Every one who knew Molière loved him. He was generous, charitable, and warm-hearted. His sense of duty towards his company induced him to remain an actor, when his leaving the stage would have opened the door to honours eagerly sought after and highly esteemed by the first men of the day. It was deliberated, to elect him a member of the French academy. The academicians felt that they should be honoured by such a member, and wished him to give up acting low comedy; without which they fancied that the dignity of the academy would be degraded. Boileau tried to persuade his friend to renounce the stage, Molière refused: he said, he was attached to it by a point of honour. "What honour?" cried Boileau, "that of painting your face, and making a fool of yourself?" Molière felt that by honour he was engaged to give all the support he could to a company whose existence (as it was afterwards proved) depended on his exertions: and besides, his point of honour might mean a steady adherence to the despised stage; so that the slur of his secession might not be added to the ignominy already heaped upon it. He had a delicacy of feeling that went beyond Boileau—that of shrinking from insulting his fellow actors by seceding from among them, and of choosing to show to the world that he thought it no dishonour to exercise his talent for its amusement. In his heart, indeed, he knew the annoyances attached to his calling; when a young man came to ask him to facilitate his going on the stage, and Molière, inquiring who he was, learnt that his father was an advocate in good practice, on which he represented forcibly the evils that attend the life of an actor. "I advise you," he continued, "to adopt your father's profession—ours will not suit you; it is the last resource of those who have nothing better, or who are too idle to work. Besides, you will deeply pain your relations. I always regret the sorrow I occasioned mine; and would not do so could I begin again. You think perhaps that we have our pleasures; but you deceive yourself. Apparently we are sought after by the great; it is true, we are the ministers of their amusement—but there is nothing so sad as being the slaves of their caprice. The rest of the world look on us as the refuse of mankind, and despise us accordingly." Chapelle came in while this argument was going on; and, taking the opposite side, exclaimed: "Do you love pleasure? then be sure you will have more in six months as an actor than in six years at the bar." But Molière's earnest and well-founded arguments were more powerful than the persuasions of his volatile friend.
In every point of view Molière's disposition and actions demand our love and veneration. He was generous to a high degree—undeviating in his friendship; charitable to all in need. His sense of Barron's talent and friendless position caused him to adopt him as a son; and he taught him the art in which both as a comic and tragic actor Barron afterwards excelled. One day the young man told him of a poor stroller who wanted some small sum to assist him in joining his company—Molière learnt that it was Mondorge, who had formerly been a comrade of his own; he asked Barron, how much he wished to give; the other replied, four pistoles. "Give him," said Moliere, "four pistoles from me—and here are twenty to give from yourself." His charities were on all sides very considerable; and his hand was never shut to the poor. Getting into a carriage one day, he gave a piece of money to a mendicant standing by; the man ran after the carriage, and stopt it, "You have made a mistake, sir," he cried out, "You have given me a louis d'or." "And here is another, to reward your honesty," replied Molière; and, as the carriage drove off, he exclaimed, "Where will virtue next take shelter" (où la vertu va-t-elle se nicher!), showing that he generalised even this simple incident, and took it home to his mind as characteristic of human nature. The biographer, Grimarest—who by no means favours him, and dilates on anecdotes till he turns them into romance—says, that he was very irritable, and that his love of order was so great that he was exceedingly discomposed by any want of neatness or exactitude in his domestic arrangements. That ill health and the various annoyances he suffered as manager of a theatre, may have tended to render him irritable, is possible; but there are many anecdotes that display sweetness of disposition and great gentleness of mind and manner. Boileau, who was an excellent mimic, amused Louis XIV. one day by taking off all the principal actors—the king insisted that he should include Molière, who was present; and afterwards asked him, What he thought of the imitation? "We cannot judge of our own likeness," replied Molière; but if he has succeeded as well with me as with the others, it must needs be admirable. One day La Fontaine having drawn on himself an unusual share of raillery by his abstraction and absence of mind, Molière felt that the joke was being carried too far—"Laissons-le," he said, "nous n'effacerons jamais le bon-homme,"—the name bestowed on La Fontaine by his friends. We cannot help considering also in the same light, that of a heart true to the touch of a nature, which "makes the whole world kin," his habit of reading his pieces, before they were acted, to his old housekeeper, La Forêt. From the dulness or vivacity which her face expressed as he read, he judged whether the audience would yawn or applaud his scenes as acted. That she was a sensible old woman cannot be doubted; as when a play, by another author, was read to her as written by her master, she shook her head, and told Molière that he was cheating her.
As a comic actor Molière had great merit: he played broad farcical parts; and a description of his style is handed down to us both by his enemies and friends. Montfleuri (the son of the actor), in his satire, says,——
——"Il vient le nez au vent,
Les pieds en parenthèse, et l'épaule en avant;
Sa péruque, qui suit le côté qui avance,
Plus pleine de lauriers qu'un jambon de Mayence;
Les mains sur les côtés, d'un air peu négligé,
La tête sur le dos, comme un mulet chargé,
Les yeux fort égarés, puis débitant ses roles,
D'un hoquet perpétuel sépare les paroles."
No doubt, though a caricature, there is truth in this picture. We still see in his portraits the wig, thickly crowned with laurels; and theatrical historians have mentioned the sort of catching of the breath—exaggerated in the verses above quoted into a hoquet, or hiccough,—which he had acquired by his endeavour to moderate the rapidity of his articulation. The newspapers of the day, in giving an account of him when he died, describe him as "actor from head to foot: he seemed to have many voices—for all spoke in him; and by a step, a smile, a trick of the eye, or a motion of the head, he said more in a moment than words could express in an hour." "He was," we find written in another newspaper, "neither too fat nor too thin; he was rather above the middle height, and carried himself well—he walked gravely, with a very serious manner; his nose was thick; his mouth large, his complexion dark; his eyebrows black and strongly marked, and the way in which he moved them gave great comic expression to his countenance." He acted well also, because, in addition to his genius, his heart was in all he did; and he wrote well from the same cause. He had that enthusiasm for his art which marks the man of genius. He did not begin to write till thirty-four—but the style of his productions, founded on a knowledge of mankind and of life, necessitates a longer apprenticeship than any other. When he did write it was with facility and speed. The whole of his comedies—each rising in excellence—were composed during the space of fourteen years; and Boileau addresses him as——
"Rare et fameux esprit, dont la fertile veine
Ignore en écrivant le travail et la peine."
But although when having conceived the project of a play his labour was light, his life, like that of all great authors, was spent in study—the study of mankind. Boileau called him the contemplator. He was silent and abstracted in company—he listened, and felt; and carried away a knowledge that displayed itself afterwards in his conception of character, in his perception of the ridiculous, in his portraitures of the human heart. Perhaps nothing proves more the original and innate bent of genius than the fact, that Molière was a comic writer. His sense of the ridiculous being intuitive, forced him to a species of composition, which, by choice, he would have exchanged for tragic and pathetic dramas: but he could only idealise in one view of life; his imagination was tame when it tried to soar to the sublime, or to touch by tenderness. Of course he has not escaped criticism even in the pieces in which his genius is most displayed. Voltaire says that his farce is too broad, and his serious pieces want interest; and that he almost always failed in the dénouement of his plots. The latter portion of this remark is truer than the former; though there is foundation for the whole. Voltaire, like Boileau, was bitten by the then Gallic mania for classical (i.e. in modern literature, imitative instead of original) productions. Boileau too often considers that Molière sacrificed good taste to the multitude when he made his audience laugh. Boileau's poetry is arid, with all its wit; and he had no feeling for humour: his very sarcasms, full of point and epigram as they are, turn entirely on manner; he seldom praises or blames the higher portions of composition. Schlegel, in his bigotted dislike for all things French, by no means does Molière justice[46]; and many of his criticisms are quite false. As, for instance, that on the "Avare;" where he says, that no miser at once hides a treasure and lends money on usury. Any one who consults the history of our celebrated English misers of the last century will find that they, without exception, united the characters of misers and money-lenders.
It has been mentioned that Molière did not succeed in the serious, the sentimental, the fanciful. Voltaire mentions his little one-act piece of "L'Amour Peintre" as the only one of the sort that has grace and spirit. This slight sketch is evidently the groundwork of the "Barber of Seville;" it contains the same characters and the same situations in a more contracted space.
Similar to our Shakspeare, Molière held up a faithful mirror to nature; and there is scarcely a trait or a speech in any of his pieces that does not charm the reader as the echo of reality. It is a question, how far Molière individualised general observations, or placed copies of real persons in his canvass. All writers of fiction must ground their pictures on their knowledge of life; and comic writers (comedy deriving so much of its excellence from slight but individual traits) are led more entirely into plagiarisms from nature. Sir Walter Scott is an instance of this, and could point out the original of almost all his comic characters. This may be carried too far; and the question is, to what extent Molière sinned against good taste and good feeling in holding up well-known persons to public ridicule. We have mentioned the story of his having paid M. de Soyecourt a visit, for the purpose of transferring his conversation to the stage, for the amusement of the king on the following day. This was hardly fair; while, on the other hand, he had full right to the count de Soissons naïve annunciation of the discovery that he had been speaking prose all his life, and putting it into M. Jourdain's mouth; and also to the anecdote we have related concerning Louis XIV. and the bishop of Rhodes, which he introduced into the "Tartuffe." Nor was it his fault that the name of Tartuffe became fixed on the bishop of Autun, as several allusions in madame de Sévigné's letters testify. There is, however, a difference to be drawn between the cap fitting after it is made, and its being made to fit. And in Trissotin, in the "Femmes Savantes," where the works of the abbé Cotin were held up to ridicule, we are apt to think that he went beyond good taste in his personality. The effect was melancholy. Cotin had long suffered from Boileau's attacks; but this last public one from Molière completely overwhelmed him, and he fell into a state of melancholy that soon after caused death. "Sad effect," writes Voltaire, "of a liberty more dangerous than useful; and which does not so much inspire good taste as it flatters the malice of men. Good poems are the best satires that can be levelled against bad poets; and Molière and Boileau need not, in addition, have had recourse to insult."
Molière died on the 17th of February, 1673, aged fifty-one. His friends deeply mourned his loss, and many epitaphs were written in his honour. By degrees France became aware of the honour the country received from having given birth to such a man. The academicians of the eighteenth century endeavoured to atone for the folly of their predecessors. The bust of Molière was placed in their hall, with an appropriate inscription by Saurin:—