Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/92

80 young collegians who seized him in bed, bound him, and forced him to swallow a litre of rum, whereof he died. One cannot imagine that proceeding handled as a farce for the amusement of gentlemen in these days, even without the tragic finish. But there is a distinct savour of its spirit in the farce of Moliere. What M. Stapfer gently avows of the satire in Les Femmes Savantes must be avowed here: "Let us confess it: this is not fine. Infatuation pushed to this degree and parading itself with this effrontery is too invraisemblable." And we accept M. Stapfer's untranslatable phrase: "Molière à le comique insolent." Evidently there is a gulf fixed — except in the theatre — between the taste of the seventeenth and that of the nineteenth century.

Of course we must allow for the fact that Molière was farcing, as he generally did, as the usages and atmosphere and "optic" of the theatre forced him to do. We need hardly look there, in any age, for life-size portraits and scrupulous colour. It is with the characters as with the actors faces: they must needs be "made-up." But if we ought to make this allowance in our criticising of Moliere, we ought also to make it in our estimating of the types he criticised. And this his complacent audiences have never done. In the matter of les précieuses they have always been unquestioningly on the side of the laughers, of the farce-maker, of the young seigneurs, of the valets; and even though the whole episode be consciously set by the onlooker in the Watteau-land of last-century comedy, there always subsists a distinct impression that the préciosité which Molière satirised was just some such imbecility as it appears in the talk of those poor preposterous provincial young ladies of the farce. That is evidently the impression left on the complacent reader as well as on the complacent theatre-goer. It is avowed in the literary histories. Some have noticed that by adding the term "ridicules" Moliere implied that Rh