It accords with Racine's conception of dramatic art that his scenes are laid in foreign countries, where artificial conventions are masked by the strangeness of the environment. But there is no attempt at any local color. The Greece of Agamemnon was not more foreign to the Versailles of Louis XIV. than it was to the Greece of Racine's "Iphigénie. This is least felt in Les Plaideurs," in " Esther," and " Athalie," for here the poet is more free; but it should be noted that in all his work the artificiality is in the received notion of tragic art rather than in the literary instinct of the man. At his most plastic period he had been associated with Molière, and to the last, so far as the conventions allowed, he tried to do what Molière had done in comedy, to study and paint with an honest and naturalistic psychology human passions and feelings, dissociated from any relations of country or age.1 He aims at a noble simplicity. His ideal, as he states it, is "a simple action, with few incidents, such as might take place in a single day, which, advancing steadily toward its end, is sustained only by the interests and passions of the characters," who, as he says elsewhere, must be neither too perfect nor too base, so that hearers may recognize themselves in them; not altogether culpable, nor wholly innocent, with a virtue capable of weakness, that their faults may make them less detested than pitied." His interest, then, is in character, not in action; while Corneille always sought the complex crises of history.

"

Now, this conception of tragedy is much more akin to comedy than any that had preceded it. It is a

1 He was reproached for this by Fontanelle, who found his characters so "natural" that they seemed base. Cp. Brunetière, Études critiques, i. 319.

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study of human passion and weakness, as in Molière; but here the pitiless analysis is pushed to the point where amused interest yields to dread, and the smile to terror. It is this naturalistic portrayal of passions common to all men of all time that keeps Racine's hold on the minds of Frenchmen, in spite of the constraints of his form; for of all Europeans they perhaps are most willing to condone this trammel to the free development of genius. Yet apart from this his He had not the tragic

talent was not of supreme rank. grandeur of Corneille, 2 still less of Shakspere, and even in his chosen sphere he had not the keen psychological insight of Molière.

We are thus brought to the greatest of all writers of social comedy, incomparably the greatest French writer of his century, and perhaps the greatest name in all their literature, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, the first Parisian among the great writers of France, in his ethics successor of Rabelais and Montaigne, and predecessor of the rationalists of the next century, of Voltaire and Diderot; who, on becoming identified with the stage, took, and made immortal, the name of Molière (16221673). His parents were well-to-do, he was carefully educated by the Jesuits, and his philosophical studies with Gassendi, or early associations with such libertins as Lhuillier, left many traces in his work and more in his life. Then, like Corneille, he studied law. But

1 This point is ingeniously elaborated by Faguet, 169 sqq.

2 Brunetière, Études critiques, i. 178, makes this judicious comparison: "The work of Corneille, with all its imperfections of detail, is more varied than that of Racine. It has a surer and quicker effect on the stage; above all, its inspiration is higher, more generous, more elevated beyond the common order and ordinary conditions of life. But how much it costs to confess it when we come from reading Racine!"

presently we find him associated with a dramatic company, "L'Illustre Théâtre," which left Paris in 1646 to try its fortune in the provinces. For some years of wandering and precarious existence, during which the company visited almost all the larger cities of France,1 Molière furnished their répertoire with light farces, and at length with more finished comedies in the style of the time, "L'Étourdi" (1653 or 1655) and "Le Dépit amoureux" (1656). This wandering life was a priceless school to him in the study of middle-class men and manners. The future social comedian could hardly have used these years to better advantage. But the company, or at least Molière, was now financially prosperous; and in 1658, after more than twelve years' absence, he arranged for their return to Paris.

But

In spite of borrowed Italian elements, these early comedies had been enthusiastically received, and indeed they were much the best that France could show. both were now cast in the shade by " Les Précieuses ridicules," the first dramatic satire on cultured society in France. The blue-stockings of the Hôtel Rambouillet, or perhaps their bourgeois imitators, who, according to the "Roman bourgeois," abounded in Paris, their affected language and manners, were held up to such good-humored ridicule that success was immediate and universal. Indeed the play has not yet lost its comic force, for learning has not wholly supplanted the affectation of it even among the women of to-day.

Equally typical of Molière is his next play, " Sganarelle" (1660), the first of those gay yet profound

1 We hear of them at Agen, Angoulême, Béziers, Bordeaux, Limoges, Lyons, Montpellier, Nantes, Narbonne, Nîmes, Rouen, Toulouse.

farces, which still hold the stage because they raise first a laugh and then a thoughtful smile. 'Don Garcie," which follows, marks a relapse to the traditional comedy; but in " L'École des maris," though the plot is borrowed from Terence's Adelphi," there is a study of character and a pathos in the treatment of the aged lover that bears the print of the time and of Molière's genius. In February of the next year Molière himself married a young woman of his troupe, more than twenty years his junior, much to his future sorrow, though she was probably not so black as contemporary scandal asserted and literary scavengers delight to repeat.

In 1662 he touched more dangerous ground in "L'École des femmes," a covert naturalistic attack on hypocrisy and literal orthodoxy, by which he raised comedy from a diversion to a living teaching of a philosophy of life. Here first comedy became moral satire, and here first the aristocracy was ridiculed. This unchained a storm of rage, nursed by jealousy, such as actor-poet has seldom faced. He replied to his critics first in the witty "Critique de l'École des femmes" and then in the " Impromptu de Versailles," where his roused indignation did not scruple to name opponents and caricature rivals whom he scourged with caustic cruelty. In 1664 he renewed his attack on that most contemptible of all vices with three acts of "Tartufe, the Hypocrite," in which he inaugurates the comedy of characters as distinct from that of manners. This open satire of false devotion, which was perhaps also a covert attack on all unnatural moral constraint, earned him from these professors of peace and good-will the pious wish that this "demon in human flesh" might " speedily be burned on earth, that

he might burn the sooner in hell.” It was five years before he was suffered to act the entire play; but the king's favor remained constant, and Molière continued the fight with the yet more daring "Don Juan," while light farces, such as "L'Amour médecin," relieved the serious contest.

But, except for “Tartufe," it is with 1666 that the great manner of Molière begins with "Le Misanthrope," which Boileau, Lessing, and Goethe unite to regard as his profoundest study of human character. Slowly but surely it has won its way to the foremost place in popular esteem also, and is now perhaps the most generally read and quoted of all his plays. Alceste, the noble pessimist soured by experience, Philinte, the easy-going social trimmer, the conceited poetaster Oronte, the witty and censorious Célimène are types as enduring as society.

Failing health now began to lessen his productivity, though not his wit. But in 1668 he brought out two masterpieces, the extremely witty " Amphitryon," and "George Dandin," type of the man who marries above. his station and suffers the consequences. Then followed that wonderful psychic picture "L'Avare," the Miser. Then for three years (1669-1671), a succession of light farces, among them the immortal" Bourgeois gentilhomme," marks the recrudescence of his malady; but in "Les Femmes savantes" the poet returned to the subject of the " Précieuses," and with his maturer powers attacked the admirers of pedantry and the affectation of learning,- a subject always new, that in our own day has inspired one of the happiest efforts of the modern stage, "Le Monde où l'on s'ennuie." This was his last important work. Already a consumptive cough was wearing him away. On February