Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/283

Rh across an orchard wall. Refined and adoring love is the key-note of the whole, broken only by the lively sallies of the inconstant Hylas, the most brightly drawn character in the romance. As a pastoral, Koerting thinks, the Astrée is inferior to the Diana, but as a romance superior. The reader's interest is more happily enlisted for the hero and heroine and their fortunes. The secondary characters are better grouped around these. Compared with Sidney's Arcadia, the Astrée is a more harmonious whole. D'Urfé allowed no interest, whether of chivalrous incident or poetic style, to usurp upon the portrayal of refined, devoted, and elevated love-sentiment. And d'Urfé's love, high-flown as it is, is not so much a mere code of gallantry as it became in his followers and in the tragi-comedies, "amour postiche, froid et ridicule," a pretext for absurdly heroic resolutions and refinements of casuistry and eloquence. There is no passion in the love which d'Urfé paints, but there was some degree of beauty in the sentiment, and of elevation in the morality which gained the admiration not only of the Hôtel but of so fine a critic of the heart as Saint Francis of Sales.

The admiration of Saint Francis was shared by his friend and follower, Jean-Pierre Camus (1582-1652), Bishop of Belley, and it was not against the Astrée so much as the continuations and imitations of Amadis de Gaule, which the Astrée superseded, that his moral and religious romances were directed. Nor are they Christian pastorals, as is sometimes said, but rather "novelle" more