that he is no Attila, intent on wasting and devastating his country's literature; that he never regarded Racine as a polisson—quite the reverse; and that he sees in the French literature of the seventeenth century one of the finest spectacles that can possibly delight an intelligent mind. "Bossuet seems to me a man of distinguished taste; Corneille I have always considered the author aux plus nobles allures in our language; there are few things I prefer to the style of Madame de Sévigné; and much sooner would I have written one scene of the 'Fourberies de Scapin,' or some thirty lines of the 'Femmes savantes,' than have won the battle of Arbela or that of Marathon." "I read," he adds, "as often as ever I can, the prose and verse of Molière, and I read at no time and on no account a single hemistich of M. Casimir Delavigne, or a single couplet of M. Béranger." Voilà his profession of faith.
Nevertheless, Racine is sadly mauled by him, first and last. Racine is argued to have been behind his age in science and thought. His "Athalie," for a century pronounced in journal and playbill "chef-d'œuvre inimitable," is subjected to a jealous scrutiny; in setting about which, M. de Cassagnac prays the public—however strange, bold, and rash it may seem in him to cross a national panegyric so constant and unanimous—to believe, notwithstanding, that while he thus sets himself to oppose it, without a moment's hesitation, he does so from no personal vanity, but from staunch literary convictions. The faults he finds with "Athalie" are not drawn from the violation of certain rules, imposed by the criticism of a later school; he accepts the piece on the principles of its own type of art; he is not offended by Racine's employment of nurses, confidants, and palaces open at all hours to all comers; nor does he censure in "Athalie" anything which, either in the material fabric of the drama, or the agency of its personæ, or the historical data of its action, might transgress the rules at present regnant in dramatic art. But he does complain that, in the first place, the scenario of this tragedy is conceived and arranged with such an entire absence of all reflection, that the performance of the piece, taken literally, is a thing impossible—the locale of the first four acts being irreconcilable with that of the fifth. "The serious oversights with which Racine is chargeable, in respect to the Temple at Jerusalem, are not the less strange, when we reflect that the author of a professedly Biblical tragedy ought to have been a reader of the Bible, where the Temple is as accurately described as in the plans of an architect." Then as to his personages: it is observable how frequently the word "priest" (prêtre) recurs in "Athalie:"—well; with Racine this word priest just signifies curé—in accordance with the spirit in which he turns the Jewish temple into a kind of Christian church, Mathan into a verger, and Joas into a boy-chorister. But it is on the ground of style that an examination of "Athalie" must be placed, in order to be just; and upon this ground, therefore, M. de Cassagnac enters at length and in detail. With regard to style, Racine, he observes, belongs to a school of which he is not the chief, for it begins with Christine de Pisan in prose, and with Malherbe in verse; a school which, speaking generally, is formed on the study and imitation of the ancients, and, among the ancients, of the Romans rather than the Greeks, and, among the Romans again, of the rhetoricians and pleaders rather than the writers of simplicity and strength. "Strange! that although Racine habitually copies the Greeks, he always Latinises in his style.
