"The great painter of man as he is." — Stendhal
"People can put up with rebukes but they cannot bear being laughed at: they are prepared to be wicked but they dislike appearing ridiculous."
"When you depict heroes, you are completely free. These are arbitrary portraits in which no one will look for any resemblance. You need only follow the flight of your imagination, which sometimes soars too high and disregards truth for the sake of the marvelous. When, however, you depict ordinary people, then you must paint from life. The portraits must bear a resemblance, and if people of your time do not recognize themselves in them, then you have not achieved your goal. In short, if the author of a serious play wants to avoid criticism, it is enough for him to express sound ideas in a beautiful form, but for a comedy, this is not enough — here one must also make jokes, and making decent people laugh is no easy task."
"But Comedy justly treated, as you find it in Molière, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Molière throws no infamous reflection upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure." — George Meredith, Victorian critic
It's amusing who became the greatest comic genius in the history of the French language spent his early career trying, and conspicuously failing, to be a tragedian. This is quite a clarifying fact about Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673), and almost everyone who tells his story hurries past it. Tragedy was the prestige form that a serious artist was supposed to aspire to. Moliere did likewise. His lifelong friend and confidante Madeleine Bejart remembered that he had "immortal longings to excel, and one could only excel in tragedy." And he was bad at it. His tragic acting was singled out for ridicule. He gave up tragedy and turned, almost against his own wishes, to comedy, where he proceeded to become immortal. The reason is the key to his type. Moliere was an IEE, with no more than a slight theatrical EIE coloring of something more dramatic — and tragedy is the dramatic register's consequence, while comedy of character is the home ground of the more curious and ranging intelligence he actually possessed.
Moliere's comedy is characterological at its root. He took a single human type — the hypocrite, the miser, the social climber, the hypochondriac, the affected bluestocking, the jealous husband — and rendered its entire interior from the inside. Even today, some people recognize others in his types, and in his times, the similarity must've been even closer. There was a case where a director (Ariane Mnouchkine) staged Tartuffe in a modern Muslim family of French-Algerians, and a lot of people in the audience had the wrong impression that the words of the play were modernized, too — apparently, the pious fraud and the household's capture by a manipulative holy man felt so contemporary and so specific. Tartuffe, Arnolphe, Alceste: these are the fruit of an intelligence endlessly fascinated by the variety of human character and its self-justifying mechanisms. This is intuition turned on people — grasping the essence of a type and all its comic possibilities — and it is the engine of his best works. You have to wonder whom would he mock in our modern world...
He liked to skewer pedantry and "classifying" Ti-style intelligence. He inherited the figure of the pompous, Latin-spouting doctor from Italian farce, and he could not stop deploying it — the clueless physicians of The Imaginary Invalid, the Doctor in Spite of Himself farce — but it was only a concentrated form of a target he hunted across his whole career. The précieuses with their affected refinement, the learned ladies with their salon-grammar (see especially the how-dares-the-cook use wrong declension scene): what unifies his gallery of fools is the "static" closed system of external rules mistaken for wisdom. His anti-pedantry is simply his own open-endedness seen from its polemical side — understandable, since he was chronically ill and had been on the receiving end of credentialed, but rather dubious medicine.
Arnolphe, in The School for Wives, is the purest specimen. Terrified of being made a cuckold, he attempts to engineer a faithful wife from scratch: he takes a small girl, has her raised in a convent under strict instructions to keep her as ignorant as possible, seals her away from the world in a locked house, and plans to marry the controllable creature he believes he has manufactured. His "Maxims of Marriage", a whole catechism of wifely subjection, is a parody of strict moralistic rulebooks. Predictably, the system bursts. Moliere takes visible pleasure in that, and he stages it again and again, with variations.
The stock Pantalone strict-father figure he received from the farce was a behavioral type. He acted tyrannically but he didn't argue. Moliere had the idea to provide this type with a developed world-view in which his authority was justified and righteous. Arnolphe doesn't just lock Agnes away, he defends his scheme as wisdom. Orgon and the religious party have a complete ideology of pious authority. The pedant-doctors have an entire epistemology. Moliere gave the cage a voice that could justify itself. A lesser comic mind keeps the tyrant a simple buffoon. Moliere made him a thinker, and ridiculed his thought, anyway. This is one of the reasons why his best characters, although being monomaniacs, appear to be "more alive" than the caricatured Commedia del'Arte ones.
Moliere's sympathies are usually quite clear: we know Tartuffe is a fraud, the quack doctors are quacks, et cetera. His comedy generally rests on a clear moral floor. What is interesting about The Misanthrope is that exactly once, he took it away. Alceste, who cannot abide the hypocrisies of polite society and demands absolute sincerity, is either a noble truth-teller or a ridiculous monomaniac, and the text refuses to say which — Rousseau read him as a wronged hero, the comic tradition reads him as a fool, and neither are strictly "wrong", although both overstate the case. Against him stands Philinte, the easygoing realist who shrugs at the world's falseness and gets along, and the play doesn't condemn him, either. This undecidability is one of the rarest achievements in world literature — most writers cannot suppress their own preferences even when they try — and the temptation is to read Alceste's bitter, non-conformist idealism as Moliere's own self-portrait, but he could be a Philinte as readily as an Alceste. He flattered the right gentlemen on his way into Paris (Fi-creatives are quite good flatterers, in fact), navigated the court for years, and his raisonneurs, while very occasionally somewhat comic themselves, often give people advice in the "don't be a grouch and fit in" sense. Yep, while your average IEE dislikes strict external rules and is quite perceptive into the inner nature of people, I don't see the type as some sort of authenticity maniac. There are types far less conformist than it, and your average IEE is by no means the archetype of a morally fastidious loner.
There was some public combativeness in him, a relish for performance and for the fight, and it gives the IEE base a certain stagey, dramatic EIE tint. But it stays a tint, and the failure at tragedy is exactly why we can be sure. He had enough of the dramatic in him to want the heroic form and to command an audience; he did not have enough to actually do tragedy, because the heightened tragic register was not his. What was his was the comic anatomy of human character, and when his tragic ambitions failed, the material did not vanish: the wreck of his failed tragedy, Dom Garcie, was salvaged and rebuilt into The Misanthrope, which is tragicomic at worst.
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