an in the famous cry--_enfin Malherbe vint_. His name
carried with it a note of completion and of an end.

When the romantic revival of our own time sought for one mind on which
to lay the burden of its anger, one hard master or pedant who could be
made responsible for the drying up of the wells, Malherbe again was
found. He became the butt of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the god of
plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had
worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity--for them
without fullness--his meagre output, his solemn reiterated code of
"perfect taste," moved them to a facile but intense aggression. He it
was that had turned to fossil stone the living matter of the sixteenth
century: He that had stifled and killed the spirit they attempted to
recall.

This man so praised, so blamed, for such a quality, was yet exactly,
year for year, the contemporary of Shakespeare, born earlier and dying
later. No better example could be discovered of the contrast between the
French and English tempers.

The Romantics, I say, believed that they had destroyed Malherbe and left
the Classic a ruined, antiquated thing. They were in error. Victor Hugo
himself, the leader, who most believed the classic to have become
isolated and past, was yet, in spite of himself, constrained by it.
Lamartine lived in it. After all the fantastic vagaries of mystics and
realists and the rest, it is ruling to-day with increasing power,
returning as indeed the permanent religion, the permanent policy, of the
nation are also returning after a century of astounding adventures: for
the Classic has in it something necessary to the character of the French
people.

Consider what the Classic is and why all mighty civilisations have
demanded and obtained some such hard, permanent and, as it were, sacred
vehicle for the expression of their maturity.

Nations that have a long continuous memory of their own past, nations
especially whose gods have suffered transformation, but never death,
develop the somewhat unelastic wisdom of men in old age. They mistrust
the taste of the moment. They know that things quite fresh and violent
seem at first greater than they are: that such enthusiasm forms no
lasting legacy for posterity. Their very ancient tradition gives them a
thirst for whatever shall certainly remain. The rigid Classic satisfies
that need.

Again, you will discover that those whose energy is too abundant seek
f