French Classicism (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III RENAISSANCE CLASSICISM. THE THEORIES OF THE PLEIADE French classicism turned out to be vastly different from the ideal we have described. Greek classicism and French classicism were based upon dissimilar fundamental conceptions of creed and government. The seventeenth century, at any rate, placed " music " above " gymnastic," and its sense of measure (awfrpoabvii) became ] an intellectual rather than a moral quality.1 Other factors, too, complicated matters. The moderns made their model too comprehensive, so that it included not only all Greek, but Roman antiquity as well. They gave, especially in the sixteenth century, much attention to the Hellenistic or Alexandrian age, and at all times to Roman literature. Euripides already represented the breaking away from the universal elements of Greek art. Instead of depicting with broad lines the conflict of eternal passions and eternal laws, he introduced a more subtle analysis. Just as in modern French realism an effort to avoid monotony drove the novelist to the Salpe'triSre and the study of morbid pathology, similarly Euripides, by showing various phases of emotions and passions, seemed to Aristophanes to have degraded tragedy. It has repeatedly been said that Euripides is not typical of Greek genius, and to understand him " requires no special sympathy with the Greek spirit." Gradually the creative spirit of Greek genius merged into an age of analysis. Instead of a spontaneous expression of ideals we get encylopaedic surveys of science and the laborious writers of the school of art for art's sake. A tour de force was valued above all things. Literature was composed more by men of learning thanby men of feeling. It is this feature which is usually meant when the epithet Alexandrian is applied to contempora...