Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/104

92 to refine even on the habit of elaborate and artificial expression which had never ceased to prevail since the outburst of modern poetic literature in the previous century, it is not creative but restrictive, save in so far as the rejection of common speech involves a resort to the fantastic. It expresses, in fine, mainly the effort of a new upper class — formed since the close of the wars of religion — to make for itself a fitting literary atmosphere, free of the associations of the despised common life outside. It further partly represents, just as the expansive preciosity of the previous century had done, the influence of Italian models; the superior refinement of Italy being now as much felt by a class craving for elegance as the greater literateness of the south had been formerly felt by a generation thirsting for letters. And as seventeenth-century Italy represented above all things fanciful dilettantism, the native energy of Italian literature being destroyed, the French dilettantists could draw thence only a limitary inspiration. Thus, in so far as they swayed the new academy and the new literature, they undoubtedly impoverished the French language in point of colour and force, while giving it elegance and precision. But then, as we saw, the same thing was done in England later by the Restoration writers and the Popean school, who represented at once the reaction against Elizabethan and later preciosity and the final French reaction against the preciosity of the salon. The English reactionists were limitary in a less degree, because it chanced that England did not become aristocratised and royalised nearly so fully as France; and a constant upcrop of middle-class intelligence kept the language more robust and informal. Yet in England also, under the rule of a sophisticated common sense, as in Boileau's France under the same rule, there was limitation of the intellectual life, with the old result. Poetry and drama fell into, and for two generations adhered to, new stereotyped and Rh