and Balzac make their
appearance. Unable to deal with the whole problem, they determine to
deal with part of it, and to reject a portion of the riches of which
they feel themselves unfit to be stewards. Balzac and his successors
make of French prose an instrument faultless and admirable in precision,
unequalled for the work for which it is fit, but unfit for certain
portions of the work which it was once able to perform. Malherbe,
seconded by Boileau, makes of French verse an instrument suited only for
the purposes of the drama of Euripides, or rather of Seneca, with or
without its chorus, and for a certain weakened echo of that chorus,
under the name of lyrics. No French verse of the first merit other than
dramatic is written for two whole centuries. The drama soon comes to its
acme, and during the succeeding time usually maintains itself at a
fairly high level until the death of Voltaire. But prose lends itself to
almost everything that is required of it, and becomes constantly a more
and more perfect instrument. To the highest efforts of pathos and
sublimity its vocabulary and its arrangement are still unsuited, though
the great preachers of the seventeenth century do their utmost with it.
But for clear exposition, smooth and agreeable narrative, sententious
and pointed brevity, witty repartee, it soon proves itself to have no
superior and scarcely an equal in Europe. In these directions
practitioners of the highest skill apply it during the seventeenth
century, while during the eighteenth its powers are shown to the utmost
of their variety by Voltaire, and receive a new development at the hands
of Rousseau. Yet, on the whole, it loses during this century. It becomes
more and more unfit for any but trivial uses, and at last it is employed
for those uses only. Then occurs the Revolution, repeating the mighty
stir in men's minds which the Renaissance had given, but at first
experiencing more difficulty in breaking up the ground and once more
rendering it fertile. The faulty and incomplete genius of Chateaubriand
and Madame de Stael gives the first evidence of a new growth, and after
many years the romantic movement completes the work. That movement
occupied almost the whole of two generations and though at the close of
the second its force may appear to be spent, the results remain, and no
new or reactionary movement is visible, and the efforts of the Romantics
themselves have been crowned with an almost complete regene