CHAPTER XXXII.

HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

SECT. I.

_Racine--Minor French Tragedians--Molière--Regnard, and other Comic Writers._

|Italian and Spanish drama.|

1. Few tragedies or dramatic works of any kind are now recorded by historians of Italian literature; those of Delfino, afterwards patriarch of Aquileia, which are esteemed among the best, were possibly written before the middle of the century, and were not published till after its termination. The Corradino of Caraccio, in 1694, was also valued at the time.[998] Nor can Spain arrest us longer; the school of Calderon in national comedy extended no doubt beyond the death of Philip IV., in 1665, and many of his own religious pieces are of as late a date; nor were names wholly wanting, which are said to merit remembrance, in the feeble reign of Charles II., but they must be left for such as make a particular study of Spanish literature.[999] We are called to a nobler stage.

[998] The following stanzas on an erring conscience will sufficiently prove this:--

Tyranne vitæ, fax temeraria, Infide dux, ignobile vinculum, Sidus dolosum, ænigma præsens, Ingenui labyrinthe voti, Assensus errans, invalidæ potens Mentis propago, quam vetuit Deus Nasci, sed ortæ principatum Attribuit, regimenque sanctum, &c.

[999] Bouterwek.

|Racine’s first tragedies.|

2. Corneille belongs in his glory to the earlier period of this century, though his inferior tragedies, more numerous than the better, would fall within the later. Fontenelle, indeed, as a devoted admirer, attributes considerable merit to those which the general voice both of critics and of the public had condemned.[1000] Meantime, another luminary arose on the opposite side of the horizon. The first tragedy of Jean Racine, Les Frères Ennemis, was represented in 1664, when he was twenty-five years of age. It is so far below his great works, as to be scarcely mentioned, yet does not want indications of the genius they were to display. Alexandre, in 1665, raised the young poet to more distinction. It is said that he showed this tragedy to Corneille, who praised his versification, but advised him to avoid a path which he was not fitted to tread. It is acknowledged by the advocates of Racine that the characters are feebly drawn, and that the conqueror of Asia sinks to the level of a hero in one of those romances of gallantry which had vitiated the taste of France.

[1000] Hist. du Théâtre François, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, iii., 111. St. Evremond also despised the French public for not admiring the Sophonisbe of Corneille, which he had made too Roman for their taste.

|Andromaque.|

3. The glory of Racine commenced with the representation of his Andromaque in 1667, which was not printed till the end of the following year. He was now at once compared with Corneille, and the scales have been oscillating ever since. Criticism, satire, epigrams, were unsparingly launched against the rising poet. But his rival pursued the worst policy by obstinately writing bad tragedies. The public naturally compare the present with the present, and forget the past. When he gave them Pertharite, they were dispensed from looking back to Cinna. It is acknowledged even by Fontenelle that, during the height of Racine’s fame, the world placed him at least on an equality with his predecessor; a decision from which that critic, the relation and friend of Corneille, appeals to what he takes to be the verdict of a later age.

4. The Andromaque was sufficient to show that Racine had more skill in the management of a plot, in the display of emotion, in power over the sympathy of the spectator, at least where the gentler feelings are concerned, in beauty and grace of style, in all except nobleness of character, strength of thought, and impetuosity of language. He took his fable from Euripides, but changed it according to the requisitions of the French theatre and of French manners. Some of these changes are for the better, as the substitution of Astyanax for an unknown Molossus of the Greek tragedian, the supposed son of Andromache by Pyrrhus. “Most of those,” says Racine himself very justly, “who have heard of Andromache, know her only as the widow of Hector and the mother of Astyanax. They cannot reconcile themselves to her loving another husband and another son.” And he has finely improved this happy idea of preserving Astyanax, by making the Greeks, jealous of his name, send an embassy by Orestes to demand his life; at once deepening the interest and developing the plot.

5. The female characters, Andromache and Hermione are drawn with all Racine’s delicate perception of ideal beauty; the one, indeed, prepared for his hand by those great masters in whose school he had disciplined his own gifts of nature, Homer, Euripides, Virgil; the other more original and more full of dramatic effect. It was, as we are told, the fine acting of Mademoiselle de Champmelé in this part, generally reckoned one of the most difficult on the French stage, which secured the success of the play. Racine, after the first representation, threw himself at her feet in a transport of gratitude, which was soon changed to love. It is more easy to censure some of the other characters. Pyrrhus is bold, haughty, passionate, the true son of Achilles, except where he appears as the lover of Andromache. It is inconceivable and truly ridiculous that a Greek of the heroic age, and such a Greek as Pyrrhus is represented by those whose imagination has given him existence, should feel the respectful passion towards his captive which we might reasonably expect in the romances of chivalry, or should express it in the tone of conventional gallantry that suited the court of Versailles. But Orestes is far worse; love-mad, and yet talking in gallant conceits, cold and polite, he discredits the poet, the tragedy, and the son of Agamemnon himself. It is better to kill one’s mother than to utter such trash. In hinting that the previous madness of Orestes was for the sake of Hermione, Racine has presumed too much on the ignorance, and too much on the bad taste, of his audience. But far more injudicious is his fantastic remorse and the supposed vision of the Furies in the last scene. It is astonishing that Racine should have challenged comparison with one of the most celebrated scenes of Euripides in circumstances that deprived him of the possibility of rendering his own effective. For the style of the Andromaque, it abounds with grace and beauty; but there are, to my apprehension, more insipid and feeble lines, and a more effeminate tone, than in his later tragedies.

|Britannicus.|

6. Britannicus appeared in 1669; and in this admirable play Racine first showed that he did not depend on the tone of gallantry usual among his courtly hearers, nor on the languid sympathies that it excites. Terror and pity, the twin spirits of tragedy, to whom Aristotle has assigned the great moral office of purifying the passions, are called forth in their shadowy forms to sustain the consummate beauties of his diction. His subject was original and happy; with that historic truth which usage required, and that poetical probability which fills up the outline of historic truth without disguising it. What can be more entirely dramatic, what more terrible in the sense that Aristotle means (that is, the spectator’s sympathy with the dangers of the innocent), than the absolute master of the world, like the veiled prophet of Khorasan, throwing off the appearances of virtue, and standing out at once in the maturity of enormous guilt! A presaging gloom, like that which other poets have sought by the hackneyed artifices of superstition, hangs over the scenes of this tragedy, and deepens at its close. We sympathise by turns with the guilty alarms of Agrippina, the virtuous consternation of Burrhus, the virgin modesty of Junia, the unsuspecting ingenuousness of Britannicus. Few tragedies on the French stage, or indeed on any stage, save those of Shakspeare, display so great a variety of contrasted characters. None, indeed, are ineffective, except the confidante of Agrippina; for Narcissus is very far from being the mere confidant of Nero; he is, as in history, his preceptor in crime; and his cold villainy is well contrasted with the fierce passion of the despot. The criticisms of Fontenelle and others on small incidents in the plot, such as the concealment of Nero behind a curtain, that he may hear the dialogue between Junia and Britannicus, which is certainly more fit for comedy, ought not to weigh against such excellence as we find in all the more essential requisites of a tragic drama. Racine had much improved his language since Andromaque; the conventional phraseology about flames and fine eyes, though not wholly relinquished, is less frequent; and if he has not here reached, as he never did, the peculiar impetuosity of Corneille, nor given to his Romans the grandeur of his predecessor’s conception, he is full of lines wherein, as every word is effective, there can hardly be any deficiency of vigour. It is the vigour indeed of Virgil, not of Lucan.

7. In one passage, Racine has, I think, excelled Shakspeare. They have both taken the same idea from Plutarch. The lines of Shakspeare are in Antony and Cleopatra:

Thy demon, that’s the spirit that keeps thee, is Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable, Where Cæsar’s is not; but near him, thy angel Becomes a fear, as being o’erpowered.

These are, to my apprehension, not very forcible, and obscure even to those who know, what many do not, that by “a fear” he meant a common goblin, a supernatural being of a more plebeian rank than a demon or angel. The single verse of Racine is magnificent:

Mon génie étonné tremble devant le sien.

|Berenice.|

8. Berenice, the next tragedy of Racine, is a surprising proof of what can be done by a great master; but it must be admitted that it wants many of the essential qualities that are required in the drama. It might almost be compared with Timon of Athens, by the absence of fable and movement. For nobleness and delicacy of sentiment, for grace of style, it deserves every praise; but is rather tedious in the closet, and must be far more so on the stage. This is the only tragedy of Racine, unless, perhaps, we except Athalie, in which the story presents an evident moral; but no poet is more uniformly moral in his sentiments. Corneille, to whom the want of dramatic fable was never any great objection, attempted the subject of Berenice about the same time with far inferior success. It required what he could not give, the picture of two hearts struggling against a noble and a blameless love.

|Bajazet.|

9. It was unfortunate for Racine that he did not more frequently break through the prejudices of the French theatre in favour of classical subjects. A field was open of almost boundless extent, the mediæval history of Europe, and especially of France herself. His predecessor had been too successful in the Cid to leave it doubtful whether an audience would approve such an innovation at the hands of a favoured tragedian. Racine, however, did not venture on a step, which, in the next century, Voltaire turned so much to account, and which made the fortune of some inferior tragedies. But, considering the distance of place equivalent, for the ends of the drama, to that of time, he founded on an event in the Turkish history not more than thirty years before his next tragedy, that of Bajazet. Most part, indeed, of the fable is due to his own invention. Bajazet is reckoned to fall below most of his other tragedies in beauty of style; but the fable is well connected; there is a great deal of movement, and an unintermitting interest is sustained by Bajazet and Atalide, two of the noblest characters that Racine has drawn. Atalide has not the ingenuous simplicity of Junie, but displays a more dramatic flow of sentiment, and not less dignity or tenderness of soul. The character of Roxane is conceived with truth and spirit; nor is the resemblance some have found in it to that of Hermione greater than belongs to forms of the same type. Acomat, the vizir, is more a favourite with the French critics; but in such parts Racine does not rise to the level of Corneille. No poet is less exposed to the imputation of bombastic exaggeration; yet, in the two lines with which Acomat concludes the fourth act, there seems almost an approach to burlesque; and one can hardly say that they would have been out of place in Tom Thumb:

Mourons, moi, cher Osmin, comme un vizir, et toi, Comme le favori d’un homme tel que moi.

|Mithridate.|

10. The next tragedy was Mithridate; and in this Racine has been thought to have wrestled against Corneille on his own ground, the display of the unconquerable mind of a hero. We find in the part of Mithridate, a great depth of thought in compressed and energetic language. But, unlike the masculine characters of Corneille, he is not merely sententious. Racine introduces no one for the sake of the speeches he has to utter. In Mithridates he took what history has delivered to us, blending with it no improbable fiction according to the manners of the East. His love for Monime has nothing in it extraordinary, or unlike what we might expect from the king of Pontus; it is a fierce, a jealous, a vindictive love; the necessities of the French language alone, and the usages of the French theatre, could make it appear feeble. His two sons are naturally less effective; but the loveliness of Monime yields to no female character of Racine. There is something not quite satisfactory in the stratagems which Mithridates employs to draw from her a confession of her love for his son. They are not uncongenial to the historic character, but, according to our chivalrous standard of heroism, seem derogatory to the poetical.

|Iphigénie.|

11. Iphigénie followed in 1674. In this Racine had again to contend with Euripides in one of his most celebrated tragedies. He had even, in the character of Achilles, to contend, not with Homer himself, yet with the Homeric associations familiar to every classical scholar. The love, in fact, of Achilles, and his politeness towards Clytemnestra, are not exempt from a tone of gallantry a little repugnant to our conception of his manners. Yet the Achilles of Homer is neither incapable of love nor of courtesy, so that there is no essential repugnance to his character. That of Iphigenia in Euripides has been censured by Aristotle as inconsistent: her extreme distress at the first prospect of death being followed by an unusual display of courage. Hurd has taken upon him the defence of the Greek tragedian, and observes, after Brumoy, that the Iphigénie of Racine being modelled rather after the comment of Aristotle than the example of Euripides, is so much the worse.[1001] But his apology is too subtle, and requires too long reflection, for the ordinary spectator; and though Shakspeare might have managed the transition of feeling with some of his wonderful knowledge of human nature, it is certainly presented too crudely by Euripides, and much in the style which I have elsewhere observed to be too usual with our old dramatists. The Iphigénie of Racine is not a character, like those of Shakspeare, and of him perhaps alone, which nothing less than intense meditation can develop to the reader, but one which a good actress might compass and a common spectator understand. Racine, like most other tragedians, wrote for the stage; Shakspeare aimed at a point beyond it, and sometimes too much lost sight of what it required.

[1001] Hurd’s Commentary on Horace, vol. i., p. 115.

12. Several critics have censured the part of Eriphile. Yet Fontenelle, prejudiced as he was against Racine, admits that it is necessary for the catastrophe, though he cavils, I think, against her appearance in the earlier part of the play, laying down a rule, by which our own tragedians would not have chosen to be tried, and which seems far too rigid, that the necessity of the secondary characters should be perceived from their first appearance.[1002] The question for Racine was in what manner he should manage the catastrophe. The _fabulous truth_, the actual sacrifice of Iphigénia, was so revolting to the mind, that even Euripides thought himself obliged to depart from it. But this he effected by a contrivance impossible on the French stage, and which would have changed Racine’s tragedy to a common melodrame. It appears to me that he very happily substituted the character of Eriphile, who, as Fontenelle well says, is the hind of the fable; and whose impetuous and somewhat disorderly passions both furnish a contrast to the ideal nobleness of Iphigénia throughout the tragedy, and reconcile us to her own fate at the close.

[1002] Réflexions sur la Poétique. Œuvres de Fontenelle, vol. iii., p. 149.

|Phèdre.|

13. Once more, in Phèdre, did the great disciple of Euripides attempt to surpass his master. In both tragedies the character of Phædra herself throws into shade all the others, but with this important difference, that in Euripides her death occurs about the middle of the piece, while she continues in Racine till the conclusion. The French poet has borrowed much from the Greek, more perhaps than in any former drama, but has surely heightened the interest, and produced a more splendid work of genius. I have never read the particular criticism in which Schlegel has endeavoured to elevate the Hippolytus above the Phèdre. Many, even among French critics, have objected to the love of Hippolytus for Aricia, by which Racine has deviated from the mythological tradition. But we are hardly tied to all the circumstance of fable; and the cold young huntsman loses nothing in the eyes of a modern reader by a virtuous attachment. This tragedy is said to be more open to verbal criticism than the Iphigenie; but in poetical beauty I do not know that Racine has ever surpassed it. The description of the death of Hippolytus is perhaps his masterpiece. It is true that, according to the practice of our own stage, long descriptions, especially in elaborate language, are out of use; but it is not, at least, for the advocates of Euripides to blame them.

|Esther.|

|Athalie.|

14. The Phèdre was represented in 1677; and after this its illustrious author seemed to renounce the stage. His increasing attachment to the Jansenists made it almost impossible, with any consistency, to promote an amusement they anathematised. But he was induced, after many years, in 1689, by Madame de Maintenon, to write Esther for the purpose of representation by the young ladies whose education she protected at St. Cyr. Esther, though very much praised for beauty of language, is admitted to possess little merit as a drama. Much indeed could not be expected in the circumstances. It was acted at St. Cyr; Louis applauded, and it is said that the Prince de Condé wept. The greatest praise of Esther is that it encouraged its author to write Athalie. Once more restored to dramatic conceptions, his genius revived from sleep with no loss of the vigour of yesterday. He was even more in Athalie than in Iphigénie and Britannicus. This great work, published in 1691, with a royal prohibition to represent it on any theatre, stands by general consent at the head of all the tragedies of Racine, for the grandeur, simplicity, and interest of the fable, for dramatic terror, for theatrical effect, for clear and judicious management, for bold and forcible, rather than subtle, delineation of character, for sublime sentiment and imagery. It equals, if it does not, as I should incline to think, surpass, all the rest in the perfection of style, and is far more free from every defect, especially from feeble politeness and gallantry, which of course the subject could not admit. It has been said that he gave himself the preference to Phèdre; but it is more extraordinary that not only his enemies, of whom there were many, but the public itself was for some years incapable of discovering the merit of Athalie. Boileau declared it to be a masterpiece, and one can only be astonished that any could have thought differently from Boileau. It doubtless gained much in general esteem when it came to be represented by good actors; for no tragedy in the French language is more peculiarly fitted for the stage.

15. The chorus which he had previously introduced in Esther was a very bold innovation (for the revival of what is forgotten must always be classed as innovation), and it required all the skill of Racine to prevent its appearing in our eyes an impertinent excrescence. But though we do not, perhaps, wholly reconcile ourselves to some, of the songs, which too much suggest, by association, the Italian opera, the chorus of Athalie enhances the interest as well as the splendour of the tragedy. It was indeed more full of action and scenic pomp than any he had written, and probably than any other which up to that time had been represented in France. The part of Athalie predominates, but not so as to eclipse the rest. The high-priest Joad is drawn with a stern zeal admirably dramatic, and without which the idolatrous queen would have trampled down all before her during the conduct of the fable, whatever justice might have ensued at the last. We feel this want of an adequate resistance to triumphant crime in the Rodogune of Corneille. No character appears superfluous or feeble; while the plot has all the simplicity of the Greek stage, it has all the movement and continual excitation of the modern.

|Racine’s female characters.|

16. The female characters of Racine are of the greatest beauty; they have the ideal grace and harmony of ancient sculpture, and bear somewhat of the same analogy to those of Shakspeare which that art does to painting. Andromache, Monimia, Iphigénie, we may add Junia, have a dignity and faultlessness neither unnatural nor insipid, because they are only the ennobling and purifying of human passions. They are the forms of possible excellence, not from individual models, nor likely perhaps to delight every reader, for the same reason that more eyes are pleased by Titian than by Raphael. But it is a very narrow criticism which excludes either school from our admiration, which disparages Racine out of idolatry of Shakspeare. The latter, it is unnecessary for me to say, stands out of reach of all competition. But it is not on this account that we are to give up an author so admirable as Racine.

|Racine compared with Corneille.|

17. The chief faults of Racine may partly be ascribed to the influence of national taste, though we must confess that Corneille has avoided them. Though love with him is always tragic and connected with the heroic passions, never appearing singly, as in several of our own dramatists, yet it is sometimes unsuitable to the character, and still more frequently feeble and courtier-like in the expression. In this he complied too much with the times; but we must believe that he did not entirely feel that he was wrong. Corneille had, even while Racine was in his glory, a strenuous band of supporters. Fontenelle, writing in the next century, declares that time has established a decision in which most seem to concur, that the first place is due to the elder poet, the second to the younger; every one making the interval between them a little greater or less according to his taste.[1003] But Voltaire, La Harpe, and in general, I apprehend, the later French critics, have given the preference to Racine. I presume to join my suffrage to theirs. Racine appears to me the superior tragedian; and I must add that I think him next to Shakspeare among all the moderns. The comparison with Euripides is so natural that it can hardly be avoided. Certainly no tragedy of the Greek poet is so skilful or so perfect as Athalie or Britannicus. The tedious scenes during which the action is stagnant, the impertinencies of useless, often perverse morality, the extinction, by bad management, of the sympathy that had been raised in the earlier part of a play, the foolish alternation of repartees in a series of single lines, will never be found in Racine. But, when we look only at the highest excellencies of Euripides, there is, perhaps, a depth of pathos and an intensity of dramatic effect which Racine himself has not attained. The difference between the energy and sweetness of the two languages is so important in the comparison, that I shall give even this preference with some hesitation.

[1003] P. 118.

|Beauty of his style.|

18. The style of Racine is exquisite. Perhaps he is second only to Virgil among all poets. But I will give the praise of this in the words of a native critic. “His expression is always so happy and so natural, that it seems as if no other could have been found; and every word is placed in such a manner that we cannot fancy any other place to have suited it as well. The structure of his style is such that nothing could be displaced, nothing added, nothing retrenched; it is one unalterable whole. Even his incorrectnesses are often but sacrifices required by good taste, nor would anything be more difficult than to write over again a line of Racine. No one has enriched the language with a greater number of turns of phrase; no one is bold with more felicity and discretion, or figurative with more grace and propriety; no one has handled with more command an idiom often rebellious, or with more skill an instrument always difficult; no one has better understood that delicacy of style which must not be mistaken for feebleness, and is, in fact, but that air of ease which conceals from the reader the labour of the work and the artifices of the composition; or better managed the variety of cadences, the resources of rhythm, the association and deduction of ideas. In short, if we consider that his perfection in these respects may be opposed to that of Virgil, and that he spoke a language less flexible, less poetical, and less harmonious, we shall readily believe that Racine is, of all mankind, the one to whom nature has given the greatest talent for versification.”[1004]

[1004] La Harpe, Eloge de Racine, as quoted by himself in Cours de Littérature, vol. vi.

|Thomas Corneille--his Ariane.|

19. Thomas, the younger and far inferior brother of Pierre Corneille, was yet, by the fertility of his pen, by the success of some of his tragedies, and by a certain reputation which two of them have acquired, the next name, but at a vast interval, to Racine. Voltaire says he would have enjoyed a great reputation but for that of his brother--one of those pointed sayings which seem to mean something, but are devoid of meaning. Thomas Corneille is never compared with his brother; and probably his brother has been rather serviceable to his name with posterity than otherwise. He wrote with more purity, according to the French critics, than his brother, and it must be owned that, in his Ariane, he has given to love a tone more passionate and natural than the manly scenes of the older tragedian ever present. This is esteemed his best work, but it depends wholly on the principal character, whose tenderness and injuries excite our sympathy, and from whose lips many lines of great beauty flow. It may be compared with the Berenice of Racine, represented but a short time before; there is enough of resemblance in the fables to provoke comparison. That of Thomas Corneille is more tragic, less destitute of theatrical movement, and consequently better chosen; but such relative praise is of little value, where none can be given, in this respect, to the object of comparison. We feel that the prose romance is the proper sphere for the display of an affection, neither untrue to nature, nor unworthy to move the heart, but wanting the majesty of the tragic muse. An effeminacy uncongenial to tragedy belongs to this play; and the termination, where the heroine faints away instead of dying, is somewhat insipid. The only other tragedy of the younger Corneille that can be mentioned is the Earl of Essex. In this he has taken greater liberties with history than his critics approve; and though love does not so much predominate as in Ariane, it seems to engross, in a style rather too romantic, both the hero and his sovereign.

|Manlius of La Fosse.|

20. Neither of these tragedies, perhaps, deserves to be put on a level with the Manlius of La Fosse, to which La Harpe accords the preference above all of the seventeenth century after those of Corneille and Racine. It is just to observe what is not denied, that the author has borrowed the greater part of his story from the Venice Preserved of Otway. The French critics maintain that he has far excelled his original. It is possible that we might hesitate to own this superiority; but several blemishes have been removed, and the conduct is perhaps more noble, or at least more fitted to the French stage. But when we take from La Fosse what belongs to another--characters strongly marked, sympathies powerfully contrasted, a development of the plot probable and interesting, what will remain that is purely his own? There will remain a vigorous tone of language, a considerable power of description, and a skill in adapting, we may add with justice, in improving, what he found in a foreign language. We must pass over some other tragedies which have obtained less honour in their native land, those of Duché, Quinault, and Campistron.

|Molière.|

21. Molière is, perhaps, of all French writers, the one whom his country has most uniformly admired, and in whom her critics are most unwilling to acknowledge faults; though the observations of Schlegel on the defects of Molière, and especially on his large debts to older comedy, are not altogether without foundation. Molière began with L’Etourdi in 1653, and his pieces followed rapidly till his death in 1673. About one half are in verse; I shall select a few without regard to order of time, and first one written in prose, L’Avare.

|L’Avare.|

22. Plautus first exposed upon the stage the wretchedness of avarice, the punishment of a selfish love of gold, not only in the life of pain it has cost to acquire it, but in the terrors that it brings, in the disordered state of mind, which is haunted, as by some mysterious guilt, by the consciousness of secret wealth. The character of Euclio in the Aulularia is dramatic, and, as far as we know, original; the moral effect requires, perhaps, some touches beyond absolute probability, but it must be confessed that a few passages are over-charged. Molière borrowed L’Avare from this comedy; and I am not at present aware that the subject, though so well adapted for the stage, had been chosen by any intermediate dramatist. He is indebted not merely for the scheme of his play, but for many strokes of humour, to Plautus. But this takes off little from the merit of this excellent comedy. The plot is expanded without incongruous or improbable circumstances; new characters are well combined with that of Harpagon, and his own is at once more diverting and less extravagant than that of Euclio. The penuriousness of the latter, though by no means without example, leaves no room for any other object than the concealed treasure, in which his thoughts are concentred. But Molière had conceived a more complicated action. Harpagon does not absolutely starve the rats; he possesses horses, though he feeds them ill; he has servants, though he grudges them clothes; he even contemplates a marriage supper at his own expense, though he intends to have a bad one. He has evidently been compelled to make some sacrifices to the usages of mankind, and is at once a more common and a more theatrical character than Euclio. In other respects, they are much alike; their avarice has reached that point where it is without pride; the dread of losing their wealth has overpowered the desire of being thought to possess it; and though this is a more natural incident in the manners of Greece than in those of France, yet the concealment of treasure, even in the time of Molière, was sufficiently frequent for dramatic probability. A general tone of selfishness, the usual source and necessary consequence of avarice, conspires with the latter quality to render Harpagon odious; and there wants but a little more poetical justice in the conclusion, which leaves the casket in his possession.

23. Hurd has censured Molière without much justice. “For the picture of the avaricious man, Plautus and Molière have presented us with a fantastic, unpleasing draught of the passion of avarice.” It may be answered to this, that Harpagon’s character is, as has been said above, not so mere a delineation of the passion as that of Euclio. But as a more general vindication of Molière, it should be kept in mind, that every exhibition of a predominant passion within the compass of the five acts of a play must be coloured beyond the truth of nature, or it will not have time to produce its effect. This is one great advantage that romance possesses over the drama.

|L’Ecole des Femmes.|

24. L’Ecole des Femmes is among the most diverting comedies of Molière. Yet it has, in a remarkable degree, what seems inartificial to our own taste, and contravenes a good general precept of Horace; the action passes almost wholly in recital. But this is so well connected with the development of the plot and characters, and produces such amusing scenes, that no spectator, at least on the French theatre, would be sensible of any languor. Arnolphe is an excellent modification of the type which Molière loved to reproduce; the selfish and morose cynic, whose pretended hatred of the vices of the world springs from an absorbing regard to his own gratification. He has made him as malignant as censorious; he delights in tales of scandal; he is pleased that Horace should be successful in gallantry, because it degrades others. The half-witted and ill-bred child, of whom he becomes the dupe, as well as the two idiot servants, are delineated with equal vivacity. In this comedy we find the spirited versification, full of grace and humour, in which no one has rivalled Molière, and which has never been attempted on the English stage. It was probably its merit which raised a host of petty detractors, on whom the author revenged himself in his admirable piece of satire, La Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes. The affected pedantry of the Hôtel Rambouillet seems to be ridiculed in this retaliation; nothing, in fact, could be more unlike than the style of Molière to their own.

|Le Misanthrope.|

25. He gave another proof of contempt for the false taste of some Parisian circles in the Misanthrope; though the criticism of Alceste on the wretched sonnet forms but a subordinate portion of that famous comedy. It is generally placed next to Tartuffe among the works of Molière. Alceste is again the cynic, but more honourable and less openly selfish, and with more of a real disdain of vice in his misanthropy. Rousseau, upon this account, and many others after him, have treated the play as a vindication of insincerity against truth, and as making virtue itself ridiculous on the stage. This charge, however, seems uncandid; neither the rudeness of Alceste, nor the misanthropy from which it springs, are to be called virtues; and we may observe that he displays no positively good quality beyond sincerity, unless his ungrounded and improbable love for a coquette is to pass for such. It is true that the politeness of Philinthe, with whom the Misanthrope is contrasted, borders a little too closely upon flattery; but no oblique end is in his view; he flatters to give pleasure; and, if we do not much esteem his character, we are not solicitous for his punishment. The dialogue of the Misanthrope is uniformly of the highest style; the female, and, indeed, all the characters, are excellently conceived and sustained; and if this comedy fails of anything at present, it is through the difference of manners, and, perhaps, in representation, through the want of animated action on the stage.

|Les Femmes Savantes.|

26. In Les Femmes Savantes, there is a more evident personality in the characters, and a more malicious exposure of absurdity than in the Misanthrope; but the ridicule falling on a less numerous class is not so well calculated to be appreciated by posterity. It is, however, both in reading and representation, a more amusing comedy: in no one instance has Molière delineated such variety of manners, or displayed so much of his inimitable gaiety and power of fascinating the audience with very little plot, by the mere exhibition of human follies. The satire falls deservedly on pretenders to taste and literature, for whom Molière always testifies a bitterness of scorn in which we perceive some resentment of their criticisms. The shorter piece, entitled Les Précieuses Ridicules, is another shaft directed at the literary ladies of Paris. They had provoked a dangerous enemy; but the good taste of the next age might be ascribed in great measure to his unmerciful exposure of affectation and pedantry.

|Tartuffe.|

27. It was not easy, so late as the age of Molière, for the dramatist to find any untrodden field in the follies and vices of mankind. But one had been reserved for him in Tartuffe--religious hypocrisy. We should have expected the original draft of such a character on the English stage; nor had our old writers been forgetful of their inveterate enemies, the Puritans, who gave such full scope for their satire. But, choosing rather the easy path of ridicule, they fell upon the starch dresses and quaint language of the fanatical party; and where they exhibited these in conjunction with hypocrisy, made the latter more ludicrous than hateful. The Luke of Massinger is deeply and villainously dissembling, but does not wear so conspicuous a garb of religious sanctity as Tartuffe. The comedy of Molière is not only original in this character, but is a new creation in dramatic poetry. It has been doubted by some critics, whether the depth of guilt it exhibits, the serious hatred it inspires, are not beyond the strict province of comedy. But this seems rather a technical cavil. If subjects such as the Tartuffe are not fit for comedy, they are, at least, fit for dramatic representation, and some new phrase must be invented to describe their class.

28. A different kind of objection is still sometimes made to this play, that it brings religion itself into suspicion. And this would, no doubt, have been the case, if the contemporaries of Molière in England had dealt with the subject. But the boundaries between the reality and its false appearances are so well guarded in this comedy, that no reasonable ground of exception can be thought to remain. No better advice can be given to those who take umbrage at the Tartuffe than to read it again. For there may be good reason to suspect that they are themselves among those for whose benefit it was intended; the Tartuffes, happily, may be comparatively few; but, while the Orgons and Pernelles are numerous, they will not want their harvest. Molière did not invent the prototypes of his hypocrite; they were abundant at Paris in his time.

29. The interest of this play continually increases, and the fifth act is almost crowded by a rapidity of events, not so usual on the French stage as our own. Tartuffe himself is a masterpiece of skill. Perhaps, in the cavils of La Bruyère, there may be some justice; but the essayist has forgotten that no character can be rendered entirely effective to an audience without a little exaggeration of its attributes. Nothing can be more happily conceived than the credulity of the honest Orgon, and his more doting mother; it is that which we sometimes witness, incurable except by the evidence of the senses, and fighting every inch of ground against that. In such a subject there was not much opportunity for the comic talent of Molière; yet, in some well known passages, he has enlivened it as far as was possible. The Tartuffe will generally be esteemed the greatest effort of this author’s genius; the Misanthrope, the Femmes Savantes, and the Ecole des Femmes will follow in various order, according to our tastes. These are by far the best of his comedies in verse. Among those in prose we may give the first place to L’Avare, and the next either to Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or to George Dandin.

|Bourgeois Gentilhomme.--George Dandin.|

30. These two plays have the same objects of moral satire; on the one hand, the absurd vanity of plebeians in seeking the alliance or acquaintance of the nobility, on the other, the pride and meanness of the nobility themselves. They are both abundantly diverting; but the sallies of humour are, I think, more frequent in the first three acts of the former. The last two acts are improbable and less amusing. The shorter pieces of Molière border very much upon farce; he permits himself more vulgarity of character, more grossness in language and incident, but his farces are seldom absurd, and never dull.

|Character of Molière.|

31. The French have claimed for Molière, and few, perhaps, have disputed the pretension, a superiority over all earlier and later writers of comedy. He certainly leaves Plautus, the original model of the school to which he belonged, at a vast distance. The grace and gentlemanly elegance of Terence he has not equalled; but in the more appropriate merits of comedy, just and forcible delineation of character, skilful contrivance of circumstances, and humorous dialogue, we must award him the prize. The Italian and Spanish dramatists are quite unworthy to be named in comparison; and if the French theatre has, in later times, as is certainly the case, produced some excellent comedies, we have, I believe, no reason to contradict the suffrage of the nation itself, that they owe almost as much to what they have caught from this great model, as to the natural genius of their authors. But it is not for us to abandon the rights of Shakspeare. In all things most essential to comedy, we cannot acknowledge his inferiority to Molière. He had far more invention of characters, and an equal vivacity and force in their delineation. His humour was, at least, as abundant and natural, his wit incomparably more brilliant; in fact, Molière hardly exhibits this quality at all. The Merry Wives of Windsor, almost the only pure comedy of Shakspeare, is surely not disadvantageously compared with George Dandin or Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or even with L’Ecole des Femmes. For the Tartuffe or the Misanthrope it is vain to seek a proper counterpart in Shakspeare; they belong to a different state of manners. But the powers of Molière are directed with greater skill to their object; none of his energy is wasted; the spectator is not interrupted by the serious scenes of tragi-comedy, nor his attention drawn aside by poetical episodes. Of Shakspeare, we may justly say that he had the greater genius, but, perhaps, of Molière, that he has written the best comedies. We cannot, at least, put any later dramatist in competition with him. Fletcher and Jonson, Wycherley and Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, with great excellencies of their own, fall short of his merit as well as his fame. Yet in humorous conception, our admirable play, the Provoked Husband, the best parts of which are due to Vanbrugh, seems to be equal to anything he has left. His spirited and easy versification stands, of course, untouched by any English rivalry; we may have been wise in rejecting verse from our stage, but we have certainly given the French a right to claim all the honour that belongs to it.

|Les Plaideurs of Racine.|

32. Racine once only attempted comedy. His wit was quick and sarcastic, and in epigram he did not spare his enemies. In his Plaideurs there is more of humour and stage-effect than of wit. The ridicule falls, happily, on the pedantry of lawyers and the folly of suitors; but the technical language is lost, in great measure, upon the audience. This comedy, if it be not rather a farce, is taken from The Wasps of Aristophanes; and that Rabelais of antiquity supplied an extravagance, very improbably introduced into the third act of Les Plaideurs, the trial of the dog. Far from improving the humour, which had been amusingly kept up during the first two acts, this degenerates into nonsense.

|Regnard--Le Joueur.|

33. Regnard is always placed next to Molière among the comic writers of France in this, and perhaps in any age. The plays, indeed, which entitle him to such a rank, are but few. Of these the best is acknowledged to be Le Joueur. Regnard, taught by his own experience, has here admirably delineated the character of an inveterate gamester; without parade of morality, few comedies are more usefully moral. We have not the struggling virtues of a Charles Surface, which the dramatist may feign that he may reward at the fifth act; Regnard has better painted the selfish ungrateful being, who, though not incapable of love, pawns his mistress’s picture, the instant after she has given it to him, that he may return to the dice-box. Her just abandonment, and his own disgrace, terminate the comedy with a moral dignity which the stage does not always maintain, and which, in the first acts, the spectator does not expect. The other characters seem to me various, spirited, and humorous; the valet of Valére the gamester is one of the best of that numerous class, to whom comedy has owed so much; but the pretended Marquis, though diverting, talks too much like a genuine coxcomb of the world. Molière did this better in Les Précieuses Ridicules. Regnard is in this play full of those gay sallies which cannot be read without laughter; the incidents follow rapidly; there is more movement than in some of the best of Molière’s comedies, and the speeches are not so prolix.

|His other plays.|

34. Next to Le Joueur, among Regnard’s comedies, it has been usual to place Le Légataire, not by any means inferior to the first in humour and vivacity, but with less force of character, and more of the common tricks of the stage. The moral, instead of being excellent, is of the worst kind, being the success and dramatic reward of a gross fraud, the forgery of a will by the hero of the piece and his servant. This servant is, however, a very comical rogue, and we should not, perhaps, wish to see him sent to the galleys. A similar censure might be passed on the comedy of Regnard, which stands third in reputation: Les Menechmes. The subject, as explained by the title, is old--twin-brothers, whose undistinguishable features are the source of endless confusion; but what neither Plautus nor Shakspeare have thought of, one avails himself of the likeness to receive a large sum of money due to the other, and is thought very generous at the close of the play when he restores a moiety. Of the plays founded on this diverting exaggeration, Regnard’s is perhaps the best; he has more variety of incident than Plautus; and, by leaving out the second pair of twins, the Dromio servants, which renders the Comedy of Errors almost too inextricably confused for the spectator or reader, as well as by making one of the brothers aware of the mistake, and a party in the deception, he has given an unity of plot instead of a series of incoherent blunders.

|Quinault. Boursault.|

35. The Mère Coquette of Quinault appears a comedy of great merit. Without the fine traits of nature which we find in those of Molière, without the sallies of humour which enliven those of Regnard, with a versification, perhaps, not very forcible, it pleases us by a fable at once novel, as far as I know, and natural, by the interesting characters of the lovers, by the decency and tone of good company, which are never lost in the manners, the incidents, or the language. Boursault, whose tragedies are little esteemed, displayed some originality in Le Mercure Galant. The idea is one which has not unfrequently been imitated on the English as well as French stage, but it is rather adapted to the shorter drama, than to a regular comedy of five acts. The Mercure Galant was a famous magazine of light, periodical amusements such as was then new in France, which had a great sale, and is described in a few lines by one of the characters in this piece.[1005] Boursault places his hero, by the editor’s consent, as a temporary substitute, in the office of this publication, and brings, in a series of detached scenes, a variety of applicants for his notice. A comedy of this kind is like a compound animal; a few chief characters must give unity to the whole, but the effect is produced by the successive personages who pass over the stage, display their humour in a single scene, and disappear. Boursault has been in some instances successful; but such pieces generally owe too much to temporary sources of amusement.

[1005] Le Mercure est une bonne chose: On y trouve de tout, fable, histoire, vers, prose, Sieges, combats, procés, mort, mariage, amour, Nouvelles de province, et nouvelles de cour-- Jamais livre à mon gré ne fut plus nécessaire.