reality, was for the France of Louis XIV; he enunciated it as if it was
the one guide to literary salvation for all ages and in all
circumstances; and it so happened that for about a century it was
accepted at his own valuation by the majority of civilized mankind.
Boileau detested--and rightly detested--the extravagant affectations of
the _precieux_ school, the feeble pomposities of Chapelain, the
contorted, inflated, logic-chopping heroes of Corneille's later style;
and the classical reaction against these errors appeared to him in the
guise of a return to the fundamental principles of Nature, Reason, and
Truth. In a sense he was right: for it is certain that the works of
Moliere and Racine were more natural, more reasonable, and more truthful
than those of l'Abbe Cotin and Pradon; his mistake lay in his assumption
that these qualities were the monopoly of the Classical school.
Perceiving the beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he
jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature
herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong.
Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and
beauty is often--perhaps more often than not--complex, obscure,
fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a
hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been
asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity. He could write,
for instance, an enthusiastic appreciation of the sublime sentence, 'God
said, Let there be light, and there was light'; for there imagination is
clothed in transparent beauty, and grandeur is achieved by the simplest
means. More completely than any of his great contemporaries, Boileau was
a representative of middle-class France.

Certainly the most famous, and perhaps the greatest, of the writers for
whom Boileau acted as the apologist and the interpreter was MOLIERE. In
the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as
Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in
that of England. His glory is more than national--it is universal.
Gathering within the plenitude of his genius the widest and the
profoundest characteristics of his race, he has risen above the
boundaries of place and language and tradition into a large dominion
over the hearts of all mankind. To the world outside France he alone, in
undisputed eminence, speaks with the authentic voice of Fran