[250] It has been noted, I think, by all who have written about the Berger, that Sorel is a sort of Balak and Balaam in one. He calls on himself to curse the Astrée, but he, sometimes at least, blesses it.
[251] The Berger fills two volumes of some nine hundred pages; Polyandre, two of six hundred each! But it must be admitted that the print is very large and widely spaced.
[252] One remembers the story of the greater Corneille calling to the lesser down a trap between their two houses, "Sans-Souci!—une rime!"
[253] I have known this word more than once objected to as pedantic. But pedantry in this kind consists in using out-of-the-way terms when common ones are ready to hand. There is no single word in English to express the lower kind of "Dutch-painting" as this Greek word does. And Greek is a recognised and standing source of words for English. If geography, why not rhyparography?—or, if any one prefers it, "rhypography," which, however, is not, I think, so good a form.
[254] There is, no doubt, significance in the fact that they are definitely called nouvelles.
[255] V. sup. p. 204. The habit of these continues in all the books. L'Illustre Bassa opens with a most elaborate, but still not very much "alive," procession and sham fight.
[256] Of course Cervantes is not shadowy.
[257] As far as mere chronology goes, Cyrano, v. inf., should come between; but it would split the parallel.
[258] Scarron had, in Le Destin's account of himself, made a distinction between the pastoral and heroic groups and the "old" romances, meaning thereby not the true mediaeval specimens but the Amadis cycle. Furetière definitely classes all of them together.
[259] The time is well known to have been fond of anagrams, and "Charroselles" is such an obvious one for "Charles Sorel" that for once there is no need to gainsay or neglect the interpreters. The thing, if really meant for a real person, is a distinct lampoon, and may perhaps explain the expulsion and persecution of Furetière, by his colleagues of the Academy, almost as well as the ostensible cause thereof—his compiling, in competition with the Academy itself, of a French Dictionary, and a very good one, which was not printed till after his death, and ultimately became the famous Dictionnaire de Trévoux. Not that Sorel himself was of much importance, but that the thing shows the irritable and irritating literary failing in the highest degree. Furetière had friends of position, from Boileau, Racine, and Bossuet downwards; and the king himself, though he did not interfere, seems to have disapproved the Academy's action. But the Roman was heavily "slated" for many years, though it had a curious revival in the earlier part of the next century; and for the rest of that century and the first part of the nineteenth it was almost wholly forgotten.