the fundamental principles of Nature, Reason, and Truth.  In a sense he was right:  for it is certain that the works of Moliere and Racine were more natural, more reasonable, and more truthful than those of l’Abbe Cotin and Pradon; his mistake lay in his assumption that these qualities were the monopoly of the Classical school.  Perceiving the beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature herself, and that without them no beauty could exist.  He was wrong.  Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and beauty is often—­perhaps more often than not—­complex, obscure, fantastic, and strange.  At the bottom of all Boileau’s theories lay a hearty love of sound common sense.  It was not, as has sometimes been asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity.  He could write, for instance, an enthusiastic appreciation of the sublime sentence, ’God said, Let there be light, and there was light’; for there imagination is clothed in transparent beauty, and grandeur is achieved by the simplest means.  More completely than any of his great contemporaries, Boileau was a representative of middle-class France.

Certainly the most famous, and perhaps the greatest, of the writers for whom Boileau acted as the apologist and the interpreter was MOLIERE.  In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England.  His glory is more than national—­it is universal.  Gathering within the plenitude of his genius the widest and the profoundest characteristics of his race, he has risen above the boundaries of place and language and tradition into a large dominion over the hearts of all mankind.  To the world outside France he alone, in undisputed eminence, speaks with the authentic voice of France herself.

That this is so is owing mainly, of course, to the power of his genius; but it is also owing, in some degree, to the particular form which his genius took.  Judging by quality alone, it is difficult to say whether his work stands higher or lower in the scale of human achievement than that of Racine—­whether the breadth of vision, the diversity, and the humanity of his comedies do or do not counterbalance the poetry, the intensity, and the perfect art of his friend’s tragedies; at least it seems certain that the difference between the reputations of the two men with the world in general by no means corresponds with the real difference in their worth.  It is by his very perfection, by the very completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses.  He is so absolute, so special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that Moliere gains.  Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical.  His fluid mind overflowed the mould