rbe, in the seventeenth century,
we find that La Fontaine, the most truly French of French writers, was
a passionate lover of Nature. He who can see nothing in the latter's
fables beyond the little dramas which they unfold and the ordinary moral
which the poet draws therefrom, must confess that he fails to understand
him. His landscapes possess precision, accuracy, and life, while such is
the fragrance of his speech that it seems laden with the fresh perfume
of the fields and furrows.

Racine himself, the most penetrating and the most psychological of
poets, is too well versed in the human soul not to have felt its
intimate union with Nature. His magnificent verse in Phedre,

"Ah, que ne suis-je assise a l'ombre des forets!"

is but the cry of despair, the appeal, filled with anguish, of a heart
that is troubled and which oft has sought peace and alleviation amid the
cold indifference of inanimate things. The small place given to Nature
in the French literature of the seventeenth century is not to be
ascribed to the language nor explained by a lack of sensibility on the
part of the race. The true cause is to be found in the spirit of that
period; for investigation will disclose that the very same condition
then characterized the literatures of England, of Spain, and of Italy.

We must bear in mind that, owing to an almost unique combination of
circumstances, there never has been a period when man was more convinced
of the nobility and, I dare say it, of the sovereignty of man, or was
more inclined to look upon the latter as a being independent of the
external world. He did not suspect the intimately close bonds which
unite the creature to the medium in which it lives. A man of the world
in the seventeenth century was utterly without a notion of those truths
which in their ensemble constitute the natural sciences. He crossed
the threshold of life possessed of a deep classical instruction, and
all-imbued with stoical ideas of virtue. At the same time, he had
received the mould of a strong but narrow Christian education, in which
nothing figured save his relations with God. This twofold training
elevated his soul and fortified his will, but wrenched him violently
from all communion with Nature. This is the standpoint from which
we must view the heroes of Corneille, if we would understand those
extraordinary souls which, always at the highest degree of tension, deny
themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles te