century, there set in, with an extreme and sudden violence, a fashion
for every kind of literary contortion, affectation and trick. The value
of a poet was measured by his capacity for turning a somersault in
verse--for constructing ingenious word-puzzles with which to express
exaggerated sentiments; and no prose-writer was worth looking at who
could not drag a complicated, ramifying simile through half a dozen
pages at least. These artificialities lacked the saving grace of those
of the Renaissance writers--their abounding vigour and their inventive
skill. They were cold-blooded artificialities, evolved elaborately,
simply for their own sake. The new school, with its twisted conceits and
its super-subtle elegances, came to be known as the 'Precious' school,
and it is under that name that the satire of subsequent writers has
handed it down to the laughter of after-generations. Yet a perspicacious
eye might have seen even in these absurd and tasteless productions the
signs of a progressive movement--the possibility, at least, of a true
advance. For the contortions of the 'Precious' writers were less the
result of their inability to write well than of their desperate efforts
to do so. They were trying, as hard as they could, to wriggle themselves
into a beautiful pose; and, naturally enough, they were unsuccessful.
They were, in short, too self-conscious; but it was in this very
self-consciousness that the real hope for the future lay. The teaching
of Malherbe, if it did not influence the actual form of their work, at
least impelled them towards a deliberate effort to produce _some_ form,
and to be content no longer with the vague and the haphazard. In two
directions particularly this new self-consciousness showed itself. It
showed itself in the formation of literary _salons_--of which the chief
was the famous blue drawing-room of the Hôtel de Rambouillet--where
every conceivable question of taste and art, grammar and vocabulary, was
discussed with passionate intensity; and it showed itself even more
strongly in the establishment, under the influence of Richelieu, of an