MOLIERE.* THE encouragement given to the study of French literature

at the Universities during the past twenty years is beginning to have its effect. There is a marked increase in the number of English readers who care for the French classics as well as for modem poetry and fiction. Possibly the reaction towards our own Augustan age, which is clearly manifest, has quickened & sympathy for Racine and Boileau as well as for Pope, or it may bo that French studies have led readers back to our native classics. In any case there is a distinct revival of interest in the great writers of the age of Louis tho Fourteenth and of their English contemporaries. Many people, then, will welcome Mr. Tilley's excellent book on the greatest of all these writers, Moliere. Mr. Tilley, whose scholarly writings have played no small part in the revival of French studies in this country, does not claim any " startling novelty " for his biography or his interpretation of the comedies. But his book embodies, in fact, the conclusions of all the best French critics and students of Moliero, as well as his own judicious comments. Wo know of no other work in English that illuminates so clearly the career of the great French dramatist.

Moliere's short life has been overlaid with legend, but the main facts are established beyond dispute. Jean-Baptiste Poquolin,

born in Paris on January 15th, 1622, was the son of a prosperous Paris upholsterer, who held by purchase the court office of tapissier at valet du ciunnbre du roi, and in that capacity had to

make the royal bed and take charge of the tapestries and bedding when the King travelled. The boy was educated at the fashion- able Jesuit College de Clermont, and afterwards studied law. He acted for a time as his father's deputy at court. But in 1643 Moliero, as he soon began to call himself, decided to become an actor, despite the lamentations of his family. With his friends Joseph, Madeleine, and Genevieve Bejart, the children of a well-to-do official, ho formed a theatrical company, under the patronage of Gaston, Duo d'Orleans. The company failed in Paris, and Moliero was thrice imprisoned for debt. In 1645 the partners went into the provinces and there learned their art by hard experience. They spent much of thoir time in the South,

which was troubled with civil war, famine, and plague. From 1652 they made Lyons their headquarters ; there Moliero pro- duced his first important play, L'Etourdi, in or about 1655. They

entered the service of the Prince do Conti, and played regularly before the provincial Estates of Languedoc. At last in October,

1658, Moliero brought his company back to Paris. A perform- ance of the farce Le ,Docteur Amoureux delighted the young

king, who allowed Moliere the use of a hall adjacent to the Louvre, and afterwards gave him the theatre built by Richelieu in the Palais Royal. For the next fourteen years Moliero was hard at work as an actor-manager and a dramatist. Ho suc- ceeded to his father's court office and in 1662 he married Armando Mart, the youngest sister of his old friend and colleague Madeleine Bejart. Mr. Tilley disbelieves the scandalous tales about Moliere's wife. Tho marriage was not a very happy one, but husband and wife, after a separation, were reconciled some years before Moliere's death. We must remember, as Mr.

Tilley points out in his chapter on Le Misanthrope, that la medisance, or evil speaking, was a common fault of that age,

and was repeatedly denounced by the preachers like Bossuet and Bourdaloue as well as by the satirists. Mlle. Moliere—to give her the correct title assigned then to a married actress or other woman of low degree—suffered in common with most people of note from the spiteful tongues of the gossips. Moliere

drew upon himself the fury of religious bigots in 1664 by his Tartuffe and his Don Juan, and for a time his theatre languished.

The king, whose constant support of Moliere must always be gratefully remembered, gave him a handsome subsidy and asked the company to call itself the Troupe du Rai. But Moliero

in 1666 unhappily had a serious attack of pleurisy, which left him with a hacking cough and caused him to think of retiring from the stage. However, he reappeared in January, 1668, in

Amphitryon, in the opening speech of which Moliere, as Sosie, had to say:—

"Vera la retraito en vain la raison nous appelle, En vain notre &Spit quelquefois y consent ; Leur vue a stir notre zeta Un ascendant trop puissant" —expressing that magnetic attraction of 'the footlights which every actor knows to be irresistible. For five years Moliere

• Afoliere. By Arthur Tilley. Cambridge : at the University Press. 112s. 6d. net.] prospered greatly, with Tartuffe, L'Avare, and Les Femmes Savantes, but his health was giving way. He mocked at disease and the doctors in Le Malade /nraginaire, which he produced on February 10th, 1673, himself playing the leading part. On February 17th, at the fourth representation of the play, he was so ill that his wife begged him not to act. " What would you

have me do ? " he replied. " There are fifty poor workmen who have nothing to live on but their day's wages. What will happen to them if I do not act ? " He struggled through his part, almost collapsing in the final burlesque ceremony, and then went home and died. The parish priest refused him Christian burial. The Archbishop of Paris, at the King's request, per- mitted the funeral to take Pace unobtrusively after dark, with a brief service at the graveside. Telma as late as 1823, as the author notes, doubted whether tho Roman Catholio Church would give him Christian burial In Moliere's day, as we know from Bossuot. an actor was excluded from the Sacra- ment and therefore from the services of the Church at his death. Mr. Tilley's commentary, in successive chapters, on the principal comedies is profoundly interesting. Ho insists on Moliere's devotion to nature and to truth of representation, and on the charm of his easy and vigorous style which " one naturally compares to that of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray and Cervantes." To a modern English reader the rhymed couplets may have at first an artificial aspect, but a very little familiarity with the plays reveals the wealth of keen and humorous observa- tion underlying the conventional forms. Mr. Tilley has no patience with the critics who would attribute to Moliero, as some do to Shakespeare, sternly philosophic and ethical aims. The dramatist was mainly concerned to depict real characters, not to write bloodless allegories. It is clear that ho succeeded, for we can all recognize a Tartuffe, a Cklimene, an Alceste, a Harpagon,

or a Sganarelle, no less than the silly hypochondriac of Le Malade Imaginaire or the rich and vulgar hero of Le Bourgeois Gentil- homme. Moliere did not seek either to caricature these people

or to make them insufferable ; ho presented them as they really are, in the true comic spirit. While his first object was to entertain his public, we may of course admit that his second- ary purpose was to lash the follies of his age—evil speaking, religious hypocrisy, the arbitrary disposal of a girl in marriage by her parents, the affectation of learning, or blind faith in the

medical profession. It says much for Moliere's popularity and for the King's encouragement of him that the dramatist only twice came into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities, namely, over Tartuffe and Don Juan, while Tartuffe, after the dissolution of the powerful secret society called tho " Company of the Holy Sacrament," was played with great success to crowded houses, despite the prelate:: disapproval In a closing chapter on Moliere's style, Mr. Tilley aptly cites from Sarcey the opinion

of tho old actor Provost, who was professor of diction at the Conservatoire—" Moliero is the only dramatic author, the only one, mark you, whose words are always easy to speak, because both his prose and his verso lend themselves so readily to the tone of conversation." It cannot be a mere coincidence that Shakespeare and Moliero, the two supreme dramatists of England and France, were both actors by profession. Their intimate knowledge of the requirements of the stage must—to put it at the lowest—have helped to give their plays immortality. Indeed, Moliere's career, rightly considered, throws much light on the career of Shakespeare, which, if wo know all the facts, would doubtless prove to be as normal and unromantic as the groat Frenchman's.