A History of French Literature Part 8

The first six books of the _Fables_ appeared in 1668; the next five in two parts, in 1678 and 1679; the twelfth and last book in 1694.

When the _Psyche_ was published, soon after the first group of the _Fables_, the prose and verse were placed in a graceful setting, which tells of the converse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine, and Moliere (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the unfinished gardens of Versailles, where the author of _Psyche_, named happily Polyphile (for he loved many things, and among them his friends), will read his romance for his literary comrades.

"_J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique, La ville et la campagne, enfin tout: il n'est rien Qui ne me soit souverain bien Jusq'aux sombres plaisirs d'un coeur melancolique._"

Some of his friends before long had pa.s.sed away, but others came to fill their places. For many years he was cared for and caressed by the amiable and cultivated Mme. de Sabliere, and when she dismissed other acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her La Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its doors to him sooner than to Boileau, but the King would not have it so, and he was admitted (1684) only when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be _sage_.

When Mme. de Sabliere died, Hervart, maitre des requetes, one day offered La Fontaine the hospitality of his splendid house. "I was on my way there," replied the poet. After a season of conversion, in which he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of _Contes_, the _bonhomme_ tranquilly died in April 1693. "He is so simple," said his nurse, "that G.o.d will not have courage to d.a.m.n him." "He was the most sincere and candid soul," wrote his friend Maucroix, who had been intimate with him for more than fifty years, "that I have ever known; never a disguise; I don't know that he spoke an untruth in all his life."

All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be found in his _Fables_. The comedies in which he collaborated, the _Captivite de Saint Malc_, written on the suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the miscellaneous poems, though some of these are admirable, even the _Contes_, exhibit only a fragment of his mind; in the _Fables_ the play of his faculties is exquisite, and is complete. His imagination was unfitted for large and sustained creation; it operated most happily in a narrow compa.s.s. The _Fables_, however, contain much in little; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with narrative; they give scope to his feeling for nature, and to his gift for the observation of human character and society; they form, as he himself has said--

"_Une ample comedie a cents actes divers Et dont la scene est l'univers._"

He had not to invent his subjects; he found them in all the fabulists who had preceded him--Greek, Latin, Oriental, elder French writers--"j'en lis qui sont du Nord et qui sont du Midi;" but he may be said to have recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to an express moral, he converted the fable into a _conte_, in which narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue have an independent value, and the moral is little more than an accident.

This is especially true of the midmost portion of the collection--Books vii.-ix.--which appeared ten years after the earliest group. He does not impose new and great ideas on the reader; he does not interpret the deepest pa.s.sions; he takes life as he sees it, as an entertaining comedy, touched at times with serious thought, with pathos, even with melancholy, but in the main a comedy, which teaches us to smile at the vanities, the follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the same time something of tenderness and pity for all that is gentle or weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat epicurean, a morality of indulgence, of moderation, of good sense. His eye for what is characteristic and picturesque in animal life is infallible; but his humanised wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical presentation of mankind and of the society of his own day, from the grand monarch to the bourgeois or the lackey.

La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations of the cla.s.sical school of the seventeenth century; his manifold reading in elder French literature enriched his vocabulary; he seems to light by instinct upon the most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the perfection of his art was attained only as the result of untiring diligence; indolent and careless as he was in worldly affairs, he was an indefatigable craftsman in poetry. His verse is as free as it is fine; it can accomplish whatever it intends; now it is light and swift, but when needful it can be grave and even magnificent:

"_Aurait-il imprime sur le front des etoiles Ce que la nuit des temps enferme dans ses voiles?_"

It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules imposed from without; its life and movement come from within, and the lines vary, like a breeze straying among blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of the writer's mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity, he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other writer of his century the genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of his feeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. If we do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer,"

we may at least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne, "mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naf que le premier," and with all the charm of verse superadded.

CHAPTER VI COMEDY AND TRAGEDY--MOLIeRE--RACINE

I

The history of comedy, from Larivey to Moliere, is one of arrested development, followed by hasty and ill-regulated growth. During the first twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, comedy can hardly be said to have existed; whatever tended to beauty or elevation, took the form of tragi-comedy or pastoral; what was rude and popular became a farce. From the farce Moliere's early work takes its origin, but of the repertory of his predecessors little survives. Much, indeed, in these performances was left to the improvisation of the burlesque actors. Gros-Guillaume, Gaultier-Garguille, Turlupin, Tabarin, rejoiced the heart of the populace; but the _farces tabariniques_ can hardly be dignified with the name of literature.

In 1632 the comedy of intrigue was advanced by Mairet in his _Galanteries du Duc d'Ossone_. The genius of Rotrou, follower though he was of Plautus, tended towards the tragic; if he is really gay, it is in _La Soeur_ (1645), a bright tangle of extravagant incidents.

For Rotrou the drama of Italy supplied material; the way to the Spanish drama was opened by d'Ouville, the only writer of the time devoted specially to comedy, in _L'Esprit Follet_ (1641); once opened, it became a common highway. Scarron added to his Spanish originals in _Jodelet_ and _Don j.a.phet d'Armenie_ his own burlesque humour. The comedy of contemporary manners appears with grace and charm in Corneille's early plays; the comedy of character, in his admirable _Le Menteur_. Saint-evremond satirised literary affectations in _La Comedie des Academistes_; these and other follies of the time are presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, _Les Visionnaires_. If we add, for sake of its study of the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the farcical _Pedant Joue_ of Cyrano, we have named the most notable comedies of the years which preceded _Les Precieuses Ridicules_.

Their general character is extravagance of resources in the plot, extravagance of conception in the characters. Yet in both intrigue and characters there is a certain monotony. The same incidents, romantic and humorous, are variously mingled to produce the imbroglio; the same typical characters--the braggart, the parasite, the pedant, the extravagant poet, the amorous old man, the designing woman, the knavish valet, the garrulous nurse--play their mirthful parts. If the types are studied from real life rather than adopted from Italian or Spanish models, they are exaggerated to absurdity.

Corneille alone is distinguished by delicacy of imagination and the finer touch of a dexterous artist.

JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN, who, when connected with the stage, named himself MOLIeRE, was born in January 1622, in Paris, the son of a prosperous upholsterer, Jean Poquelin, and Marie Cresse, his wife.

Educated at the College de Clermont, he had among his fellow-pupils the Prince de Conti, Chapelle, the future poet Hesnault, the future traveller Bernier. There seems to be no sufficient reason to doubt that he and some of his friends afterwards received lessons in philosophy from Ga.s.sendi, whose influence must have tended to loosen him from the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independence of thought. A translation by Moliere of the great poem of Lucretius has been lost, but a possible citation from it appears in the second act of the _Misanthrope_. Legal studies followed those of philosophy.

But Moliere had other ends in view than either those of an advocate or of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King. In 1643, at the age of twenty-one, he decided to throw in his lot with the theatrical company in which Madeleine Bejart and her brothers were leading members. The _Ill.u.s.tre Theatre_ was const.i.tuted, but Paris looked askance at the ill.u.s.trious actors; debt, imprisonment, and release through friendly aid, formed the net result of Moliere's first experiment.

The troupe decided at the close of 1645 or in the early days of the following year to try their fortune in the provinces. It is needless to follow in detail their movements during twelve years--twelve years fruitful in experience for one who observed life with keenest eyes, years of toil, in which the foundations of his art were laid. At Lyons, probably in 1655, possibly in 1653, a comedy, founded on the Italian of Nicolo Barbieri, _L'etourdi_, saw the light, and Moliere revealed himself as a poet. Young Lelie, the _etourdi_, is enamoured of the beautiful Celie, whom the merchant Trufaldin, old and rich, has purchased from corsairs. Lelie's valet Mascarille, who is the life of the play, invents stratagem on stratagem to aid the lover, and is for ever foiled by his master's indiscretions, until the inevitable happy denouement arrives. The romantic intrigue is conventional; the charm is in the vivacity and colour of the style. In 1656 _Le Depit Amoureux_ was given with applause at Beziers; much is derived from the Italian of Secchi, something perhaps from Terence; the tender scenes of lovers' quarrels and lovers' reconciliation, contrasting with the franker comedy of the loves of waiting-maid and valet, still live, if the rest of the play be little remembered.

The years of apprentices.h.i.+p were over when, in 1658, Moliere and his company once more in Paris presented, by command, before the King, Corneille's _Nicomede_, and, leave being granted, gave his farce in the Italian style, the _Docteur Amoureux_, before pleased spectators.

The company was now the troupe of Monsieur, the King's brother, with the Pet.i.t-Bourbon as theatre, and there, in November 1659, was enacted Moliere's first satiric play on contemporary manners, _Les Precieuses Ridicules_. We do not need the legendary old man crying from the pit "Courage, Moliere! voila la bonne comedie" to a.s.sure us that the comic stage possessed at length a masterpiece. The dramatist had himself known the precieuses of the provinces; through them he might with less danger exhibit the follies of the Hotel de Rambouillet and the _ruelles_ of the capital. The good bourgeois Gorgibus is induced by his niece and daughter, two precieuses, to establish himself in Paris. Their aspirant lovers, unversed in the affectations of the salon, are slighted and repelled; in revenge they employ their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to play the parts of men of fas.h.i.+on and of taste. The exposure and confusion of the ladies, with an indignant rebuke from Gorgibus, close the piece. It was a farce raised to the dignity of comedy. Moliere's triumph was the triumph of good sense.

After a success in _Sganarelle_ (1660), a broad comedy of vulgar jealousy, and a decided check--the only one in his dramatic career--in the somewhat colourless tragi-comedy _Don Garcie de Navarre_ (1661), Moliere found a theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, which was happily suited to his genius. _L'ecole des Maris_ (1661) contrasts two methods of education--one suspicious and severe, the other wisely indulgent. Two brothers, Ariste and Sganarelle, seek the hands of their wards, the orphan sisters Isabelle and Leonor; the amiable Ariste, aided by the good sense of a gay soubrette, is rewarded with happiness; the vexatious Sganarelle is put to confusion. The drama is a plea, expressing the writer's personal thoughts, for nature and for freedom. The comedy of manners is here replaced by the comedy of character. Its success suggested to Fouquet that Moliere might contribute to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the King at the fetes of the Chateau de Vaux; in fifteen days the dramatist had his bright improvisation _Les Facheux_ ready, a series of character sketches in scenes rather than a comedy. The King smiled approval, and, it was whispered, hinted to Moliere that another bore might with advantage be added to the collection--the sportsman whose talk shall be of sport. At Fontainebleau he duly appeared before his Majesty, and unkind spectators recognised a portrait of the Marquis de Soyecourt.

Next February (1662) Moliere, aged forty, was married to the actress Armande Bejart, whose age was half his own--a disastrous union, which caused him inexpressible anxiety and unhappiness. In _L'ecole des Femmes_ of the same year he is wiser than he had shown himself in actual life. Arnolphe would train a model wife from childhood by the method of jealous seclusion and in infantile ignorance; but love, in the person of young Horace, finds out a way. There is pathos in the anguish of Arnolphe; yet it is not the order of nature that middle-aged folks should practise perverting arts upon innocent affections. The charming Agnes belongs of right to Horace, and the over-wise, and therefore foolish, Arnolphe must quit the scene with his despairing cry. Some matter of offence was found by the devout in Moliere's play; it was the opening of a long campaign; the _precieuses_, the dainty gentle-folk, the critical disciples of Aristotle, the rival comedians, were up in arms. Moliere for the occasion ignored the devout; upon the others he made brilliant reprisals in _La Critique de l'ecole des Femmes_ (1663) and _L'Impromptu de Versailles_ (1663).

Among those who war against nature and human happiness, not the least dangerous foe is the religious hypocrite. On May 12, 1664, Moliere presented before the King the first three acts of his great character-comedy _Tartufe_. Instantly Anne of Austria and the King's confessor, now Archbishop of Paris, set to work; the public performance of "The Hypocrite" was inhibited; a savage pamphlet was directed against its author by the cure of Saint-Barthelemy. Private representations, however, were given; _Tartufe_, in five acts, was played in November in presence of the great Conde. In 1665 Moliere's company was named the servants of the King; two years later a verbal permission was granted for the public performance of the play. It appeared under the t.i.tle of _L'Imposteur_; the victory seemed won, when again, and without delay, the blow fell; by order of the President, M. de Lamoignon, the theatre was closed. Moliere bore up courageously.

The King was besieging Lille; Moliere despatched two of his comrades to the camp, declaring that if the Tartufes of France should carry all before them he must cease to write. The King was friendly, but the Archbishop fulminated threats of excommunication against any one who should even read the play. At length in 1669, when circ.u.mstances were more favourable, Louis XIV. granted the desired permission; in its proper name Moliere's play obtained complete freedom. Bourdaloue might still p.r.o.nounce condemnation; Bossuet might draw terrible morals from the author's sudden death; an actor, armed with the sword of the comic spirit, had proved victorious. And yet the theologians were not wholly wrong; the tendency of Moliere's teaching, like that of Rabelais and like that of Montaigne, is to detach morals from religion, to vindicate whatever is natural, to regard good sense and good feeling as sufficient guides of conduct.

There is an accent of indignation in the play; the follies of men and women may be subjects of sport; base egoism a.s.suming the garb of religion deserves a lash that draws the blood. Is it no act of natural piety to defend the household against the designs of greedy and sensual imposture; no service to society to quicken the penetration of those who may be made the dupes of selfish craft? While Organ and his mother are besotted by the gross pretensions of the hypocrite, while the young people contend for the honest joy of life, the voice of philosophic wisdom is heard through the sagacious Cleante, and that of frank good sense through the waiting-maid, Dorine.

Suddenly a providence, not divine but human, intervenes in the representative of the monarch and the law, and the criminal at the moment of triumph is captured in his own snare.

When the affair of _Tartufe_ was in its first tangle, Moliere produced a kind of dramatic counterpart--_Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre_ (1665). In Don Juan--whose valet Sganarelle is the faithful critic of his master--the dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulity and scorn of all religion are united with the most complete moral licence; but hypocrisy is the fas.h.i.+on of the day, and Don Juan in sheer effrontery will invest himself for an hour in the robe of a penitent. Atheist and libertine as he is, there is a certain glamour of reckless courage about the figure of his hero, recreated by Moliere from a favourite model of Spanish origin. His comedy, while a vigorous study of character, is touched with the light of romance.

These are masterpieces; but neither _Tartufe_ nor _Don Juan_ expresses so much of the mind of Moliere as does _Le Misanthrope_ (1666). His private griefs, his public warfare, had doubtless a little hardened and a little embittered his spirit. In many respects it is a sorry world; and yet we must keep on terms with it. The misanthropist Alceste is n.o.bly fanatical on behalf of sincerity and rect.i.tude. How does his sincerity serve the world or serve himself? And he, too, has his dose of human folly, for is he not enamoured of a heartless coquette? Philinte is accommodating, and accepts the world for what it is; and yet, we might ask, is there not a more settled misanthropy in such cynical acquiescence than there is in the intractable virtue of Alceste? Alone of Moliere's plays, _Le Misanthrope_ has that Shakespearean obscurity which leaves it open to various interpretations. It is idle to try to discover actual originals for the characters. But we may remember that when Alceste cried to Celimene, "C'est pour mes peches que je vous aime," the actors who stood face to face were Moliere and the wife whom he now met only on the stage.

Moliere's genius could achieve nothing higher than _Tartufe_ and the _Misanthrope_. His powers suffered no decline, but he did not again put them to such strenuous uses. In 1668 the brilliant fantasy of _Amphitryon_, freely derived from Plautus, was succeeded by an admirable comedy in prose, _Georges Dandin_, in which the folly of unequal marriage between the substantial farmer and the fine lady is mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the year closed Moliere, continuing to write in prose, returned to Plautus, and surpa.s.sed him in _L'Avare_. To be rich and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity; but Harpagon is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a ruling pa.s.sion will admit one of subordinate influence. _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who suffer from the social ambition to rise above their proper rank, is wholly original; it mounts in the close from comedy to the extravagance of farce, and perhaps in the uproarious laughter of the play we may discover a touch of effort or even of spasm. The operatic _Psyche_ (1671) is memorable as having combined the talents of Moliere, Corneille, and Quinault, with the added musical gifts of Lulli.

In _Les Femmes Savantes_ (1672) Moliere returned to an early theme, with variations suited to the times. The Hotel de Rambouillet was closed; the new tribe of _precieuses_ had learnt the Cartesian philosophy, affected the sciences, were patronesses of physics, astronomy, anatomy. Something of the old romantic follies survived, and mingled strangely with the pretensions to science and the pedantries of erudition. Trissotin (doubtless a portrait in caricature from the Abbe Cotin) is the Tartufe of spurious culture; Vadius (a possible satire of Menage) is a pedant, arrogant and brutal.

Shall the charming Henriette be sacrificed to gratify her mother's domineering temper and the base designs of an impostor? The forces are arrayed on either side; the varieties of learned and elegant folly in woman are finely distinguished; of the opposite party are Chrysale, the bourgeois father with his rude common-sense; the sage Ariste; the faithful servant, Martine, whose grammar may be faulty, but whose wit is sound and clear; and Henriette herself, the adorable, whom to know is more of a liberal education than to have explored all the Greek and Latin masters of Vadius and Trissotin. The final issue of the encounter between good sense, good nature, reason and folly, pedantry and pride, cannot be uncertain.

_Le Malade Imaginaire_ was written when Moliere was suffering from illness; but his energy remained indomitable. The comedy continued that long polemic against the medical faculty which he had sustained in _L'Amour Medecin_, _Monsieur de Pourceaugnac_, and other plays.

Moliere had little faith in any art which professes to mend nature; the physicians were the impostors of a learned hygiene. It was the dramatist's last jest at the profession. While playing the part of Argan on February 17, 1673, the "Malade Imaginaire" fell dying on the stage; he forced a laugh, but could not continue his part; at ten o'clock he was no more. Through the exertions of his widow a religious funeral was permitted to an actor who had died unfortified by the rites of the Church.

Many admirable though slighter pieces served as the relief of his mind between the effort of his chief works. In all, gaiety and good sense interpenetrate each other. Kindly natured and generous, Moliere, a great observer, who looked through the deeds of men, was often taciturn--_le contemplateur_ of Boileau--and seemingly self-absorbed. Like many persons of artistic temperament, he loved splendour of life; but he was liberal in his largess to those who claimed his help. He brought comedy to nature, and made it a study of human life. His warfare was against all that is unreal and unnatural.

He preached the worth of human happiness, good sense, moderation, humorous tolerance. He does not indulge in heroics, and yet there is heroism in his courageous outlook upon things. The disciple of Moliere cannot idealise the world into a scene of fairyland; he will conceive man as far from perfect, perhaps as far from perfectible; but the world is our habitation; let us make it a cheerful one with the aid of a sane temper and an energetic will. As a writer, Moliere is not free from faults; but his defects of style are like the accidents that happen within the bounds of a wide empire. His stature is not diminished when he is placed among the greatest European figures. "I read some pieces of Moliere's every year," said Goethe, "just as from time to time I contemplate the engravings after the great Italian masters. For we little men are not able to retain the greatness of such things within ourselves."

To study the contemporaries and immediate successors of Moliere in comedy--Thomas Corneille, Quinault, Montfleury, Boursault, Baron--would be to show how his genius dominates that of all his fellows. The reader may well take this fact for granted.[1]

[Footnote 1: An excellent guide will be found in Victor Fournel's _Le Theatre au xvii. Siecle, La Comedie_.]

II

With the close of the sanguinary follies of the Fronde, with the inauguration of the personal government of Louis XIV. and the triumph of an absolute monarchy, a period of social and political reorganisation began. The court became the centre for literature; to please courtiers and great ladies was to secure prosperity and fame; the arts of peace were magnificently ordered; the conditions were favourable to ideals of grace and beauty rather than of proud sublimity; to isolate one's self was impossible; literature became the pastime of a cultivated society; it might be a trivial pastime, but in fitting hands it might become a n.o.ble pleasure.

The easier part was chosen by PHILIPPE QUINAULT, the more arduous by Racine. Quinault (1635-88) had given his first comedy as early as 1653; in tragedies and tragi-comedies which followed, he heaped up melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon characters strongly conceived, or pa.s.sion truly felt. A frigid sentimentality replaces pa.s.sion, and this is expressed with languorous monotony.

Love reigns supreme in his theatre; but love, as interpreted by Quinault, is a kind of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy _Astrate_ (1663) was not the less popular because its sentiment was in the conventional mode. One comedy by Quinault, _La Mere Coquette_, is happy in its plot and in its easy style. But he did not find his true direction until he declined--or should we rather say, until he rose?--into the librettist for the operas of Lulli. His lyric gifts were considerable; he could manipulate his light and fragile material with extraordinary skill. The tests of truth and reality were not applied to such verse; if it was decorative, the listeners were satisfied. The opera flourished, and literature suffered through its pseudo-poetics. But the libretti of Quinault and the ballets of Benserade are representative of the time, and in his mythological or chivalric inventions Benserade sometimes could attain to the poetry of graceful fantasy.

Quinault retired from the regular drama almost at the moment when Racine appeared. Born at La Ferte-Milon in 1639, son of a procureur and comptroller of salt, JEAN RACINE lost both parents while a child.

His widowed grandmother retired to Port-Royal in 1649. After six years' schooling at Beauvais the boy pa.s.sed into the tutelage of the Jansenists, and among his instructors was the devout and learned Nicole. Solitude, religion, the abbey woods, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides--these were the powers that fostered his genius. Already he was experimenting in verse. At nineteen he continued his studies in Paris, where the little abbe Le Va.s.seur, who knew the _salons_ and haunted the theatre, introduced him to mundane pleasures.

Racine's sensitive, mobile character could easily adapt itself to the world. His ode on the marriage of the King, _La Nymphe de la Seine_, corrected by Chapelain (for to bring Tritons into a river was highly improper), won him a gift of louis d'or. But might not the world corrupt the young Port-Royalist's innocence? The company of ladies of the Marais Theatre and that of La Fontaine might not tend to edification. So thought Racine's aunts; and, with the expectation that he would take orders, he was exiled to Uzes, where his uncle was vicar-general, and where the nephew could study the _Summa_ of theology, but also the Odyssey, the odes of Pindar, Petrarch, and the pretty damsels who prayed in the cathedral church.

In 1663 he was again in Paris, was present at royal levees, and in Boileau's chambers renewed his acquaintance with La Fontaine, and became a companion of Moliere. His vocation was not that of an ecclesiastic. Two dramatic works of earlier date are lost; his first piece that appeared before the public, _La Thebade_, was presented in 1664 by Moliere's company. It is a tragedy written in disciples.h.i.+p to Rotrou and to Corneille, and the pupil was rather an imitator of Corneille's infirmities than of his excellences. _Alexandre_ followed towards the close of the ensuing year--a feeble play, in which the mannered gallantry of the time was liberally transferred to the kings of India and their Macedonian conqueror. But amorous sighs were the mode, and there was a young grand monarch who might discover himself in the person of the magnanimous hero. The success was great, though Saint-evremond p.r.o.nounced his censures, and Corneille found ridiculous the trophies erected upon the imagined ruins of his own. Discontented with the performers at the Palais-Royal, Racine offered his play to the Hotel de Bourgogne; Moliere's best actress seceded to the rival house. Racine's ambition may excuse, but cannot justify an injurious act; a breach between the friends was inevitable.

Boileau remained now, as ever, loyal--loyal for warning as well as for encouragement. Nicole, the former guide of Racine's studies, in his _Visionnaires_, had spoken of dramatic poets as "public poisoners." The reproach was taken to himself by Racine, and in two letters, written with some of the spirit of the _Provinciales_, he turned his wit against his Jansenist friends. Thanks to Boileau's wise and firm counsel, the second of these remained unpublished.

Madame de Sevigne was the devoted admirer of the great Corneille, but when she witnessed his young rival's _Andromaque_ she yielded to its pathos six reluctant tears. On its first appearance in 1667 a triumph almost equal to that of the _Cid_ was secured. Never before had grace and pa.s.sion, art and nature, ideality and truth, been so united in the theatre of France. Racine did not seek for novelty in the choice of a subject; Euripides had made Andromache familiar to the Greek stage. The invention of Racine was of a subtler kind than that which manufactures incidents and constructs a plot. Like Raphael in the art of painting, he could accept a well-known theme and renew it by the finest processes of genius. He did not need an extraordinary action, or personages of giant proportions; the simpler the intrigue, the better could he concentrate the interest on the states of a soul; the more truly and deeply human the characters, the more apt were they for betraying the history of a pa.s.sion. In its purity of outline, its harmony of proportions, _Andromaque_ was Greek; in its sentiment, it gained something from Christian culture; in its manners, there was a certain reflection of the Versailles of Louis XIV. It was at once cla.s.sical and modern, and there was no discordance between qualities which had been rendered, to borrow a word from Shakespeare, "harmonious charmingly." With _Andromaque_ French tragedy ceased to be oratorical, and became essentially poetic.

Adversaries there were, such as success calls forth; the irritable poet retorted with epigrams of a kind which multiply and perpetuate enmities. His true reprisal was another work, _Britannicus_, establis.h.i.+ng his fame in another province of tragedy. But before _Britannicus_ appeared he had turned aside, as if his genius needed recreation, to produce the comedy, or farce, or buffoonery, or badinage, or mockery (for it is all these), _Les Plaideurs_. It may be that his failure in a lawsuit moved Racine to have his jest at the gentlemen of the Palais; he and his friends of the tavern of the _Mouton Blanc_--Furetiere among them--may have put their wits together to devise material for laughter, and discussed how far _The Wasps_ of Aristophanes could be acclimatised in Paris. At first the burlesque was meant for an Italian troupe, but Scaramouche left the town, and something more carefully developed would be expected at the Hotel de Bourgogne. The play was received with hisses, but Moliere did not fear to laugh at what was comic, whether he laughed according to the rules or against them. A month later, at a court performance, Louis XIV. laughed loudly; the courtiers quickly discovered Racine's wit, and the laughter was echoed by all loyal citizens. In truth, there is laughing matter in the play; the professional enthusiasm of Dandin, the judge, who wears his robe and cap even in bed, the rage and rapture of litigation in Chicanneau and the Countess, have in them something of nature beneath the caricature; in the buffoonery there is a certain extravagant grace.

_Les Plaideurs_, however, was only an interlude between graver efforts. _Britannicus_ (1669), founded on the Annals of Tacitus, exhibits with masterly power Nero's adolescence in crime; the young tiger has grace and strength, but the instinct of blood needs only to be awakened within him. Agrippine is a superb incarnation of womanly ambition, a Roman sister of Athalie. The play was at first coldly received; Corneille and his cabal did not spare their censures.

In a preface Racine struck back, but afterwards repented of his bitter words and withdrew them. The critics, as he says in a later preface, disappeared; the piece remained. His conception of tragedy in contrast with that of Corneille was defined by him in memorable words--what is natural should be sought rather than what is extraordinary; the action should be simple, "chargee de peu de matiere"; it should advance gradually towards the close, sustained by the interests, sentiments, and pa.s.sions of the personages.