Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/227

Rh R A C li A C 209 and his unbroken friendship for Boileau are the sole points of his life which are entirely creditable to him. His conduct to Moliere and to Nicole cannot be excused ; his attitude towards his critics and his rivals was querulous and spiteful ; his relation to Corneille contrasts strikingly with the graceful position which young men of letters, sometimes by no means his inferiors, have often taken up towards the surviving glories of a past generation ; his " conver- sion," though there is no just cause for branding it as hypocritical, appears to have been a singularly accommodating one, enabling him to tolerate adultery, to libel his friends in secret, and to flatter greatness unhesitatingly. None of these things perhaps are very heinous crimes, but they are all of the class of misdoing which, fairly or unfairly, mankind are apt to regard with greater dislike than positive misdeeds of a more glaring but less unheroic character. The personality of an author is, however, by all the laws of the saner criticism, entirely independent of the rank to be assigned to his work, and, as in other cases, the strongest dislike for the char- acter of Racine as a man is compatible with the most unbounded admiration of his powers as a writer. But here again his injudicious admirers have interposed a difficulty. There is a theory common in France, and sometimes adopted out of it, that only a Frenchman, and not every Frenchman, can properly appreciate Racine. The charm of his verse and of his dramatic presentation is so esoteric and delicate that foreigners cannot hope to taste it. This is of course absurd, and if it were true it would be fatal to Racine's claims as a poet of the highest rank. Such poets, such writers, are not paro- chial or provincial, and even the greatest nations are but provinces or parishes in the realm of literature. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, even Moliere, Rabelais, Goethe, are not afraid to challenge the approval of the whole world, and the whole world is not found incom- petent or unwilling to give it. Nor need Racine in reality avail himself of this unwise pretension. Judged by the common tests of literature he is a consummate artist, but he is scarcely a great poet, for his art, though unsurpassed in its kind, is narrow in range and his poetry is neither of the highest nor of the most genuine. He may be considered from two very different points of view, (1) as a playwright and poetical artificer, and (2) as a dramatist and a poet. From the first point of view there is hardly any praise too high for him. He did not invent the form he practised, and those who, from want of attention to the historical facts, assume that he did are unskilful as well as ignorant. When he came upon the scene the form of French plays was settled, partly by the energetic efforts of the Pleiade and their successors, partly by the reluctant acquiescence of Corneille. It is barely possible that the latter might, if he had chosen, have altered the course of French tragedy ; it is nearly certain that Racine could not. But Corneille, though he was himself more responsible than any one else for the acceptance of the single -situation tragedy, never frankly gave himself up to it, and the inequality of his work is due to this. His heart was, though not to his knowledge, elsewhere, and with Shake- speare. Racine, in whom the craftsman dominated the man of genius, worked with a will and without any misgivings. Every advantage which the Senecan tragedy adapted to modern times was capable of he gave it. He perfected its versification ; he subordi- nated its scheme entirely to the one motive which could have free play in it, the display of a conventionally intense passion ; he set himself to produce in verse a kind of Ciceronian correctness. The grammar criticisms of Vaugelas and the taste criticisms of Boileau produced in him no feeling of revolt, but only a determination to play the game according to these new rules with triumphant accuracy. And he did so play it. He had supremely the same faculty which enabled the rhetoriqueurs of the 15th century to execute apparently impossible tours de force in ballades couronnees, and similar tricks. He had besides a real and saving vein of truth to nature, which preserved him from tricks pure and simple. He would be and he was as much a poet as prevalent taste would let him be. The result is that such plays as Phedre and Andromaque are supreme in their own way. If the critic will only abstain from thrusting in tierce, when according to the particular rules he ought to thrust in quart, Racine is sure to beat him. But there is a higher game of criticism than this, and this game Racine does not attempt to play. He does not even attempt the highest poetry at all. His greatest achievements in pure passion the foiled desires of Hermione and the jealous frenzy of Phedre are cold, not merely beside the crossed love of Ophelia and the remorse of Lady Macbeth, but beside the sincerer if less perfectly expressed passion of Corneille's Cleopatre and Camille. In men's parts he fails still more completely. As the decency of his stage would not allow him to make his heroes frankly heroic, so it would not allow him to make them utterly passionate. He had, moreover, cut away from himself by the adoption of the Senecan model all the opportunities which would have been offered to his remarkably varied talent on a freer stage. It is indeed tolerably certain that he never could have achieved the purely poetical comedy of As You Like It or the Vida cs Sueno, but the admirable success of Les Plaidcurs makes it at least probable that he might have done some- thing in a lower and a more conventional style. From all this, however, he deliberately cut himself off. Of the whole world whicL is subject to the poet he took only a narrow artificial and conven- tional fraction. Within these narrow bounds he did work which no admirer of literary craftsmanship can regard without admiration. But at the same time no one speaking with competence can deny that the bounds are narrow. It would be unnecessary to contrast his performances with his limitations so sharply if those limitations had not been denied. But they have been and are still denied by persons whose sentence carries weight, and therefore it is still neces- sary to point out the fact of their existence. Nearly all Racine's works are mentioned in the above notice. There is here no room for a bibliographical account of their separate appearances. The first collected edition was in 1675-76, and contained the nine tragedies which had then appeared. The last and most complete which appeared in the poet's life- time (1697) was revised by him, and contains the dramas and a few miscellane- ous works. Like the editio princeps, it is in 2 vols. 12mo. The posthumous editions are innumerable and gradually became more and more complete. The most noteworthy are the Amsterdam edition of 1722 ; that by Abbe d*Olivet, also at Amsterdam, 1743 ; the Paris quarto of 1760 ; the edition of Luneau de Boisjermain, Paris and London, 1768 ; the magnificent illustrated folios of 1805 (Paris) ; the edition of Germain Gamier with La Harpe's commentary, 1807 ; Geoffrey's of the next year ; Aime Martin's of 1820 ; and lastly, the grands tcrivains edition of Paul Mesnard (Paris, 1865-73). This last contains almost all that is necessary for the study of the poet, and has been chiefly used in Preparing the above notice. Louis Racine's Life was first published in 1747. ranslations and imitations of Racine are innumerable. In English the Dis- tressed Mother of Philips and the PheedraandHippolytus of Smith, both composed more or less under Addison's influence, are the most noteworthy. (G. SA.) EACKETS. Like tennis, this game of ball is of French origin, and its name is derived from " raquette," the French term for the bat used in the pastime. In the United Kingdom it is not so universally pursued as cricket and football, and is essentially an indoor game, which is played only in prepared and covered courts. Such buildings have been erected at many of the large public schools, at the universities, and in garrison towns, where will be found the chief exponents of rackets, a game which requires active running powers, quick eyesight, and dexterity of hand. The old "open" courts, which merely consisted of a plain wall without any side walls, are now almost obsolete and need not be FRONT WALL Sf Feet Of Feet LEFT SERVICE SPACE RIGHT SERVICE SPACE SERVICE LINE further mentioned. The usual dimen- sions of a "close" court are 80 feet by 40 feet for four- handed matches, whilst 60 feet by 30 feet are sufficient for a single match. Sometimes courts are built of an in- termediate size so as to be available for either single or double matches. The front wall of a court should be 40 feet high, the back one 14 feet, the space over the latter being utilized by a gallery for specta- tors, umpire, and marker. The side walls are 40 feet high throughout, in order to support the roof. This must be well lit with sky- lights carried on light iron girders and protected inside with wire -work in order to ward off damage from the balls. Bricks make the best walls, which must be plastered inside with Roman cement or plaster of Paris, set to a perfectly level surface in order that the balls may rebound evenly. In the military officers' courts in India this plaster is painted white for the sake of XX. 27 LEFT BACK COURTS BACK HIGHT BACK COURT WALL Racket court.