and conquering. The Catholicism of the French Jansenists, the Protestantism of Puritan times, furnish the most admirable instances of unalloyed Christianity that the world has seen, and their influence elevated the men who were neither Jansenists nor Puritans. Those who judge the religion of England at its best in the seventeenth century by the life of Nicholas Ferrar or of John Bunyan, and who turn to the records of Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal to appreciate the Jansenist, will find that the religious tone of Anglican, Nonconformist, and Catholic was practically indistinguishable. Those who wish to trace what was vulgar and dishonest in the professors of those days will find inimitable portraitures in the Tartufe of Molière, which was probably aimed at a mystic or a Jansenist,[1] and in Hudibras, which was written by a man who had lived in a Puritan household. It is well to know that there was a bad side, and to remember that the worst men were habitually those who traded upon the success of religion; for the good is so admirable as to induce a
- ↑ There is a tradition that Tartufe was drawn from Roquette, Bishop of Autun, a very ordinary type of the intriguing priest (Biographie Universelle, art. "Molière"). Michelet appears to identify Tartufe with Desmarets, an illumine, and quotes the line:
"Priez Dieu que toujours le ciel vous illumine."
Henri Martin describes him as "Pathée travesti en Jésuite." The only point that Tartufe has in common with the Jesuits is casuistry. " On trouve avec le ciel des accommodements." On the other hand, Louis XIV. would hardly have tolerated an attack on the Jesuits, and Tartufe's ostentation of austerity is incomparably more a Jansenist than a Jesuit trait. The great hatred the clergy generally had for the play appears due to the fact that in the first sketch Tartufe was a clerical confessor (Martin, Hist. de France, tome xiii. p. 678). It seems safest, however, to hold that Tartufe was hypocrisy incarnate rather than any particular hypocrite; and we know from Mdme. de Sevigne (Lettres, Dec. 1, 1664) that the Chancellor Seguier was described as "la metamorphose de Pierrot en Tartufe."
