CHAPTER XLII

THE HARPOONER OF HYPOCRISY

In vain do kings and emperors set up the doctrine that art exists for courts; that only the great ones of the earth are the proper theme for art works, and courtiers and court critics the true judges of taste. Deeply planted in the human heart is an instinct, declaring that all human beings are of consequence; and men of genius arise who follow that instinct, and write about ordinary people, and appeal to wider and wider groups of the community. We shall now see this happening to the exclusive and haughty court of the “grand monarch.” A world genius appears, who breaks the established barriers, sets all France to arguing over his ideas, and helps to make the drama of Europe the social force which it is today.

He was the son of the royal upholsterer in Paris; that is to say, of a tradesman who had the job of repairing the soft and expensive cushions upon which this court reclined. But Molière, a volcano of energy and enterprise, did not take long to discover that he was not interested in cushioning a court. At the age of twenty-one he sold his claims to the family job, and started a theater on a tennis-court in Paris. It was a failure, and the young Molière was three times imprisoned for debt. But he would not give up; he organized a company to tour the provinces, and for thirteen years he lived a life of “one-night stands.” It is a dog’s life today, and must have been worse three hundred years ago, when actors were outcasts and almost outlaws. Catholic bigotry in France was as bitter against them as Puritan bigotry in England.

It was a hard school, in which Molière made no money and lost his health. But it was a way to make a tragi-comic dramatist, for it brought him into contact with every kind of human being. When he came to Versailles to become the king’s favorite dramatist, he brought with him knowledge of something more than courtly intrigue; he brought the fighting spirit of a man who had been roughly handled, who had been poor and in jail, and who knew France as it was to the plain people.

Molière got a chance to produce plays before the king, including a couple of his own little farces. The king was then twenty-one years of age, curious about life, and not entirely in the hands of women and priests as he later became. Molière was thirty-seven when he produced his first significant work, “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” a satire on the literary fashions of the time, according to which a mirror was called “the counsellor of the graces,” and a chair “the commodity of conversation.” Great ladies were accustomed to assemble to display their wit to one another, and it was exactly like the literary tea-parties we have nowadays. I have pictured them in a chapter in “The Metropolis”--

“Go ahead with Molière!” says Mrs. Ogi.

“I just want to quote a dozen lines,” pleads her husband. “This shows you what happens to literature, when it becomes ‘the rage’ among fine ladies: ‘We learn thereby, every day, the latest gallantries, and the prettiest novelties in prose and verse; we are told just in the nick of time, that such a one has composed the prettiest piece in the world on such a subject; that some one else has written words to such an air; that this person has made a madrigal upon an enjoyment, and that his friend has composed some stanzas upon an infidelity; that Mr. So-and-so sent half a dozen verses yesterday evening to Miss Such-and-such, and that she sent back an answer at eight o’clock this morning; that one celebrated author has just sketched a plan for a new book, that another has got to the third part of his romance, and that a third is passing his works through the press.’”

“Is that in ‘The Metropolis’?” asks Mrs. Ogi, suspiciously.

Whereat, her husband grins with malice. “Look for it; and if you don’t find it, try the tenth scene of ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules.’”

It was insolence for a mere tradesman’s son to make fun of high-born ladies, and the ladies were furious, and succeeded in keeping the play off the stage for five days. That was the beginning of a fight, which lasted the rest of Molière’s life. At any time he chose to write a silly farce or a ballet he could have it produced safely and with applause; but whenever he wrote a play with a serious purpose he raised up a swarm of enemies, who kept his play off the boards anywhere from five days to five years. And here is where the man showed his spirit; he was sick, he was always struggling with debt, he had his theatrical company to look out for--people whom he loved and whose burdens he carried. Nevertheless, truth blazed in him like a white-hot flame, and he could not let his enemies alone. He would quit the fight for a year or two, then come back to it with a piece of ridicule yet more stinging, or a picture of cruelty and falsehood so grim that it was hard to pass off for a comedy.

Molière hated hypocrisy with a deadly hatred; he hated the church of his time, because it was an organized system of hypocrisy for cash. He hated vain fops, and empty-headed, pretentious women, and the snobbish and self-seeking great ones of the earth. Also he hated the enslaving and imprisoning of love. In his time the French girl was raised in a convent, and when she was somewhere between thirteen and eighteen her parents, with the aid of the family lawyer, sold her in marriage to some mature man of the world, who possessed rank and fortune, and was apt to possess vices and diseases. In no less than nine of Molière’s plays there is such a situation; also there is an amiable young man in love with the girl, and the couple find a way to thwart the schemes of their elders. The plays thus become a plea for common sense and human feeling, as opposed to avarice and worldly pride. This has become a familiar theme of comedy; the poet’s first instinctive revolt against the money-power.

It is Molière’s custom to take some propaganda theme, and to construct upon it a sermon in picture form. He chooses very simple characters to illustrate the theme, and in the conversations he pounds upon it like a man driving in a spike with a sledge. Every bit of knowledge and skill he possesses goes into those hard strokes; all his wit and verve, his insight into human character, his amazing vividness, his palpitating sense of life.

The greatest evil of the time was unquestionably the church, which controlled the mind and conscience of the nation and repressed all independent thinking. The life of France was beset by a horde of spies, the secret agents of a predatory power, the Jesuits; nothing could be hid from them, because they controlled the salvation of souls, and through the instrument of the confessional were able to dominate political and social life. They worked, as always, upon the ignorance and emotionalism of women; they beset the mind of the king, and in the end they got him, forcing the revocation of the law tolerating Protestants, and beginning another monstrous persecution. Molière saw all that going on around him, and he wrote about it one of the most terrible plays in the world. It is called “Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite,” and shows a religious intriguer, worming his way into a middle-class family and seducing the wife of his benefactor. The drama is an utterance of blazing anger, a veritable harpooning of hypocrisy. As a weapon of propaganda it is exactly as powerful today as it was three hundred years ago.

Of course it raised a storm in the little world of Paris and Versailles. The clerical party besieged the king, and the play was barred from public performance, though it was shown privately to some of the great nobles. The archbishop threatened to excommunicate those who even read the play, and Bossuet, the ruling-class literary pope of the time, took Molière’s untimely death from tuberculosis as a divine judgment upon him for the writing of this infamous work. Two years later the king again permitted the play to be shown; but when the performance came on he was away at one of his wars, and an official closed the theater, and Molière’s appeals to the king were in vain. For five years the fight over this play went on, before at last it could be freely shown.

They were years of incessant struggle for Molière. He produced “Don Juan,” and the clerical critics objected to that also, because it portrayed an intellectual and free thinker. To be sure, it portrayed him as a very immoral man; but that did not satisfy the clerical party, for few of them could meet that test. It was the irony of fate that the archbishop, who forbade to Molière’s body a church service, was himself a man of notoriously vile habits.

Then came a play called “The Misanthrope,” a name doubtless given as a sop to Molière’s critics. There is really nothing misanthropic about the hero; he is simply a man of fine ideals, who is stunned by his discovery of the powers of evil in the world about him, and their ability to destroy human life. He is married to a woman whom he loves, but who will not give up this evil world, and gives up her husband instead. Molière himself had made a bitterly unhappy marriage with a young actress who preferred the world to her husband, and the hero of this play is generally taken as Molière’s own voice, just as Hamlet is taken as Shakespeare’s voice.

This greatest comic dramatist of France had to waste much of his time producing farces and ballets for his exacting king. He now wrote a farce comedy, which I suppose is produced a thousand times every year in American high schools, “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” The play makes merry with a crude, newly-rich merchant who tries to acquire a little culture in his prosperous years. Molière was thus catering to high-born snobbery, and also voicing the dislike which all artists feel for those who buy and sell. You will recall the scorn of Aristophanes for “mongers” of all sorts--“mutton-mongers” and “rope-mongers” and “leather-mongers” and “offal-mongers.”

In another play, “The Learned Ladies,” Molière joins Aristophanes in poking fun at the idea that women should or could be educated. It is true that the vanities of women are especially absurd when applied to scientific matters, in which personality is so entirely out of place; but the same absurdities result from the first efforts of any disinherited group or class or race to lift itself. We have seen Shakespeare making fun of workingmen trying to produce a play; similarly, we shall find Kipling ridiculing the notion that Hindoos can master the English language, and become fit to hold government positions in their own country.

Molière’s last whack was at the doctors, whom he especially disliked. We can understand that a man afflicted with a chronic disease, concerning which the doctors of his time understood nothing, must have had unsatisfactory results from their visits, must have submitted to their purgings and their bleedings to no purpose, and paid them money which he felt they did not earn. Anyhow, he goes after them again and again, and in his “Imaginary Invalid” he portrays a man who thinks he is sick, and all the various quacks who swarm around him. Three times the play was given with great success, with Molière acting the leading part. A fourth performance was due, and the poor playwright was ill; he thought of his company and what would happen to them if he were to shut down, so he went through the performance, and collapsed and died a few hours later.

But his vivid and courageous propaganda did not die. It lives, even to our time, as the greatest glory of the French drama; proving over and over again our thesis that really great art has never been produced except by men who wished to improve their fellow-men and to abolish cruelty and greed and falsehood from the earth.

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