dwindle into frigid artificiality, to fall below the level of Molière's prose.

All the love-scenes of his comedies show this. They are written in the language of the drawing-room, rendered artificial by translation into the trite vocabulary of the style noble and the epigrammatic Alexandrine. Lines like these would certainly lose nothing by being put in plain prose:

Et s'il faut qu'à mes feux votre flamme réponde,
Que vous doit importer tout le reste du monde?

Nor are we transported into the realm of poetry and passion by such lines as these, which are nevertheless fairly representative of Molière's diction:

or:

L'amour dans ses transports parle toujours ainsi
Des retours importuns évitons le souci.

Je vais avec ce fer, qui m'en fera justice,

Au milieu de mon sein vous chercher un supplice;
Et, par mon sang versé, lui marquer promptement
L'éclatant désaveu de mon emportement.

The utter inadequacy of such diction is to a great extent due to the inferiority of the metre and language; but Racine, though he wrote also in the Alexandrine and the style noble, would never have written:

marquer promptement

L'éclatant désaveu de mon emportement

nor would he have written:

Des retours importuns évitons le souci.

We have only to turn from this to such a scene as that of the portraits in the Misanthrope to note at once the complete difference. Here Molière is in his natural

element. With what ease and naturalness and brilliancy the conversation flows here! What liveliness of repartee! What keen and cutting satire! One portrait after another is struck off with wit as sharp and concentrated as Pope's or Dryden's, and with a fertility of observation that makes them far more composite and human, and quite superior to anything else of their kind. In the famous scene of the School for Scandal, where Sheridan imitates Molière, the portraits are made up of brilliant details, arbitrarily accumulated and joined together. They do not coalesce to form a portrait at all. They are only clever and malicious epigrams. Molière's are real portraits, and what is more, they are portraits in action; they have a dramatic movement that makes them real, that makes them live and breathe, as Sheridan's do not. Here we have Molière's style at its best, a style essentially like that of Dryden and Pope, but of a far wider range than theirs, having a flexibility, a warmth, a Horatian geniality, and an unstudied and charming abandon which they lack.

It is, therefore, misleading to speak absolutely, as French critics so often do, of the perfection of Molière's style, as we can speak of the perfection of Shakespeare's style. The latter was the expression of a universal personality, and was therefore perfectly adequate to expressing every thought and feeling in the whole range of poetry. Molière was only the greatest of half-poets, and his style could only be perfect within certain definite limits. As long as he keeps strictly within the domain of satiric comedy, it is perfect. When he is on the borderland of romantic comedy, when he has to

Mis.

deal with serious and violent passions, as in the famous quarrel scene of the Misanthrope, it is still adequate, though lacking the poetic charm which a more imaginative temperament, such as Racine's, can infuse into such passages; and finally, when he passes definitely into the realm of romantic comedy, when he has to deal with delicate and exquisite sentiments, his style becomes quite inadequate; his sins of omission become sins of commission; realism usurping the place of fantasy, handles these things with a heaviness of touch and a fundamental lack of sympathy that translate them from the seventh heaven of poesy into the every-day world of prose; and then, like Matthew Arnold, one wishes that Molière had written in prose. But this is only exceptional; Molière was too keen a critic of himself not to

know instinctively that his proper field was satiric

comedy, and to adhere to it.

That the romantic ele

ment should at times enter was inevitable, and Molière certainly can not be accused of any undue predilection for it, since it is usually kept quite in the background. The shortcomings of his style are therefore only incidental, its splendid qualities are general and pervading, and it is consequently, on the whole, one of the most thoroughly satisfying styles in literature.

A final word. One of our American serials, publishing literature of that thoroughly modern kind, which has crowded Shakespeare and Molière to the wall, announces itself as a purveyor of amusing, instructive, and elevating literature. Whatever its achievement may be, its programme certainly gives us a valuable summary of all the ideals which the highest literature

can aim at filling. If we apply this criterion to Molière, it is to be feared that he does not wholly realize these high ideals. He is amusing, for he is the greatest wit in all literature; he is instructive, for a stern and healthy realist always is; but is he elevating?

It must be acknowledged that Molière is not a writer for our highest moods, he neither invites nor satisfies them. They must turn from reality to the realm of the ideal, to the divine and primordial archetypes of beauty and of perfection, of which life presents only fragmentary and deviating copies. This is the realm of the grandly serious, where art becomes one of the purest and fullest expressions of what is highest in our human nature, because its cult of beauty becomes a worship of perfection, and is at bottom only another expression of religion itself. Molière does not rise into the realm of the grandly serious; he remains in the realm of comedy, of irony, of moquerie. But, we also can not dwell too persistently in the world of the ideal, for in that case it would soon become a world of illusion. The world of reality is always at hand, nudging us by the elbow and bidding us solve its problems and meet its issues. must learn that man is the meanest as well as the grandest being in the world, that he is at once, as Pascal says, the glory and the refuse of the universe. We must learn to know not only his grandeur, but also his pettiness, his weakness, and his vice. If it is better to learn to regard these with the serene irony of Molière, rather than with the saeva indignatio of Swift; if we wish to see how life presented itself to one who saw clearly and keenly, who studied

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human nature with a serene and healthy objectivity, never morbid, never embittered, never pessimistic, yet cherishing no illusions, and who, with the most inexhaustible fertility of wit and comic invention, translated the whole of life as he saw it, even suffering itself, into laughter, then we must turn to Molière, for no other writer has done this, either before or since.