dy. But they have not on the
whole been equally fortunate in surmounting the difficulties caused by
the very genius of the language--the clear, sober, critical _ethos_ of
French. This is an enemy to mystery, to vagueness, to what may be called
the twilight of sense--all things more or less necessary to the highest
poetry. It will not I think be alleged by any impartial reader of this
book that its author is insensible to the majesty or to the charm of
French verse. But it is impossible for me to admit that that majesty and
that charm are shewn in the highest degree (in the degree in which not
merely Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Shelley, Heine, shew them, but many minor
names in Greek, in English, and in German), by any but a very few
Frenchmen, and by these in more than comparatively few places. A very
competent and obliging French critic has said that it is impossible for
any Frenchman to agree with me exactly in my estimate of La Fontaine,
and probably there is no better instance than La Fontaine of the
fundamental difference of conception of poetry which corresponds to the
English channel. Inexhaustibly inventive, full of criticism of life, a
master of harmonious language, managing rhythms and metres with a skill
only the more artful that it seems so artless, La Fontaine yet has too
little of dawn or sunset, still less of twilight or moonlight, too much
of the light of common day to deserve, according to my estimate, the
title of poet in the highest degree. The same may be said of most other
French poets except a few who are to be found almost exclusively in the
middle ages, in the Renaissance, and in the nineteenth century. Only in
one form of the highest poetry, the passionate declamation which is in
effect oratory of the most picturesque kind, France has never been
wanting, and in this she has for half the time been mightily helped by
the possession of the magnificent Alexandrine metre.

[294]At the close of the eleventh century and at the beginning of the
twelfth we find the vulgar tongue in France not merely in full
organisation for literary purposes, but already employed in most of the
forms of poetical writing. An immense outburst of epic and narrative
verse has taken place, and lyrical poetry, not limited as in the case of
the epics to the north of France, but extending from Roussillon to the
Pas de Calais, completes this. The twelfth century adds to these
earliest forms the important development of the mystery, ex