Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze.  It was a boon to the comic poet.  He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions, the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers, extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteering marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair.  A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct.  Yet, though the King was benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the French Court that we are indebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind in society.  For the amusement of the Court the ballets and farces were written, which are dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower, class than intellectual comedy.  The French bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works that were perilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to launch on streams running to shallows.  The Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy’s vessel; it offended, not Dieu mais les devots, as the Prince de Conde explained the cabal raised against it to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy in teaching the world to understand what ails it.  The farce of the Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made popular by certain famous novels.  The comedy of the Femmes Savantes exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of an excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic in precision.  The French had felt the burden of this new nonsense; but they had to see the comedy several times before they were consoled in their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received.  Moliere thought it dead.  ‘I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,’ he said.  It is one of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of the opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and applauded.  In all countries the middle class presents the public which, fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the world best.  It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us into sophistries.  Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make acute and balanced observers.  Moliere is their poet.