de la Crete,
    Malgre tous les detours de sa vaste retraite: 
    Pour en developper l’embarras incertain
    Ma soeur du fil fatal eut arme votre main. 
    Mais non:  dans ce dessein je l’aurais devancee;
    L’amour m’en eut d’abord inspire la pensee;
    C’est moi, prince, c’est moi dont l’utile secours
    Vous eut du labyrinthe enseigne les detours. 
    Que de soins m’eut coutes cette tete charmante!

It is difficult to ‘place’ Racine among the poets.  He has affinities with many; but likenesses to few.  To balance him rigorously against any other—­to ask whether he is better or worse than Shelley or than Virgil—­is to attempt impossibilities; but there is one fact which is too often forgotten in comparing his work with that of other poets—­with Virgil’s for instance—­Racine wrote for the stage.  Virgil’s poetry is intended to be read, Racine’s to be declaimed; and it is only in the theatre that one can experience to the full the potency of his art.  In a sense we can know him in our library, just as we can hear the music of Mozart with silent eyes.  But, when the strings begin, when the whole volume of that divine harmony engulfs us, how differently then we understand and feel!  And so, at the theatre, before one of those high tragedies, whose interpretation has taxed to the utmost ten generations of the greatest actresses of France, we realise, with the shock of a new emotion, what we had but half-felt before.  To hear the words of Phedre spoken by the mouth of Bernhardt, to watch, in the culminating horror of crime and of remorse, of jealousy, of rage, of desire, and of despair, all the dark forces of destiny crowd down upon that great spirit, when the heavens and the earth reject her, and Hell opens, and the terriffic urn of Minos thunders and crashes to the ground—­that indeed is to come close to immortality, to plunge shuddering through infinite abysses, and to look, if only for a moment, upon eternal light.

1908.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

The life of Sir Thomas Browne does not afford much scope for the biographer.  Everyone knows that Browne was a physician who lived at Norwich in the seventeenth century; and, so far as regards what one must call, for want of a better term, his ‘life,’ that is a sufficient summary of all there is to know.  It is obvious that, with such scanty and unexciting materials, no biographer can say very much about what Sir Thomas Browne did; it is quite easy, however, to expatiate about what he wrote.  He dug deeply into so many subjects, he touched lightly upon so many more, that his works offer innumerable openings for those half-conversational digressions and excursions of which perhaps the pleasantest kind of criticism is composed.