an ardent specialist in grammar and the use of words, Malherbe reacted
violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the
_Pleiade_ and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to
purify the French tongue; to make it--even at the cost of diminishing
its flavour and narrowing its range--strong, supple, accurate and
correct; to create a language which, though it might be incapable of
expressing the fervours of personal passion or the airy fancies of
dreamers, would be a perfect instrument for the enunciation of noble
truths and fine imaginations, in forms at once simple, splendid and
sincere. Malherbe's importance lies rather in his influence than in his
actual work. Some of his Odes--among which his great address to Louis
XIII on the rebellion of La Rochelle deserves the highest place--are
admirable examples of a restrained, measured and weighty rhetoric,
moving to the music not of individual emotion, but of a generalized
feeling for the beauty and grandeur of high thoughts. He was
essentially an oratorical poet; but unfortunately the only forms of
verse ready to his hand were lyrical forms; so that his genius never
found a full scope for its powers. Thus his precept outweighs his
example. His poetical theories found their full justification only in
the work of his greater and more fortunate successors; and the masters
of the age of Louis XIV looked back to Malherbe as the intellectual
father of their race.

Malherbe's immediate influence, however, was very limited. Upon the
generation of writers that followed him, his doctrines of sobriety and
simplicity made no impression whatever. Their tastes lay in an entirely
different direction. For now, in the second quarter of the seventeenth
century, there set in, with an extreme and sudden violence, a fashion
for every kind of literary contortion, affectation and trick. The value
of a poet was measured by his capacity for turning a somersault in
verse--for constructing ingenious word-puzzles with which to express
exaggerated sentiments; and no prose-writer was worth looking at who
could not drag a complicated, ramifying simile through half a dozen
pages at least. These artificialities lacked the saving grace of those
of the Renaissance writers--their abounding vigour and their inventive
skill. They were cold-blooded artificialities, evolved elaborately,
simply for their own sake. The new school, with its twisted conceits and
its super-subtle el