Alceste keeps trying to say sir. Oronte keeps supplying the rest of the conversation. Admiration pours out of him: Alceste deserves the esteem of the world; no grander name impresses Oronte half so much. He wants an embrace, a handshake, a friendship. By the time Alceste manages a reservation, Oronte is astonished that such warmth could meet resistance. The poem has not yet been read. Already its listener is having difficulty getting an answer into the room.

In the first act of Molière's The Misanthrope, Oronte arrives professing a desire to know Alceste. Alceste thinks friendship requires exactly that—knowing someone before making promises. Oronte agrees to let acquaintance grow. He also mentions his access to the king and his willingness to be useful. Then he produces a sonnet. Perhaps reading it together can begin this new connection.

The poem arrives with company. It brings the compliments, the proposed friendship, the offer of influence. Oronte never threatens to withhold favors in exchange for a bad review. Nothing so explicit is necessary for the encounter to become difficult. An ordinary disagreement about fourteen lines may now sound like a rejection of the whole person who has approached with such enthusiasm.

Alceste tries to decline the invitation to judge. His fault, he warns, is excessive frankness. That is precisely what Oronte wants. Concealing an opinion after being asked to speak openly would amount to betrayal. Alceste accepts the terms. Both men can now say they agreed on honesty. They have not necessarily agreed to encounter an answer they do not already expect.

The sonnet is called Hope. Before and during its delivery, Oronte explains what kind of tenderness he intends, checks whether the wording is clear and mentions that he wrote it in a quarter of an hour. The instructions for appreciation arrive alongside the work. Alceste urges him to read: the time spent composing cannot settle whether the result is good.

Their mutual friend Philinte praises the opening, the phrasing and the finish. Alceste has a second conversation underneath this one. He rebukes Philinte in low comments and asides, increasingly furious at his enthusiasm. The audience hears more than Oronte does. It would flatten the comedy to treat all these remarks as insults delivered openly to the poet. Oronte hears one listener applaud and waits for the other. Alceste hears his friend betray everything he values.

When his turn comes, the champion of plain speaking takes a remarkably indirect route. These matters are delicate, he begins. People hope to be flattered about their intelligence. He once advised an unnamed aspiring poet to resist publication rather than damage an otherwise respectable reputation. Is he saying Oronte should stop writing? Not at all. Is he criticizing this poem? Again he denies the immediate application and continues his example.

The invented distance does little to soften the blow. That unnamed writer increasingly occupies Oronte's chair. Before Alceste will admit to finding fault with the sonnet, he has raised the larger possibility that writing bad verse might disgrace its author. Indirection can prolong exposure to a judgment rather than make it kinder. Oronte has to keep requesting the criticism he can already hear approaching.

At last Alceste turns to particular phrases. He finds them strained: elaborate verbal ingenuity in place of a feeling someone might actually have. As an alternative he recites an old song in which a lover would refuse the whole of Paris rather than surrender the beloved. Its language may be old-fashioned; for him, its feeling is alive. Now the disagreement has something usable in it—an example, a reason, another way of writing.

Oronte may disagree. He need not demonstrate his maturity by adopting Alceste's taste. Nor is Alceste disqualified from criticism because he cares passionately about his own example. When Philinte laughs at the song, he immediately defends it. Nobody here is an impartial machine producing a literary score. Alceste is evaluating a poem, fighting his friend's social habits and defending his own identity as a man who will not flatter. Those projects begin crowding one another.

Oronte appeals to the other people who admire the sonnet. For a moment Alceste makes room for difference: Oronte has his reasons, and Alceste can have reasons not to follow him. Then he declares the admirers insincere. In protecting his judgment from the pressure of everyone else's praise, he has almost abolished their right to mean their praise. His dissent is allowed to be genuine; their agreement is explained away.

The argument leaves the poem and moves into intelligence, vanity and personal worth. Oronte challenges him to write a better sonnet on the same subject. Alceste replies that he might write one just as bad, but would not show it to people. It is a splendidly efficient insult. A critic need not win a writing competition before expressing an opinion. That does not make every way of expressing the opinion equally defensible.

Philinte steps between them. The men retreat into extravagantly courteous farewells, each professing himself the other's servant. The courtesies do not reveal their secret affection. They provide an exit. Neither has to enact every shade of anger before leaving the room. Philinte's earlier praise may be questionable; his ability to interrupt the quarrel is still useful.

After Oronte goes, Philinte tries to explain himself. Alceste repeatedly cuts him off. The scene began with an answer blocked by affection and ends with one blocked by fury. The man who insists that other people hear uncomfortable truths cannot bear to hear what his friend wants to say. Molière lets this reversal happen through interruption, without suspending the comedy to deliver a verdict on hypocrisy.

Courtesy has not ended the dispute. In Act II, an officer summons Alceste to a mediation ordered by the marshals. Alceste fears that external authority will compel him to consider the sonnet good. He agrees to attend, not to change his taste. A quarrel that needs containing and a judgment that need not become unanimous have been bundled into the same proceeding.

We do not watch the mediation itself. At the opening of Act IV, Philinte tells Éliante how stubbornly Alceste resisted. Oronte might be a gentleman of excellent birth, talents and character, he conceded, while remaining a bad poet. He was willing to praise his household, horsemanship, fencing and dancing. The more generous the list became, the more conspicuous its single omission.

There is still a barb in that generosity. Alceste continues advising people without the necessary talent to stop rhyming. Yet he is attempting a distinction worth making: to dislike someone's creation is not to erase everything admirable about them. Recognizing those other qualities does not require manufacturing an aesthetic pleasure one never felt. Oronte can reasonably find this painful. Pain alone cannot make compulsory praise tell him anything useful about his poem.

The apology eventually extracted from Alceste is almost exquisitely unhelpful. He regrets being so difficult to please and, for Oronte's sake, sincerely wishes he had liked the sonnet more. There is consideration in it without a changed verdict. If Oronte wanted a retraction, the apology might sting all over again. Its comedy lies in being utterly sincere and still the wrong kind of sincerity for its recipient.

The mediators have the men embrace. The gesture does not improve the poem or create a friendship. Their larger entanglements continue elsewhere in the play. But a limited pause need not be worthless because it is not reconciliation. Oronte wanted an honest answer that would confirm his poem's merit; Alceste wanted his honesty to be recognized as honorable. Neither quite gets what he wants. What remains is an awkward wish that the experience had been better for the other person. They can keep the disagreement without making those fourteen lines decide which of them deserves to remain in human company.