one may well say, for you anticipated Nature herself: you gave us,
before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a
lacquey; in a mot of Don Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and
the watchword of Comte, l'amour de l'humanite.

Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with
humour; and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of
a secular civilisation? With a heart the most tender, delicate,
loving, and generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to
make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of
promise, or hope, or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the
greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only
help was in voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to hazard
all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to
pretend to see what you found invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and
Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait
of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play
conceived that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while
were mocking every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons
preached to Agnes we surely hear your private laughter; in the
arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet
we listen to the eternal self-defence of superstition. Thus,
desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent element of life--
precisely where Pascal recognised all that was most fleeting and
unsubstantial--in divertissement; in the pleasure of looking on, a
spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies
of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our
life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic