Two qualities are characteristic of Moliere as a playwright, his humor and his common sense. In fact he was essentially a bourgeois humorist writing comedies more or less classical in form but full of a sane and vivacious wit not found in appreciable amounts in his two great contemporaries.

One of Moliers's finest plays, a comedy of character which ranks with "Tartuffe" as an example of his genius, is "L'Avare" one of the few plays of the time written in prose rather than inverse, and at that, no doubt more for the purpose of saving time than as an experiment in a new form. Yet there is evident in "L'Avare", a probably unconscious moving to a form of comedy different from the classical; toward a more modern form which does not exclude pathos or even a bit of tragedy but mingles tears with laughter. In fact wherever, as in this play, the study of a character--even a character in a comedy--becomes profound, it tends to become drama.

At 8.30 o'clock tonight, and at a matinee tomorrow in Jordan Hall the Cercle Francais will present 'L'Avare" and it will be well worth while for any student vagabond to be present.

The theory of romantic irony, one of the most extravagant theories of that extravagant movement, was first worked out by Friederich Schlegel. "Formerly," says Heine, himself a romantic ironist, "when a man had said a stupid thing he had said it; now he can explain it away as irony."

Romantic irony is in a word a combination of a sort of introspection with the idea of the infinite or striving for endlessness, to use the jargon of the German romanticists. That is to say, an ironist in the romantic sense not only looks down upon his ordinary ego from the height of his "transcendental ego", and stands aloof from it, but there is in him something which may even stand aloof from this aloofness and so ad infinitum.

Admittedly a wild idea, but also one which exercised a powerful effect upon the literature of the early nineteenth century. Professor Burkhard will discuss it at 12 o'clock this morning in Sever 6.