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Updated: August 9, 2024
One reads upon the tombs, however, the familiar historic names with vivid interest, such as Rossini, Molière, Scribe, Alfred de Musset, Talma, Arago, and others. One remarkable tomb attracts us; it is that of Abélard and Héloise, upon which some hand has just placed fresh flowers.
The invention of Molière is not quite so sluggish; and there are probably three or four of his plays the plots of which seem to be more or less his own; but even in building up these scant exceptions he never hesitated to levy on the material available in the two hundred volumes of uncatalogued French and Spanish and Italian plays, set down in the inventory of his goods drawn up at his death.
Whether the inventors of Jazz thought that, in their pursuit of beauty and intensity, the artists of the nineteenth century had strayed too far from the tastes and interests of common but well-to-do humanity I know not, but certain it is that, like Racine and Molière, and unlike Beaudelaire and Mallarmé and César Franck, they went to la bonne compagnie for inspiration and support.
Such was the man that by himself wrote a whole library about his century, the Walter Scott of France, not the Walter Scott of landscape and adventure, but what is much more prodigious, the Walter Scott of characters, the Dante of the infinite circles of human life, the Moliere of read comedy, less perfect but more fertile than the Moliere of played comedy.
Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière, and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them.
In this matter of denouements he certainly was no more careful than Shakspeare or Moliere. The permanence of Sir Walter's romances is proved, as we said, by their survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he took up his pen to begin "Waverley," fiction had not absorbed, as it does to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign writers.
'You see me, said the King to them, 'engaged in entertaining Moliere, whom my valets de chambre do not consider sufficiently good company for them. From that time Moliere never had occasion to appear at the valets' table; the whole Court was forward enough to send him invitations.
Moliere was contented to revenge himself on the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of studies in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives high fellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we know of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane.
We should be disposed to rank the Le Vieux Bachelier of Collin d'Harleville much higher; but for judging this true picture of manners there is no scale afforded in the works of Moliere, and it can only be compared with those of Terence.
There is fire and movement in the head, and genius on that brow. Raoul belongs to the small number of men who strike your mind as you pass them, and who, in a salon, make a luminous spot to which all eyes are attracted. He makes himself remarked also by his "neglige," if we may borrow from Moliere the word which Eliante uses to express the want of personal neatness.
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