Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/226

208 RACINE se croit courtisan," makes it appear that his comparatively low birth was not forgotten at Versailles. Racine's first campaign was at the siege of Ypres in 1678, where some practical jokes are said to have been played on the two civilians who acted this early and peculiar variety of the part of special correspondent. Again in 1683, in 1687, and in each year from 1691 to 1693 Racine accompanied the king on similar expeditions. The literary results of these have been spoken of. His labours brought him, in addition to his other gains, frequent special presents from the king, one of which was as much as 1000 pistoles. In 1690 he further received the office of " gentilhomme ordinaire du roi," which afterwards passed to his son. Thus during the later years of his life he was more prosperous than is usual with poets. His domestic life appears to have been a happy one. Louis Racine tells us that his mother " did not know what a verse was," but Racine certainly knew enough about verses for both. They had seven children. The eldest, Jean Baptiste, was born in 1678 ; the youngest, Louis, in 1692. It has been said that he was thus too young to have many personal memories of his father, but he tells one or two stories which show Racine to have been at any rate a man of strong family affection, as, moreover, his letters prove. Between the two sons came five daughters, Marie, Anne, Elizabeth, Franchise, and Madeleine. The eldest, after showing "vocation," married in 1699, Anne and Elizabeth took the veil, the youngest two remained single but did not enter the cloister. To complete the notice of family matters much of Racine's later correspondence is addressed to his sister Marie, Madame Riviere. The almost complete silence in the literary sphere which Racine imposed on himself after the comparative failure, shameful not for himself but for his adversaries, of PJtedre was broken once or twice even before the appearance of the two exquisite tragedies in which under singular circum- stances he took leave of the stage. The most honourable of these was the reception of Thomas Corneille on 2d January 1685 at the Academy in the room of his brother. The discourse which Racine then pronounced turned almost entirely on his great rival, of whom he spoke even more than becomingly. But it was an odd conjunction of the two reigning passions of the latter part of his life devoutness and obsequiousness to the court which made him once more a dramatist. Madame de Maintenon had established an institution, first called the Maison Saint Louis, and afterwards (from the place to which it was transferred) the Maison de Saint Cyr, for the education of poor girls of noble family. The tradition of including acting in edu- cation was not obsolete. At first the governess, Madame de Grinon, composed pieces for representation, but, says Madame de Caylus, a witness at first hand and a good judge, they were "detestable." Then recourse was had to chosen plays of Corneille and Racine, but here there were obvious objections. The favourite herself wrote to Racine that "nos petites filles" had played Andromaque "a great deal too well." She asked the poet for a new play suited to the circumstances, and, though Boileau advised him against it, it is not wonderful that he yielded. The result was the masterpiece of Esther, with music by Moreau, the court composer and organist of Saint Cyr. Although played by schoolgirls and in a dormitory, it had an enormous success, in which it may be charitably hoped that the transparent comparison of the patroness to the heroine had not too much to do. Printed shortly afterwards, it had to suffer a certain reaction, or perhaps a certain vengeance, from those who had not been admitted to the private stage. But no competent judge could hesitate. Racine probably had read and to some extent followed the Aman of Montchrestien, but he made of it only the use which a proved master in literature has a perfect right to make of his forerunners. The beauty of the chorus, which Racine had restored more probably from a study of the Ple"iade tragedy than from classical suggestions, the per- fection of the characters, and the wonderful art of the whole piece need no praise. Almost immediately the poet was at work on another and a still finer piece of the same kind, and he had probably finished At/talie before the end of 1690. The fate of the play, however, was very different from that of Esther. Some fuss had been made about the worldliness of great court fetes at Saint Cyr, and the new play, with settings as before by Moreau, was acted both at Versailles and at Saint Cyr with much less pomp and ceremony than Esther. It was printed in March 1691 and the public cared very little for it. The truth is that the last five-and-twenty years of the reign of Louis XIV. were marked by one of the lowest tides of literary accom- plishment and appreciation in the history of France. The just judgment of posterity has ranked Athalie, if not as Racine's best work (and there are good grounds for consider- ing it to be this), at any rate as equal to his best. Thence- forward Racine was practically silent, except for four can- tiques sjriritiielles, in the style and with much of the merit of the choruses of Esther and Athalie. The general literary sentiment led by Fontenelle (who inherited the wrongs of Corneille, his uncle, and whom Racine had taken care to estrange further) was against the arrogant critic and the irritable poet, and they made their case worse by espousing the cause of La Bruyere, whose personalities in his Carao- teres had made him one of the best hated men in France, and by engaging in the ancient and modern battle with Perrault. Racine, moreover, was a constant and spiteful epigrammatist, and the unlucky habit of preferring his joke to his friend stuck by him to the last. A savage epigram on the Sesostris of Longepierre, who had done him no harm and was his familiar acquaintance, dates as late as 1695. Still the king maintained him in favour, and so long as this continued he could afford to laugh at Grub Street and the successors of the Hotel de Rambouillet alike. At last, however, there seems (for the matter is not too clear) to have come a change. Some say that he disobliged Madame de Maintenon, some (and this would be much to his honour, but not exactly in accord with anything else known of him) that, like Vauban and F6nelon, he urged the growing misery of the people. But there seems to be little doubt of the fact of the royal displeasure, and it is even probable that it had some effect on his health. Disease of the liver appears to have been the immediate cause of his death, which took place on 12th April 1699. The king seems to have, at any rate, forgiven him after his death, and he gave the family a pension of 2000 livres. Racine was buried at Port Royal, but even this transaction was not the last of his relations with that famous home of religion and learning. After the destruction of the abbey in 1 7 1 1 his body was exhumed and transferred to Saint Etienne du Mont, his gravestone being left behind and only restored to his ashes a hundred years later, in 1818. His eldest son was never married; his eldest daughter and Louis Racine have left descendants to the present day. A critical biography of Racine is, in more ways than one, an ex- ceptionally difficult undertaking, not in regard to the facts, which, as will have been seen, are fairly abundant, but as to the construc- tion to be placed on them. The admirers of Racine's literary genius have made it a kind of religion to defend his character ; and strict- ures on his character, it seems to be thought, imply a desire to depreciate his literary worth. The reader of the above sketch of his life must judge for himself whether Racine is or is net to be ranked with those great men of letters, fortunately the giv.it IT number, whose personality is attractive and their foibles at worst excusable. , There is no doubt that the general impression givm, not merely by the flying anecdotes of the time, but by ascertained facts, is somewhat unfavourable. Racine's affection for his family