They are informed with a high purpose, and a genuine love of humanity and the truth. The French authorities soon recognized this; they perceived that every page contained a cutting indictment of their system of government; and they adopted their usual method in such a case. The sale of the book was absolutely prohibited throughout France, and a copy of it solemnly burnt by the common hangman. It was only gradually that the new views, of which Montesquieu and Voltaire were the principal exponents, spread their way among the public; and during the first half of the century many writers remained quite unaffected by them. Two of these--resembling each other in this fact alone, that they stood altogether outside the movement of contemporary thought--deserve our special attention. The mantle of Racine was generally supposed to have fallen on to the shoulders of Voltaire--it had not: if it had fallen on to anyone's shoulders it was on to those of MARIVAUX. No doubt it had become diminished in the transit. Marivaux was not a great tragic writer; he was not a poet; he worked on a much smaller scale, and with far less significant material. But he was a true dramatist, a subtle psychologist, and an artist pure and simple. His comedies, too, move according to the same laws as the tragedies of Racine; they preserve the same finished symmetry of design, and leave upon the mind the same sense of unity and grace. But they are slight, etherealized, fantastic; they are Racine, as it were, by moonlight. All Marivaux's dramas pass in a world of his own invention--a world curiously compounded of imagination and reality. At first sight one can see nothing there but a kind of conventional fantasy, playing charmingly round impossible situations and queer delightful personages, who would vanish in a moment into thin air at the slightest contact with actual flesh and blood. But if Marivaux had been simply fantastic and nothing more, his achievement would have been insignificant; his great merit lies in his exquisite instinct for psychological truth. His plays are like Watteau's pictures, which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the realities of life. His characters, like Watteau's, seem to possess, not quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality--the distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting in the human spirit. His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their hearts are miraculously one; in their conversations the subtleties of metaphysicians are blended with the airy clarities of birds. _Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard_ is perhaps the most perfect example of his work. Here the lady changes places with her waiting-maid, while the lover changes places with his valet, and, in this impossible framework of symmetrical complications, the whole action spins itself out.