Racine, JEAN, the greatest tragic dramatist of France, was born at La Ferté-Milon, in the modern department of Aisne, in December 1639, and was baptised on the 22d of that month. His father was a procureur or solicitor by profession, and held, like his father before him, the office of comptroller of salt at La Ferté. His mother died while he was still a child, whereupon his father married again, but soon after died also. The boy was taken care of by his maternal grandfather, and was sent for his education to the college of Beauvais, whence he passed to Port Royal in October 1655, being, indeed, closely connected, both on the father's and mother's side of the family, with the famous abbey. Here he studied hard under the especial care of Claude Lancelot, Nicole, and Le Maître, and at an early age discovered a faculty for verse-making and, still worse, a liking for romance that caused his good teachers no small uneasiness. He was almost nineteen when he left Port Royal to pursue the course of philosophy at the Collège d'Harcourt, and here he appears to some extent to have exchanged the severity of his Jansenist upbringing for the libertinism of the world of his day, as well as to have first felt the attraction of the life of letters. Naturally he became estranged from his Port Royal friends, who saw spiritual ruin in his worldliness and his intimacy with the abhorred actors and actresses. Meantime he had written an ode, La Nymphé de la Seine, on the marriage of Louis XIV., finished one piece and begun another for the theatre, and made the acquaintance of La Fontaine, Chapelain, and other men of letters. About this time he lived a while under the care of his cousin, N. Vitart, fifteen years his senior, and gave him some kind of assistance in his work as financial secretary to the Duc de Luynes. Many letters of this period to Vitart, the Abbé Le Vasseur, and La Fontaine are extant, and show how the lessons of Port Royal were fading into forgetfulness, as his true vocation opened itself up before his eyes. The great dispersion of the solitaires of Port Royal took place in 1661, and, from Racine's contemporary letters to the Abbé Le Vasseur, it troubled him but lightly. In November 1661 he went to Uzès in Languedoc, hoping, but in vain, to get a benefice from his maternal uncle, the vicar-general of the diocese, and here he divided his time between St Thomas, Virgil, and Ariosto. Again in Paris before the beginning of 1664, he obtained in August of that year a pension from the king of six hundred francs for a congratulatory ode. But indeed he received almost to the end of his life handsome rewards in money—'gratifications'—from the court. An ode of gratitude to the king for one of these, La Renommée aux Muses, gained him the life-long friendship of Boileau, and from about this time began the famous but much over-estimated friendship of 'the four'—Boileau, La Fontaine, Molière, and Racine. Unfortunately from about this point there is a break in his correspondence, so that we lack satisfactory evidence about the most doubtful and, at the same time, interesting points in his career—his singular spite against Molière, his bitter attack upon Port Royal, and his final conversion and retirement from dramatic work. His earliest play, La Thébaïde ou Les Frères Ennemis, was acted by Molière's company at the Palais Royal theatre in June 1664; his second, Alexandre le Grand, in December 1665. After the sixth performance the latter was without explanation represented by the rival actors at the Hôtel de Bourgogne—a fact which of course involved a complete breach of friendship between Molière and himself. This famous quarrel is difficult beyond most to clear up, but there is at least light enough to see that the wrong did not rest with Molière. Racine showed himself as hostile to Corneille, most probably only because the older dramatist judged the younger's work somewhat severely. But he soon plunged into a yet more discreditable quarrel. Stung by one of Nicole's Lettres Visionnaires (January 1666) condemning the romancer or the dramatic poet as an 'empoisonneur public' in accordance with the ethics of Port Royal, he published a clever and stinging letter to the author, in which he heaped disgrace on his own head by indecent personalities upon Nicole and even his dead teacher Le Maître. Boileau's advice alone saved him from further shaming himself with a second. 'This letter,' said Boileau, 'may do credit to your intellect, but certainly none at all to your heart.' Later in life Racine himself said he would give his heart's blood to wipe out the most disgraceful blot upon his life. His repentance made noble atonement for the wrong—as for the literary quality of the letters, for brilliant wit and delicate irony they were not unworthy of the hand of Pascal.
During the next thirteen years Racine produced his greatest work, seeking relaxation from labour in at least one liaison with an actress. His plays followed in this order: Andromaque (1667), with its charming character Hernione; Les Plaideurs (1668), a delightful little comedy of satire against lawyers, which Molière was the first to appreciate; Britannicus (1669), which Voltaire styled 'la pièce des connaisseurs'; Bérénice (1670), written unconsciously in competition with Corneille, the same theme having been given to both poets by Henrietta of Orleans; Bajazet (1672), admirable, but anything rather than oriental; Mithridate (1673), produced almost at the moment of his admission to the French Academy; Iphigénie (1675), a masterpiece of pathos; and Phèdre (1677), a marvellous representation of human agony, which afforded a subject adequate even to the powers of Rachel. With the last ended abruptly his thirteen years of unbroken playwriting. A few days after its production the Troupe du Roi introduced an opposition Phèdre, by Phaon, which, though worthless by comparison, was eagerly supported by a powerful party, including the famous Duchess of Bouillon. Whether from disgust and mortification, or from the conversion attributed to him just at this period, Racine turned at once from dramatic work, made his peace with Port Royal, married on June 1, 1677, and settled down to twenty years of domestic happiness. His wife brought him money, if she bore him five daughters and two sons; and he himself had found ample profit in the drama, besides enjoying an annual gratification that grew gradually from 800 to 2000 livres, not to speak of the office of treasurer of France at Moulins, at least one benefice, and from 1677, jointly with Boileau, the office of historiographer-royal of France, with a salary of 4000 livres a year. The last involved the duty of accompanying the king on several of his expeditions, but in the case of both poets bore little historical fruit beyond a crop of good intentions and a few fragments. In January 1685 Racine emerged from his retirement to pronounce the discourse at the reception to the Academy of Thomas Corneille, and at last did himself honour by his admirable eulogium upon his greater brother.
In 1689 he wrote Esther, in answer to a request from Madame de Maintenon for a play suitable for her girls at Saint-Cyr. She had tried Andromaque, but found that the girls acted it 'a great deal too well.' Its success was great, but entirely warranted by the exquisite art of the poem. Athalie followed in 1691 with much less success, though it perhaps deserved even a greater. Four cantiques spirituelles, and an admirably written Histoire abrégée de Port Royal, make up the whole remainder of Racine's literary work. In his later years he lost the favour of the king—how is not by any means clearly understood. He is said to have prepared a memoir on the miseries of the people, and the king, finding Madame de Maintenon reading this, expressed his displeasure in some harsh words that broke the sensitive heart of the courtier-poet. On 4th March 1698 he wrote a long letter to Madame de Maintenon, to clear himself from the crime of Jansenism, but he never recovered the king's favour, and his acute mortification appears to have hastened his death. He said to Boileau, with the sweet graciousness of his nature, as he embraced him for the last time, 'Je regarde comme un bonheur pour moi de mourir avant vous.' He died 21st April 1699, and was buried by his own desire in Port Royal.
In France it remains an article of patriotism to claim Racine as the greatest of all masters of tragic pathos, yet this estimate does not very greatly exceed the truth. He took the conventional French tragedy from the stronger hands of Corneille, and added to it all the grace of which it was capable, perfecting exquisitely its versification, and harmoniously subordinating the whole action to the central idea of the one dominant passion. But he was a far greater poet even than a dramatist, and the tender sweetness and beauty of his rhythm, the finished perfection and flexibility of his cadence, and the indefinable yet ever present stamp of distinction that informs his style, combine to add a charm of its kind beyond almost anything else in the whole poetry of France. It may be that the highest poetry of all is beyond his reach, and that his verses are only for a sensitive ear, but such they haunt with a peculiar charm beyond the art of a Lamartine or a Hugo. Within its limits his poetry attains the perfection of the classic in the highest as well as severest sense of the term; it sums up in its content all that was noble in the royalism of the 18th century, and in the spiritual aspirations out of which grew a Mère Angélique and a Pascal; and it attains the Olympian height of distinct originality as well in the balanced proportion and harmony of all its elements as in the grandeur and sublimity of which it is capable of rising in a Phèdre, an Esther, and an Athalie. These high creations transcend and crown with the glory of completion his habitual tenderness and beauty, but into this empyrean also the poet soars no less naturally on the same strong and steady wing. Voltaire, when asked to write a commentary on Racine, answered, and with truth: 'Il n'y a qu'à mettre au bas de toutes les pages—beau, pathétique, harmonieux, admirable, sublime.'
The first collected edition appeared 1675-76; the last within his life-time in 1697. Of more important editions may be named the splendid folio of 1805, those of La Harpe (with commentary, 1807), Geoffroy (1808), Aimé Martin (1820), A. France (5 vols. 1874), and especially the splendid edition by Paul Mesnard in 'Les Grands Écrivains de la France' (8 vols. 1865-73). The first volume of the last contains a Life; the eighth, a Lexique by Marty-Laveaux. Of English translations are the Distressed Mother, by Ambrose Philips (1712), the Phœdra and Hippolytus, by Edmund Smith, brought out at the Haymarket in 1707; and a complete metrical version by R. B. Boswell (vol. i. 1889; vol. ii. 1891). See vol. vi. of Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal, and vol. i. of Portraits Littéraires; also Henry M. Trollope's Cornicille and Racine, in the series of 'Foreign Classics.'