THE C RI TIC ISM 0 F J A C QUE SRI V I ERE
185
describes them and this makes them perpetually naked for one
another....
When, a moment or two ago, I used the word
dissolu,
I gave it,
mentally, its full meaning including its etymological meaning.
I
meant
that feelings are described by Racine without there being anything
which attaches them; the core of the mind in which they are per–
ceived seems to have crumbled away. Everything that could act as a
cement between them, everything that
composes
them, has been
suppressed.
"We must go further than this," he writes a page or two later.
"We must show at work
in
Racine's characters those ferments of
~lution,
those forces which destroy the. personality that modern
French writers are blamed for analyzing too complacently in their
work. Almost all Racine's characters, or at any rate those in whom
the poet manages to interest us, are characters who go to pieces
(des
personnages qui se delont)."
He concludes:
I claim that Racine's indifference to morality enabled him, and
alone could enable him, to seize the workings of the mind in their
darkest but their most real spontaneity. His way of putting aside what
is
factitious and noting what is immediate in the human heart is prop–
erly speaking miraculous.
This
is
not a plea for a shallow amoralism in literature. Riviere be–
lieved that the claim of truth was paramount and in his study of
Racine he anticipates the theory of the
saintete de la verite
which has
since become familiar
in
the work of writers like Maritain. It must
be
remembered that the lecture on Racine was part of a public de–
bate
and it is possible that his thesis carried
him
too far
in
the last
passage. (He seems to admit this in his summing up in the final
lecture.)
I believe Riviere confuses the moral attitude of Racine's
char–
(Jeters
with the attitude of the
author
toward them. There was un–
doubtedly an element of complicity
in
Racine's representation of
the moral collapse of his characters, but it is going too far to assume
that he necessarily approved of the moral tone of the world he
created. Riviere's contention that he did not interfere with his char–
acters by introducing irrelevant moral considerations
is,
however,
