Don Juan—­so enigmatic in its meaning and so loose in its structure—­might almost be the work of some writer of the late nineteenth century; but Le Misanthrope—­at once so harmonious and so brilliant, so lucid and so profound—­could only have been produced in the age of Louis XIV.  Here, in all probability, Moliere’s genius reached its height.  The play shows us a small group of ladies and gentlemen, in the midst of which one man—­Alceste—­stands out pre-eminent for the intensity of his feelings and the honesty of his thoughts.  He is in love with Celimene, a brilliant and fascinating woman of the world; and the subject of the play is his disillusionment.  The plot is of the slightest; the incidents are very few.  With marvellous art Moliere brings on the inevitable disaster.  Celimene will not give up the world for the sake of Alceste; and he will take her on no other terms.  And that is all.  Yet, when the play ends, how much has been revealed to us!  The figure of Alceste has been often taken as a piece of self-portraiture; and indeed it is difficult not to believe that some at any rate of Moliere’s own characteristics have gone to the making of this subtle and sympathetic creation.  The essence of Alceste is not his misanthropy (the title of the play is somewhat misleading), it is his sensitiveness.  He alone, of all the characters in the piece, really feels intensely.  He alone loves, suffers, and understands.  His melancholy is the melancholy of a profound disillusionment.  Moliere, one fancies, might have looked out upon the world just so—­from ’ce petit coin sombre, avec mon noir chagrin’.  The world!  To Alceste, at any rate, the world was the great enemy—­a thing of vain ideals, cold hearts, and futile consolations.  He pitted himself against it, and he failed.  The world swept on remorselessly, and left him, in his little corner, alone.  That was his tragedy.  Was it Moliere’s also?—­a tragedy, not of kings and empires, of vast catastrophes and magnificent imaginations; but something hardly less moving, and hardly less sublime—­a tragedy of ordinary life.

Englishmen have always loved Moliere.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they have always detested RACINE.  English critics, from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have steadily refused to allow him a place among the great writers of the world; and the ordinary English reader of to-day probably thinks of him—­if he thinks of him at all—­as a dull, frigid, conventional writer, who went out of fashion with full-bottomed wigs and never wrote a line of true poetry.  Yet in France Racine has been the object of almost universal admiration; his plays still hold the stage and draw forth the talents of the greatest actors; and there can be no doubt that it is the name of Racine that would first rise to the lips of an educated Frenchman if he were asked to select the one consummate master from among all the writers of his race.  Now in literature, no less than in politics, you cannot indict