Assuredly we of to-day can see more in _Hamlet_ than its first audience could. But the curve of “posterity” is really a zig-zag. Each generation selects from a classic what suits it. Few of the original colours are “fast”; some fade, others grow more vivid and then fade in their turn. The Jacobean playgoer was impressed by Webster’s heaped corpses, and we titter. He probably revelled in the mad scene of the “lycanthropic” Ferdinand, where we are bored. (The taste for mad scenes was long lived; it lasted from the Elizabethans, on through Betterton’s time—see Valentine in _Love for Love_—and Garrick’s time, as we know from Boswell’s anecdote about _Irene_, down to the moment when Tilburina went mad in white satin.) On the other hand, a scene which has possibly gained in piquancy for us of to-day, the proud contemporaries of Mr. Shaw, is that wherein the Duchess woos the coy Antonio and weds him out of hand. When we chance upon a thing like this in a classic we are apt, fatuously enough, to exclaim. “How modern!” No one is likely to make that exclamation over another classic of momentary revival, _Le Malade Imaginaire_. There is not a vestige of “modernity” in Molière’s play. It is absolutely primitive. Or rather it seems, in all essentials, to stand outside time, to exhibit nothing of any consequence that “dates.” It has suffered no such mishap as has befallen Webster’s tragedy—a change of mental attitude in the audience which has turned the author’s desired effect upside down. At no point at which Molière made a bid for our laughter are we provoked, contrariwise, to frown. You cannot, by the way, say this about all Molière. Much, _e.g._, of the fun in _George Dandin_ strikes a modern audience as merely cruel. Both in Alceste and Tartuffe there has been a certain alteration of “values” in the progress of the centuries. But _Le Malade Imaginaire_ is untouched. We can enjoy it, I imagine, with precisely the same delight as its first audience felt. Some items of it, to be sure, were actual facts for them which are only history for us; the subservience of children to parents, for instance, and (though Mr. Shaw will not agree) the pedantic humbug of the faculty. But the point is, that the things laughed at, though they may have ceased to exist in fact, are as ridiculous as ever. And note that our laughter is not a whit affected by childish absurdities in the plot. Argan’s little girl shams dead and he immediately assumes she is dead. Argan shams dead and neither his wife nor his elder daughter for a moment questions the reality of his death. His own serving-wench puts on a doctor’s gown and he is at once deceived by the disguise. These little things do not matter in the least. We are willing to go all lengths in make-believe so long as we get our laughter.