[Howarth is an English educator and critic whose works on French literature include Life and Letters in France: The Seventeenth Century (1965), and Sublime and Grotesque: A Study of French Romantic Drama (1975). In the following essay, he discusses Molière 's view of human nature, the problems of contemporary production of Molière 's plays, and the moral function of Molière 's drama. Howarth concludes that "the cathartic function" of the Molière 's comedies was "to preserve a healthy view of the relationship between the individual and society."]

Before Molière's day, as we have seen, French comedy was lacking anything that could be called 'comic vision'. The world of the farces, and of Scarron's Jodelet plays, was a world of two-dimensional theatrical characters, a world of fantasy whose only relationship with reality was that of parody or burlesque. In Corneille's comedies, on the other hand, the characters, though more rounded and lifelike, were colourless, and the plots remained tied to the complex artificiality inherited from the pastorals; so that although his plays can be accepted as portraying reality after a fashion, we should look in vain here too (except perhaps to some extent in Mélite and L'Illusion comique) for an authentic comic vision on the playwright's part.

It must have seemed to contemporaries at the beginning of Molière's career that whatever promise this new arrival showed, there were few signs of his departing from traditional patterns of comedy established by predecessors. L'Étourdi, Dépit amoureux, Les Fâcheux are all recognisably in the comic idiom of 1640-58; and the comedies based on the Mascarille type of character (the same will also be true of Les Fourberies de Scapin) offer no more of a comic vision—that is, an identifiable philosophy of life than Le Menteur or Dom Japhet d'Arménie. But with the creation of the Sganarelle figure; the evolution of the formula 'ridicule en de certaines choses et honnête homme en d'autres'; the transfer of the comic scene indoors; and the treating of contemporary topics such as preciosity, honnêteté, dévotion or social climbing: with such highly individual innovations, Molière fashioned a totally new type of comedy that demanded to be related to the real world outside the theatre.

How are we to define Molière's comic vision? More than any other writer of comedies has ever done, he offers us a valid and consistent view of human nature. His major plays are of course rich enough for commentators to be able to argue about this or that detail of their interpretation; but there is general agreement about the broad lines of a coherent philosophy. This is in the first place critical, or negative, in that it holds up to ridicule certain tendencies that are unsociable, or anti-social, in character there is a common denominator of egoism and self-interest in all the Sganarelle figures but it is also possible to deduce from the plays a constructive social ideal: an ideal very close to that of the honnêtes gens. It is not put forward didactically as a programme to be followed; rather it is to be inferred as a more or less implicit social norm against which the Sganarelle figures offend.

In conveying to the spectator this positive recommendation of a social norm, one group of characters has a particular importance, namely the so-called 'raisonneurs': the Chrysaldes, Cléantes and Béraldes of Molière's theatre. From having been looked on by earlier critics as lay figures playing a role as mouthpieces of the author in an essentially didactic form of comedy, this group of characters has recently come to be seen in a more theatrical light, as taking one side in a dialectical confrontation which Molière puts before us objectively, without himself taking sides: what Moore calls 'a dialogue on humanity' [in Molière: A New Criticism]. Bray, who also considers these characters to be satisfactorily integrated into the dramatic scheme of the plays, goes so far as to declare: 'Il n'y a pas de raisonneurs dans le théâtre de Molière. Chaque personnage est exigé par sa fonction dramatique, non par une prétendue morale inventée par la critique' [in Molière, homme de théâtre].

What is the true role of the raisonneurs, and what do they stand for? There is a distinct family likeness between the two Aristes (in L'École des maris and Les Femmes savantes), Chrysalde (L'École des femmes), Cléante (Tartuffe) and Béralde (Le Malade imaginaire): all of these are mature characters 'd'un certain âge', standing somewhat to one side of the dramatic action, but showing a sympathetic interest in the fortunes of the central figure, with whom they are connected by family ties or by longstanding friendship. Philinte, the other character who is often labelled a 'raisonneur', corresponds in the main to this description; and although he clearly belongs, like Alceste, to a younger age-group, his phlegmatic temperament seems to be that of the raisonneur type in general. To say that their function is merely to express the viewpoint he wants his audience to adopt, is to ascribe to Molière a very limiting and simplistic view of the comic process. On the other hand, to claim that the opening dialogue between Arnolphe and Chrysalde on cuckoldry, or that between Alceste and Philinte on sincerity, is presented in a completely neutral manner, and to maintain that the spectator is not expected to find one of the characters much more reasonable than the other, seems to fly in the face of all one's experience in the theatre; moreover, even Bray seems to concede that Cléante, at least, is an episodic character whose presence is hardly essential to the plot of Tartuffe. But is it not possible that there is another way to justify the existence of the raisonneur? If we consider Molière's comedy as having evolved as the result of a two-way process, in response to the demands of a cultivated audience who were in turn being invited to approve a new form of comic drama which went beyond these demands, then would it not be legitimate to see this group of characters, who make their appearance in the most original, and most provocative, of the plays those that belong to the category of 'comedy of ideas' as a sort of 'objective correlative' of the honnêtes gens in the audience: recognisable, sympathetic figures expressing a point of view with which they could identify? Only Philinte, it is true, is fully representative of the honnête homme in the exclusive, aristocratic sense of the term: he is an enlightened courtier, whereas Chrysalde, Cléante and the others are bourgeois exponents of honnêteté. But they all represent the virtues of moderation, tolerance, and charity; they are all good listeners, wise counsellors, not doctrinaire theorists but practical men, thoroughly integrated into the society to which they belong; and all of them are good friends who can be depended on in an emergency. It would surely not be unreasonable to see their urbane, civilised manner, and the way of life they practise, as an illustration, if not of the aristocratic social ideal formulated by the Chevalier de Méré, at any rate of the code of honnêteté as it was accepted by some of his less exacting contemporaries.

In one important sense, the term raisonneur is a misnomer; and Littré's definition: 'Personnage grave de la comédie, dont le langage est celui du raisonnement, de la morale' hardly does justice to this group of characters in Molière's theatre. For Molière's raisonneurs, though they certainly stand for la raison in the sense of reasonableness or common sense, should not be identified with le raisonnement or la raison raisonnante. On the contrary: it is the doctrinaire characters, the imaginaires who inhabit a world of their own, who constantly make dogmatic use of their reasoning faculty in an attempt to coerce others into accepting their opinions. This can be seen particularly clearly in the opening scenes of L'École des femmes and Le Misanthrope, where in each case it is Arnolphe or Alceste who takes the initiative, arguing aggressively, while the so-called 'raisonneur' adopts a defensive posture, speaking in the name of ordinary human experience in a reasonable but by no means a rationalistic manner:

Arnolphe: Mon Dieu, notre ami, ne vous tourmentez point:
Bien huppé qui pourra m'attraper sur ce point.
Je sais les tours rusés et les subtiles trames
Dont pour nous en planter savent user les femmes,
Et comme on est dupé par leurs dextérités.
Contre cet incident j'ai pris mes sûretés;
Et celle que j'épouse a toute l'innocence
Qui peut sauver mon front de maligne influence.

Chrysalde: Et que prétendez-vous qu'une sotte, en un mot …

Arnolphe: Épouser une sotte est pour n'être point sot.

(L'École des femmes lines 73-82)

Philinte: Tous les pauvres mortels, sans nulle exception,
Seront enveloppés dans cette aversion?
Encore en est-il bien, dans le siècle où nous sommes …

Alceste: Non: elle est générale, et je hais tous les hommes:
Les uns, parce qu'ils sont méchants et malfaisants,
Et les autres, pour être aux méchants complaisants,
Et n'avoir pas pour, eux ces haines vigoureuses
Que doit donner le vice aux âmes vertueuses …

(Le Misanthrope, lines 115-21)

The relationship between the raisonneur and the central comic character presents few problems of interpretation in most of the plays; though the reason why Chrysalde should defend, as he does, the 'douceurs' and the 'plaisirs' of cuckoldry (L'École des femmes, lines 1244ff., 1302-5) has given rise to a certain amount of theorising by the critics - as has, much more importantly, the enigmatic question of Cléante's religious standpoint. But generally speaking, there seems to be no reason why an audience of honnêtes gens should not have been able to identify with the point of view expressed by Cléante, Chrysalde or Béralde, since that coincided with the attitudes they acknowledged themselves, or the social ideal to which they aspired; and by the same token, they presumably found no difficulty in accepting Orgon, Arnolphe or Argan as ridiculous inasmuch as their behaviour obviously departed from these accepted norms. But the relationship between Alceste and Philinte is another matter. In Alceste, contemporary spectators found a character who seemed to be one of themselves: a courtier, a would-be honnête homme, and a man with a highly developed sense of honour and personal integrity; and it must be acknowledged, to judge from such comment as has been preserved, that some of them found it easier to admire Alceste than to laugh at him. That the critical debate over the interpretation of Alceste's character should still be a live issue after three centuries shows that it was not just a problem of communication between Molière and contemporary audiences; though twentieth-century spectators should be better able than their seventeenth-century counterparts to situate Alceste in the context of Molière's whole comic oeuvre, to perceive the filiation that links him to the early Sganarelles, and to recognise the shaky foundations of self-importance and self-interest on which his crusade for sincerity is based. But Alceste will always have his champions; and Philinte, the embodiment of moderation and common sense, the honnête homme par excellence, will always seem to some playgoers less attractive than his headstrong, opinionated friend. And a degree of ambiguity is inevitable: ambiguity is, indeed, inherent in the formula 'ridicule en de certaines choses et honnête homme en d'autres'; and however convinced some of us may be that Alceste remains 'ridicule', we must agree that he is by far the most rounded, the most interesting, and the most sympathetic of Molière's comic characters. As Jean Emelina puts it in a most perceptive passage: [from Les Valets et les servantes dans le théâtre comique en France de 1610 à 1700]:

La simplification psychologique, dans un genre plus populaire que la tragédie, est une nécessité pour le rire et pour la satire … La comédie ne peut, sans risquer de se détruire, prétendre sérieusement à une authentique lucidité. Elle est l'univers rassurant et clair du manichéen. Elle est l'univers de l'invraisemblable et de l'imaginaire tant pour les êtres que pour les situations, parce que le rire se nourrit de l'irréel. L'inévitable ambiguïté des personnages d'après nature, 'ni tout à fait bons ni tout à fait mauvais', ne peut pas être son lot, car de l'ambiguïté naît le malaise. Térence, Molière ou Marivaux, par les étranges résonances que font parfois lever en nous certaines de leurs créations, montrent assez que tout réalisme psychologique, que toute finesse d'analyse au sein de la comédie risquent, fatalement, de frôler le pathétique.

On the one hand, we know that Molière's plays were written for a company who were the favourite entertainers of Paris and the Court in the 1660s, and were the product of an intimate relationship with the audiences of his day. On the other hand, they are more frequently, and more widely, played in the twentieth century than ever before. What problems of understanding or interpretation arise for today's spectators from the fact that these comedies were created in response to the demands of a society so different from ours?

First of all, there is a group of comedies depending on fantasy and virtuosity, whose seventeenth-century reference is almost nonexistent; this group includes plays which are conspicuously successful with modern audiences, such as Le Médecin malgré lui or Les Fourberies de Scapin, and there is no reason to believe that their appeal for us today differs essentially from the appeal they had for their first audiences three hundred years ago. A second group does, it is true, present certain problems of comprehension because of the seventeenth-century setting; but all that is required of us, really, is a minimum of factual knowledge about, say, préciosité or the salons, so that Les Précieuses ridicules or Les Femmes savantes should be at least as easy of access for twentieth-century spectators as The Recruiting Officer or The Rivals. On the other hand, plays like Dom Juan, Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope (and one could add L'École des femmes and George Dandin) pose genuine problems of interpretation, which largely derive from changes in the intellectual and moral climate between Molière's day and our own; and in such cases a great deal must obviously depend on the way in which a director views his role in guiding the response of an audience.

There seem to be two temptations for a modern director producing Molière. One is the temptation to update, to impose on the seventeenth-century play an arbitrary link with a selected period of modern history. Veteran theatregoers will no doubt have had a chance to experience Le Misanthrope in Edwardian dress, Les Femmes savantes in the costumes of the 1920s, Tartuffe in the dress and decor of la belle époque, or other productions based on similar historical analogies. One problem with such an approach is of course the very specific nature of the contemporary references in Molière's text: to take obvious examples, what does one make of the detailed evocation of seventeenth-century fashions in Alceste's scathing portrait of Clitandre (Misanthrope, lines 475-88) if the actors are all wearing Savile Row suits, or of the references to Descartes and other thinkers in Les Femmes savantes which become quite meaningless in a twentieth-century context? Perhaps the most distinguished of such productions was Jean Anouilh's Tartuffe at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in 1960: set in the period around 1900, it evidently succeeded in saying something important about the continuity of certain moral and social attitudes across the centuries. But to point an analogy so clearly must result in a very limiting interpretation of Molière's play: striking as such links may be, it is surely too restricting to insist on a single modern analogue to the exclusion of others that are possibly just as valid; and this kind of updating is best left to the alert spectator's imagination as he watches the play. The second temptation, irresistible to many modern directors, is to leave the play in the seventeenth century, but to subject it to a highly subjective, often political or sociological, interpretation. This has been above all the manner of Roger Planchon's productions at the Théâtre National Populaire; and both his George Dandin of the late 1960s and his Tartuffe of the mid-seventies took the form of explicit commentaries on the class-structure of the Grand Siècle. Not only does such a tendentious approach leave far too little to the imagination of the audience, but it leads to a solemn interpretation of Molière's plays which risks turning them into humourless drames bourgeois. The 1979 production of Dom Juan at the Comédie-Française by Jean-Luc Boutté illustrated a similar approach, dictated not so much by political conviction or sociological doctrine as by a personal resolve to be different at all costs, added to a damaging lack of confidence in Molière's text.

For this is the inescapable conclusion: one reason why directors find it necessary to treat Molière thus is the desire to divert the audience's attention from a text that they presumably judge to be hackneyed, out of date, or lacking in theatrical qualities. Louis Jouvet gave a clear warning to his fellow-producers in the following passage from his Témoignages sur le théâtre:

Dans cet art de métamorphoses qu'est le théâtre, seules comptent les pensées du poète; elles sont la vertu du théâtre. Ce que nous appelons pensées n'est qu'un vêtement de sentiments et de sensations. Généreusement le poète nous l'offre, et chacun s'approprie ce manteau, et chacun s'en revêt à son tour, pour vouloir penser à sa manière. Ce n'est là qu'une usurpation. L'usage véritable d'une pièce de théâtre est d'y réchauffer son corps et son coeur.

The text is sacred: this is Jouvet's message. It must never become a pretext for a priori sociological doctrine, for flashy theatricality, or for gratuitous embellishments in the name of 'relevance'. There will always be difficulties, ambiguities, possibilities of various layers of meaning, in certain of Molière's plays that is partly what gives them their special quality but the way to arrive at a meaningful reading of the text, on stage as well as in the study, is, as Jouvet says, to 'subir l'oeuvre avant de la comprendre et de l'apprécier': patiently to elucidate and interpret the original, not to substitute for it a subjective, anachronistic version of our own invention.

It is not difficult to create a convincing decor for the indoor comedies, whose text surely demands a firm link with a certain historical reality; and that can be done without indulging in the obsessive and obtrusive realism of Planchon and other directors. The seventeenth-century setting, which helps to establish the social context that is so necessary to a proper understanding of Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, L'Avare or Les Femmes savantes, is not in any way exclusive: like all comic masterpieces, Molière's great plays combine the local and the topical with the universal, the individual with the general. It is a commonplace of literary theory that tragedy deals with individuals, comedy with general types. As Diderot puts it [in Writings on the Theatre]:

Le genre comique est des espèces, et le genre tragique est des individus … Le héros d'une tragédie est tel ou tel homme: c'est ou Régulus, ou Brutus, ou Caton; et ce n'est point un autre. Le principal personnage d'une comédie doit au contraire représenter un grand nombre d'hommes. Si, par hasard, on lui donnait une physionomie si particulière, qu'il n'y eût dans la société qu'un seul individu qui lui ressemblât, la comédie retournerait à son enfance, et dégénérerait en satire.

Diderot is quite right in his conclusion; but perhaps the terms he uses need looking at more closely: the notions of 'type' and 'individual' tend to be accepted too uncritically. For the pure stage types the braggart soldier of Renaissance comedy, the stereotyped 'characters' of the eighteenth century remain two-dimensional, and what gives a comic character that third dimension which brings him dramatic life is the successful blend of the general type to which he belongs with the individual features that distinguish him from that type.

Almost without exception, the comedy of Molière's contemporaries fails to achieve such a synthesis. Orgon, Alceste or Harpagon, on the other hand, although they are rooted unmistakably in the world that Molière and his audience knew, have the same universal reference as characters like Volpone and Falstaff. As with the most memorable creations of other comic dramatists, we can put this universality to the test in the case of Molière's characters when, as sometimes happens to us all, we draw on our experience as playgoers to help us to characterise acquaintances in the real world. It is not so very unusual for us to think of people we know as 'a Falstaff or 'a Harpagon': convincing proof that these characters possess some quality or other that transcends the boundaries of time and place.

If we recognise our neighbours, then, or at any rate traits of character that we associate with our neighbours, in figures like Harpagon or Argan, what does that tell us about the moral function of comedy? Do we recognise ourselves as well? If not, it is difficult to see how comedy could fulfil the corrective role traditionally ascribed to it, even if one were to accept the sternly moralistic approach of some nineteenth-century commentators, enshrined in Meredith's well-known description of Molière [in An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit]: 'Never did man wield such a shrieking scourge upon vice. But the more nearly one approaches to the notion of satire in one's definition of comedy, the more difficult it surely is to believe that the moral effect attributed to Molière's comedy works in such a way. There have been periods when dramatists have proclaimed a fervent belief in the corrective power of the theatre, and have matched that belief in practice by writing a heavily didactic kind of play; but in Molière's case we are entitled to discount the sort of claim he puts forward in the Preface to Tartuffe, where he is conducting a defensive campaign against those, precisely, who had accused his play of immorality. Emile Augier, for all his faith that 'de tous les engins de la pensée humaine, le théâtre est le plus puissant, voilà tout', was realist enough to concede that it is asking too much of the dramatist to demand the conversion of individuals: 'd'ailleurs le but n'est pas de corriger quelqu'un, c'est de corriger tout le monde'. [Preface to Les Lionnes pauvres]

In any case, even if we assume that there were real-life counterparts of Molière's characters in the society for which he wrote, are we also to assume that they went to the theatre? Can we really imagine a real-life Tartuffe (or even a real-life Orgon), a Harpagon or an Argan among the audience for whom the plays were performed? Such moral correction was never the business of comedy; this is certainly not the way in which the moral effect of Molière's comedy operates, and Alain is surely nearer the mark when he writes [in Propos]:

Ce n'est point ton semblable, cet Avare qui dit son secret, car de ton semblable tu ne connais jamais que le dehors; toutefois ce qui est mis sur cette scène, c'est ce que chaque homme connaît de lui-même. Chacun est Harpagon, chacun a pensé le 'Sans dot', mais personne ne l'a jamais

dit …

Qui n'a jamais été ridicule ne sait point rire. Au reste un tel homme n'est pas né. Si l'avarice était une sorte de maladie rare, qui donc en rirait? Et si l'on me fait un portrait d'avare, d'après l'anecdote, j'éprouverai le faible plaisir de mépriser. Mais chacun est avare, de vraie avarice, et jaloux, de ridicule jalousie; chacun est Purgon et Jourdain en importance, cent fois par jour.

'We are all of us miserly, jealous, and self-important, every day of our lives … ': this shows a similar insight to Augier's 'le but n'est pas de corriger quelqu'un, c'est de corriger tout le monde'. We are all of us implicated in the comic process: not because as individuals we are the counterparts of either the malade imaginaire or the pompous doctors who attend on him, but because of the common humanity we share with the rest of the theatre audience. Some of us may imagine it is easy to preserve a comfortable detachment as we watch the follies of Orgon or Monsieur Jourdain; but can we say the same thing about Alceste? Here is a very different case, for we all have moods in which we think we are better, nobler, purer than the world we live in; in which we imagine that our merits are unrecognised or unrewarded. There is something of Alceste in all of us, in our most intimate relationships with those we love as well as in the broader context of our social behaviour. How many of us have not at times thought, even if we have not given expression to the thought:

… Je verrai, dans cette plaiderie,
Si les hommes auront assez d'effronterie,
Seront assez méchants, scélérats et pervers.
Pour me faire injustice aux yeux de l'univers?
(Le Misanthrope, lines 197-200)

How many of us, by the same token, have not often felt, even if we have never voiced the feeling:

… C'est pour mes péchés que je vous aime ainsi …

Mon amour ne se peut concevoir, et jamais
Personne n'a, Madame, aimé comme je fais?
(ibid., lines 520-4)

And how many of us, if we were honest, would not have to admit to occasional fantasies such as the following:

Oui, je voudrais qu'aucun ne vous trouvât aimable,
Que vous fussiez réduite en un sort misérable,
Que le Ciel, en naissant, ne vous eût donné rien,
Que vous n'eussiez ni rang, ni naissance, ni bien,
Afin que de mon coeur l'éclatant sacrifice
Vous pût d'un pareil sort réparer l'injustice,
Et que j'eusse la joie et la gloire, en ce jour,
De vous voir tenir tout des mains de mon amour?
(ibid., lines 1525-32)

We can all see something of ourselves in Alceste. And we may be quite sure that in confronting us with the truth about ourselves in this way, Molière never intended either to reinforce our self-esteem or to justify our antisocial impulses. For the mirror he holds up to us is the distorting mirror of comedy, and the 'truth' is exaggerated and caricatured by the comic process; so that if we can recognise the absurdity of Alceste's behaviour, we may be led to acknowledge the absurdity of any similar tendencies in ourselves. We laugh at the critical portrait of the honnête homme imaginaire, and thereby express our solidarity with the civilised way of life his behaviour so constantly flouts. The confrontation with a comic exaggeration of faults latent within ourselves acts as a painless corrective: this therapeutic effect is common to all Molière's great comedies, and Le Misanthrope is no exception. Experience teaches us, however, that there are spectators who are resistant to this process; and Alain might have been thinking of Rousseau's reaction to Le Misanthrope when he wrote [in Les Arts et les dieux]: 'Heureux celui qui ne sait pas être important sans être ridicule; mais ces bonnes chances ne vont pas sans un peu d'humeur. La comédie nous guérit mieux, sans la honte; car la force du spectacle fait que personne ne pense au voisin.'

Are we perhaps now in a position to offer an interpretation of the comic process, to which it might not seem too inappropriate to attach the label 'a comic catharsis'? Is it possible to discern an analogue for the spectator of comedy to the purging of the passions which, from Aristotle's day onwards, has been recognised by most theorists as a valid formulation of what we experience as spectators of tragedy? The fact that Aristotle did not include his projected section on comedy in the Poetics has not prevented commentators from constructing the theory of comedy to which he might have given expression; and W. Lane Cooper went so far as to produce a full-scale adaptation of the Poetics [in An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an Adaptation of the Poetics], substituting concepts appropriate to comedy for those referring to tragedy. The essence of Lane Cooper's 'Aristotelian' definition is as follows:

A comedy is the artistic imitation of an action which is ludicrous (or mirthful), organically complete, and of a proper length … As for the end or function resulting from the imitation of such an object… it is to arouse, and by arousing to relieve, the emotions proper to comedy.

And his amplification of the last phrase provides a most interesting commentary on one of the central notions of the Letter sur l'Imposteur, namely 'la disconvenance':

Here we shall assume that, as men in daily life are accustomed to suffer from a sense of disproportion, it is this that is relieved or purged away by the laughter of comedy; for comedy (witness the comic mask) distorts proportions; its essence is the imitation of things seen out of proportion. By contemplating the disproportions of comedy, we are freed from the sense of disproportion in life, and regain our perspective, settling as it were into our proper selves.

As with the tragic catharsis, such a process can be interpreted in two very different ways: one, as a direct, exemplary or corrective function, and the other, as an uplifting aesthetic experience of a much less specific nature. There is a world of difference between the interpretation advanced by Corneille in his Discours de la tragédie:

La pitié d'un malheur où nous voyons tomber nos semblables nous porte à la crainte d'un pareil pour nous; cette crainte, au désir de l'éviter; et ce désir, à purger, modérer, rectifier et même déraciner en nous la passion qui plonge à nos yeux dans ce malheur les personnes que nous plaignons

and Racine's version of the cathartic process, surely more consistent with the mature classical spirit, according to which what is 'purged' or 'tempered' is not the specific passion portrayed on stage, but any harmful excess of the very emotions of pity and fear that have been aroused by that portrayal. By the same token, what we have called the comic catharsis has been seen by many as a moralistic or didactic process, but it too can be interpreted as something much less direct and specific and again, I have no doubt that this subtler interpretation is more in keeping with the fully-developed classical aesthetic. Molière's purpose in his comedies was not to 'scourge' a particular vice; it is noteworthy that when he did set out to do something like that, in Dom Juan, he was forced to resort to a corrective process other than that of laughter. The punishment of a grand seigneur méchant homme lies outside the scope of the comic catharsis, and the playwright had to use dramatic, not comic, means to achieve that end. But elsewhere, Molière's aim to 'corriger les hommes en les divertissant' was to amuse all his audience, and to instruct all his audience, not merely such misers, misanthropists or learned ladies as might happen to be present. The heroes of classical comedy are not annihilated, like Dom Juan, but neither are they cured. They remain the intransigent outsiders, the impenitent egoists that they have been shown to be throughout the five acts of the play. They are in a sense the imaginary scapegoats of society, and by laughing at them in the social microcosm of the theatre the individuals composing the audience are enabled, as Lane Cooper puts it, to regain their proper perspective: that is, to preserve a healthy view of the relationship between the individual and society. This, then, is the cathartic function of Molière's comedy: to send us all away from the play purged and regenerated, as social beings, by the restorative process of laughter.

'Molière n'eût pas été classique', writes Charles Lalo [in Esthétique du rite], 's'il n'avait défendu la bonne société établie en son temps contre les excentriques et les snobs, comme Alceste, les femmes savantes ou les précieuses ridicules; les parasites, comme Tartuffe, Harpagon ou Même Dom Juan; les usurpateurs de dignités consacrées, comme le Bourgeois gentilhomme ou George Dandin.' To see Molière as exemplifying this kind of rire conformiste would be to take a very restrictive view both of the relationship between the individual and society in his theatre, and of the nature of classical art. As L. J. Potts has written [in Comedy]:

Society, in the sense in which the word defines the setting of a comedy, stands for an idea rather than for a particular set of persons. It stands for coherence; for a common body of opinions and standards and a disposition to cooperate. It can be contracted to a very small class living together in a small area; it can be extended to the whole of humanity …

It would no doubt have been easy for Molière, once he was firmly established in the King's favour, to write comedies appealing to a narrowly-defined, self-contained Court audience, playing on that superficial sense of the proprieties which, as Stendhal says somewhere, is always the source of the courtier's notion of the comic. If he had done no more than this, his plays would long ago have become trivial museum-pieces. Instead, his comedy reflects a larger, more generous concept of society, neither exclusively aristocratic nor exclusively bourgeois; one that owed a good deal to the civilising force of Renaissance thought that had been handed down to Frenchmen of his age by the humanist tradition of previous generations. Biographers have often sought to emphasise the significance, as a guide to Molière's fundamental philosophy of life, of his translation of Lucretius and his friendship with free-thinking disciples of Gassendi. Such factors will probably always remain speculative; but the influence of the social ideas of the Renaissance humanists is much more tangible, and the society reflected in his theatre has considerable affinities with the ideal envisaged by thinkers like Erasmus and Montaigne. We know that in practice the France of Louis XIV's reign had its fair share of privilege and corruption, but the selective picture given by the artists and the writers of the age was not a complete misrepresentation of reality: French classical literature emphasises the values of an ordered, civilised way of life in which men and women of culture did genuinely believe, and which many of them honestly tried to practise. This aspect of the classical ideal, as a reflection of the highest aspirations of the civilisation of an age, is one that applies as fully to comedy as to any other art form; and when we speak of 'classical comedy' in this context, we think almost exclusively of Molière.