see at once how inveterate and malignant were the diseases to which the dramatic methods of the Elizabethans were a prey.  Wisdom and poetry are intertwined with flatness and folly; splendid situations drift purposeless to impotent conclusions; brilliant psychology alternates with the grossest indecency and the feeblest puns.  ’O matter and impertinency mixed!’ one is inclined to exclaim at such a spectacle.  And then one is blinded once more by the glamour of Lear and Othello; one forgets the defective system in the triumph of a few exceptions, and all plays seem intolerable unless they were written on the principle which produced Pericles and Titus Andronicus and the whole multitude of distorted and disordered works of genius of the Elizabethan age.

Racine’s principles were, in fact, the direct opposite of these.  ‘Comprehension’ might be taken as the watchword of the Elizabethans; Racine’s was ‘concentration’.  His great aim was to produce, not an extraordinary nor a complex work of art, but a flawless one; he wished to be all matter and no impertinency.  His conception of a drama was of something swift, simple, inevitable; an action taken at the crisis, with no redundancies however interesting, no complications however suggestive, no irrelevances however beautiful—­but plain, intense, vigorous, and splendid with nothing but its own essential force.  Nor can there be any doubt that Racine’s view of what a drama should be has been justified by the subsequent history of the stage.  The Elizabethan tradition has died out—­or rather it has left the theatre, and become absorbed in the modern novel; and it is the drama of crisis—­such as Racine conceived it—­which is now the accepted model of what a stage-play should be.  And, in this connexion, we may notice an old controversy, which still occasionally raises its head in the waste places of criticism—­the question of the three unities.  In this controversy both sides have been content to repeat arguments which are in reality irrelevant and futile.  It is irrelevant to consider whether the unities were or were not prescribed by Aristotle; and it is futile to ask whether the sense of probability is or is not more shocked by the scenic representation of an action of thirty-six hours than by one of twenty-four.  The value of the unities does not depend either upon their traditional authority or—­to use the French expression—­upon their vraisemblance.  Their true importance lies simply in their being a powerful means towards concentration.  Thus it is clear that in an absolute sense they are neither good nor bad; their goodness or badness depends upon the kind of result which the dramatist is aiming at.  If he wishes to produce a drama of the Elizabethan type—­a drama of comprehension—­which shall include as much as possible of the varied manifestations of human life, then obviously the observance of the unities must exercise a restricting and narrowing influence