taste, France would have possessed a truly national drama. As it was, however, the Parisian tragedy failed to truthfully reflect even the life of Paris, much less that of France in general. On the one hand, the characters and social life of the classical theatre are Gallicised; in Andromaque the stigmas of slavery are wiped out, in Iphigénie Achilles is gifted with Parisian gallantry, in Phèdre the centre of interest is shifted from the hero of Euripides to a heroine more in accordance with Parisian sentiment.[1] On the other, the Parisian theatre was divorced from the provincial life of France and condemned to rapidly exhaust its narrowly restricted supplies of thought and sentiment; hence even the wit of Molière, confined within a narrow circle of individuality, tends to run into types—Le Misanthrope, Le Grondeur—rather than to create a living personality like that of Falstaff. Macaulay, comparing Bunyan and Shelley as writers who have "given to the abstract the interest of the concrete," observed that "there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than the tendency so common among writers of the French school to turn images into abstractions, no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process and to make individuals out of generalities." But neither Macaulay nor the French dramatists seem to have known that individuality depends for life and variety on the range of social evolution which the artist has within his ken—a range which may be limited not only by the degree of evolution actually reached in the given group, but also by the proprieties- of an élite circle or the restrictions of classical imitation.
§ 94. For a time it looked as if courtly and classical
- ↑ Cf. Géruzez, His. de la Litt, Fran., vol. ii. pp. 246, sqq.; A. W. Schlegel, Lect. on Dram. Art., lect. xviii.
