TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 209 



part of this abounding life. After tlie mediaeval asceticism and tlie 

 intellectual bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast out- 

 break and explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a 

 complete man." 



Proceeding to the Pleiade, we find its doctrine admirably enunci- 

 ated, and one point of literary history is well brought- out- — namely, 

 that to the Pleiade, and not to Malherbe alone, belongs the honor 

 of establishing the bases of classicism in France, the difference chiefly 

 residing in the fact that the programme of the Pleiade was one of ex- 

 pansion in matters of language and prosody, whereas it is precisely in 

 these points that Malherbe and Boileau are concerned with restrictive 

 refinements. Again Professor Dowden, following perhaps in the 

 wake of M. Brunetiere, characterizes the conditions of the time as 

 being unfavorable to lyrical expansiveness. " Ronsard's genius was 

 lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a time when the great affair 

 was the organization of social life, and as a consequence the limitation 

 of individual and personal passions, were not favorable to the devel- 

 ojDment of lyrical poetry." These words are ripe with suggestiveness, 

 and duly weighed, they afford the true solution of the oratorical and 

 impersonal character of French literature for two long centuries, 

 when the social genres in prose and poetry usurped dominion over the 

 national mind. With our eye then upon the social conditions in 

 France, the often-quoted words " Malherbe a tue le lyrisme " mean 

 nothing more than that he struck a prostrate body. 



Before turning from the sixteenth century it should perhaps be 

 observed that in discussing the comedy of that period the author 

 might have amplified his statement of Italian influences by at least 

 a reference to the Commedia delV Arte which we find established 

 in France in 1576, with its traditional repertory of stock characters, 

 whose antiquity ascends to the venerable times of the early Latin 

 farces, and whose survival the work of Moliere, nay, even of Beau- 

 marchais, will adequately attest. The last great figure that greets us 

 in the sixteenth century is Montaigne, and we feel a sense of disap- 

 pointed curiosity when he is relentlessly dismissed at the end of the 

 five pages to which he is entitled here. This singularly modern 

 doubter still smiles inscrutably at us through the misty centuries that 

 flow between us, and we would prefer to loiter with him by the way 

 rather than pass him with a curt nod of recognition. But Montaigne is 

 more important in the history of thought than in the history of litera- 

 ture, so, crossing the threshold of the sixteenth century, we meet the 

 great lawgiver Malherbe, a Moses who really entered the promised 

 land. Professor Dowden is eminently just and appreciative in his 

 judg-ment of this pedantic and unsympathetic figure, estimating his 

 merits and impartially noting his defects without presuming in his 



VOL. LT. — 17 



