M. Emile Zola dans ses éloquentes polémiques? Mentionner simplement cette multiplicité de productions, c'est achever de corroborer la vérité d'ordre général qui a servi de point de départ à ces brèves réflexions, à savoir que, pour une espèce littéraire, se développer, c'est faire la conquête d'un très grand nombre d'esprits, s'enrichir de tout ce que perdent les formes en décadence, et devenir une des deux ou trois expressions nécessaires des plus profondes tendances de l'époque. C'a été le sort de l'Essai Critique en France depuis cent ans; et la fécondité créatrice de ce genre, regardé longtemps comme le contraire d'un genre créateur, prouve que la nature est en effet toujours pareille à elle-même, et que, dans l'ordre intellectuel comme dans l'ordre physique, partout où le besoin apparaît, l'organe suit.

paul Bourg in

THE CRITICAL ESSAY IN FRANCE

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF PAUL BOURGET

AMONG the distinct forms of production which the old school of rhetoric felicitously described as "the literary genera," there seems to be a struggle for life quite analogous to the war between the various orders of animals. Certain of these literary forms, after having monopolised the field of contemporary thought, and shown their energy in the production of a great number of works, become anæmic and impoverished, vegetate and die. In France this has been the fate of epic poetry, and to-day it is the position, in France, of tragedy, and in England, of the drama as a whole. During the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, Rotrou, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, time after time, and with them a legion of imitators, attest the vitality of a form of literature, which, even in the nineteenth century, produces, infrequently, remarkable specimens, so rarely, indeed, as to seem almost archaic. Compare, in the same way, the English drama of our day with that of the Elizabethan period. On the other hand, some literary forms, of which the creative power seemed slender and attenuated during earlier epochs, develop, in our time, a new vigour and richness. This was, during the first half of the century, the case with lyric poetry, and is to-day the case with the novel and with what I will call, for want of a more exact term, the Critical Essay. The resemblance between the evolution of literary species and that of animal species, seems to show that nature employs the same processes in the moral and in the physical world. It is also, by the way, a further proof of the grand principle of unity of com

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