SOURCE: "The World and the Theatre, in Theatre Arts Monthly, Vol. XIV, No. 9, September, 1930, pp. 727-30.

A French dramatist and novelist, Giraudoux is recognized primarily for his highly stylized works centering around the elemental themes of love, death, and war. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in a longer form in La Nouvelle Revue Française, he discusses Racine's method, emphasizing the dramatist's exemplary accomplishment while working within an established context: his own, distinctly literary age.

Those who believe in genius have the opportunity, when contemplating Racine, to verify the fact that a civilization which has reached its pinnacle … is itself a genius—the genius of Pericles or of Louis XIV…. One of its virtues is that, instead of the smaller means by which writers in less complete epochs acquire their experience—misfortune, observations of men in daily life, affairs of the heart or conjugal...