Virgil’s “They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able,” is recalled by this:
The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
So much for Vauvenargues.
And so much for what—considering that, logically, though not quite chronologically, Vauvenargues belongs with them—we may call the seventeenth-century group of French pensée-writers. A nineteenth-century group of the same literary class will form the subject of a chapter in due course to follow.
VI.
LA FONTAINE.
1621-1695.
La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely “no fellow in the firmament” of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever among the French by long proof more secure than is La Fontaine’s, of universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true poetry—this, surely, is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.