incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that
Molière gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least
classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art,
sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest
buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too
closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it
seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of
the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often
careless; the structure of some of his finest works was perfunctorily
thrown together; the envelope of his thought--his language--was by no
means faultless, his verse often coming near to prose, and his prose
sometimes aping the rhythm of verse. In fact, it is not surprising that
to the rigid classicists of the eighteenth century this Colossus had
feet of clay. But, after all, even clay has a merit of its own: it is
the substance of the common earth. That substance, entering into the
composition of Molière, gave him his broad-based solidity, and brought
him into kinship with the wide humanity of the world.

It was on this side that his work was profoundly influenced by the
circumstances of his life. Molière never knew the leisure, the
seclusion, the freedom from external cares, without which it is hardly
possible for art to mature to perfection; he passed his existence in the
thick of the battle, and he died as he had lived--in the harness of the
professional entertainer. His early years were spent amid the rough and
sordid surroundings of a travelling provincial company, of which he
became the manager and the principal actor, and for which he composed
his first plays. He matured late. It was not till he was thirty-seven
that he produced _Les Précieuses Ridicules_--his first work of genius;
and it was not till three years later that he came into the full
possession of his powers with _L'École des Femmes_. All his masterpieces