confused
splendour on an audience. It is the old difficulty of getting a quart
into a pint bottle. But _Berenice is_ a pint--neither more nor less, and
fits its bottle to a nicety. To witness a performance of it is a rare
and exquisite pleasure; the impression is one of flawless beauty; one
comes away profoundly moved, and with a new vision of the capacities of
art.

Singleness of purpose is the dominating characteristic of the French
classical drama, and of Racine's in particular; and this singleness
shows itself not only in the action and its accessories, but in the
whole tone of the piece. Unity of tone is, in fact, a more important
element in a play than any other unity. To obtain it Racine and his
school avoided both the extreme contrasts and the displays of physical
action which the Elizabethans delighted in. The mixture of comedy and
tragedy was abhorrent to Racine, not because it was bad in itself, but
because it must have shattered the unity of his tone; and for the same
reason he preferred not to produce before the audience the most exciting
and disturbing circumstances of his plots, but to present them
indirectly, by means of description. Now it is clear that the great
danger lying before a dramatist who employs these methods is the danger
of dullness. Unity of tone is an excellent thing, but if the tone is a
tedious one, it is better to avoid it. Unfortunately Racine's successors
in Classical Tragedy did not realize this truth. They did not understand
the difficult art of keeping interest alive without variety of mood, and
consequently their works are now almost unreadable. The truth is that
they were deluded by the apparent ease with which Racine accomplished
this difficult task. Having inherited his manner, they were content;
they forgot that there was something else which they had not
inherited--his genius.

Closely connected with this difficulty there was another over which
Racine triumphed no less completely, and which proved equally fatal to
his successors. Hitherto we have been discussing the purely dramatic
aspect of classical tragedy; we must not forget that this drama was also
literary. The problem that Racine had to solve was complicated by the
fact that he was working, not only with a restricted dramatic system,
but with a restricted language. His vocabulary was an incredibly small
one--the smallest, beyond a doubt, that ever a great poet had to deal
with. But that was not all: the machinery o