s, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.
Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest--our
sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a
gentleman, despite his misadventures.

Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and
defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you
did not mean that they should win it. They go off with laughter, and
their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth,
behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your
sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are having their day; you can
throw a bone or a crust to the dog that has had his, and has been taught
that it is over and ended. Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy,
in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and
the husband of Celimene be untaught in that experience?), you never
sided quite heartily, as other comedians have done, with young
prosperity and rank and power.

I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for just
after your own death the author of 'Les Dialogues des Morts' gave you
Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of 'Le Jugement de Pluton'
made the 'mighty warder' decide that 'Moliere should not talk
philosophy.' These writers, like most of us, feel that, after all, the
comedies of the _Contemplateur_, of the translator of Lucretius, are a
philosophy of life in themselves, and that in them we read the lessons
of human experience writ small and clear.

What comedian but Moliere has combined with such depths--with the
indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of
Don Juan--such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit!
Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much
water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles
of contemporary mirth (_cetera_ _fluminis ritu feruntur_), even now we
never laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread
the boards in the Maison de Moliere. Since those mobile dark brows
of yours ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the
'demoniac' manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that
no player has been more worthy to wear the _canons_ of Mascarille or
the gown of Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comedie Francaise. In him
you have a successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts