Racine 5 



to truncate his action uncommonly, beginning much farther in 

 than is usual with him.^ And still in this case the result, as far as 

 it is not purely romantic, is Corneillean — the action, where it is 

 not extended, is merely compressed and makes no pretense to the 

 congruous simplicity demanded by the unities. In a word, it is 

 still analytic, no matter what artifice has been used to make it ap- 

 pear foreshortened. And it is just Racine's distinction to have 

 recognized this fact — of the essential incompatibility of such an 

 action with the unities of time and place, a fact to which Corneille 

 was totally blind — and to have succeeded in working out a gen- 

 uine unity of action in the strict sense of the word — a synthetic 

 action, that is, — which would be conformable with the other uni- 

 ties—though, indeed, it is a distinction that is usually overlooked 

 or misesteemed. 



As a matter of fact, the notorious rivalry between the two great 

 poets, amounting to little less than open hostility, ought to be 

 quite enough in itself to discredit the commonplace that Racine 

 was a mere successor or continuator to Corneille. In reality, 

 Racine, while accepting Corneille's definition of the drama in 

 general terms, censures expressly his management of at least two 

 unities, those of time and action, with severity. As Corneille was 

 in the habit of handling it, the unity of time was by his own con- 

 fession nothing but a barefaced trick or deception— barefaced to 

 the reader, however it might appear to the spectator. It con- 

 sisted, as he himself explains, in ignoring the actual duration of 

 events in favour of an hypothetical stage-day of twenty-four 

 hours or thereabouts. Upon his choice and organization of ma- 

 terial it exerted little or no influence. For the playwright who is 

 embarrassed by the extent of his subject or by a plethora of inci- 

 dent he has no better advice, as has been seen, than to refrain 

 from mentioning the topic on the ofif chance that the audience may 

 fail to notice the congestion of the action. In short, for all his 

 floundering Corneille never succeeded in imagining, much less in 

 defining, a unity of action commensurate with his ideal unities of 

 time and place. The nearest he comes to doing so is in his " unity 



3 I am referring, of course, to the so called " double time " of Othello. 



177 



