ing adherence to this standard. It is impossible to reproduce
the _subtilitas naturae_ in its most subtle example--the character of
man--without introducing a large diversity of circumstance and action.
That diversity in its turn cannot be produced without a great
multiplication of characters, a duplication or triplication of plot, and
a complete disregard of pre-established 'common form.' Now this 'common
form' was the essence of French tragedy. Following, or thinking that
they followed, the ancients, French dramatists and dramatic critics
adopted certain fixed rules according to which a poet had to write just
as a whist-player has to play the game. There was to be no action on the
stage, or next to none, the interest of the play was to be rigidly
reduced to a central situation, subsidiary characters were to be avoided
as far as possible, the only means afforded to the personages of
explaining themselves was by dialogue with confidantes--the curse of the
French stage--and the only way of informing the audience of the progress
of the action was by messengers. Corneille accepted these limitations
partially, and without too much good-will, but he evaded the difficulty
by emphasising the moral lesson. The ethical standard of his plays is
perhaps higher on the whole than that of any great dramatist, and the
wonderful bursts of poetry which he could command served to sugar the
pill. But Racine was not a man of high moral character, and he was a man
of great shrewdness and discernment. He evidently distrusted the
willingness of audiences perpetually to admire moral grandeur, whether
he did or did not hold that admiration was not a tragic passion.
Probably he would have put it that it was not a passion that would draw.
Love-making, on the contrary, would draw, and love-making accordingly is
the staple of all his plays. But the defect which has attended all
French literature, which was aggravated enormously by this style of
drama, and which is noticeable even in his greater contemporaries,
Corneille and Moliere, manifested itself in his work almost inevitably.
If there is one fault to be found with the creations of French literary
art, it is that they run too much into types. It has been well said that
the duty of art is to give the universal in the particular. But to do
this exactly is difficult. It is the fault of English and of German
literature to give the particular without a sufficient tincture of the
universal, to lose the