In this juxtaposition the comic poet exhibits clearly enough the anti-social tendency of the inflated characteristic. The outrage to woman in the rigorous treatment of their wards by Arnolphe and Sganarelle, the harshness of Alceste’s demands on the high-spirited girl he woos, {366} the menace in Jourdain’s craze to the stability of the home, the cruel bearing of Harpagon’s avarice on his son—all this is made quite plain to the spectator; and the exposure of this maleficent tendency in the perverse attitude serves somehow to strengthen the comic effect.
In thus presentating the hypertrophy of a moral tendency, Molière gives movement to the embodiment by disclosing the organic action of the disordered part on other parts of the man. The avarice of Harpagon renders him fearful of a theft, as if this would ruin him. He takes it as an insult that he should be called rich, asserting that “nothing is more false”. This points to that effect of perverted passion which Molière everywhere emphasises, intellectual blindness, the result of a mastery of the mind by compulsory ideas (idées fixes). The often-quoted indication of mental deafness in Orgon, when, to the servant’s announcement that his wife is ill, he dreamily iterates the ejaculations “Et Tartuffe?” and “Le pauvre homme!” illustrates the full comic value of such a detachment of mind from the realities which are seen by others to be rapping at the doors of sense.
This state of the intelligence reduced to something resembling “mono-ideism” carries with it a loss of the normally clear self-consciousness. The foolish Arnolphe, who, in order to guard himself against the risk of a faithless spouse, subjects the girl he means to wed to intolerable restraints, has the delusion that he is a great reformer, striking the hyper-pedagogic note when he says that a woman’s mind is soft wax.[307] Here and elsewhere the spectator is made to see that the queer creature is acting like a somnambulist, quite unaware of the consequences of his actions. It thus {367} becomes an exhibition of human folly, and of the droll obliquity and bombastic extravagance which are folly’s inseparable concomitants.
There is, no doubt, somewhat of abstraction here. To give a tendency complete dominance and to reduce intelligence to the menial position of its servant is to destroy the organic complexity of the man. All the same, this method of uncovering the drollness of moral obliquity is not adequately judged when it is called abstract. The simplified mechanism still lives, in a sense. One might say that the mature mind is reduced to the level of the child’s. There is, indeed, something suggestive of the child in a lull of naughty temper in Harpagon’s inquiry of his coachman, what people are saying about him. A still more striking approach to the childish occurs when M. Jourdain shows off to his wife and his maid his newly acquired superiority through the discovery of the meaning of “prose”.
It may be added that an escape from the rigidity of the abstract is secured by the development of the obliquity itself. As long as things are seen to grow, they are taken to be alive. The expansion of the ridiculous ambition of M. Jourdain endows him with a certain plenitude of life. It may all be very one-sided, and, by comparison with the life of a normal man, remind us of the inflexibility of a machine; yet it is still a deranged organism that acts, and not a mechanism.[308]
It is to be noted, too, that though they resemble distinctly morbid aberrations from the normal pattern, these characters do not reach to the full height of mania. M. Jourdain, no doubt, gets near the boundary that separates sanity from {368} insanity in the closing scenes of the play;[309] but the comic intention is careful to keep the droll figure on the right side of the boundary.
A frequent termination of the action in this comedy is a climax, in which the folly of the comic character rises to an outburst so voluminous and torrent-like as to throw the onlookers in his world into uproarious mirth. The final befooling of M. Jourdain is an example. Molière was too good an artist, and too wise a man, to try in every case to compass the end of “poetic justice” by giving to society in its struggle with a mighty and obstinate perversion of humanity more of a victory than the laugh. Unhappy Alceste has to rush into the desert without his Célimène amid the hilarity of onlookers. Arnolphe and Sganarelle are no doubt found out and disappointed; and Tartuffe is unmasked and gets into trouble. Yet there is no evidence of a general intention to punish. Orgon, though he is cured of his pious delusion by a rough surgical operation, receives no more chastisement than M. Jourdain receives for having brought alien interests and an alien master into the home. Nor does even that embodiment of an ugly vice, Harpagon, get anything worthy of being called a trouncing.
In all this, the master shows us how well he knew how to keep at the point of view which he had selected as the comic. Let us try to define this after our study of his plays.
When we contrast the world, quiet and orderly for the most part, presented in these comedies with the hurly-burly scenes of a play of Aristophanes, we are tempted to say, as has been said, that Molière sets before our eyes the realities of everyday life. Yet the comic figures blown out into {369} ridiculous volume are certainly not taken straight out of our familiar world. They are always transformations, to this extent, that they are the simplified embodiments of fully developed tendencies which only show themselves in germ-form, and complicated more or less by balancing tendencies, in the real world which is said to be imaged here. We seem thus to have an element of the unreal thrown against a background of the real.
There is no anomaly here when once we get at the comic point of view. In Molière’s plays, the source of laughter lies in this very intrusion of the ill-shapen into a community of well-rounded forms. It is the intruder on whom we fix the eye, for whose unpredictable antics in a world for which he is not made our expectation is set. The serious background is there, but does not take a strong hold of our minds: we are not greatly moved, for example, by the spectacle of the sufferings of the daughters and the wards of testy old gentlemen, or even of the wearing housewifely anxieties of Madame Jourdain. The proper world, into which the absurdly ill-fitted is here pitchforked, is but a background, rendering the valuable service of backgrounds by throwing into relief and so sharply defining the form for which the spectator’s eye is accommodated.