17, 1673, as he was acting in a new and almost fiercely bitter farce, "Le Malade imaginaire,” he ruptured a blood-vessel in a spasm of coughing, and was carried from the stage to die. He was buried half clandestinely; for the Archbishop of Paris, feeling perhaps that Molière's ethics were as irreconcilable with the received form of Christianity as ever those of Rabelais had been, forbade the clergy to say prayers for him. But he had given liberally of his wealth, and the poor crowded to his funeral; yet the site of his grave is now uncertain.

Molière came at a propitious time, for comedy had not suffered from the false classicism of tragedy; and if little of merit had yet been done, there was promise in the general interest, both popular and cultured, in the subject. The danger was that Spanish or classical models might be too slavishly followed. In his hands farce became comedy, and so won a dignity and an independence that gave it the freedom of conscious strength. And at the same time he broke a way of escape from the " alexandrine prison" and the bondage of the unities. Some of his very best work was done in prose, and he never allowed verse to fetter his thoughts or be more than a subordinate means to a higher end. Indeed, he could not have polished his work as Racine did. In thirteen years he had written twenty-five plays, seven of them serious masterpieces; he had been stage-manager, actor, and often manager of the royal festivals at Versailles. Life to him had been work, and it was fitting that he should die in harness.

A man of indomitable energy, no dramatist ever united so much wit with so much seriousness as did Molière. There is often a pathetic, even a sad, background to his work; but he never allows this to get the better of

his healthy humor, which depends for its effect, not on intrigue or play of words, but on the unexpected revelations of character that come like flashes in his plays. And here his satire is directed always against those social faults that disguise or suppress natural instincts, not against the excesses of nature. It is not ambition or even hedonism that he scourges, but hypocrisy, pedantry, amorous old age, prudery, avarice, or preciosity.1 The purpose to hold the mirror up to Nature, that she may see her face and mend her ways, gives even his roaring farces an element of true comedy. But this purpose brings with it a tendency to typify phases of character, as with Racine, rather than to present the complexity of human nature, as with Corneille; and this disposition was long characteristic of French comedy.2 In the analysis of character Shakspere is more profound, and he tells a story with far more dramatic force. Indeed, to Molière the story, for its own sake, is a very minor matter; but Shakspere has less of the direct contact with and influence on contemporary life that is the result of Molière's naturalistic method and his study of the immediate environment.

This method was that of his successors, of whom Régnard only need be named, though his best work is disappointing, whether regarded in the light of what had preceded, or of the French comedy of to-day. For the tendency of the coming age was away from the naturalistic position. Yet, as one reviews the seventeenth century and the "classical" period, it is clear that naturalism was characteristic of its most successful

1 Cp. Brunetière, Études critiques, iv. 185.

2 Such titles as "The Miser," "The Misanthrope," or Régnard's "The Gambler," "The Distraught," illustrate this.

work. It began with an attempt to codify and regulate the individual conquests of the sixteenth century. Malherbe in poetry, Balzac in prose, undertook to be lawgivers for language and style. Just in so far as the century yielded, and the mental lassitude of the reaction from the Renaissance made it easy to yield, to this gospel of artificiality, stagnation followed. In prose it was least possible to crib and confine; and here there was the most varied development, from which it was easy to purge the chaff and the tinsel. In the drama the yoke was more felt, and in poetry most of all. But those poets and dramatists who were able to rise above these artificial constraints, and to build upon the foundations laid by the giants of the sixteenth century a structure of their own, the independent students of nature and society,— La Fontaine, Molière, in a greater degree Corneille, in a less degree Racine, are those who are prized to-day, and prized most for that which the strict " classical" purists would have condemned

6

THE eighteenth century is the age of Voltaire in a sense and to a degree that is unparalleled in European literary history. Even Goethe, who has also his " century," is less typical, his sway less undisputed, and his excellence, though greater, less diversified; for it is the peculiar distinction of Voltaire that there is no department of letters in which he did not hold a prominent place, while in most he stood by common consent at the head.

Voltaire is not the author of the best lyrics of the century, but he comes just short of the highest place, being indeed all that a versifier can be who lacks what Horace calls the "divine breath" of poetry. His satires are the keenest, his tales in verse the wittiest, in the language. He is the author of the most correct serious epic and of the wittiest comic epic of his time; he is incomparably its best novelist and its best dramatist. His essays in physics are said to be creditable; and though he was neither a metaphysician nor a theologian, his works on ethics and theology are, and were, more read and prized than those of any of his philosophical or clerical contemporaries. He was far the best literary critic of that day, and its most popular historian. Besides this, he was the author of

1 This chapter, with slight changes, appeared in "The Sewanee Review" for February, 1895.

an infinite number of miscellaneous pamphlets, and of a correspondence of appalling volume, almost all of which is interesting, at least, for its polished form. To whatever field of literature we turn, we shall find his mark set up in it. It is not until toward the close of the century that Rousseau, in the ethical and political field, rivals, and for a time overshadows, the philosopher of Ferney. Voltaire will introduce us to the century and accompany us through it; Rousseau will furnish its natural epilogue.

Voltaire (1694-1778), whose real name of Arouet is seldom given him, was the son of a wealthy and rather distinguished Parisian notary; but his early training was at the hands of his skeptical and scholarly godfather, the Abbé de Châteauneuf, and in 1704 he passed into the moulding hands of the Jesuits, who seem to have given him a better education than in later controversial years he liked to admit. He still saw much of the Abbé, and was far from cloistered. Indeed, during the first year of his school life he so won the attention and interest of his godfather's friend, the famous Ninon de l'Enclos, that she bequeathed him two thousand livres, - to buy books," she said.

He left school in 1711, and pretended to study law; but all his ambitions were clearly literary, and he was already a member of the noted literary circle, “du Temple." His father, dissatisfied with such vagaries, sent him first to Caen; then to the Hague, where he got entangled with a young Protestant lady, to the yet more intense disgust of his parent, who actually obtained a lettre de cachet from the king authorizing his son's confinement. But he made no use of it; for Voltaire, always cautious in his daring, returned to Paris and the law, and occupied his mischievous energy