was it only in the broad outlines that the change was manifest; the whole temper of life, in all its details, took on the suave, decorous, dignified tone of good breeding, and it was impossible that men of letters should escape the infection.  Their works became remarkable for clarity and elegance, for a graceful simplicity, an easy strength; they were cast in the fine mould of perfect manners—­majestic without pretension, expressive without emphasis, simple without carelessness, and subtle without affectation.  These are the dominating qualities in the style of that great body of literature, which has rightly come to be distinguished as the Classical literature of France.

Yet there was a reverse to the medal; for such qualities necessarily involved defects, which, hardly perceptible and of small importance in the work of the early masters of the Classical school, became more prominent in the hands of lesser men, and eventually brought the whole tradition into disrepute.  It was inevitable that there should be a certain narrowness in a literature which was in its very essence deliberate, refined, and select; omission is the beginning of all art; and the great French classicists, more supremely artistic, perhaps, than any other body of writers in the history of the world, practised with unsparing devotion the virtue of leaving out.  The beauties of clarity, simplicity, and ease were what they aimed at; and to attain them involved the abandonment of other beauties which, however attractive, were incompatible with those.  Vague suggestion, complexity of thought, strangeness of imagination—­to us the familiar ornaments of poetry—­were qualities eschewed by the masters of the age of Louis XIV.  They were willing to forgo comprehensiveness and elaboration, they were ready to forswear the great effects of curiosity and mystery; for the pursuit of these led away from the high path of their chosen endeavour—­the creation, within the limits they had marked out, of works of flawless art.  The fact that they succeeded so well is precisely one of the reasons why it is difficult for the modern reader—­and for the Anglo-Saxon one especially, with his different aesthetic traditions—­to appreciate their work to the full.  To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains.  Nor is this our only difficulty:  the classical tradition, like all traditions, became degenerate; its virtues hardened into mannerisms, its weaknesses expanded into dogmas; and it is sometimes hard for us to discriminate between the artist who has mastered the convention in which he works, and the artisan who is the slave of it.  The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit behind.  And indeed, in the work of the