Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/103

Rh new preciosity that is to overtake it when it in turn becomes but a pastime and a technique.

The common-sense literature of the "age of prose and reason" in England, however, represents not merely the reaction against the previous preciosity of extravagance; it connects with the movement of regulation in France, with the campaign of Molière and Boileau against the preciosity of their time — that which Molière burlesqued and degraded in his farce. Here we come to a preciosity that seems in a manner the contrary of that of the Euphuists, seeing that it is consciously rather a fastidious process of purification and limitation than one of audacious adventure in language. But the essential characteristic remains the same; it is still an innovation, a manifestation of egoism and cliqueism in taste; only the egoism is that of a very select and exclusive type, a taste which has passed through times of commotion, and calls with its unemployed nervous energy for elegance and finesse; the cliqueism is that of certain fastidious members and hangers-on of a formal and aristocratic court or upper four hundred. The new preciosity has the period of vigorous euphuism behind it, in the earlier energetic and expansive literature of Ronsard and Montaigne. In the euphuism of the sixteenth century the intellectual limitation or one-sidedness was that involved in a lop-sided culture, in a cultivation of language and fancy without a proportional knowledge of things or analysis of thinking. Limited on those sides, the mind played the more energetically and extravagantly in the phrasing of what ideas it had. In the Hotel Rambouillet the limiting principle is seen to be an ideal of bon ton. The new preciosity is thus indirect and fantastic with a difference. Seeking Rh