SOURCE: "The Unreconstructed Heroes of Molière," in The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. IV, No. 3, March, 1960, pp. 14-37.

[Nelson is an American critic and educator whose works on French literature include Play Within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of His Art (1958), and Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds (1963). In the following essay, he discusses Molière 's treatment of the relationship between appearance and reality in Le Tartuffe, Dom Juan, and Le Misanthrope, "in order to assess [the meaning of this theme] for Molière 's art in particular and for comic theory in general."]

There are, as Bailly has said [in L'Ecole classique franglaise], no conversions in Molière. To the end, Arnolphe remains a bigot, Harpagon a miser, Jourdain a parvenu, Argan a hypochondriac. Thus Molière remains true to a rule of comedy far more important than the conventions of time, place, and unity considered the hallmarks of classical dramaturgy: the rule of the unity of character. For, conversion would take the spectator into affective and moral regions where the satiric purpose—laughter—might be compromised. A repentant Arnolphe, a disabused Jourdain, an enlightened Argan might satisfy our sense of the pathetic or the propitious, but only at the expense of our pleasure. In fact, to make us feel sorry for such characters at the end of the play or to make them share our superior view of their previous conduct would come dangerously close to identifying us with them in that previous conduct as well. In leaving these characters "unreconstructed" Molière earns our gratitude as well as our applause.

Yet, this "non-conversion" disturbs us in three of his greatest comedies: Le Tartuffe, in which the hypocrite remains a hypocrite; Dom Juan, in which the "sinner" refuses to repent; Le Misanthrope, in which the hater of men hates them more at the end of the play than at the beginning. Holding a similar place in the Molière canon to All's Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure in the Shakespeare canon, these plays might be described as Molière's "bitter comedies." In them, as Borgerhoff has observed [in The Freedom of French Classicism], Molière has reversed his usual dramaturgy, unsettling the categories into which we have cast his work: triumph of the golden mean, the importance of common sense, the essentially bourgeois outlook, etc. Usually, the "hero" (in the purely structural sense of the major role) is a monomaniac, a person lacking what Ramon Fernandez has called "la vision double" [in La vie de Molière] or the capacity for what I have described in an earlier essay [in Play Within a Play] as "the deliberate multiplication of the self." In a Molière play, the "others" have this capacity: the Agnès, the Toinettes, the Scapins who use it to check the effects of the principal character's monomania. "The true hero of a comedy," I wrote in that essay, "is, in fact, the 'others' and their view ought more appropriately be compared with that of the tragic hero in any discussion of the tragic and the comic…. The comic 'others' are ready to assume a mask, they are willing to play a double game. The central figure (an Argan, an Harpagon) simply cannot play such a game, for he does not know of its possibility. Ironically, the tragic hero yearns for the singleness of vision of the comic figure, for whom appearance and reality coincide. However, if the tragic figure and the comic Others' are alike in their doubleness of vision, they differ in the very essence of that vision: where the tragic hero sees discrepancy and even duplicity, the comic 'others' see combination and complementarity: of the social and the natural, of the logical and the illogical, of the conditioned and the instinctive, of the material and the spiritual." Through the use of mask or ruse the "others" usually get the upper hand over the monomaniacal figure. However, in Le Tartuffe the unscrupulous Tartuffe also possesses the usually commendable "double vision." Indeed, short of the King's intervention, his wiles prove more effective than those of the "others" (Elmire, Dorine). In Dom Juan, throughout much of the play, the relationship between the "hero" and the "others" is turned completely inside out: aware of the doubleness of vision of the "others," Dom Juan asserts the moral superiority of his single vision and, in spite of a complex departure from it himself, succeeds in imposing it upon the spectator if not upon the "others." Finally, in Le Misanthrope as in Dom Juan, the monomanic, though fully aware of doubleness, tries to impose his single vision upon the double vision of the "others." However, unlike Dom Juan, Alceste does not find ultimate victory in the very face of defeat.

These three plays are marked by a questioning and at times aggressive outlook and their dates suggest that the outlook was an enduring one: Le Tartuffe (in its first version during the festivities at Versailles) dates from May 1664; Dom Juan from February 1665; Le Misanthrope from June 1666. Only L'Amour médecin (September 1665) interrupts this mood, a fact to which I shall return. Whatever causes account for this mood (professional bitterness at the prudish criticism of L'Ecole des femmes; personal unhappiness because of marriage difficulties, etc.) the outlook itself, the patent reversal of dramaturgy and the chronology of the plays suggest that at this stage of his career Molière sees in a different light the relationship between appearance and reality, the theme which Lionel Trilling has described [in The Liberal Imagination] as the essential theme of all literature. I should now like to look at Molière's "review" of this theme in some detail, in order to assess its meaning for Molière's art in particular and for comic theory in general.

1. Le Tartuffe

Though Molière has divided the limelight between the Impostor and his victim, the play can still be inserted into the typical formula of Molière dramaturgy: the monomaniac (Orgon) is the butt of the satire and the entire action is organized around the effort to break down his fanatical devotion to Tartuffe. The play thus resembles the very last, Le Malade imaginaire, with Tartuffe corresponding to the doctors (and possibly Beline), Orgon to Argan, Elmire to Béralde, Dorine to Toinette, etc. Yet, certain aspects of Le Tartuffe make it very untypical: the monomaniac is finally disabused—Organ sees the light about Tartuffe as Argan does not about the doctors; the "others" are saved not by their own wit but by "chance." At first glance, of course, the "chance intervention" of the king need not be seen as untypical: chance also frustrates Arnolphe on the verge of triumph in L'Ecole des femmes. Yet, the nature of "chance" in the two plays is profoundly different. In L'Ecole, though Enrique's return has been "dramatically" prepared for in Horace's (casual!) reference to his father's expected return (I.iv), the timing of the return could not be more fortuitous. It is conceivable within the terms of the situation that the return be too late—with Agnès wed to Arnolphe. But in Le Tartuffe, the king's intervention is not really a matter of chance. However dramatically surprising it may appear at this time, it was bound to occur in time to frustrate Tartuffe's ultimate designs. For, the king has been wise to Tartuffe for a long time:

Ce monarque, en un mot, a vers vous détesté
Sa lâche ingratitude et sa déloyauté:
Et ne m'a jusqu'ici soumis à sa conduite
Que pour voir l'impudence aller jusques au bout
Et vous faire par lui faire raison de tout.
(V.vii)

Like God in the work of Flaubert, the king has been "partout dans l'oeuvre, mais nulle part visible." The appearance of the exempt "just in time" is not the mere convention (a deux ex machina) it appears to be; the king—through the exempt—is a key character and his intervention is not a "convenient" way out of the dilemma but the only way out of it.

Now, this interpretation of the king's role would seem to support those Molière scholars who have maintained against Michaut that a supposed three-act version of the play without the king's saving role did not exist—at most, the three acts of May 1664 were either only the first three acts of the five-act version or simply a compression of the present five acts. Yet, as Michaut has insisted almost in vain, [in Les Luttes de Molière], there is nothing incompatible between a three-act version without the king's saving role and the play as we now have it. We need not be shocked that Molière might have written Le Tartuffe first of all without a "happy ending," with Tartuffe in full command of the situation, master of Orgon and his possessions. In this case one is not so much shocked by the hypocrisy of Tartuffe as by the gullibility of Orgon. Michaut's brilliant thesis has been rejected by leading Molière scholars for reasons which tell more about the prevailing climate of Molière criticism than they do about the climate in which the play was written. Thus, seventy-five years ago, Mesnard and Despois in their monumental edition of Molière [Oeuvres] summarized and fixed that didactic approach to the play which characterizes most of the criticism surrounding it. They believed that Molière had envisaged the king's intervention from the very beginning of the play, holding it to the very end in order to show "la fausse dévotion en train de devenir maîtresse de la société avec une entière sécurité d'insolence, si la plus haute des puissances tutélaires ne l'arrêtait pas." The plural "puissances tutélaires" is revealing, casting as it does the absolute power of the king in the anonymous functions of modern theories of government, robbing the act of its personal providential character and of its status as a tribute to Molière's patron, Louis XIV. Again, Lancaster, [in History: Part Three], while accepting the possible existence of a completed three-act version, includes the intervention of the king in both versions on the grounds that comedy demands a "happy ending"—a requirement called for also by Mornet (who differs from Lancaster, however, in rejecting the existence of a completed threeact version on purely historical grounds). Finally, the most recent and the most scrupulous of those scholars who have studied the problem, John Cairncross, [in New Light on Molière] has rejected Michaut's thesis of a triumphant Tartuffe, although he has reconstructed his own three-act version terminating with the exposure of Tartuffe at the end of the present Act IV. "The Urtartuffe, was, it will be remembered, described as a 'comédie fort divertissante.' It could not therefore conceivably have terminated … on such a sombre note as the ruin of an entire family owing to the donation or even (if it is admitted that the donation was only added in 1667) on the expulsion of Damis from home and the seduction of Elmire. It is worth stressing the consistency with which in seventeenth century France virtue is always rewarded and vice punished on the stage. Nor is it likely that Molière should have gone out of his way to weaken his hand in dealing with the dévots by so obviously running counter to the accepted convention." One senses behind these and similar objections the didactic view of Molière as a judge handing out rewards and punishments in his "lecture plays." (There is, too, perhaps an unconscious fear of facing up to the fundamentally tragic bases of satire, a notion to which I shall return here.) Evidently, if we accept the widespread view of Molière as a social satirist with a bourgeois outlook, it is difficult to conceive of him writing such a "vicious" play as a Le Tartuffe, without the rescue of Orgon by "tutelary" intervention of some kind.

However, certain critics have discovered in the great comedian not a bourgeois but an aristocratic poet in whom cruelty toward the Prud'-hommes is a marked trait. Such a poet could write a Tartuffe showing the impostor triumphant at the end; such a Tartuffe would make negatively the same point that the present version makes positively: the king is as powerful in the moral realm as in the physical. In laughing at Orgon, helpless at the hands of Tartuffe, the king in no way approves of the unscrupulous Tartuffe. On such an occasion the king can enjoy undiluted the pleasure of laughing at that figure who almost everywhere in the work of Molière, according to Bénichou, [in Les Morales du grand siècle] "est médiocre ou ridicule": the bourgeois. Louis XIV did not want to laugh at false devotion (Tartuffe) but at blind devotion (Orgon). Neither Molière nor the king had any doubts about the evil of false devotion, but in a version destined expressly for the king's pleasure there was no need to spell out the obvious. Thus, as Michaut has conjectured, in the first version Tartuffe probably remained in the margin and the ridiculous Orgon held the spotlight. A dangerous procedure undoubtedly, for there was no protagonist on-stage—a fact which provoked the wrath of Molière's enemies, the dévots, and a fact which might have led Molière to take the royal protagonist out of the audience and to put him into the play itself when he decided to rewrite it.

Nevertheless, until the "ur-Tartuffe" is found (or another reliable document on the contents of the 1664 performance), Michaut's thesis must be treated for what it is: a brilliant but debatable conjecture. Yet, whether we regard the scene of the exempt as tacked on to an earlier version or as part of the play in all of its versions, we must acknowledge that it strikes an unusual, though not necessarily unpleasant, note in the play. In contrast to the satirical realism of the preceding scenes, it is lyrical in effect. The speech of the exempt is less a reproach to Tartuffe than a eulogy of the Roi Soleil. The king is a "Prince … dont les yeux se font jour dans les coeurs"; the king "donne aux gens de bien une gloire immortelle"; with this king "le mérite … ne perd rien, / Et que mieux que du mal il se souvient du bien" (V.vii). The tone of the speech is affirmative, expansive, exultant; if this king is a deus ex machina the emphasis is upon the divinity and not the vehicle. And it is upon the divinity of the king himself: nowhere in this speech of forty verses do we hear the king speak in that role traditionally associated with the Catholic Monarchs of the ancien régime: Defender of the Faith. Nor is the divinity of the god-king Christian in any sense: Louis's divine faculties of omniscience (the emphasis in the speech on metaphors of vision-intelligence) and Justice (his reward to Orgon for services rendered and his judgment upon Tartuffe) are not tempered by the specifically Christian attribute of the godhead: Mercy. The king rescues Orgon not out of merciful understanding of his weakness in supporting the Fronde, but on balance: his service outweighs his misdeeds. In short, the king who appears in these verses looks less to the royal saint whose name Louis continued than to the splendid figure of the pagan divinity who was to be the hero of Molière's most emphatic tribute to his royal patron, the Jupiter of Amphitryon. However briefly, the dénouement of Le Tartuffe is marked by the euphoria which pervades the whole of Amphitryon and the so-called court plays in general.

Given the essentially lyrical character of the intervention, then, is it surprising that for a number of critics the dénouement destroys the realistic focus of the rest of the play? Even if we maintain that the intervention is the only solution for the moral anarchy of "Tartuffism," we cannot help but note that the tone of the dénouement does not fuse with the rest of the play. Molière has used a dramatic form inappropriate to his inattention to flatter the king. To recall Baudelaire's division of the Molière canon, the dramatist has used the mode of the "comique significatif to create an example of the "comique grotesque." Or, more precisely, he has juxtaposed the two modes. One cannot sing the praises of anyone with mordant satire; satire is by definition negative and to sing of glories some other form is required. Earlier in 1664 Molière had begun to work in such a form with Le Mariage forcé, his first comédie-ballet. Possibly, with the first version of Le Tartuffe, he counted on the context of Les Plaisirs de l'Ile Enchantée, which included his second comédie-ballet as well (La Princesse d'Elide), to dilute the negativism of the satire (just as he counted on the "dilution" of the bitterly satirical George Dandin in the context of Le Grand Divertissement royal de Versailles in 1668). Be that as it may, in the final version of Le Tartuffe he has tried with the scene of the exempt to "take back" the negativism of the satire—and failed. The "significatif and the "grotesque" did not fuse and would not until much later with Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire.

2. Dom Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre

As the quarrel of L'Ecole des femmes has already taught us, Molière is not one to back down in a close fight. So, in Dom Juan, he gives a fuller, more affirmative expres sion of the ideals only negatively implied in most of Le Tartuffe and brought out briefly in the final scenes of that play. The statement is astonishing only if we persist with generations of unsympathetic critics in taking the Dom Juan of the first part of the fifth act as the same character we see earlier in the play or if we see in the dénouement Molière's own punishment of the legendary lover. For Dom Juan adopts hypocrisy in the fifth act only temporarily and in clear contrast with his open behavior in the first four acts, where he gives himself only for what he is. In fact, as James Doolittle has shown in a character-by-character analysis of the play ["The Humanity of Molière's Dom Juan," PMLA, LXVIII], it is just this honesty which sets Dom Juan in such violent conflict with the "others" of this play. But, one objects, perhaps Dom Juan is honest with Sganarelle and Dimanche and Dom Luis—but what about his behavior with Elvire and the peasant girls? Yet, can we really judge these "deceptions" on the same ethical grounds as the deceptions of Tartuffe? We have only to compare Dom Juan's courtship of the peasant girls with the nervous, sly courtship of Elmire by Tartuffe to sense immediately a profound difference between the two "hypocrites." With Dom Juan, "hypocrisy" is not a matter of ethics but of esthetics: he is a hypocrite only in the etymological sense of the word: an actor. The lies of courtship are only conventions of his role in the game of love. The Charlottes and even the Elvires are well aware of this. However, like many an actor in this game, they forget or want to forget that the first and most important rule of the game is that it must not be taken seriously. Unlike Tartuffe, Dom Juan seeks no victims in his "conquests"—only fellow-actors. Thus, if the other "actors" take the game too seriously, they have only themselves to blame. That Charlotte and Mathurine should get burned in this games does not affect us too deeply, for, as even the most antipathetic critics have admitted, we identify with the appealing Dom Juan even in disapproving of him. However, the nobility of Elvire's worldly station and her dignified airs make her defeat in the game of love seem especially pathetic. Yet, this "grande dame" is less honest with herself than the relatively simple peasant girls and so deserves our sympathy even less. In reproaching Dom Juan she blames him not for infidelity—she knows the rules of the game too well for that—but, as Doolittle says, "for his seeming inability to hide it … for his silence … for his failure to cloak his action in a set of conventional phrases." For, the game being over, Dom Juan in all honesty makes the clear distinction between appearance and reality which the occasion calls for. Indeed, if his conduct in the courtship of the peasant girls is any clue, even in courtship Dom Juan makes the more subtle but no less clear distinction between appearance and reality which the occasion calls for; we assume, then, that he acted in the same way in his courtship of Elvire which we do not actually see in the play. Being pure conventions, the deceptions of courtship do not really obscure the courtier's objective of sensual satisfaction; rather, they "sublimate" animal drives, translate them into human terms. Not that I would minimize the importance of physical possession for this "grand seigneur." Dom Juan is no Marivaux prince wryly delighting in the playing of the game of love for its own sake; his sense of reality is too great to allow that. Nevertheless, Dom Juan is not Lady Chatterly's lover either and to miss the conventionality of his courtships is to miss his humanity.

No matter how much we may ultimately justify the amorous aspects of Dom Juan's behavior in terms of the rest of the action and whatever the emphasis in the legend, criticism of the play has made too much of Dom Juan's "attachments." Actually, much of the action is concerned not with Dom Juan's supposedly unscrupulous wooing but with the shortcomings of the "others" of this play: Sganarelle, who blandly justifies selling phony medicine to gullible peasants on the sole authority of appearances, the doctor's robes the buys (III.i); Dom Louis, who presumptuously identifies his own with God's purposes; Alonse, whose brutish loyalty to the code of honor makes a mockery of that code as it is more sympathetically represented in his brother, Carlos; etc. These self-deceivers remind us by contrast of Dom Juan's chief virtue: his refusal to deceive himself, his intention to give himself on every occasion only for what he is. Nor is this virtue simply moral in character—vertu; it is also virtu, the manliness of a brave man as is clearly evident in Dom Juan's rescue of Carlos and in his courage before threats made by the highest as well as the lowliest of powers: the Statue and Pierrot (who are, by the way, linked etymologically as well in the very sub-title of the play: Le Festin de Pierre):

Thus Dom Juan is the most authentic of Molière's heroes, a généreux in the Cornelian mold who refuses to accept any compromise of his ideal of self-assertion. This affiliation with Corneille inevitably calls to mind Poulaille's thesis, [in Corneille sous le marque de Molière], so let me say immediately that I am in no way subscribing to the preposterous notion that Corneille really wrote Molière's plays in whole or in part. Nevertheless, Poulaille, like Bénichou more responsibly, has sensed a kinship between the two writers, one that I feel I should explore in some detail before going on with my assessment of Dom Juan's place in the entire Molière canon.

Remembering the parodistic rehearsal of various Cornelian dramas in L'Impromptu de Versailles, we tend to read Molière comedy as the very evacuation of "Cornelianism"—nothing, we feel, could be further from its supposed posturings. Yet, both as producer and dramatist, Molière had quite sincerely turned at an earlier stage of his career to the Cornelian mold. Fernandez reminds us that Molière had been formed intellectually and artistically in the "age of Corneille" and that a tragedy of Corneille accompanied each of the new comedies Molière presented upon arriving in Paris. And most critics agree that this preoccupation with Corneille gives a decidedly Cornelian stamp to Molière's only attempt at a "serious" play: Dom Garcie de Navarre, ou le Prince jaloux (first presented in February 1661, although generally believed to have been written much earlier). It should be said, however, that most of these critics feel that the Cornelianism is incomplete or misdirected: the heroine, Elvire, is Cornelian; the hero, Dom Garcie, is not. Fixing an interpretation of the hero which has obtained throughout the history of the play's criticism, Rigal, writing fifty years ago, objected that Dom Garcie's jealousy, unlike that of Othello and Alceste, is unmotivated. Lancaster, following Michaut, regards Dom Garcie as "un maniaque de jalousie," while Fernandez, in the most pointed criticism of the play to date, regards him as an "intrus dans un monde dont il est indigne, ou comme un enfant gâté pour lequel on est trop bon." Dom Garcie doesn't belong in the same world as Elvire because "d'après les canons cornéliens la jalousie est un crime contre l'amour: elle ravale l'objet aimé et l'amant lui-même, elle donne le pas à l'animal sur l'homme; surtout elle rompt tout rapport entre l'amour et les hauts principes de l'idéal humain." The subject, indeed, seems more Racinian than Cornelian, so that Rigal and others perhaps do a disservice to Molière in asking him to justify the hero's behavior: in Dom Garcie, ever ready to accuse his mistress of infidelity, we could read an instance of the Racinian character's tendency to find in reality the confirmation of his own inmost desires—whether it is there or not. In short, intelligence at the service of will or desire. Thus, Léon Emery has been led [in Molière: du metier à la pensée] to describe Dom Garcie as "un document à illustrer le passage du style cornélian au style racinien de la tragédie. Plus de complications romanesques en dehors des postulates conventionnels que tout le monde connaît; plus de tirades qui se déroulent avec pompe ou qui jaillissent comme des épées nues."

Yet, in Dom Garcie himself, we are with neither Corneille nor Racine; Molière's attitude toward his hero is very much his own. Though nowhere so subtle as in the great plays, Molière's dramaturgy is familiar enough here. Following W. G. Moore's brilliant analysis of Le Misanthrope [in Molière: A New Criticism], we might say that in Dom Garcie de Navarre, too, "the successive scenes do not so much narrate events as expose an attitude and a relationship." However, the early play lacks the poetic subtlety and the dramatic complexity (the "suffusion" as Moore speaks of it) of the later one: Molière concentrates too exclusively on a single dramatic device for "illuminating" the central aspect of character (jealousy) which is his subject in the play. Each act is like a little play in itself, but we get the same little play over and over: Elvire assures Dom Garcie that she loves him; he comes upon something (a letter [used twice]; the presence of a "rival", etc.) which feeds his jealousy; she finally disabuses him. There is some forward motion at the ending of certain acts as a secondary character (the Iago-like Dom Lope) or the report of some new circumstance feeds the hero's jealousy, but instead of carrying us along in an ascending dramatic movement, the successive acts remain at the same expository level of dramatic interest. The "surprise ending" is a happy enough one, but rather than being a dénouement (in the strictest sense) to the problem of the play, it seems more designed simply to bring the repetitive action to an abrupt halt. Dom Garcie's jealousy never issues in a tragic insight into himself, a recognition of his "tragic flaw." Indeed, his "flaw" is without such universal significance; rather, like the obsessions of Molière's other monomaniacs, it is peculiar, beyond the human as it were. The mechanical, repetitive dramaturgy of the play suggests a quizzical, tentative attitude on the part of Molière in the face of this peculiarity, as if his desire to remain "serious" prevented him from taking the obvious comic attitude which the hero's obsession calls for. Circumstance, not the wiles of the "others" of this play, provides the temporary resolution of the conflict of the play: Dom Sylvie, the supposed triumphant rival for Elvire's love, turns out to be her brother, Dom Alphonse. I say "temporary," for here as well, Bailly's "rule of non-conversion" holds true: even this latest circumstance, Dom Garcie admits, finds him "tombé de nouveau dans ces traitres soupçons" and Elvire accepts him "jaloux ou non jaloux."

Given Dom Garcie's character, then, we might see in the play the proof of Molière's "international" criticism of Corneille in L'Impromptu. Yet, this would be to forget the presence of a truly Cornelian character in the play: his mistress. "Elvire," writes Fernandez, "est une héroîne de Corneille, une cousine de Pauline, un peu à la mode de Bretagne. Toujours, dit-elle, notre coeur est en notre pouvoir, et s'il montre parfois quelque faiblesse, la raison doit être maîtresse de tous nos sens." It is true that even Elvire's générosité is inevitably compromised in the love she bears Dom Garcie, for, unlike her Cornelian counterparts, she cannot really be said to find in her lover a perfect reflection of herself. Nevertheless, as Baumal has argued [in Molière: auteur précieux], her pity is dictated to her by her reason—she recognizes that Dom Garcie's vice is "incurable et fatal"—and her reason thereby teaches her that she cannot deny her lover the "estime" she otherwise owes him. Her love as seen in this gesture is not of the heedless, self-destructive kind in Racine's Andromagne, for example, but recalls rather Auguste's patronizing and self-congratulatory clemency in Corneille's Cinna. Though she is indeed touched by her lover's incurable malady, Elvire accepts him because "on doit quelque indulgence / Aux défauts où le Ciel fait pencher l'influence" (V.vi). One owes such indulgence to the victim himself, of course, but, more fundamentally, one owes it to oneself. Elvire's love is narcissistic.

Molière's serious imitation of Corneille in the character of Elvire should make us wary of that tradition which pits Molière against Corneille almost as automatically as it does Racine. To link Molière and Racine in this way against Corneille is to misconstrue both Molière comedy and Corneille "tragedy." Actually, with his unlimited confidence in man Corneille is the least tragic of writers. As for Molière, once we begin to see that not the limiting motions of satire but the expansive notions of what we can only call the "pure comic" are the real essence of his work, then we can begin to see his true relation to Corneille. Both the comedian and the so-called tragedian have an optimistic view of "man's fate." There is, to be sure, a crucial difference between the two: Corneille's optimism is cerebral and is expressed as an unrestrained voluntarism; Molière's is visceral and is grounded in a confident naturalism. In Cartesian terms, if the will follows the intelligence (entendement) so closely as to be identified with it in Corneille, in Molière the will follows the appetitive so closely as to be identified with it. (I am speaking of this relationship in "others," of course. Also just as the will is passional in Corneille, so the appetitive is intelligent in Molière—witness the naturally wily Agnès and the numerous shrewd peasant-types.) There is, in sum, in the two writers a difference in both the psychical functions and in the ends to which man should direct those functions, but in each there is no doubt that man has it within his power to direct those functions to whatever ends he chooses. The difference from the truly tragic sense of human limitation in Racine could not be greater. And so the failure of Dom Garcie is not due to a contradiction between two radically different views of the human condition. True, the play is fractured in conception, but it is fractured in terms familiar to us already in Le Tartuffe: Molière has tried to fuse not the tragic and the comic but two modes of the comic—the heroic and the satiric. As with all Molière plays, the hero's obsession (here, jealousy) is not symbolic of irrational, destructive forces which really govern "la condition humaine." Rather, that obsession is peculiar and special—fantastical, as Béralde might put it—and we can accommodate ourselves to it. What makes Dom Garcie exceptional in the Molière canon is that the means of accommodation are not the familiar ones of ruse and wile and justified duplicity, carefully articulated throughout the entire play. Accommodation is possible, rather, because of a frankly "noble" conception of the heroine's character. And, most significantly for my purposes here, that "nobility" is undoubtedly Cornelian.

In light of Molière's demonstrated sympathy for Corneille then, we might take a very different view of the parodistic rehearsals from Corneille's plays in L'Impromptu: it is more the director aiming his satire at the acting style of his rivals than it is the dramatist aiming his barbs at the writer whom he had so frankly imitated in his own career. Further, in light of that imitation, Bénichou's interpretation of Dom Juan [in Les Morales] is given an especially Cornelian force: that play the critic believes, is based "sur la conception d'un héros souverain, dont les désirs se prétendent au-dessus du blâme et de la contrainte." Of course, générosité in Dom Juan is far more concrete in its expression than it was in Elvire and certainly more so than in any Cornelian hero (although, even in the case of the latter, the tendency to abstraction and introversion has been vastly exaggerated). Nevertheless, the données of characterization are the same: self-assertion and self-definition in action.

Yet, this authentic Cornelian hero becomes a hypocrite. Dom Juan is a Molière character who, at a certain point, undergoes a conversion. Bailly's term becomes richly ironic in this play: from an anti-religious outlook Dom Juan pretends to convert to a religious one. Now, from a strictly religious point of view, Bailly's "rule of non-conversion" is sustained, of course: Dom Juan only pretends to be converted. Nevertheless, the rule of Molière comedy is broken: in the very act of pretending to be converted to religion Dom Juan no longer gives himself for what he is; he converts to hypocrisy not in the etymological sense of "play-acting" but in the acquired moral sense of "lying." He ceases to be généreux.

Now, it is for this derogation from the purely human ideal of générosité and not from the Christian ideal of sincere self-abnegation that Dom Juan is to be reproached as a hypocrite. Christian doctrine has too readily regarded hypocrisy as a vice having particular reference to its system of values. This is understandable: of all vices, hypocrisy is the most fundamentally destructive of any system of sanctions, but especially one of invisible sanctions. The sinner who admits to wrong-doing acknowledges the validity of the moral code according to which he is reprimanded. But a hypocrite rejects radically the whole system of values and sanctions which pretends to reprimand him. Doctrinally speaking, what we might call the true hypocrite does not believe in an ultimate day of judgment and he is incapable of feeling remorse based on a fear of hell, the threat of damnation which is the Christian moralist's ultimate weapon. At most, this weapon can hope to reach only those sinners who might be described as unsystematic or half-hearted hypocrites: the gamblers of the Christian faith who count on weekly confession or deathbed repentance or God's inscrutable mercy to "insure" the risks they run. Such "hypocrites" are unworthy of the name, for, in the very act of hoping to get by the sanctions, they admit their existence. But the only sanctions which a true hypocrite recognizes are of a more practical nature: threats to his physical safety or of an exposure which will make it impossible to continue to practice of his duplicity. Since, theoretically, the final proof of exposure depends on the hypocrite himself, on his decision to drop his pose, it is impossible to "catch" a true hypocrite. Indeed, the true hypocrite will turn every attempt at exposure by others to his own advantage. Thus, Tartuffe's attempt to pass himself off as the self-sacrificing instrument of the very power which arrests him reveals the frightening moral anarchy to which a thoroughgoing hypocrisy leads.

"N'aurons-nous donc pas de règle?" The poignancy of Pascal's question is felt even by that thinker whom we usually pit against him: Descartes. The very founder of modern rationalism required a Guarantor of the truth of his first principles. Like Pascal, though by a different route, he found his Guarantor of moral as well as epistemological truth in God. And Molière, does he too find his Guarantor of Truth in God? One wonders. We may speculate endlessly about the extent to which his conventional deferences to religion (for example, the baptism of his children or the remarks of the first and second Placets to Le Tartuffe) reflect a genuine piety. As for the plays, at most they suggest a secularist separation of the things of this world from those of the next and, at worst, from the religious viewpoint, an exclusively human solution to the moral dilemmas they pose. Thus, in Le Tartuffe, the king is Molière's answer to the poignant question of Pascal: he and not God is the Guarantor of Truth. Lest it be objected that, in good monarchial theory, the king is only God's surrogate on earth, I would point once again to the decidedly non-Christian tone of the exempt's speech. In the resplendent image of the king, who restores order and truth to the anarchical situation created by Tartuffe, man, Molière tells us, is his own Guarantor of Truth.

This anthropocentrism, which emerges only in the dénouement of Le Tartuffe, is the guiding theme of Dom Juan. Dom Juan's humanism harks back to the ancient pagan and aristocratic ideal of man as self-sufficient and self-determining. This ideal, which Christianity tried in vain to assimilate, persisted in the ideals of feudalism which were still felt in the seventeenth century. For practical reasons it was unnecessary and for moral reasons unthinkable to the holders of this ideal to use hypocrisy to achieve their ends: practically, their power was subject to almost no checks, since, being aristocrats, they were to be found at the top of the social and political structure; morally, they could not tolerate the thought that any situation could require the concealed expression of their power. Obviously, the dynamics of such an outlook are ultimately destructive of the outlook itself: at some point, one aristocrat's self-assertion will run counter to another's. Both theoretically and practically, only one aristocrat can hope to attain to the purest embodiment of the ideal: absolute monarchy. Even this expression of the ideal has proved historically untenable: the self-assertion of the absolute monarch has run counter to the combined assertions of the other elements of society and been frustrated by revolution. But the historical and the political ramifications of the ideal need not concern us here. More to the present point is the moral basis of the ideal: the injunction to an absolute identification between appearance and reality, between intention and deed. In pretending to convert to religion, Dom Juan breaks this injunction. This constitutes his real hypocrisy and his real conversion.

Why does Molière have Dom Juan convert to hypocrisy? Did he wish to appease his religious enemies by "exposing" the legendary scourage of Christian morality? In the Dom Juan who scolds Sganarelle at the beginning of the fourth act, Michaut sees the signs of a bad conscience—as if Dom Juan were anxiously trying to deny to himself the truth of the Christian view. Yet, these transports might as easily be explained as revealing the impatience and exasperation which finally attains a Dom Juan forced to live in the world of the Sganarelles and the Dimanches. It is difficult to be—or to remain—Dom Juan in such a world. In Dom Juan's irritability we get a glimmering of that other Molière hero who finds himself in a world too confining for his noble ideals: Alceste, the généreux become atrabilaire. In fact, one lesson of Dom Juan's hypocrisy seems to be that the only way in which he can fulfill the law of his being—the overriding drive to self-definition in action—is through hypocrisy. Yet, the context of his hypocrisy suggests that there is a higher lesson to be learned from it. For it is a curious hypocrisy which exposes itself even before it is practiced: Dom Juan announces his intention to be a hypocrite to Sganarelle. His servant (and we the audience) thus becomes his witness that the hypocrisy is not "for real." Rather, we learn that it is only a tool to show the "others" the futility and inhumanity of their reliance upon a system of invisible sanctions. In attacking the "dévots" against whom it was presumably aimed, Dom Juan attacks the very idea of religion and the social ideas which flow from the Christian religion in particular: the notion of man's nature as fallen from a "state of grace" and the reliance upon sanctions outside of man to regulate his "fallen" nature. Dom Juan's adoption of hypocrisy is a frightening pendent to the king's crushing of it in Le Tartuffe. In the latter, the highest example of humanity guaranteed truth and restored order; in Dom Juan, the highest example of humanity abandons truth and disrupts the true order which he has represented in the play to this point. And Dom Juan is obviously the highest example of humanity: in him appearance and reality coincide not only with respect to moral intention and deed, but in moral nature and physical appearance. Dom Juan's handsomeness not only explains his appeal to the ladies—it defines his inner reality: truth and beauty are one. Thus, if the highest example of humanity shall adopt hypocrisy, who shall be the guarantor of truth? If Dom Juan, the enemy of illusion and self-deception in the first four acts, shall hypocritically claim to speak in God's name, who can really be said to speak in God's name? If we cannot trust to the natural appearances of integrity, how can we trust to artificial evidences: a priest's robes, for example? Sganarelle's donning of doctor's robes to sell patent medicines gives special point to this question. This is the lesson of Dom Juan's hypocrisy in the larger context in which it occurs.

Nevertheless, we cannot deny that this larger context is itself compromised by Dom Juan's hypocrisy. "I hope you have not been leading a double life," Cecily says to Algernon in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy" (Act II). In Dom Juan's compromised générosité we see that the only way in which humanity can affirm its self-sufficiency is in an act of pretended dependence; the only way in which man can affirm himself is through an act of pretended self-denial. Dom Juan's good intentions in some larger context notwithstanding, the appearance which Dom Juan gives to the world belies the reality; unlike the Dom Juan of the first part of the play, the one who speaks as a Christian convert to Dom Carlos in V.iii does not give himself for what he is. At least in the Christian world, Dom Juan's hypocrisy tells us, there are limits to the power of générosité, cases in which it can express itself only by denying itself. This cruel perception borders on the tragic. Yet, the dénouement of the play robs this tragic paradox of its force. In refusing to repent for his false conversion both before the specter and the statue, Dom Juan actually repents or "re-converts" to the ideals we saw him uphold in the first part of the play. In "testing" the specter, which Michaut sees as a symbol of Divine Grace, Dom Juan clearly resists God in his most mysterious and supposedly irresistible form. As for the statue, there is a sublime simplicity in Dom Juan's "La voilà" as he gives it his hand. In light of this gesture it is difficult to accept W. G. Moore's view of Dom Juan as "a man who despises humanity, who sets himself apart and above the rest and is thus bound, being human, to fail." Suicide and damnation are the means by which Dom Juan defines the superiority of his purely human ideals over the Christian ideals represented by the specter in their most appealing forms and by the statue in their most terrifying forms. In best Cornelian fashion, Dom Juan uses death as an instrument of self-assertion. In this test with the highest power, the généreux proves himself without limits, transcending tragedy not through resignation but through affirmation.

But what of Dom Juan's last words before falling into the abyss?—"O Ciel! que sens-je? Un feu invisible me brûle, je n'en puis plus, et tout mon corps devient un brasier ardent. Ah" (V.vi)! Do they not acknowledge a "tragic illumination" of his "failure?" Possibly, although they do no more than acknowledge the failure and express no particular attitude toward it. Merely recording a physical event, this "illumination" contains no repentance: at most, Dom Juan admits a limitation ("je n'en puis plus") without in any way disowning what he has been able to do up to this point. Indeed, in this purely objective recognition of the supernatural we can see a reproach directed not at Dom Juan, but at the supernatural for using brute force to overwhelm an adversary who has proved its equal in the spiritual realm.

We can understand, then, that in spite of the orthodoxy of the dénouement, the dévots did not like Dont Juan any more than they did Le Tartuffe. The manner of Dom Juan's death belies the orthodoxy of the damnation itself. In the language of one of its Jansenist critics, the play offended "ce qu'il y a de plus saint et de plus sacré dans la religion." It reaffirmed the "orgueil des grands" against which Bossuet and the Jansenists in particular directed their anathemas: it depicted man as self-sufficient, able to get along without God in order to achieve his fullest dignity as a man. Nevertheless, this heroism is defended with a disturbing aggressiveness. In spite of the good intentions behind it, Dom Juan's hypocrisy strikes a jarring, unpleasant note in the play. Furthermore, the satiric butts of Dom Juan's aggressive générosité share the limelight as much as he: like Alceste in the next play, Molière uses this hero as a dramatic lever to force the "others" in all their ridiculousness into our view. Thus, Dont Juan shows a lack of fusion similar to that in Le Tartuffe, though obviously not so pronounced as in that play. Here Molière has done more than juxtapose two modes of comedy, but, to borrow a metaphor from chemistry, the combination is as yet only a mixture. It will not be a compound until he suffuses it with the poetry of his comédies-ballets.

3. Le Misanthrope

If Tartuffe is the only hypocrite in a world of innocents, Alceste is the only innocent in a world of hypocrites. In describing the most controversial of Molière's characters as "innocent" I am not implying that he is naúve nor in stressing his uniqueness do I mean to forget Philinte and Eliante. Like Dom Juan, Alceste knows only too well the duplicity of human behavior. He himself compromises his integrity in his behavior with the writer of the sonnet and with Célimène. Nevertheless, to the contrary of the "others" of this play, at the moment of ultimate decisions he upholds the ideal of absolute integrity; his deeds then match his intentions. In his readiness to pay the supreme price "selon les lois constitutives de l'univers de la pièce" Alceste differs from Philinte and Eliante. The latter are but relatively innocent, set apart by the "virtue" of their tolerance from the rigid Alceste, cast very much in their relationship to him as Le Pauvre to Dom Juan.

Isolated from the "others" of this play, Alceste is a kind of Dom Juan raté, one seen in the distorting mirror of "la vie mondaine," one who salvages nothing from his defeat at the end of the play. The implicit lessons of Le Tartuffe and Dom Juan, obscured in the triumphant accents of the final scenes, become explicit in the final scenes of Le Misanthrope. The absence of a Guarantor has been remarked and Alceste does not banish himself to his "désert" with the éclat of Dom Juan sublimely proferring his hand to his destroyer. The anarchy of hypocrisy has reached man not in his relations with the invisible but in his relations with his fellow-man. In Le Misanthrope Molière questions the root idea of society: the good faith of its members upon which the social contract is based. The dénouement offers us two symbols of the most sombre significance: Célimène telling us that society is committed to doubleness, to a discrepancy between appearance and reality, between intention and deed; Alceste telling us that the correspondence of intention and deed is possible only in a social void.

Alceste's désert is, of course, only metaphorical. "On le dit … d'un homme qui, aimant la solitude, a fait bâtir quelque jolie maison hors des grands chemins et éloignée du commerce du monde, pour s'y retirer." Yet, given Alceste's quasi-religious fervor, the term re-acquires some of its literal meaning, evoking for us those early Christian saints who monastically retreated to the desert in their search for purity. In announcing his intention Alceste is only making explicit what we assume about the other great monomaniacs of Molière comedy: they too go to a desert at the end of the play. Not that the dénouement of Le Misanthrope simply repeats the lessons of the other plays. We should remember that Alceste willingly banishes himself to his desert; the Harpagons and the Arnolphes are banished unwillingly. Or more precisely, unwittingly. In fact, they have been living psychologically in a desert from the very beginning of the play: the desert of their particular obsessions. Monomania prevents them from effectively participating in society, the arena of compromise, self-criticism and, to a certain degree, self-sacrifice. What makes Alceste unique among these monomaniacs is his awareness of the compromise upon which society is based. Thus, his self-exile constitutes a powerful doubt as to the value of self-sacrifice for the sake of society. For the first time the self is posited as an equal and possibly superior value to society. Alceste represents that bifurcation of the personality into public and private selves which characterizes man in society and which creates the tensions of "civilization and its discontents." As the demands of society become greater, moulding the self to acceptable "norms," the self is forced into its own recesses, into its own "désert."

Of course, in the ideal world of the généreux, Alceste would have no problems—were he not so single-minded, paradoxically enough, in his générosité. For, in spite of a basic similarity, Alceste differs from Dom Juan in one essential aspect: he is incapable of that esthetic hypocrisy which justifies, from a moral point of view, Dom Juan's behavior towards women. If Alceste is right in his condemnation of many of the forms of society, he is wrong in his failure to recognize the value of the esthetic in the domain of love. There, his integrity dehumanizes him and renders him ridiculous. Does this mean that Célimène's behavior is implicitly justified? Hardly, for her estheticism is only an opposite extreme to Alceste's integrity. She is an artificial character: Half Dom Juan, half Tartuffe. Like the former she plays a role, but like the latter she plays the role everywhere. In Dom Juan, the esthetics of courtship led to sensual satisfaction; in Célimème they are subverted to the purely social: satisfaction is frustrated in order that the game might go on. Her sociability exacts as high a price as Alceste's sincerity. Her "tartuffism" is not thoroughgoing, of course: she accepts exposure, admits to wrongdoing. But in the very admission she remains unconverted: looking forward to the spirit of Marivaux comedy, she believes that everything can be arranged after the damage is done in the simple admission that her intentions were not after all vicious, that it was all only a kind of game—a cruel one, to be sure, but a game.

Le Misanthrope ends in a moral stalemate. It is a comedy without a happy ending, a tragedy without a tragic illumination. Both Célimène and Alceste are presented to us with strong reservations; each is the object of Molière's satire. The play is, in fact, Molière's supreme achievement in the satiric mode. In this mode he invites us to laugh at man's foibles, to delight in the depiction of man's obsessions and pretentions and so to rise above such "vices" in ourselves. Now, it is in this self-protective laughter that we usually locate the essence of Molière's "comic view of life." Yet, it is debatable whether the definition of comedy as self-protective or dissociative laughter is a valid one—at least in contradistinction to tragedy. Satire points up the discrepancy between ideals and performance, between reality and appearance; it emphasizes man's limitations. Indeed, to the extent that in the "non-conversion" of the comic figure a given limitation is shown to be ineradicable, Molière satirical comedy repeats the lesson of tragedy without offering the paradoxical victory of tragedy: in the very act of perceiving the limitation which is inherent in the scheme of things (fate) man transcends his limitation.

Seen in this perspective, the happy endings of the satiric plays are "smoke screens" to cover up the negative, depressing view of the unreconstructed comic figure who has just been taught a lesson whose point he cannot see. In the euphoria of Horace's union with Agnès, for example, we lose sight of the fact that Arnolphe has been left "holding the bag," we are spared the uncomfortable reminder of his humanity. Traditionally, criticism has tried to escape this bitter lesson by locating the real lesson of the play somewhere in between convention and obsession—in the moderateness of the Chrysaldes and the Philintes. Thus, with Philinte's marriage to Eliante, Le Misanthrope seems a typical Molière play, one teaching a familiar lesson: society, the marriage of different wills and temperaments, depends on a spirit of compromise. But is it not indeed a watered-down euphoria which this marriage creates? Eliante, we remember, takes Philinte as a sort of consolation prize. Moreover, far from seeing Molière's position in Philinte's moderation, we might see in it only a dramatic foil which casts the extremes on either side of it in a stronger light. Even so, whether dramatic principle or lesson of the play, this moderation accepts the basically tragic notion of man as a limited creature, ultimately frustrated in his fondest ambitions and his highest aspirations.

Indeed, a professional psychiatrist, Ludwig Jekels, has seen in the climate of comedy the same preoccupation with Oedipal guilt which we have become accustomed to find in tragedy. He reads the ascension of the young in comedy as a "doing away with the father" so that the son can fulfill his wish to take the father's place sexually. In such a reading, the son is the true monomaniac, but he transfers his monomaniacal love rivalry and its attendant guilt feeling onto the father figure. "This withdrawal of the super-ego and its meaning in the ego are all in complete conformity with the phenomenon of mania … In each we find the ego, which has liberated itself from the tyrant, uninhibitedly venturing its humor, wit and every sort of comic manifestation in a very ecstasy of freedom." ["On the Psychology of Comedy," Tulane Drama Review, II, No. 3, May, 1958.] Frankly admitting the Bergsonian echoes of his theory, Jekels says that "comedy represents an esthetic correlate of mania." Yet, such a theory of comedy fails to account for those comedies in which the father figure remains dominant, or in which the pattern of relationships cannot be fitted into the Oedipal scheme. By its very premises, of course, the psychoanalytical interpretation must regard the former types as tragedies and the latter type as nonexistent. Thus, Jekels reads into Le Tartuffe a disguised Oedipal relationship: Tartuffe is the son who displaces his guilt onto Orgon. Yet, what would Jekels make of Dom Juan, where the "mania" is not displaced but is steadily defended by the son-figure? Indeed, the whole point of Dont Juan in Freudian terms is that the son refuses to accept as blameworthy his desire to replace the father and, as I have shown, successfully defies both father figures of the play (his biological father and the statue). Or to take a Molière play in which the father figure remains dominant, in Amphitryon we might read the pattern of relationships between father and son figures in two ways, but in each the father-figure remains dominant: (1) Jupiter, without being a clear rival of his "son" Mercure, keeps the latter in his place—a pattern repeated in the Amphitryon-Sosie relationship; or in a truer Freudian parallel (2) Jupiter and Mercure play father figures to Amphitryon and Sosie respectively displacing their "sons" in the love intrigues of the play. Yet these plays, like the "Oedipal comedies" Jekel cites, also end in a "very ecstasy of freedom." Obviously, comedy in which this is true is an "esthetic correlate" of something different from mania.

Thus, we can define Molière's "comic view of life" in the Jekelian sense only by dismissing that part of his work in which a different sense of the comic prevails. This is in the so-called "court work," the series of comédies-ballets which makes up nearly one-half the canon, but which has been treated as "minor" by the main current of Molière criticism since the early nineteenth century. Essentially liberal-bourgeois in ethos, this criticism has found it difficult to assimilate these poetic plays, created to please Molière's royal patron, into its portrait of the "scourge" of the ancien régime, the unmasker of social hypocrisy in a class-structured society, the enemy of all absolutisms in the very hey day of absolutism. Yet, however convenient, the division of the canon into major and minor, satire and poetry, is ill-founded. The entire canon expresses a single consistent "comic view of life." Like the first Le Tartuffe, the satiric plays reflect an aristocratic bias negatively. This negative bias reached its peak in Le Tartuffe, Dont Juan and Le Misanthrope, in the period of approximately one year between the first version of Le Tartuffe (May 1664) and the completion of Dont Juan (February 1665). For, as Jasinski has shown [in Molière et le Misanthrope] in conception Le Misanthrope belongs between those two plays, Molière having completed the first act before writing Dont Juan. All three bitter comedies are enclosed between two comedies-ballets: La Princesse d'Elide of May 1664 and L'Amour médecin September 1665. Le Misanthrope, with its unhappy ending, is "negative" only in the sense that the positive faith on which it is based is implicit. The absence of a Guarantor of truth in the play does not mean that one does not exist: he is in the audience in the person of Molière's royal patron. Or was to have been, the play having been first shown to the "town" due to the unforeseen departure of the king and much of the court just before the scheduled premiere. Like the plays which immediately surround it, the play was written with the court in mind, Molière actually having read it before its production to members of the court and accepting minor revisions. Rousseau notwithstanding, the stalemate with which the play ends is thus no more of a tragic defeat for man than was the triumph of the hypocrite at the end of the three-act Le Tartuffe. In the negativism of this great satiric play we see only the underside of Molière's "comic view of life."

However, the dates show that even while bringing the mode of "le significatif" to perfection, Molière has been experimenting with "le grotesque." The revision of Le Tartuffe actually dates from the period of the comédies-ballets, a fact reflected in the imperfect fusion of the two modes in the play. You cannot move towards the "grotesque," you must start from it; it must inform—literally: give form—to the entire work. Of the fifteen plays written after Le Misanthrope (including Psyché) ten are comédies-ballets as against three out of fifteen in the period preceding. The first Le Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope are the only directly satirical plays between L'Impromptu de Versailles (October 1663) and George Dandin (July 1668), itself contained in a festival atmosphere like the first Le Tartuffe. Remembering that the very combination of modes makes Dom Juan problematic, only Le Médecin malgré lui (August 1666) in this period comes close to Le Misanthrope in the directness of its satire. Yet, like the later Fourberies de Scapin, the satire of this comedy is edulcorated by the emphasis upon the instrument of comedy, the wily Sganarelle, rather than the butt, Géronte, and by its ballet-like treatment of physical action as the rhythmic vehicle of meaning. The comedy in these plays is not satire, a species of tragedy; it is pure.

"Pure comedy" shows man not as a creature of limitations but of possibilities. In the "naturalism" of plays like L'Amour médecin and Le Malade imaginaire we find the moral bases for this confident outlook. In a play like Amphitryon the physiological bases of this naturalism become explicit. In celebrating the sexual conquests of Jupiter, Molière is doing more than justifying the love affairs of his royal patron. Such a subject provides the perfect symbolism for affirming a comic belief in life's possibilities, even as death provides a perfect symbolism for recognizing life's limitations. Comic belief rather than comic relief lies behind the laughter of such a play. For all its value, Bergson's theory of laughter cannot explain the comedy of Amphitryon, where laughter expresses not a release from forces which threaten to mechanize life but a release of forces which give life. In sexual release there is undoubtedly a sense of physiological relief, but we should be wary of reading into it an analogue of the superior laughter which is the essence of satiric comedy. In the latter, the "life" which is in danger of being mechanized is the artificial, man-made life of society, just as the threats to its functioning are artificial: hypocrisy, pretense, obsession, etc. "Society," to paraphrase the Marxists, "contains the roots of its own destruction." So it is not surprising that Jekels should find that the true psychological climate of satiric comedy is anxiety. However, to the very contrary of the man-made tensions on which satiric comedy is based, true comedy is based on the natural tensions of the sexual act, those from which we can always expect a happy release. For orgasmic release is predictable and inevitable and, most importantly, fruitful. It will go on and because of it life will go on. The psychological climate of true comedy is thus the very opposite of that of satiric comedy: confident rather than anxious, optimistic rather than pessimistic. This is the real meaning of Molière's naturalism, an affirmation of rather than an accommodation to the "facts of life."

This affirmation of nature in its most basic function—self-perpetuation—is heard even in the satiric comedies. Significantly, it is usually a marriage between young people which the socially derived obsession of the central figure threatens: Arnolphe's fear of cuckoldry leads him to raise Agnès in a "social hothouse" where she will be unable to succumb to the court of "jeunes galants" like Horace; the "femmes savantes" would put the library in the bedroom; etc. But nature inevitably overcomes obsession and, seen in this light, the "conventional marriage" at the end is not a smoke screen to conceal the monomaniac's defeat but itself expresses the "pure comic." Our very sympathy for the "others" of satiric comedy lies in their desire to restore the "law of nature," as they abet the young people in their wiles against the monomaniac. The "happy ending" of these comedies is possible only because the natural has been "given its head." Agnès in L'Ecole des femmes is a wonderful example of this naturalism: her wiles are defensible because they serve natural purpose, while Arnolphe's are blameworthy because they would frustrate nature. Nevertheless, naturalism is less important in the satiric plays than its opposite: the over-socialization of the central figure. And in certain "oversocialized" figures we see that even the comic instrument of natural wile can be subverted to unnatural ends: Tartuffe and Célimène are the real anti-heroes of Molière comedy, not Dom Juan and Alceste. The subversion of natural wile must be undone and truth or "natural law" guaranteed by a more worthy exemplar of humanity.

Molière's naturalism need not be construed as a classical anticipation of the Lawrentian mystique of sex. Sensualism is not an end in itself. Even in Dom Juan, the legendary lover, Molière stresses the ethical significance of the hero's behavior: the drive toward self-satisfaction, the exaltation of self-reliance, the autonomy of the human. In Amphitryon the emphasis upon the ethical becomes even more pronounced. Jupiter's "treacherous love affair" is justified on the grounds that from it will be born humanity's greatest hero, Hercules. This legendary exemplar of man at his best is a worthy son of the Olympian creature in whom Molière is said to have portrayed the noblest man of his age, Louis XIV. In the blinding image of this Roi Soleil of classical mythology we are reminded of a Pascalian truth without a Pascalian pathos: the order of the "grands" is distinct from the other social orders and the laws of the latter cannot be made to apply to the former. Inevitably, Jupiter's "intervention" into the inferior social order of Amphitryon and Alcmène must be condemned by the laws of that order. But, the king's "self-exposure as a 'hypocrite'" reveals that a higher ethical purpose has been at work. Jupiter's sensual self-indulgence has really been more than that. Amphitryon's body, the physical sign of his humanity, has not been a mere plaything of the gods; it has been their instrument. In the divine purpose (the half-man, half-god Hercules) appearance (Amphitryon) and reality (Jupiter) coincide. Hercules, man at his best, thus stands in stark contrast to Tartuffe, man at his worst; the eulogy of man which we hear only at the end of Le Tartuffe informs the entire conception of Amphitryon. Against the unconverted monomania of the Arnolphes and the Harpagons, against the throughgoing hypocrisy of the Tartuffes of Molière's world we must place the unconverted integrity of the king-figures, who guarantee the truth of the natural order. In its most glorious exemplars, mankind knows no limitations.

We cannot dismiss Amphitryon as an opportunistic compliment to Louis XIV nor discount the role of the King in Le Tartuffe as a meaningless convention. Molière's king-figures (including Dom Juan) remind us that in both the "significat' and in the "grotesque" his comedy is pivoted on an axis of faith in man. In its very lack of fusion the definitive version of Le Tartuffe arrests the "development" of that faith like a film suddenly brought out of the "dark room" in the midst of processing. For in the truly comic comédies-ballets which make up the bulk of his work after Le Tartuffe of 1664 Molière is not reversing himself; he is only printing the "positives" from the "negatives" he took earlier in his career. This relation of the "court" to the "town" plays, of pure comedy to satiric comedy, gives special meaning to Bailly's observation that there are no conversions in Molière.