of the very heart of his subject, and seized in a single stroke. Thus
many of his most astonishing phrases burn with an inward concentration
of energy, which, difficult at first to realise to the full, comes in
the end to impress itself ineffaceably upon the mind.

C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit.

The sentence is like a cavern whose mouth a careless traveller might
pass by, but which opens out, to the true explorer, into vista after
vista of strange recesses rich with inexhaustible gold. But, sometimes,
the phrase, compact as dynamite, explodes upon one with an immediate and
terrific force--

C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée!

A few 'formal elegances' of this kind are surely worth having.

But what is it that makes the English reader fail to recognise the
beauty and the power of such passages as these? Besides Racine's lack of
extravagance and bravura, besides his dislike of exaggerated emphasis
and far-fetched or fantastic imagery, there is another characteristic of
his style to which we are perhaps even more antipathetic--its
suppression of detail. The great majority of poets--and especially of
English poets--produce their most potent effects by the accumulation of
details--details which in themselves fascinate us either by their beauty
or their curiosity or their supreme appropriateness. But with details
Racine will have nothing to do; he builds up his poetry out of words
which are not only absolutely simple but extremely general, so that our
minds, failing to find in it the peculiar delights to which we have been
accustomed, fall into the error of rejecting it altogether as devoid of