C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit.
The sentence is like a cavern whose mouth a careless traveller might pass by, but which opens out, to the true explorer, into vista after vista of strange recesses rich with inexhaustible gold. But, sometimes, the phrase, compact as dynamite, explodes upon one with an immediate and terrific force--
C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée!
A few 'formal elegances' of this kind are surely worth having.
But what is it that makes the English reader fail to recognise the beauty and the power of such passages as these? Besides Racine's lack of extravagance and bravura, besides his dislike of exaggerated emphasis and far-fetched or fantastic imagery, there is another characteristic of his style to which we are perhaps even more antipathetic--its suppression of detail. The great majority of poets--and especially of English poets--produce their most potent effects by the accumulation of details--details which in themselves fascinate us either by their beauty or their curiosity or their supreme appropriateness. But with details Racine will have nothing to do; he builds up his poetry out of words which are not only absolutely simple but extremely general, so that our minds, failing to find in it the peculiar delights to which we have been accustomed, fall into the error of rejecting it altogether as devoid of significance. And the error is a grave one, for in truth nothing is more marvellous than the magic with which Racine can conjure up out of a few expressions of the vaguest import a sense of complete and intimate reality. When Shakespeare wishes to describe a silent night he does so with a single stroke of detail--'not a mouse stirring'! And Virgil adds touch upon touch of exquisite minutiae:
Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pictaeque volucres, Quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis Rura tenent, etc.
Racine's way is different, but is it less masterly?
Mais tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune.
What a flat and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman's first thought--with the conventional 'Neptune,' and the vague 'armée,' and the commonplace 'vents.' And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce--the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and vastness and ominous hush.