Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/95

Rh freer, or a little subtler, for their spell of life; though on the other hand all preciosity tends to set up a reaction towards commonplace. But in any case, all forms alike represent a certain ungoverned energy, an extravagance and exorbitance of mental activity, an exorbitance which is of course faulty as such, but which has nothing in common with mere vulgar absurdity. Molière's provincial pecques, once more, are impossible. The victims of Mascarille and his master might have committed malapropisms, affectations, and absurdities innumerable; but they are glaringly incapable of preciosity.

If we trace the thing historically, this will become more and more clear. For it is much older, even in France, than the Hotel de Rambouillet or even the Pléiade. It would be safe to say that it rises periodically in all literatures. There is something of it in Euripides; and it is this element in the later Roman poets, as in the prose of Apuleius, that has brought on the whole post-Augustan literature the reproach of decadence. And this sets us questioning what it is that underlies alike the prevailing "false" style of an age later seen to have been decadent, and some of the "false" styles of an age later seen to have been vigorously progressive. We have the pedantic preciosity that is caricatured in Rabelais; the fanciful preciosity of the English and other Euphuists of the latter half of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century; the aristocratic French preciosity of the seventeenth century — all affectations of vigorous periods; all more or less akin to the style of Claudian and Statius and Apuleius. Lastly, we have the self-willed preciosity of Mr. Meredith, who may or may not belong to an age of decadence, but who certainly writes Rh