Similarly when Mr. Bailey, turning from the vocabulary to more general questions of style, declares that there is no ’element of fine surprise’ in Racine, no trace of the ’daring metaphors and similes of Pindar and the Greek choruses—­the reply is that he would find what he wants if he only knew where to look for it.  ‘Who will forget,’ he says, ’the comparison of the Atreidae to the eagles wheeling over their empty nest, of war to the money-changer whose gold dust is that of human bodies, of Helen to the lion’s whelps?...  Everyone knows these.  Who will match them among the formal elegances of Racine?’ And it is true that when Racine wished to create a great effect he did not adopt the romantic method; he did not chase his ideas through the four quarters of the universe to catch them at last upon the verge of the inane; and anyone who hopes to come upon ‘fine surprises’ of this kind in his pages will be disappointed.  His daring is of a different kind; it is not the daring of adventure but of intensity; his fine surprises are seized out of the very heart of his subject, and seized in a single stroke.  Thus many of his most astonishing phrases burn with an inward concentration of energy, which, difficult at first to realise to the full, comes in the end to impress itself ineffaceably upon the mind.

    C’etait pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit.

The sentence is like a cavern whose mouth a careless traveller might pass by, but which opens out, to the true explorer, into vista after vista of strange recesses rich with inexhaustible gold.  But, sometimes, the phrase, compact as dynamite, explodes upon one with an immediate and terrific force—­

    C’est Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee!

A few ‘formal elegances’ of this kind are surely worth having.

But what is it that makes the English reader fail to recognise the beauty and the power of such passages as these?  Besides Racine’s lack of extravagance and bravura, besides his dislike of exaggerated emphasis and far-fetched or fantastic imagery, there is another characteristic of his style to which we are perhaps even more antipathetic—­its suppression of detail.  The great majority of poets—­and especially of English poets—­produce their most potent effects by the accumulation of details—­details which in themselves fascinate us either by their beauty or their curiosity or their supreme appropriateness.  But with details Racine will have nothing to do; he builds up his poetry out of words which are not only absolutely simple but extremely general, so that our minds, failing to find in it the peculiar delights to which we have been accustomed, fall into the error of rejecting it altogether as devoid of significance.  And the error is a grave one, for in truth nothing is more marvellous than the magic with which Racine can conjure up out of a few expressions of the vaguest import a sense of complete and intimate reality.  When Shakespeare wishes to describe a silent night he does so with a single stroke of detail—­’not a mouse stirring’!  And Virgil adds touch upon touch of exquisite minutiae: