nwhile all nations of Western Europe have come to France
for their literary models and subjects, and the greatest writers in
English, German, Italian, content themselves with adaptations of
Chretien de Troyes, of Benoist de Sainte More, and of a hundred other
known and unknown trouveres and fabulists. But this age does not last
long. The language has been put to all the uses of which it is as yet
capable; those uses in their sameness begin to pall upon reader and
hearer; and the enormous evils of the civil and religious state reflect
themselves inevitably in literature. The old forms die out or are
prolonged only in half-lifeless travesties. The brilliant colouring of
Froissart, and the graceful science of ballade- and rondeau-writers like
Lescurel and Deschamps, alone maintain the literary reputation of the
time. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the translators and
political writers import many terms of art, and strain the language to
uses for which it is as yet unhandy, though at the beginning of the next
age Charles d'Orleans by his natural grace and the virtue of the forms
he used, emerges from the mass of writers. Throughout the fifteenth
century the process of enriching or at least increasing the vocabulary
goes on, but as yet no organising hand appears to direct the process.
Villon stands alone in merit as in peculiarity. But in this time
dramatic literature and the literature of the floating popular
broadsheet acquire an immense extension--all or almost all the vigour of
spirit being concentrated in the rough farce and rougher lampoon, while
all the literary skill is engrossed by insipid _rhetoriqueurs_ and
pedants. Then comes the grand upheaval of the Renaissance and the
Reformation. An immense influx of science, of thought to make the
science living, of new terms to express the thought, takes place, and a
band of literary workers appear of power enough to master and get into
shape the turbid mass. Rabelais, Amyot, Calvin, and Herberay fashion
French prose; Marot, Ronsard, and Regnier refashion French verse. The
Pleiade introduces the drama as it is to be and the language that is to
help the drama to express itself. Montaigne for the first time throws
invention and originality into some other form than verse or than prose
fiction. But by the end of the century the tide has receded. The work of
arrangement has been but half done, and there are no master spirits left
to complete it. At this period Malherbe