Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/287

Rh Bassa (1641), Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649-1653), and Clélie ou Histoire Romaine (1654), the heroic, pseudo-historical romances reached a climax and expired. The cult of precious sentiment could no further go. Turks, Persians, and early Romans, who were French statesmen, authors, and précieuses in disguise, palled upon a generation whose watchword was "good sense," and who were beginning to prefer Racine to Corneille. Madame de Sévigné was in 1675 still an enthusiastic reader of La Calprenède, carried away by the beauty of the sentiments, the violence of the passions, and the success of the heroes' redoubtable swords; and she shared the taste with the analytic and cynical La Rochefoucauld. But her tone is apologetic, and the last word on the heroic romance was spoken by Boileau. Its further development in the psychological romances of Marie de Lafayette belongs to the succeeding volume.

The absurdity of the long-winded love romances, palpable enough to us,—although the idealisation of amorous passion in the novel is, still, more widely popular than psychological analysis and dramatic action,—was also palpable to many shrewd minds of the generation which produced and admired these romances. From almost the beginning of the century a counter-current of realistic and satirical story, dealing with life as it is, and not as the Hôtel de Rambouillet loved to imagine it, ran side by side with the more fashionable stream. Here also the influence of Spain was dominant. The picaresque romance, of which a full and trenchant description