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Updated: June 4, 2025
Hippolitus in this picture is perhaps more beautiful than even in Racine; he resembles more the ancient Meleager, because no love for Aricia disturbs the impression of his wild and noble virtue; but is it possible to suppose that Phèdre, in the presence of Hippolitus, can support her falsehood? Is it possible that she can behold him innocent and persecuted without falling at his feet?
Nothing was more Hoffmanesque than this slaughter of pigs at the period I am speaking about, for since then a sentiment of humanity has crept, although still somewhat timidly, into this temple of porcine hecatombs. I returned from this visit quite ill. That evening I played in Phedre.
Painting can with difficulty render a succession of events: time and movement exist not for it. "The Phèdre of Racine has furnished the subject of the fourth picture," said Corinne, showing it to Lord Nelville.
Cyr, in the uniform of the house, played the piece quite simply at Versailles before Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, in a room without a stage. When the players gave a representation of it at Paris, it was considered heavy; it did not, succeed. Racine imagined that he was doomed to another failure like that of Phedre, which he preferred before all his other pieces.
The poet has never put Phèdre and Hippolitus in the same scene after the former has calumniated the latter; the painter has been obliged to do so in order to bring together, as he has done in his picture, all the beauties of the contrast; but is not this a proof that there is such a difference between poetical and picturesque subjects that it would be better for the poets to write from pictures, than for the painters to compose their works from the poets?
Half Paris is now stark mad about a picture by Guerin of Phedre and Hippolyte, which they actually think equal to Raphael. Of the public buildings Les Invalides appears to me the finest; here are all the flags and standards used in battle, or won from foreign nations, a long-drawn aisle of glory that must create ambition in the rising generation of military in France.
The lady by whom she was first mentioned declared she thought that all Mademoiselle Clairon's studying must have made her a very unnatural actress. The chief justice quoted the answer which Mademoiselle Clairon gave, when she was reproached with having too much art. "De l'art! et que voudroit-on done que j'eusse? Etois-je Andromaque? Etois-je Phedre?"
Profound books will not give vogue to a language: they will be translated; people will learn Newton's philosophy; but they will not learn English in order to understand it. What makes French still more common is the perfection to which the drama has been carried in this tongue. It is to "Cinna," "Phèdre," the "Misanthrope" that it owes its vogue, and not to the conquests of Louis XIV.
Of what we call acting there is little, little change in the expression of the face. The part is a part for the voice, and it is only in "Phèdre" that one can hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty.
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.
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