It was with Verlaine and his successors that French verse completely broke away from the control of those classical rules, the infallibility of which had been first attacked by the Romantics.  In order to express the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well, Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could pour at will into the subtle mould of his feeling and his thought.  The result justified the means.  Verlaine’s poetry exhales an exquisite perfume—­strange, indistinct, and yet, after the manner of perfume, unforgettable.  Listening to his enchanting, poignant music, we hear the trembling voice of a soul.  This last sad singer carries us back across the ages, and, mingling his sweet strain with the distant melancholy of Villon, symbolizes for us at once the living flower and the unchanging root of the great literature of France.

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We have now traced the main outlines of that literature from its dim beginnings in the Dark Ages up to the threshold of the present time.  Looking back over the long line of writers, the first impression that must strike us is one of extraordinary wealth.  France, it is true, has given to the world no genius of the colossal stature and universal power of Shakespeare.  But, then, where is the equal of Shakespeare to be found?  Not even in the glorious literature of Greece herself.  Putting out of account such an immeasurable magnitude, the number of writers of the first rank produced by France can be paralleled in only one other modern literature—­that of England.  The record is, indeed, a splendid one which contains, in poetry and drama, the names of Villon, Ronsard, Corneille, Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine, Chenier, Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine; and in prose those of Froissart, Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant.  And, besides this great richness and variety, another consideration gives a peculiar value to the literature of France.  More than that of any other nation in Europe, it is distinctive and individual; if it had never existed, the literature of the world would have been bereft of certain qualities of the highest worth which France alone has been able to produce.  Where else could we find the realism which would replace that of Stendhal and Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant?  Where else should we look for the brilliant lucidity and consummate point which Voltaire has given us?  Or the force and the precision that glow in Pascal?  Or the passionate purity that blazes in Racine?

Finally, if we would seek for the essential spirit of French literature, where shall we discover it?  In its devotion to truth?  In its love of rhetoric?  In its clarity?  In its generalizing power?  All these qualities are peculiarly its own, but, beyond and above them, there is another which controls and animates the rest.  The one high principle which, through so many generations, has guided like a star the writers of France is the principle of deliberation, of intention, of a conscious search for ordered beauty; an unwavering, an indomitable pursuit of the endless glories of art.