cs of Mr. Bailey's calibre can write of him as they do,
brings a feeling not only of entire disagreement, but of almost personal
distress. Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to
think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of
an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes
fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared
by no other poetry in the world. To have grown familiar with the voice
of Racine, to have realised once and for all its intensity, its beauty,
and its depth, is to have learnt a new happiness, to have discovered
something exquisite and splendid, to have enlarged the glorious
boundaries of art. For such benefits as these who would not be grateful?
Who would not seek to make them known to others, that they too may
enjoy, and render thanks?

M. Lemaitre, starting out, like a native of the mountains, from a point
which can only be reached by English explorers after a long journey and
a severe climb, devotes by far the greater part of his book to a series
of brilliant psychological studies of Racine's characters. He leaves on
one side almost altogether the questions connected both with Racine's
dramatic construction, and with his style; and these are the very
questions by which English readers are most perplexed, and which they
are most anxious to discuss. His style in particular--using the word in
its widest sense--forms the subject of the principal part of Mr.
Bailey's essay; it is upon this count that the real force of Mr.
Bailey's impeachment depends; and, indeed, it is obvious that no poet
can be admired or understood by those who quarrel with the whole fabric
of his writing and condemn the very principles of his art. Before,
however, discussing this, the true crux of the question, it may be well
to consider briefly another matter which deserves attention, because the
English reader is apt to find in it a stumbling-block at the very outset
of his inquiry. Coming to Racine with Shakespeare and the rest of the
Elizabethans warm in his memory, it is only to be expected that he
should be struck with a chilling sense of emptiness and unreality. After
the colour, the moving multiplicity, the imaginative luxury of our early
tragedies, which seem to have been moulded out of the very stuff of life
and to have been built up with the varied and generous structure of
Nature herself, the Frenchman's dramas, with their rigid un