Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.

Moliere was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis XIV., and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and amuse the Parisians.  But deeper than this; Moliere was by nature a great satirist.  I call him a great satirist, because of the affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite—­namely, a clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense, shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the comic and absurd.  For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with histrionic genius.  The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities, the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the game for his faculties.  The interior of Paris households he transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness of his pictures by comic hyperbole.  His portraits are caricatures, not because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a lop-sided deformity.  Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a personage the medium of incarnating a quality.  Harpagon is not a miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing.  Alceste is not a person; he is Misanthropy personified.

This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of relations and juxtapositions.  With laughable unscrupulousness Moliere multiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions.  All verisimilitude is sacrificed to scenic vivacity.  Hence, the very highest of his comedies are farce-like; even “Tartuffe” is so.

In Moliere little dramatic growth goes on before the spectator’s eye.  His personages are not gradually built up by successive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselves chiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on the stage unfolded.  The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through the unrolling of the persons represented.  Hence, his most important personages are prosaic and finite.  They interest you more as agents for the purpose in hand than as men and women.  They are subordinate rather to the action than creative of action.

Moliere is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength.  In him the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and body to the comic.  He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet.  Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was a present Parisian actuality of story and agents.  A poetic comedy ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life.  Moliere’s comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are, philosophically speaking, low life.  His are comedies not of character and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore