French tragedy is mostly the working out of a moral situation. English tragedy holds the mirror up to manifold nature. The French tragedy is “heroic,” it seeks to interest and to elevate the soul by heroic sentiments dramatically displayed. We meet with heroes who are altogether noble, and with the opposite characters who are altogether base. They are “ideal” personages, who do little else but deliver artistic declamatory speeches in the manner of Seneca. On the other hand, the English tragedy represents men as they are, with all their complexities, inconsistencies, and shortcomings. The French do not, or did not, understand the English drama any better than we understand theirs. They call it irregular and inartistic. Voltaire at one period declared Shakespeare “a drunken savage, without the least spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules.” We, on the other hand, grow weary of the continuous and unrelieved progress of the one and only action, and of the vagueness of background and lack of individuality in “the ideal action performed by ideal characters.” The French portray types, not characters. The great masters accepted a fixed architecture for their plays and fixed limitations to work under, and their merit is that, despite these cramping conditions, they produced works of so elevated a literary and so exalted a moral style. It is not meant that Corneille, Racine, and the minor dramatists were as much alike as larger and smaller peas. A manifest difference, for example, which renders the plays of Racine more generally interesting than those of Corneille, is that Racine chooses subjects which come nearer home to most human beings. He brings us into one part, at least, of the practical human world, the world of love. The fault of French tragic drama is excess of rule and restraint; the fault of English drama had, by the time of the post-Shakespeareans, come to be excess of licence and consequent bad taste bordering on absurdity.