TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 211 



of Cartesianism. The terms are familiar enough. The identity of 

 being and of thought. The objectivity of science. The all-power- 

 fulness of reason. Progress to infinity. Optimism at all times. We 

 can not fail to observe the significance of these categories, and how 

 they contain the germs of almost every great subject debated by the 

 leviathians of the eighteenth century. Yet the nation struggled long 

 before it had strength to shake the incubus of Jansenism from its 

 back, and the stimulating work of Bayle had to be supported by 

 events of actual political significance before the stringent and con- 

 straining dogmas of Catholicism relaxed their grasp on thought and 

 conduct. The revocation of the Edict of l^antes, the Quietistic move- 

 ment with its unseemly attendant episcopal quarrels, and finally the 

 actual persecution of the Jansenists, all pointed inevitably in one 

 direction, and stimulating the anti-religious sentiment and opening 

 the flood gates to immorality, induced a potent reaction of Cartesian- 

 ism in the fundamental theories of the eighteenth century. 



In his treatment of Corneille, Professor Dowden " opens his hands 

 only sufficiently to let out a portion of the truth he holds," but what 

 he says is admirable to a degree. Of his diction he writes : " His 

 mastery in verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed ; his dialogue 

 of rapid statement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short 

 swords ; in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge 

 of latent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action." 

 This is well said, but hardly indicates how Corneille soared so often 

 in the region of Spanish bombast, or crept among the insipid flowers 

 of Italian preciosity; defects from which Racine's severer Greek taste 

 held him free. 



It is refreshing when we come to Boileau to find an English mind 

 impartial enough to do justice to the much-abused " lawgiver of 

 Parnassus." Criticism has for so long deplored his narro^\aiess that 

 we relish an encomium on his good sense. But beyond this there is 

 an opinion which the general reader would be reluctant to admit, but 

 which Professor Dowden has had the courage and the discernment to 

 enforce, when he Avrites as follows : " But for Paris itself, its various 

 aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye and the precise 

 rendering of a realist in art; his faithful objective touch is like that 

 of a Dutch painter." Let the incredulous merely turn to the satires 

 to appreciate the scope and truth of the remark. It is difficult to 

 imagine that a more brilliant and effective account of Boileau's work 

 and influence could be presented within so limited a space; yet might 

 not the author have added that whereas Malherbe is the representa- 

 tive of the aristocratic element in literature, Boileau is the first great 

 incarnation in modern times of the bourgeois spirit ? 



With regard to La Fontaine it need only be observed that Pro- 



