love resembling hate, is represented in the Sultana Roxane. In the
Vizier Acomat, deliberate in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved,
as he proved by his Nero and his Joad, that he was not always doomed
to fail in his characters of men. The historical events were
comparatively recent; but in the perspective of the theatre, distance
may produce the idealising effect of time. The story was perhaps found
by Racine in _Floridon_, a tale by Segrais. The heroine of
_Mithridate_ (1673), the noble daughter of Ephesus, Monime, queen
and slave, is an ideal of womanly love, chastity, fidelity, sacrifice;
gentle, submissive, and yet capable of lofty courage. The play unites
the passions of romance with a study of large political interests
hardly surpassed by Corneille. The cabal which gathered head against
_Bajazet_ could only whisper its malignities when _Mithridate_
appeared.

_Iphigenie_, which is freely imitated from Euripides, was given at
the fetes of Versailles in the summer of 1674. The French Iphigenia
is enamoured of Achilles, and death means for her not only departure
from the joy of youth and the light of the sun, but the loss of love.
Here, as elsewhere, Racine complicates the moral situation with cross
and counter loves: Eriphile is created to be the jealous rival of
Iphigenie, and to be her substitute in the sacrifice of death. The
ingenious transpositions, which were necessary to adapt a Greek play
to Versailles in the second half of the seventeenth century, called
forth hostile criticisms. Through miserable intrigues a competing
_Iphigenie_, the work of Le Clerc and Coras, was produced in the spring
of 1675; it was born dead, and five days later it was buried.

The hostilities culminated two years later. It is commonly said that
Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day.
In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and
their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode.
He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled.
It was known that Racine was engaged on _Phedre_. The Duchesse de
Bouillon and her brother the Duc de Nevers were arbiters of elegance
in literature, and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on the
same subject was ordered from Pradon; and to insure her victory the
Duchess, at a cost of fifteen thousand livres, as Boileau declares,
engaged the front seats of two theatres for six successive
evenings--the one to