J’aimais jusqu’a ses pleurs que je faisais couler.

Or let us listen to the voice of Phedre, when she learns that Hippolyte and Aricie love one another: 

    Les a-t-on vus souvent se parler, se chercher? 
    Dans le fond des forets alloient-ils se cacher? 
    Helas! ils se voyaient avec pleine licence;
    Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait l’innocence;
    Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchant amoureux;
    Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux.

This last line—­written, let us remember, by a frigidly ingenious rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window—­does it not seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty of a Claude with the misery and ruin of a great soul?

It is, perhaps, as a psychologist that Racine has achieved his most remarkable triumphs; and the fact that so subtle and penetrating a critic as M. Lemaitre has chosen to devote the greater part of a volume to the discussion of his characters shows clearly enough that Racine’s portrayal of human nature has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality with the passage of time.  On the contrary, his admirers are now tending more and more to lay stress upon the brilliance of his portraits, the combined vigour and intimacy of his painting, his amazing knowledge, and his unerring fidelity to truth.  M. Lemaitre, in fact, goes so far as to describe Racine as a supreme realist, while other writers have found in him the essence of the modern spirit.  These are vague phrases, no doubt, but they imply a very definite point of view; and it is curious to compare with it our English conception of Racine as a stiff and pompous kind of dancing-master, utterly out of date and infinitely cold.  And there is a similar disagreement over his style.  Mr. Bailey is never tired of asserting that Racine’s style is rhetorical, artificial, and monotonous; while M. Lemaitre speaks of it as ‘nu et familier,’ and Sainte-Beuve says ‘il rase la prose, mais avec des ailes,’ The explanation of these contradictions is to be found in the fact that the two critics are considering different parts of the poet’s work.  When Racine is most himself, when he is seizing upon a state of mind and depicting it with all its twistings and vibrations, he writes with a directness which is indeed naked, and his sentences, refined to the utmost point of significance, flash out like swords, stroke upon stroke, swift, certain, irresistible.  This is how Agrippine, in the fury of her tottering ambition, bursts out to Burrhus, the tutor of her son: 

    Pretendez-vous longtemps me cacher l’empereur? 
    Ne le verrai-je plus qu’a titre d’importune? 
    Ai-je donc eleve si haut votre fortune
    Pour mettre une barriere entre mon fils et moi? 
    Ne l’osez-vous laisser un moment sur sa foi? 
    Entre Seneque et vous disputez-vous la gloire
    A qui m’effacera plus tot de sa memoire?