Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/316

296 blushed for its crimes, but Théophile's style is not all "points." The prophetic dream of Thisbe's mother is eloquently and dramatically described. About two years later Racan appealed to the prevalent taste for pastoral kindled by L'Astrée, and the enthusiasm for Italian literature, with his Arthénice, recast later as Les Bergeries. Racan's play has all the dramatic vapidness of the genre, but is the first French play with anything of the poetic beauty of its models, the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. It contains some delicious description in musical and flowing verses—

"Aussitôt qu'il fit jour, j'y menais mes brebis:          À peine du sommet je voyais la première           Descendre dans ces prés qui bornent la rivière,           Que j'entendis au loin sa musette et sa voix,           Qui troublaient doucement le silence des bois;           Quelle timide joie entra dans ma pensée!"

Crude plays to amuse the Paris public, which still formed the bulk of the audience, continued to be produced for many years; but the movement which Théophile and Racan  thus inaugurated gradually developed, bringing the drama more and more within the range of polite interest, and involving it thereby in the general development of French literature. The immediate consequence was not, of course, the emergence of tragedy and comedy of the classical type. The taste of the day was for romance full of high-flown polite sentiment and elegant writing. To this taste the drama had to minister.