Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,
    Quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis
    Rura tenent, etc.

Racine’s way is different, but is it less masterly?

    Mais tout dort, et l’armee, et les vents, et Neptune.

What a flat and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman’s first thought—­with the conventional ‘Neptune,’ and the vague ‘armee,’ and the commonplace ‘vents.’  And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce—­the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and vastness and ominous hush.

It is particularly in regard to Racine’s treatment of nature that this generalised style creates misunderstandings.  ‘Is he so much as aware,’ exclaims Mr. Bailey, ’that the sun rises and sets in a glory of colour, that the wind plays deliciously on human cheeks, that the human ear will never have enough of the music of the sea?  He might have written every page of his work without so much as looking out of the window of his study.’  The accusation gains support from the fact that Racine rarely describes the processes of nature by means of pictorial detail; that, we know, was not his plan.  But he is constantly, with his subtle art, suggesting them.  In this line, for instance, he calls up, without a word of definite description, the vision of a sudden and brilliant sunrise: 

    Deja le jour plus grand nous frappe et nous eclaire.

And how varied and beautiful are his impressions of the sea!  He can give us the desolation of a calm: 

                        La rame inutile
    Fatigua vainement une mer immobile;

or the agitated movements of a great fleet of galleys: 

    Voyez tout l’Hellespont blanchissant sous nos rames;

or he can fill his verses with the disorder and the fury of a storm: 

    Quoi! pour noyer les Grecs et leurs mille vaisseaux,
    Mer, tu n’ouvriras pas des abymes nouveaux! 
    Quoi! lorsque les chassant du port qui les recele,
    L’Aulide aura vomi leur flotte criminelle,
    Les vents, les memes vents, si longtemps accuses,
    Ne te couvriront pas de ses vaisseaux brises!

And then, in a single line, he can evoke the radiant spectacle of a triumphant flotilla riding the dancing waves: 

    Prets a vous recevoir mes vaisseaux vous attendent;
    Et du pied de l’autel vous y pouvez monter,
    Souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter.

The art of subtle suggestion could hardly go further than in this line, where the alliterating v’s, the mute e’s, and the placing of the long syllables combine so wonderfully to produce the required effect.

But it is not only suggestions of nature that readers like Mr. Bailey are unable to find in Racine—­they miss in him no less suggestions of the mysterious and the infinite.  No doubt this is partly due to our English habit of associating these qualities with expressions which are complex and unfamiliar.  When we come across the mysterious accent of fatality and remote terror in a single perfectly simple phrase—­