If we turn from the work of Shakespeare to that of Moliere, we shall find many more evidences of the influence of the actor on the dramatist.  In fact, Moliere’s entire scheme of character-creation cannot be understood without direct reference to the histrionic capabilities of the various members of the Troupe de Monsieur.  Moliere’s immediate and practical concern was not so much to create comic characters for all time as to make effective parts for La Grange and Du Croisy and Magdeleine Bejart, for his wife and for himself.  La Grange seems to have been the Charles Wyndham of his day,—­every inch a gentleman; his part in any of the plays may be distinguished by its elegant urbanity.  In Les Precieuses Ridicules the gentlemanly characters are actually named La Grange and Du Croisy; the actors walked on and played themselves; it is as if Augustus Thomas had called the hero of his best play, not Jack Brookfield, but John Mason.  In the early period of Moliere’s art, before he broadened as an actor, the parts that he wrote for himself were often so much alike from play to play that he called them by the same conventional theatric name of Mascarille or Sganarelle, and played them, doubtless, with the same costume and make-up.  Later on, when he became more versatile as an actor, he wrote for himself a wider range of parts and individualised them in name as well as in nature.  His growth in depicting the characters of young women is curiously coincident with the growth of his wife as an actress for whom to devise such characters.  Moliere’s best woman—­Celimene, in Le Misanthrope—­was created for Mlle. Moliere at the height of her career, and is endowed with all her physical and mental traits.

The reason why so many of the Queen Anne dramatists in England wrote comedies setting forth a dandified and foppish gentleman is that Colley Cibber, the foremost actor of the time, could play the fop better than he could play anything else.  The reason why there is no love scene between Charles Surface and Maria in The School for Scandal is that Sheridan knew that the actor and the actress who were cast for these respective roles were incapable of making love gracefully upon the stage.  The reason why Victor Hugo’s Cromwell overleaped itself in composition and became impossible for purposes of stage production is that Talma, for whom the character of Cromwell was designed, died before the piece was finished, and Hugo, despairing of having the part adequately acted, completed the play for the closet instead of for the stage.  But it is unnecessary to cull from the past further instances of the direct dependence of the dramatist upon his actors.  We have only to look about us at the present day to see the same influence at work.