No!  Moliere had not yet discovered his true genius; he was not yet emancipated from his old seductions.  A rival company was reputed to have the better actors for tragedy, and Moliere resolved to compose an heroic drama on the passion of jealousy—­a favourite one on which he was incessantly ruminating. Don Garcie de Navarre, ou Le Prince Jaloux, the hero personated by himself, terminated by the hisses of the audience.

The fall of the Prince Jaloux was nearly fatal to the tender reputation of the poet and the actor.  The world became critical:  the marquises, and the precieuses, and recently the bourgeois, who were sore from Sganarelle, ou Le Cocu Imaginaire, were up in arms; and the rival theatre maliciously raised the halloo, flattering themselves that the comic genius of their dreaded rival would be extinguished by the ludicrous convulsed hiccough to which Moliere was liable in his tragic tones, but which he adroitly managed in his comic parts.

But the genius of Moliere was not to be daunted by cabals, nor even injured by his own imprudence. Le Prince Jaloux was condemned in February, 1661, and the same year produced L’Ecole des Maris and Les Facheux.  The happy genius of the poet opened on his Zoiluses a series of dramatic triumphs.

Foreign critics—­Tiraboschi and Schlegel—­have depreciated the Frenchman’s invention, by insinuating that were all that Moliere borrowed taken from him, little would remain of his own.  But they were not aware of his dramatic creation, even when he appropriated the slight inventions of others; they have not distinguished the eras of the genius of Moliere, and the distinct classes of his comedies.  Moliere had the art of amalgamating many distinct inventions of others into a single inimitable whole.  Whatever might be the herbs and the reptiles thrown into the mystical caldron, the incantation of genius proved to be truly magical.

Facility and fecundity may produce inequality, but, when a man of genius works, they are imbued with a raciness which the anxious diligence of inferior minds can never yield.  Shakspeare, probably, poured forth many scenes in this spirit.  The multiplicity of the pieces of Moliere, their different merits, and their distinct classes—­all written within the space of twenty years—­display, if any poet ever did, this wonder-working faculty.  The truth is, that few of his comedies are finished works; he never satisfied himself, even in his most applauded productions.  Necessity bound him to furnish novelties for his theatre; he rarely printed any work. Les Facheux, an admirable series of scenes, in three acts, and in verse, was “planned, written, rehearsed, and represented in a single fortnight.”  Many of his dramatic effusions were precipitated on the stage; the humorous scenes of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac were thrown out to enliven a royal fete.