168
PARTISAN R'EVIEW
tended
to
rise out of their class, to intermarry with the aristocracy
or like the writers to move in court circles by virtue of their calling.
At the other end of the scale were the provincials who were drifting
toward the peasantry and who, living dim, ignorant and impoverished
on their farms, were the constant butt of seventeenth-century wit.
In
between these two extremes came the bourgeoisie proper-the doctors,
lawyers and merchants. They were prosperous, pious and respectable,
and
in
spite of heavy attacks from the writers they were probably the
most stable element in society.
Now though there are some grounds for identifying this middle
stratum with the bourgeois of the novelists and playwrights, the
identification cannot be absolute. The concept is not merely social;
it is also moral. "When one has the good fortune to belong to a
high rank," remarks a character
in
Moliere's
Amphitryon,
"every–
thing one does is fine and good." I think we can assume that the
dramatist thoroughly endorsed this proposition. What he admired
was
les grands,
was a certain aristocratic style of life. And the people
whom he admired were not less great because they spent their lives
,at the Court instead of on the batdefield. Compared with
les grands,
the bourgeois represents (as a recent critic puts it) "a form of existence
which is morally inferior and which is incapable of realizing
le beau
caractere humain.
m
Looked at from this point of view, the whole of
Moliere's work is seen to be an attack on the middle-class way of
life--particularlyon its respectability.
L' Ecole des femmes
is
an attack
on the bourgeois conception of marriage;
Tartuffe
on its stuffy piety;
l'Avare
on a thriftiness which has turned into miserliness; the
Femmes
savantes
on its intellectual pretensions.
Don Juan
certainly pillories
the aristocratic free-thinkers of the day, but this does not prevent
Moliere from showing his bourgeois enemies in an excessively unfavor–
able light.
This attack on middle-class respectability, lack of adventurousness
and, more important still, lack of real culture has led Moliere's critics
to describe his plays as subversive. There is certainly something
in
it.
For we detect from time to time in his work a note of exasperation;
and this exasperation probably led him to go further than he
in–
tended and developed into an apology not merely for the"aristocratic
style of life, but for a certain aristocratic licentiousness.
1. Paul Benichou,
Morales au grana siecie,
Paris, 1948, p. 180.
