For volume and merit taken together the product of these eight centuries
of literature excels that of any European nation, though for individual
works of the supremest excellence, they may perhaps be asked in vain.
No French writer is lifted by the suffrages of other nations—the only
criterion when sufficient time has elapsed—to the level of Homer, of
Shakspere, or of Dante, who reign alone. Of those of the authors of
France who are indeed of the thirty, but attain not to the first three,
Rabelais and Molière alone unite the general suffrage, and this fact
roughly but surely points to the real excellence of the literature which
these men are chosen to represent. It is great in all ways, but it is
greatest on the lighter side. The house of mirth is more suited to it
than the house of mourning. To the latter, indeed, the language of the
unknown marvel who told Roland’s death, of him who gave utterance to
Camilla’s wrath and despair, and of the living poet who sings how the
mountain wind makes mad the lover who can not forget, has amply made good
its title of entrance. But for one Frenchman who can write admirably in
this strain, there are a hundred who can tell the most admirable story,
formulate the most pregnant reflection, point the acutest jest. There
is thus no really great epic in French, few great tragedies, and those
imperfect and in a faulty kind, little prose like Milton’s, or like
Jeremy Taylor’s, little verse (though more than is generally thought)
like Shelley’s, or like Spenser’s. But there are the most delightful
short tales, both in prose and in verse, that the world has ever seen,
the most polished jewelry of reflection that has ever been wrought, songs
of incomparable grace, comedies that must make men laugh as long as they
are laughing animals, and above all, such a body of narrative fiction,
old and new, prose and verse, as no other nation can show for art and
for originality, for grace of workmanship in him who fashions, and for
certainty of delight to him who reads.—_Encyclopædia Britannica._
[To be continued.]
[A] The words in ~this type~ call attention to “~Readings~” to follow.