Authors: Erich Auerbach,Edward W. Said,Willard R. Trask
Mimesis (65 page)
(
Ahasuerus
: One enters here without my orders! What insolent mortal comes seeking death? Guards!… Is it you, Esther? What! without being expected?
Esther
: My handmaids, sustain your distracted queen. I die … (She falls in a faint.)
Ahasuerus
: Mighty gods! what strange pallor suddenly blots out the color of her complexion! Esther, what do you fear? Am I not your brother? Is such a stern order made for you? Live: the golden scepter which this hand holds forth to you is a sure pledge to you of my clemency. …
Esther
: My lord, never but with fear have I beheld the august majesty imprinted on your brow; judge how that brow, angered against me, must have cast terror into my troubled soul: on that sacred throne, which thunderbolts surround, I thought that I saw you ready to reduce me to dust. Alas! without shuddering, what audacious heart would bear the lightnings which leaped from your eyes? Thus flashes the wrath of the living God. …
Ahasuerus
: … Calm, O queen, calm the terror which assails you. Sovereign mistress of Ahasuerus’ heart, feel only his ardent friendship. Shall I give you half of my States?)
The text of the Book of Esther—not at this point, it is true, but a little later, during the banquet—accompanies the offer of half the King’s realm with the “sober” remark
postquam vinum biberat abundanter
. In Racine we read nothing of the sort. And before this he similarly suppresses a realistic detail from the Book of Esther although it casts a clearer light on Esther’s courage than the mere rule which prohibits her appearance before the king without having been summoned:
Ego igitur quo modo ad regem intrare potero, quae triginta iam diebus non sum vocata ad eum?
(Then how can I go in to the king, who have not been summoned to him for thirty days?)
What all these quotations bring out is the extreme exaltation of the tragic personage. Be it a prince who abandons himself to his love in his cabinet
superbe et solitaire
after saying to his retinue,
que l’on me laisse
; or be it a princess going aboard a ship which awaits her,
souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter
(
Mithridate
, 1, 3)—the tragic personage is always in a sublime posture, in the foreground, surrounded by utensils, retinue, people, landscape, and universe, as by so many trophies of victory which serve it or are at its disposal. In this posture the tragic personage abandons itself to its princely passions. And the most impressive stylistic effects of this sort are those in which whole countries, continents, or even the universe appear as spectator, witness,
background, or echo of the princely emotion. For this special case too I shall cite a few examples. In
Andromaque
(2, 2) Hermione says:
Pensez-vous avoir seul éprouvé des alarmes;
Que l’Epire jamais n’ait vu couler mes larmes?
(Think you that you alone have undergone alarms; that Epirus has never seen my tears flow?)
Far more famous is the marvelous verse from Antiochus’ declaration of love,
Bérénice
, 1, 4, which I shall quote in its immediate context and in which the Baroque tendency toward exaltation appears to meet romanticism:
Rome vous vit, madame, arriver avec lui.
Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui!
Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,
Lieux charmants où mon cœur vous avait adorée,
Je vous redemandais à vos tristes Etats;
Je cherchais en pleurant les traces de vos pas. …
(Rome saw you, madam, arrive with him. In the desert East what did not my hopelessness become! For long I remained wandering in Caesarea, charming sites where my heart had adored you, I conjured your forlorn realms to give you back to me; weeping I sought the traces of your steps. …)
And finally another illustration from
Bérénice
:
Aidez-moi, s’il se peut, à vaincre ma faiblesse,
A retenir des pleurs qui m’échappent sans cesse;
Ou, si nous ne pouvons commander à nos pleurs,
Que la gloire du moins soutienne nos douleurs;
Et que tout l’univers reconnaisse sans peine
Les pleurs d’un empereur et les pleurs d’une reine. (4, 5).
(Aid me, if possible, to conquer my weakness, to hold back tears which constantly escape me; or, if we cannot command our tears, may glory at least sustain our griefs; and may the whole universe easily recognize the tears of an emperor and the tears of a queen.)
The tragic personage has so strong an awareness of its princely rank that it can never be without it. In the deepest misfortune and the most extreme passion Racine’s tragic personages identify themselves
by their rank. They do not say “I wretched,” but “I, wretched prince!” Hermione calls herself
une triste princesse
(
Andromaque
, 2, 2), and Bérénice, in the most dreadful confusion, implores Antiochus in these words:
O ciel! quel discours! Demeurez!
Prince, c’est trop cacher mon trouble à votre vue:
Vous voyez devant vous une reine éperdue,
Qui, la mort dans le sein, vous demande deux mots… (3, 3).
(O Heaven! what words! Remain! Prince, it is too much to hide my trouble from your eyes: you see before you a distracted queen, who, with death in her heart, asks brief speech with you …)
Titus constantly calls himself
un prince malheureux
; and in the dramatic moment when Athalie, suddenly seeing herself betrayed and lost, breaks out in despair, she exclaims:
Où suis-je? O trahison! ô reine infortunée!
D’armes et d’ennemis je suis environnée! (5, 5).
(Where am I? O treachery! O unfortunate queen! By arms and enemies I am surrounded!)
We have already mentioned the passage where Esther, as she falls into a faint, exclaims:
Mes filles, soutenez votre reine éperdue
. … The princely rank of these tragic personages and their concomitant exaltation have become part of their natural being, inseparable from their substance, and they appear before even God or death in the princely posture which is theirs by right; quite in contrast to the “creatural” conception which we attempted to describe in our chapter on the fifteenth century (p. 249f.). Yet it would be quite wrong if, as the romanticists sometimes did, we were to deny them everything natural and human, immediate and simple. At least in the case of Racine such a judgment betrays an utter lack of understanding. His characters are completely and exemplarily natural and human—only their emotion-charged and exemplarily human lives are lived on an exalted level, which to them has become normal. And indeed, at times it occurs that their very exaltation yields the most enchanting and profoundly human effects. By way of example I might refer to many passages in
Phèdre
, but instead I shall limit myself to the speech of Bérénice when, in her unsuspecting happiness, she almost rapturously describes the
majesty of her beloved Titus at the nocturnal ceremony in the Senate, to end with something which only a person in love could say:
Parle: peut-on le voir sans penser, comme moi,
Qu’en quelque obscurité que le sort l’eût fait naître,
Le monde en le voyant eût reconnu son maître?
(Speak: can one see him, without thinking, as I do, that in whatever obscurity fate had caused him to be born, the world, seeing him, would have recognized its master?)
Now while the tragic personage, as we have seen, is pervaded in its very substance by its consciousness of princely rank, the actual function of rulership—that is, the tragic personage’s practical activity—is not made apparent except through the most general allusions. Being a prince is much rather a posture, an “attitude,” than a practical function. In the earliest plays, especially in
Alexandre
, the prince’s political and military activity is made completely subservient to his love. Alexander conquers the world only in order to lay it at the feet of his beloved, and the whole play is full of Baroque stylistic effects in the manner of the following:
Alexandre
…
Maintenant que mon bras, engagé sous vos lois,
Doit soutenir mon nom et le vôtre à la fois,
J’irai rendre fameux, par l’éclat de la guerre,
Des peuples inconnus au reste de la terre,
Et vous faire dresser des autels en des lieux
Où leurs sauvages mains en refusaient aux dieux.
Cléophile
Oui, vous y traînerez la victoire captive;
Mais je doute, seigneur, que l’amour vous y suive.
Tant d’Etats, tant de mers, qui vont nous désunir
M’effaceront bientôt de votre souvenir.
Quand l’Océan troublé vous verra sur son onde
Achever quelque jour la conquête du monde;
Quand vous verrez les rois tomber à vos genoux,
Et la terre en tremblant se taire devant vous,
Songerez-vous, seigneur, qu’une jeune princesse,
Au fond de ses Etats, vous regrette sans cesse
Et rappelle en son cœur les moments bienheureux
Où ce grand conquérant l’assurait de ses feux?
Alexandre
Et quoi! vous croyez donc qu’à moi-même barbare
J’abandonne en ces lieux une beauté si rare?
Mais vous-même plutôt voulez-vous renoncer
Au trône de l’Asie où je vous veux placer? (3, 6)
(
Alexander
: … Now that my arm, enlisted under your laws, must maintain my name and yours together, I shall go and, by the splendor of war, bring fame to peoples unknown to the rest of the earth, cause altars to be raised to you in realms where their savage hands refused them to the gods.
Cléophile
: Yes, you will drag victory captive there; but there I doubt if love will follow you. So many States, so many seas, which will separate us, will soon blot me from your memory. When troubled Ocean shall one day see you on his flood achieving the conquest of the world; when you shall see kings fall at your knees, and the earth tremble and keep silent before you, will you remember, my Lord, that a young princess, in the depths of her States, regrets you without ceasing and recalls in her heart the blessed moments when that great conqueror assured her of his fires?
Alexander
: What! You think, then, that, barbarous to myself, I shall abandon so rare a beauty in these realms? Do you not rather wish to renounce the throne of Asia upon which I would set you?)
This fictitious order of things, which stems directly from the
romans galants
and indirectly from the courtly epic (cf. page 141), is still very pronounced in
Andromaque
, where Pyrrhus says to the heroine:
Mais, parmi ces périls où je cours pour vous plaire,
Me refuserez-vous un regard moins sévère? (1, 4)
(But, among these dangers into which I run to please you, will you refuse me a less severe look?)
or later, in a classical example of Baroque hyperbole, comparing the torment of his love with the torments he inflicted on the Trojans:
Je souffre tous les maux que j’ai faits devant Troie:
Vaincu, chargé de fers, de regrets consumé,
Brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumai
…
Hélas! fus-je jamais si cruel que vous l’êtes?
(I suffer all the ills which I caused before Troy: conquered, loaded with irons, devoured with regrets, burned with more fires than I kindled … alas! was I ever as cruel as you are?)
Quite comparable are Orestes’ utterances in regard to his vain search for death among the Scythians as an escape from the torment of his love:
Enfin, je viens à vous, et je me vois réduit
A chercher dans vos yeux une mort qui me fuit.
…
Madame, c’est à vous de prendre une victime
Que les Scythes auraient dérobée à vos coups,
Si j’en avais trouvé d’aussi cruels que vous (2, 2).
(Now at last I come to you, and I see myself reduced to seeking in your eyes a death which flees me … Madam, it is for you to take a victim whom the Scythians would have snatched from your assaults, had I found any of them to be as cruel as you.)
In the later plays such motifs appear more rarely. An example is
Bérénice
, 2, 2:
… et de si belles mains
Semblent vous demander l’empire des humains. …
(… and such fair hands seem to demand that you give them the empire of the human race. …)
On the whole there is later a change in the conception of the ruler’s business and of the political order of things, but it remains a loftily general conception, far removed from the practical and the factual. It is always a matter of court intrigues and struggles for power which do not go beyond the highest social spheres, the monarch’s immediate entourage; and this allows the poet to confine everything entirely to the realm of the personal-psychological and to a small number of personages who are treated moralistically. What lies behind or beneath is either not expressed at all or only in the most general way. This latter procedure obtains for instance in the case of the
loi qui ne se peut changer
which prevents the Emperor Titus (
Bérénice
) from marrying a foreign queen. When in this conflict Titus asks what the mood of the people is, we get this:
Que dit-on des soupirs que je pousse pour elle?
This completely moralistic view of the political order of things, which excludes every possibility of a factually problematic approach and every concern with the concrete and practical elements in the business of the ruler, may be best studied in
Britannicus, Bérénice
, and
Esther
.
In all these plays the good or evil of the state is exclusively dependent upon the moral qualities of the monarch, who either controls his passions and puts his omnipotence at the service of virtue and hence of the common weal, or succumbs to his passions and allows the flatterers in his entourage to mislead him and support him in his evil desires. His omnipotence is never challenged, encounters no resistance; and all the factual problems and obstacles which in the reality of life oppose both good and evil wills are completely disregarded; all that lies far below us. From this point of view the picture is everywhere the same, be it in the allusions to Nero’s early years of virtuous rule:
