Abstract
It is an English tradition to deplore the lack of imagination displayed by French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before endorsing this opinion, however, it might be well to examine its general implications. This verdict embraces the dramatic creations of Corneille, Racine, and Molie`re, the fairy-tales of Perrault and his school, the fables of La Fontaine, and the remarkable suite of novels which" from the middle of the seventeenth century until the Revolution, illustrate the variety and richness of the French inventive genius. It implies that no imagination was required to conceive the comedies of Regnard, Dancourt, Marivaux, and Beaumarchais, and assumes that by a purely rational process the French presented Europe with a new type of play, le drame, and brought to perfection the genre known as the ope´ra comique. Finally, it ignores the fact that Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre first showed the novelists of Europe how to observe and to exploit the artistic possibilities of external nature in their fictions.
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