A Short History of French Literature
returned to Paris in 1658, and on the 24th of October performed with his
troupe before the court. He had long been a dramatist as well as an
actor, and had written besides minor pieces, most of which are lost, the
_Etourdi_ and the _Depit Amoureux_. Moliere soon acquired the favour of
the king, and the _Precieuses Ridicules_, the first of his really great
works, gained for him that of the public. In 1662 he married Armande
Bejart, the younger sister of Madeleine--a marriage which brought him
great unhappiness, though it was probably not without influence on some
of his finest work. The king was godfather to the first child of the
marriage, and Moliere was a prosperous man. He became valet-de-chambre
to Louis, and it was some insolence of his noble colleagues which is
alleged, in a late and improbable though famous story, to have
occasioned the incident of his partaking of the king's _en cas de nuit_.
The highest point of his genius was shortly reached; _Tartuffe_, the
_Festin de Pierre_, and _Le Misanthrope_ being the work of three
successive years, 1664-6. _Tartuffe_ brought him some trouble because it
was supposed to be irreligious in tendency, or at least to satirise the
profession of religion. These, his three greatest comedies, were not all
warmly received, and he fell back upon lighter work, producing in rapid
succession farce-comedies for the public theatre, and _divertissements_
of divers kinds for the court until his death in February 1673, which
happened almost on the stage.
The following is a complete list of Moliere's work which has come down
to us. During his provincial sojourn he had written many slight pieces
half-way in kind between the Italian comedy and the native farce. Of
these two only survive, _Le Medecin Volant_ and _La Jalousie du
Barbouille_. Both have considerable merit, and Moliere subsequently
worked up their materials, as no doubt he did those of the lost pieces.
_L'Etourdi_, 1653, is a regular comedy in five acts, still strongly
Italian in style and somewhat improbable in circumstances, but full of
sparkle and lively action and dialogue. _Le Depit Amoureux_, 1654, is
even better and more independent. Nothing had yet been seen on the
French stage so good as the quarrels and reconciliation of the quartette
of master, mistress, valet, and _soubrette_. But _Les Precieuses
Ridicules_, 1659, struck an entirely different note. The stage had been
employed often enough for personal satire, but it had not yet been made
use of for the actual delineation and criticism of contemporary manners
as manners and not as the foibles of individuals. The play was directed
against the affectations and unreal language of the members of literary
_coteries_ which, with that of the Hotel Rambouillet as the chief, had
long been prominent in French society. It has but a single act, but in
its way it has never been surpassed either as a piece of social satire
or a piece of brilliant dialogue illustrating ludicrous action and
character. _Sganarelle_, 1660, relapses into the commonplaces of farce,
and has no moral or satirical intention, but is amusing enough. _Don
Garcie de Navarre_, 1661, may be called Moliere's only failure. He
styles it a _comedie heroique_, and it is in fact a kind of anticipation
of Racine's manner, but applied to less serious subjects. The jealousy
of the hero is, however, the only motive of the piece, and its
exhibition is rather tiresome than anything else. The play is monotonous
and unrelieved by action. The genius of the author reappeared in its
appropriate sphere in _L'Ecole des Maris_ (same date), where a Terentian
suggestion is adapted and carried out with the greatest skill. Then,
still in the same prolific year, Moliere returned to social satire in
_Les Facheux_, an audacious lampoon on the forms of fashionable boredom
common among the courtiers of the time. In 1662 appeared _L'Ecole des
Femmes_, which is generally considered the best of Moliere's plays
before _Tartuffe_. A certain slyness about the character of Agnes is its
only drawback. This gave occasion to the brilliant and most amusing
_Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes_, 1663. Here the author is once more the
satirist of contemporary society, which he introduces as criticising his
own work. _L'Impromptu de Versailles_ (same date), according to a
curious habit which Moliere did not originate, brings the author himself
and his troupe in their own names and persons before the spectator. _Le
Mariage Force_, 1664, a slight piece, was worked up into a ballet for
the court. _La Princesse d'Elide_ (same date) is Moliere's most
important court piece, or _comedie-ballet_, and, though necessarily
artificial, has great beauty. Next in point of composition came _The
Hypocrite_, that is to say _Tartuffe_, but the difficulties which this
met with made _Le Festin de Pierre_, 1665, appear first. This is a
tragi-comic working up of the Don Juan story, and is of a different
class from any other of Moliere's comedies. It has been thought, but
without sufficient ground, that Moliere here gave expression to a
modified form of the freethinking which was so common at the time. It
may, perhaps, be more truly regarded as an excursion into romantic
comedy--the comedy which, like Shakespeare's work, is not directly
satiric on society or on individuals, but tells stories poetically and
in dramatic form with comic touches. It is noteworthy that Don Juan is
of all Moliere's heroes least exposed to the charge of being an
abstraction rather than a man. The pleasant trifle, _L'Amour Medecin_
(same date), was succeeded by _Le Misanthrope_, 1666. Here Moliere's
special vein of satire was worked most deeply and to most profit, though
the reproach that the handling is somewhat too serious for comedy is not
undeserved. Alceste the impatient but not cynical hero, Celimene the
coquette, Oronte the fop, Eliante the reasonable woman, Arsinoe the
mischief-maker, are all immortal types. The admirable farce-comedy of
the _Medecin malgre Lui_ (same date), founded upon an old _fabliau_,
followed, and this was succeeded almost immediately by the graceful
pastoral of _Melicerte_, the amusing _Pastorale Comique_, and the slight
sketch of _Le Sicilien, ou L'Amour Peintre_. At last, in 1667,
_Tartuffe_ got itself represented. It is a vigorous and almost ferocious
satire on religious pretension masking vice, and many of its separate
strokes are of the dramatist's happiest. Here however, more than
elsewhere, is felt the drawback of the method. Comparing Tartuffe with
Iago, we have all the difference between a skilful but not wholly
probable presentation of wickedness in the abstract, and a picture of a
wicked man. In _Amphitryon_, 1668, Moliere measured himself with Plautus
and produced an admirable play. _George Dandin_ (same date), the working
up of _La Jalousie du Barbouille_, is one of the happiest of his
sketches of conjugal infelicity. Then came _L'Avare_ (same date), in
which Moliere was once more indebted to the ancients and to his French
predecessors, but in which he amply justified his borrowings. At this
time he extended his field and brought his knowledge of provincial and
bourgeois life to bear. _M. de Pourceaugnac_, 1669, is an ingenious
satire, pushed to the verge of burlesque and farce, on the country
squires of France. _Les Amants Magnifiques_, 1670, shows the writer once
more in his capacity of court playwright. But _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_
(same date) is the most audacious and by far the most successful of the
wonderful extravaganzas in which a sound and perennial motive of satire
on society is wrapped up, the theme this time being the bourgeoisie of
Paris, of which the author was himself a member. _Psyche_, 1671, is,
perhaps, the most remarkable example of collaboration in literature,
Moliere, Pierre Corneille, and Quinault, the greatest comic dramatist,
the greatest tragic dramatist, and the greatest opera librettist of the
day, having joined their forces with a result not unworthy of them. _Les
Fourberies de Scapin_ (same date) is again farce, but farce such as only
Moliere could write; and in _La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas_ (same date) the
theme of _M. de Pourceaugnac_ is taken up with a certain heightening of
colour and manner. _Les Femmes Savantes_, 1672, brings the reader back
to what is as emphatically 'la bonne comedie' as its original _Les
Precieuses Ridicules_. The tone and treatment are more serious than in
the older piece and deal with a different variety of feminine coxcombry,
but the effect is not less happy, and is free from the broader elements
of farce. Lastly, _Le Malade Imaginaire_, 1673, the swan-song of
Moliere, combined both his greatest excellences, the power of raising
audacious farce into the region of true comedy and the power of
satirising social abuses with a pitiless but good-humoured hand. The
main theme here is the absurdity of the current practice of medicine,
but as usual the genius of the writer veils the fact of the drama being
a drama with a purpose.
The unique individuality and the extraordinary merit of the various
pieces which make up Moliere's theatre have made it necessary to give a
tolerably minute account of them, and that account will to a certain
extent dispense us from dealing with his general characteristics at
great length, especially as a few remarks on French comedy of the
Molieresque kind as a whole will have to be given at the end of this
chapter. Independently of the characters which Moliere shares with all
the great names of literature, his fertility and justness of thought,
the felicity of the expression in which he clothes it, and his accurate
observation of human life, there are two points in his drama which
belong, in the highest degree, to him alone. One is the extraordinary
manner in which he manages to imbue farce and burlesque with the true
spirit of refined comedy. This manner has been spoken of by unfriendly
critics as 'exaggerated,' but the reproach argues a deficiency of
perception. Even the most roaring farces of Moliere, even such pieces as
_M. de Pourceaugnac_ and the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, demand rank as
legitimate comedy, owing to his unmatched faculty of intimating a
general purpose under the cloak of the merely ludicrous incidents which
are made to surround the fortunes of a particular person. This general
purpose (and here we come to the second point) is invariably a moral
one. Of all dramatists, ancient and modern, Moliere is perhaps that one
who has borne most constantly in mind the theory that the stage is a
lay-pulpit and that its end is not merely amusement, but the reformation
of manners by means of amusing spectacles. Occasionally, no doubt, he
has pushed this purpose too far and has missed his mark. He has never
given us, and perhaps could not have given us, such examples of dramatic
poetry of the non-tragic sort as Shakespeare and Calderon have given.
Indeed, it seems to be a mistake to call Moliere a poet at all, despite
his extraordinary creative faculty. He was too positive, too much given
to literal transcription of society, too little able to convey the vague
suggestion of beauty which, as cannot be too often repeated, is of the
essence of poetry. But, if we are content to regard drama as a middle
term between poetry and prose, he, with the two poets just named, must
be appointed to the first place in it among modern authors. In
brilliancy of wit he is, among dramatists, inferior only to Aristophanes
and Congreve. But he took a less Rabelaisian licence of range than
Aristophanes, and he never, like Congreve, allows his action to drift
aimlessly while his characters shoot pleasantries at one another. If we
leave purely poetic merit out of the question and restrict the
definition of comedy to the dramatic presentment of the characters and