XVIII. To Monsieur De Molie're, Valet De Chambre du Roi - Page 2

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
civilisalion? 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 voluntary blindness, 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 credulous excess of Faith. In
the sermons preached to Agne's 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