For such a man--_tyran des mots et des syllabes_, as Balzac called him--the higher qualities of poetry could have little or no meaning. His ideals were propriety, clearness, regularity, and force. These, as Chapelain perceived at the time, are oratorical rather than purely poetic qualities; yet for these, all the true qualities that go to make up a great poet were to be sacrificed. Of imagination and poetic sensibility he takes no account whatsoever. After the verbal perfection of the verse, the logical unity of the poem was his chief interest. Logic and reason are without doubt important things, but they cannot exist in poetry to the exclusion of imagination. By eliminating inspiration, as it were, Malherbe excluded the possibility of lyrical production in France throughout the period of classicism. He hated poetic fictions, since for him, as for Boileau, only actual reality is beautiful. If he permitted the employment of mythological figures, it was because they are reasonable and universally intelligible symbols. The French mind is essentially rational and logical, and Malherbe reintroduced this native rationality into French poetry. He set up common sense as a poetic ideal, and made poetry intelligible to the average mind. The Pleiade had written for a learned literary coterie; Malherbe wrote for learned and unlearned alike. For the Pleiade, poetry had been a divine office, a matter of prophetic inspiration; for Malherbe, it was a trade, a craft, to be learnt like any other. Du Bellay had said that "it is a well-accepted fact, according to the most learned men, that natural talents without learning can accomplish more in poetry than learning without natural talents." Malherbe, it has been neatly said, would have upheld the contrary doctrine that "learning without natural talents can accomplish more than natural talents without learning."[424] After all, eloquence was Malherbe's ideal; and as the French are by nature an eloquent rather than a poetic people, he deserves the honor of having first shown them how to regain their true inheritance. In a word, he accomplished for classical poetry in France all that the national instinct, the _esprit gaulois_, could accomplish by itself. Consistent structural laws for the larger poetic forms he could not give; these France owes to Italy. Nor could he appreciate the high notion of abstract perfection, or the classical conception of an absolute standard of taste--that of several expressions or several ways of doing something, one way and only one is the right one; this France owes to rationalistic philosophy. Malherbe seems almost to be echoing Montaigne when he says in a letter to Balzac:-- "Do you not know that the diversity of opinions is as natural as the difference of men's faces, and that to wish that what pleases or displeases us should please or displease everybody is to pass the limits where it seems that God in His omnipotence has commanded us to stop?"[425]