the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which
brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend,
by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to
folly and even vice itself. Thus it is that he has invested the feeble,
miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, and that he has
elevated the scoundrel Don Juan into an alarming image of intellectual
power and pride. In his satire on learned ladies--_Les Femmes
Savantes_--the ridicule is incessant, remorseless; the absurd, pedantic,
self-complacent women are turned inside out before our eyes amid a
cataract of laughter; and, if Molière had been merely the well-balanced
moralist some critics suppose, that, no doubt, would have been enough.
But for the true Molière it was not enough. The impression which he
leaves upon us at the end of the play is not simply one of the utter
folly of learning out of place; in Philaminte, the central female
figure, he has depicted the elevation that belongs even to a mistaken
and perverted love of what is excellent; and when she finally goes out,
ridiculous, baffled, but as unyielding as ever in her devotion to
grammar and astronomy, we come near, in the face of her majestic
absurdity, to a feeling of respect. More remarkable still is Molière's
portrayal of the eminence of the human spirit in the case of Tartufe.
Here it is vice in its meanest and most repulsive forms which has become
endowed with an awful grandeur. Tartufe, the hypocrite, the swindler,
the seducer of his benefactor's wife, looms out on us with the kind of
horrible greatness that Milton's Satan might have had if he had come to
live with a bourgeois family in seventeenth-century France.

Molière's genius was many-sided; he was a master not only of the smile,
but of the laugh. He is the gayest of writers, and his farces, in their
wild hilarity, their contagious absurdity, are perfect models of what a
farce should be. He has made these light, frivolous, happy things as