To have called a bowstring a bowstring was out of the question; and Racine, with triumphant art, has managed to introduce the periphrasis in such a way that it exactly expresses the state of mind of the Sultana.  She begins with revenge and rage, until she reaches the extremity of virulent resolution; and then her mind begins to waver, and she finally orders the execution of the man she loves, in a contorted agony of speech.

But, as a rule, Racine’s characters speak out most clearly when they are most moved, so that their words, at the height of passion, have an intensity of directness unknown in actual life.  In such moments, the phrases that leap to their lips quiver and glow with the compressed significance of character and situation; the ‘Qui te l’a dit?’ of Hermione, the ‘Sortez’ of Roxane, the ‘Je vais a Rome’ of Mithridate, the ‘Dieu des Juifs, tu l’emportes!’ of Athalie—­who can forget these things, these wondrous microcosms of tragedy?  Very different is the Shakespearean method.  There, as passion rises, expression becomes more and more poetical and vague.  Image flows into image, thought into thought, until at last the state of mind is revealed, inform and molten, driving darkly through a vast storm of words.  Such revelations, no doubt, come closer to reality than the poignant epigrams of Racine.  In life, men’s minds are not sharpened, they are diffused, by emotion; and the utterance which best represents them is fluctuating and agglomerated rather than compact and defined.  But Racine’s aim was less to reflect the actual current of the human spirit than to seize upon its inmost being and to give expression to that.  One might be tempted to say that his art represents the sublimed essence of reality, save that, after all, reality has no degrees.  Who can affirm that the wild ambiguities of our hearts and the gross impediments of our physical existence are less real than the most pointed of our feelings and ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’?

It would be nearer the truth to rank Racine among the idealists.  The world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through ’an ampler ether, a diviner air.’  It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness is a forgotten name, and lust itself has grown ethereal; where anguish has become a grace and death a glory, and love the beginning and the end of all.  It is, too, the world of a poet, so that we reach it, not through melody nor through vision, but through the poet’s sweet articulation—­through verse.  Upon English ears the rhymed couplets of Racine sound strangely; and how many besides Mr. Bailey have dubbed his alexandrines ‘monotonous’!  But to his lovers, to those who have found their way into the secret places of his art, his lines are impregnated with a peculiar beauty, and the last perfection of style.  Over