His dramas must be read as one looks at an airy, delicate statue,
supported by artificial props, whose only importance lies in the fact
that without them the statue itself would break in pieces and fall to
the ground. Approached in this light, even the 'salle du palais de
Pyrrhus' begins to have a meaning. We come to realise that, if it is
nothing else, it is at least the meeting-ground of great passions, the
invisible framework for one of those noble conflicts which 'make one
little room an everywhere.' It will show us no views, no spectacles, it
will give us no sense of atmosphere or of imaginative romance; but it
will allow us to be present at the climax of a tragedy, to follow the
closing struggle of high destinies, and to witness the final agony of
human hearts.

It is remarkable that Mr. Bailey, while seeming to approve of the
classicism of Racine's dramatic form, nevertheless finds fault with him
for his lack of a quality with which, by its very nature, the classical
form is incompatible. Racine's vision, he complains, does not 'take in
the whole of life'; we do not find in his plays 'the whole pell-mell of
human existence'; and this is true, because the particular effects which
Racine wished to produce necessarily involved this limitation of the
range of his interests. His object was to depict the tragic interaction
of a small group of persons at the culminating height of its intensity;
and it is as irrational to complain of his failure to introduce into his
compositions 'the whole pell-mell of human existence' as it would be to
find fault with a Mozart quartet for not containing the orchestration of
Wagner. But it is a little difficult to make certain of the precise
nature of Mr. Bailey's criticism. When he speaks of Racine's vision not
including 'the whole of life,' when he declares that Racine cannot be
reckoned as one of the 'world-poets,' he seems to be taking somewhat
different ground and discussing a more general question. All truly great