Those ordinary words, that simple construction—­what can there be there to deserve our admiration?  On the surface, very little no doubt; but if we plunge below the surface we shall find a great profundity and a singular strength.  Racine is in reality a writer of extreme force—­but it is a force of absolute directness that he wields.  He uses the commonest words, and phrases which are almost colloquial; but every word, every phrase, goes straight to its mark, and the impression produced is ineffaceable.  In English literature there is very little of such writing.  When an English poet wishes to be forceful he almost invariably flies to the gigantic, the unexpected, and the out-of-the-way; he searches for strange metaphors and extraordinary constructions; he surprises us with curious mysteries and imaginations we have never dreamed of before.  Now and then, however, even in English literature, instances arise of the opposite—­the Racinesque—­method.  In these lines of Wordsworth, for example—­

    The silence that is in the starry sky,
    The sleep that is among the lonely hills—­

there is no violent appeal, nothing surprising, nothing odd—­only a direct and inevitable beauty; and such is the kind of effect which Racine is constantly producing.  If he wishes to suggest the emptiness, the darkness, and the ominous hush of a night by the seashore, he does so not by strange similes or the accumulation of complicated details, but in a few ordinary, almost insignificant words—­

    Mais tout dort, et l’armee, et les vents, et Neptune.

If he wishes to bring before the mind the terrors of nightmare, a single phrase can conjure them up—­

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

By the same simple methods his art can describe the wonderful and perfect beauty of innocence—­

    Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur;

and the furies of insensate passion—­

    C’est Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee.

But the flavour of poetry vanishes in quotation—­and particularly Racine’s, which depends to an unusual extent on its dramatic surroundings, and on the atmosphere that it creates.  He who wishes to appreciate it to the full must steep himself in it deep and long.  He will be rewarded.  In spite of a formal and unfamiliar style, in spite of a limited vocabulary, a conventional versification, an unvaried and uncoloured form of expression—­in spite of all these things (one is almost inclined, under the spell of Racine’s enchantment, to say because of them)—­he will find a new beauty and a new splendour—­a subtle and abiding grace.