been the dominant fashion under Louis XIV. Infidelity
was a broad literary mark, written all over the face of the eighteenth
century. It was the hour and power of the Encyclopaedists and the
Philosophers,--of Voltaire, of Diderot, of D'Alembert, of Rousseau.
Montesquieu, though contemporary, belongs apart from these writers. More
really original, more truly philosophical, he was far less
revolutionary, far less destructive, than they. Still, his influence
was, on the whole, exerted in the direction, if not of infidelity, at
least of religious indifferentism. The French Revolution was laid in
train by the great popular writers whom we have now named, and by their
fellows. It needed only the spark, which the proper occasion would be
sure soon to strike out, and the awful, earth-shaking explosion would
follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,--the
usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte,--literature was well-nigh
extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant,
of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, belong to this period.

Three centuries have now elapsed since the date of "The Pleiades."
Throughout this long period, French literature has been chiefly under
the sway of that spirit of classicism in style which the reaction
against Ronsardism, led first by Malherbe and afterwards by Boileau, had
established as the national standard in literary taste and aspiration.
But Rousseau's genius acted as a powerful solvent of the classic
tradition. Chateaubriand's influence was felt on the same side,
continuing Rousseau's. George Sand, too, and Lamartine, were forces that
strengthened this component. Finally, the great personality of Victor
Hugo proved potent enough definitively to break the spell that had been
so long and so heavily laid on the literary development of France. The
bloodless warfare was fierce between the revolutionary Romanticists and
the conservative Classicists in literary style, but the victory seemed
at last to remain with the advocates of the new romantic revival. It
looked, on the face of the matter, like a signal triumph of originality
over prescription, of genius over criticism, of power over rule. We
still live in the midst of the dying echoes of this resonant strife.
Perhaps it is too early, as yet, to determine on which side, by the
merit of the cause, the advantage truly belongs. But, by the merit of
the respective champions, the result was, for a time at