AJV ELEMENT OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 513 
The poet has not launched out into the great deep of human life to discover 
its boundaries and sound its depths. This species of literature, which flourished 
in Provence and Normandy from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, followed 
a tendency which has been developed into a settled literary doctrine in France. 
The poetry of Matherbe and of Lamartine, though separated by two centuries 
and a half, does not display only the characteristics of their authors, but the 
thread of French nationality runs through them all. They have come from that 
loom which has gathered out of the very centres of French life its love of the 
beautiful, the histrionic, the superficial, as also the speculative, the scientific, the 
logical, and woven them into a woof and warp so paradoxical and so diversified 
that the world offers no parallel. The power of analysis, the delineation of the 
subtle passions, that probing to the core of the instincts and emotions which con- 
vulse the soul, do not thrive in the French mind. They are exotics if they exist 
at all. Men do not talk as Frenchmen represent them. The poet is not true to 
nature. Passion welling up from the human heart never vents itself in studied 
speeches or measured climaxes. That electric current of sympathy which runs 
through the hearts of English poets and their readers is here broken at the out- 
set. It is im.possible, by the very constitution of French genius, to scale the 
heights of spiritual thought attained by Milton, or to give to weak, and erring 
men the heroism, strength and intellect that is depicted by Shakespeare, or to 
clothe the elements with those weird and fantastic forms which abound in Dante's 
Inferno. 
Nevertheless, the predominance of the reasoning faculty has a grand purpose 
to eflect. True, in poetry, thought has been sacrificed to style, yet the result is 
that France can proudly boast of a language so clear and forcible in its diction 
that it has become the medium of diplomacy, the interpreter of philosophy and 
the pioneer in scientific research, and it is just in these departments that Europe 
has yielded France the scepter. So far as truth is attainable by logic, so far as 
French thinkers can mount from some established dogma or hypothesis to height 
after height in the search for first principles, they hold undisputed sway. But be- 
yond this they are totally unreliable. 
When they have entered that mysterious unknown equipped only with their 
own poor reason, they find themselves either stricken with impotence or reduced 
to the alternative of becoming egotists and skeptics. How else shall we account 
for the long roll of French skeptics from the days of Abelard down to the present 
time? They have been slow to believe by intuition. Those great truths which 
our natures attest as being something mightier than all reason, nay, as the very 
part and parcel of the Divinity Himself, they attempt to reach by rational pro- 
cesses. Thus they have become rebels against their own consciences, and an- 
tagonists to the highest truths of Christian philosophy. 
