truth is that both men were great moralists, and Bossuet, besides this, had many other claims to greatness.

Bourdaloue was a preacher, and never wished to be anything else. He died at the age of seventy-two, having preached for forty years. Nothing so clearly shows "the taste of the age as the universal, brilliant, uninterrupted and unvarying success of Bourdaloue. Bourdaloue had little imagination, scarcely any depth of feeling, and he was not a great writer. He charmed and delighted his contemporaries by his analysis and his logic. Bourdaloue possessed a great power of reasoning, of analysing accurately the passions, of describing manners and painting portraits, and it was these qualities that aroused universal approbation during half a century. His contemporaries were intensely interested in moral analysis and logical arguments. It must also be said that Bourdaloue discovered the true style and just level of the sermon. Bossuet exceeded it somewhat. Bourdaloue, without being in the least trivial, possessing indeed a singular austerity, and "never thinking about pleasing his audience," as Voltaire well said, was more on a level with his hearers. D'Aguesseau, a very good judge, praises in him "the beauty of his arrangement, the order, the division of his subject-matter, the clearness and the 'popular' style of expression." Bourdaloue occupied himself little with the explanation of dogma, but turned his attention to morality and to the correction of the manners of his age, and it is for this reason that his discourses, in spite of their scholastic divisions and subdivisions, have remained so living. Sainte-Beuve very cleverly calls him—not without a sly hit at some one else—"an eloquent Nicole." Madame de Sévigné, who literally idolised him, has described the peculiar effect of his eloquence on his hearers: "He has often taken away my breath by the strength and justness of his discourses, which absolutely riveted my attention. I was only able to breathe when it pleased him to cease speaking." Various anecdotes of the time confirm this view. Marshal de Gramont was one day so much absorbed by the force of the orator's deductions that he cried out in the middle of the sermon, "Good gracious! he is certainly quite right." On another occasion the Prince of

Condé, seeing him mount into the pulpit, cried out, "Silence, here is the enemy! Boileau worthily rendered justice to his great faculties as a moralist when he said, "In satire on women I am merely the imitator of Bourdaloue."

"Sur

Among the most celebrated sermons of Bourdaloue which are constantly quoted are those on "Madeleine," Madeleine," "Sur la Pensée de la Mort," "Sur la Sévérité évangélique," l'Hypocrisie," "Sur l'Impureté," "Sur la Médisance." In the sermon on hypocrisy there was a direct attack on Molière and his Tartuffe, and in the sermon on slander Bourdaloue, who was a Jesuit, alluded at length to the Provincial Letters; and with much aptness, as the following extract shows, he retorted on Pascal for his complaint concerning "direction d'intention" by showing that nowhere has this "direction d'intention " been so much employed as in the "Provincial Letters" :

"On a trouvé le moyen de consacrer la médisance et de la changer en vertu. . . . Il faut humilier ces gens-là, dit-on, et il est du bien de l'Eglise de flétrir leur réputation et diminuer leur crédit. Làdessus on se fait une conscience et il n'y a rien qu'on ne se croie permis pour un si beau motif. On invente, on empoisonne les choses; on confond le général avec le particulier; ce qu'un a mal dit, on le fait dire à tous; ce que plusieurs ont bien dit, on ne le fait dire à personne; et tout cela pour la gloire de Dieu. Car cette direction d'intention rectifie tout cela. Elle ne suffirait pas pour justifier une équivoque, mais elle est plus que suffisante pour rectifier la calomnie, quand on est persuadé qu'il y va du service de Dieu."

Bourdaloue continued preaching until his death, vainly asking permission from his superiors to retire and seek rest. He lived to see the early successes of Massillon, to pronounce the words of St. John the Baptist: "Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui." Massillon certainly became great, but Bourdaloue has taken a higher place than he in the eyes of posterity.

CHAPTER XI

THE POETS AFTER 1660

IT was in the midst of this polished and serious societypolished and refined by the "précieux," the salons, the Hotel de Rambouillet, made serious by the religious and lay moralists and by the attention with which they were listened to—that the Poetical School of 1660 grew and flourished quite naturally in a soil already prepared for it. In varying degrees, and, moreover, of very varied types of genius, the writers of this school were all firm partisans of reason, nature, reality.

By the term reason for there is often confusion about the word must be simply understood that which is reasonablethat is to say, what is neither strained, nor pretentious, nor bombastic, nor fantastic, nor fanciful.

By natural almost the same thing must be understood ; for the men of 1660 used a hundred times over the words natural and reasonable, nature and reason, as synonyms. They called natural that which seems not to be laboured, which keeps its spontaneous movement and free play of thought whilst being watched, directed, and clearly arranged by the exercise of much reflection.

Finally, by reality, a word which they did not use, but a thing from which they were seldom far removed, is to be understood attentive observation, without prejudice or artificial system, of nature, and, above all, of human nature. The study of man, of man considered as an individual, preferably of man as a social being, was their constant preoccupation and the very foundation of their art.

When Boileau laughingly spoke of himself as "le singe

de Bourdaloue" he described himself and his friends. If Bourdaloue is an "eloquent Nicole," then Boileau, Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine himself, although the last named must be given a place apart, are Bourdaloues who are poets.

Boileau was the theorist, the doctrinaire, and the disputant of the group. His work falls into three divisionspolemics, philosophy, literary diversions.

As a polemical writer his standpoint can be quickly defined with the exception of Malherbe, Racan, and Voiture, Boileau attacked all those who lived before his own friends; and except (he only excepted these with a very bad grace!) Benserade, Segrais, and Furetière, he attacked all his contemporaries who were not his friends. This meant a good deal. Thus Boileau could see nothing good in Ronsard or Desportes, or Bertaut, or Théophile, or SaintAmant, and it is "with difficulty" that three good sonnets could be found in Gombauld, Maynard, and Malleville, taken together. Villon possesses great clearness, and that is all that can be said about him; Corneille is the author of the " Cid," but he very quickly fell from his high position, and there is nothing to praise and everything to mock at in his later works. Briefly, for Boileau, French poetical literature is reduced to Malherbe, Racan, Racine, and Molière; for even La Fontaine annoys Boileau, who had too much taste not to admire him, too much prudery and love of what is noble to praise him, and who therefore avoids as much as possible mentioning him. Boileau as a polemical writer had the defect of such men; he was narrow, and took a pleasure in appearing more blind than he really was: that is the definition of all sectaries.

As a philosopher he was broader-minded, whilst still remaining very rigid. Above everything else he advocated nature and the observation of nature, and attacked the imagination. I use the terms nature and the observation of nature and not reason, as might, perhaps, have been expected. I do so because, although Boileau very often uses the term reason, he does so in the sense of nature and "conformity

to observation." In all the passages in Boileau where the word reason is used the context shows that it never has any other meaning. Boileau has nowhere better summed up his literary doctrine than in the line

"Jamais de la nature il ne faut s'écarter."

He was a pure and simple realist in the true sense of the word; that is, a man who loves the real without believing that he must only love the real that is base. He was a passionate lover of truth, clearness, conciseness, and of reality/ in all its bearings. "Study the Court and know the town," "observe man carefully and penetrate to the depths ❞—that is the precept to which he is always returning. At heart he does not care about anything else. It was because of this that he so much mistrusted the imagination. He has never actually said, "Do not invent, do not use your imagination,” and I am imputing to him words when I make him say this, but his whole advice is in the direction of eliminating, if not proscribing, the imagination in works of art. The play of fancy is odious to him; bursts of eloquence, rapture, or even a rhetorical passage he mistrusts. He said very aptly, for he had a most discriminating taste, "Malherbe in his furious outbursts has too studied an air," and if he likes Malherbe it is because he is, above all, a man who expatiates wisely in verse of an admirable form. In truth, for Boileau, poetry was a well-arranged, well-balanced, precise, and clever dis course, based on very careful observation and written in correct lines.

On account of these views, and, moreover, with justice, he attacked the "précieux." The "précieux" had great cleverness, as Boileau, who liked Voiture, knew well; but they had, as La Bruyère said most appropriately, "that sort of cleverness in which imagination plays the greatest part." A laboured and studied imagination which resulted in works which were clever because of the unexpected was intolerable to Boileau, in whose mind reason was the predominant faculty. Lastly, Boileau's work, considered as merely a literary pastime,