Monsieur,--With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the
great Moliére! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his
comb!) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your
dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his
titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Moliére--you
found your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to
the dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved
for French comedy; and the ba'ton of Scapin still wields its sway though
the sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees,
or so he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you
overcame the Channel. If England vanquished your country's arms, it was
through you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty
of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden
borrowed 'L'Etourdi,' our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters
theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While
you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial
business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and
their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Moliére. Now they
are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty
where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord
Chamberlain. But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw,
and envied, and imitated your successes--still we pilfer the plays of
France, and take our _bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever
we can find it. We are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely,
to be sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has not first been
'cut out' from the countrymen of Moliére. Why this should be, and what
'tenebriferous star' (as Paracelsus, your companion in the 'Dialogues
des Morts,' would have believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour,
we know not; but certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest
tribute to you. Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor 'a
wilderness of monkeys' like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to
France and restored her to Europe.
While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and
beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that
we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with
daily and nightly care 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'humanité_.
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 Agnés 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 sometimes, 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 Céliméne 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 'Moliére 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 Moliére 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 Moliére. 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 Comédie Francaise. In him
you have a successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of
play-goers of your date might cry, could they see him, that Moliére had
come again. But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if
Mdlle. Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town
to the loss of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true
Céliméne, Armande. Yet had you ever so merry a _soubrette_ as Mdme.
Samary, so exquisite a Nicole?
Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago,
you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility
and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may
approve. Are not the Moliéristes a body who carry adoration to
fanaticism? Any scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any
anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may prove
your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by
your too minute historians. Concerning your private life, these men
often write more like malicious enemies than friends; repeating the
fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by
grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you
from your friends--from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M.
Arséne Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur.
Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Moliére
among the sweepings of attorneys' offices. As I regard them (for I
have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities--the
exercises of men who neglect Moliérés works to write about Moliére's
great-grandmother's second-best bed--I sometimes wish that Moliére
were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, 'Les Moliéristes.' How
fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked with you, who saw
you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the kindest
loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the most open-handed in
friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy! Ah,
that for one day I could behold you, writing in the study, rehearsing
on the stage, musing in the lace-seller's shop, strolling through the
Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine's, dusting your ruffles
among the old volumes on the sunny stalls. Would that, through the
ages, we could hear you after supper, merry with Boileau, and with
Racine,--not yet a traitor,--laughing over Chapelain, combining to gird
at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking your favourite
philosophy, mindful of Descartes. Surely of all the wits none was ever
so good a man, none ever made life so rich with humour and friendship.