the Précieuse is the basis of Molière's criticism. It is not the learning of the Précieuse that is at fault, but her attitude to the experience of life which is the result of her vanity. On the other hand, Molière does not exalt the simplicity of an Agnès of L'École des Maris, but he appeals to the practical wisdom of the sweet-natured Henriette, whose straightness in accepting facts is after all in part the result of her being in contact with different dispositions and of having formed the habit of thought. Only instead of keeping her thought for abstract ideas, she applies it to life.

Le Malade Imaginaire, under the form of farce, presents other serious problems. The one suggested by the title is the least serious and the most farcical in the play. But Molière has realized in his presentation of Argan's character that the fear of death and constant search after health constitute a type of mental illness that is clearly marked out from physical disease. Toinette, who, as the soubrette, marks the common-sense view in the piece, expresses this. The key to the play is, however, not the fact of Argan's nervous weakness, but the self-deception which is at the root of it, and which brings with it the deceit of others. There is a whole network of deceit in the play. Angélique's engagement is brought about by a ruse, Argan's credulousness in the matter of his wife Bélise can only be cured by Toinette's ingenious device. Louison is trained in ways of deceit. Under the cover of robust farce Molière is again tilting at the evils of a society which does not fulfil its natural obligations of sincerity and kindness.

Le Misanthrope, one of the most self-revealing of Molière's plays, is more full of bitter criticism of this kind than almost any other, though not his latest effort. As representing a definite stage in Molière's development, and at the same time completing the study of Molière's criticism of life which has been traced through L'École des Maris and

L'École des Femmes and Tartufe, Le Misanthrope calls for more detailed study.

What is there in Le Misanthrope that at once brings to mind the modern epoch of the drama? It is partly, perhaps, the setting. As in the case of the action in Ibsen's domestic dramas, that of Molière's play is confined to a room, which is the theatre of passions formerly represented on the open piazza, or on a stage imitated in its spacious width from that of the morality play. The actors, too, are figures taken from contemporary society. There is practically no caricature in the play. The farcical element had been used by Molière to throw up by contrast the reality of the other characters in his other plays. This is not necessary in Le Misanthrope-the painting from life is so delicate and clear, the movement of thought and emotion so evident, though restrained. Of action there is little, of

intrigue practically none. But Le Misanthrope is par excellence the comedy of manners. Because of this it has a lasting interest of its own. Thoughts and emotions, as Racine would say a few years later in his preface to Iphigénie, arouse the same interest in Paris as in ancient Athens. What is characteristic of humanity in general will always move the audience at a drama.1 In Le Misanthrope, Alceste's heart and his reason are seen in conflict, and this gives the material for a moving play. The conflict is increased through Alceste's natural disposition, which despises the ordinary traffic of politeness, while by his sincerity he shows up the hollowness of the society which surrounds him. No caricature of Molière's has been half so effective as this placing against the background of a social order that is highly nervous and artificial, the solitary man sincere and uncompromising, who wounds the sensibilities of others,

6

1 Préface, Iphigénie : ... Mes spectateurs ont été émus des mêmes choses qui ont mis autrefois en larmes le plus savant peuple de la Grèce...'

but is bound to suffer in return both in his pride and in his happiness. As the play moves on, the more Alceste is injured by the conflicts he brings about, the more he desires love and idealizes it in Célimène; but in vain, for after his momentary defection and attention to Éliante, when he returns to Célimène, it is to find that her love is not equal to sharing his solitude in the desert that his nature has spread around him. (The Misanthrope of Molière is not the man and woman hater, but the disillusioned idealist. He is really the hero of Corneille obliged to express himself in the highly artificial conditions of court and society life at the end of the reign of Louis XIV; he is in contact with too complex a life, and the process is an uneasy one.1 But in his search for simplicity and reality Alceste not only recalls Corneille's heroes, but prefigures the ideal of the modern world. We have lost the outward conditions of the reign of Louis XIV, and though we can by no means claim to have outlived the artificiality and hypocrisy of that time, the ideal of the modern world since the Revolution has pointed in the direction of simplicity of action and of social relations. Hence, perhaps, the present importance of this play of Molière's. His Alceste expresses the necessity for revolt against conditions that are bound to cramp the progress of society. The failure of Alceste no doubt reflects Molière's own sense of rebuff and of misunderstanding. For the artist has the necessity of seeing his own time clearly and reporting it courageously. Whether he reflects the better elements only, or puts them in relief by reflecting the baser ones, he is conscious of both, and of the struggle between them. In this we find one reason for the tragic quality of the piece. Its pathetic quality is due to something else. If we analyse the emotions which a moving

1 Voilà la bonne foi, le zèle vertueux,

La justice et l'honneur que l'on trouve chez eux!

Le Misanthrope, act v, sc. 1.

play excites in us, we may discover, as Aristotle did, that where tragedy predominates pity and terror are the effects. If the strong perception of the trend of the conflict can awaken terror, it is surely the intimate knowledge of the way the characters regard their own fate that arouses pity. The pathetic in drama depends almost wholly on the consciousness of the actors of the tragic quality in their fate.1 Ophelia's songs utter this consciousness, though disjointed and almost dissociated from the original experience. Lear and Hamlet pity themselves; Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Lady Macbeth, do not, and the pathetic quality is absent from the impression they produce. There is, however, another aspect of the idea of pathos which was prominent in the case of a Greek play and is less so on the French stage. The Greek audience at a tragedy felt the pathos in the case of the unconscious victims of a Nemesis, in the action of which the chorus had instructed them. The audience was in the counsels of the gods. But the Christian tragedy of Corneille is entirely without this appeal to pathos. His heroes are strongly supported by the sense of the invisible world, and Polyeucte marches to the pyre as to a royal victory. Shakespeare's heroes in the historical plays sometimes arouse the same sense of the pathetic in us as a Greek play, because we know the fate that is hanging over them. Racine's Phèdre is pathetic in both senses: she is the plaything of fate, and also she is fully conscious of the tragic pitifulness of her suffering and sin.

In all Molière's comedies the one case in which a sense of pathos is evoked is that of Le Misanthrope. Alceste deserved better of his world, and knew it. Therefore his suffering, and his conscious interest in his own case, arouse pathetic interest in the audience. The play represents at once Molière's strongest criticism and greatest height of dramatic characterization.

1 Except in the case of children, or the weak and oppressed. See, e.g., Shakespeare's treatment of the children of Lady Macduff.

CHAPTER VII

THE COMEDY OF MOLIÈRE

IN the comparative study of Corneille and Racine we see that the tragic drama of the first great author deals with the will in conscious action, and that of the second with the disintegration of the will, and thus with human life in prey to the unrestrained forces of nature. It will be observed that the two series of dramas taken together cover the same field as that of the Aeschylean trilogy, where the selfdetermination of the will is studied side by side with the moral and physical consequences of sin. The greatness of the Aeschylean trilogy lies in its presentation of the two aspects. In the Christian drama of Corneille the greatness may be said to lie in the contrast of the tragic event and the moral victory; the author makes us feel that the victory prevails. Freedom, in its seventeenth-century dramatic significance, is associated not only with this creative action of the will, but with the belief in the final victory of good over evil.1 It is averse from the idea of classification, and from the working out of determined physical laws. So long,

1 See Descartes' Méditation Quatrième, p. 100, ed. Charpentier: 'Car, afin que je sois libre, il n'est pas nécessaire que je sois indifférent à choisir l'un ou l'autre des deux contraires; mais plutôt, d'autant plus que je penche vers l'un, soit que je connaisse évidemment que le bien et le vrai s'y rencontrent, soit que Dieu dispose ainsi l'intérieur de ma pensée, d'autant plus librement j'en fais choix et je l'embrasse; et certes, la grâce divine et la connaissance naturelle, bien loin de diminuer ma liberté, l'augmentent plutôt et la fortifient, de façon que cette indifférence que je sens lorsque je ne suis point emporté vers un côté plutôt que vers un autre par le poids d'aucune raison, est le plus bas degré de la liberté, et fait plutôt paraître un défaut dans la connaissance.'