profound and
subtle artists writing for a small, leisured, distinguished, and
critical audience, while retaining the larger outlook and sense of
proportion which had come to them from their own experience of life.

The fact, too, that this aristocratic audience was no longer concerned
with the activities of political power, exercised a further influence
upon the writers of the age. The old interests of aristocracy--the
romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war--faded into
the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate
pursuits of peace and civilization. The exquisite letters of Madame de
Sevigne show us society assuming its modern complexion, women becoming
the arbiters of taste and fashion, and drawing-rooms the centre of life.
These tendencies were reflected in literature; and Corneille's tragedies
of power were replaced by Racine's tragedies of the heart. Nor was it
only in the broad outlines that the change was manifest; the whole
temper of life, in all its details, took on the suave, decorous,
dignified tone of good breeding, and it was impossible that men of
letters should escape the infection. Their works became remarkable for
clarity and elegance, for a graceful simplicity, an easy strength; they
were cast in the fine mould of perfect manners--majestic without
pretension, expressive without emphasis, simple without carelessness,
and subtle without affectation. These are the dominating qualities in
the style of that great body of literature, which has rightly come to be
distinguished as the _Classical_ literature of France.

Yet there was a reverse to the medal; for such qualities necessarily
involved defects, which, hardly perceptible and of small importance in
the work of the early masters of the Classical school, became more
prominent in the hands of lesser men, and eventually brought the whole
tradition into disrepute. It was inevitable that there should be a
certain narrowness in a literature which was in its very essence
deliberate, refined, and select; omission is the beginning of all art;
and the great French classicists, more supremely artistic, perhaps, than
any other body of writers in the history of the world, practised with
unsparing devotion the virtue of leaving out. The beauties of clarity,
simplicity, and ease were what they aimed at; and to attain them
involved the abandonment of other beauties which, however attractive,
were incompatible with those. Va