C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée! 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: Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pictaeque volucres, Quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis Rura tenent, etc. Racine's way is different, but is it less masterly? Mais tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune. What a flat and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman's first thought--with the conventional 'Neptune,' and the vague 'armée,' and the commonplace 'vents.' And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce--the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and vastness and ominous hush. It is particularly in regard to Racine's treatment of nature that this generalised style creates misunderstandings. 'Is he so much as aware,' exclaims Mr. Bailey, 'that the sun rises and sets in a glory of colour, that the wind plays deliciously on human cheeks, that the human ear will never have enough of the music of the sea? He might have written every page of his work without so much as looking out of the window of his study.' The accusation gains support from the fact that Racine rarely describes the processes of nature by means of pictorial detail; that, we know, was not his plan. But he is constantly, with his subtle art, suggesting them. In this line, for instance, he calls up, without a word of definite description, the vision of a sudden and brilliant sunrise: Déjà le jour plus grand nous frappe et nous éclaire. And how varied and beautiful are his impressions of the sea! He can give us the desolation of a calm: