e central female
figure, he has depicted the elevation that belongs even to a mistaken
and perverted love of what is excellent; and when she finally goes out,
ridiculous, baffled, but as unyielding as ever in her devotion to
grammar and astronomy, we come near, in the face of her majestic
absurdity, to a feeling of respect. More remarkable still is Moliere's
portrayal of the eminence of the human spirit in the case of Tartufe.
Here it is vice in its meanest and most repulsive forms which has become
endowed with an awful grandeur. Tartufe, the hypocrite, the swindler,
the seducer of his benefactor's wife, looms out on us with the kind of
horrible greatness that Milton's Satan might have had if he had come to
live with a bourgeois family in seventeenth-century France.

Moliere's genius was many-sided; he was a master not only of the smile,
but of the laugh. He is the gayest of writers, and his farces, in their
wild hilarity, their contagious absurdity, are perfect models of what a
farce should be. He has made these light, frivolous, happy things as
eternal as the severest and the weightiest works of man. He has filled
them with a wonderful irresponsible wisdom, condensing into single
phrases the ridiculousness of generations: 'Nous avons change tout
cela.'--'Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?'--'Vous etes
orfevre, Monsieur Josse.' So effectually has he contrived to embalm in
the spice of his humour even the momentary affectations of his own time
that they have come down to us fresh as when they first appeared, and
the _Precieuses Ridicules_--a skit upon the manners and modes of speech
affected by the fops of 1650--still raises to-day our inextinguishable
laughter. This is the obvious side of Moliere; and it is hardly in need
of emphasis.

It is the more remote quality of his mind--his brooding melancholy, shot
through with bitterness and doubt--that may at first sight escape the
notice of the reader, and that will repay the deepest attention. His
greatest works come near to tragedy. _Le Tartufe_, in spite of its
patched-up happy ending, leaves an impression of horror upon the mind.
_Don Juan_ seems to inculcate a lesson of fatalistic scepticism. In
this extraordinary play--of all Moliere's works the farthest removed
from the classical ideal--the conventional rules of religion and
morality are exposed to a withering scorn; Don Juan, the very embodiment
of the arrogance of intellect, and his servant Sganarelle,