Books and Characters, French & English. Lytton Strachey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ his poetry out of words which are not only absolutely simple but extremely general, so that our minds, failing to find in it the peculiar delights to which we have been accustomed, fall into the error of rejecting it altogether as devoid of significance. And the error is a grave one, for in truth nothing is more marvellous than the magic with which Racine can conjure up out of a few expressions of the vaguest import a sense of complete and intimate reality. When Shakespeare wishes to describe a silent night he does so with a single stroke of detail—'not a mouse stirring'! And Virgil adds touch upon touch of exquisite minutiae:

      Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,

      Quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis

      Rura tenent, etc.

      Racine's way is different, but is it less masterly?

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

      What a flat and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman's first thought—with the conventional 'Neptune,' and the vague 'armée,' and the commonplace 'vents.' And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce—the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and vastness and ominous hush.

      It is particularly in regard to Racine's treatment of nature that this generalised style creates misunderstandings. 'Is he so much as aware,' exclaims Mr. Bailey, 'that the sun rises and sets in a glory of colour, that the wind plays deliciously on human cheeks, that the human ear will never have enough of the music of the sea? He might have written every page of his work without so much as looking out of the window of his study.' The accusation gains support from the fact that Racine rarely describes the processes of nature by means of pictorial detail; that, we know, was not his plan. But he is constantly, with his subtle art, suggesting them. In this line, for instance, he calls up, without a word of definite description, the vision of a sudden and brilliant sunrise:

      Déjà le jour plus grand nous frappe et nous éclaire.

      And how varied and beautiful are his impressions of the sea! He can give us the desolation of a calm:

      La rame inutile

      Fatigua vainement une mer immobile;

      or the agitated movements of a great fleet of galleys:

      Voyez tout l'Hellespont blanchissant sous nos rames;

      or he can fill his verses with the disorder and the fury of a storm:

      Quoi! pour noyer les Grecs et leurs mille vaisseaux,

      Mer, tu n'ouvriras pas des abymes nouveaux!

      Quoi! lorsque les chassant du port qui les recèle,

      L'Aulide aura vomi leur flotte criminelle,

      Les vents, les mêmes vents, si longtemps accusés,

      Ne te couvriront pas de ses vaisseaux brisés!

      And then, in a single line, he can evoke the radiant spectacle of a triumphant flotilla riding the dancing waves:

      Prêts à vous recevoir mes vaisseaux vous attendent;

      Et du pied de l'autel vous y pouvez monter,

      Souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter.

      The art of subtle suggestion could hardly go further than in this line, where the alliterating v's, the mute e's, and the placing of the long syllables combine so wonderfully to produce the required effect.

      But it is not only suggestions of nature that readers like Mr. Bailey are unable to find in Racine—they miss in him no less suggestions of the mysterious and the infinite. No doubt this is partly due to our English habit of associating these qualities with expressions which are complex and unfamiliar. When we come across the mysterious accent of fatality and remote terror in a single perfectly simple phrase—

      La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé

      we are apt not to hear that it is there. But there is another reason—the craving, which has seized upon our poetry and our criticism ever since the triumph of Wordsworth and Coleridge at the beginning of the last century, for metaphysical stimulants. It would be easy to prolong the discussion of this matter far beyond the boundaries of 'sublunary debate,' but it is sufficient to point out that Mr. Bailey's criticism of Racine affords an excellent example of the fatal effects of this obsession. His pages are full of references to 'infinity' and 'the unseen' and 'eternity' and 'a mystery brooding over a mystery' and 'the key to the secret of life'; and it is only natural that he should find in these watchwords one of those tests of poetic greatness of which he is so fond. The fallaciousness of such views as these becomes obvious when we remember the plain fact that there is not a trace of this kind of mystery or of these 'feelings after the key to the secret of life,' in Paradise Lost, and that Paradise Lost is one of the greatest poems in the world. But Milton is sacrosanct in England; no theory, however mistaken, can shake that stupendous name, and the damage which may be wrought by a vicious system of criticism only becomes evident in its treatment of writers like Racine, whom it can attack with impunity and apparent success. There is no 'mystery' in Racine—that is to say, there are no metaphysical speculations in him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo! But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble? And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longings for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine Racine, the more clearly we shall discern in him another kind of mystery, whose presence may eventually console us for the loss of the first—the mystery of the mind of man. This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies—Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phèdre—seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight! Look where we will, we shall find among his pages the traces of an inward mystery and the obscure infinities of the heart.

      Nous avons su toujours nous aimer et nous taire.

      The line is a summary of the romance and the anguish of two lives. That is all affection; and this all desire—

      J'aimais jusqu'à ses pleurs que je faisais couler.

      Or let us listen to the voice of Phèdre, when she learns that Hippolyte and Aricie love one another:

      Les a-t-on vus souvent se parler, se chercher?

      Dans le fond des forêts alloient-ils se cacher?

      Hélas! ils se voyaient avec pleine licence;

      Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait l'innocence;

      Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchant amoureux;

      Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux.

      This last line—written, let us remember, by a frigidly ingenious rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window—does it not seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty of a Claude with the misery and ruin of a great soul?

      It is, perhaps, СКАЧАТЬ