. His early years were spent amid the rough and
sordid surroundings of a travelling provincial company, of which he
became the manager and the principal actor, and for which he composed
his first plays. He matured late. It was not till he was thirty-seven
that he produced _Les Precieuses Ridicules_--his first work of genius;
and it was not till three years later that he came into the full
possession of his powers with _L'Ecole des Femmes_. All his masterpieces
were written in the ten years that followed (1662-73). During that
period the patronage of the king gave him an assured position; he became
a celebrity at Paris and Versailles; he was a successful man. Yet, even
during these years of prosperity, he was far from being free from
troubles. He was obliged to struggle incessantly against the intrigues
of his enemies, among whom the ecclesiastical authorities were the most
ferocious; and even the favour of Louis had its drawbacks, for it
involved a constant expenditure of energy upon the frivolous and
temporary entertainments of the Court. In addition, he was unhappy in
his private life. Unlike Shakespeare, with whom his career offers many
analogies, he never lived to reap the quiet benefit of his work, for he
died in the midst of it, at the age of fifty-one, after a performance in
the title-role of his own _Malade Imaginaire_.

What he had achieved was, in the first place, the creation of French
Comedy. Before him, there had been boisterous farces, conventional
comedies of intrigue borrowed from the Italian, and extravagant pieces
of adventure and burlesque cast in the Spanish mould. Moliere did for
the comic element in French literature what Corneille had done for the
tragic: he raised it to the level of serious art. It was he who first
completely discovered the aesthetic possibilities that lay in the
ordinary life of every day. He was the most unromantic of writers--a
realist to the core; and he understood that the true subject of comedy
was to be found in the actual facts of human society--in the
affectations of fools, the absurdities of cranks, the stupidities of
dupes, the audacities of impostors, the humours and the follies of
family life. And, like all great originators, his influence has been
immense. At one blow, he established Comedy in its true position and
laid down the lines on which it was to develop for the next two hundred
years. At the present day, all over Europe, the main characteristics of
the avera