they are diffused, by emotion;
and the utterance which best represents them is fluctuating and
agglomerated rather than compact and defined. But Racine's aim was less
to reflect the actual current of the human spirit than to seize upon its
inmost being and to give expression to that. One might be tempted to say
that his art represents the sublimed essence of reality, save that,
after all, reality has no degrees. Who can affirm that the wild
ambiguities of our hearts and the gross impediments of our physical
existence are less real than the most pointed of our feelings and
'thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls'?

It would be nearer the truth to rank Racine among the idealists. The
world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and
rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an
ampler ether, a diviner air.' It is a world where the hesitations and
the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a
world where ugliness is a forgotten name, and lust itself has grown
ethereal; where anguish has become a grace and death a glory, and love
the beginning and the end of all. It is, too, the world of a poet, so
that we reach it, not through melody nor through vision, but through the
poet's sweet articulation--through verse. Upon English ears the rhymed
couplets of Racine sound strangely; and how many besides Mr. Bailey have
dubbed his alexandrines 'monotonous'! But to his lovers, to those who
have found their way into the secret places of his art, his lines are
impregnated with a peculiar beauty, and the last perfection of style.
Over them, the most insignificant of his verses can throw a deep
enchantment, like the faintest wavings of a magician's wand. 'A-t-on vu
de ma part le roi de Comagene?'--How is it that words of such slight
import should hold such thrilling music? Oh! they are Racine's words.
And, as to his rhymes, they seem perhaps, to the true worshipper, the
final crown of his art. Mr. Bailey tells us that the couplet is only fit
for satire. Has he forgotten _Lamia_? And he asks, 'How is it that we
read Pope's _Satires_ and Dryden's, and Johnson's with enthusiasm still,
while we never touch _Irene_, and rarely the _Conquest of Granada_?'
Perhaps the answer is that if we cannot get rid of our _a priori_
theories, even the fiery art of Dryden's drama may remain dead to us,
and that, if we touched _Irene_ even once, we should find it was in
blank verse. But