The Misanthrope—Molière

Honesty? The worst policy!

Gossip (AI-generated image)

At the age of forty-six and after a period of poor health and depression, Molière wrote the Misanthrope. Even though a comedy, it strikes me as coming from a deeply cynical place in a discouraged author’s heart. The protagonist, Alceste, learns that honesty only makes one into an outcast from a society that feeds on lies.

Alceste has become fed up with all the flattery and wheedling that abounds in polite society. He adopts the heroic stance of never saying anything but the unvarnished truth to everyone. He holds not just himself to this high standard, but demands similar honesty from his friend and his lover. Predictably, he ends up alone, but apparently quite content in his uncompromising virtue. The play starts with him insisting that his friend Philinte stop treating everyone like his dearest and most cherished companion.

PHILINTE

Why, what have I done, Alceste? Is this quite just?

ALCESTE

My God, you ought to die of self-disgust.

I call your conduct inexcusable, Sir,

And every man of honor will concur.

I see you almost hug a man to death,

Exclaim for joy until you're out of breath,

And supplement these loving demonstrations

With endless offers, vows, and protestations;

Then when I ask you "Who was that?", I find

That you can barely bring his name to mind!

…

If I caught myself behaving in such a way,

I'd hang myself for shame, without delay.

Molière exploits the predictable results of such brutal honesty to great comic effect. A certain Oronte, after shamelessly flattering Alceste, reads to him a love sonnet he’s written and asks for Alceste’s honest opinion. Alceste demurs, saying “I am, I fear, / inclined to be unfashionably sincere,” but Oronte brushes aside these warnings.

Just what I ask; I'd take no satisfaction

In anything but your sincere reaction.

I beg you not to dream of being kind.

Well, he need not have worried about Alceste’s kindness. In fact, when Alceste gets through with Oronte, Philinte has to step between them to prevent a fight. It doesn’t end there, however. A lawsuit follows, albeit offstage, and we eventually learn that Alceste has dug in his heels and refused to retract or soften one word of his insults. He loses the suit, and doesn’t stoop to the level of contesting the results, apparently happy to play the righteous victim.

Molière’s play provides ample evidence for Alceste’s condemnation of polite society. The characters gossip behind each other’s backs, delivering the most vicious barbs, yet they ooze with unctuous praise when face to face. In fact even though no one believes their flatterers, they still delight in hearing themselves praised and take great offense when the truth slips out. Everyone lies, everyone knows it, and all those lies keep the engine of society running smoothly.

While the audience must have loved seeing the characters ridiculing each other in secret, they probably thrilled whenever Alceste spoke blunt truth to vanity. Even without Alceste present, the cruel truth would sometime find a way of slipping out. In one delightfully wicked exchange between Célimène and her friend, Arsinoé, each indulges in nasty caviling at the other, all the while pretending to offer honest advice, purely out of love and affection of course.

Most of the male characters circle longingly around the lovely Célimène, who merrily strings them along, quite at home among so many men pining for her attention. She flirts and encourages all of them, but has told Alceste that she favors him the most. Alceste, of course, doesn’t believe her as long as she keeps stringing the others along. How does he know she hasn’t told everyone else the same thing? Led more by his heart than his mind, Alceste willingly tolerates her faults, (even though he doesn’t fail to mention them).

ACASTE

I see her charms and graces, which are many;

But as for faults, I've never noticed any.

ALCESTE

I see them, Sir; and rather than ignore them,

I strenuously criticize her for them.

The more one loves, the more one should object

To every blemish, every least defect.

Were I this lady, I would soon get rid

Of lovers who approved of all I did,

And by their slack indulgence and applause

Endorsed my follies and excused my flaws.

CÉLIMÈNE

If all hearts beat according to your measure,

The dawn of love would be the end of pleasure;

And love would find its perfect consummation

In ecstasies of rage and reprobation.

At this juncture, the wisest character of the play, Célimène’s cousin Éliante, offers a delightful account of how the urge for self-deception—an urge as old as love itself—keeps passion alive.

ÉLIANTE

Love, as a rule, affects men otherwise,

And lovers rarely love to criticize.

They see their lady as a charming blur,

And find all things commendable in her.

If she has any blemish, fault, or shame,

They will redeem it by a pleasing name.

The pale-faced lady's lily-white, perforce;

The swarthy one's a sweet brunette, of course;

The spindly lady has a slender grace;

The fat one has a most majestic pace;

The plain one, with her dress in disarray,

They classify as beauté négligée;

The hulking one's a goddess in their eyes,

The dwarf, a concentrate of Paradise;

The haughty lady has a noble mind;

The mean one's witty, and the dull one's kind;

The chatterbox has liveliness and verve,

The mute one has a virtuous reserve.

So lovers manage, in their passion's cause,

To love their ladies even for their flaws.

In any event, Alceste can’t stand the tension of not knowing where he stands in Célimène’s estimation, and he insists that she be forthright not just with him but also with everyone else. He insist that she tell each of her courtiers her true feelings so that those who have no hope can move on with their lives. I won’t spoil the ending, though, except to say that truthfulness in the world of this play never leads to what society would call success.

Molière wrote The Misanthrope in alexandrine verse (each line containing twelve syllables and a caesura in the middle). It makes for a natural flow in French and works quite well for the rapid give and take of dialogue, as actors would divide the lines between them. The translator, Richard Wilbur, himself a brilliant poet, pointed out that Molière’s verse makes possible the stepwise presentation of a logical argument which would have come across as intolerably pedantic in prose. Verse also turns a threefold repetition of an idea into a delightful crescendo, which in prose would have come across as simple redundancy. Wilbur in his introduction to the play offered such considerations to justify a verse translation, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. The singsong dialogue makes many passages funny that would otherwise have bored me to tears.

To render Molière’s alexandrine verse into English, Wilbur used heroic couplets. Oronte’s awful sonnet, mentioned earlier, while having the requisite fourteen lines, doesn’t seem to fit any normal rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EE FGGF? Furthermore, the meter of each line makes no sense. Take the first two lines for instance: iambs on one line, trochees on the next, with a dactyl thrown in for good measure.

Hope comforts us awhile, t'is true,

Lulling our cares with careless laughter,

˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /

/˘ ˘ /˘ /˘ /˘

I’d add that the “cares with careless” doesn’t help either. I feel certain that writing bad but believable verse must pose a challenge to a great poet. But Wilbur pulls off that feat like a PDQ Bach of poetry. Another translator, Donald M. Frame, renders these same two lines thus:

Hope does, ‘tis true, some comfort bring,

And lulls awhile our aching pain;

Though Frame’s translation captures the strained grammar of a poet who tries too hard, he renders the doggerel into straightforward iambic tetrameter. Its badness then stems mostly from its loftiness. But Wilbur’s version grates like fingernails on a chalkboard; one might call it magnificently awful.

I mentioned in a note a few days ago that people sometimes see themselves in satire and take great offense. In his biography of Molière, Bulgakov tells of an incident at a performance of The Misanthrope. Word had gotten out that Molière had modeled Alceste after the Duc de Montausier, the Dauphin’s tutor. The Duke, assuming that Moliere had held him up to public ridicule, vowed he would thrash the playwright if ever they met. When Molière learned Montausier was in the audience he tried to hide backstage. But the Duke wanted to see him, so he knew he had to come out and meet his fate. But instead of the thrashing he expected, the Duke embraced him and declared that “he was flattered to have been the model for the portrait of so noble a man as Alceste.” Of course Molière had not modeled Alceste on anyone at all, but the Duke must have felt that that particular shoe fit him quite well.

§ § §

The more I read by Molière and the more I read about him, the more interesting he becomes. Even though the Decade list contains two more Molière plays, I think I’ll wait for a more scholarly biography of Molière I’ve ordered to arrive. In the meantime, I’ll jump back a few centuries and enjoy Antigone, by Sophocles, in the David Grene translation.

Thanks to everyone who continues to watch me struggling with the Western Canon. I welcome your feedback, and I love your support. As Oronte said, “I'd take no satisfaction / In anything but your sincere reaction.” Only I really mean it.

Books mentioned in this post

The Misanthrope, by Molière, translation by Richard Wilbur

The Misanthrope, by Molière, translation by Donald M. Frame

The Life of Monsieur de Molière: A Portrait, by Mikhail Bulgakov, translation by Mirra Ginsburg

Antigone, by Sophocles, translation by David Grene