that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions,
the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full
activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,
extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians,
sonneteering marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids,
inter-threading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois
circle will not furnish it, for the middle class must have the
brilliant, flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern;
otherwise it is likely to be inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct.
Yet, though the King was benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the
French Court that we are indebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind
in society. For the amusement of the Court the ballets and farces were
written, which are dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower,
class than intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie of Paris were
sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great
works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works
that were perilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to
launch on streams running to shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as an
enemy's vessel; it offended, not Dieu mais les devots, as the Prince de
Conde explained the cabal raised against it to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy
in teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon
made popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes
exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity
of an excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to
be idiotic in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new
nonsense; but they had to see the comedy several times before they were
consoled in their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.
'I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,' he said. It is one
of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of
the opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,
fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the
world best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question