696 POETRY 



to the eye, the devil blaspheming against heaven the devil, whose 

 aim it is to abase the glory of your Hero, and who often disputes the 

 victory with God! " 



True enough in its application to the feeble invention of Scudery 

 and his companions, a criticism like this only proves that the French 

 were incapable of producing a great epic poem. It does not prove 

 that there was anything fundamentally wrong in the conception of 

 Paradise Lost. And the same rigid restrictive logic characterizes all 

 Boileau's devices with regard to diction and versification the exclu- 

 sive use of the Alexandrine, the caesura always in the middle of the 

 line, the avoidance of the hiatus and the " enjambement," the choice 

 of words to harmonize exactly with the movement of the rhythm, 

 all which are only the final declaration by the Academic dictator of 

 the laws first promulgated by Malherbe. For the time the victory of 

 Boileau and the ideas of the cultivated bourgeoisie over the party of 

 mediaeval Romance was complete. Xor was it a mere transient fashion 

 of taste. For about one hundred and fifty years the Law of Classicism, 

 as defined in the Art Poetique, exerted an irresistible authority. In 

 spite alike of the half-hearted efforts of Voltaire to enlarge the liber- 

 ties of dramatic action, and of the experiments of Diderot in senti- 

 mental cOmedy, the classic style, founded on the Law of the Three 

 Unities, reigned supreme upon the French stage through the eight- 

 eenth century. But it was a party triumph, a Pyrrhic victory, won 

 by the vigor of a certain element in society, and liable to be reversed 

 when the class from which the movement sprang lost its vitality. 

 Undermined by the growth of natural science, by the philosophy of 

 the encyclopasdists, and by the sentimentalism of Rousseau, the im- 

 posing structure of French classicism fell almost at the first discharge 

 of artillery brought against it by the Romantic party after the restora- 

 tion of the Bourbons. 



It is riot to be denied that it deserved its fate. But at the same 

 limn it would be well for us Englishmen to examine very carefully the 

 true los.-on to ho learned from the triumph of French Romanticism. 

 The Law of Classic Taste in Franco could not have remained para- 

 mount for so long a period; its authority could not have been in- 

 stinctively recognized by so many groat creative intellects, or so clearly 

 do finer] by a sucopssir.n of able critie=. if it had not represented some- 

 thing real and positive in the constitution of the French character. 

 And looking at the matter historically, when we see that the idea 

 of the manner in winch Xaturo ought io be imitated in Poetry, as 

 expressed in the Art Poetique, i= actually embodied in the poems of 

 La Fontaine and Molierp. and that the idea of the structure and 

 versification proper to the drama is the same in the tragedies of Ra- 

 cine and Yoliaire as in the criticism of Boileau, then candid minds will 

 allow that, however narrow may have been the sphere of imitation, 



