Landmarks in French Literature Lytton Strachey Books
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Landmarks in French Literature Lytton Strachey Books
Publication date: 1912A remarkably concise survey (101 pp.) written in a very smooth and polished style:
... The complex origin of the English tongue has enabled English writers to obtain those effects of diversity, of contrast, of imaginative strangeness, which have played such a dominating part in our literature. The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction—in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.
(This is one of his earliest generalizations. Here he is much later:)
Throughout French Literature, it is easy to perceive two main impulses at work, which, between them, have inspired all the great masterpieces of the language. On the one hand, there is that positive spirit of searching and unmitigated common sense which has given French prose its peculiar distinction, which lies at the root of the wonderful critical powers of the nation, and which has produced that remarkable and persistent strain of Realism—of absolute fidelity to the naked truth—common to the earliest Fabliaux of the Middle Ages and the latest Parisian novel of to-day. On the other hand, there is in French literature a totally different—almost a contradictory—tendency, which is no less clearly marked and hardly less important—the tendency towards pure Rhetoric. This love of language for its own sake—of language artfully ordered, splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible—may be seen alike in the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of Bossuet, and in the passionate tirades of Corneille. With the great masters of the seventeenth century—Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère—the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense.
Perhaps, in the end, Strachey is too smooth. It is too hard to tell what he has judged for himself, and what he has 'got up' for his whirlwind tour. It almost goes without saying that this is the most conventional book that he ever wrote. Superb performance, however.
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Landmarks in French Literature Lytton Strachey Books Reviews
Beautiful style and very stimulating essays on varied topics; of interest to people with some background in French culture. It's not an introduction to French literature or French thought.
Publication date 1912
A remarkably concise survey (101 pp.) written in a very smooth and polished style
... The complex origin of the English tongue has enabled English writers to obtain those effects of diversity, of contrast, of imaginative strangeness, which have played such a dominating part in our literature. The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction—in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.
(This is one of his earliest generalizations. Here he is much later)
Throughout French Literature, it is easy to perceive two main impulses at work, which, between them, have inspired all the great masterpieces of the language. On the one hand, there is that positive spirit of searching and unmitigated common sense which has given French prose its peculiar distinction, which lies at the root of the wonderful critical powers of the nation, and which has produced that remarkable and persistent strain of Realism—of absolute fidelity to the naked truth—common to the earliest Fabliaux of the Middle Ages and the latest Parisian novel of to-day. On the other hand, there is in French literature a totally different—almost a contradictory—tendency, which is no less clearly marked and hardly less important—the tendency towards pure Rhetoric. This love of language for its own sake—of language artfully ordered, splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible—may be seen alike in the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of Bossuet, and in the passionate tirades of Corneille. With the great masters of the seventeenth century—Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère—the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense.
Perhaps, in the end, Strachey is too smooth. It is too hard to tell what he has judged for himself, and what he has 'got up' for his whirlwind tour. It almost goes without saying that this is the most conventional book that he ever wrote. Superb performance, however.
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