Those who believe in genius have the opportunity, when contemplating Racine, to verify the fact that a civilization which has reached its pinnacle … is itself a genius—the genius of Pericles or of Louis XIV…. One of its virtues is that, instead of the smaller means by which writers in less complete epochs acquire their experience—misfortune, observations of men in daily life, affairs of the heart or conjugal crises—there is substituted in these happier periods, an instinctive knowledge of great spirits and great moments. Racine is the most perfect illustration of this. No childhood was further removed than his from the laws of childhood…. His adolescence was not less theoretical…. Studying and the joys of studying were to him the substitutes for all contact with life, all happiness, all catastrophes, up to the day when he entered a world even more devoid of steadiness: the theatre. He knew people and actions only in fancy-dress. Yet, from the contact of this young man without youth and this artificial society, was suddenly born the most direct and most realistic work of the century.

Aesthetic laws are, no doubt, as rigid as mathematical laws: Racine evolves his discoveries about human beings with an abstraction, a detachment from humanity as lofty as the indifference of the geometrician for the family life of figures. There is not one sentiment in Racine that is not a literary sentiment…. Nothing in him is visionary or real, frantic or discouraged. His bitterness, when he is bitter, does not come from his being lame or imposed upon; his mellowness from being at peace; his power from being athletic—but from his being a writer.

His method, his only method, consists in taking from the outside, through style and poetics, as through a fish-net, a catch of truths of which he himself only suspects the presence…. The yeast of his talent is purely literary. Not only did Racine never take his inspiration from the questions that the intellectual currents … urged upon his time … but he did not let even one of them touch his inner life….

There was no "question of the theatre" at the time Racine began to write…. It would have irritated him, moreover, to waste time in reforms and innovations. The theatre is a microcosm where the poetical, moral and material preferences and tastes of an age should shine forth in their greatest splendor and passions, but the theatre cannot create perceptions in the spectator; it takes them for granted. A literary generation, a literary age, can end with a theatrical era but never starts with one. Good drama is an accumulation of perfections; although the reader may look for new discoveries in the course of his reading, the spectator wants only enjoyment from his spectacle. This excludes from the theatre every manifestation which is only a quest or a lesson; which does not instinctively embrace dramatic life such as actuality has created it…. Great drama is the drama which convinces minds already convinced, moves souls already shaken, dazzles eyes already enlightened. It is as a student submitting to the customs and the laws of its genre that Racine came to the theatre.