214 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



an exhaustive treatment of them was not to be expected. Sucli are 

 the memorable quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the 

 philosophe idea of perfectibility and human progress. The chapter 

 closes with an account of the great protagonist and pioneer in the 

 warfare against Christianity, the patient, plodding, dangerous Pierre 

 Jiayle. So effectually was his teaching absorbed by Voltaire and the 

 encyclopedists that he is read no longer; but low as his flame has 

 sunk, he remains one of the beacons lighting us over the lurid 

 threshold of the century of strife. 



We are in safe hands when it is Professor Dowden who guides us 

 on the highways and bypaths of the eighteenth century, but by very 

 reason of his accurate knowledge of the ground whereon he treads we 

 are disappointed when he fails to point out to us some special feature 

 of the landscape. Beauties we could hardly hope to meet with on our 

 journey. There was not sap enough in that arid soil to nourish 

 flowers, or send a flush of living green over hill and valley. The 

 most serious omission is to have left entirely out of account the exceed- 

 ingly interesting reactionary influences that leaped back and forth 

 across the Channel when Marivaux's romances were devoured in Eng- 

 land, and Richardson's Pamela was in every French pocket large 

 enough to hold it. It is in itself still an open question which of these 

 two authors exerted the initial influence on the other, although 

 eighteenth-century criticism invariably held that in Marianne Rich- 

 ardson found his inspiration. 



A great deal of interest attaches to an explanation of the causes 

 of Le Sage's decline in popularity, and this question likewise Pro- 

 fessor Dowden has not adequately presented. Le Sage saw the im- 

 perative need of mediating between the stilted heroic romances a la 

 Scudery and the grotesque travesties of Scarron and Furetiere. In- 

 spired by the picaroon romances of Spain, he produced, amid much 

 inferior work, Gil Bias, a masterpiece in its kind. The plot is loose- 

 jointed, the composition nil, but the book teems with such verve and 

 vigor that it still pulses with an abounding life when Marivaux and 

 Richardson slumber on our shelves. Yet we must admit that the 

 characters are vagabonds, and the sentiment not without coarseness. 

 Love when not slighted is ridiculed, and metaphysical analysis and 

 moral disquisitions are both refreshingly absent from the book. 

 Hence Le Sage's claims on our consideration as the progenitor of 

 naturalism in romance, but on this account also the reactionary wave 

 against which he had to buffet in his declining years. Marivaux, on 

 the other hand, saw the need of mediating between the stilted heroics 

 of Scudery and what he deemed the ignoble realism of Le Sage. In 

 this resolve he elevated the characters to bourgeois rank, and abandon- 

 ing the empty love rhetoric of the old romances, he brought the acute- 



