he worked in.  His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it seems to aspire.  He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often careless; the structure of some of his finest works was perfunctorily thrown together; the envelope of his thought—­his language—­was by no means faultless, his verse often coming near to prose, and his prose sometimes aping the rhythm of verse.  In fact, it is not surprising that to the rigid classicists of the eighteenth century this Colossus had feet of clay.  But, after all, even clay has a merit of its own:  it is the substance of the common earth.  That substance, entering into the composition of Moliere, gave him his broad-based solidity, and brought him into kinship with the wide humanity of the world.

It was on this side that his work was profoundly influenced by the circumstances of his life.  Moliere never knew the leisure, the seclusion, the freedom from external cares, without which it is hardly possible for art to mature to perfection; he passed his existence in the thick of the battle, and he died as he had lived—­in the harness of the professional entertainer.  His early years were spent amid the rough and sordid surroundings of a travelling provincial company, of which he became the manager and the principal actor, and for which he composed his first plays.  He matured late.  It was not till he was thirty-seven that he produced Les Precieuses Ridicules—­his first work of genius; and it was not till three years later that he came into the full possession of his powers with L’Ecole des Femmes.  All his masterpieces were written in the ten years that followed (1662-73).  During that period the patronage of the king gave him an assured position; he became a celebrity at Paris and Versailles; he was a successful man.  Yet, even during these years of prosperity, he was far from being free from troubles.  He was obliged to struggle incessantly against the intrigues of his enemies, among whom the ecclesiastical authorities were the most ferocious; and even the favour of Louis had its drawbacks, for it involved a constant expenditure of energy upon the frivolous and temporary entertainments of the Court.  In addition, he was unhappy in his private life.  Unlike Shakespeare, with whom his career offers many analogies, he never lived to reap the quiet benefit of his work, for he died in the midst of it, at the age of fifty-one, after a performance in the title-role of his own Malade Imaginaire.