6 Prosser Hall Frye 



of peril " ;* and how unsatisfactory that was he was himself the 

 first to acknowledg'e. To all intents and purposes his action re- 

 mains of the same dimensions as that of the Spanish, commedia; 

 it is as diffuse and protracted, as wanting in concision and con- 

 centration : — his efforts are directed solely toward disguising its 

 character. Apparently it never occurred to him that the solution 

 of the whole problem consisted in such an ordonnance of his plot 

 that the unities of time and place should be involved in the nature 

 of the action itself and should result from it, instead of being 

 imposed upon it as a durance or constraint. As a matter of fact, 

 the unities of time and place, as far as they are valid at all, are 

 only functions of the unity of action. 



At all events, it is directly against this method of dramatic 

 composition that Racine directs his satire in replying to the de- 

 tractors of his Britanniciis: 



" What can be done," he asks, " to satisfy such rigorous 

 judges " as these umbrageous Corneilleans. And he answers : 

 " Nothing is easier in defiance of good sense. All you have to do is 

 to abandon naturalness for extravagance. Instead of a simple 

 action [italics mine] made up of a modest amount of material, 

 which takes place in a single day and advances gradually to a con- 

 clusion sustained only by the interests, sentiments, and passions 

 of the characters, you must cram this same action with a great 

 quantity of incidents which could not possibly come to pass in 

 less than a month, with a vast amount of stage clap-trap the more 

 amazing the more unlikely it is, with a multitude of declamations 

 wherein the actors are made to say just the contrary of what they 

 should." 



And to the same effect in a familiar passage of the preface to 

 Berenice he insists upon this pertinent simplicity of action : — 



" Nothing matters much in tragedy save likelihood ; and what 

 is the likelihood that there should happen in a single day a multi- 

 tude of things which could hardly happen in several weeks? 

 Some there are who think that this simplicity is a sign of small 

 invention. They fail to notice that on the contrary all invention 

 consists in making something out of nothing and that all this 



4 Examen d'Horace. 



178 



