nd intensity of Moliere's art--the more we look, the more
difficult we shall find it to be certain that Tartufe is a less
tremendous creation even than Falstaff himself.

For, indeed, it is in his characters that Moliere's genius triumphs
most. His method is narrow, but it is deep. He rushes to the essentials
of a human being--tears out his vitals, as it were--and, with a few
repeated master-strokes, transfixes the naked soul. His flashlight never
fails: the affected fop, the ignorant doctor, the silly tradesman, the
heartless woman of fashion--on these, and on a hundred more, he turns
it, inexorably smiling, just at the compromising moment; then turns it
off again, to leave us with a vision that we can never forget. Nor is it
only by its vividness that his portraiture excels. At its best it rises
into the region of sublimity, giving us new visions of the grandeur to
which the human spirit can attain. It is sometimes said that the essence
of Moliere lies in his common sense; that his fundamental doctrine is
the value of moderation, of the calm average outlook of the sensible man
of the world--_l'honnete homme_. And no doubt this teaching is to be
found throughout his work, devoted as it is, by its very nature, to the
eccentricities and exaggerations which beset humanity. But if he had
been nothing more than a sober propounder of the golden mean he never
would have come to greatness. No man realized more clearly the
importance of good sense; but he saw farther than that: he looked into
the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which
brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend,
by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to
folly and even vice itself. Thus it is that he has invested the feeble,
miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, and that he has
elevated the scoundrel Don Juan into an alarming image of intellectual
power and pride. In his satire on learned ladies--_Les Femmes
Savantes_--the ridicule is incessant, remorseless; the absurd, pedantic,
self-complacent women are turned inside out before our eyes amid a
cataract of laughter; and, if Moliere had been merely the well-balanced
moralist some critics suppose, that, no doubt, would have been enough.
But for the true Moliere it was not enough. The impression which he
leaves upon us at the end of the play is not simply one of the utter
folly of learning out of place; in Philaminte, th