Triss. Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature has hidden few things from you.
Phil. For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.
Bél. I have not, I believe as yet, quite distinguished men, but I have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.
Arm. In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar, history, verse, ethics, and politics.
Phil. I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was formerly the admiration of great geniuses; but I give the preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their founder.
“Les Précieuses Ridicules” is an earlier and lighter treatment of the same theme. The object of ridicule in both these pieces was a lapsed and degenerate form of what originally was a thing worthy of respect, and even of praise. At the Hôtel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the standards which the ladies of that circle enforced. Their mutual communication was all conducted in a peculiar style of language, the natural deterioration of which was into a kind of euphuism, such as English readers will remember to have seen exemplified in Walter Scott’s Sir Piercie Shafton. These ladies called each other, with demonstrative fondness, “Ma précieuse.” Hence at last the term précieuse as a designation of ridicule. Madame de Sévigné was a précieuse. But she, with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a précieuse ridicule. Molière himself, thrifty master of policy that he was, took pains to explain that he did not satirize the real thing, but only the affectation.
“Tartuffe, or the Impostor,” is perhaps the most celebrated of all Molière’s plays. Scarcely comedy, scarcely tragedy, it partakes of both characters. Like tragedy, serious in purpose, it has a happy ending like comedy. Pity and terror are absent; or, if not quite absent, these sentiments are present raised only to a pitch distinctly below the tragic. Indignation is the chief passion excited, or detestation, perhaps, rather than indignation. This feeling is provided at last with its full satisfaction in the condign punishment visited on the impostor.
The original “Tartuffe,” like the most of Molière’s comedies, is written in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading student of Molière sufficiently feel how much is lost when the form is lost which the creations of this great genius took, in their native French, under his own master hand. A satisfactory metrical rendering is out of the question. The sense, at least, if not the incommunicable spirit, of the original, is very well given in Mr. C. H. Wall’s version, which we use.
The story of “Tartuffe” is briefly this: Tartuffe, the hero, is a pure villain. He mixes no adulteration of good in his composition. He is hypocrisy itself, the strictly genuine article. Tartuffe has completely imposed upon one Orgon, a man of wealth and standing. Orgon, with his wife, and with his mother, in fact, believes in him absolutely. These people have received the canting rascal into their house, and are about to bestow upon him their daughter in marriage. The following scene from act first shows the skill with which Molière could exhibit, in a few strokes of bold exaggeration, the infatuation of Orgon’s regard for Tartuffe. Orgon has been absent from home. He returns, and meets Cléante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not answering a question just addressed to him:
Orgon (to Cléante). Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly allow me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (To Dorine, a maid-servant.) Has every thing gone on well these last two days? What has happened? How is every body?