character as literary historian to stamp them as such. Malherbe undeniably eliminated personality from poetry. Shall we regard this as a defect? A century's masterpieces of objective art survive to say us nay, and if the critic's personal sympathies sway him to the side of lyric eloquence, the historian of literature observing without prejudice judges without rancor. "The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France, its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes, and much of its prose literature, are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway."
And now in the wake of Malherbe so thick do the great names throng that I must perforce touch swiftly only on what seems to demand amplification rather than dwell at length, as it would be much less difficult to do, on the many admirable views the book contains. And first as regards the literary significance of Rene Descartes. Professor Dowden places himself in accord with the customary views of criticism in assigning to Descartes a preponderating influence on the literary art of his century. "The spirit of Descartes's work was in harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought for general truths by the light of reason; he made clearness a criterion of truth; he proclaimed man a spirit; he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the classical period sought also for general truths, and subordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries; it was essentially spiritualist; it represented the crises and heroic victories of the will." This sounds reasonable, and is indeed in large measure in accordance with the actual conditions observable in the seventeenth century. Yet there is no doubt that the literature of Louis XIV is more intimately penetrated by the ascetic spirit of Jansenism as conveyed in the famous doctrines of Port-Royal, and it is to Jansenism, and emphatically not to Cartesianism, that the literature of the seventeenth century owes that aspect of grandeur and moral serenity which characterizes it. To quote Brunetière: "Pendant plus de cinquante ans, la conscience française, si l'on pent ainsi dire, incarnée dans le jansénisme, et rendue par lui à elle-même, a fait contre la frivolité naturelle de la race le plus grand effort qu'elle eut fait depuis les premiers temps de la réforme ou du calvinisme." Indeed, the tenaciously religious Jansenist spirit of the "grand siècle" would have been universal were it not that Molière and La Fontaine were apathetically indifferent, nay, sometimes actively hostile, to the general enthusiasm.
Let us, however, examine in all brevity the fundamental doctrines
