Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/563

549 our author that, in the famous "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns," it is Boileau who is the true son of Descartes and not Perrault. For while what has just been said is prefectly true, it is not the whole truth. Descartes has another side. If his originality is not as great as has sometimes been represented, he is the first of the moderns notwithstanding. He is modern not merely in the freedom of his speculation, but—and this especially—in his appreciation and use of the spirit and methods of empirical research. The last part of the Discours is as characteristic as the first. Looking to this side of Descartes' philosophy, the romanticists might as well claim to be Cartesian as the classicists. This, then, is our first objection: it is certain that the classicists wrought in the Cartesian spirit, but it is not certain from which side Descartes would have himself attempted to develop his æsthetic theories; it is quite possible he might have sought a development from both.

The second objection is that the other proposition mentioned, namely, that French classical literature derived its principles from the influence of Descartes' s philosophy, cannot be proved. There is another possible explanation of their congruence, one, we think, on the whole, much more probable. It is possible, namely, that what is common to both was derived largely from a common source. The philosophy of an age formulates something of the same fundamental consciousness which in another form is expressed in its art. This seems to have been conspicuously the case in the seventeeth century. The age was an age of rationalism inspired by the genius of the antique. The turbulence of the earlier Renaissance had given place to a more contained enthusiasm for the classical spirit, its intellectuality, its self-restraint, its good sense. Boileau's L'art poétique, here analyzed ad tædium through nearly 150 pages in the endeavor to show the Cartesian character of its minutest details, is in imitation of Horace, and in the main derived from him. The rules of the three unities, here said to reflect the spirit of Descartes, were really supposed to be derived from Aristotle. Racine himself refers to the poetics of Aristotle as the authority for his theory of dramatic composition and, in expressing his obligations to Homer and Euripides, takes occasion to remark that the taste of Paris agrees with that of Athens. All this is, of course, familiar to M. Krantz, for the illustrations are taken from his pages; but he seems to us to underestimate its importance, and to exaggerate the special influence of the philosopher. The classics were imitated and admired, he says in effect, only because they were supposed to express, not the spirit of the ancients merely, but the rational and universal spirit of humanity; but this conception of the universal reason in humanity as something preeminently adorable is peculiarly Cartesian. This claims for Descartes an excess of originality. The author forgets the underlying rationalism of the times, and that Descartes is their child. This is not to say, of course, that Descartes had no influence on the literature.

M. Krantz is not unaware of the distinction and separability of the two