Moliere. Why this should be, and what "tenebriferous star" (as
Paracelsus, your companion in the "Dialogues des Morts," would have

believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but
certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.

Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor "a wilderness of
monkeys" like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and

restored her to Europe.
While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair

and beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to
you that we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you

studied with daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and
Terence, if you "let no musty bouquin escape you" (so your enemies

declared), it was to some purpose that you laboured. Shakespeare
excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that

follow, however fresh, we turn: we turn from Regnard and
Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron

and Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations. "Creations"
one may well say, for you anticipated Nature herself: you gave us,

before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a
lacquey; in a mot of Don Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and

the watchword of Comte, l'amour de l'humanite.
Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with

humour; and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of
a secular civilisation? With a heart the most tender, delicate,

loving, and generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to
make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of

promise, or hope, or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the
greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only

help was in voluntaryblindness, that the only chance was to hazard
all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to

pretend to see what you found invisible.
In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and

Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait
of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play

conceived that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while
were mocking every credulousexcess of Faith. In the sermons

preached to Agnes we surely hear your private laughter; in the
arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet

we listen to the eternal self-defence of superstition. Thus,
desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent element of life--

precisely where Pascal recognised all that was most fleeting and
unsubstantial--in divertissement; in the pleasure of looking on, a

spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies
of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our

life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic
note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of

tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and
human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts,

and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their
tormentors. Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the

rest--our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de
Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures.

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

Celimene 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 "Moliere 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 Moliere 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 Moliere. 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
Comedie Francaise. In him you have a successor to your Mascarille

so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of your date might cry,
could they see him, that Moliere 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 Celimene,
Armande. Yet had you ever so merry a soubrette as Mdme. Samary, so

exquisite a Nicole?
Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years

ago, you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more
servility and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than

you may approve. Are not the Molieristes a body who carry adoration
to fanaticism? Any scrap of your writing" target="_blank" title="n.笔迹；书法">handwriting (so few are these),

any anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may
prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and

discussed by your too minute historians. Concerning your private
life, these men often speak more like malicious enemies than

friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying
vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is

most necessary to defend you from your friends--from such friends as
the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious

but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among
the dead, and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings of attorneys'

offices. As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and
as I behold their trivialities--the exercises of men who neglect

Moliere's works to gossip about Moliere's great-grand-mother's
second-best bed--I sometimes wish that Moliere were here to write on

his devotees a new comedy, "Les Molieristes." How fortunate were
they, Monsieur, who lived and worked with you, who saw you day by

day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the kindest loyalty
to the best and most honourable of men, the most open-handed in

friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy!
Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in the study,

rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller's shop, strolling
through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine's,

dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls.
Would that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry

with Boileau, and with Racine,--not yet a traitor,--laughing over
Chapelain, combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at

Cotin, or talking your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes.
Surely of all the wits none was ever so good a man, none ever made

life so rich with humour and friendship.
LETTER--To Robert Burns

Sir,--Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are
some to whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there

are others whom we admire rather than love. By some we are won with
our will, by others conquered against our desire. It has been your

peculiar fortune to capture the hearts of a whole people--a people
not usually prone to praise, but devoted with a personal and

patriotic loyalty to you and to your reputation. In you every Scot
who IS a Scot sees, admires, and compliments Himself, his ideal

self--independent, fond of whisky, fonder of the lassies; you are
the true representative of him and of his nation. Next year will be