within, the candles are lighted, the company is gathered together, and all is warmth and brilliance.  To eyes which have grown accustomed to the elemental conflicts without, the room may seem at first confined, artificial, and insignificant.  But let us wait a little!  Gradually we shall come to feel the charm of the well-ordered chamber, to appreciate the beauty of the decorations, the distinction and the penetration of the talk.  And, if we persevere, that is not all we shall discover.  We shall find, in that small society, something more than ease and good breeding and refinement; we shall find the play of passion and the subtle manifestation of the soul; we shall realize that the shutting out of terrors and of mysteries has brought at least the gain of concentration, so that we may discern unhindered the movements of the mind of man—­of man, not rapt aloft in the vast ardours of speculation, nor involved in the solitary introspection of his own breast; but of man, civilized, actual, among his fellows, in the bright light of the world.

Yet, if it is true that a refined and splendid worldliness was the dominant characteristic of the literature of the age, it is no less true that here and there, in its greatest writers, a contrary tendency—­faint but unmistakable—­may be perceived.  The tone occasionally changes; below the polished surface a disquietude becomes discernible; a momentary obscure exception to the general easy-flowing rule.  The supreme artists of the epoch seem to have been able not only to give expression to the moving forces of their time, but to react against them.  They were rebels as well as conquerors, and this fact lends an extraordinary interest to their work.  Like some subtle unexpected spice in a masterly confection, a strange, profound, unworldly melancholy just permeates their most brilliant writings, and gives the last fine taste.

Before considering these supreme artists more particularly, it will be well to notice briefly the work of one who can lay no claim to such a title, but who deserves attention as the spokesman of the literary ideals of his age.  BOILEAU, once the undisputed arbiter of taste throughout Europe, is now hardly remembered save as the high-priest of an effete tradition and as the author of some brilliant lines which have passed as proverbs into the French language.  He was a man of vivid intelligence—­courageous, independent, passionately devoted to literature, and a highly skilled worker in the difficult art of writing verse.  But he lacked the force and the finesse of poetic genius; and it is not as a poet that he is interesting:  it is as a critic.  When the lines upon which French literature was to develop were still uncertain, when the Classical school was in its infancy, and its great leaders—­Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine—­were still disputing their right to pre-eminence among a host of inferior and now forgotten writers whose works were carrying on the weak and tasteless traditions