Molière. by Walther KüchlerReview by: H. Carrington LancasterModern Language Notes, Vol. 45, No. 8 (Dec., 1930), pp. 538-539Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2913177 .

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538 MODERN LANGTUAGE NOTES, DECEMBER, 1930

met at first, for it was highly rated by contemporary authors and was sufficiently popular to be revived by Moliere, in 1659, with considerable success, but the characteristics noted above will make it one of those plays which a student of the development of the classic French drama should know. Its new form will make this easy and pleasant.

CASIMIR D. ZDANOWICZ University of Wisconsin

moliere. Von WALTHER K1CHLER. Leipzig, Teubner, 1929. Pp. 271.

This book is not a life of Moliere, nor a history of his plays. The work of the dramatist's predecessors is summarized too briefly for the reader to learn how much he owed to them and no new sources are pointed out. Much controversial material is brushed aside while the author goes to his main object, the interpretation of Moliere as essentially a writer of comedies, one in whom the search for the Comic dominated all other considerations. The point of view is, as the author declares, the same as that of Michaut, but, owing to the far more limited scope of his production, he is able to present his argument with even greater force. According to K., Mfoliere was no philosopher and only to a limited extent a moralist or satirist, but he was one who, seeking primarily to make men laugh, succeeded in composing comedies that are more continuouslv amusing than those of any other dramatist. If one understands that he was not greatly concerned with instructing or attacking, one will be spared the heated discussions roused by Tartuffe or George Dandin, and one will not share the opinion expressed by Goethe and M. J. Wolff (cf. p. 117) that the Misanthrope is a tragedy. Ideas are, indeed, expressed, and manners described, but not for their own sake. There is action, but its primary purpose is to produce an uninterrupted series of comic situations. And the characters, even Don Juan and Alceste, do not possess the complex personalities we find in life or that other authors have described. They may be called caricatures, but the word is to be used without disparagement, for they give us the impression of being alive.

This interpretation needs certain modifications in view of various personal and literary influences that were exerted upon the dra- matist. He was himself more complex than his creatures and can- not be simplified into their mould. Nevertheless K.'s view is, I believe, in the main sound. He has a deep appreciation of Moli'ere's genius and he no more attempts to belittle him than to give him a broader personality than he possessed- The book should be read

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REVIEWS 539

by all who seek to find in Moliere a philosopher, a moralist, a romaantic individualist, or a ruthless critic, rather than the supreme master of the comic art.'

H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

Elizabethan and Other Essays by SIR SIDNEY LEE. Selected and Edited by FREDERICK S. BOAS. Oxford University Press, 1929. Pp. xxii + 344. $6.00.

These essays, which Dr. Boas has selected with much judgment, were very well worth collecting. The volume will be a lasting memorial, I think, to a scholar whose contributions to knowledge it is easy, and at present fashionable, to underrate.

Sir Sidney Lee was in fact a difficult person to appreciate truly. As the able organizer of factual research in the D. N. B. and the author of long (and at times rather platitudinous) 'official' lives of Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, and King Edward VII, he en- joyed a popular repute that exposed him to gibes from those who fancied themselves capable of seeing a good deal deeper into criti- cal millstones than he attempted to do; and the suspicion of being a dull dog was intensified by the circumstance that he maintained a provokingly skeptical, or at least indifferent, attitude to both the conspicuous schools of Elizabethan study in his time: the personal, 'romantic' biographers of the type of Edward Dowden and Sir Walter Raleigh, and the more recent scientific biblio- graphers and ' disintegrators.'

He was, however, as these incisive essays attest, a sounder thinker than his critics sometimes implied, and (as Dr. Boas re- marks in his Introduction) was essentially a humanist of the kind now called 'new.' What was taken to be superficiality was mainly disillusion. An Oxford classicist and a Jew, he held aloof equally from modern romanticism and modern science, and was usually more concerned to prove the negative than the positive argument.

1 A few corrections follow: P. 15, the first line from Sfylvie is quoted as if complete and the importance of politics exaggerated. P. 16, 1628 is not the correct date for Me'lite; for " Clovis" read " Cloris." P. 17, les Visionnaires should not be dated 1640. P. 69, K. opposes Michaut's con- tention that the first performance of Tartuffe in three acts was that of a complete play on the ground that Moliere would not have ended his comedy with the triumph of Tartuffe, but this objection applies only to Michaut's form of the theory. I suggested in 1923 (Modern Language Journal, Nov., pp. 69-70) that the play was complete in three acts, but that the third act originally ended in Tartuffe's discomfiture. This formi of the theory K. does not discuss. P. 149, Michaut has shown that Dandin was not necessarily, as K. holds, a reworking of Barbouille', for the latter play may have been based upon the former.

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