Moliere was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis
XIV., and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and
amuse the Parisians. But deeper than this; Moliere was by nature a
great satirist. I call him a _great_ satirist, because of the
affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite--namely, a
clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the
false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense,
shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the
comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was
the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with
histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities,
the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the
game for his faculties. The interior of Paris households he
transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness
of his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, not
because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat
out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a
lop-sided deformity.
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