CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 381 



as John of Salisbury complains, were curtailed in order to hurry the 

 student forward to Aristotelian dialectic and scholastic theology. 

 The revolt against the medieval Aristotle was conducted in the name 

 of Plato, and when the seventeenth-century Cartesianism at last 

 banished the Aristotle of the Physics, literary criticism enthroned in 

 his place the Aristotle of the Poetics. Ronsard, Montaigne, Rabelais, 

 are direct products of Renaissance erudition and Renaissance en- 

 thusiasm. Ronsard is with the exception of the Hellenists, La Fontaine 

 and Racine, the only poetical poet in French literature before the 

 Hellenist Andre Chenier. Montaigne's saturation with ancient criti- 

 cism of life makes the Essays a chief source of all subsequent ethical 

 and reflective literature. Rabelais, beneath the veil of Aristophanic 

 buffoonery and Lucianic satire, is pregnant with educational and 

 social suggestions three centuries in advance of his age. 



The half-century which ensued was one of decline in classical studies 

 and of literary decadence. The classical revival of which Boileau 

 became the legislator was, despite Racine, La Fontaine, and Fenelon, 

 more Latin than Greek. This is the classicism that dominated Euro- 

 pean literature for a century and a half. For the healthy encyclo- 

 pedic appetite and uncritical enthusiasms of the Renaissance it- 

 substituted a nicer taste and a more discriminating admiration. 

 It marked the distinction between the antique and the classic. It 

 undertook to correct the crudity of Senecan tragedy and Spanish 

 melodrama by the precepts of Aristotle and the practice of Sophocles. 

 It selected fewer models for more careful imitation,, and completely 

 assimilated the urbanity of Horace, the elegance of Virgil, the hu- 

 manity of Cicero, the good sense of Quint ilian. 



The end of this classicism was, to copy the title of M. Bertrand's 

 interesting book, at the same time a return to antiquity. 1 But it is 

 only because he confines his survey to eighteenth-century France that 

 M. Bertrand can describe this return to antiquity as a recommence- 

 ment of the work of Malherbe, an attempt to resist the German and 

 English invasion by galvanizing into artificial life a dying tradition. 

 The tragedies of Voltaire or Ducis, the Georgics of Delille, the Pin- 

 daric odes of Lebrun, the criticism of La Harpe, may possibly be 

 reduced to this formula. But the memoirs of the Academy of Inscrip- 

 tions, the connoisseurship of Caylus and Choiseul-Gouffier, the investi- 

 gations and discoveries of Villoison. the real if coquettishly displayed 

 erudition of the " Anacharsis, " arc evidences of a genuine revival 

 of scholarly interest in antiquity. In France and Italy this move- 

 ment, after producing a few estimable scholars, antiquarians, and 

 connoisseurs, was checked by the ignorance and educational un- 

 settlement which the Revolution brought in its train. But in Ger- 

 many it developed continuously into the new Renaissance in which 

 1 La Fin du Classicisme et Ic Rctour a I' Antique, etc. Paris, 1897. 



