the stage.  But Racine carried out his ideals more rigorously and more boldly than any of his successors.  He fixed the whole of his attention upon the spiritual crisis; to him that alone was of importance; and the conventional classicism so disheartening to the English reader—­the ‘unities,’ the harangues, the confidences, the absence of local colour, and the concealment of the action—­was no more than the machinery for enhancing the effect of the inner tragedy, and for doing away with every side issue and every chance of distraction.  His dramas must be read as one looks at an airy, delicate statue, supported by artificial props, whose only importance lies in the fact that without them the statue itself would break in pieces and fall to the ground.  Approached in this light, even the ’salle du palais de Pyrrhus’ begins to have a meaning.  We come to realise that, if it is nothing else, it is at least the meeting-ground of great passions, the invisible framework for one of those noble conflicts which ’make one little room an everywhere.’  It will show us no views, no spectacles, it will give us no sense of atmosphere or of imaginative romance; but it will allow us to be present at the climax of a tragedy, to follow the closing struggle of high destinies, and to witness the final agony of human hearts.

It is remarkable that Mr. Bailey, while seeming to approve of the classicism of Racine’s dramatic form, nevertheless finds fault with him for his lack of a quality with which, by its very nature, the classical form is incompatible.  Racine’s vision, he complains, does not ’take in the whole of life’; we do not find in his plays ’the whole pell-mell of human existence’; and this is true, because the particular effects which Racine wished to produce necessarily involved this limitation of the range of his interests.  His object was to depict the tragic interaction of a small group of persons at the culminating height of its intensity; and it is as irrational to complain of his failure to introduce into his compositions ‘the whole pell-mell of human existence’ as it would be to find fault with a Mozart quartet for not containing the orchestration of Wagner.  But it is a little difficult to make certain of the precise nature of Mr. Bailey’s criticism.  When he speaks of Racine’s vision not including ‘the whole of life,’ when he declares that Racine cannot be reckoned as one of the ‘world-poets,’ he seems to be taking somewhat different ground and discussing a more general question.  All truly great poets, he asserts, have ‘a wide view of humanity,’ ’a large view of life’—­a profound sense, in short, of the relations between man and the universe; and, since Racine is without this quality, his claim to true poetic greatness must be denied.  But, even upon the supposition that this view of Racine’s philosophical outlook is the true one—­and, in its most important sense, I believe that it is not—­does Mr. Bailey’s conclusion really follow?  Is it possible to test a poet’s