Читать книгу Books and Characters, French & English - Lytton Strachey - Страница 4

Oui, prince, je languis, je brûle pour Thésée …

Il avait votre port, vos yeux, votre langage,

Cette noble pudeur colorait son visage,

Lorsque de notre Crète il traversa les flots,

Digne sujet des voeux des filles de Minos.

Que faisiez-vous alors? Pourquoi, sans Hippolyte,

Des héros de la Grèce assembla-t-il l'élite?

Pourquoi, trop jeune encor, ne pûtes-vous alors

Entrer dans le vaisseau qui le mit sur nos bords?

Par vous aurait péri le monstre de la Crète,

Malgré tous les détours de sa vaste retraite:

Pour en développer l'embarras incertain

Ma soeur du fil fatal eût armé votre main.

Mais non: dans ce dessein je l'aurais devancée;

L'amour m'en eût d'abord inspiré la pensée;

C'est moi, prince, c'est moi dont l'utile secours

Vous eût du labyrinthe enseigné les détours.

Que de soins m'eût coûtés cette tête charmante!

It is difficult to 'place' Racine among the poets. He has affinities with many; but likenesses to few. To balance him rigorously against any other—to ask whether he is better or worse than Shelley or than Virgil—is to attempt impossibilities; but there is one fact which is too often forgotten in comparing his work with that of other poets—with Virgil's for instance—Racine wrote for the stage. Virgil's poetry is intended to be read, Racine's to be declaimed; and it is only in the theatre that one can experience to the full the potency of his art. In a sense we can know him in our library, just as we can hear the music of Mozart with silent eyes. But, when the strings begin, when the whole volume of that divine harmony engulfs us, how differently then we understand and feel! And so, at the theatre, before one of those high tragedies, whose interpretation has taxed to the utmost ten generations of the greatest actresses of France, we realise, with the shock of a new emotion, what we had but half-felt before. To hear the words of Phèdre spoken by the mouth of Bernhardt, to watch, in the culminating horror of crime and of remorse, of jealousy, of rage, of desire, and of despair, all the dark forces of destiny crowd down upon that great spirit, when the heavens and the earth reject her, and Hell opens, and the terriffic urn of Minos thunders and crashes to the ground—that indeed is to come close to immortality, to plunge shuddering through infinite abysses, and to look, if only for a moment, upon eternal light.

1908.