Racine 3 



the incidents of your play into the compass of a single day and 

 dodge circumspectly anything that may call the attention of the 

 audience to the passage of dramatic time in the hope that they 

 may not notice the imposture. Every Corneillean tragedy con- 

 forms more or less closely to this general rule. I can not think 

 of one in which there is not some embarrassment in supposing 

 that the whole action elapses within twenty-four hours. 



On this account it is not quite fair to represent Racine as merely 

 taking over Corneille's model. To the formal theory and criti- 

 cism of French tragedy, it may be, the former contributed little. 

 But if drama is a craft in any sense of the word, then the man 

 who took up tragedy at the point to which Corneille had brought 

 it and carried it on to the point where Racine left it, can hardly be 

 said to have added little or nothing to it. And the misconception 

 arises, I believe, from a persistent confusion with regard to one 

 of the unities — to wit, the unity of action. 



However it may be with the unities of time and place, we are 

 commonly assured that all drama, the romantic not excepted, has 

 one unity in common, the unity of action ; for such unity, it is 

 speciously added, is indispensable to a dramatic work of any kind. 

 That the statement is true in one sense, may be granted; most 

 statements are so in some sense or other. But that the romantic 

 drama possesses unity of action in the same sense as the classic 

 drama — or even anything that would have been recognized as a 

 unity by Aristotle — such a position can hardly be maintained with 

 any great show of plausibility. Indeed, so great is the difference 

 in kind that the use of the same term with reference to the two 

 dramas is misleading and bewildering in the extreme. As well 

 say that romantic tragedy possesses unity of time and place be- 

 cause each individual scene is within itself continuous and sta- 

 tionary. 



The fact is that the romantic and the classic action are con- 

 ceived in two quite different manners and produce two quite dis- 

 tinct impressions. While the latter, as everybody acknowledges, 

 is concerned only for the upshot or issue of a certain business or 

 transaction ; the former is concerned equally for its inception and 

 development — for the soil in w'hich the tragic seed is planted and 



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