Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/105

Rh factitious forms, which again fostered preciosity of a kind, the preciosity of artificial and falsetto style. So much is there in common between an apparent contraction and an apparent expansion in human progress.

For, to come back to our starting-point, even the restrictive preciosity in both countries represented after all a play of intelligence, a new exercise of thought. In rejecting parts of the irregular vocabulary of the preceding age, it rejected also the vagueness of its thought and the frequent puerility of its fancy. Its own formative preciosity, arising by way of the exclusion of the common, was of course a new puerility : and when "voiturez-nous les commodités de la conversation," or anything near it, became a way of asking a servant to bring chairs, the preciosity of the salon had reached the point where common sense must needs protect and avenge itself, in the manner of Pantagruel if need be. After all, there may have been an obscure justice in Molière's mode of vengeance, suggesting as it did that this self-conscious torturing of a language was a fitter occupation for conceited and ignorant provincials than for noble ladies in a great capital. But the fact remains that Molière and Boileau, in their vindication of good sense against finikin absurdity, were really standing at the point of departure from which that absurdity had been reached. They stood in the main with Malherbe; and Malherbe's purism had been a judicious restrictive preciosity to begin with. The line of heredity is clear. All of the first generation of the French classicists, as M. Bourgoin rightly insists, were touched with preciosity; and Corneille stands out not as rejecting it but as bringing it to bear on new notions, new themes, a new dramatic inspiration. And the best prose writers of the time before Pascal, as M. Brunetiére again reminds us, were chronically precious in their elaborate indirectness and sophistication of phrasing. Rh