much less criminal, in her case, for that Venus was sovereign of the carth, the ocean, and the sky, and that even the Gods acknowledged her sway, but that if she would follow her advice, a remedy might still be devised. Hip polytus is informed, by the nurse, of the love of Phædra, who, hurried on by shame and despair, dies by her own hands. Meanwhile Theseus arrives, and finds the letter already mentioned, and, in the paroxysm of his grief and rage, meets Hippolytus, whom, in the bitterness of his spirit, he curses, and orders into banishment. He defends himself from the charge by his known character, but the nurse, having bound him by an oath of secrecy, he does not even insinuate the guilt of Phædra. He quits the stage with these words: H. Wretch that I am, my doom is Oh! virgin huntress, whose abodes I love Farewell, I ne'er must look on you again; A messenger arrives, and informs Theseus of the fatal accident which had befallen his son: M. We wept, as we prepared our master's steeds On the sea beach, washed by the rolling waves; For we had heard the gallant prince was doom'd, By thy decree, to quit his native land, By the indissoluble bonds of friendship; And of their weeping there had been no end, Had not he cried, My friends, why stand we here? I must obey the orders of my father. Then lifting up his hands to heaven, he cried, Oh! Jove, if I am guilty, let me perish; But if I die or live, convince my father That I am innocent, and he has wrong'd me. loss Hast thou sustained in this illustrious man; Oh! woe is me. This play is peculiar among the Greek tragedies, as being founded on love; but the love of Phædra is a guilty passion, and it is by her generous struggle to conquer it, and by those nature in which she transports herself, involuntary and enthusiastic bursts of in imagination, to the favourite haunts of the object of her idolatry, and by the atonement she makes in preferring death to shame, that Euripides has rendered her character so greatly interesting. A dramatic writer among ourselves has fallen into the same train of feeling, when he makes one of his personages, in very similar circumstances, beautifully exclaim, Oh! that I were on the hill side with I shall now consider the metamorphosis of this play by a French poet. In the original, every thing is Greek; a Greek legend, Greek customs, Greek characters, Greek mythology, and pure Attic taste; but there is reason to fear that the Frenchman has mingled a little of the seasoning of his coun woman try with the simple viands of Greece. He tells us, in a preface to his play, that the ancients blamed the character of Hippolytus as being too free from the weaknesses incident to our nature. They may have done so, and they may have been wrong. No very attentive perusal of this play will convince us, that much of its pathos arises from the purity of his manners, and the lofty moral tone of his mind. He was simply a young man of a cultivated taste, addicted to the study of philosophy, and fond of field sports;whose bosom had not hitherto felt the passion of love, and who, therefore, fancied it a weakness to which he was superior. It was certainly not the rigour of virtue to receive, with indignation, the advances of a whom he had every reason to believe a wanton, who wished to seduce him into an unnatural crime; and, even in the heat of his resentment, to indulge in an invective against the whole sex; for whatever the ancients may have said, or Racine may have supposed, this is all that appears in the play. But, by way of endowing him with more amiable and more interesting qualities, he makes him a whining lover, who has long entertained an involuntary and a hopeless passion for Aricie, a new personage whom he has introduced for this purpose, and thus ruins the whole beauty and integrity of the creation of Euripides. In order to diminish the guilt of Phædra, he has made another change in propagating a report of the death of The seus, in which she believed. This was altogether unnecessary. In the Greek play, her love is a divine infliction, and even though that idea could not be introduced into a modern tragedy, the sentiment is involuntary, and her heart and her actions are alike pure. She sees her danger, and laments it, and is long the martyr of concealment. The interest of the piece is in the struggle betwixt love and duty in her mind; and, when she can no longer maintain the combat, she withdraws from it by a voluntary death. This is as tragical as possible, and it was certainly an extraordinary way of removing the horror of guilt, and of heightening pathos, to represent her as making a declaration of love to a son immediately after the death of his father, who was VOL. I. her own husband. This was a refine- calomnie avoit quelque chose de trop The author has said, "Je n'ai pas laissé d'enrichir ma piéce de tout ce qui m'a paru le plus éclatant dans la sienne." I shall examine how far this promise is fulfilled. One of the most brilliant passages in the Greek play, is that in which the young hunter returns from the chace, singing the praises of Diana, and bearing a garland to offer at her shrine. In this description, we feel the inspiration of the silence, and solitude, and darkness of the groves, and tread among flowers visited only by the wing of the wild bee, and have our souls purified by These are the chastity of the dews. the genuine themes of poetry. We have a similar passage in a celebrated work, of such beauty, that I cannot resist the temptation of quoting it. 3 K Hie away, hie away, Over bank and over brae, Where the copsewood is the greenest, It is probable, that, at the moment of composition, the Scottish minstrel did not think of the lines of Euripides, or perhaps was not aware of their existence, yet, with all his well earned fame, he will not blush at having accidentally fallen into the track of such a man. For these refreshing views of nature, to which the poet's mind is ever ready to escape from the crowds and constraints of the city, Racine has substituted a conversation between Hippolytus and a friend, in which he professes a determination to go in search of his father, who had been long absent from his country; but it soon appears that his object is to shun the fascination of a young princess, for whom, in the style of true French gallantry, il brule: Je fuis, je l'avouerai, cette jeune Aricie. In the same style he addresses the lady: : few happy touches, brought before the mind, in the richness of Nature, the skies, and the woodlands, and the mountains of Greece. Dieux! que ne suis je assise à l'ombre des forets. This is one of the few poetical lines in the French play, because it is literally taken from the Greek; but, the moment the poet has got into a train of true feeling and genuine poetry, by a strange infatuation he quits it, and degenerates into such ravings as De l'amour j'ai toutes les fureurs. Yes! the delicate-minded, but unfortunate, Phædra, who would suffer death rather than breathe her passion into the ear of any one living, discloses the secret of her soul to Hippolytus himself. In a conversation, in which he endeavours to console her for the death of Theseus, he says,— Peut-être votre epoux voit encore le jour. But nothing was further from her wishes; and she replies,— On ne voit point deux fois les rivages des morts. Que dis-je ? il n'est point mort, puisque il respire en vous. -Connois donc Phedre et toute sa fureur. This would have been food for the woman-hate of Hippolytus indeed; but the unwelcome husband starts up, and spoils the intrigue. Theseus is astonished at the confusion and embarrassment of her manner, and the Mes seuls gemissements font retentir les coldness of his son. bois, Et mes coursiers oisifs ont oublié ma voix. There was certainly nothing to prevent Racine from writing so; he hung his reputation as a poet on the risk; but he had no right to commit murder on the fine inventions and glorious imaginations of Euripides, and to give to the sickly bantling of his own fantastic brain the name of the high-minded Hippolytus. Nor has Que vois-je ? quelle horreur dans ces lieux repandues Fait fuir devant mes yeux ma famille eperdue. The nurse then clears up the mys tery, by the accusation of Hippolytus, and, as in the Greek play, the father prays to Neptune to inflict vengeance on the son. Et toi Neptune, Je t'implore aujourdhui, venge un malheureux pere. The young man protests his innocence in vain. he been more fortunate in the scene which he has substituted for that in which Phædra first appears in the Greek play, where the genius of Euripides has blended the enthusiasm of Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de love with its concealment, and, by a mon cœur. And, when driven to extremity, in order to remove all suspicion of love for Phædra, he confesses his secret passion for Aricie, though he knew she was of a race hated by his father. Je l'adorai, et mon ame à vos ordres rebelle, Ne peut ni soupirer ni bruler que pour elle. But Theseus, who considers this a Il soutient qu'Aricie a son cœur, a sa foi, And she thus expresses her feelings Enone, qui l'eut crut! j'avois une rivale, queur, Aricie a trouvé le chemin de son cœur. Hippolytus, before his departure, has a tender interview with Aricie, whom he urges to an elopement. She is alarmed, no doubt. A. Mais vous m'aimez, Seigneur, et ma gloire alarmée. But he calms her fears, Non, non, j'ai trop de soin de votre renom mée ; This is one of the few passages which Racine has not changed, and it is rather extraordinary that he should have blundered alike in his copy and his changes. The story of the sea-monster raised by Neptune in answer to the prayers of Theseus, is tolerable in superstitious belief of the country; Euripides, because it was within the but surely a Christian poet might have devised simpler means of overturning a chariot than the agency of and in her last moments acquits Hipa heathen god. Phædra takes poison, polytus by the confession of her own guilt. Such is the far famed Phedre, the glory of the French stage. The reputation which this tragedy has obtained in France, would almost tempt us to believe that there was one standard of nature there, and another in England and Greece. It is fortunate, however, that there are principles in which the majority of mankind are agreed, by which we may judge of the accidental tastes and false refinements of any age or country. To this test it is my purpose to bring this play; and the poetry of the age of Lewis XIV., which is considered by the French themselves as the golden age of their literature--on the productions of which all their poetry since has been modelled. Never was there an age, perhaps, in which any people had deviated further from the simplicity of nature, and, of course, in which poetry was more unlikely to thrive. In that of monstrous distortion. All the moral reign, every thing appears in a state feelings were sophisticated and corrupted, and the simple pleasures of nature were neglected by the minions of a profligate court, who preferred the cheek plastered with rouge to the fresh bloom of youth and beauty, and the tinsel of the royal drawing-room, to the glorious garniture of heaven and earth, and degraded the dignity of Among them there was nothing of man into the grimaces of a inonkey. friendship but the smile; and the pure fountains of love and domestic affection were poisoned by an unblushing gallantry that made a jest of fidelity and the union of congenial hearts; nor were the well-heads of virtue alone tainted,-the polluted waters overflowed the land, and corrupted the whole mass of society. In such a state of things, it would be vain to look for true taste. In other countries, courtiers have been contented to walk abroad and enjoy the voice of the muse in her native element, amid the beauties, or sublimities, or solitudes of nature; in France alone, she has been compelled to enter the palace, (where she ought never to have appeared but armed with whips and scorpions,) tricked up in the garb of a court wanton, with her golden tresses bedaubed with powder, and the celestial tints of her countenance overlaid with "paint an inch thick;" and the consequence has been, that the Divinity has fled in indignation, and left an incubus in her place. This artificial people seem to have wanted the very elements of the poetical character, simplicity, and sincerity, and profound feeling, and enthusiasm, and the spontaneous kindling of delight, from the great or the lovely in the various shows of external nature. With them green fields, and leafy forests, and pure waters, and bright skies, are themes unworthy of poetry. They have wilfully shut their eyes on the windows of heaven, and denied themselves what other poets have considered their most noble privilege, the unlimited range of the universe. They have confined themselves to the human passions and their consequences upon human character; and as they have neglected one wide field of nature, so in that which they have selected they have forsaken the right path. A French author has said that his countrymen have not" la tétte epique;" he might have added, with equal justice, "l'imagination poetique ;" and it has been lately acknowledged by a French lady, of deserved celebrity, that the prose writers of France are more poetical than the poets themselves. On another occasion, we may consider the poetry of their prose, and perhaps discover that they have as little to boast of here. If we examine their poetry by the standard of nature, as it has existed in all ages, from the times of Homer downwards, we shall find that it is as artificial and fantastic as their character. They are, in truth, an imaginationless race, but in proportion to their deficiency in all the qualities requisite to form the poetical character are their vanity and conceit. Their very language is unpoetical, being much bet ter fitted for the smartness of an epigram, than the lofty imaginations of an enthusiastic mind, or the deep feelings of the heart; and it may be safely asserted, that if the writings of Homer, and Shakespear, and Milton, and Spencer, are poetry, we look in vain for any thing similar in France, to which we should give the name. Such as it is we shall examine it, and the French themselves will not say that we treat them unfairly, if we rest their pretensions to it on the Phedre. The structure of their verse is like every thing else, the most artificial and constrained that ever was invented. The ear is fatigued, and the mind disgusted by the constant recurrence of rhyme in a conversation poem, and there is a total want of the variety of pauses and cadences on which all the music of rythmical language depends. Intense feeling rejects a multitude of words, and the noblest thoughts are always expressed in the simplest language; but, with the French, feeling degenerates into sentimental declamation, and greatness into inflation. We have seen how the beautiful simplicity of the Greek characters is ruined by the meretricious refinement of the French poet, and equally so are the sentiments that they utter, which, whether they be tender or sublime, are always true to nature. Instead of the elevation of soul with which Euripides has inspired his hero, and the rich and refreshing scenes with which he has surrounded his path, we have such lines as Mais que sert d'affecter un superbe dis |