Vous l’ai-je confie pour en faire un ingrat,
    Pour etre, sous son nom, les maitres de l’etat? 
    Certes, plus je medite, et moins je me figure
    Que vous m’osiez compter pour votre creature;
    Vous, dont j’ai pu laisser vieillir l’ambition
    Dans les honneurs obscurs de quelque legion;
    Et moi, qui sur le trone ai suivi mes ancetres,
    Moi, fille, femme, soeur, et mere de vos maitres!

When we come upon a passage like this we know, so to speak, that the hunt is up and the whole field tearing after the quarry.  But Racine, on other occasions, has another way of writing.  He can be roundabout, artificial, and vague; he can involve a simple statement in a mist of high-sounding words and elaborate inversions.

    Jamais l’aimable soeur des cruels Pallantides
    Trempa-t-elle aux complots de ses freres perfides.

That is Racine’s way of saying that Aricie did not join in her brothers’ conspiracy.  He will describe an incriminating letter as ’De sa trahison ce gage trop sincere.’  It is obvious that this kind of expression has within it the germs of the ‘noble’ style of the eighteenth-century tragedians, one of whom, finding himself obliged to mention a dog, got out of the difficulty by referring to—­’De la fidelite le respectable appui.’  This is the side of Racine’s writing that puzzles and disgusts Mr. Bailey.  But there is a meaning in it, after all.  Every art is based upon a selection, and the art of Racine selected the things of the spirit for the material of its work.  The things of sense—­physical objects and details, and all the necessary but insignificant facts that go to make up the machinery of existence—­these must be kept out of the picture at all hazards.  To have called a spade a spade would have ruined the whole effect; spades must never be mentioned, or, at the worst, they must be dimly referred to as agricultural implements, so that the entire attention may be fixed upon the central and dominating features of the composition—­the spiritual states of the characters—­which, laid bare with uncompromising force and supreme precision, may thus indelibly imprint themselves upon the mind.  To condemn Racine on the score of his ambiguities and his pomposities is to complain of the hastily dashed-in column and curtain in the background of a portrait, and not to mention the face.  Sometimes indeed his art seems to rise superior to its own conditions, endowing even the dross and refuse of what it works in with a wonderful significance.  Thus when the Sultana, Roxane, discovers her lover’s treachery, her mind flies immediately to thoughts of revenge and death, and she exclaims—­

    Ah! je respire enfin, et ma joie est extreme
    Que le traitre une fois se soit trahi lui-meme. 
    Libre des soins cruels ou j’allais m’engager,
    Ma tranquille fureur n’a plus qu’a se venger. 
    Qu’il meure.  Vengeons-nous.  Courez.  Qu’on le saisisse! 
    Que la main des muets s’arme pour son supplice;
    Qu’ils viennent preparer ces noeuds infortunes
    Par qui de ses pareils les jours sont termines.