o lives. That
is all affection; and this all desire--

J'aimais jusqu'a ses pleurs que je faisais couler.

Or let us listen to the voice of Phedre, when she learns that Hippolyte
and Aricie love one another:

Les a-t-on vus souvent se parler, se chercher?
Dans le fond des forets alloient-ils se cacher?
Helas! ils se voyaient avec pleine licence;
Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait l'innocence;
Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchant amoureux;
Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux.

This last line--written, let us remember, by a frigidly ingenious
rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window--does it not
seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty
of a Claude with the misery and ruin of a great soul?

It is, perhaps, as a psychologist that Racine has achieved his most
remarkable triumphs; and the fact that so subtle and penetrating a
critic as M. Lemaitre has chosen to devote the greater part of a volume
to the discussion of his characters shows clearly enough that Racine's
portrayal of human nature has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality
with the passage of time. On the contrary, his admirers are now tending
more and more to lay stress upon the brilliance of his portraits, the
combined vigour and intimacy of his painting, his amazing knowledge, and
his unerring fidelity to truth. M. Lemaitre, in fact, goes so far as to
describe Racine as a supreme realist, while other writers have found in
him the essence of the modern spirit. These are vague phrases, no doubt,
but they imply a very definite point of view; and it is curious to
compare with it our English conception of Racine as a stiff and pompous
kind of dancing-master, utterly out of date and infinitely cold. And
there is a similar disagreement over his style. Mr. Bailey is never
tired of asserting that Racine's style is rhetorical, artificial, and
monotonous; while M. Lemaitre speaks of it as 'nu et familier,' and
Sainte-Beuve says 'il rase la prose, mais avec des ailes,' The
explanation of these contradictions is to be found in the fact that the
two critics are considering different parts of the poet's work. When
Racine is most himself, when he is seizing upon a state of mind and
depicting it with all its twistings and vibrations, he writes with a
directness which is indeed naked, and his sentences, refined to the
utmost point of significance, flash out like swords, st