RACINE, JEAN (1639-1699), French tragic dramatist, was born at La Ferte-Milon (Aisne), and was christened on Dec. 22, 1639. His father was a solicitor, and held the office of con troleur au grenier a sel at La Ferte. Racine's mother died when he was little more than a year old and his father married again but himself died soon afterwards, whereupon the poet went to his grandparents, who had strong Jansenist leanings. He was sent to the grammar school at Beauvais, and in Oct. 1655 was transferred to the school which the "Solitaires" had established at Port Royal. He was a diligent student, and wrote verse both in Latin and French, his Port Royal odes being far from despi cable. In 1658 he was entered at the College d'Harcourt, and it is clear from his correspondence, which, as we have it, begins in 166o, that he was not at all of an austere disposition at this time, and that he was already given up irrevocably to literature. The marriage of Louis XIV. was the occasion an ambitious ode, La nymphe de la Seine, which earned 600 livres, and in 166o Racine finished one piece, Amasie, and undertook another, Les A mours d'Ovide, for the theatre. The first, however, was rejected by the actors of the Marais, and it is not certain that the other was ever finished. Racine's letters show that he was intimate with more than one actress at this time; he also made acquaint ance with La Fontaine, and the foundations of the legendary "society of four" (Boileau, La Fontaine, Moliere and Racine) were thus laid. In Nov. 1661 he went to Uzes in Languedoc to live with his uncle the Pere Sconin, vicar-general of that diocese, whose attempts to secure a benefice for him were, however, in vain. Racine was back in Paris before the end of 1663, and an ode on the recovery of Louis XIV. from a slight illness secured him another grant of 600 livres in the summer of 1664. The ode in which he thanked the king for his presents, La Renommee, is said to have introduced him to Boileau, to whose censorship he was deeply indebted. Unfortunately there is a break in his corre spondence after Nov. 1663, and from this time forward the
gossip of the period, and the Life by his son Louis, who was only six years old when his father died, are our main sources.
The first but the least characteristic of the dramas by which Racine is known, La Thebaide, was played by Moliere's com pany at the Palais Royal theatre on June 20, 1664. In Feb. 1665 the greater part of his second acted play, Alexandre le Grand, was read before a distinguished audience at the Hotel de Nevers, and Moliere's company played it on Dec. 4. But a fortnight after wards Alexandre was played, "de complot avec M. Racine," says La Grange, by the rival actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and Racine's friendship with Moliere ended in consequence. If, how ever, Alexandre was the occasion of showing the defects of Racine's character as a man, it raised him vastly in public esti mation as a poet. He was now for the first time proposed as a serious rival to Corneille, and the contrast between the two was accurately apprehended and put by Saint Evremond in his masterly Dissertation sur l'Alexandre, still the best criticism of the faults of Racine, though not of the merits, which had not yet been fully seen. It may be added that in the preface of the printed play the poet showed the extreme sensitiveness to criticism which often accompanies a tendency to criticize others. These defects of character showed themselves still more fully in another matter. The Port Royalists detested the theatre, and in Jan. 1666 Nicole, their chief writer, spoke of dramatic poets as "empoisonneurs publics." Racine immediately published a letter to the author, which, though very smartly written, is full of savage personalities. He had written a second pamphlet and was about to publish it when fortunately Boileau, who had been absent from Paris, returned and protested against the publica tion. It remained accordingly unprinted till after the author's death, and in later years he expressed bitter regret for having published the first.