ive
and trustworthy example extant of the chronology and order of
spontaneous literary development--first poetry, then drama, then prose:
in poetry, first epic, then lyric, then didactic and miscellaneous
verse: in drama, first ceremonial and liturgic pieces, then comedy, then
artificial tragedy: in prose, first history, then miscellaneous work,
and lastly artificial and elaborate fiction. It is a curious and
somewhat complex phenomenon that the cycle which began with verse
fiction should apparently end with fiction in prose, but the foregoing
pages will have shewn sufficiently how dangerous it would be to
generalise from this.

One thing however may be safely concluded from the mere fact of this
remarkable resistance to foreign influence, or rather from the still
more remarkable power of assimilation which this resistance implies. The
literature which has been able to exert both must have very strongly
marked general characteristics of its own. As a matter of fact French
literature has these characteristics: and a brief enumeration and
description of them may complete, more appropriately than anything else
could do, the survey of its history. French literature, notwithstanding
the revolution of fifty years ago, is generally and rightly held to be
the chief representative among the greater European literatures of the
classical rather than the romantic spirit. It is therefore necessary to
define what is meant by these much controverted terms; and the
definition which best expresses the views of the present writer is one
somewhat modified from the definition given by Heine. The terms classic
and romantic apply to treatment not to subject, and the difference is
that the treatment is classic when the idea is represented as directly
and with as exact an adaptation of form as possible, while it is
romantic when the idea is left to the reader's faculty of divination
assisted only by suggestion and symbol. Of these two modes of treatment
France has always inclined to the classic: during at least two
centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, she relied upon it almost
wholly. But the fertility of her mediaeval and Renaissance literature in
strictly romantic examples, and the general tendency of the literature
of the nineteenth century, have shewn a romantic faculty inferior, but
only inferior, to the classical. To illustrate this statement by a
contrast, it may be pointed out that in Greek the romantic element is
almost in abey