Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/224

212 Dowden recognizes what French critics with repeated insistence emphasize, the cunning harmonies of his verse.

Much space is of right devoted to Molière, who with La Fontaine has ever been a stumbling-block to English criticism. Professor Dowden voices our national feeling in refusing to consider him as a poet, preferring to emphasize his profound and healthy philosophy of life. Tartufe he considers to be an attack on religious hypocrisy merely. Is not the interpretation perhaps correct which regards it as an attack on the intolerance and Puritanism of all religion, even the most sincere?

Once again, in dealing with Racine, the author shows that subtle discernment in which his criticism abounds. He penetrates to the heart of the secret reason for the cabals that harassed Racine in the later years of his dramatic activity, and which doubtless had their influence in enforcing his retirement. Have we ever sufficiently realized that Boileau, Molière, and Racine were waging constant war against a rebirth of the précieux spirit which threatened not only society with ridiculousness but literature with ruin? Such, indeed, was the case, and in the eyes of the super-refined coterie that grouped itself round the Duchesse de Bouillon, Boileau and his fellow-workers were innovators of a dangerous and revolutionary order. Does not this idea carry us far from our preconceived notions of the narrow conservatism that dominated the leaders of classical thought? Referring to the disastrous check of Racine's Phèdre, the author writes: "It is commonly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled." The point of view may seem extreme to us, and this vaunted realism may show pale and weakly when contrasted with the grossness of much of the realism that prevails at the present day, or with the graphic directness of the best examples of the type. But the words ring true if we are willing to accept the refined psychological realism of Racine as equally worthy to the title with the physiological naturalism of our more scientific age. Our whole conception of Racine's art falls into line with this view, and his constant solicitude for an easy and natural intrigue in the structure of his tragedies may be brought home to the same healthy impulse of his mind. Was it not Faguet who maintained that so natural indeed were the processes of his plots that a happy ending would have alone been needed to make any of his tragedies, with some added modicum of wit, in all essential features a comedy that Molière might have penned? Mr. Saintsbury, on the other hand, in dealing with Racine is seemingly swayed by some innate prejudice,