An Introduction to the French Classical Drama

Excerpt from An Introduction to the French Classical Drama

If we assume with the large majority of French critics that the seventeenth century was the time in which French art most truly reflected the ideal qualities of the French nation as a whole, we shall be anxious to discover in the literature of that century what it is that marks it off from the pscudo-classical literature of the age of Anne in England, and why the Siede d'or is a truer epithet as applied to France than the 'Augustan age' as applied to England.

It was, in the first place, the age of the greatest French dramatists : and it is not generally disputed that though the genius of the French can be expressed in beautiful and lucid prose, whether in the seventeenth-century 'period' or the freer, more pictured phrase of modern times, yet the drama offers to the French spirit its greatest opportunities. Perhaps one reason for this is to be seen in a consideration of the national temperament. In contrast to the genius of the Teuton, which tends to express the thought and emotion of the individual, the French mind tends to express in art and literature the thought and feeling of man as part of a society.

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