Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/226

214 an exhaustive treatment of them was not to be expected. Such are the memorable quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the philosophe idea of perfectibility and human progress. The chapter closes with an account of the great protagonist and pioneer in the warfare against Christianity, the patient, plodding, dangerous Pierre Bayle. So effectually was his teaching absorbed by Voltaire and the encyclopedists that he is read no longer; but low as his flame has sunk, he remains one of the beacons lighting us over the lurid threshold of the century of strife.

We are in safe hands when it is Professor Dowden who guides us on the highways and bypaths of the eighteenth century, but by very reason of his accurate knowledge of the ground whereon he treads we are disappointed when he fails to point out to us some special feature of the landscape. Beauties we could hardly hope to meet with on our journey. There was not sap enough in that arid soil to nourish flowers, or send a flush of living green over hill and valley. The most serious omission is to have left entirely out of account the exceedingly interesting reactionary influences that leaped back and forth across the Channel when Marivaux's romances were devoured in England, and Richardson's Pamela was in every French pocket large enough to hold it. It is in itself still an open question which of these two authors exerted the initial influence on the other, although eighteenth-century criticism invariably held that in Marianne Richardson found his inspiration.

A great deal of interest attaches to an explanation of the causes of Le Sage's decline in popularity, and this question likewise Professor Dowden has not adequately presented. Le Sage saw the imperative need of mediating between the stilted heroic romances à la Scudéry and the grotesque travesties of Scarron and Furetière. Inspired by the picaroon romances of Spain, he produced, amid much inferior work, Gil Blas, a masterpiece in its kind. The plot is loose-jointed, the composition nil, but the book teems with such verve and vigor that it still pulses with an abounding life when Marivaux and Richardson slumber on our shelves. Yet we must admit that the characters are vagabonds, and the sentiment not without coarseness. Love when not slighted is ridiculed, and metaphysical analysis and moral disquisitions are both refreshingly absent from the book. Hence Le Sage's claims on our consideration as the progenitor of naturalism in romance, but on this account also the reactionary wave against which he had to buffet in his declining years. Marivaux, on the other hand, saw the need of mediating between the stilted heroics of Scudéry and what he deemed the ignoble realism of Le Sage. In this resolve he elevated the characters to bourgeois rank, and abandoning the empty love rhetoric of the old romances, he brought the