rigue, derived from Spanish or Italian examples, and the elements of
a comedy of character, in French and more especially in Italian farce
and ballet-pantomime. Corneille's _Menteur_ had pointed the way to a
fuller combination of character with intrigue, and in this direction
Moliere's genius exercised the height of its creative powers. After
beginning with farces, he produced in the earliest of his plays (from
1652), of which more than fragments remain, comedies of intrigue which
are at the same time marvellously lively pictures of manners, and then
proceeded, with the _Ecole des maris_ (1661), to begin a long series of
masterpieces of comedy of character. Yet even these, the chief of which
are altogether unrivalled in dramatic literature, do not exhaust the
variety of his productions. To define the range of his art is as
difficult as to express in words the essence of his genius. For though
he has been copied ever since he wrote, neither his spirit nor his
manner has descended in full to any of his copyists, whole schools of
whom have missed elements of both. A Moliere can only be judged in his
relations to the history of comedy at large. He was indeed the inheritor
of many forms and styles--remaining a stranger to those of Old Attic
comedy only, rooted as it was in the political life of a free imperial
city; though even the rich extravagances of Aristophanes' burlesque was
not left wholly unreproduced by him. Moliere is both a satirist and a
humorist; he displays at times the sentiments of a loyal courtier, at
others that gay spirit of opposition which is all but indispensable to a
popular French wit. His comedies offer elaborate and subtle--even
tender--pictures of human character in its eternal types, lively
sketches of social follies and literary extravagances, and broad appeals
to the ordinary sources of vulgar merriment. Light and perspicuous in
construction, he is master of the delicate play of irony, the
penetrating force of wit, and the expansive gaiety of frolicsome fun.
Faithful to the canons of artistic taste, and under the sure guidance of
true natural humour, his style suits itself to every species attempted
by him. His morality is the reverse of rigid, but its aberrations are
not those of prurience, nor its laws those of pretence; and, wholly free
as he was from the didactic aim which is foreign to all true dramatic
representation, the services rendered by him to his art are not the less
services rendered