Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/723

* BACINE. good nature than either. Racine's domestic life was happy. He had seven children and a suffi- cient income from sinecure offices and from the post of royal historiographer, which he shared with Boileau. This involved the duty of accom- panying the King to his various 'sieges,' but what Racine wrote was accidentally burned. In 1685 lie pronounced in the Academy, of which he had been a member since 1673, a tine eulogy on Cor- neille, and in 1689 made a kind of return to the stage with Esther, written to be acted by the girls at Madame de ilaintenon's school at Saint- Cyr. It was a biblical dramatic poem and very successful. Athalie, a similar and greater piece (1691), was much less successful. Neither was publicly produced in Racine's lifetime. In his last years he grew ever more devout, wrote four Cantiques spirituels and an Histoire abregee de Port-Royal. For this or some other reason he lost Court favor. Tradition says it was for pre- paring a memoir on the miseries of the people. In ilarcb, 1698, he sought to clear himself of complicity in the Jansenist 'heresy' in a long letter to JIadame de JIaintenon. A careful examination of Racine's life and let- ters reveals a puzzling duality, a serious soul and a mobile mind. He was not merely religious; he was credulous and superstitious. He was more than loyal to the King; he was his toy. He was vain, irritable, timid, easily influenced by those he loved or feared. He was gentle and lovable, but the kind of moral goodness that he had was wholly consistent with moral weakness. His mind was keen, supple, strong, with good power of psychic analysis, remarkable delicacy of sentiment, and an exquisite though narrow sense of literary art. The best of him is in his work, a rare combination of wit and feeling, energy and poise, imagination and self-restraint, eloquence and repose. The production of Andromaque makes Xovem- ber 17, 1667, one of the great dates in the history of the French stage. It marked a new concep- tion of the tragedian's art. For Corneille's heroic tragedy is at that moment contrasted with Racine's tragedy of love. Corneille stands for the triumph of will, Racine for the inevitableness of destiny and of passion. This conditions his dramatic form. Since he deals with the universals of hu- man nature, he chooses a conventional environ- ment, whatever least distracts attention and least binds the development and play of passion. With comedy it is different. He puts the scene of Les plaideurs in the Paris of his day. The dominance of passion over will is accepted more readily in women than in men. and Racine's great characters are nearly all women. This is preeminently true of Phedre. Andromaque, and Iphiffeiiie. his three most popular tragedies. It is true, too. though in a different way. of Athalie and Esther. Racine's plays are simple. Each is a problem which the dramatist solves in a way often more consistent with logic than with psychology. Thus the dramatic element is enhanced, for Racine touches only such features in his characters as shall make them stand out clearly and do noth- ing to hinder the development of his plot. Every person behaves with the utmost decorum ; not one of them says anything inelegant or unrefined; there are no visible bloody deeds, no roughness even, and no jesting nor comedy. Herein Ra- cine's men and women constitute an ideal or Vol. XVI. —41. 635 RACK. rather an unreal society; perhaps it were better to say a society from which such features as did not fit Racine's ajsthetic theories are absent. Again, Racine took all his tragic themes from ancient history or legend, but his tragedies are nevertheless of the seventeenth century. French- men in French apparel are called Nero and Achil- les. Iphigenie is French to the core. Indeed, little remains of the old heroes and heroines, villains, and saints, save their names and the thread of historic tradition. Racine's tragedies teem with anachronisms, but these anachronisms are precisely what quickens the Racinian charac- ters and makes them national or racial. They are not restorations, but vivid adaptations. Racine's tragedies and his Plaideurs are writ- ten wholly in Alexandrine verse. In Athalie and Esther other measures are employed in the choruses. His vocabulary is limited. There are very few allusions to visible nature, to hills, rivers, plants, animals, etc. The whole interest, in a word, is centred in man, and mostly in the aristocracy. The mob, the lowly folk, even middle class people are conspicuously absent. Racine is therefore the poet of the high-bom. He has never appealed to the French nation as a whole, but rather to the most cultivated and fastidious classes, who find in him a precise and poetic interpretation of the loftier, more general sides of life. BiBLioGBAPHY. Of many editions of Racine the best is Mesnard's (7 vols., Paris, 1865-73). That by Girodet (3 vols., ib., 1801-05) is remark- able for its typograpliy. That of Anatole France is also noteworthy (s'vols., ib., 1874). The first edition is dated 1675-76; the last revision by Racine, 1697. There is an English translation (metrical) by Boswell, in Bohn's Library (Lon- don, 1889-91). Andromaque was adapted as The Distressed Mother by Ambrose Philips in 1712. Phedre was acted in London in English in 1707. For Racine's life we have llemoires. ed- ited by his son Louis (Lausanne, 1747). Con- sult the popular biograjihies by Larroumet in Les yrands eerirains frangais ' {Faris, 1898); Deschanel . (Paris, 1884); Jlonceaux ((Paris, 1892) : also Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare (ib., 1882); Blaze de Bury, Racine and the French Classical Drama (London, 1845) ; Sainte- Beuve, Port-Royal, vol. vi. (4th ed., Paris, 1878) ; Roy, Racine; sa vie intime (ib.. 1871), Stapfer, Racine et Victor Hugo (ib., 1887): Robert, La poetique de Racine (ib., 1890); Deltour, Les ennemis de Racine (ib.. 1892); De Grouchy, Documents inedits relntifs a .Jean Racine (ib., 1892) ; Delfour, La Bible dans Racine (ib., 1893). Bruneti&re, Etude» critiques de la litterature fran^aise, vol. i. (Paris, 1880) ; id., Histoire et litterature, vol. ii. (ib.. 1S84) -. id., Les epoques du theatre fran<;ais (ib., 1892); and Lemaitre, Impressions de theatre, vols, i., ii., iv. (Paris, 1888 et seq), contain useful criticism of Racine's dramatic art. The English series of Foreign Classics has a study by Trollope. Corneille and Racine (Edinburgh, ISSl). BACK (Goth, uf-raekjan, OHG., Ger. recken, to stretch : connected with Lat. regere. to stretch, rule, Gk. 6p4yei,v, oregein. Lith. raizyti. Skt. arj, to stretch). An obsolete instrument of torture, formerly used for extracting confessions from criminals and suspected persons. It consisted of a large oblong frame of wood, with four beams, slightly raised from the ground, on which the suf-