At this time, Racine. in the zenith of his glory, forsook the theatre at the age of 37. He married, reverted to the Christian religion, and this great passionate master became trans formed into the best of husbands and fathers. It was fated, however, that he should bequeath two more works to the theatre, though after an absence of 12 years and under very different conditions. At the request of Madame de Maintenon he composed for the ladies of Saint Cyr two religious tragedies with choirs, (Esther) (1687) and (1689), a work which is unique for its purity and vigor. Vol taire saw in it ale chef d'oeuvre de l'esprit hu main" ("the masterpiece of the human spirit").
As we have pointed out, Racine was the very antithesis of Corneille. He portrayed to us the wandering at random, abandoning itself to its destiny, the latter being to love and die for love. All his heroes might repeat with Oreste: me livre en aveugle an destin qui m'entraine (°I yield blindly to the fate that impels me"), and all his heroines echo with Phedre: Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee" (°It is Venus entirely fastened on her prey")..
Racine's art is unrivalled. His poesy is as sweet and melodious as music and colored as a painting. His imagination, of a marvelous rich ness, evokes the splendors of a fête in Imperial Rome, or the horrors of : . . . cette nuit cruelle qui fut pour tout tin peuple tine nuit eternelle° (". . . . that cruel night which was an eternal night for a whole nation)).
If it is borne in mind that he used the sim plest methods, that his tragedies contained as little matter as possible, and that he excelled in creating "something out of nothing," it is not difficult to understand Voltaire's unstinted praise and his preference for "the perfect trag edies of Racine° to the "sublime scenes of Cor neille ° Voltaire has employed the right epi thet: In Racine we find perfection.
Besides these two illustrious names all others pale. We might, however, cite Thomas Cor neille, 20 years his brother's junior, who possessed a vapid and romantic talent, and above all, Rotrou, of an original imagination with occasional flashes of genius. His 'Saint Genest' is a weird Christian tragedy, wherein the hero, a comedian, becomes a martyr. Pra don is known only• by his (Phedre,' written with the special object of discrediting Racine's work of the same name, and Quinault, the tamest of tragedy authors, is more famed for his numerous operatic compositions. Hereafter tragedy may be considered as dead. Voltaire
and Cribillon, in their brilliant but factitious works, endeavored to give it an appearance of revival, but at the end of the following cen tury it disappeared entirely from the stage.
Classical Comedy.—In the 17th century it may be said that comedy is incarnated in one name, hut what a name: Moliere! The great est name in dramatic art after Shakespeare. It would, however, he unjust to overlook certain other authors among his predecessors, con temporaries or successors.
In the first place, we have Corneille. He made his debut with the three following light comedies (Melite) (1629), 'La Place Royale' (1634) and 'L'Illusion (1636). In 1643 Menteur' appeared, which was the first character comedy given in France before Mo liere's plays, and in 1644 we Shave (La Suite du Menteur.' Scarron, with his burlesque com edy (Don Japhet d'Armenie) (1644), and Cy rano de Bergerac, with (Le Pedant Joni' (1654), furnished certain elements from which our great comedian gleaned a few ideas, for he never made a secret of the fact that he "adopted ideas wherever he found them? Furthermore, the Italian comedies played in Paris supplied him with ready-made material for plots and topics on which he could exercise his genius.
can Baptiste Poquelin, called Moliere, a native Parisian, was horn in 1622 in the shop of an upholsterer to the king, situated under the columns of a densely populated middle class quarter of Paris. He rubbed shoulders from his childhood with those who were later on to figure in his works. When still. very young he founded, with a few friends, the Theatre Illustre; the troupe led a precarious ex istence in Paris and drifted to the provinces. Moliere was the guiding spirit, manager, actor and author. At the beginning he merely com posed a few farces, crude sketches on the lines of the Italian theatre in which the actors suited the Bests and words to their own fancy. He returned to Paris in 1658 and thereafter led an exceedingly strenuous life. His literary output was prodigious and he composed his works, even his masterpieces, in feverish haste, often on the order of the king who commanded his troupe to play at Versailles. In the meantime, he married one of his actresses, Madeleine Mart, pretty, coauette and 20 years his junior, on whose account he experienced great suffer ing. Finally, worn out and broken by the in tense life he led, he died on the stage while playing in his piece