earliest _Fabliaux_ of the Middle Ages and the latest Parisian novel of
to-day. On the other hand, there is in French literature a totally
different--almost a contradictory--tendency, which is no less clearly
marked and hardly less important--the tendency towards pure Rhetoric.
This love of language for its own sake--of language artfully ordered,
splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible--may be seen alike in
the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of
Bossuet, and in the passionate _tirades_ of Corneille. With the great
masters of the seventeenth century--Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La
Bruyère--the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In
their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by
all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is
preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense. With
the eighteenth century, however, a change came. The age was a critical
age--an age of prose and common sense; the rhetorical impulse faded
away, to find expression only in melodramatic tragedy and dull verse;
and the style of Voltaire, so brilliant and yet so colourless, so
limited and yet so infinitely sensible, symbolized the literary
character of the century. The Romantic Movement was an immense reaction
against the realism which had come to such perfection in the acid prose
of Voltaire. It was a reassertion of the rhetorical instinct in all its
strength and in all its forms. There was no attempt simply to redress
the balance; no wish to revive the studied perfection of the classical
age. The realistic spirit was almost completely abandoned. The pendulum
swung violently from one extreme to the other.

The new movement had been already faintly discernible in Diderot's
bright colouring and the oratorical structure of Rousseau's writing. But
it was not until after the Revolution, in the first years of the
nineteenth century, that the Romantic spirit completely declared