THE CHURCH AND LITERATURE

New Zealand Tablet, 9 March 1916, Page 13

THE CHURCH AND LITERATURE

SOME EMINENT WRITERS—SONS OF THE .. * CHURCH. V (For the N.Z. Tablet by ' Daleth.') ; IV.—RACINE. The source of all aesthetic emotion in a people is its religion; the sacred ceremonies, the music, the indefinable feeling attending the worship of the unknown give rise to a passion which is assignable to no other cause. The Greeks first experienced the need for some external display of this emotion; hence the institution of the Dionysiac festivals which culminated in -the tragedies of the great Sophocles, and 1 Euripides. The Christian Church, too, had, in France, as in Spain, its liturgical dramas, and its mystery plays. Thus it has been given as a rule that all drama has proceeded from the Church; a French critic has put it better in saying- that ' the Christian drama proceeds from .the Christian Church.' ■ • The Holy Mass is in itself a great drama, in its alternate chant and recitation, in its dialogue between the officiating, priest and his acolytes, in its gradual symbolic progress towards the climax of the' Consecration, in its whole signification. The daily Office, commemorating Pope and Martyr, Doctor and Confessor, recounting the sufferings of the Saints and the struggles of the faithful soul, meditating on the final judgment, and heaven, and purgatory, and hell, constitutes a dramatic poem awaiting only the distinction of th« characters and the distribution of the parts. N The Offices of Holy Week seem set designedly in dramatic form, with the procession on Palm Sunday, the closing of the doors, and the re-entrance after the thrice-repeated knocking of the priest; Tenebrse, with the extinguishing one by one of the candles and the dirge-like Miserere; the momentary exultation on Holy Thursday and the relapse into the awful gloom of Good Friday; has not all "this a spectacular beauty which no secular drama can ever hope to equal ? But it is on the Friday of Holy Week that the nearest approach to pure stage effect is made, when the Passion is sung' by three voices, representing the Christ, the People, the Priests and the Judges, and the chorus of Grecian tragedy. The intense solemnity of the Mass of the Presanctified gives the spectator the feeling that he is assisting .at,— is a participant in, a world's tragedy. The Good Friday of the Catholic Church is a day that has no parallela day of mourning, desolation, and woe.

In France, on the great feasts, were enacted what were known as liturgical dramas. As in Spain, these grew more popular; and, the language becoming more and more settled, the drama became proportionately secularised until it reached the height of its development in the seventeenth century, in the finished tragedies of Corneille and Racine..

The origin of comedy was different. This found its source in the hastily improvised farces and buffoonery of travelling jugglers, who provided amusement at the fairs and on occasions of public rejoicing. There were, besides, representations in the colleges of the comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus. The form of the liturgical drama showed how the scattered elements of classical comedy and medieval buffoonery might be combined to produce a new style in dramatic performances.! A school of comedy thus arose which found its master in the great Moliere.

While its comedy is world-famous, the tragic drama of France has remained strictly national. Its use of the three so-called classical rules of unity of action, time, and place, became, in the eyes of foreigners at least, an abuse of , what should \ be in reality a very secondary means to ah ; end. ; , The action on the stage was hampered; long speeches, to the foreigners a bore, but to the Frenchman a source of the keenest delight,

took the place of the movement and energy of the more breezy English stage, and the introduction of the confidant—a literary as well as a dramatic nuisbecame absolutely necessary. Added to this, the French became possessed of the idea that "any beyond a verbal display of passion was in bad taste. True, they cultivated this verbal display ' to a wonderful degree but all the skill of a first-rate actress is required to render attractive the passion even of Phedre, probably the greatest drama of its kind on the French stage. Voltaire considered he had done wonders when, in '.Metope,' he introduced a coffin on the stage but in Zaire, his version of 'Othello,' he could not bring himself to introduce such common articles as a handkerchief and a pillow : no, —a. more elegant letter and a dagger were, to him, far more befitting the dignity of tragedy. As we have seen in the case of Spanish drama, so too that of. France is insipid to a foreigner. It seems to have been reserved for the Northern races to produce a stage literature that would be world-wide. The name of Schiller, Ibsen, and Shakespeare are known not only to the cultured few, but to the masses of every nation. Theirs was not work for a people, but for mankind ; they wrote not for their own , day only, but for posterity. If we rank the dramatists of France according to literary as well as artistic excellence, the highest place should perhaps be given to Corneille ; but it is none the less certain that to ■ the Frenchman as to the foreigner Jean Racine is far more representative of his nation than any other dramatic writer. -Born at la Ferte-Milon in 1639, Racine was sent at an early age to Port Royal, where he came under the influence of- the famous Nicole, whose name seems indissolubly linked with this home of Jansenism. At Port Royal Racine acquired his love of antiquity and his delicate perception of the beauties of Grecian art and culture; his own keenly artistic nature expanded in the congenial atmosphere surrounding him, and his love for poetry disappointed the expectations of both relatives and masters, who had intended him to study for the Bar. An incorrigible writer of sonnets, madrigals, odes, and every form of verse, he was sufficiently fortunate to find in Chapelain and Perrault two enthusiastic patrons. But the reputation of a poet depended at that time largely, if not entirely, on his success in writing for the stage. Appreciating this, Racine attempted comedy, thereby scandalising his relatives, who forthwith sent him to Uzes, in Languedoc, to study theology with his uncle. He duly read St. Thomas and the Fathers, but lost none of his love for the world, returning to Paris in 1663, more a poet than ever.' Here he met La Fontaine, Boileau, and Moliere; here also he lived a loose and dissipated life, experiencing in person much.of what he was afterwards so successfully to paint.

His career as a dramatist had now properly begun; but his first two tragedies, 'La Thebaide' and ' Alexandre, estranged him from his two best friends, Nicole and Moliere. The former had published a letter which contained a reference to some public poisoner not of the bodies but of the souls of the faithful.' Racine took this as referring to himself; why he should do so no one at his time could understand; and certainly no one since has been able to explain it. At all events he instantly published a second letter in which he attacked Nicole with a malice and virulence utterly uncalled for, and completely unbecoming in regard to one to whom he owed so much. This discreditable performance would have been followed by another had not Boileau intervened to save what little was remaining of the, poet's reputation.

'"■ In the case of Moliere, Racine had given him the tragedy of 'La Thebakie' for his company to perform.. Unaccountably, and assigning no reason whatever, he gave his * Alexandre to a, rival /company, y / Hereon -. ensued a lively and acrimonious debate, the honors of which decidedly do not rest with Racine.. ; .

These two instances of a most disagreeable temperament are the best authenticated of -a-. whole series attributed to our dramatist; and it is certain that up to the date of his last profane tragedy,' Phedre,' Racine, however perfect he may have been as an artist, was anything but an amiable character. ' :. One after another his tragedies appeared with unvarying success. They are typical examples of the frigid notion of tragic drama -that is so eminently characteristic of French literature. . French critics, naturally,' claim that Racine's genius was something supernatural. Perfect in his delineation of character, unfaltering in his adhesion to the three ' classical' unities, full of energy and animation,/ in short, an unparalleled phenomenon, such they would have us believe, was Racine; but the world is not unanimous in its confirmation of their claim. Nevertheless, he was a master of drama as drama was understood in France. And of all their encomiums that referring to his psychological insight into character is the one most founded on fact; so much so that at times he becomes wearisome in his constant probing into motives and intentions. Someone has said that in the first act of a Racinian tragedy a question is put .to the heroine: will she answer ' yes ' or no ' ? In the second act the lady, inclining to 'no,' is doubtful whether such an answer may not deprive her questioner of all hope and drive him or her to despair ; in the third act she has almost decided on ' yes' when the appalling consequences of full and unqualified acquiescence strike her in all their hideousness. The fourth act is occupied with a painful and -protracted halting between two opinions'; in the last, driven to distraction, she decides the matter by committing suicide, and the reader or spectator is left in a "delightful uncertainty as to what she might ultimately have decided to do. This is, of course, a caricature of Racine's fine psychological studies.. But,, to the superficial reader, it is almost exactly his method. • Racine's characters, aga%, though they are supposedly Greek heroes, are simply cultured French courtiers, whose speeches are miracles of gallant politeness. To exhibit Achilles in all his ferocity, _or Agamemnon in all his brutality, would offend against the delicate and gentle breeding of the audiences before whom they were presented. This, to the Englishman accustomed to the real life studies of Shakespeare, is the greatest flaw in Racine's work. It would take too long to examine Racine's credentials to the high place French critics give him. His profane plays, culminating in the terribly passionate ' Phedre,' ended with that drama. Enraged by his phenomenal success, and aided by the known malice o'f his disposition, his enemies, of whom he" had not a few, succeeded in making the representation of Phedre a disastrous failure. Racine at once gave up writing, and at the same time abandoning his loose manner of living, retired into an exemplary private life. Only twice after this was he prevailed on to write, for the stage.. Madame M'aintenon, who had established the Maison de Saint-Cyr for the education of poor girls of noble family, asked him to write for them more suitable plays than those they had been in the habit of presenting. Racine complied, and the result was that the French stage gained two incomparable masterpieces, absolutely perfect in their formation on the model of the classic Greek tragedy, and full of genuine ' lyrical beauty. With this notice of Esther and ' Athalie,' our study of Racine and the French drama must close. Whatever may have been the great writer's failings in his early life, there is no doubt, sneer as English critics will, that his change after the fall of « Phedre was sincere. Called into momentary notice again as the Royal Historiographer, after having resigned this charge, he died in 1699, surrounded .by his family, and fortified by all the rites of Holy Church. ■ ; . -. ' .