Misanthropy Made Plain
Richard Wilbur’s rhymed couplet
translation of Molière unfolds in a long, dazzling parade of pithy aphorisms
and pungent epigrams. This is not surprising, given the verse form. The
favourite tool of English satirists of the 18th century (see for
example Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes”), the razor-sharp two-liner suits a
moralizing, pontificating tone better than any other, and Alceste, the titular
curmudgeon of the first play, moralizes and pontificates at length—and
brilliantly. Indeed, he takes up where Shakespeare’s embittered outcast, Timon
of Athens, leaves off. Timon delivers his great, world-damning soliloquy
outside the walls of Athens and then most of his caustic wit is spent, but
Alceste’s rants at Philinte in Act One are just the start of his outraged
speechifying. What is worst in people—all the unchanging darkness of the human
heart—is the subject of the play, and Alceste’s bitter criticisms are no less
perennial than what is being criticized. The modern edge given to the jibes by
the modern translation underscore a key point: we’re as bad as we ever were,
and solace for the moral imagination can be found, albeit of a sour-tasting
sort, in the pages of The Misanthrope.
In Tartuffe
there is a villain who is vilified and vanquished, and the reader can gloat
at his downfall just as he groans at the credulity of the gulls who succumb to
his trickery, and think himself superior. But in The Misanthrope there
is no one worst wrongdoer and the reader realizes his own faults are on display
as much as anybody else’s, in the great parade of follies that so galls
Alceste. Indeed, even Alceste ultimately concedes, after all his
stone-throwing, that he too is not without sin.
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