of the former age—­it was at this moment that Boileau brought to the aid of the new movement the whole force of his admirable clear-sightedness, his dauntless pertinacity, and his caustic, unforgettable wit.  No doubt, without him, the Classical school would have triumphed—­ultimately, like all good things—­but it would be hard to exaggerate the service which was rendered it by Boileau.  During many years, in a long series of satires and epistles, in the Art Poetique and in various prose works, he impressed upon the reading public the worthlessness of the old artificial school of preciosity and affectation, and the high value of the achievements of his great contemporaries.  He did more:  he not only attacked and eulogized the works of individuals, he formulated general principles and gave pointed and repeated expression to the ideals of the new school.  Thus, through him, classicism gained self-consciousness; it became possessed of a definite doctrine; and a group of writers was formed, united together by common aims, and destined to exercise an immense influence upon the development not only of French, but of European literature.  For these reasons—­for his almost unerring prescience in the discernment of contemporary merit and for his triumphant consolidation of the classical tradition—­Boileau must be reckoned as the earliest of that illustrious company of great critics which is one of the peculiar glories of French letters.  The bulk of his writing will probably never again be read by any save the curious explorer; but the spirit of his work lies happily condensed in one short epistle—­A son Esprit—­where his good sense, his wit, his lucid vigour and his essential humanity find their consummate expression; it is a spirit which still animates the literature of France.

His teaching, however, so valuable in its own day, is not important as a contribution towards a general theory of aeesthetics.  Boileau attempted to lay down the principles universally binding upon writers of poetry; but he had not the equipment necessary for such a task.  His knowledge was limited, his sympathies were narrow, and his intellectual powers lacked profundity.  The result was that he committed the common fault of writers immersed in the business of contemporary controversy—­he erected the precepts, which he saw to be salutary so far as his own generation was concerned, to the dignity of universal rules.  His message, in reality, was for the France of Louis XIV; he enunciated it as if it was the one guide to literary salvation for all ages and in all circumstances; and it so happened that for about a century it was accepted at his own valuation by the majority of civilized mankind.  Boileau detested—­and rightly detested—­the extravagant affectations of the precieux school, the feeble pomposities of Chapelain, the contorted, inflated, logic-chopping heroes of Corneille’s later style; and the classical reaction against these errors appeared to him in the guise of a return to