MOLIÈRE, AND THE FRENCH CLASSICAL DRAMA. INTRODUCTION. Ir is a far easier task to make the English reader enter into and appreciate the beauties of the great comic poet of Louis XIV.'s æra, than to familiarize the descendants of our Saxon race with the purely classical spirit which animates the tragic writers of the same period. Between the latter and our countrymen, generally, there exists, we are fully aware, a natural, nay more, an instinctive antipathy. Towards Molière and the comic authors of France no such hostility is at all manifest; on the contrary, they have ever been looked upon as the first and best of models. Tragedy in general, from the necessary elevation of the personages it exhibits, the exceptional grandeur of the situations it depicts, and the violence of the passions it displays, finds naturally a somewhat tardy echo in the breasts of the multitude at large; and French tragedy in particular, from its entirely conventional tone, is less likely than any other to be admired, or even understood, by a public not intimately acquainted with its peculiar customs and traditions. In comedy, this is of course not the case; the scene of action, the characters, the situation, the language, all is in accordance with B the subject represented, and all more or less comes home to the comprehension of every individual spectator, of whatever nation he may be. A public accustomed to the local colouring, to the technical niceties deemed almost indispensable to the getting-up, as it is termed, of pieces in the modern dramatic school, might possibly be deprived of all sympathy with a Lucretia or a Cleopatra whom it should behold dying in hoops and high-heeled shoes; but in a comedy none of these material drawbacks exist, and there is no reason to prevent a votary of Shakspere from equally appreciating Molière; nothing which should deter him who has applauded to-night the sweet wit of Beatrice from doing homage to-morrow to the brilliant and courtly Célimène. If we have mentioned the name of Shakspere, it has not been unadvisedly. There is more analogy between Molière and the bard of Avon than between Shakspere and any other poet, unless it may be Cervantes (and observe, we take the word poet in its true signification—a creator, a maker, and not merely a man whose business it is to jingle rhymes at the end of a certain number of syllables); without even touching on their social conditions, so nearly similar-for both were actors, managers, authors (like Plautus, with whom Molière has still more marked points of resemblance)—we find in their genius strong signs of near relationship. We do not mean to say that Lear,' 'Othello,' 'Macbeth,' or any of the more sublime forms evoked by Shakspere's fancy, can meet with kindred spirits amid the creations of Molière ; nor that the author of Tartuffe' has passages wherewith in energy and depth to cope with the lofty sadness, the profound philosophy of certain scenes in Hamlet.' Extreme pathos in the first place is not Molière's characteristic (although in our own individual opinion we confess to have rarely found anything more essentially pathetic than parts of the Misanthrope'); but his chief resemblance to our own" Sweet Will" is to be found in his inexhaustible fecundity, and in the "careless inimitable grace with which he throws off to every passing wind the varied blossoms of his wit. There is in him the same deep-diving into the secrets of men's minds (which so |