688 POETEY 



which made French conversation for so long the standard of manners 

 in European society, and French prose the finest instrument of criti- 

 cism, letter-writing, and diplomacy. But the masculine qualities of 

 imagination are conspicuous by their absence. What the French 

 aristocracy wanted in their literary style was substance, sincerity, a 

 sense of the reality of things. Weigh the names of their representa- 

 tive men, Charles of Orleans, Eonsard, Voiture, Chapelain, St. Amant, 

 against such names as Eabelais, La Fontaine, Moliere, and Voltaire, 

 representatives of the bourgeoisie; observe the triviality of matter 

 in the lyrics of the Troubadours, in the poetry written for the Hotel 

 Eambouillet, in the romance of the Grand Cyrus; -and you will 

 see the defeat of the French aristocracy in the conflict of History 

 explained in the conflict of Ideas. 



The bourgeois element in French poetry is of an evidently opposite 

 kind. It has none of the romance, delicacy, or spiritual imagination, 

 which distinguish the work of the chivalric party; its qualities are, 

 above all, good sense, shrewd observation, keen logic, a penetrating 

 appreciation of hypocrisy and unreality, an unerring sense of the 

 ridiculous, an Epicurean enjoyment of life. Deprive this bourgeois 

 genius of its native tendencv to vulgarity, by putting it under the 

 patronage of the Court, give it subjects for imitation suitable to its 

 knowledge and powers, find it an instrument of expression analogous 

 to its favorite fall inn; and the flower of the French imagination will 

 in time unfold itself in the Comedies of Moliere and the Fables of 

 La Fontaine. It is in the works of these two writers, perhaps above 

 all others, that we may observe the operation of what it is not improper 

 to call the idea of Xatural Law in French Poetry. 



Moliere has been severely censured by the more austere critics of 

 France a= a careless and slovenly writer. He is blamed for want of 

 polish in his style, for his incorrect selection of metaphors, for his 

 audacious plagiarisms: and all these reproaches he has to some extent 

 justly incurred. P>ut his defects are almost the inevitable accom- 

 paniment of his splendid qualities as a comic creator. Moliere im- 

 itated the ridiculous in Mature wherever he found it. When he 

 thought that Spanish or Italian phrases, or the vulgarisms of French 

 idiom, were cxpro-sive of character, he used them without any regard 

 to tin- delicate nerve? of the French Aeademy. With as little hesita- 

 tion he drew on the inventions of the classic and Italian dramatists or 

 the fnlliuii.r of Boccaccio, if they furni-hed him with cnvenipnt plots 

 for framing hi- observation nf what was deserving of ridicule in 

 hi- own society. But all his creation.- are eminently original. Xo- 

 wheyr- el-e than in France could -m-h universal types of human nature 

 as M. .Tourdain Tarrtnff. and Alceste have been conceived ami em- 



sucli nice pre- 



