utterly is no doubt, on the whole, a cause for rejoicing; but,
as we look back upon it, we may still feel something of the old
enchantment, and feel it, perhaps, the more keenly for its
strangeness--its dissimilarity to the experiences of our own days. We
shall catch glimpses of a world of pomp and brilliance, of ceremony and
decoration, a small, vital passionate world which has clothed itself in
ordered beauty, learnt a fine way of easy, splendid living, and come
under the spell of a devotion to what is, to us, no more than the
gorgeous phantom of high imaginations--the divinity of a king. When the
morning sun was up and the horn was sounding down the long avenues, who
would not wish, if only in fancy, to join the glittering cavalcade where
the young Louis led the hunt in the days of his opening glory? Later,
we might linger on the endless terrace, to watch the great monarch, with
his red heels and his golden snuff-box and his towering periwig, come
out among his courtiers, or in some elaborate grotto applaud a ballet by
Moliere. When night fell there would be dancing and music in the gallery
blazing with a thousand looking-glasses, or masquerades and feasting in
the gardens, with the torches throwing strange shadows among the trees
trimmed into artificial figures, and gay lords and proud ladies
conversing together under the stars.

Such were the surroundings among which the classical literature of
France came into existence, and by which it was profoundly influenced in
a multitude of ways. This literature was, in its form and its essence,
aristocratic literature, though its writers were, almost without
exception, middle-class men brought into prominence by the royal favour.
The great dramatists and poets and prose-writers of the epoch were in
the position of artists working by special permission for the benefit
and pleasure of a select public to which they themselves had no claim
to belong. They were _in_ the world of high birth and splendid manners,
but they were not of it; and thus it happened that their creations,
while reflecting what was finest in the social ideals of the time,
escaped the worst faults of the literary productions of persons of
rank--superficiality and amateurishness. The literature of that age was,
in fact, remarkable to an extraordinary degree for precisely contrary
qualities--for the solidity of its psychological foundations and for the
supreme excellence of its craftsmanship. It was the work of