of all Moliere’s characters, presents a less complex figure even than such a slight sketch as Shakespeare’s Malvolio.  Who would have foreseen Malvolio’s exquisitely preposterous address to Jove?  In Tartufe there are no such surprises.  He displays three qualities, and three only—­religious hypocrisy, lasciviousness, and the love of power; and there is not a word that he utters which is not impregnated with one or all of these.  Beside the vast elaboration of a Falstaff he seems, at first sight, hardly more solid than some astounding silhouette; yet—­such was the power and intensity of Moliere’s art—­the more we look, the more difficult we shall find it to be certain that Tartufe is a less tremendous creation even than Falstaff himself.

For, indeed, it is in his characters that Moliere’s genius triumphs most.  His method is narrow, but it is deep.  He rushes to the essentials of a human being—­tears out his vitals, as it were—­and, with a few repeated master-strokes, transfixes the naked soul.  His flashlight never fails:  the affected fop, the ignorant doctor, the silly tradesman, the heartless woman of fashion—­on these, and on a hundred more, he turns it, inexorably smiling, just at the compromising moment; then turns it off again, to leave us with a vision that we can never forget.  Nor is it only by its vividness that his portraiture excels.  At its best it rises into the region of sublimity, giving us new visions of the grandeur to which the human spirit can attain.  It is sometimes said that the essence of Moliere lies in his common sense; that his fundamental doctrine is the value of moderation, of the calm average outlook of the sensible man of the world—­l’honnete homme.  And no doubt this teaching is to be found throughout his work, devoted as it is, by its very nature, to the eccentricities and exaggerations which beset humanity.  But if he had been nothing more than a sober propounder of the golden mean he never would have come to greatness.  No man realized more clearly the importance of good sense; but he saw farther than that:  he looked into the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend, by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to folly and even vice itself.  Thus it is that he has invested the feeble, miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, and that he has elevated the scoundrel Don Juan into an alarming image of intellectual power and pride.  In his satire on learned ladies—­Les Femmes Savantes—­the ridicule is incessant, remorseless; the absurd, pedantic, self-complacent women are turned inside out before our eyes amid a cataract of laughter; and, if Moliere had been merely the well-balanced moralist some critics suppose, that, no doubt, would have been enough.  But for the true Moliere it was not enough.  The impression which he leaves upon us at the end of the play is