with the grossest indecency and the feeblest puns. 'O matter and
impertinency mixed!' one is inclined to exclaim at such a spectacle. And
then one is blinded once more by the glamour of _Lear_ and _Othello_;
one forgets the defective system in the triumph of a few exceptions, and
all plays seem intolerable unless they were written on the principle
which produced _Pericles_ and _Titus Andronicus_ and the whole multitude
of distorted and disordered works of genius of the Elizabethan age.

Racine's principles were, in fact, the direct opposite of these.
'Comprehension' might be taken as the watchword of the Elizabethans;
Racine's was 'concentration'. His great aim was to produce, not an
extraordinary nor a complex work of art, but a flawless one; he wished
to be all matter and no impertinency. His conception of a drama was of
something swift, simple, inevitable; an action taken at the crisis, with
no redundancies however interesting, no complications however
suggestive, no irrelevances however beautiful--but plain, intense,
vigorous, and splendid with nothing but its own essential force. Nor can
there be any doubt that Racine's view of what a drama should be has been
justified by the subsequent history of the stage. The Elizabethan
tradition has died out--or rather it has left the theatre, and become
absorbed in the modern novel; and it is the drama of crisis--such as
Racine conceived it--which is now the accepted model of what a
stage-play should be. And, in this connexion, we may notice an old
controversy, which still occasionally raises its head in the waste
places of criticism--the question of the three unities. In this
controversy both sides have been content to repeat arguments which are
in reality irrelevant and futile. It is irrelevant to consider whether
the unities were or were not prescribed by Aristotle; and it is futile
to ask whether the sense of probability is or is not more shocked by the
scenic representation of an action of thirty-six hours than by one of