work was profoundly influenced by the circumstances of his life. Molière never knew the leisure, the seclusion, the freedom from external cares, without which it is hardly possible for art to mature to perfection; he passed his existence in the thick of the battle, and he died as he had lived--in the harness of the professional entertainer. His early years were spent amid the rough and sordid surroundings of a travelling provincial company, of which he became the manager and the principal actor, and for which he composed his first plays. He matured late. It was not till he was thirty-seven that he produced _Les Précieuses Ridicules_--his first work of genius; and it was not till three years later that he came into the full possession of his powers with _L'École des Femmes_. All his masterpieces were written in the ten years that followed (1662-73). During that period the patronage of the king gave him an assured position; he became a celebrity at Paris and Versailles; he was a successful man. Yet, even during these years of prosperity, he was far from being free from troubles. He was obliged to struggle incessantly against the intrigues of his enemies, among whom the ecclesiastical authorities were the most ferocious; and even the favour of Louis had its drawbacks, for it involved a constant expenditure of energy upon the frivolous and temporary entertainments of the Court. In addition, he was unhappy in his private life. Unlike Shakespeare, with whom his career offers many analogies, he never lived to reap the quiet benefit of his work, for he died in the midst of it, at the age of fifty-one, after a performance in the title-rôle of his own _Malade Imaginaire_.

What he had achieved was, in the first place, the creation of French Comedy. Before him, there had been boisterous farces, conventional comedies of intrigue borrowed from the Italian, and extravagant pieces of adventure and burlesque cast in the Spanish mould. Molière did for the comic element in French literature what Corneille had done for the tragic: he raised it to the level of serious art. It was he who first completely discovered the æsthetic possibilities that lay in the ordinary life of every day. He was the most unromantic of writers--a realist to the core; and he understood that the true subject of comedy was to be found in the actual facts of human society--in the affectations of fools, the absurdities of cranks, the stupidities of dupes, the audacities of impostors, the humours and the follies of family life. And, like all great originators, his influence has been immense. At one blow, he established Comedy in its true position and laid down the lines on which it was to develop for the next two hundred years. At the present day, all over Europe, the main characteristics of the average play may be traced straight back to their source in the dominating genius of Molière.

If he fell short of the classical ideal in his workmanship, if he exceeded it in the breadth and diversity of his mind, it is still true that the essence of his dramatic method was hardly less classical than that of Racine himself. His subject-matter was rich and various; but his treatment of it was strictly limited by the classical conception of art. He always worked by selection. His incidents are very few, chosen with the utmost care, impressed upon the spectator with astonishing force, and exquisitely arranged to succeed each other at the most effective moment. The choice of the incidents is determined invariably by one consideration--the light which they throw upon the characters; and the characters themselves appear to us from only a very few carefully chosen points of view. The narrowed and selective nature of Molière's treatment of character presents an illuminating contrast when compared with the elaborately detailed method of such a master of the romantic style as Shakespeare. The English dramatist shows his persons to us in the round; innumerable facets flash out quality after quality; the subtlest and most elusive shades of temperament are indicated; until at last the whole being takes shape before us, endowed with what seems to be the very complexity and mystery of life itself. Entirely different is the great Frenchman's way. Instead of expanding, he deliberately narrows his view; he seizes upon two or three salient qualities in a character and then uses all his art to impress them indelibly upon our minds. His Harpagon is a miser, and he is old--and that is all we know about him: how singularly limited a presentment compared with that of Shakespeare's bitter, proud, avaricious, vindictive, sensitive, and almost pathetic Jew! Tartufe, perhaps the greatest of all Molière's characters, presents a less complex figure even than such a slight sketch as Shakespeare's Malvolio. Who would have foreseen Malvolio's exquisitely preposterous address to Jove? In Tartufe there are no such surprises. He displays three qualities, and three only--religious hypocrisy, lasciviousness, and the love of power; and there is not a word that he utters which is not impregnated with one or all of these. Beside the vast elaboration of a Falstaff he seems, at first sight, hardly more solid than some astounding silhouette; yet--such was the power and intensity of Molière's art--the more we look, the more difficult we shall find it to be certain that Tartufe is a less tremendous creation even than Falstaff himself.

For, indeed, it is in his characters that Molière's genius triumphs most. His method is narrow, but it is deep. He rushes to the essentials of a human being--tears out his vitals, as it were--and, with a few repeated master-strokes, transfixes the naked soul. His flashlight never fails: the affected fop, the ignorant doctor, the silly tradesman, the heartless woman of fashion--on these, and on a hundred more, he turns it, inexorably smiling, just at the compromising moment; then turns it off again, to leave us with a vision that we can never forget. Nor is it only by its vividness that his portraiture excels. At its best it rises into the region of sublimity, giving us new visions of the grandeur to which the human spirit can attain. It is sometimes said that the essence of Molière lies in his common sense; that his fundamental doctrine is the value of moderation, of the calm average outlook of the sensible man of the world--_l'honnête homme_. And no doubt this teaching is to be found throughout his work, devoted as it is, by its very nature, to the eccentricities and exaggerations which beset humanity. But if he had been nothing more than a sober propounder of the golden mean he never would have come to greatness. No man realized more clearly the importance of good sense; but he saw farther than that: he looked into the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend, by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to folly and even vice itself. Thus it is that he has invested the feeble, miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, and that he has elevated the scoundrel Don Juan into an alarming image of intellectual power and pride. In his satire on learned ladies--_Les Femmes Savantes_--the ridicule is incessant, remorseless; the absurd, pedantic, self-complacent women are turned inside out before our eyes amid a cataract of laughter; and, if Molière had been merely the well-balanced moralist some critics suppose, that, no doubt, would have been enough. But for the true Molière it was not enough. The impression which he leaves upon us at the end of the play is not simply one of the utter folly of learning out of place; in Philaminte, the central female figure, he has depicted the elevation that belongs even to a mistaken and perverted love of what is excellent; and when she finally goes out, ridiculous, baffled, but as unyielding as ever in her devotion to grammar and astronomy, we come near, in the face of her majestic absurdity, to a feeling of respect. More remarkable still is Molière's portrayal of the eminence of the human spirit in the case of Tartufe. Here it is vice in its meanest and most repulsive forms which has become endowed with an awful grandeur. Tartufe, the hypocrite, the swindler, the seducer of his benefactor's wife, looms out on us with the kind of horrible greatness that Milton's Satan might have had if he had come to live with a bourgeois family in seventeenth-century France.

Molière's genius was many-sided; he was a master not only of the smile, but of the laugh. He is the gayest of writers, and his farces, in their wild hilarity, their contagious absurdity, are perfect models of what a farce should be. He has made these light, frivolous, happy things as eternal as the severest and the weightiest works of man. He has filled them with a wonderful irresponsible wisdom, condensing into single phrases the ridiculousness of generations: 'Nous avons changé tout cela.'--'Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?'--'Vous êtes orfèvre, Monsieur Josse.' So effectually has he contrived to embalm in the spice of his humour even the momentary affectations of his own time that they have come down to us fresh as when they first appeared, and the _Précieuses Ridicules_--a skit upon the manners and modes of speech affected by the fops of 1650--still raises to-day our inextinguishable laughter. This is the obvious side of Molière; and it is hardly in need of emphasis.

It is the more remote quality of his mind--his brooding melancholy, shot through with bitterness and doubt--that may at first sight escape the notice of the reader, and that will repay the deepest attention. His greatest works come near to tragedy. _Le Tartufe_, in spite of its patched-up happy ending, leaves an impression of horror upon the mind. _Don Juan_ seems to inculcate a lesson of fatalistic scepticism. In this extraordinary play--of all Molière's works the farthest removed from the classical ideal--the conventional rules of religion and morality are exposed to a withering scorn; Don Juan, the very embodiment of the arrogance of intellect, and his servant Sganarelle, the futile and superstitious supporter of decency and law, come before us as the only alternatives for our choice; the antithesis is never resolved; and, though in the end the cynic is destroyed by a _coup de théâtre_, the fool in all his foolishness still confronts us when the curtain falls.

_Don Juan_--so enigmatic in its meaning and so loose in its structure--might almost be the work of some writer of the late nineteenth century; but _Le Misanthrope_--at once so harmonious and so brilliant, so lucid and so profound--could only have been produced in the age of Louis XIV. Here, in all probability, Molière's genius reached its height. The play shows us a small group of ladies and gentlemen, in the midst of which one man--Alceste--stands out pre-eminent for the intensity of his feelings and the honesty of his thoughts. He is in love with Célimène, a brilliant and fascinating woman of the world; and the subject of the play is his disillusionment. The plot is of the slightest; the incidents are very few. With marvellous art Molière brings on the inevitable disaster. Célimène will not give up the world for the sake of Alceste; and he will take her on no other terms. And that is all. Yet, when the play ends, how much has been revealed to us! The figure of Alceste has been often taken as a piece of self-portraiture; and indeed it is difficult not to believe that some at any rate of Molière's own characteristics have gone to the making of this subtle and sympathetic creation. The essence of Alceste is not his misanthropy (the title of the play is somewhat misleading), it is his sensitiveness. He alone, of all the characters in the piece, really feels intensely. He alone loves, suffers, and understands. His melancholy is the melancholy of a profound disillusionment. Molière, one fancies, might have looked out upon the world just so--from 'ce petit coin sombre, avec mon noir chagrin'. The world! To Alceste, at any rate, the world was the great enemy--a thing of vain ideals, cold hearts, and futile consolations. He pitted himself against it, and he failed. The world swept on remorselessly, and left him, in his little corner, alone. That was his tragedy. Was it Molière's also?--a tragedy, not of kings and empires, of vast catastrophes and magnificent imaginations; but something hardly less moving, and hardly less sublime--a tragedy of ordinary life.

Englishmen have always loved Molière. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they have always detested RACINE. English critics, from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have steadily refused to allow him a place among the great writers of the world; and the ordinary English reader of to-day probably thinks of him--if he thinks of him at all--as a dull, frigid, conventional writer, who went out of fashion with full-bottomed wigs and never wrote a line of true poetry. Yet in France Racine has been the object of almost universal admiration; his plays still hold the stage and draw forth the talents of the greatest actors; and there can be no doubt that it is the name of Racine that would first rise to the lips of an educated Frenchman if he were asked to select the one consummate master from among all the writers of his race. Now in literature, no less than in politics, you cannot indict a whole nation. Some justice, some meaning, France must have when she declares with one voice that Racine is not only one of the greatest of dramatists, but also one of the greatest of poets; and it behoves an Englishman, before he condemns or despises a foreign writer, to practise some humility and do his best to understand the point of view from which that writer is regarded by his own compatriots. No doubt, in the case of Racine, this is a particularly difficult matter. There are genuine national antipathies to be got over--real differences in habits of thought and of taste. But this very difficulty, when it is once surmounted, will make the gain the greater. For it will be a gain, not only in the appreciation of one additional artist, but in the appreciation of a new _kind_ of artist; it will open up a whole undiscovered country in the continent of art.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind. But, after all, Shakespeare himself was but the product and the crown of a particular dramatic convention; he did not compose his plays according to an ideal pattern; he was an Elizabethan, working so consistently according to the methods of his age and country that, as we know, he passed 'unguessed at' among his contemporaries. But what were these methods and this convention? To judge of them properly we must look, not at Shakespeare's masterpieces, for they are transfused and consecrated with the light of transcendent genius, but at the average play of an ordinary Elizabethan play-wright, or even at one of the lesser works of Shakespeare himself. And, if we look here, it will become apparent that the dramatic tradition of the Elizabethan age was an extremely faulty one. It allowed, it is true, of great richness, great variety, and the sublimest heights of poetry; but it also allowed of an almost incredible looseness of structure and vagueness of purpose, of dullness, of insipidity, and of bad taste. The genius of the Elizabethans was astonishing, but it was genius struggling with difficulties which were well-nigh insuperable; and, as a matter of fact, in spite of their amazing poetic and dramatic powers, their work has vanished from the stage, and is to-day familiar to but a few of the lovers of English literature. Shakespeare alone was not subdued to what he worked in. His overwhelming genius harmonized and ennobled the discordant elements of the Elizabethan tradition, and invested them not only with immortality, but with immortality understanded of the people. His greatest works will continue to be acted and applauded so long as there is a theatre in England. But even Shakespeare himself was not always successful. One has only to look at some of his secondary plays--at _Troilus and Cressida_, for instance, or _Timon of Athens_--to see at once how inveterate and malignant were the diseases to which the dramatic methods of the Elizabethans were a prey. Wisdom and poetry are intertwined with flatness and folly; splendid situations drift purposeless to impotent conclusions; brilliant psychology alternates with the grossest indecency and the feeblest puns. 'O matter and impertinency mixed!' one is inclined to exclaim at such a spectacle. And then one is blinded once more by the glamour of _Lear_ and _Othello_; one forgets the defective system in the triumph of a few exceptions, and all plays seem intolerable unless they were written on the principle which produced _Pericles_ and _Titus Andronicus_ and the whole multitude of distorted and disordered works of genius of the Elizabethan age.

Racine's principles were, in fact, the direct opposite of these. 'Comprehension' might be taken as the watchword of the Elizabethans; Racine's was 'concentration'. His great aim was to produce, not an extraordinary nor a complex work of art, but a flawless one; he wished to be all matter and no impertinency. His conception of a drama was of something swift, simple, inevitable; an action taken at the crisis, with no redundancies however interesting, no complications however suggestive, no irrelevances however beautiful--but plain, intense, vigorous, and splendid with nothing but its own essential force. Nor can there be any doubt that Racine's view of what a drama should be has been justified by the subsequent history of the stage. The Elizabethan tradition has died out--or rather it has left the theatre, and become absorbed in the modern novel; and it is the drama of crisis--such as Racine conceived it--which is now the accepted model of what a stage-play should be. And, in this connexion, we may notice an old controversy, which still occasionally raises its head in the waste places of criticism--the question of the three unities. In this controversy both sides have been content to repeat arguments which are in reality irrelevant and futile. It is irrelevant to consider whether the unities were or were not prescribed by Aristotle; and it is futile to ask whether the sense of probability is or is not more shocked by the scenic representation of an action of thirty-six hours than by one of twenty-four. The value of the unities does not depend either upon their traditional authority or--to use the French expression--upon their _vraisemblance_. Their true importance lies simply in their being a powerful means towards concentration. Thus it is clear that in an absolute sense they are neither good nor bad; their goodness or badness depends upon the kind of result which the dramatist is aiming at. If he wishes to produce a drama of the Elizabethan type--a drama of comprehension--which shall include as much as possible of the varied manifestations of human life, then obviously the observance of the unities must exercise a restricting and narrowing influence which would be quite out of place. On the other hand, in a drama of crisis they are not only useful but almost inevitable. If a crisis is to be a real crisis it must not drag on indefinitely; it must not last for more than a few hours, or--to put a rough limit--for more than a single day; in fact, the unity of time must be preserved. Again, if the action is to pass quickly, it must pass in one place, for there will be no time for the movement of the characters elsewhere; thus the unity of place becomes a necessity. Finally, if the mind is to be concentrated to the full upon a particular crisis, it must not be distracted by side issues; the event, and nothing but the event, must be displayed; in other words, the dramatist will not succeed in his object unless he employs the unity of action.

Let us see how Racine carries out these principles by taking one of his most characteristic plays--_Bérénice_--and comparing it with an equally characteristic work of Shakespeare's--_Antony and Cleopatra_. The comparison is particularly interesting because the two dramas, while diametrically opposed in treatment, yet offer some curious parallels in the subjects with which they deal. Both are concerned with a pair of lovers placed in the highest position of splendour and power; in both the tragedy comes about through a fatal discordance between the claims of love and of the world; in both the action passes in the age of Roman greatness, and vast imperial issues are intertwined with individual destinies. Of Shakespeare's drama it is hardly necessary to speak. Nowhere else, perhaps, has that universal genius displayed more completely the extraordinary fertility of his mind. The play is crammed full and running over with the multifarious activities of human existence. 'What is there in the whole of life, in all the experience of the world,' one is inclined to ask after a perusal of it, 'that is not to be found somewhere or other among these amazing pages?' This tremendous effect has been produced, in the first place, by means of the immense variety of the characters; persons of every rank and every occupation--generals and waiting-women, princesses and pirates, diplomatists and peasants, eunuchs and emperors--all these we have, and a hundred more; and, of course, as the grand consummation of all, we have the dazzling complexity of Cleopatra. But this mass of character could never have been presented to us without a corresponding variety of incident; and, indeed, the tragedy is packed with an endless succession of incidents--battles, intrigues, marriages, divorces, treacheries, reconciliations, deaths. The complicated action stretches over a long period of time and over a huge tract of space. The scene constantly shifts from Alexandria to Rome, from Athens to Messina, from Pompey's galley to the plains of Actium. Some commentators have been puzzled by the multitude of these changes, and when, for a scene of a few moments, Shakespeare shows us a Roman army marching through Syria, they have been able to see in it nothing more than a wanton violation of the rule of the unity of place; they have not understood that it is precisely by such touches as these that Shakespeare has succeeded in bringing before our minds a sense of universal agitation and the enormous dissolution of empires.

Turning to _Bérénice_, we find a curious contrast. The whole tragedy takes place in a small antechamber; the action lasts hardly longer than its actual performance--about two hours and a half; and the characters are three in number. As for the plot, it is contained in the following six words of Suetonius: 'Titus reginam Berenicem dimissit invitus invitam.' It seems extraordinary that with such materials Racine should have ventured to set out to write a tragedy: it is more extraordinary still that he succeeded. The interest of the play never ceases for a moment; the simple situation is exposed, developed, and closed with all the refinements of art; nothing is omitted that is essential, nothing that is unessential is introduced. Racine has studiously avoided anything approaching violent action or contrast or complexity; he has relied entirely for his effect upon his treatment of a few intimate human feelings interacting among themselves. The strain and press of the outer world--that outer world which plays so great a part in Shakespeare's masterpiece--is almost banished from his drama--almost, but not quite. With wonderful art Racine manages to suggest that, behind the quiet personal crisis in the retired little room, the strain and the pressure of outside things do exist. For this is the force that separates the lovers--the cruel claims of government and the state. When, at the critical moment, Titus is at last obliged to make the fatal choice, one word, as he hesitates, seems to dominate and convince his soul: it is the word 'Rome'. Into this single syllable Racine has distilled his own poignant version of the long-resounding elaborations of _Antony and Cleopatra_.

It would, no doubt, be absurd to claim for Racine's tragedy a place as high as Shakespeare's. But this fact should not blind us to the extraordinary merits which it does possess. In one respect, indeed, it might be urged that the English play is surpassed by the French one--and that is, as a _play. Bérénice_ is still acted with success; but _Antony and Cleopatra_--? It is impossible to do justice to such a work on the stage; it must be mutilated, rearranged, decocted, and in the end, at the best, it will hardly do more than produce an impression of confused splendour on an audience. It is the old difficulty of getting a quart into a pint bottle. But _Bérénice is_ a pint--neither more nor less, and fits its bottle to a nicety. To witness a performance of it is a rare and exquisite pleasure; the impression is one of flawless beauty; one comes away profoundly moved, and with a new vision of the capacities of art.

Singleness of purpose is the dominating characteristic of the French classical drama, and of Racine's in particular; and this singleness shows itself not only in the action and its accessories, but in the whole tone of the piece. Unity of tone is, in fact, a more important element in a play than any other unity. To obtain it Racine and his school avoided both the extreme contrasts and the displays of physical action which the Elizabethans delighted in. The mixture of comedy and tragedy was abhorrent to Racine, not because it was bad in itself, but because it must have shattered the unity of his tone; and for the same reason he preferred not to produce before the audience the most exciting and disturbing circumstances of his plots, but to present them indirectly, by means of description. Now it is clear that the great danger lying before a dramatist who employs these methods is the danger of dullness. Unity of tone is an excellent thing, but if the tone is a tedious one, it is better to avoid it. Unfortunately Racine's successors in Classical Tragedy did not realize this truth. They did not understand the difficult art of keeping interest alive without variety of mood, and consequently their works are now almost unreadable. The truth is that they were deluded by the apparent ease with which Racine accomplished this difficult task. Having inherited his manner, they were content; they forgot that there was something else which they had not inherited--his genius.

Closely connected with this difficulty there was another over which Racine triumphed no less completely, and which proved equally fatal to his successors. Hitherto we have been discussing the purely dramatic aspect of classical tragedy; we must not forget that this drama was also literary. The problem that Racine had to solve was complicated by the fact that he was working, not only with a restricted dramatic system, but with a restricted language. His vocabulary was an incredibly small one--the smallest, beyond a doubt, that ever a great poet had to deal with. But that was not all: the machinery of his verse was hampered by a thousand traditional restraints; artificial rules of every kind hedged round his inspiration; if he were to soar at all, he must soar in shackles. Yet, even here, Racine succeeded: he _did_ soar--though it is difficult at first for the English reader to believe it. And here precisely similar considerations apply, as in the case of Racine's dramatic method. In both instances the English reader is looking for variety, surprise, elaboration; and when he is given, instead, simplicity, clarity, ease, he is apt to see nothing but insipidity and flatness. Racine's poetry differs as much from Shakespeare's as some calm-flowing river of the plain from a turbulent mountain torrent. To the dwellers in the mountain the smooth river may seem at first unimpressive. But still waters run deep; and the proverb applies with peculiar truth to the poetry of Racine. Those ordinary words, that simple construction--what can there be there to deserve our admiration? On the surface, very little no doubt; but if we plunge below the surface we shall find a great profundity and a singular strength. Racine is in reality a writer of extreme force--but it is a force of absolute directness that he wields. He uses the commonest words, and phrases which are almost colloquial; but every word, every phrase, goes straight to its mark, and the impression produced is ineffaceable. In English literature there is very little of such writing. When an English poet wishes to be forceful he almost invariably flies to the gigantic, the unexpected, and the out-of-the-way; he searches for strange metaphors and extraordinary constructions; he surprises us with curious mysteries and imaginations we have never dreamed of before. Now and then, however, even in English literature, instances arise of the opposite--the Racinesque--method. In these lines of Wordsworth, for example--

The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills--

there is no violent appeal, nothing surprising, nothing odd--only a direct and inevitable beauty; and such is the kind of effect which Racine is constantly producing. If he wishes to suggest the emptiness, the darkness, and the ominous hush of a night by the seashore, he does so not by strange similes or the accumulation of complicated details, but in a few ordinary, almost insignificant words--

Mais tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune.

If he wishes to bring before the mind the terrors of nightmare, a single phrase can conjure them up--

C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit.

By the same simple methods his art can describe the wonderful and perfect beauty of innocence--

Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur;

and the furies of insensate passion--

C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.

But the flavour of poetry vanishes in quotation--and particularly Racine's, which depends to an unusual extent on its dramatic surroundings, and on the atmosphere that it creates. He who wishes to appreciate it to the full must steep himself in it deep and long. He will be rewarded. In spite of a formal and unfamiliar style, in spite of a limited vocabulary, a conventional versification, an unvaried and uncoloured form of expression--in spite of all these things (one is almost inclined, under the spell of Racine's enchantment, to say _because_ of them)--he will find a new beauty and a new splendour--a subtle and abiding grace.