Such are the materials of _The Misanthrope_, common stones: and into them a man did once breathe such life that he made a thing standing quite apart from all his other creations, and something higher than anything any other had accomplished. What depths and further depths! What suggestions to the left and to the right! What infinite complexity of real character (and just that infinite complexity of real character exists in all of us), shines through those few pages, illumines and glorifies two hours of acting on a stage!
There is perhaps no man intelligent and sensitive and having passed the age of forty who will not, as he watches the acting of _The Misanthrope_, see all that he knows of life passing before him and sounding exactly in tune with the vibrations of his own soul. There is passionate love, intense and disappointed, and there is the foil to passion; that large, that honest, that domestic thing which rare women possess, and, when they possess it, afford food, sustenance, sacrament to the life of men. There is friendship; there is the ideal sought and unattained; there is the disappointment to which all noble souls are doomed. There is all human story put into one little frame. How? No one can tell how. Molière himself could not have told how.
When those simple words, spoken quickly and in a low tone--"_Morbleu! Faut il que je vous aime_"--are heard, the man's whole self, his whole past (if he has loved fully), his security, his doubt, all of him respond. Why? I cannot tell. I only know that the great poets do it, and they themselves do not know how. It is the Muse. It is something divine. It is inspiration.
It is inspiration. That word was justly framed. It would seem that among the few consolations afforded to the miserable race of men, among the little hints of a possible coming Beatitude, the Creator has especially chosen from his storehouse this gem, this priceless gem, of poetical power. I am reminded of it when I read the foolish judgment so often repeated--that the Ancients had no landscape.
[Greek: "... oi rha min ôka Thêsouo en Lukiês eureiês pioni dêmps."]
When I read that I see what I think Flaxman saw, the sunlight on the Ægean, the Asian hills, and the fertile plain between; I feel the warmer air. Yet is there not one word which describes these things, unless you except the common word and symbol which says that Lycia is rich. Tennyson did it too: "And the moon was full." So did Byron: "The moon is up and yet it is not night." So did Shakespeare in "gentle and low an excellent thing in women." So did Virgil: "_Et inania regna_." So do they all.