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THE SCHOOL FOR HUSBANDS was the first of Molière's
plays in the title of which the word "School" was employed,
to imply that, over and above the intention of amusing, the author
designed to convey a special lesson to his hearers. Perhaps Molière
wished not only that the general public should be prepared to
find instructions and warnings for married men, but also that
they who were wont to regard the theatre as injurious, or at
best trivial, should know that he professed to educate, as well
as to entertain. We must count the adoption of similar titles
by Sheridan and others amongst the
tributes paid, by imitation, to Molière's genius.
This comedy was played for the first time at Paris, on the
24th of June, 1661, and met with great success. On the 12th of
July following it was acted at Vaux, the country seat of Fouquet,
before the whole court, Monsieur, the brother of the King, and
by the Queen of England; and by them also was much approved.
Some commentators say that Molière was partly inspired
by a comedy of Lope de Vega, La
Discreta enamorada, The Cunning Sweetheart; also by a remodelling
of the same play by Moreto, No puede ser guardar una muger,
One Cannot Guard a Woman: but this has lately been disproved.
It appears, however, that he borrowed the primary idea of his
comedy from the Adelphi
of Terence; and from a tale, the third
of the third day, in the Decameron of Boccaccio, where a young
woman uses her father-confessor as a go-between for herself and
her lover. In the Adelphi there are two old men of dissimilar
character, who give a different education to the children they
bring up. One of them is a dotard, who, after having for sixty
years been sullen, grumpy and avaricious, becomes suddenly lively,
polite, and prodigal; this Molière had too much common
sense to imitate.
The School for Husbands marks a dinstinct departure
in the dramatist's literary progress. As a critic has well observed,
it substitutes for situations produced by the mechanism of plot,
characters which give rise to situations in accordance with the
ordinary operations of human nature. Molière's method--the
simple and only true one, and, consequently, the one which incontestably
established the original talent of its employer--is this: At
the beginning of a play, he introduces his principal personages:
sets them talking; suffers them to betray their characters, as
men and women do in every-day life,--expecting from his hearers
that same discernment which he has himself displayed in detecting
their peculiarities: imports the germ of a plot in some slight
misunderstanding or equivocal act; and leaves all the rest to
be effected by the action and reaction of the characters which
he began by bringing out in bold relief. His plots are thus the
plots of nature; and it is impossible that they should not be
both interesting and instructive. That his comedies, thus composed,
are besides amusing, results from the shrewdness with which he
has selected and combined his characters, and the art with which
he arranges the situations produced.
The character-comedies of Molière exhibit, more than
any others, the force of his natural genius, and the comparative
weakness of his artistic talent. In the exhibition and evolution
of character, he is supreme. In the unraveling of his plots and
the dénouement of his situations, he is driven
too willingly to the deus ex machina.
The School for Husbands was directed against one of
the special and prominent defects of society in the age and country
in which Molière lived. Domestic tyranny was not only
rife, but it was manifested in one of its coarsest forms. Sganarelle,
though twenty years younger than Ariste, and not quite forty
years old, could not govern by moral force; he relied solely
on bolts and bars. Physical restraint was the safeguard in which
husbands and parents had the greatest confidence, not perceiving
that the brain and the heart are always able to prevail against
it. This truth Molière took upon himself to preach, and
herein he surpasses all his rivals; in nothing more than in the
artistic device by which he introduces the contrast of the wise
and trustful Ariste, raisonneur as he is called in French,
rewarded in the end by the triumph of his more humane mode of
treatment. Molière probably expresses his own feelings
by the mouth of Ariste: for The School for Husbands was
performed on the 24th of June, 1661, and about eight months later,
on the 20th of February, 1662, he married
Armande Béjart,
being then about double her age. As to Sganarelle in this play,
he ceases to be a mere buffoon, as in some of Molière's
farces, and becomes the personification of an idea or of a folly
which has to be ridiculed.
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