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Don Juan so enigmatic in its meaning and so loose in its structure might almost be the work of some writer of the late nineteenth century; but Le Misanthrope at once so harmonious and so brilliant, so lucid and so profound could only have been produced in the age of Louis XIV. Here, in all probability, Molière's genius reached its height.
In that old maid there's always something of Madame la Ressource in Moliere's 'Miser." "I think, Monsieur le maire, that you are mistaken," said Phellion. "Madame la Ressource is a character in 'Turcaret, a very immoral play by the late Le Sage." "Do you think so?" said Minard. "Well, very likely.
Waldo Plubley, for instance, was reported to be nursing a headache. A large breakfast and an "A.B.C." had been taken up to his room, but he had made no appearance in the flesh. "I expect he's playing up to some character," said Vera Durmot; "isn't there a thing of Moliere's, 'Le Malade Imaginaire'? I expect he's that." Eight or nine lists came out, and were duly pencilled with the suggestion.
Their best amusement, and which, in some parts, beats ours, is the comedy; three or four of the actors excel any we have: but then to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the fashionable nights; and then they go, be the play good or bad except on Molière's nights, whose pieces they are quite weary of. Gray and I have been at the Avare to-night: I cannot at all commend their performance of it.
The uncertainty of the personages respecting their own identity and duplication is founded on a sort of comic metaphysics: Sosia's reflections on his two egos, which have cudgelled each other, may in reality furnish materials for thinking to our philosophers of the present day. The most unsuccessful of Moliere's imitations of the ancients is that of the Phormio in the Fourberies de Scapin.
When one has passed whole months away from what is unwholesome and artificial, such things as make up life in Paris, one becomes a little like Alceste, Moliere's misanthrope, when one gets back to them. It is ridiculous at my age, and yet if I were to tell you " "What? you puzzle me. What can there be that is unwholesome in selling things for the poor?" "The poor!
Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter. But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind. Moliere's laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light to our nature, as colour to our thoughts.
Madame Récamier had no intellectual superiority, but, paraphrasing in action Molière's witty sentence, that "silence, well employed, may go far to establish a man's capacity," she resolved to employ well the talent she possessed of making other people believe themselves clever. Mme.
A great effect is sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal acquaintance. Thus Molière's Tartufe does not come on the stage until the third act of the comedy which bears his name.
Had he kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting on to it types he had learned from books, he might have made himself an English Molière without Molière's breadth and clarity but with a corresponding vigour and strength which would have kept his work sweet.
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