life which it conveys." Thus, in a double sense, these "Fables are not of one age, but for all ages, and for all men, except it be poets of the type of Lamartine, who could discern only " limping, disjointed, unequal verses, without symmetry either in the ear or on the page," in stanzas where others find a most original and studied harmony.1

The "Fables" of La Fontaine are familiar to every French school-boy, acquaintance with his work is presumed in all cultivated society, turns of expression and phrases taken from them fall as naturally from the lips and pens of educated Frenchmen as biblical phrases did, and perhaps still do, from New England Puritans. The universal acquaintance with his work influenced and aided the emancipation of poetry by the school of 1830, especially among those who still did homage to Boileau with their lips though their hearts were elsewhere. For La Fontaine is very great, perhaps supreme; but it is in a kind of poetry that is not great. Therefore, though he is the best fabulist and best story-teller that is known to French literature, he is not a great poet. But he is the one poet of his century whose poetry is still generally read and enjoyed, while Boileau's verses are studied rather as rhetorical models and as essays in criticism.

It was natural that the prose of the early part of the seventeenth century should suffer less from artificiality than lyric poetry, the most sensitive of all literary forms; but it too felt the reaction, and there is nothing to recall the verve of Rabelais, the force of Montaigne, or the grace of Marguerite, in the work

1 Rousseau and his age cared too much for their "state of nature" to care for La Fontaine, but Voltaire toward the close of his life regretted the strictures of his youth. See his letter to Chamfort.

In fiction the changed

of the first third of the century. spirit shows itself in the influence of the Italian Pastorals, and in imitations of those Spanish followers of Góngora who were the chief instigators throughout Europe of the style known to English students as Euphuism. This studied affectation showed itself in France, as elsewhere, chiefly in chivalrous romances. The immediate model was the Spanish " Amadis," that had been translated late in the sixteenth century. Hence these novels will usually be named, at least by readers of Don Quixote, with a certain mocking shrug. The best of them is D'Urfé's " Astrée," whose chilly heroine tells of the combat in her soul between love and reason, of which the linked sweetness is prolonged through some five thousand pages, during which her love-sick Céladon learns to know himself sufficiently to discern that a pastoral lover" is no longer man, for he has cast off all wit and judgment." It is but just to say that Céladon's foil, the inconstant shepherd Hylas, is not without humor, and has touches of quite modern blague. "Astrée" was a pastoral; the " Grand Cyrus" and "Clélie" of the Scudérys pictured modern society under the thin disguise of heroic romance. Yet it is only with amused curiosity that one notes to-day the ponderous apparatus of their elaborate allegory, or glances at the explanatory map of " Tenderland," with its rivers of Esteem, Gratitude, and Inclination, its villages of Attention, Verses, and Epistles, its lake of Indifference, and its seas of Enmity and Danger.

1

In their day D'Urfé and the Scudérys, with other similar though less talented novelists, were immensely popular, and that among the most cultured and aris

1 E. g., La Calprenède, Camus, and Gomberville.

tocratic class. Indeed, the picture of society that “ Astrée” painted was the inspiring cause of the first Parisian salon, which met at the Hôtel Rambouillet and took its name from its hostess. The raison d'être

of this coterie, like that of Céladon and his mistress, was the attrition of witty conversation in an exclusive society. But narrow as this circle was, both in its principles and its numbers, it exercised a very important influence on the whole classical period, for by its unnatural straining after rare and curious conceits, it interrupted the development of a simple and direct style. Thus it fostered an artificiality that, in spite of Molière's satire, was not wholly banished from French literature till the rise of the Romantic School.

"

But so far as the pastoral or heroic romance was concerned, if the disease was acute the remedy was speedy. The analogy of other literatures would lead us to expect a reaction from over-strained sentiment to coarse naturalism. Of this Sorel's "Francion" had given a warning sign as early as 1622, and the old romances. received their coup de grâce in Scarron's "Roman comique (1651), that drew its inspiration from Rabelais and the Spanish novela picaresca, and found its more artistic sequel in Le Sage's "Gil Blas."1 A more independent social study that shows the influence. of the realistic school of 1660 is Furetière's " Roman bourgeois" (1666), a collection of " human documents for middle-class Parisian life. Meantime the same careful observation was being directed to the study of individual character by Madame de Lafayette, who, in "Mlle. de Montpensier," had discovered that marriage

1 The corresponding English movement, begun by Defoe and continued by Smollett, owes much to both Spanish and French picaroon

romancers.

was as appropriate as courtship for artistic treatment, and furnished in her exquisite " Princesse de Clèves " (1678) the starting-point of the psychological novel as distinct from romance. But the critics of the time were far from appreciating the real importance of this very popular book. Indeed, just as realism was thus announcing its advent in fiction, the court coterie, attracted by La Fontaine's " Cupid and Psyche,” were seized with a fancy for writing prose fables, fairy tales, of which a vast number were born to an ephemeral life during the closing decades of the century. The best in this shadowy kind is Perrault, the French godfather of "Puss-in-Boots," of of "Red Riding-Hood," "The Sleeping Beauty," and "Tom Thumb." In the next century this style was continued by Hamilton and many others, and was diverted later by Voltaire to political and philosophical purposes, and to ethical ones by Marmontel; while the "Princesse de Clèves " has no direct literary progeny.

Outside the sphere of fiction the prose of the century opens with Jean de Balzac, a rhetorical and painstaking continuator of Montaigne, who did much to smooth the way for the great prose writers and orators that followed. Aided by the prestige of the Hôtel Rambouillet, and by the foundation of the French Academy (1634), of which he was a leading member, he set deliberately to work to be to French prose the benefactor that he conceived Malherbe to have been to its poetry; but his work had value only as a stylistic model. Not so the limpid directness of Descartes and the supple strength of Pascal, the philosophers who illustrate this period. The former's "Discourse on Method" is the starting-point in France of a developed, scientific, argumentative style; while his " Treatise on

the Passions" is the systematic statement of the psychological basis of Corneille's tragedies, whose virile energy of will contrasts with the more feminine sentiment of Racine and the School of 1660.1 It was from Descartes as much as from Balzac that Pascal and La Rochefoucauld learned their marvellous mastery over language. Pascal's "Pensées," though incomplete, are as clear as they are keen, as logical as they are charming. They combine the mathematical mind with the poet's vision, while his "Provincial Letters " against the casuistry of the Jesuits remain to this day an unmatched.masterpiece of caustic irony and crushing contempt, clothed in a style of which one knows not whether most to admire the graceful energy or the brilliant wit. Pascal is the leader of the ascetic reaction against the naturalism of the sixteenth century and the facile ethics of the Jesuits, but he is also the first of French prose writers who seems thoroughly at home with his rhetorical tools. There has been gradual adaptation to new needs, but French prose has made no great advance, indeed has needed to make none, from his day to ours.

After these had gone before, progress became easy in other lines. So De Retz's " Conspiracy of Fiesco marks a gain in picturesque historical description; while his lively, keen, and piquant " Memoirs" show an unscrupulous will and a pen sharpened by use. The worldly wisdom of his maxims yields only to the cruel temper of La Rochefoucauld's cynical satire. That the underlying pessimism of these men is fairly representative of a general state of mind, is clear from the reception accorded to their work. La Rochefoucauld, especially, marks an ethical change in the pop1 Cp. Lanson, p. 393.