the works of Plautus and Terence, if you 'let no
musty _bouquin_ escape you' (so your enemies declared), it was to some
purpose that you laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who
came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we
turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan: and Goldsmith,
from Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your
creations. 'Creations' one may well say, for you anticipated Nature
herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a
gentleman not a lacquey; in a _mot_ of Don Juan's, the secret of the new
Religion and the watchword of Comte, _l'amour de l'humanite_.

Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour;
and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular
civilisalion? With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and
generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life
endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope,
or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of
all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary
blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens,
you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you
found invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and
Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of
their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived
that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking
every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons preached to Agnes we
surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity
which are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal
self-defence of superstition. Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for
the permanent element of life--precisely where Pascal recognised all
that was most fleeting and unsubstantial--in _divertissement_; in the
pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an
observer of the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you
seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how
often the tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an
accent of tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly
and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts,
and to leave them sometime