Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ROMANCE AND YOUTH A Year or two ago M. Ferdinand Brune- tiere, the austere literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes, delivered a lecture at the Ode"on Theatre upon Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes. According to him, so M. Lemaitre reported, the comedy turned upon the question of age. Agnes is sixteen; Arnol- phe confesses to forty-two. That in itself is enough in the play to make Arnolphe not only ridiculous but odious from beginning to end. His successful rival Horace is twenty. He has nothing but youth to recommend him; nor is anything more needed. He and Agnes have all the sympathy of author and audience. And quite right too! cries this austere M. Brune- tiere; it is a natural and sacred law. In sympathising with Agnes and Horace, the heart is sympathising with nature and instinct. Moliere perhaps does not make the play turn quite so nakedly on the contrast of age as the moral requires. There may not be much in Horace's favour beside his youth; but there is a good deal more than his forty- two years to be set to the discredit of Arnolphe. He is a system-monger and an egotist. Now the egotist, according to Mr. Meredith, is the chosen sport of the comic spirit; while woman (bless her!) was created to be the bane of system and the despair of the system-monger. When a mature bachelor like Arnolphe, in self-conscious dread of becoming as one of the horned herd of husbands about him, captures a babe in long clothes and has her mewed up and artificially trained to be a helpmeet for his special lordship, then the imps of mischief gather in a circle on their haunches to wait and watch for the catastrophe. And if the wretched man, after dwarfing the girl's nature and bounding her horizon, demands love on the score of gratitude, the angels of heaven join in the applause over his dis...