A Note on Moliere and his Religion

Extract

The recent visit to London of a troupe of players from the Comédie Francaise gave us a welcome opportunity of studying a few of Moliere’s greatest works in the only completely satisfactory way in which they can be studied. For though we may read and re-read our Moliere with never-failing joy till we know every line by heart and every character as well as the members of our own family, it is not until those familiar figures are actually moving before us and revealing their characters in every word they utter that we can realise quite fully the greatness of their creator’s genius.

Surely no dramatist has ever equalled Moliere in his power of writing dialogue that is at the same time apparently so faithful a reproduction of real speech and so entirely characteristic of each individual speaker. The talk is all so natural, so spontaneous, that the fact that in many plays it is carried on in Alexandrine couplets never jars on our sense of reality in the least—it is not until afterwards, if at all, that we reflect that after all nobody ever did talk in Alexandrine couplets in real life. Moliere wrote his plays for the stage and not for the study, consequently this quality of naturalness in the dialogue strikes us even more forcibly when we hear it spoken than when we read it. In the same way we have to see the characters not merely with the mind’s eye, but as actual living beings, in order fully to appreciate them.