Thus ends the first and longest act. If Hermione will follow Orestes and Andromache accept the hand of Pyrrhus, all will be well. Yes; we feel that, with Hermione once away, Andromache could naintain her moral supremacy over Pyrrhus without yielding in anything to him. But we shall have reckoned without Hermione, in whom the hopefulness of Orestes arouses a passionate rage of jealousy, as we see from her conversation with her confidante, Cléone (II., 1), and with Orestes (II., 2). She is willing to sacrifice both him and herself to her vengeance. Therefore she seeks to hide her love for Pyrrhus from Orestes, and agrees to return with him to Greece, should Pyrrhus, with the choice put plainly before him by Orestes, elect to save Astyanax—not that she intends, as he imagines (II., 3), to crown his love, but only to inflame it, so that, in case Pyrrhus abandons her, she may use it for her vengeance. The hopes and plans of Orestes are unexpectedly crossed, however, by the offer of Pyrrhus (II., 4) to surrender Astyanax and to marry Hermione, since Andromache has again refused him (I., 4), though he cannot hide that he loves her still, any more than Hermione would have hidden her love for Pyrrhus from the jealous Orestes (II., 2), had he not been too blind to see it. Orestes withdraws desperate, his glowing passion ready to be forged to Hermione's purpose; but Pyrrhus, in conversation with Phoenix, shows that he still loves Andromache and still hopes to win her love, so that the second act closes in artistic suspense.

Orestes now determines on a forcible abduction of Hermione, whom he fondly imagines to prefer him to Pyrrhus (III., 1), but he finds her, as we expect, ready to accept the love of Pyrrhus without hesitation and coldly neglectful of Orestes (III., 2). Rejoicing in the valor of Pyrrhus, she has no fear of provoking the vengeance of Orestes (III., 3), and in her pride consents to receive the suppliant Andromache (III., 4), whose prayers she treats with scorn, and refers her with cold irony to Pyrrhus. But pride goes before a fall. As in Greek tragedy, Hyoris summons Até. Andromache follows the advice contemptuously

proffered (III., 5). She sees Pyrrhus, and by her presence and supplications inspires him with new hope (III., 6) and leads him to offer to conduct her to the temple prepared for his marriage with Hermione (III., 7). He leaves her, saying that he will return in a moment to crown her, or, should she refuse, to slay Astyanax before her eyes (976). In a superb scene she tells the conflicting motives that rend her soul, and determines at last to seek counsel at her husband's tomb (III., 8).

Thus the third act ends with the same question as the second, but now it is the mother that asks it, not the master; and so the intensity of the situation is ever increasing. The psychic climax, so far as Andromache is concerned, is reached, and in the first scene of the fourth act our minds are set at rest in regard to her and Astyanax : she will wed Pyrrhus, take from him at the altar a pledge to guard Astyanax, and then die, faithful to Hector, by her own hand. The psychic interest from now to the close centres in Hermione, who will show us that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” She will have vengeance, and there shall no love be mingled with her hate. Orestes shall serve her, but he shall not receive the price of his service. Her confidante informs her of Pyrrhus's changed mind and goads her to fury (IV., 2); she refuses the offer of Orestes to flee with him and arm all Greece for her vengeance, for then Pyrrhus would have had some happy marriage days. Orestes shall kill him at the very altar of Hymen, and to this the blinded lover consents (IV., 3). Then, after a scene with her confidante (IV., 4), in which her passion utters itself in geyser-bursts, the king comes to inform her of his decision, and extorts from her passionate declarations of love, followed by bitter reproaches and fiercest threats (IV., 5), but all in vain (IV., 6); so that the close of the fourth act seems to preclude all possibility of a peaceful solution.

Yet the opening of the fifth act finds her still tossed between love and hate, doubtful of her will (V. 1), until her thirst of vengeance is fanned by her confidante's account of the opening

ceremonies of her rival's wedding; then, impatient at the delay of Orestes, she determines to go herself to slay the king (V., 2), when she is met by Orestes, returning to her with the news of the assassination of Pyrrhus by the Greek followers of Orestes. But, to his surprise, she greets him with imprecations. Now that Pyrrhus is dead, jealousy dies with him, and love alone survives. Determined to perish with her beloved, she rushes from the scene (V., 3), leaving the astonished Orestes to come to a consciousness of his crime and of its fruitlessness (V., 4). But Pylades soon interrupts his bitter reflections. The men of Epirus, recognizing Andromache for their queen, are determined to avenge Pyrrhus, and Orestes has just time to join the retreating Greeks; but, on hearing that Hermione has killed herself on the body of Pyrrhus, his mind is clouded, the Furies seize on him, and he is borne away by the faithful Pylades. All who gave way to passion have perished in body or in mind; Andromache alone remains, because she alone has not been passion's fool.

It will have been obvious to any classical student that the acts, and in some degree the motives, of the personages in this drama are not those that are or could be attributed to the persons bearing like names in Homer, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Pausanias, or Seneca. To them Andromache did, indeed, save Astyanax from the flames of Troy, but only to see him perish at the hands of Ulysses or Menelaus, or, as Seneca avers, of Pyrrhus himself. These writers further state or assume that Andromache lived connubially with Pyrrhus before and after his marriage with Hermione, and that she bore to him three sons: Molossus, Piclus, and Pergamus, the first of whom takes in Euripides somewhat the place accorded here to Astyanax. On the death of Pyrrhus the Andromache of tradition married Helenus, a son of Priam, and governed with him a part of Epirus, as a sort of vassal of Pyrrhus' grandfather, Peleus.

The Hermione of classic tradition had been promised, as in

Andromaque, in her father's absence and before his return from Troy, to Orestes, her first cousin. Her father, however, preferred the son of Achilles. Here the resemblance ends. In classic tradition Pyrrhus took Hermione to Epirus as his bride; here she is escorted there by Greeks, with the understanding that he will espouse her, and thus she has more reason for jealous irritation with Pyrrhus for his delay than the married Hermione could have had. Given the character of Orestes, such a situation could end only tragically; but, though the ancients tell discordant tales, none of them agrees with Racine. Some make Hermione passionately attached to Orestes, and so willing to connive at his murder of Pyrrhus; others make her motive jealousy of her captive rival Andromache; others make Orestes kill Pyrrhus without her connivance. But whether she gave herself to the murderer of her husband out of love or pique, the pair went to Sparta, and seem to have reigned there long and happily. Thus not merely the circumstance that Orestes has Pyrrhus killed by his followers at Delphi in the temple, instead of in Epirus, with a slightly different motive, separates the older writers from Racine, but the result of the murder on Orestes and on Hermione herself is wholly different.

It must be admitted that the changes made by Racine in the received tradition were justifiable from an artistic point of view, and demanded from a moral one; but if he separated himself thus radically from tradition in his action, he separated himself still more radically from historic probability, in the sentiments that he attributes to his characters. No Greek king of the heroic age, much less the king most notorious for his cruel fury, would have been capable of such romantic feelings and wavering affections. Pyrrhus' conception of love is not the conception of the heroic age at all, but, as has been cleverly shown by Taine, that of the précieux Salons of Paris and of the courtiers of Versailles, with a certain decorum in its outward expression, with happily turned phrases, and insinuating attenuations that

mask with a certain courtliness the fundamental brutality of his

absolute power.

And much the same may be said of all the other characters. This Orestes whose " innocence weighs upon him" (772) is surely not the murderer of Clytemnestra, this Andromache was never a Greek slave, and this Hermione is what under freer conditions the ladies would have become of whom Bussy-Rabutin tells, and those whose vengeance he felt; and Pylades, from having been a friend and companion, has become for Racine a dependent, without individual will or even conscience, whose merit is not to be a man, but an echo."

But, when we have said all this, Racine will answer that historical reality is absolutely indifferent to him; that, here and always, he has subordinated situation to character and the individual to the general. The scene is in no definite country; the action, in no particular century. They are simply far off, in order that they may the better seem universal backgrounds for the display of the feelings of a universal social life, somewhat modified by the larger place in it of the sentiment of love that had come through the general acceptance of Christianity. As Brunetière has well observed: "Racine sought in history only the means to make such feelings tragic or unique. All mothers have trembled for their sons, but only one was in the position of Andromache. History knows but one Hermione, but all duchesses or all laundry-girls have felt, like her, the tortures of jealousy."

Thus the less there is in Andromaque of special history the more there is of universal truth; for it is as classic as it can be, if it is to be as modern and contemporary as it ought to be, to remain a joy to successive generations. Corneille's heroes are of another race; Racine's seem always our brothers, more so because they walk in the Epirus of his fancy than if they had lived in the palace of Versailles.