that all prècieuses were not ridiculous; but the prevailing assumption is that what he showed up was the current preciosity. Yet the fact clearly could not have been so. Supposing any one to have ever talked the jargon we hear in the farce, it could not have been such types as these. It was not perked-up middle-class Audreys, gullible by valets, blunderingly bewraying themselves, who arrived at the fine frenzy of "Voiturez-nous les commoditès de la conversation." No; preciosity was not quite what the judicious Moliere supposed it to be; and the précieuses — and this he must have known — were not at all what he represented them.[1] He had merely used the immemorial stratagem of satirising the practice by fictitiously degrading the practitioners. He convicted it of gross and vulgar absurdity by first masking them in gross and vulgar absurdity. As a matter of fact, preciosity is the last fault to which gross and vulgar absurdity can attain.
II
What then is it, in essence and origin? We can take it from two points of view. Scientifically speaking, it is an attempt to deviate widely and wilfully, waywardly, from the normal forms of
- ↑ It may easily have happened that Molière had some drawing-room impertinences to avenge. "Born of the people," as M. Lanson remarks in his excellent history, "absent from Paris for twelve years, he had been aloof from the work carried on by the upper class society in regard to the language; and when he returned, in 1658, he retained his free and firm style, nourished on archaisms, on Italian and Spanish locutions, popular or provincial metaphors and forms of phrase. . . ." At such a style fine folks would sneer; and Molière might not unfairly seek some dramatic revenge.
