ce herself.

That this is so is owing mainly, of course, to the power of his genius;
but it is also owing, in some degree, to the particular form which his
genius took. Judging by quality alone, it is difficult to say whether
his work stands higher or lower in the scale of human achievement than
that of Racine--whether the breadth of vision, the diversity, and the
humanity of his comedies do or do not counterbalance the poetry, the
intensity, and the perfect art of his friend's tragedies; at least it
seems certain that the difference between the reputations of the two men
with the world in general by no means corresponds with the real
difference in their worth. It is by his very perfection, by the very
completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so
special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for
any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his
incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that
Moliere gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least
classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art,
sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest
buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too
closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it
seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of
the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often
careless; the structure of some of his finest works was perfunctorily
thrown together; the envelope of his thought--his language--was by no
means faultless, his verse often coming near to prose, and his prose
sometimes aping the rhythm of verse. In fact, it is not surprising that
to the rigid classicists of the eighteenth century this Colossus had
feet of clay. But, after all, even clay has a merit of its own: it is
the substance of the common earth. That substance, entering into the
composition of Moliere, gave him his broad-based solidity, and brought
him into kinship with the wide humanity of the world.

It was on this side that his work was profoundly influenced by the
circumstances of his life. Moliere never knew the leisure, the
seclusion, the freedom from external cares, without which it is hardly
possible for art to mature to perfection; he passed his existence in the
thick of the battle, and he died as he had lived--in the harness of the
professional entertainer