cause of this attitude of the French writer, which is
more an instinct than an attitude, born of a need to
communicate and to establish a relationship between
his thought and the minds of other men, his works
are characterized by a tone of bareness, of separate-
ness. They often give the effect of arias sung in the
midst of great silence, sung at some distance from the
world, even if they are directed toward the world.
This is sometimes described as the classical spirit
in French art, and works composed in this spirit
have the inflections of a pleader and a lawyer whose
skill is used to combat and convince and seduce.

Such works, and they have occurred in all periods
of French history, illustrate the solitude of literary
speech. But such speech-solitude, because of its cere-
monial aspect, is floodlighted. Its contrived effect, so
carefully planned to provoke, hold, subjugate and en-
chant, may often appear a pure theatricality. The
writer in the French tradition resembles a perform-
ing artist. In French schools the primary literary
exercise is that of textual explication, by which a
single page of a writer is made to serve as a revelation
of his particular art and thought, and even the art
and thought of his period. Only a very highly self-
conscious and even histrionic art permits such exami-
nation and such treatment, whereby a novelist is
studied not in his novel, but in a single paragraph from
his novel, and a poet is studied in a single sonnet. This
habit of study has helped to convert French litera-
ture into a series of celebrated set-pieces. Renan is
known for his prayer on the Acropolis and Proust
for the passage on the madeleine cake dipped in a cup
of linden tea.

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