raises a point we might consider at once. Leigh Hunt's comment is
comment on translation; Racine's Andromaque had become The
Distrest Mother. Perhaps indeed most Anglo-Saxon antipathy or in-
difference to our dramatist is due to the fact that Racine, unlike the
Greeks, really doesn't survive translation. His poetry is so essential
that when it is gone the work is no longer itself; in each play so delicate
a balance prevails, so great is the interdependence of act, scene, and line,
that to disturb a single element is to disrupt all. This book is therefore
addressed to those who can read Racine in French. Yet even proficient
readers of French may, if they do not read with sufficient care, miss
much of his power and depth. For despite his apparent simplicity,
Racine is a complex poet, and if it is true, as has been said so often, that
"il rase la prose," it is also true, as one critic has put it, that "c'est avec
des ailes." Readers and critics alike would do well to bear in mind what
a professor at the Sorbonne recently told his students: "Il faut faire
quand nous le lisons, le même travail que nous faisons quand nous
voulons comprendre Sènéque ou Homére. Settlement, quand nous
lisons des auteurs anciens, nous n'avons pas, comme lorsque nous
lisons Racine, la candeur de croire que nous comprenons la langue." ³

Thus the main road to any understanding of Racinian tragedy must
lead through a careful examination of its form, and it is chiefly as a
contribution to the study of Racine's form that I offer this book. That
the form is paramount is my continuous argument, and anything which
does not involve that argument I have deliberately left out.

For this reason I welcome rather than deplore the fact that we know
next to nothing of Racine's personal life. The Romantic idea that an
author's career should somehow be a replica of his works has prompted
many an incautious remark about Racine's "sadism" and the desire
to make of this punctilious courtier a revolutionary has even encouraged
critics to find in his plays covert attacks on royal policy or polemics in
favour of deposed kings. But Racine was neither a Musset nor a Hugo.
Jean Giraudoux says, a trifle pettishly, that "Il n'est pas un sentiment en
Racine qui ne soit un sentiment littéraire," ⁴ suggesting, I suppose, that
his works might have profited from being "sincere" expressions of
personal vicissitudes. The same writer shakes his head over the fact that

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