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No one can imagine the Scapin's roguery, the tricks of a Sganarelle, the wiles of a Dorine by which the chineur contrives to make a footing for himself. These comedies are as good as a play, and founded indeed on the old stock theme of the dishonesty of servants.
"You will do me the favor to leave me as soon as we reach the woods," said Gerfaut, as he continued to limp with a grace which would have made Lord Byron envious; "you may go straight ahead, or you may turn to the left, as you choose; the right is forbidden you." "Very well. Hearts are trumps, it seems, and, for the time being, you agree with Sganarelle, who places the heart on the right side."
While he possesses a certain airy playfulness, he fails in rich broad humor utterly, and situations of comedy are by no means so well handled as the more serious scenes. A good illustration of this may be found in "Le Médecin malgré lui," in the couplets given to the drunken Sganarelle. They are beautiful music, but utterly unflavored with the vis comica.
The world became critical: the marquises, and the précieuses, and recently the bourgeois, who were sore from Sganarelle, ou Le Cocu Imaginaire, were up in arms; and the rival theatre maliciously raised the halloo, flattering themselves that the comic genius of their dreaded rival would be extinguished by the ludicrous convulsed hiccough to which Molière was liable in his tragic tones, but which he adroitly managed in his comic parts.
Moliere's friends urged him to give up the stage. "Your health is going," Boileau would say to him, "because the duties of a comedian exhaust you. Why not give it up?" "Alas!" replied Moliere, with a sigh, "it is a point of honor that prevents me." "A what?" rejoined Boileau; "what! to smear your face with a mustache as Sganarelle, and come on the stage to be thrashed with a stick?
And when Sganarelle finally drives Pancrace back and shuts him up inside the house inside the box, one is tempted to say a window suddenly flies open, and the head of the philosopher again appears as though it had burst open the lid of a box. The same by-play occurs in the Malade Imaginaire.
She disappeared for days at a time, and soon, Montboron, who was not fitted to play the part of a Sganarelle, either by age or temperament, became convinced that his mistress was making him wear the horns, that she was hobnobbing with the General, and that she was in possession of one of the five keys of the house in the Eglisottes quarter; and as he was as jealous as an Andalusian, and felt a horror for that kind of pleasantry, he swore that he would make his rival pay a hundred fold for the trick which he had played him.
This is a charming little work, instinct with a delicate flavour of antiquity, but lacking in comic power. It has often been played in England as 'The Mock Doctor. Sganarelle is a drunken woodcutter, who is in the habit of beating his wife Martine. She is on the look-out for a chance of paying him back in his own coin.
Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures. Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you did not mean that they should win it.
What we have in this denial, as I have said, is no more than a proof of woman's talent for a high and sardonic form of comedy and of man's infinite vanity. "I wooed and won her," says Sganarelle of his wife. "I made him run," says the hare of the hound.
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