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PARTISAN REVIEW
of expression for their own sake" and in an essay called
«La Crise du
Concept de Litterature"
he criticizes the Romantic movement for
confusing religion and literature:
If, in the seventeenth century, anyone had taken it into his head
to ask Moliere or Racine why they wrote, they would probably only
have been able to answer: "To amuse decent people." It was only with
Romanticism that the act of writing began to be thought of as a raid
on the absolute and its result a revelation.
This explains in part his immense admiration for Racine and
his
dislike of what he called
moralisme.
The short lecture on
Andro–
maque
in
M oralisme et litterature
does more than any other modem
work to demolish the 'tender' Racine of the nineteenth-century myth
and to restore the true Racine whose ferocity shocked
his
own age as
it delights ours. The distinguished critics of the last century were in–
clined to insist too much on Racine's elegance and to overlook the
destructive force of passion in his plays and the extraordinary insight
into emotion which Sainte-Beuve referred to somewhat vaguely in
the
Portraits litteraires
as his
({savante metaphysique du coeur."
"There is therefore nothing in his mind," Riviere said of a character
in
Andromaque,
"which so to speak acts as a dyke against the wave
of love except a contrary wave which he calls anger, resentment,
hate or what you will, but which at bottom
is
of the same nature
and the same stuff as the passion against which it is pitted and
which in the last resort is no more than the flow of the same passion
turned against itself."
In the comment on the line:
Leur haine ne lera qu'irriter sa tendresse
he remarks:
This is the basic principle and even the postulate of Racine's psy–
chology which is formulated with an absolute clarity. He displays what
I feel inclined to call the pure or direct contact between feelings and
their way of modifying one another instantaneously There is no inter–
vention of reason or reflection.... No, [Pylade] foresees, knows that
their hatred will act as a direct irritant on Pyrrhus'
tendresse
for An–
dromaque. Nothing can prevent the friction. There is, if one can use
the expression, an absence of any sheath in the feelings as Racine
