excite interest by adventures that are unreal, and characters that are grotesque. Corneille's Corneille in La Veuve (1634) brings comedy back from the romantic tone of extraordinary adventures, where the setting is vaguely associated with lovers sighing under the casement of their mistress, or mad with jealousy, telling their grief to the mute rocks and woods, and places the setting in a society background-in the drawing-rooms of Paris. Love is the subject in La Veuve. Alcedon and Philiste are both in love with Clarice (la veuve), but Alcedon is pretending to be in love with Philiste's sister Doris in order better to further his ends. Clarice and Philiste love each other ardently, but the latter is kept from avowing his love by a feeling of inferiority in situation to Clarice she is rich, he is poor. The intrigue is simple and proceeds naturally from the idea of the play. There is but little humour in the conception of the characters, except in that of Florange, Doris' lover, who does not appear, but of whom Doris gives an extremely life-like and amusing sketch. But what spoils the play most is that it is too much in the region of the mind, abstract discussions about love- -we are not brought enough into touch with the concrete which would give flesh and blood to the picture. We cannot accuse Corneille of having copied his types as his predecessors had done for the most part, but instead of observing them from life, he invented them; they are the products of his imagination. His Realism. IV. MOLIÈRE AND HIS ART Having thus cursorily surveyed Comedy from its origin in the mysteries and farces, through the period of Comedy after the Renaissance, we reach Molière. And in reading his Molière's plays you will be able for yourselves to detect something of what Molière owes to his predecessors. The farce and classical comedy give him his types; Italian comedy shows him how to use action and intrigue; classical comedy and Italian comedy furnish him with his plots. Corneille, by bringing back comedy from decessors. the romantic to the domestic setting, serves also Debt to his Pre as a guide. There is not a single genre, not a single type of the comedy previous to Molière which he has not laid under contribution for one or other of his plays. You will find, the more you read of Molière's predecessors, more of the greatness of his indebtedness. But you will also find that it is even more interesting to observe how much there is of Molière himself in his comedy. The parts may belong to others, but the whole is his own. He founded his comedy on the imitation of nature; with him comedy lies in the observation of the real, not in the creation of the imaginary. The people in his comedies must be recognizable by his audience, and if he fails in that he feels he has failed absolutely. The function of comedy, as Molière understands it, is to castigate vice by laughter, not by a moral lecture. Now these statements bring us to the following considerations: first, what Molière considered a vice; second, what art he used in the portrayal of his personae to give them the effect on the stage of living people, and living people of his own. time. Molière's ethical code has been briefly summarized thus: Avoid affectation-Les Précieuses Molière's ridicules; do not contravene nature-L'École des Code. Maris and L'École des Femmes; be sincere and do ethical not be a coquette-Le Misanthrope; do not be hypocriticalTartuffe; do not try to rise above your condition in life— Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; do not be a pedant-Les Femmes savantes; in short, have confidence in nature and avoid untruth and affectation under all its forms. Molière would seem to have surveyed human nature as a philosopher and psychologist; he saw man in pursuit of happiness, whether consciously or not, and he condemned the pursuit that did not confine itself to the sphere prescribed by nature. He condemns the love of gold, pedantry, sensualism, hypocrisy, affectation of all kinds, and he says: 'Be natural, be what nature has indicated to you through the instincts she supplies you with and the needs she creates in you.' That would seem to be his moral code, judging by what he attacks as vices and by those people whom he paints most sympathetically and whom he would therefore seem to set up to us as patterns of virtue. He laughs at any contravention of nature by showing us how weak are those shackles with which we attempt to bind her. The second consideration is, how Molière succeeded in creating living men and women, where others, even when exercising their observation, have failed. It is obviously not enough to observe closely and to set Imitation Nature. of down what you see, you must also observe deeply. His art consists in his sympathetic appreciation of the complexity of which the simplest soul is composed. He did not paint abstract qualities, for such do not exist in nature. He entered into touch with the innermost emotions, he was capable of appreciating the reaction under external influences of the people he described, and as there is nothing simple in the simplest of these reactions, as the simplest emotion is complex, therefore to get the effect of nature Molière gave the emotions as complex and not elementary. That is to say he painted souls and not abstract qualities, for qualities do not exist in nature in the pure state, and it is only for our own convenience that we analyse and catalogue them under various heads- pedantry, avarice, hypocrisy and we are apt to be misled as to the complexity of emotions by this very habit of cataloguing. Molière, in his study of the complexity of the emotions, is obliged to follow nature in mingling the comic with the tragic, but his art showed him how to choose his scenes in order to keep the tragic from our eyes, however much we may feel that somewhere in the background, hidden from our gaze, there is this tragic element. We live in a world of concrete things, and our emotions react at contact with concrete things, so Molière paints humanity under the influ- The Eleence of material situations. He shows us Harpagon Tragedy. in contact with his money, his family, with Mariane, ment of Realism. with his servants, his horses, and he uses these concrete things in order to paint Harpagon. Moreover, while the qualities of his people are profoundly studied and therefore are such as persist eternally, yet the concrete situations in which they are placed are those of his time, so that they should be all the more clearly recognized by the audience of his time. In his choice of types he does not take the trouble to be original; he chooses those which had existed on the stage from time immemorial-the miser, the valet, the pedant, etc.-but he gives them to us in the contemporary form, in the costume of the age of Louis XIV. The pedant becomes the femme savante, the miser becomes the bourgeois usurer. In this choice of vices to attack he is guided, as we have said, by his adherence to nature, but he is also strengthened in his conviction of the rightness of the attack by the fact that these were the vices castigated by comedy since comedy's birth. Molière introduces little realistic touches of contemporary manners to fill out the effect for his audience and to help to heighten the reality. Moreover, he adheres to nature in the simplicity of his subjects. He only uses enough intrigue to bring out the passions of his people, and it is from the characters that the intrigue proceeds. He despised the facile method of exciting curiosity by extraordinary adventures, and chose to follow nature in the simplicity of the action and in the fact that character and event are mutually interactive. The character produces the event and the event displays the character. Simplic ity of Intrigue. We have said before that Molière paints nature in all its complexity. Now there is danger that out of this very complexity the characters should be obscure and indefinite. But Molière chooses his situations carefully, and displays his people in those very situations which would most tend to bring out the dominating quality he wishes to emphasize. Further, to get the effect he desires to produce, to make the characters plain to us in the short time at his disposal, he increases the proportion of the dominating quality. It is by an analysis of the complexity of a man's soul, by choosing those qualities that are the necessary accompaniments of the predominating quality, and by choosing those situations that strongly bring forth these dominant and accessory qualities, that he gives a full picture of a man and yet one that is free from vagueness. There may be other qualities in the soul of any particular miser, but the qualities Molière gives must be present in the soul of every miser. They are those which are essential to the picture. You will observe too, that his characters never change their qualities at the end of the play; there is no throwing off a vice and assuming a virtue in order to give a happy ending, for that does not happen in life. The situation has to be cleared up by an external circumstance which will either react pleasurably on all concerned, as in the case of L'Avare, or else will just bring the situation to a conclusion. The Setting. V. 'L'AVARE'-THE PLAY We shall first of all consider the setting of this comedy, because it has been objected by the critics that the setting is vague, that Molière tells us little about Harpagon's social position-how he had come by his wealth, how, if he was a miser, he came to have horses and carriages, etc. From that part of the Introduction dealing with the age of Molière, one may conclude that Harpagon probably belonged to the haute bourgeoisie-the bourgeoisie |