They were years of incessant struggle for Molière. He produced “Don Juan,” and the clerical critics objected to that also, because it portrayed an intellectual and free thinker. To be sure, it portrayed him as a very immoral man; but that did not satisfy the clerical party, for few of them could meet that test. It was the irony of fate that the archbishop, who forbade to Molière’s body a church service, was himself a man of notoriously vile habits.
Then came a play called “The Misanthrope,” a name doubtless given as a sop to Molière’s critics. There is really nothing misanthropic about the hero; he is simply a man of fine ideals, who is stunned by his discovery of the powers of evil in the world about him, and their ability to destroy human life. He is married to a woman whom he loves, but who will not give up this evil world, and gives up her husband instead. Molière himself had made a bitterly unhappy marriage with a young actress who preferred the world to her husband, and the hero of this play is generally taken as Molière’s own voice, just as Hamlet is taken as Shakespeare’s voice.
This greatest comic dramatist of France had to waste much of his time producing farces and ballets for his exacting king. He now wrote a farce comedy, which I suppose is produced a thousand times every year in American high schools, “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” The play makes merry with a crude, newly-rich merchant who tries to acquire a little culture in his prosperous years. Molière was thus catering to high-born snobbery, and also voicing the dislike which all artists feel for those who buy and sell. You will recall the scorn of Aristophanes for “mongers” of all sorts—“mutton-mongers” and “rope-mongers” and “leather-mongers” and “offal-mongers.”
In another play, “The Learned Ladies,” Molière joins Aristophanes in poking fun at the idea that women should or could be educated. It is true that the vanities of women are especially absurd when applied to scientific matters, in which personality is so entirely out of place; but the same absurdities result from the first efforts of any disinherited group or class or race to lift itself. We have seen Shakespeare making fun of workingmen trying to produce a play; similarly, we shall find Kipling ridiculing the notion that Hindoos can master the English language, and become fit to hold government positions in their own country.
Molière’s last whack was at the doctors, whom he especially disliked. We can understand that a man afflicted with a chronic disease, concerning which the doctors of his time understood nothing, must have had unsatisfactory results from their visits, must have submitted to their purgings and their bleedings to no purpose, and paid them money which he felt they did not earn. Anyhow, he goes after them again and again, and in his “Imaginary Invalid” he portrays a man who thinks he is sick, and all the various quacks who swarm around him. Three times the play was given with great success, with Molière acting the leading part. A fourth performance was due, and the poor playwright was ill; he thought of his company and what would happen to them if he were to shut down, so he went through the performance, and collapsed and died a few hours later.
But his vivid and courageous propaganda did not die. It lives, even to our time, as the greatest glory of the French drama; proving over and over again our thesis that really great art has never been produced except by men who wished to improve their fellow-men and to abolish cruelty and greed and falsehood from the earth.
CHAPTER XLIII
ÉCRASEZ L’INFAME
In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protestants was repealed, the best schools in France were closed, and half a million of the most intelligent people were driven from the country. At the same time wars of conquest were undertaken, and a series of military disasters befell. The king’s reign closed in darkness and despair, and the crowds of Paris mocked his funeral pageant. But the people’s wrath had to fester for seventy years longer before it broke the tyranny of this “ancient regime.”
Two years after the “grand monarch’s” death, the regent sent to the Bastille a young French poet and man of fashion, the son of a wealthy lawyer of Paris. This youth, known to us as Voltaire, was accused of having written a pamphlet ridiculing absolutist ideas; the charge happened to be false, but needless to say, a year spent in prison without redress did not increase the young man’s love for absolutism. He was one of the wittiest mortals ever born on earth, and blessed, or cursed, with an incessantly active mind. His jailers were comparatively civilized—I mean, compared with jailers of capitalist absolutism in America; they permitted the young man to write poetry and dramas, and when he came out he continued the gay and dissolute life of a literary fop of that period. He was welcomed in the salons of the great, and his long epic poems and his rhymed verse tragedies were produced with great success.
But in his pride as a man of letters Voltaire forgot his place in the great world of France; he presumed to resent an insult from a noble gentleman, whereupon this gentleman brought his lackeys, armed with sticks, and had the poet cruelly beaten, while the noble gentleman sat in his sedan-chair, jeering and directing the punishment. To the amazement of the French aristocracy, the victim failed to accept this as a proper form of discipline; he, a mere lawyer’s son, proceeded to train himself to fight a duel with the nobleman—whereupon his great friends turned their backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille, and got out only upon promise to leave France.