RACINE'S Andromaque has been, throughout the present century, by far the most popular of French classical tragedies; and in the two hundred and thirty years since its production Phèdre alone has counted more performances on the French stage. Therefore it demands attention for its intrinsic merits, but it claims the interest of the student also because it marks a turning-point in the development of French drama.

I. TRAINING AND CHARACTER OF RACINE.

The great fact that dominates Racine's intellectual and moral life is his relation to the group of protesting Jansenist Catholics who called themselves the Solitaries of Port-Royal, and counted among their number such master minds as Pascal, and among their sympathizers some of the choicest intellects of France as well as many men of humble birth but sturdy faith, the Puritan element that persisted within the established church of France, though not without persecution both from the hierarchy and the

court.

It was in such a family of the upper middle class that Jean Racine was born (Dec. 22, 1639). His primary education was at a school at Beauvais that was affiliated with the Port-Royalists, and thence he passed, in 1655, to l'École des Granges, under their immediate direction. Here his teachers were the noted Greek scholar Lancelot, the Latinist Nicole, noted also as a moral philosopher, and other worthy though less distinguished men, the most skilled pedagogues of their

time; and the three years that he passed here left an in、 effaceable mark not alone on his mind but on his character. He became a very exceptional classical scholar, had "read and annotated all the ancient classics from Homer to Plutarch and to St. Basil, from Terence to Sulpicius Severus." He could recite long passages from the Greek romances and declaimed to astonished friends the choruses of Sophocles, who remained, with Euripides, his model in dramatic art to the end. But beside this he acquired what was as important for the work he was to do, a Puritanic tenacity of mind, the Puritan uprightness and reasoning devotion. Sentiments, whether spiritual or worldly, interested him primarily because they offered problems for the head to analyze. But another element soon entered into his education, an element that was to make him all his life "at strife with himself," as he said at its close. It was natural that a man of his qualities should find social success and seek intellectual recognition, and while he was pursuing these the world laid hold on him and drew him from Puritanism. Yet he never grew quite indifferent to these influences of his youth. Once and again he returned to the fold in which he was to die, and his bore the inscription grave Poet, recluse of Port-Royal." For the moment, however, on leaving his last school, the Collège d'Harcourt (1658), worldly influences prevailed. But from these vagaries he was brought back by his relatives rather sharply to the influences of Port-Royal and sent, in 1661, into a sort of exile in the South with prospects of clerical preferment. He remained there some fifteen months, storing his mind richly by diligent reading in the Christian Fathers as well as in the Greek, Latin and Italian poets and historians. In 1661 he seemed likely to degenerate to a wit. In 1663 he returned to Paris an accomplished scholar, though still dominated by social and poetic ambition. He was presented to the king and became a fashionable poet, much to the grief and indignation of his friends and relatives of Port-Royal; for since 1664 Racine had been brought by La Fontaine and by his own genius into

Intimate relations with the court patrons of literature and with the classical realists whom it is customary to call the School of 1660, Chapelie, Furetière, Molière and, above all, Boileau, who united to preach a reasonable naturalism and formed in the already successful dramatist a new theory of dramatic art.

Meantime, however, he was undergoing experiences that tended to make his thought more tragically sombre. He was irritated by the attitude of his relatives at Port-Royal, and replied to their exhortations with growing acerbity. It was at this psychic crisis when the poet in Racine was wrestling with the Puritan, and had for the moment gained the upper hand in a struggle of conscience that was to last a lifetime, that Andromaque (1667) was written. He was then twenty-eight.

For Andromaque Racine received the modest remuneration of 100 écus, about $60 in silver. But it caused a sensation almost as deep as Corneille's Cid. It made him friends, but it roused bitter jealousies that pursued him through all his dramatic career. Into this it is foreign to the present purpose to enter, but it may be recalled that Andromaque was followed by Racine's only comedy les Plaideurs (1668), and this by Britannicus (1669). Then came Bérénice (1670), Bajazet (1672), Mithridate (1673), Iphigénie (1674), Phèdre (1677), Esther (1689), Athalie (1691). Racine died in 1699.

Among all Racine's tragedies the seventeenth century accorded the first place to Phèdre and the second to Andromaque. During the eighteenth century Phèdre still held the first place, with Iphigénie second and Andromaque third. For the nineteenth Andromaque is far in the lead of all, as can be shown by a tabulation of the play-bills of the Comédie Française.

An immediate result of the popularity of Andromaque in France was that it received the homage of a translation into English prose by Crown in 1675, and in 1712 Philipps adapted it to English taste in his Distressed Mother, a tragedy in verse that Richardson thought of sufficient importance to justify a lengthy criticism in his Pamela (1st ed., iv. pp. 66-88). The

situation has been used in our century by the elder Dumas in Charles VII. et ses grands vassaux and, with more wit, by Musset in les Marrons du feu, where Orestes is the Abbé, Pyrrhus Raphaël, Hermione Camargo, but there is no second Andromache.

To one who examines in detail the life and letters of Racine he exhibits a puzzling duality, a serious soul and a mobile mind. He was not only religious, he was credulous, superstitious even. He was not only loyal to a king, he was his dupe. He was exceedingly vain and irritable, timid and easily influenced by those whom he loved or feared. The kind of moral goodness that he possessed was wholly consistent with moral weakness. On the other hand his intellect was keen, supple and strong, he had almost unique powers of psychic analysis, a remarkable delicacy and vitality of sentiment and an exquisite sense of literary art. As he wrote all that was petty in him receded into the background. The best that was in him is in his work, a rare combination, perhaps unique in modern times, of wit and sentiment, of energy and poise, of imagination and self-restraint, of eloquence and repose.

II. THE STORY OF ANDROMAQUE.

The tragedy of Andromaque brings together in Epirus four persons familiar to the classic poets and to their imitators in the renascence: Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, known to Euripides as Neoptolemos; and his beloved captive, Andromache, once the wife of the Trojan Hector; Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus; and Orestes, the son of Agamemnon. The relation of these persons is in Racine as it was in Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca.

The situation in which he has placed them was, he says, suggested by Virgil's Eneid, III., 292–325, a passage that he has given in his preface, but the action, and to some extent the characters, are his own invention,

The first scene gives us the material and psychic situation of all parties to the tragedy. Orestes tells his refound friend, Pylades, at the court of Pyrrhus, that he has come to Epirus as ambassador of the Greek prinçes to demand the surrender of Hector's son, Astyanax, who, with his mother, Andromache, had fallen to the share of Pyrrhus after the sack of Troy, and, according to varying Greek traditions, had been killed long before, either by Ulysses, Menelaus or Pyrrhus himself. Orestes has sought this embassy because he loves Hermione, who has scorned him in Sparta, but now occupies a somewhat equivocal position in Epirus, having come thither as the betrothed of Pyrrhus, who is hesitating to marry her, because he loves Andromache-a situation of which Orestes hopes to take present advantage. For Pylades has observed that Hermione is vexed at the indifference of the king, who, Pylades thinks, will be able to force Andromache to accept his suit to save the life of her son. All this is involved with much art in a conversation of one hundred and forty-two lines, in which Orestes betrays also his intense love and passionate nature. Filled with new hope, he presents (I., 2) the demands of the Greeks to Pyrrhus in a way likely to provoke the haughty refusal he secretly desires. Indeed the king seems to coöperate with his plans, for he requests him to visit his relative Hermione (they were first cousins) before his departure (245), and seems haughtily to suggest that he would not be altogether displeased (254, 255) if Orestes took her with him, for he knows of Orestes' passion (250), and in conversation with his confidant, Phoenix, he confirms what Pylades had reported of his irritation at her presence (I., 3). Andromache now joins them, accompanied by her confidante, Céphise (I., 4), and Pyrrhus urges his suit with somewhat impetuous barbarity, telling her of the embassy of Orestes, assuring her that her possession alone will induce him to save Astyanax, and, after listening to her noble widow's lament and magnanimous counsel, bids her go visit her son, and in embracing him revise her resolution (384).