What he had achieved was, in the first place, the creation of French Comedy.  Before him, there had been boisterous farces, conventional comedies of intrigue borrowed from the Italian, and extravagant pieces of adventure and burlesque cast in the Spanish mould.  Moliere did for the comic element in French literature what Corneille had done for the tragic:  he raised it to the level of serious art.  It was he who first completely discovered the aesthetic possibilities that lay in the ordinary life of every day.  He was the most unromantic of writers—­a realist to the core; and he understood that the true subject of comedy was to be found in the actual facts of human society—­in the affectations of fools, the absurdities of cranks, the stupidities of dupes, the audacities of impostors, the humours and the follies of family life.  And, like all great originators, his influence has been immense.  At one blow, he established Comedy in its true position and laid down the lines on which it was to develop for the next two hundred years.  At the present day, all over Europe, the main characteristics of the average play may be traced straight back to their source in the dominating genius of Moliere.

If he fell short of the classical ideal in his workmanship, if he exceeded it in the breadth and diversity of his mind, it is still true that the essence of his dramatic method was hardly less classical than that of Racine himself.  His subject-matter was rich and various; but his treatment of it was strictly limited by the classical conception of art.  He always worked by selection.  His incidents are very few, chosen with the utmost care, impressed upon the spectator with astonishing force, and exquisitely arranged to succeed each other at the most effective moment.  The choice of the incidents is determined invariably by one consideration—­the light which they throw upon the characters; and the characters themselves appear to us from only a very few carefully chosen points of view.  The narrowed and selective nature of Moliere’s treatment of character presents an illuminating contrast when compared with the elaborately detailed method of such a master of the romantic style as Shakespeare.  The English dramatist shows his persons to us in the round; innumerable facets flash out quality after quality; the subtlest and most elusive shades of temperament are indicated; until at last the whole being takes shape before us, endowed with what seems to be the very complexity and mystery of life itself.  Entirely different is the great Frenchman’s way.  Instead of expanding, he deliberately narrows his view; he seizes upon two or three salient qualities in a character and then uses all his art to impress them indelibly upon our minds.  His Harpagon is a miser, and he is old—­and that is all we know about him:  how singularly limited a presentment compared with that of Shakespeare’s bitter, proud, avaricious, vindictive, sensitive, and almost pathetic Jew!  Tartufe, perhaps the greatest