THE MISANTHROPE

A verse comedy in five acts, first performed June 4, 1666, at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris by Molière’s company, the Troupe du Roi. In his privilege to print the play Molière used the subtitle Or, The Melancholy Lover (Ou l’Atrabilaire amoureux); but he later abandoned this. Molière played Alceste; his wife played Célimène; the distribution of the other roles is not known. The play was not a box-office success; after two months it was withdrawn in favor of The Doctor in Spite of Himself, and during Molière’s lifetime it was performed only a few times a year. However, it won many admirers from the first, and Boileau hailed it as Molière’s best.

Within a century Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought out the possibilities of a heroic, if not a tragic, Alceste in what he considers Molière’s masterpiece. The author’s aim, he argues, is to make virtue ridiculous by pandering to the shallow and vicious tastes of the man of the world; the play would have gained in beauty and consistency if Alceste—with whom he obviously identifies himself—had been meek toward injustice to himself, indignant against public vices; and Philinte the converse. The notion of a tragic Alceste, though not common today, may be dormant, not dead; in any case, it has had a long and vigorous life.

Yet Rousseau was quite right in seeing that Molière had made the play a comedy, and a comedy of virtue. As Ramon Fernandez shows, in the three great plays of the mid-1660s Molière was clearly testing the limits of the comic, struggling to enlarge its domain. In Don Juan and Tartuffe he had shown that vice is not immune to comic treatment; here he does the same with virtue. Perhaps even more than these two others, this play shows just how serious a Molière comedy can be. Hence the tension of the play, the problems it raises, the contradictory views it has aroused.

Of Molière’s comic intent there is no reasonable doubt; nor is there much more of his success. Playing the leading comic role (here, of Alceste), as he always did, from the very first scene he makes this fully clear. Alceste’s constant excessiveness is demonstrated from the start: it may be honorable to protest against the “white lies” of social life, but it is comic to urge suicide—to one’s best friend at that—as the only atonement for such a crime; the “objective correlative” that T. S. Eliot speaks of is clearly inadequate. An unconscious but tyrannical egoist, Alceste is always full of himself; his speech abounds in what in English would be the vertical pronoun, characteristically followed by a statement of how he wants men to be. In his first two long speeches (ll. 14–28, 41–64) he gives his own motives away as he moves from the “good reason” of pure principle to the hatred he feels (l. 43) for social pretense and at last (l. 63 and 53–64 passim) to the clear avowal of what irks him: that standardized politeness frustrates his thirst to be singled out for what he alone is.

In the same first scene, after hearing Alceste’s theory of utter frankness, his friend Philinte tests his “theoretical practice” by asking whether he would really say just what he thinks of them to such grotesques as the tedious Dorilas and the old coquette Émilie; and Alceste answers a resounding Yes. The very next scene, however, shows his failure to practice what he preaches. To be sure, he finally makes an enemy of his sonneteering rival Oronte; but this is only after much more temporizing and deviousness (“Sir . . .” ll. 267–277; “I don’t say that. But . . .” ll. 352–362), not to mention the obvious exemplum of what he told another, hypothetical scribbler, that is not at all consistent with the way he says he would, and others should, behave.

A different kind of inconsistency seems, from the early subtitle noted above, embedded in Molière’s original concept of the play: Alceste’s love for Célimène. To be sure, to most modern readers at least, this is as endearing and poignant as it is comic. But here too we find Alceste misled by vanity. From the first he is sure that she loves him and that his love will prevail and change her character (ll. 233–237). Later we find—and so does he—that he is abjectly in love with her (ll. 1371–1390) and ready to accept any explanation that will allow her to “seem faithful,” and that her love for him, such as it is, is merely the best she can manage for anyone but herself. The self-assurance of his early statements leads to a comic fall.

The “virtue” that is ridiculed in Alceste is not virtue itself but the unexamined virtue of the theorist—who talks plausibly but does not practice what he preaches—and of the nonconformist, who has eyes for all the vices of society except his own. It is the barnacles on the ship of morality, the excesses and other vices that naturally accompany Alceste’s virtues—self-righteousness, inconsistency, and consequently a certain hypocrisy—that Molière holds up to our laughter.

Alceste is by no means merely comic. Characteristically, Molière did not merely play the role, but endowed it with some of his own traits: his love, as an older man, for a younger woman, his eagerness to criticize and correct human foibles.* There is obviously something noble about Alceste, for all his comic flaws; and the sincere Éliante, the most trustworthy character in the play, pays homage to it (ll. 1165–1166):

. . . the sincerity that is his pride

Has a heroic and a noble side.

Moreover, Molière endows Alceste with a magnetism that is his alone. Not only does Oronte seek to become his friend; he enjoys the devoted friendship of Philinte, and he is the man most loved by the three leading ladies of the play. Moreover, of Célimène’s suitors, he is the only one whose love is greater than his vanity.

Even his view of human nature is shared by his main theoretical opponent, Philinte. What separates them is not their opinion of it, but their reactions. Philinte clearly finds it no more shocking (ll. 176–178)

To see a man unjust, self-seeking, sly,

Than to see vultures hungry for their prey,

Monkeys malicious, wolves athirst to slay.

Finally, this view of human nature, expounded so angrily by Alceste and so matter-of-factly by Philinte, seems to be fully borne out by the action of the play. If it is fair, as I think it is, to regard Alceste, Philinte, and Éliante as in a sense the “we” of the play, and the others as the “they”—the world, or perhaps the court; for all the principal characters are members of high society—then clearly “they” are shown to be vain, unloving, and malicious. The polished world of high society is just a lacquered jungle. And it is at least one of Molière’s aims to bring this out even while the principal railer against these vices is made, by his own unwitting flaws, a comic, not a tragic, hero.