rooting out a taste in manners so unreasonable and ridiculous.
Tartuffe, or The Impostor, has occasionally, and even recently, sometimes to the disturbance of the public peace in France, given great offence not only to those who felt the justice, and winced under the severity of the satire; but to others, who suspected that a blow was aimed at religion, under the mask of an attack upon hypocrisy. But its intrinsic merit, the truth of the drawing, and the justness of the colouring, have secured patrons for it among persons of unquestionable sense, virtue, learning, and taste; and it has always triumphed over the violence of opposition. Cibber, a vamper of other men’s plays, has borrowed from it his favourite Nonjuror, and applied it to the purposes of a political party. On this adaptation has been grafted a more modern attack on the Methodists, under the title of The Hypocrite. But however great may be the merit of this celebrated drama, it cannot boast of entire originality. Machiavelli left behind him three comedies, the fruits of a statesman’s leisure hours. In all three, the author has exhibited the hand of a master; he has painted mankind in the spirit of truth, and unmasked falsehood and hypocrisy in a tone of profound contempt. Two monks, a brother Timothy and a brother Alberico, are represented with too much wit and keenness of sarcasm to have been overlooked by Moliere in his working up of the third specimen. The first three acts of the Tartuffe were played for the first time at court before the piece was finished. Masques of pomp, magnificence and panegyric, such as usually furnish out the amusement of royal saloons, are forgotten as soon as they have served the purpose of the moment: but masterpieces like that now in question perpetuate their own renown, and leave a lasting memorial of what is supposed to be a phenomenon, a princely taste for genuine wit.
Les Fâcheux was the first piece in which dancing was so connected with the dramatic action, as to fill up the intervals without breaking the thread of the story.
Le Mariage Forcé was borrowed from Rabelais, to whom both Moliere and La Fontaine were deeply indebted. The Aristotelian and Pyrrhonian philosophy, as travestied by modern doctors, furnishes occasion for lively satire and clever buffoonery. The horror with which Pancrace calls down the vengeance of heaven on him who should dare to say the form of a hat, instead of the figure of a hat, is a pleasant parody on the unintelligible absurdities of the schools. According to Marphurius, philosophy commands us to suspend our judgment, and to speak of every thing with uncertainty; not to say I am come, but, I think that I am come.
La Princesse d’Elide, though not one of Moliere’s happiest efforts, deserves notice on account of its contributing to the festivities of the court, by an adaptation of ingenious allegories to the manners and events of the time. This satire was aimed at the illusion of Judicial Astrology, after which many princes of the period were running mad; and in particular Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, father of the Duchess of Burgundy, who kept an astrologer about his person even after his abdication. The dramatic antiquary may find some amusement in comparing the fêtes of the French court with the masques of Ben Jonson, Davenant, and others, exhibited before our James I. and Charles I.; but here the interest ends. It is sufficient to remark, that the masques of the English court owed their power of pleasing to the ingenuity of the machinist and the flattery of the poet. The little dramas performed before the royal family of France tickled the ears of the audience by the pungency of their wit and ridicule.
The Miser has been pretty closely translated, for the version is little more, by Henry Fielding; but not so happily as he himself seems to have imagined.
The subject of that excellent comedy, Les Femmes Savantes, in which the ridicule is kept within reasonable bounds, and female faults and virtues are painted with a proper gradation of colouring, where what the painters call a medium tint harmonizes the extremes of light and shade, was taken up by Goldoni with that coarse and abrupt pencilling of black and white, which has always been the vice of the Italian stage. It has indeed been advanced as a reproach to Moliere, that he too often charged his comic pictures with the extravagance of caricature: but if we compare even the most farcical of his scenes with the speaking pantomimes and half-improvisations of Italy, we must pronounce him a model of delicacy and classical propriety.
His last comedy was Le Malade Imaginaire. It was acted for the fourth time on the 17th February, 1673. The principal character represented is that of a sick man, who, to carry on a purpose of the plot, pretends to be dead. This part was played by Moliere himself. The popular story was, that when he was to discover that it was only a feint, he could neither speak nor get up, being actually dead. The wits and epigrammatists made the most of the occurrence; those who could not write good French, treated it with bad Latin. But unluckily for the stability of their conceits, they were not built on the foundation of truth. Though very ill, and obviously in much pain, he was able to finish the play. He went home, and was put to bed: his cough increased violently; a vessel burst in his lungs, and he was suffocated with blood in about half an hour after. He was only in his fifty-second year when this event took place. The King was extremely affected at this sudden loss, by which, as Johnson said of Garrick, the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; and as a strong mark of his regard, he prevailed with the archbishop of Paris to allow of his being interred in consecrated ground. Nothing short of so absolute a King’s interposition could have effected this; for, independently of the general sentence of excommunication then in force against scenic performers, Moliere had drawn upon himself the resentment of the ecclesiastics in particular, by exposing the hypocrites of their cloth, as well as the bigots among the laity. Those who ridicule folly and knavery in all orders of men must expect to be treated as Moliere was, and to have the foolish and knavish of all orders for enemies. During his life, Paris and the court were stirred up and inflamed against the dramatist; and on more than one occasion, he must have fallen a sacrifice to the indignation of the clergy, had he not been protected by the King. The friend of his life did not desert him when he was dead; but procured for his insensible remains that decent respect, which all nations have consented to pay, as a tribute even to themselves.
Voltaire characterizes Moliere as the best comic poet of any nation; and treats the posthumous hostility which made a difficulty about his burial as a reproach both to France and to the Catholic religion. Professing to have reperused the comedians of antiquity for the purpose of comparison, he gives it as his judgment, that the French dramatist is entitled to the preference. He grounds this decision on the art and regularity of the modern theatre, contrasted with the unconnected scenes of the ancients, their weak intrigues, and the strange practice of declaring by the mouths of the actors, in cold and unnatural monologues, what they had done and what they intended to do. He concludes by saying that Moliere did for comedy what Corneille had done for tragedy; and that the French were superior on this ground to all the people upon earth. A country possessing such a comic drama as ours, throughout the course of about two centuries, with Much ado about Nothing at one end of the list, and The School for Scandal at the other, will be inclined to demur to this broad national assumption: but we, in our turn, must in candour confess, that though the chronological precedence of Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford, had established a glorious stage for us before Moliere was born, or while he was yet in petticoats; yet our most eminent comic writers in the reigns of William III., Anne, and George I., drank deep and often from the abundant source of French comedy. But Moliere’s influence was most beneficially exerted in reclaiming his countrymen from a fondness for such Italian conceits as ringing the changes upon odours and ardours, &c., to which authors like Scudery, Voiture, and Balzac had given an ephemeral fashion. Boileau and Moliere principally contributed to arm the French against the invasion from beyond the Alps, of such madrigal-writers as Marini, Achillini, and Préti.
It is not true that Moliere, when he commenced his career, found the theatre absolutely destitute of good comedies. Corneille had already produced Le Menteur, a piece combining character with intrigue, imported from the Spanish stage. Moliere had produced only two of his most esteemed plays, when the public was gratified with La Mère Coquette of Quinault, than which few pieces were more happy either in point of character or intrigue. But if Corneille be the first legitimate model for tragedy, Moliere was so for comedy. The general shaping of his plots, the connexion of his scenes, his dramatic consistency and propriety were attempted to be copied by succeeding writers: but who could compete with him in wit and spirit? His well-directed attacks did more than any thing to rescue the public from the impertinence of subaltern courtiers affecting airs of importance;