ho, with an incapacity for the finest original strokes of
poetry, have an almost unlimited capacity for writing from models, for
improving the technical execution of their poems, and for adjusting the
conception of their pieces to their powers of rendering. These writers
are always impossible without forerunners, and not usually possible
without critics of the pedagogic kind. Racine was extraordinarily
fortunate in his forerunner, and still more fortunate in his critic. He
was able to start with all the advantages which thirty years of work on
the part of his rival, Corneille, gave him; and he had for his trainer,
Boileau, one of the most capable, if one of the most limited and
prejudiced, of literary schoolmasters. Boileau was no respecter of
persons, and arrogant as he was, he was rather an admirer of Racine than
of Corneille; yet, according to a well-known story, he distinguished
between the two by saying that Corneille was a great poet, and Racine a
very clever man, to whom he himself had taught the knack of easy
versification with elaborate rhyming. It is indeed in his versification
that both the strength and the weakness of Racine lie, and in this
respect he is an exact analogue to the poets mentioned above. He treated
the Alexandrine of Corneille exactly as Pope treated the decasyllable of
Dryden, and as Virgil treated the hexameter of Lucretius. In his hands
it acquired smoothness, softness, polish, and mechanical perfections of
many kinds, only to suffer at the same time a compensatory monotony
which, when the honied sweetness of it began to cloy, was soon
recognised as a terrible drawback. The extraordinary estimation in which
Racine is held by those who abide by the classical tradition in France
depends very mainly on the melody of his versification and rhymes, but
it does not depend wholly upon this. There must also be taken into
account the perfection of workmanship with which he carries out the idea
of the drama which he practised. What that ideal was must therefore be
considered.

It must be remembered that the object of the French drama of Racine's
time was not in the least to hold the mirror up to nature. The model
which, owing to admiration of the classics, the Pleiade had almost at
haphazard followed, rendered such an object simply unattainable. The
so-called irregularity of the English stage, which used to fill French
critics with alternate wonder and disgust, is nothing but the result of
an unflinch