Racine und Shakespeare

Stendhal published "Racine et Shakspeare" (he spelled the name the French way) in 1823, from articles first written for an English review in Paris; in 1825 he added a second pamphlet, "Racine et Shakspeare n° II," in answer to a speech against Romanticism given at the Académie française by Louis-Simon Auger. The two parts are the two episodes here, condensed in Stendhal's own voice. Two of the 1825 letters (VII and X) could not be consulted for this retelling and are not retold; nothing is guessed in their place. The English is my own, made from the French.

Preface

Nothing resembles us less than the marquis in embroidered coat and great black wig, costing a thousand crowns, who judged the plays of Racine and Molière about the year 1670. Those two great men tried to flatter the taste of the marquis, and worked for him.

I maintain that from now on we must write tragedies for ourselves — for the reasoning, serious and somewhat envious young people of the year of grace 1823. Those tragedies must be in prose. In our day the alexandrine is, most of the time, only a cover for foolishness.

The reigns of Charles VI, of Charles VII, of the noble François I, must be fruitful for us in national tragedies of deep and lasting interest. Philippe de Comines tells their bloody catastrophes, and the "Chronique scandaleuse" of Jean de Troyes is full of them. But how can one paint with any truth the bloody catastrophes of those reigns, if the word "pistol" may not appear in a tragic verse?

Painting has shown us the way. About 1780, the celebrated David began in the vaporous, insipid manner of Lagrenée, of Fragonard, of Vanloo; he painted three or four pictures which were much admired. Then he saw that the silly manner of the old French school no longer suited the severe taste of a people that was beginning to want energetic action. Monsieur David taught painting to leave the footsteps of Lebrun and Mignard, and to dare to show us Brutus and the Horatii. If we had gone on following the models of the age of Louis XIV, we should be pale imitators for ever.

Everything leads me to believe that we are on the eve of a similar revolution in poetry. Until the day of success, we defenders of the Romantic kind shall be loaded with insults. But at last that great day will come; French youth will awake; that noble youth will be astonished to have applauded for so long, and with such seriousness, such great follies.

The two articles that follow were written in a few hours, with more zeal than talent, as the reader will see only too well; they appeared in numbers 9 and 12 of the "Paris Monthly Review." Far removed by my position from any literary pretension, busy all my life with other things, and with no title to speak of literature, I have sometimes given my ideas a confident tone — out of respect for the public, so as to say them clearly and in few words. I could have wrapped them in the elegant forms of doubt, which suit a man who does not admire all that the holders of opinion admire; my modesty would have been safe; but I should have spoken three times as long, and in this age one must hurry, above all when it is a question of literary trifles.

Chapter I: To write tragedies that can interest the public of 1823, should one follow the ways of Racine or those of Shakespeare?

This question seems worn out in France; yet only one side has ever been heard. The newspapers, which disagree on everything in politics, agree on one point: that the French theatre is the finest in the world, and the only reasonable one. Romanticism, whatever it may say, is shut out of every paper.

What has been the greatest success in France for ten years? The novels of Walter Scott — which are Romantic tragedies, mixed with long descriptions. Plays such as "Les Vêpres siciliennes," "Le Paria," "Les Machabées," "Régulus" also succeed; but the pleasure they give is epic pleasure, not dramatic. The audience enjoys generous sentiments in fine verse, without that illusion which deep emotion requires. The plot of "Le Paria" is absurd, and the critics have said so; it made no difference; the public wants fine verses above all — as at the Opéra in the rue Le Peletier, where the action of a ballet exists only to bring on the graceful dances.

I speak to the young people who whistled Shakespeare because he was English. I will speak to them plainly.

The whole dispute comes down to this: can one, by observing the unities of place and of time, write plays that make spectators of the nineteenth century weep and tremble? These unities are a deep-rooted French habit, which Paris, the drawing-room of Europe, makes hard to shake off. I maintain that they are not necessary to produce deep dramatic emotion.

The Academician. — It is impossible for an action shown in two hours to last a week or a month; impossible for the actors to travel from Venice to Cyprus, as in "Othello," or from Scotland to England, as in "Macbeth."

The Romantic. — It is just as impossible for an action of twenty-four or thirty-six hours.

The Academician. — I grant that the time of the fiction need not be the time of the performance. The spectator imagines the intervals, especially while the orchestra plays.

The Romantic. — Then how far may this go? Double the time? Four times? A hundred times?

The Academician. — You want mathematical rigour from rules that are meant to be flexible.

The Romantic. — Reason cannot tell us what spectators can imagine; only experience can.

The Academician. — Agreed.

The Romantic. — Experience has answered. For two hundred years in England, and fifty in Germany, audiences have watched tragedies whose action lasts for months, without the least difficulty.

The Academician. — Foreigners! Germans!

The Romantic. — Ah, our French vanity — the vanity of a spoiled despot, flattered from the cradle. A lady once declared, to please the Parisians, that the gutter of the rue du Bac was the finest stream in the world. In London and in Edinburgh they watch "Macbeth" without objection, though its action takes months.

The Academician. — It is absurd to suppose that the English believe months pass while the play goes on.

The Romantic. — And the Parisian does not believe that a day passes during "Iphigénie en Aulide."

The Academician (irritated). — There is a difference.

The Romantic. — Illusion does not mean believing that time has really passed. A Parisian watches Agamemnon wake Arcas at seven in the morning, and sees Iphigenia led to the altar, and would admit that several hours have gone by. Yet if, during the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, he looks at his watch, and it says a quarter past eight, he is not surprised. Spectators are used to time moving at one pace on the stage and at another in the hall. The sculptors Dupaty and Bosio give us statues without movement, and no one counts it a fault of their art. The only difference between the Parisian and the Scot is that the Parisian, being of good family, has been taught to laugh at the Scot.

What, then, is illusion? The dictionaries — Monsieur Guizot's among them — say: the act of believing what is not. Last year, in August 1822, a soldier on guard in the theatre at Baltimore, watching Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out that it should never be said that in his presence a black man killed a white woman; and he fired his musket, and broke the arm of the actor who played Othello.

Stendhal reports the soldier's words as an example of illusion; they are the soldier's prejudice, not the author's.

That soldier had perfect illusion. The ordinary spectator, even in his greatest excitement, applauds Talma, not the Roman Manlius; his illusion is never complete.

The Academician. — A commonplace.

The Romantic. — You are defeated by a habit of elegant phrases. Everyone knows that he is in a theatre, watching a work of art. But tell me: is the illusion never complete, for a second or two at a time?

The Academician. — I should have to go back to the theatre to answer.

The Romantic. — Your good faith does you honour; we shall soon agree. These moments of perfect illusion are more frequent than people think, though they last only half a second, a quarter of a second. Young women have them more often than we do; that is why they weep at tragedies.

They do not come at a change of scene, or at a leap of a fortnight, or in long narrations made only to inform the audience, or at a fine line admired for its verse. They come in the heat of a lively scene, when the replies follow quickly — as when Hermione asks Orestes, who has just killed Pyrrhus at her command: "Who told you to?" Murders on the stage, arrests of characters, never produce illusion; nobody believes in them; they exist only to lead us to the moments that do. These moments are more frequent in Shakespeare than in Racine; and tragic pleasure depends on how often they come, and on the state of emotion they leave between them. Admiring fine verses hinders illusion; and judging them is worse still, as the Parisian public does at the first performance of "Le Paria."

I cannot prove this to a man who denies that he feels these moments. One cannot take a feeling out of the heart and show it. Here we reach the limit of what logic can grasp in poetry.

The Academician. — Your metaphysics is abominably obscure. Will it get Racine hissed?

The Romantic. — Only charlatans claim that algebra, or the pulling of a tooth, can be painless. The question is among the hardest the mind can face. Racine's glory is untouched. If Caesar came back to life, he would want cannon, like a modern general; and no one ranks Caesar below Catinat because Caesar had no guns. You are like someone telling François I at Marignano not to use artillery, because Caesar had none. Chénier, Lemercier, Delavigne would have done far better if they had escaped from rules that are out of date. Lemercier's "Pinto" is worth more than any "Clovis"; and Lebrun's "Marie Stuart," weaker in its verses than Racine's "Bajazet," gives more pleasure, because Lebrun was half a Romantic.