Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/91



By John M. Robertson

is permitted in these days to have doubts on all matters; and as French critics (following the German) have set us the example of doubting the artistic infallibility of Molière, a Briton may make bold to confess to one more misgiving in regard to that great artist. It was in witnessing recently a performance of Les Précieuses Ridicules at the Théâtre Français that there forced itself upon me, across the slight boredom of a third seeing, a new question as to the subject-matter of that classic farce. First it took shape as a certain wonderment at the brutality of the argument, still complacently followed twenty times a year by audiences for whom, in real life or modern drama, the classic exploit of the young seigneurs and their valets would have been an enormity, supposing anything on the same scale of feeling and taste to have been done or imagined in this generation. It distantly recalled the mediaeval argument in Much Ado About Nothing, in which the more serious scheme or masculine vengeance might be supposed to suggest to Shakspere himself the reflection of Touchstone on some of the things devised as sport for ladies. It also recalled the recent episode of the killing of a French usher by a gang of Rh