Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you did not mean that they should win it.  They go off with laughter, and their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth, behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation.  Your sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are having their day; you can throw a bone or a crust to the dog that has had his, and has been taught that it is over and ended.  Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy, in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and the husband of Ce’lime’ne be untaught in that experience?), you never sided quite heartily, as other comedians have done, with young prosperity and rank and power.

I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for just after your own death the author of ‘Les Dialogues des Morts’ gave you Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of ‘Le Jugement de Pluton’ made the ’mighty warder’ decide that ‘Molie’re should not talk philosophy.’  These writers, like most of us, feel that, after all, the comedies of the Contemplateur, of the translator of Lucretius, are a philosophy of life in themselves, and that in them we read the lessons of human experience writ small and clear.

What comedian but Molie’re has combined with such depths—­with the indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of Don Juan—­such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit!  Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles of contemporary mirth (cetera fluminis ritu feruntur), even now we never laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the boards in the Maison de Molie’re.  Since those mobile dark brows of yours ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the ‘demoniac’ manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Come’die Francaise.  In him you have a successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of play-goers of your date might cry, could they see him, that Molie’re had come again.  But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle.  Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Ce’lime’ne, Armande.  Yet had you ever so merry a soubrette as Mdme. Samary, so exquisite a Nicole?