Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/97

Rh lacking. The former rule of old and middle-age over youth was dissolved under a régime which put age and youth equally in tutelage; and the faults of youth, of which injudicious and overstrained style is one, would have a new freedom of scope. A factitious literature, an art for art's sake, would tend to flourish just as superstition flourished; only, inasmuch as bad intellectual conditions tend ultimately to kill literature altogether, that soon passed from morbid luxuriance to inanition, while superstition in the same soil grew from strength to strength.

The preciosity of the Renascence, again, is also in large part a matter of the unrestrained exuberance of youth — in this case exercising itself one-sidedly in a new world of literature, living the life of words much more than the life of things and the knowledge of things. Not only the weak heads but the headstrong would tend to be turned by that intoxication. What ultimately came about, however, was the ripening of the general taste by the persistence of conditions of free strife, which nourish common sense and make the common interest in speech prevail over the perversities of pedants. The latinising Limousin student of Rabelais's caricature suggests in the Rabelaisian manner what the actual latinists did. He speaks of Paris as the "inclyte et celebre academic que l'on vocite Lutece," and tells how nous transfretons la Sequane [= Seine] au dilucule et crepuscule; nous déambulons par les compites et quadrivies de l'urbe'. . . . A quoy, Pantagruel dist, 'Quel diable de langaige est cecy? Par Dieu, tu es quelque heretique — the spontaneous comment of the robust Philistine of all ages. "Segnor no, dist l'escolier, car libentissement des ce qu'il illucesce quelque minutule lesche du jour, . . . me irrorant de belle eau lustrale, grignotte d'un transon Rh