THE LIFE OF MOLIERE.* ON February 17th, 1673, the great

Moliere died at his work. Le Malade _Tmaginaire was acted for the fourth time at the theatre of the Palais Royal ; it was only a week since it had been first put on the stage. Moliere himself took the part of Argan. Paris thronged to see and hear this fresh satire on the foolish doctors of the time ; the laughter and applause were great, and one telling touch after another was recognised. Everybody laughed, except the author of the comedy. He was ill and suffering, and on that last day he confessed to his wife and a friend that he "could hold out no longer, but must give up the game." They begged him at least to rest himself, not to play that day, to give notice that the performance must be put off. He said :—" What can I do? There are fifty poor workpeople who live on their day's pay ; what would they do if there were no perform- ance P I should reproach myself if I were to keep their bread from them for one day, being actually able to give it to them." He yielded so far, however, as to give the actors notice that unless the play could begin at four o'clock punctually, he would not act that afternoon. It is a hint of the delay and the confusion that must often have vexed his finely impatient spirit.

The candles were lit, the stage was ready, the audience were assembled, and the curtain rose for the last time on Moliere. He went through the performance bravely, but with noticeable difficulty and pain. When it was over, he returned to his

• The Life of Holier.. By Henry M. Trollope. London: A. Constable and Co. [16s. net.] house in the Rue Richelieu, close by. His cough became terribly bad; at ten o'clock that night he broke a blood-vessel and died in a few minutes. He was fifty-one; thus very

nearly overtaking Caesar, Shakespeare, Napoleon, at the death-age of genius.

"The cure of Saint-Eustache refused to bury Moliere." Mr. Trollope here seems to bold up a worthy man to the scorn and hatred of posterity; but really, in 1673, it would have been far more extraordinary if the cure had consented. He could not, indeed, have done so without the leave of his superiors. Comedians were still what they had been in the Middle Ages, and continued to be for some time longer,—

" hors la loi." They were almost in a state of excommunica- tion. A comic actor was regarded as a kind of heathen. In Moliere's case, the Archbishop gave the necessary permission, for the great poet and actor in his later years had lived as a

Christian. But Bossuet did not strike contemporary minds as "foolish" or " uncharitable " when he drew his moral from the almost sudden death of Moliere, the awful transition from "the laughter of the stage" to God's tribunal.

Mr. Trollope has a keener vision when he writes of Moliere's exclusion from the Academy. He does not, we notice, find much that is unnatural or inconsistent in it :—

" Among great French writers who have not been members of the French Academy, Moli6re is the chief. Yet if we think for a moment what was his position as an actor who delighted the crowd in the pit of his theatre with his performances of ridiculous characters; when we think of him as the author of the Tart affe which had brought down upon him the censure of nearly all churchmen and of many men who by their abilities had risen in the world; as the author of George Dandin, where it was believed he had extolled the shameless effrontery of an impudent woman in order to jeer at the misfortunes she caused to her husband ; when we recollect that the poet, about whose verses many of the Academicians cared nothing and whose wit they derided, was the leader of a troop of actors and lived much in their society ; when we recollect also how many churchmen there were among the actual members of the Academy in Moliere's day, and the unwillingness that men have very commonly and everywhere shown to admit into their choies society another of very opposite opinions to their own ;—when we think of all this for a moment, we shall feel that the surprise would indeed have been great if Moliere had been allowed to sit as one of the forty immortals."

It would have been still greater if Archbishop and cure had been ready, without hesitation or pressure, to bury Moliere with a solemn service in consecrated ground ; and it is to the credit of the Church that this was done. As to the Academy,

it left him out in the cold for more than a hundred years. Then it set his bust among its glories, with the inscription : "Rien ne manque is sa gloire, il manquait is la nOtre."

Mr. Trollope's Life of Moliere is a most complete book. Those who know nothing of Moliere, and have never read his plays, will find here an exhaustive history of the man and his times, so far at least as the theatrical world is concerned. And the French theatre of the seventeenth century is a very curious and interesting subject. Those who have studied Moliere and his work in the light of the best French criticism will also find a good deal to interest and amuse them. It will occur to them, perhaps, that a long comparison between Shakespeare and Moliere as "comic dramatists" was hardly

worth the labour of its composition. It was surely not necessary, except for the ignorant, to dwell on the fact that

"Shakespeare and Moliere lived in different mental atmo- spheres, and they wrote under different conditions." The fundamental differences between the supreme poet of all Nature and the brilliant satirist of human nature are surely too great for any fair balance to be held between them. There is, however, a certain entertainment to be found in Mr. Trollope's frankly expressed regret that Shakespeare did not write a little more like Moliere. He would then, he thinks, be better understood by the ordinary young man. This is an instance of the kind of criticism that leads into pitfalls, and the writer himself seems almost aware that he has been beguiled off the road by the genius of Moliere.

Still, the book is very interesting ; it is a conscientious piece of work which was well worth doing, and it represents a considerable amount of careful research. It is a mine or usually correct information as to Moliere's life and the world

he lived in : the theatres of Paris, the wandering troupes of the provinces, illustrated by the Roman Comique ; the society of the Hotel de Rambouillet, that much-needed school of manners, th_, exaggerated successors of which gave birth to Les Precieu,ses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes ; early

struggles, Royal favour, increasing popularity, till Jean Bap- tiste Poguelin, called Moliere, became a kind of prophet from whom all the weakness, absurdity, and humbug of Court and city expected and received laughing castigation. People went to Hohere's theatre to laugh at their neighbours' follies, as they might go to a plain-spoken popular preacher to have their ears tickled with their neighbours' sins.

The analyses of the plays make an amusing and very readable part of Mr. Trollope's book. Among these the best

and fullest are Le Tarture, Le Misanthrope, .Le Malade Imaginaire. There always has been and always will be a great deal to say about the immortal Tarture. It was a very daring play, "an event," as Mr. Trollope says, "in the ftnnstIR of the stage." Moliere was not either "a reformer or an enthusiast." Satirists are seldom perhaps either the one or the other. Neither was he a great moralist. M. Branetiere, the more to be trusted because be can look at genius without dazzle and with detachment, is strong on the "naturalist" side of Moliere. He was of the school of Montaigne and of Rabelais :— " Precieux et pedants; marquis et bourgeois; comediens et auteurs ; gens de cour on d'eglise ; prudes et tarlupins ' on grotesques,—tous calm qu'il y attaque ce sont ceux qui deguisent, on qui fardent in nature ; es sont tons ceux qui interposent le peclantisme des ftles ou Is respect des prejuges entre l'art et la representation de la vie ;—et ce sont surtout ceux qui pretendent contraindre on discipliner in nature."

There were undoubtedly two sides to the comedy of Le Tarture. It was a violent indictment of hypocrisy; but this was not the reason why the King at first, the Parliament, the Archbishop, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, and most of the religious people in France lifted their voices against it. M. Brunetiere sees that there must have been some better cause for all this, and he remarks that " rattaque it la religion y eat indubitable, en taut quo la religion eat concue comme prineipe reprimant.' " There was a good deal of caricature in Moliere's brilliant art. Les Precieuses Ridicules takes no account of the brutal state of society against which /a preeiosite was in its begin-

nings so great and successful a protest. The doctors are laughed at chiefly because they try to put Nature right, to be cleverer than Nature, when she ought to be left to cure her- self : this is a doctrine which may easily run into greater foolishness than it attacks.

In a review, however, one can only touch on these and other controversial aspects of Moliere. Probably much new interest in his plays, too often only known by name, will be aroused by the publication of Mr. Trollope's handsome book. We would offer two suggestions to those who turn anew to the study of Moliere. Avoid translations, which represent him miserably, and read him in the originaL And as to criticism, read something wider and more philosophical than the work of the special " molieristes."