se they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat
out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a
lop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a
personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a
miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he
is Misanthropy personified.

This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of
relations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Moliere
multiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude is
sacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comedies
are farce-like; even "Tartuffe" is so.

In Moliere little dramatic growth goes on before the
spectator's eye. His personages are not gradually built up by
successive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselves
chiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on the
stage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through
the unrolling of the persons represented. Hence, his most important
personages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agents
for the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinate
rather to the action than creative of action.

Moliere is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him
the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and
body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet.
Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was
a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy
ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life.
Moliere's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are,
philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character
and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be
highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote
ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is
essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who
therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which
reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That,
notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his
comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the
breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his
rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.

Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, th