osturers,
extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteering
marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading as
in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois circle will not
furnish it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant,
independent upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be
inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King was
benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the French Court that we are
indebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind in society. For the
amusement of the Court the ballets and farces were written, which are
dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower, class than
intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficiently
quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great works like Le
Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works that were
perilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to launch on
streams running to shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy's
vessel; it offended, not _Dieu mais les devots_, as the Prince de Conde
explained the cabal raised against it to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy in
teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made
popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes
exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of an
excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic
in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new nonsense; but
they had to see the comedy several times before they were consoled in
their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.
'I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,' he said. It is one
of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of the
opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,
fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the world
best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us into
sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream of
life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make
acute and balanc