210 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



character as literary historian to stamp them as such. Malherbe un- 

 deniably eliminated personality from poetry. Shall we regard this 

 as a defect? A century's masterpieces of objective art survive to 

 say us nay, and if the critic's personal sympathies sway him to the 

 side of lyric eloquence, the historian of literature observing without 

 prejudice judges without rancor. " The processes of Malherbe's art 

 were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his 

 verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But 

 the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France, its odes, 

 its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes, and much of its 

 prose literature, are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress 

 of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a 

 highway." 



And now in the wake of Malherbe so thick do the great names 

 throng that I must perforce touch swiftly only on what seems to de- 

 mand amplification rather than dwell at length, as it would be much 

 less difficult to do, on the many admirable views the book contains. 

 And first as regards the literary significance of Rene Descartes. Pro- 

 fessor Dowden places himself in accord with the customary views of 

 criticism in assigning to Descartes a preponderating influence on the 

 literary art of his century. " The spirit of Descartes's work was in 

 harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He 

 sought for general truths by the light of reason ; he made clearness a 

 criterion of truth; he proclaimed man a spirit; he asserted the free- 

 dom of the will. The art of the classical period sought also for gen- 

 eral truths, and subordinated imagination to reason. It turned away 

 from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries; it was essentially spiritualist; 

 it represented the crises and heroic victories of the will." This sounds 

 reasonable, and is indeed in large measure in accordance with the 

 actual conditions observable in the seventeenth century. Yet there 

 is no doubt that the literature of Louis XIV is more intimately pene- 

 trated by the ascetic spirit of Jansenism as conveyed in the famous 

 doctrines of Port-Royal, and it is to Jansenism, and emphatically not 

 to Cartesianism, that the literature of the seventeenth century owes 

 that aspect of grandeur and moral serenity which characterizes it. 

 To quote Brunetiere : " Pendant plus de cinquante ans, la conscience 

 frangaise, si 1'on peut ainsi dire, incarnee dans le jansenisme, et 

 rendue par lui a elle-meme, a fait centre la frivolite naturelle de la 

 race le plus grand effort qu'elle eut fait depuis les premiers temps de 

 la reforme ou du calvinisme." Indeed, the tenaciously religious Jan- 

 senist spirit of the " grand siecle " would have been universal were it 

 not that Moliere and La Fontaine were apathetically indifferent, nay, 

 sometimes actively hostile, to the general enthusiasm. 



Let us, however, examine in all brevity the fundamental doctrines 



