“It is good sense, reason which does all,—­virtue, genius, soul, talent, and taste.—­What is virtue? reason put in practice;—­talent? reason expressed with brilliance;—­soul? reason delicately put forth;—­and genius is sublime reason.”

While writing those lines he was evidently thinking of Pope, Boileau, and Horace, the master of them all.  The peculiar characteristic of the theory which subordinated imagination and feeling itself to reason, of which Scaliger perhaps gave the first sign among the moderns, is, properly speaking, the Latin theory, and for a long time it was also by preference the French theory.  If it is used appositely, if the term reason is not abused, that theory possesses some truth; but it is evident that it is abused, and that if, for instance, reason can be confounded with poetic genius and make one with it in a moral epistle, it cannot be the same thing as the genius, so varied and so diversely creative in its expression of the passions, of the drama or the epic.  Where will you find reason in the fourth book of the AEneid and the transports of Dido?  Be that as it may, the spirit which prompted the theory, caused writers who ruled their inspiration, rather than those who abandoned themselves to it, to be placed in the first rank of classics; to put Virgil there more surely than Homer, Racine in preference to Corneille.  The masterpiece to which the theory likes to point, which in fact brings together all conditions of prudence, strength, tempered boldness, moral elevation, and grandeur, is Athalie.  Turenne in his two last campaigns and Racine in Athalie are the great examples of what wise and prudent men are capable of when they reach the maturity of their genius and attain their supremest boldness.

Buffon, in his Discourse on Style, insisting on the unity of design, arrangement, and execution, which are the stamps of true classical works, said:—­“Every subject is one, and however vast it is, it can be comprised in a single treatise.  Interruptions, pauses, sub-divisions should only be used when many subjects are treated, when, having to speak of great, intricate, and dissimilar things, the march of genius is interrupted by the multiplicity of obstacles, and contracted by the necessity of circumstances:  otherwise, far from making a work more solid, a great number of divisions destroys the unity of its parts; the book appears clearer to the view, but the author’s design remains obscure.”  And he continues his criticism, having in view Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, an excellent book at bottom, but sub-divided:  the famous author, worn out before the end, was unable to infuse inspiration into all his ideas, and to arrange all his matter.  However, I can scarcely believe that Buffon was not also thinking, by way of contrast, of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History, a subject vast indeed, and yet of such an unity that the great orator was able to comprise it in a single treatise.  When we open the first edition, that