Racine ii 



la reduire a une proposition."^ The great weakness of the 

 romantic drama has always and everywhere been its lack of 

 theme. And particularly is this statement true of the Spanish 

 comniedia as practised by Calderon, Lope de Vega, and Tirso de 

 Molina. With the exception of a play or two like La Vida es 

 Sueno, Spanish tragedy is almost themeless — unless for the tire- 

 some pimdonor, and that is a motive rather than a theme. Or if 

 a romantic tragedy has happened to catch a momentary glimpse 

 of something that might have served it for a theme, the pressure 

 of incident has been so irresistible as to jostle it out of sight forth- 

 with. In the best of instances it remains rudimentary and in- 

 choate, hardly rising above the suggestion of a motive. There is 

 no place or leisure for it in the serried procession of events, 

 marching hurriedly by numerous degrees from a distant incep- 

 tion to a remote issue. The interest is distributed so impartially 

 over the series that little or no attention is left with which to ex- 

 haust the sense of a single situation. As far as I can remember, 

 there is nothing in romantic tragedy, for example, to parallel the 

 discussion over the corpse of Ajax — the soliloquies of Hamlet, 

 perhaps, excepted ; and even they seem strangely clouded in com- 

 parison. As for Corneille, he does marvellously well in this re- 

 spect for all his disadvantages, as witness Pompee and China. 

 But naturally enough, under the circumstances, it is in Racine, 

 whose characters of passion have little more to do than just to 

 exhaust the sense of their situation, that the theme attains its 

 fullest development. And it is one of his aptitudes that this 

 treatment should suit so well with the particular passion that he 

 picked as the lever of his tragedy. 



That, as compared with the Greeks, his conception of passion 

 was limited must be conceded. 



Cest Venus toute entiere a sa proye attachee.^ 



It would be idle to deny that his exclusive preoccupation with 

 one master passion — this virtual identification, for dramatic pur- 

 poses, of passion with sexual desire, gives his drama as a whole 



"^ Les Poetes du Steele de Louis XIV. 

 8 Phedre, I, iii. 



183 



