La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae

we are apt not to hear that it is there.  But there is another reason—­the craving, which has seized upon our poetry and our criticism ever since the triumph of Wordsworth and Coleridge at the beginning of the last century, for metaphysical stimulants.  It would be easy to prolong the discussion of this matter far beyond the boundaries of ‘sublunary debate,’ but it is sufficient to point out that Mr. Bailey’s criticism of Racine affords an excellent example of the fatal effects of this obsession.  His pages are full of references to ‘infinity’ and ’the unseen’ and ‘eternity’ and ‘a mystery brooding over a mystery’ and ’the key to the secret of life’; and it is only natural that he should find in these watchwords one of those tests of poetic greatness of which he is so fond.  The fallaciousness of such views as these becomes obvious when we remember the plain fact that there is not a trace of this kind of mystery or of these ‘feelings after the key to the secret of life,’ in Paradise Lost, and that Paradise Lost is one of the greatest poems in the world.  But Milton is sacrosanct in England; no theory, however mistaken, can shake that stupendous name, and the damage which may be wrought by a vicious system of criticism only becomes evident in its treatment of writers like Racine, whom it can attack with impunity and apparent success.  There is no ‘mystery’ in Racine—­that is to say, there are no metaphysical speculations in him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo!  But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble?  And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longings for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine Racine, the more clearly we shall discern in him another kind of mystery, whose presence may eventually console us for the loss of the first—­the mystery of the mind of man.  This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies—­Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phedre—­seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight!  Look where we will, we shall find among his pages the traces of an inward mystery and the obscure infinities of the heart.

    Nous avons su toujours nous aimer et nous taire.

The line is a summary of the romance and the anguish of two lives.  That is all affection; and this all desire—­