IDEA OF LAW 1ST POETRY 687 



the elimination of the Huguenots as a political power; the wars of 

 the Fronde and the annihilation of the political power of the feudal 

 aristocracy; the absorption of all the powers of the State by the 

 Crown in the reign of Louis XIV. ; the decay of the Monarchy in the 

 eighteenth century; the French Revolution. 



As illustrating the working of the Law of National Character in 

 literature, nothing can be more remarkable than the vivid reflection 

 of this course of political development in the various stages of French 

 poetry. There in the very infancy of society, may be observed the 

 trenchant antithesis between the genius of the two opposing classes in 

 the contrasted styles of the Provencal lyric and the fabliau of the 

 Trouvere ; the one the poetical vehicle of the inhabitants of the 

 Castle, the other of the inhabitants of the town. We see the two 

 types brought into deliberately satiric contrast in the famous Romance 

 of the Rose, in the latter part of which the bourgeois John de Meung 

 mocks at the ideals of his chivalric predecessor William de Lorris. 

 The alliance between the Court and the bourgeoisie is symbolized in 

 the poems of Marot, who set himself to refine the character of the old 

 French poetry to suit the more fastidious taste of Francis I. On 

 the other hand, the poetry of Ronsard, the representative, with the 

 Pleiad, of the party of the aristocrac}", reflects in a new form the old 

 tendency of the castled nobility to mark out for themselves a manner 

 of conception and expression sharply separated from that of the 

 vulgar. Ronsard's movement, in spite of his real genius, is seen from 

 the first to be against the inevitable tendency of things, and is there- 

 fore doomed to failure; and in the same way D'Aubigne's Huguenot 

 ideals, unable to make head against the Catholic tendency in the 

 French nation, find utterance, like a lonely "Vox Clamantis," in 

 the lofty strains of Lcs Tragitjiics. Henry IV. ascends the throne; 

 and with Malherbe, as the dictator of poetical taste, the victory of the 

 Monarchical over the feudal principle in French politics, the victory 

 of reason over imagination in French poetry, is practically decided. 



If, turning from this general historic \iew, we ask how these two 

 parties respectively manifested their character in French literature, 

 it is clear, in the first place, that the qualities in the French nation 

 which the aristocracy communicated to the language were of the 

 feminine order, both in their virtue and their defect. How remark- 

 able is the long -array of brilliant women who have left a name in 

 French literature the Countess of ( 'h 

 the Marquise de Rambouillet, Madame . 

 How poweifiil an influence on the coui 

 cisocl by the Covtrs d'Amour, the Hotel Rainbouillet, the Salon- of the 

 PrecJeuses! From the noble ladies of France, and the men who, 

 according to the laws of chivalry, declare! thorn-elves their servants, 

 the French idiom acquired that exquisite vein of irony and innuendo 



