We have seen to what misunderstanding of the idea of society the unhistoric, mathematical line of thought of the eighteenth century led. A kindred line of thought produced a very similar misunderstanding of poetry. In their admiration for mathematical reasonableness, and for the certainty with which general truths had been arrived at by mathematical inferences, men were eager to communicate to language, as far as possible, the quality of mathematically exact expression. Condillac defined science as _une langue bien faite, i.e._ a perfectly clear and perfectly exact language. The fact was not sufficiently appreciated that, when it is desired to reproduce impressions which are different in different persons, and which even in the same person may change from one moment to another, a flexible, impressionable language is required, a language which accepts its spirit and whole stamp from the person using it. Scientific men began to deride what they called poetry and style, and maintained that in writing thought was everything, form nothing. Barante, who, in a critical work published at the beginning of the new century, was the first to protest against these ideas of his age, argues cleverly: "When Chimène says to Rodrigue: 'Go! I do not hate thee,' it is plain, if we submit these words to calm investigation, that they mean the same as if she had said: 'Go! I love thee'; and yet, if she used the latter expression, she would be quite a different being; her consideration for her father would be gone, and so would her modesty and her charm."
The poets, who were in reality influenced by the same ideas as the scientists, and were as far as they from conceiving of style as the direct outcome of the personality, set themselves to work to fabricate style, and spoke of it as we speak of the music composed for any given libretto. They looked upon the art of writing as a perfectly external art, and the descriptive school, with Delille at their head, took unpoetic themes--physics, botany, astronomy, sea-voyages--and out of them manufactured style. (See poetical works of Boisjolin, Gudin, Aimé Martin, and Esménard.) Cournand actually wrote a poem in four cantos on style itself and its various species. Poetry was regarded as an artificial form communicated to the matured thought. This was the idea which Buffon had contradicted in his notable proposition: _Le style c'est l'homme même_, a proposition which was presently to become the most hackneyed of quotations, inevitable whenever the subject of style was broached, and employed by none so frequently as by those who were neither men nor possessors of style.[7] The poets of the eighteenth century derived their conception of the nature of poetry from their own practice. As their own poetry, their own language, was not a natural product, but the result of labour and the observance of certain rules respecting elegance of expression, choice of similes, and employment of mythology, they naturally believed that language and thought originated independently of each other.