CHAPTER I.
FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.
THE SUPPLANTING OF ITALY BY FRANCE—BRILLIANCY OF THE FRENCH REPRESENTATIVES—MALHERBE—THE ‘COMMENTARY ON DESPORTES’—WHAT CAN BE SAID FOR HIS CRITICISM—ITS DEFECTS STIGMATISED AT ONCE BY REGNIER—HIS ‘NINTH SATIRE’—THE CONTRAST OF THE TWO A LASTING ONE—THE DIFFUSION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM—VAUGELAS—BALZAC—HIS LETTERS—HIS CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS—OGIER AND THE PREFACE TO ‘TYR ET SIDON’—CHAPELAIN: THE HOPELESSNESS OF HIS VERSE—THE INTEREST OF HIS CRITICISM—THE ‘SENTIMENTS DE L’ACADÉMIE SUR LE CID’—PREFACES—‘SUR LES VIEUX ROMANS’—LETTERS, ETC.—CORNEILLE—THE THREE ‘DISCOURSES’—THE ‘EXAMENS’—LA MESNARDIÈRE—SARRASIN—SCUDÉRY—MAMBRUN—SAINT-EVREMOND—HIS CRITICAL QUALITY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT—HIS VIEWS ON CORNEILLE—ON CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS, ETC.—ON ANCIENTS AND MODERNS—GUI PATIN: HIS JUDGMENT OF BROWNE—TALLEMANT, PELLISSON, MÉNAGE, MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ—THE ‘ANA’ OTHER THAN MÉNAGE’S, ESPECIALLY THE ‘HUETIANA’—'VALESIANA'—‘SCALIGERANA’—AND ‘PARRHASIANA’—PATRU, DESMARETS, AND OTHERS—MALEBRANCHE—THE HISTORY OF BOILEAU’S REPUTATION—THE ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—ITS FALSE LITERARY HISTORY—ABSTRACT OF IT—CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF IT—WANT OF ORIGINALITY—FAULTS OF METHOD—OBSESSION OF GOOD SENSE—ARBITRARY PROSCRIPTIONS—BOILEAU’S OTHER WORKS—THE ‘SATIRES’—THE ‘EPIGRAMS’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—PROSE: THE ‘HÉROS DE ROMAN’; THE ‘RÉFLEXIONS SUR LONGIN’—THE “DISSERTATION ON 'JOCONDE'”—A “SOLIFIDIAN OF GOOD SENSE”—THE PLEA FOR HIS PRACTICAL SERVICES—HISTORICAL EXAMINATION OF THIS—CONCLUDING REMARKS ON HIM—LA BRUYÈRE AND FÉNELON—THE “DES OUVRAGES DE L’ESPRIT”—GENERAL OBSERVATIONS—JUDGMENTS OF AUTHORS—FÉNELON: THE ‘DIALOGUES SUR L’ELOQUENCE’—'SUR LES OCCUPATIONS DE L’ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE'—AND ITS CHALLENGE TO CORRECTNESS—THE ABBÉ D’AUBIGNAC—HIS ‘PRATIQUE DU THÉÂTRE’—RAPIN—HIS METHOD PARTLY GOOD—HIS PARTICULAR ABSURDITIES AS TO HOMER IN BLAME—AS TO VIRGIL IN PRAISE—AS TO OTHERS—THE READING OF HIS RIDDLE—LE BOSSU AND THE ABSTRACT EPIC—BOUHOURS—ENCYCLOPÆDIAS AND NEWSPAPERS—BAYLE—BAILLET—THE ETHOS OF A CRITICAL PEDANT—GIBERT—THE ANCIENT AND MODERN QUARREL—ITS SMALL CRITICAL VALUE.
The causes of the transference of the course of critical empire, northwards as well as westwards, from Italy to France, in the seventeenth century, lie (except in so far as they will body themselves forth in the plain tale of this course which follows) somewhat outside the plan which has been traced for our History. [Sidenote: _The supplanting of Italy by France._] They belong, in part at least, to that “metacritic” and guesswork which we endeavour to exclude. Indeed, as usually, and more than as usually, in such case, the old puzzle of “the egg from the Owl, or the Owl from the egg?” besets us specially in this division of the History of that Art for which some have had it that the bird of Pallas is a specially suitable symbol. We can see the importance of the establishment of the French Academy, when only the first third of the century had passed, of the extraordinary influence of coteries like that of the Hotel Rambouillet, of the coincidence of the towering ambition of a youthful king and the concentrated force of his at least partially reunited kingdom, with the existence of a remarkable knot of great men of letters, including one critic of the most masterful, if not quite the most masterly, type. But can there possibly be any causation in this latter coincidence? Can we say why Conrart’s Academy, instead of lasting for a time and then breaking up, became a national institution? why the Rambouillet blue-stockings were more influential than those who haunted Mrs Montagu’s peacock-room, or put rubbish into the Bath-Easton vase? Only by guessing, or by arguing in stately circle about national temperaments. And we endeavour to avoid both these things here.[292]
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Footnote 292:
I am not aware of any History of the subject of this Book as a whole: nor even of any devoted to French seventeenth-century Criticism extensively but exclusively. The nearest thing to this latter is M. Bourgoin’s excellent _Les Maîtres de la Critique au 17ème Siècle_ (Paris, 1889), giving studies of Malherbe, Chapelain, Saint-Evremond, Boileau, and La Bruyère. For the inevitable, though tedious, quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, H. Rigault’s book on the subject (Paris, 1859) is, and is likely to remain, a standard. Monographs are, of course, innumerable; and the very large proportionate space given in the usual French literary histories to this period, makes these specially pertinent. Two of the largest volumes of M. Petit de Julleville’s book, for instance—with ample bibliographies—contain the seventeenth century only.
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What is certain is, that while on the one hand Italy is scarcely less addicted to criticism, and scarcely less fruitful of [Sidenote: _Brilliancy of the French representatives._] critics, in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and while the authority of Scaliger, Castelvetro, Minturno, Piccolomini, is felt[293] all over Europe, the contemporary practitioners of the art exercise no such authority, and are of almost the least importance. A page for every score that we gave them in the last Book will nearly suffice in this. In France, on the other hand, no part of the century is not full of the critical labour, and no part is without critics to whom, whether we grant the epithets “good” or “great” or not, we cannot possibly refuse those of “important,” “influential”—in more than one or two cases even “epoch-making.” In the first generation we have the half-revolution, half-reaction of Malherbe, who, for good or for ill, determined the main course of French poetry for two whole centuries, and great part of that course for three. In the second we have the similar work in prose, of Balzac by counsel and example, by example of Descartes and Pascal; the contest over the _Cid_, and the purblind but still intentionally business-like investigations of Hédelin-d’Aubignac; the constant debates of the Academy: and, perhaps most important of all, the general _engouement_ for literary discussion of pedant and fine gentleman, of prude and coquette alike. From the third come the ambitious code-making of Boileau; the squabble, tedious and desultory, but in intention at least wholly critical, of the Ancients and Moderns; the immense collections of Baillet and others; the work, not bulky but full of germ and promise, of Saint-Evremond, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère, Fénelon. What century earlier (some may say, what century later) will give us, in any country, a critical galaxy like this, where the stars dart, in at least most cases, so many other rays besides those of criticism?
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Footnote 293:
Felt rather than acknowledged, it is true. We by no means uncommonly find hard words used of Scaliger, whose Homerophobia shocked orthodox French critics of this time more than his Virgiliomania conciliated them. Yet they owed him almost everything.
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It is possible—as the historian of such a subject as this could wish that it were possible oftener—to do justice to Malherbe’s undoubtedly prominent position in the history of criticism without wasting much space on him. [Sidenote: _Malherbe._] The universally known phrase of Boileau,[294] though containing an innuendo of the grossest critical injustice, and led up to by a passage of astounding historical ignorance or falsification, is yet substantially true. The stage of French poetry which Malherbe started was a new stage; it was a stage not at once, but before long, acquiesced and persevered in by all but the whole population of the French Parnassus; and it cannot be said that seventy years of almost unceasing effort have done more than partially substitute a fresh one. Further, it is undoubtedly in favour of Malherbe, though the compliment may seem a left-handed one, that he was not a man of commanding genius in any way; that he left no important critical work; that his creative work is very scanty, far from consummate as a rule, and by no means all in the style he himself approved; and that even the secondhand accounts which we have of his doctrines are scrappy, vague, and indirect. For it is quite clear that a man who exercises such influence, and exercises it practically at once, in such circumstances, must have hit upon the right string, must have coincided strangely with the general feeling, temper, aspirations, taste of his countrymen. Our documents for these doctrines are an extensive, but fragmentary, commentary on Desportes (the still more destructive and characteristic handling of Ronsard seems either to be a myth or never to have been preserved on paper), the _Life_ by Racan,[295] some phrases in the _Letters_, the vivid and admirable attack of Regnier,[296] and the remarks of writers in his own and the next generation.
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Footnote 294:
_Enfin Malherbe vint._ The edition in the _Grands Ecrivains_, by M. Ludovic Lalanne (5 vols., Paris, 1862-69), is not only by far the best, but in our case indispensable, as giving the full commentary on Desportes.
Footnote 295:
The _Historiette_ of Tallemant (ed. Monmerqué, i. 236-278) is apparently based upon a fuller version of Racan, and must be compared.
Footnote 296:
In the Ninth Satire (_v. infra_). Regnier was Desportes’ nephew, and is said by the anecdotists (see last note) to have been incensed against Malherbe, not merely by the latter’s literary opposition to his uncle, but by a piece of gross rudeness of Malherbe’s to Desportes in the latter’s own house, where Regnier himself had introduced him.
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All concur in showing Malherbe to us as, on the one hand, mainly a verbal critic, and on the other, as verbal critics usually, but by no means always or necessarily are, singularly unable to rise above the word, or its nearest neighbour, the mere sense. Both these things made him the natural enemy (though, for his earlier years at least, he was a more or less disloyal follower) of the Pléiade. Their abundant word-coinages and word-borrowings shocked him; he did not want, and could not feel,[297] the poetic _souffle_ which they managed to give by means, or in despite, of their vocabulary. Racan, a rather simple but absolutely honest creature, confesses that his master _n’aimait du tout les Grecs_, regarded Pindar especially as a maker of _galimatias_, liked Statius and Seneca best of the Latins,[298] and (it was generous) classed the Italians with the Greeks. On the other hand, in French, he had at least the merit of knowing exactly what he wanted, and exactly how to get it. He it was who first invented those rigid laws of rhyme, which even French classicism never quite adopted—the proscription of the different use of _a_ and _e_ in such rhymes as _ance_ and _ence_, _ent_ and _ant_; the rule against simples and compounds of them, and even words which commonly go together, out of verse, as _père_ and _mère_. He was equally rigid on the cæsura: and Racan is not to be suspected of catering for laughers, though Tallemant might be, when he tells us that, while actually in the death-struggle, Malherbe revived himself to tell his nurse that she had used a word _qui n'ètoit pas bien Français_.
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Footnote 297:
The French critics, however, have perhaps taken too literally his reported blasphemy, that he did not value a good poet above a good player at ninepins. Malherbe was a Norman—that is to say, a parcel-Englishman—and may well have had something of that English humour of disparaging his own matters which is so incomprehensible to the French.
Footnote 298:
The version in Tallemant adds that he _dis_liked Virgil. He also scoffed at the idea of “number” (rhythm) in prose.
Footnote 299:
Ed. Lalanne, iv. 249-473. There is an elaborate and standard monograph on this by M. Brunot, _La Doctrine de Malherbe_ (Paris, 1891); but, as in other cases, I am obliged to postpone the comment to the text.
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It is, however, in the Commentary on Desportes,[299] and there only, that we have the real Malherbe at first hand for our purpose. [Sidenote: _The_ Commentary on Desportes.] It is a very remarkable piece, and the first of the kind in modern times;[300] though Gellius and Macrobius no doubt set a certain pattern for it in ancient. Nor am I acquainted with anything more thorough in the particular species; the modern Zoilus, as a rule, is equally inferior to Malherbe in thoroughness, acuteness, and learning. More than 200 pages—a large page and a small type—are occupied in M. Lalanne’s edition (the only one) with the citations and remarks, the former being rigidly confined to the line or two (rarely more) that Malherbe annotated. It would be almost worth while to reprint[301] the original volume as it exists scored by the critic’s hand, and I do not know that it would be at all unfair to Desportes; for it is not the author who comes worst out of the exposure.
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Footnote 300:
There are things of Castelvetro’s in the _Opere Varie_ not wholly dissimilar; but these were then unpublished.
Footnote 301:
I have sometimes wondered whether the fact that, according to the Racan-Tallemant anecdote, Malherbe only “struck through” his copy of Ronsard without annotating it, is not an involuntary testimony to the Prince of Poets. Malherbe, for all his rancour and narrowness, was no fool; and he must in his mind have anticipated a famous later sentence about the eagle floating
“Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men.”
Desportes is not exactly an eagle, and Malherbe has better game with him, but still not the best of the game.
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Whatever may be said against Malherbe, he cannot be accused of verbiage. He constantly contents himself with a single word—_bourre_ (“padding”), _cheville_ (“expletive”), or simply _note_ or _nota_, which expresses, much more forcibly, the “Will the reader believe,” or “It will hardly be credited” of our less succinct Aristarchs. It is curious how sensitive Malherbe’s ear is to certain suggestions of real or fancied cacophony, or absurdity, in juxtaposition of different words. There is no doubt that the French habit of delivering verse in a sort of recitative or singsong, running the syllables very much together, putting strong emphasis on certain vowels and slurring others, makes things like the famous “vaincu Loth” and “vingt culottes,” “vieillard stupide” and “vieil as de pique” less of mere childishness with them than with us. Malherbe seems to have a perfect obsession of this kind, especially in the direction of alliterated syllables. Thus he annotates the harmless line—
“Si la foi plus certaine en une âme non feinte”— _n’en, nu, n’a_;
and, still more in the style of the two later jokes—
“Mais vous, belle tyranne, aux Nérons comparable”— _Tira nos nez_!
Indeed, he never loses an opportunity of blackmarking this collocation of letters in different words, a point to which the later Latin rhetoricians had perhaps made the French specially attentive, but notice of which, except in the rarest cases, would be thought unworthy of anybody but a schoolboy (or a comic journalist of not the highest class) in England.
It was perhaps a little dangerous for Malherbe to be so prodigal of the words “pedantry” and “stupidity” as he is; while time and use have sometimes made his peremptory judgments look rather foolish. For instance, Desportes had used _poumons_ in the plural, as we have practically always used “lungs” in English. “On ne dit,” says our usher, with an almost audible bang of the ferule on the desk,—“On ne dit point qu’un homme ait des poumons: et ne m’allègue pas qu’il y a plusieurs lobes au poumon, car tu serais un sot.” Poor posterity! It has been (in France) tolerably docile to Malherbe, but it has in this respect undoubtedly written itself down an ass—or perhaps him. For no Frenchman now would hesitate to use the word in the plural. He is constantly objecting to _consommer_ in the sense of _consumer_; he ejaculates (with the sort of indignant bark which we hear so often from him and from critics of his kind) on
“Et pensant de mes faits l'étrange frénésie”
“Je ne sais si c’est allemand ou anglais: mais je sais bien que ce n’est pas français”; stigmatises (surely with injustice?) _trop injuste Amour_ as a _mauvais vocatif_, and shows his own want of poetic imagination and poetic sympathy by scouting as bad the beautiful epithet _amoureuse_ in
“Enflammant l’air d’amoureuse clarté,”
for which some of us would excuse Desportes many worse things than he has actually done. On the other hand, the mere grammarian comes out in his note on
“Où de tant de beauté ton œil eut jouissance Que le seul souvenir chasse au loin ma souffrance,”— “_Le seul souvenir de quoi?_”
I should rather like to give more of this; but the reader will no doubt say _Sat prata_. [Sidenote: _What can be said for his criticism._] We must not be too hard on it. In the first place, it is (as criticism of the Zoilus kind is by no means always) transparently honest criticism. Malherbe does not garble; he does not foist his own misconception, not to say his own stupidity, on his author, and then condemn him for it; he does not, like Boileau, fling offensive and contemptuous epithets broadcast without anything to support them. Further, there can be not the very slightest doubt that such an office as his could, at the time, be very usefully filled. The French sixteenth century, like our own, had poured, and the early French seventeenth century had, also like our own, begun to pour, a vast and rather indiscriminately selected reinforcement of word and phrase and image into the language. All this wanted sorting, arranging—in some cases, though no doubt not in so many as Malherbe thought, rejecting and clearing out. The mere French grammar, which Vaugelas was soon to write, had not been written; and the Arts Poetic in existence were, as we have already seen, either technical and higgledy-piggledy, or like that of Vauquelin (which appeared just as Malherbe was beginning his crusade, and of which it would not be uninteresting to have a copy annotated by him as he annotated Desportes), almost as higgledy-piggledy, and much vaguer, on all technical points except some of the crotchets of the Pléiade. Indeed, the best justification for Malherbe is the French poetical history of the next thirty or forty years. He may claim some, though but little, of the merit of such different poets as Corneille and Voiture; the defects, where they really existed, of Boileau’s victims can seldom or never be charged upon him, and might sometimes have been avoided by listening to his precepts.
This, I think, is fairly generous as well as just; generosity may now make her bow and leave justice unfettered; but justice herself need not go beyond that admirable pronouncement of Regnier, which has been already referred to. [Sidenote: _Its defects stigmatised at once by Regnier._] The great satirist, the passionate poet, could hardly have needed a personal grievance to spur him on to the composition of his Ninth Satire, though the generosity of his character might have induced silence had not Malherbe broken their friendship. The address to “Rapin[302] le favori d’Apollon et des Muses”[303] begins by graceful compliments, but turns soon and sharply on
“Ces resveurs dont la Muse insolente Censurant les plus vieux, arrogamment se vante De reformer les vers.”
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Footnote 302:
Not to be confounded with the critic and versifier, René Rapin, who was not born till after Regnier’s death, and whom to call “favourite, &c.,” would indeed have been a dreadful thing to do; still less with the historian Rapin de Thoyras, who was a generation later again. This Rapin was Nicolas, part author of the glorious _Satire Menippée_, victor in the burlesque contest of the Flea (see Southey’s _Doctor_), a good versifier in Latin, and no ill one in French, though he was of the (in France not very numerous) partisans of classical metres. He died in 1608, not long after the date of this satire.
Footnote 303:
I read my Regnier in two editions, both very desirable as books, and of different merits otherwise. The one, that of Prosper Poitevin (Paris, 1860), is very compact; and, besides other matter, has the old commentary of Brossette, which is extremely interesting as expressing the views of a disciple of Boileau on a poet whom, to do him justice, Boileau could not but admire, though he characteristically belittled him. The other, that of E. Courbet (Paris, 1875), has a text adjusted in the scrupulous modern manner, and some important additions to the biography.
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If we have given Malherbe the credit of being the first modern critic to play the awful Aristarch with a contemporary in the true and full Aristarchian manner, Regnier must deserve that of being the first poet of genius in modern times to undertake a real _chevauchée_ in the interests of the true criticism against the false. [Sidenote: _His_ Ninth Satire.] The Satire is not faultless; there is some divagation, and an attempt (giving some countenance to the deplorable excesses, in the opposite direction of insulting poverty, which Boileau and Pope permit themselves) to set the profits and prosperity of Desportes against the comparative neediness of Malherbe. But this neediness was only comparative; and Regnier has the good taste never to name his adversary, and to let the arrows find their mark without vulgar personal abuse. The spirit of the piece is delightful; its straight hitting never baulks the game; and the verse is often of the very first quality. Read—I only wish I had room to quote—the passage, which only Juvenal and Dryden have equalled, on Malherbe’s contempt alike of the Greeks and the Pléiade (20-27); that on his elevation of the mere vernacular, as the test of language, which follows; the denunciation of his arrogant assumption of knowledge as being his own peculiar, which follows that; and the famous diatribe of forty verses long, and with every other verse a triumph, which scoffs at the anxiety—
“Prendre garde qu’un _qui_ ne heurte une diphtongue,”
which labels the whole proceeding—
“C’est proser de la rime et rimer de la prose;”
compares it to the tricks of rouging and dressing up in women, and contrasts the natural beauties of poetry with all this powder and pomatum.
The first hundred lines are the best part of the satire, and the remainder is, to a certain extent, amplification and repetition. Yet it is good art, and good sense, not merely in the scattered phrases—
“Sans juger nous jugeons,”
and
“Votre raison vous trompe, aussi bien que vos yeux,”
and
“O débile raison! où est ores ta bride,”
which hit at once the foible and the forte of the criticism of the century; but in the final sting—
“Mais, Rapin, à leur gout si les vieux sont profanes,— Si Virgile, le Tasse, et Ronsard sont des ânes— Sans perdre en ces discours les temps que nous perdons, Allons comme eux aux champs, et mangeons des chardons!”
One might write a whole essay on these wonderfully prophetic and (no doubt to the writer half-unconsciously) many-sided[304] lines. After two centuries Europe did “go to the fields”—and she found something better to eat there than thistles.
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Footnote 304:
For instance, the _yoking_ of Virgil, Tasso, and Ronsard. This Pisgah-sight of literature was what the Renaissance, and the whole neo-classic period, almost invariably failed to attain.
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For the moment, as we have seen before in other cases, the voice crying in the wilderness found only a wilderness to cry in. [Sidenote: _The contrast of the two a lasting one._] Men could not mistake the vigour and verve of Regnier’s verse, but they either disregarded his doctrine or misunderstood it. Malherbe was their music-maker then; they understood _him_.[305] In the contrast of these two we have practically a contrast which subsists to the present day, and which we do not find by any means so sharply accentuated in ancient criticism—that of the critic who looks only at the stop-watch, and of the critic who looks beyond it; of the critic of form and the critic of spirit. But the curious thing is that for the last three centuries the antagonists have behaved exactly like Hamlet and Laertes, or even like that puzzling pair in the lower circles of the _Inferno_. They take from time to time each other’s parts, each other’s weapons, and renew the contest with changed persons, or at least rapiers. At first sight it may seem as if Malherbe and, after him, Boileau were simply insisting on form and expression; as if Regnier, and those who at longer intervals have followed him, were those who say that “all depends upon the subject.” But a more accurate acquaintance with the History which is to follow will show us that this is far from being the case. Malherbe had so little opportunity of shaping, or took such little trouble to shape, his critical ideas that it is perhaps the safer way not to draw up any complete creed for him, as M. Brunot and Mr Spingarn have done. But in Boileau, as we shall see, there is a distinct attempt, which has been practically followed by all of his side since, to prescribe expression, subject, spirit, and everything—to insist not merely that the work shall be good, but that it shall be good according to sealed patterns, in choice of subject as well as in method, in method as well as in form, in form as well as in language.
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Footnote 305:
There was, however, a remnant. Even Balzac called him “Le tyran des mots et des syllabes;” even Chapelain recognised (acutely enough) the fact that his methods were rhetorical rather than poetical; even Tallemant practically summed him up, once and for all, in the words, “Il n’avait pas beaucoup de génie: la méditation et l’art l’ont fait poëte.” But the majority and the hour were with him.
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There can be very little doubt that the private discussions which, as we know from Racan, Malherbe used, for years before his death, to hold with Racan himself and others, and the letters which he also exchanged with younger men, had a very great deal to do with the wide development of criticism in the second third of the century. [Sidenote: _The diffusion of seventeenth century criticism._] The fact of this development is certain; it is vouched for by the appearance of literary subjects in the _Ana_, and in Tallemant’s _Historiettes_, by the foundation of the Academy, by the _Cid_ quarrel, practically by almost everything we know of the time that concerns literature. But we must deal, according to our wont, with the matter _par personnages_. Of such personages we have, in the first place, Vaugelas, Balzac, Ogier, and Chapelain, to whom we may join Ménage, Gui Patin, Tallemant himself, and the far greater names of Saint-Evremond and Corneille. Then we can take Boileau—at least in reputation one of the culminating points or personages of our history—and the less exclusively critical deliverances of La Bruyère, of Fénelon, and of Malebranche; can give some account of the Quarrel—tenacious of life, if scarcely vivacious—of the Ancients and Moderns; diverge to the scholastic and somewhat dismal but important performances of La Mesnardière and others, of Hédelin and Le Bossu, Rapin and Bouhours, and end by some account of the miscellaneous compilations and observations of journalists and _savants_. The matter is abundant in all conscience; it is at least sufficiently varied, and the real greatness of some at least of the persons concerned should save it from being insipid.
We may all the better pass directly from Malherbe to Vaugelas[306] because this is about the last place in this _History_ where we can give special attention to _merely_ verbal and grammatical criticism. [Sidenote: _Vaugelas._] In this Malherbe had at least the absolute, and almost admirable, courage of his opinions. On the one hand he transfers the prudery of the Ciceronians (_v. supra_, p. 12) to French, and will not allow even an analogue such as _accroît_ on the strength of _surcroît_. On the other he bars all the delightful Pléiade diminutives, likes not technical terms, is so horrified at any indelicate suggestion that his countrymen really need not have ridiculed our “sho[c]king,” and has a whole black list of “plebeian” expressions. Everything is to be “according to rule,” and the rule is to be drawn with as few exceptions as possible—and with as few inclusions.
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Footnote 306:
Those who wish for something more on this subject, without attacking Vaugelas for themselves, may be strongly recommended to the full and excellent article of M. Brunot in Petit de Julleville (vi. 674-690), one of the very best papers in the book.
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It is no wonder that Regnier opened the full broadside of his magnificent poetical rhetoric against this system; and it is only a pity that nobody less fantastic than Mlle. de Gournay—Montaigne’s _fille d’alliance_, and almost the first as almost the oddest of blue-stockings—took up the parable more practically against it. But the set of the tide, as we have said, was with him. La Mothe le Vayer, a little later, in his _Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française de ce temps_ “transacts,” though he is on the whole on the side of liberty. And _enfin Vaugelas vint_, the Savoyard[307] who was to teach France French. His famous _Remarques_ did not appear till 1647, when he was fifty-two, and only three years before his death, but the book expresses work much older.[308]
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Footnote 307:
He is often called this, but not quite fairly, for he was born in Bresse.
Footnote 308:
For other grammarian-rhetoricians of 1610-1660 see M. Brunot as above. On the _Art Poétique_ of P. de Deimier (1610), compare also Rücktaschel _ubi sup._
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Vaugelas, to do him justice, has not the “pistolling ways” of Malherbe. Usage is his standard, but, as in the old jest, the coin is no sooner in the child’s pocket than he is told not to spend it. It is _good_ usage only that you must follow; and the goodness of course is _penes nos_. It would be neither interesting nor proper here to discuss Vaugelas’ merely grammatical precepts, but it is permissible to point out that he, first of all moderns—or at any rate more than any early modern—contributed to bring about the disastrous idea that grammar exists independently, instead of being a generalisation, partly from the usage which even great writers cannot violate, partly from their own. But it is worth observing that, according to him, you must not use technical words, popular words, improper words (it is dreadful to say “breast,” for do we not talk of a “breast of mutton or veal”?), poetical words in prose, archaisms, neologisms, which last he hates more than anything else. And when he comes to style, Purity, Clearness, Sobriety, and so forth are of course his cardinal virtues.
Jean Guez de Balzac, who, in the rather idle nomenclature of traditional literary history, has usually been styled “the Malherbe of French prose,” is on the whole more important in the history of French style than in that of French criticism. [Sidenote: _Balzac._] He was not, as we have seen from the phrase quoted above, by any means an indiscriminate admirer of his correspondent—in fact, though not exactly a Gascon,[309] he was enough of a Southerner to feel nettled at the Northern arrogance which undertook _dégasconner la France_. But he was himself an ardent disciple of “purity,” and the principal objection that even posterity has made to his _Socrate Chrétien_, his _Aristippe_, his _Prince_, and most of his elaborate Letters, all of which were fanatically admired by contemporaries, is that they are scarcely more than pieces of epideictic, with very little substance in them.
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Footnote 309:
He was born in Angoulême.
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These same letters, moreover, contain numerous critical passages; while a whole division of his _Works_[310] is critical. [Sidenote: _His Letters._] The interest, however, of the most literary part of the _Letters_, those to Chapelain, as a whole, is not so much on Balzac’s side as on Chapelain’s; and the subjects of them will, at any rate in part, be best treated when we come to discuss that (in the latter part of his own lifetime and since) much-enduring writer. To Bois-Robert Balzac confides (III. 7) that he only cares for verses as he does for melons—both must be in absolute perfection if they are to please him; also that the philosopher’s stone will be found as soon as the sort of eloquence that _he_ values. The thousand pages of the _Letters_ are sprinkled with finery of this sort; but better matter is not very common. The somewhat hollow elegance which the French allow to be the chief merit of Balzac does not lend itself well to real criticism: nor, to do him justice, does he much attempt this, even to men of letters like Conrart, Heinsius, Descartes, or to Chapelain himself. Sometimes he drops into verbal criticism, as in VI. 57, where he consents to call Mlle. de Gournay herself _traductrice_ and _rhétoricienne_, but not _poétesse_ or _philosophesse_. The letter to Scudéry in reference to his attacks on _The Cid_ is very sensible and in good taste; but (as Balzac indeed generally is) much more ethical and “gentlemanly” than æsthetic (XII. 20). Even when he writes directly to Corneille (XVI. 9) about _Cinna_ he cannot get much beyond elegant generalities as to this Rome being the Rome _de Tite Live_. So that it is not surprising, when we come to the Chapelain Letters themselves (of which, besides a few stray ones earlier, there are six entire Books, XVII.-XXII.) that although most of them touch literature, and many contain critical remarks or judgments,[311] there is little of much interest. Only now and then do we come across such a refreshment as: “Why, sir, what prodigy do you tell me of? Is it possible that any one with a drop of common-sense in him can prefer the Spanish poets to the Italians? and take the visions of a certain Lope de Vega for reasonable compositions?” (XX. 127). His remarks on Ronsard and Malherbe, “the Martyr and the Tyrant” (XXII. 20), are fair, and with room one might extend the anthology. But on the whole, though Balzac was a very handsome letter-writer, and could, and did, give all the Frank Churchills of Europe lessons in that art, he was not very much of a critic.
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Footnote 310:
Pp. 509-689 of the second of two stately folios (Paris, 1665). The _Letters_ are in the first.
Footnote 311:
Balzac himself rather mincingly deprecates this word. “Je ne donne” he says to Chapelain (XX. 25) “jamais de jugement; mais je dis quelquefois mon avis.”
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His set Critical Dissertations quite confirm this verdict. [Sidenote: _His Critical Dissertations._] He opens them with a great deal about Discipline, _Justesse_, _Bienséance_, the Mean, and the like. He tells us (vol. ii. p. 537) that any one who likes Ariosto would prefer a Siren to a beautiful woman—the answer to which challenge may be justly suspended by the true critic till he has a Siren produced before him. There might be much to be said for her. He has some not unpleasant remarks on the obligatory subject of the great sonnet-duel between Voiture’s “Uranie” and Benserade’s “Job”: but he has not, so far as I remember, discovered the critical truth that their beauty lies in the singular charm of the _first_ line of the one and the _last_ of the other. He is in one place (ii. 597) almost savage with Montaigne, of whom he says that, though he be adopted father to Mlle. de Gournay, esteemed by Father Paul, and “_allégué par le Chancelier Baccon_” (_sic_), he can see nothing in his Essays but equivoques and mistakes of judgment. This, however, is said chiefly in reference to Montaigne’s Latinity and knowledge of Latin: and elsewhere (pp. 657-662) there is a set judgment much more favourable, though still smacking of the double prejudice against a prophet of his own country and a man of the last generation. But his Dissertation on or against the Burlesque[312] style, when one remembers the excesses in which, from Scarron down to Dassoucy, men were about to indulge, is not contemptible: and there are amusing things in his _Barbon_, a sort of elaborate Theophrastian portrait of a young pedant, from which Scriblerus may have borrowed.
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Footnote 312:
With this it is interesting to compare the disquisition written to Balzac, and apparently at his request, _De Ludicra Dictione_ (opening his _Opera_, fol., Amst., 1709) by François Vavasseur, a Jesuit Professor, who also wrote not a bad book on _Epigrams_ and some other literary work, besides sermons and theological treatises. Vavasseur is at once refreshingly logical and audacious. The Greeks (he is bold enough even to face the retort of “Aristophanes”?) did not use _ludicra dictio_ or burlesque language. Nor did the Romans: for Lucilius _desideratur_ (scarcely so much as to warrant the conclusion to those who know the fragments well), and as for Petronius and Apuleius, decent people never mention _them_. Secondly, the ancient critics give no precepts for it. Thirdly, there is no reason for using it. Fourthly, there are many reasons for _not_ using it. So that is settled. One may like Vavasseur.
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Vaugelas, as we have seen, did not finally elaborate his work till some twenty years after Malherbe’s death, and Balzac, though a correspondent of the Norman poet, outlived him by more than a quarter of a century. [Sidenote: _Ogier and the Preface to_ Tyr et Sidon.] But in the very year (1628) of that death appeared a document on the other side, and taking that side in flank at the point where it was, with the majority, to be most victorious. This was the _Preface_ of François Ogier to the second edition of the _Tyr et Sidon_ of Daniel d’Anchères, or rather (for this is a mere anagram) Jean de Schélandre.[313] The play is almost the only worthy representative, in French, of that English-Spanish drama which set the Unities at defiance;[314] the Preface, written twenty years after the first appearance of the play, but seven before the author’s death, is a brief but extraordinarily remarkable vindication, in principle, of Schélandre’s practice. Until M. Asselineau, in 1854, published an article on the subject, and the _Bibliothèque Elzévirienne_, two years later, included both play and preface in the eighth volume of the invaluable _Ancien Théâtre Français_, both were practically unknown. Even then notice of them was for a long time confined to literary historians; and of late an attempt has been made to put the _Preface_ aside as the mere freak of a student, in opposition to the taste of the time and the necessities of the stage. That the general course of literature in France followed for a time the line which Ogier argued against, and to which Schélandre ran counter, is perfectly true. But this is quite indifferent (except as a matter to be registered) to history, which knows perfectly well that Athanasius and his world are always changing places and principles. Moreover, it is quite a mistake to think that Ogier writes merely from the study, and with no consideration of the stage. Like Cinthio, like Patrizzi, like Castelvetro himself, he is no mere study-theorist. On the contrary he carries the war into the enemy’s camp with a refreshing audacity and no small force. It is the _classical_ arrangement, he says, which _offense le judicieux spectateur_, with its improbable and unnatural coincidences and tallyings. How, he asks, in a passage interesting to compare with Sidney’s satirical description of the opposite style, do the identifying rings, the shepherd-fosterers, the good old nurses, always turn up _comme par art de magie_ exactly at the right moment? How is it that Creon, and the old attendant of Laius, and the Corinthian who picked Œdipus up, all rendezvous at Athens in the nick of time? Is verisimilitude observed even in the _Agamemnon_? Is there anything dramatic at all—anything more than sheer narration—in the _Persæ_? Can the extreme defenders of the Unity of Time work out the _Antigone_ on their lines? or the _Heautontimoroumenos_? Then he proceeds to account (not at all badly) for the practice of the ancients, and then to revert to the only sound argument—that of Cinthio and Pigna in the matter of the _Romanzi_, of Il Lasca in reference to Italian comedy—that Athens and Rome, and the lives and customs of both, are _not_ modern countries and their lives and customs, that the practice of the one can give no final and prohibitive rule to the practice of the other.[315]
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Footnote 313:
Some authorities give _this_ as the anagram, the other as the name. But it does not in the least matter.
Footnote 314:
The Pleiad tragedies (_v. supra_, p. 127) had been Senecan, but not quite “regular”; and though Hardy broke loose from Time and Place, it was not always very violently.
Footnote 315:
Ogier, like his Italian predecessors, is firm on the pleasure-giving quality of dramatic art. His manner is well illustrated by his remark that the constant arrival of messengers is more suitable to a good inn than to a good tragedy. One wonders whether he knew the Spaniards (_v. inf._ ch. 2).
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We are not in the least concerned to argue for this Preface. It is enough to point out its bold and independent spirit, and to lay special stress on the fact that Ogier fully admits that he is defending, if not a heresy, an orthodoxy which is not popular, offers to explain “pourquoi nous nous sommes jetez à quartier du chemin ordinaire,” speaks of the Unity of Time as “cette règle que nos critiques veulent nous faire garder si religieusement à cette heure,” indirectly condemns the Unity of Place in his arguments, and vindicates the full tragi-comic blending of Actions. Now, this was in 1628, eight years before the _Cid_ and the _Sentiments de l’Académie_, even a year before Mairet’s _Sophonisbe_ earned the reputation of being the first French piece that was absolutely “correct.” This is of itself enough to show how erroneous is the idea, once common and still repeated, that the discussion over the _Cid_, with Scudéry for mover, was in the nature of a surprise, and that Chapelain, if he most certainly did not invent the Unities, introduced them into France.
Although M. Bourgoin, and one or two others, have done something of late years to relieve Chapelain himself of the weight—not so much of obloquy as of contemptuous ignoring—which rested on him for nearly two centuries, even they have for the most part lain under that curious fear of Boileau which we shall have to notice so often. [Sidenote: _Chapelain: the hopelessness of his verse._] Sainte-Beuve (who knew his French seventeenth century as no other man ever has known, or probably ever will know it, and who had in his own possession the _MS._ Letters which do Chapelain not a little credit) takes a kind of apologetic tone on the subject, and seems never to have made up his mind to treat Chapelain as a whole. It is, indeed, only on the prose side that he can be approached without fear of disaster. There are good things even in the _Pucelle_, but they are ill to win. You may read Le Moyne, Desmarets, Saint-Amant, not without satisfaction of the true poetic sort, especially in the first case. I think I once got through some part of Scudéry’s _Alaric_. But the _Pucelle_ has a double touch-me-not-ishness—of _niaiserie_, and of what Boileau (for once justly) calls “hardness”; there is something really impregnable about her. And the minor pieces—fine as is the Richelieu Ode in parts—hardly save their captainess.
Chapelain as a critic is quite another person. He still writes somewhat heavily: and (among his other faithfulnesses to the Pléiade[316]) goes in the teeth of Malherbe and Vaugelas by his use of classicised words. [Sidenote: _The interest of his criticism._] But he almost deserves the name of the first properly equipped critic of France in point of knowledge: and (shocking as the statement may appear) I am not sure that he was not the last, till almost within the memory of an aged man. Not only did he know Italian literature thoroughly—that was not in his time uncommon for Frenchmen—and Spanish—that also was not far to seek—but he was accurately drilled in the theory and practice of Italian criticism. He is constantly referring to it in his correspondence with Balzac; he (that is to say, the transparently identical author of the main part at least of the Censure of the _Cid_) not merely rests his objections on these critics, but refers to the controversies over the _Gerusalemme_ and the _Pastor Fido_, as he does elsewhere to that between Castelvetro and Caro. Above all, he, almost alone of his time, knew old French literature. It has not been noticed, I think, either by M. Feillet, who published, or by M. Bourgoin, who discusses, his most interesting and remarkable dialogue, _Sur la Lecture des Vieux Romans_, that his devotion to _Lancelot_ was almost certainly one of his debts to Ronsard. For the Prince of Poets, as we saw, expressly enjoined the reading of _Lancelot_ and the other romances in order to enrich the vocabulary.
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Footnote 316:
His mother was deeply devoted to this school, and had in her youth known Ronsard personally. The gibing part of the anecdote about the author of the _Pucelle_ being “bred a poet” was never very funny, and is now more than very stale. The historical part remains and flourishes.
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The blot on Chapelain’s critical record in the general estimation is, of course, his[317] Censure of the _Cid_ above referred to. [Sidenote: _The_ Sentiments de l’Académie sur le Cid.] Even those who admit that critical like other thought is free, and that a critic is not to be sentenced to Malebolge because he is unfortunate enough not to like the great work of a great man, must acknowledge a certain striking poetical justice in the spectacle of the censor of the _Cid_, for want of correctness, being pitilessly flogged thirty years later by a correcter than he. Nor, nowadays, do we admit much excuse in the undoubted fact that this censure was practically forced on the Academy, and on Chapelain, by the sordid jealousy of Richelieu.
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Footnote 317:
It is formally the Academy’s and not his. But there is no real doubt that nearly all of it expresses his sentiments, and that much of it is actually his in language. The whole history of the _Cid_ dispute is minute and complicated, and may be found in many books. The persons chiefly responsible for it, besides Richelieu and Chapelain, were Georges de Scudéry, an eccentric failure of a genius, Mairet, a playwright of talent, and Claveret, one of none. In all cases, it is to be feared, the extraordinary success of the piece was the exciting cause.
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But even in this censure it is possible, even for one who frankly puts Corneille at the head of all French Tragedy, to acknowledge some critical merits. The first (not perhaps quite the least) of these is that it is strictly _civil_; the second is that, meticulous, purblind, peddling, prudish—a score of similar epithets if you please—as it is, it does adopt an intelligible code of critical judgment, and does apply that code with legal propriety. Moreover, as we have seen, it is quite a mistake to represent this code as being invented for the occasion—suddenly foisted upon France to gratify the envy of Scudéry and Mairet, or the less excusable malignity of Richelieu. The code had been growing for more than a century; it had been gaining wider and wider acquiescence every day; the protests against it, however gallantly made, had fallen practically unheard. Eight years before we have Ogier explicitly admitting it as the code of _nos critiques_—as the accepted opinion. We may be fully entitled—some of us intend, for us and for our house, to do so, whether entitled or not—to hold the Unities things vainly invented in two cases, and mischievous, if exclusively and universally enforced, in the third.[318] We may think the objections to Corneille’s diction hypercritical, and the objection to Chimène’s conduct utterly absurd.[319] But Chapelain, and those about Chapelain, were also quite entitled to think differently, and there is no reason to believe their opinion feigned, though they might not have put it so forcibly save to curry favour with the Cardinal. After all, Corneille hardly disputed their verdict except in detail; and, whether luckily or unluckily, tried to do as they told him afterwards.
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Footnote 318:
Of course there is much to be said for them, rightly understood, from the point of view of mere _theatrical_ arrangement: while mediocre writers are more safely to be trusted with than without them. But we are speaking of _literature_, not the theatre; and in literature the weak brother is rather a nuisance to be extirpated, than a person to be provided for, or conceded to.
Footnote 319:
M. Jules Lemaître’s article on the subject in Petit de Julleville (iv. 273 _sq._) most ingenuously cites the virtuous authority of M. Dumas _fils_ in support of Chapelain, and is not far from opining in the same sense. It is always difficult for a Frenchman to pardon an honest love. If Chimène had been married and Rodrigue her gallant, it would have been quite different. She might have overlooked the blood of 20,000 fathers.
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Chapelain’s other critical exercises are numerous: they are quite interesting, and there ought to be some accessible collection of them, for at present they have to be hunted up in half-a-dozen different books or collections, some of them very hard to get at. [Sidenote: _Prefaces._] It is probable, though disputed, that he wrote the Introduction to a translation of _Guzman d’Alfarache_, which may have been done in his twentieth year, and in which the author (according to the Pléiade view) by no means magnifies his office as translator. He certainly wrote, some years later, the prefatory panegyric to Marini’s _Adone_, where he practises, in a fashion familiar to students of Italian criticism, an elaborate scholastic division of kinds and qualities, with definitions and connections of them. [Sidenote: Sur les Vieux Romans.] We need not trouble ourselves with his Academic discourse, against Love and for Glory, which is full of _précieuse_ personification, but pass to his most interesting works, the _Dialogue on the Romances_ and the critical _Letters_. In the first[320] he maintains the case of the Arthurian romances against Ménage and Sarrasin, not with a thorough-going championship (that would be wholly anachronistic), but with singular sense, knowledge, and even, as far as it goes, appreciation. He does not affect to admire the composition or the style in _Lancelot_. But he knows something of the origin (it is extraordinary that he allows it to be, in part at least, English). He will not allow that, barring style and expression, there is any necessary gulf between _Lancelot_ and Homer (wherein he is a hundred years ahead in sense of Blair, who was a hundred years ahead of him in time), delights (taught to do so, as we said, by Ronsard) in the vocabulary, and feels and rejoices in the point of honour (“la crainte perpetuelle qu’ils ont de rien faire et de rien dire dont leur reputation puisse souffrir la moindre tache”),[321] their jealousy of their word, their devotion (so different from “our _galanterie_”) to their ladies. _Quia multum amavit!_ Moreover, the document is connected in a rather fascinating manner with another,[322] in which the same interlocutors, with others, appear, which refers to it, and in which not only does Sarrasin confess that he had been brought by Chapelain to a state of mind different from that which is to be seen in his _Discours_ noticed below, but Chapelain himself reinforces his argument with a long citation from, and discussion of, an episode in _Perceforest_—that huge and interesting romance which is almost inaccessible to modern readers, in consequence of the depraved persistence of modern scholars and Societies in reprinting the same text in idle emulation of each other, instead of giving what are practically _anecdota_.
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Footnote 320:
_De la lecture des Vieux Romans_, ed. Feillet, Paris, 1870. Unfortunately printed in very small numbers, but still obtainable for less than half its weight in silver.
Footnote 321:
It is really refreshing to find Mr. Burke saying ditto to M. Chapelain some 150 years afterwards, in a sentence as well known to all the world as that in the text is unknown to all but a few.
Footnote 322:
_S’il faut qu’un Jeune Homme soit Amoureux._ Sarrasin, _Œuvres_, _ed. cit. inf._, 139-235.
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The Letters (published, with some omissions, by M. Tamizey de la Roque in 1880, and supplemented fourteen years later by some more in the Transactions of a learned Society[323]) are crammed with references to books, and contain not a little real criticism. [Sidenote: _Letters, &c._] And lastly, the famous list[324] of characterisations of French men of letters which Chapelain drew up for Colbert’s use in allotting pensions, though it has been laughed at in parts, is for its date (some of its subjects, including Molière, had not yet done anything like their best work) as sound, as sensible, and, at the same time, as benevolent a hand-list of the kind as you shall discover in the records of the centuries.
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Footnote 323:
_Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire_, vol. xxi., Paris, 1894.
Footnote 324:
This, with other things, will be found in Chapelain’s _Mélanges de Littérature_ (Paris, 1726).
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On the whole we may say that Chapelain only wanted the proverbial “That!” to make a good and perhaps a really great critic. Not all, though a good deal, of the deficiency must be put down to the transition character of time, taste, literary diction, and everything, in midst of which he found himself. The point of critical genius, the ability to grasp and focus and methodise, must have been wanting too. But he had knowledge, both of literature and of criticism; he had obviously catholic, if not unerring, sympathies; he had acuteness and penetration, if not quite combination and the architectonic; and he was entirely free from that ill-nature which, while it may seem to assist the critic, really disables him. _Critique manqué_, perhaps, on the whole; but still on his day a critic and no mean one.
“Il faut observer l’Unité d’action, de lieu et de jour. Personne n’en doute.” But, out of France at least, and perhaps in it, it is possible that few people may know, or even doubt, whence this saying comes. [Sidenote: _Corneille._] It would be an insult to a Frenchman of letters to tell him that it comes from Pierre Corneille; long, it is true, after the debate over the _Cid_, but nearly a quarter of a century before the close of his glorious, if not too happy, life. It may be gathered—rather from a long and large induction than from any single utterance of a person of importance—that the French do not think very much of Corneille as a critic; it may be further gathered from this that a man should never submit his genius. _Tu contra audentior ito_ is the counsel of wisdom. He has written much the best things that have been written in favour of the “correct” theory; but its partisans (and small blame to them) suspect him. They see the eyes of Chimène behind the mask, and they distrust them—wisely also after their kind.
But we must not rhapsodise here on the admirable poetry of this great poet, and the way in which the critics not merely, as somebody said in his own day, _ont tari sa veine_, but made him in a way false to it. We have only to do with his actual criticism; and whatever view we take of the general question, it must be here pronounced great criticism of its kind. The three _Discours_, and the series of _Examens_ which appeared first in 1660, present an almost unique, an extremely touching, and (to men of English birth) a rather incomprehensible instance of a man of supreme genius crouching and curbing himself to obey the tendency of the time and the dictates of “the wits.”[325] _We_ are not kneaded of this dough. We cannot even conceive Shakespeare taking a copy of Sidney or going to Ben, and afterwards constructing dramas as regularly as he could, or apologising for their irregularity; Milton adjusting _Paradise Lost_ to Dryden’s views of rhyme; nay, even Dryden himself (who is in some ways, as we shall see, very close to Corneille) “looking first at the stop-watch” in any way. But “things are as they are,” and (a great saying from which sometimes the wrong inference has been drawn) “their consequences will be what they will be.”
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Footnote 325:
Tennyson paid almost greater heed to his critics in detail; but he never made any formal or general concession.
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The three Discourses, “De l’Utilité et des parties du Poëme Dramatique,” “De la Tragédie,” and “Des Trois Unités,” and the _Examens_ of the different plays, are the result of this submission.[326] [Sidenote: _The Three_ Discourses.] Let us say at once that it is in no sense the mere submission of a man who recants, either with tongue in cheek or simply under fear of rack and gallows and fire. Corneille (and this is the interesting point of the French temperament as contrasted with the English) is really affected by authority, and by the _Zeitgeist_. He has been honestly converted; indeed he asserts (and we may believe him to a great extent) that he never needed conversion—it was only his green unknowing age that made him go wrong. In the three Discourses he examines the question with plentiful quotations from Aristotle, with some knowledge of Italians like Castelvetro and Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius. He is quite aware of the weak points of the ancients; he repeats, though he does not much dwell upon, the earlier comments on the singular rapidity with which Agamemnon[327] follows the beacon-fires, the astonishing patness of the turning up of the Corinthian in the _Œdipus_. And to any one who thinks little of Corneille as a critic I should like to prescribe the reading, marking, and inwardly digesting of his remarks in the _Discours des Trois Unités_ on the separation of acts and scenes, and the relation of the chorus to orchestral interludes. Elsewhere we may find the mark of the chain: as where the poet, pretending indifference, is evidently rather unhappy because he cannot tell exactly what the wicked Queen in _Rodogune_ (which some have thought his best play next to the _Cid_) was doing when she was not on the stage. This inquiry is of itself almost sufficient to show the sheer idiocy to which this kind of criticism is always on the point of descending. But on the whole, and since Giant Unity has long ceased even to gnash at the pilgrims, we can tolerate it.
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Footnote 326:
They will be found in all good editions. I always use the best, that of M. Marty-Laveaux, where the _Discours_ appear conveniently, if chronologically out of place, in Vol. I, and the _Examens_, each at the head of its own play.
Footnote 327:
Let me, for one has always to guard these things, observe that no charge is here brought against the _Agamemnon_, which is perhaps the greatest tragedy in the world out of Shakespeare, and almost worthy to be ranked with Shakespeare’s best. It is of the folly of the commentators that Corneille was, and that I (_quam longo intervallo post Cornelium!_) am thinking.
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The _Examens_ are of still greater importance; for we have had plenty of inquiries in general into the qualities and requirements of Kinds, though few from persons like Corneille. [Sidenote: _The_ Examens.] The system of elaborate critical reviews—for that is what it comes to—of his past work, by a great poet who has taken pains to acquaint himself with critical method, and is almost too respectful of its utterances, is practically a new one. There is a certain flavour of it in Spenser and Ronsard, much more than a flavour in Tasso; but it was not till the seventeenth century, when the critic was abroad in earnest, that it could be done on such a scale as this. For Corneille, though he never issued any _Examens_ till 1660, applied them to all but his very latest plays. To the mere general reader they may be rendered distasteful by the elaborate and most pathetic pains which Corneille takes to adjust himself to the theories which his reason docilely accepted, but to which his faith was always secretly recalcitrant. To the student of him, and to the student of criticism, they must always have a great attraction.
But for the latter, if he have but a little of the “rascally comparative” spirit, they have an attraction greater still. There is no doubt at all that they served as pattern, at a very brief interval, to the critical exercises of Dryden, and thereby opened a way which criticism is treading still. And there is more in them besides this accidental and extrinsic attraction. Corneille, though he really shows extraordinary impartiality as well as great acumen in his examinations, was by the mere force of nature driven to stick close to his actual work, to observe it narrowly, if only so as to put the best face on it. And, as we have seen, the great fault both of ancient and of mediæval criticism was the omission or the refusal to consider individual works of art minutely and exactly—the constant breaking off and escape to the type. The natural partiality of authors for their own work has not always been fortunate in its results. Here it was so.
Although we have had, and shall have, to question the exact importance assigned by some to the _Cid_ quarrel, there can be no doubt that it had a very important influence, extending far beyond the chief parties concerned, and helping, very particularly, that popularisation of criticism which is undoubtedly the work of France in general, and of the French Academy in particular. [Sidenote: _La Mesnardière—Sarrasin—Scudéry._] In the years almost immediately succeeding it we have, for 1639, the _Discours de la Tragédie_ of the ingenious and ill-fated Sarrasin, for 1640 the formal _Art Poétique_ of La Mesnardière, a treatise specially dealing with tragedy, strongly, almost idolatrously, Aristotelian in tone, and characterised by a lively polemic against the Spanish and Italian influences which had been so powerful for a generation in France. Scudéry followed up the pamphlets which had actually given occasion to the _Cid_ dispute, almost at the same period, with the Preface to _Ibrahim_, as well as years afterwards in that to _Alaric_. Nay, it was at this very time (about 1640) that the world was at least threatened with the birth of the dullest critical treatise of the century, that of Hédelin, though a respite of seventeen years was actually granted.
La Mesnardière had evidently made a careful study of the Italian critics. His very _format_—a handsome small quarto—reminds one of their favourite shape, and contrasts curiously with the tiny duodecimos of the sixteenth-century French critics. And he puts forth his whole strength in arguing for the Stagirite against the blasphemies of Castelvetro, whom, however, he declares that he honours _hors des intérêts d’Aristote_—an odd, but very characteristic, way of putting it. La Mesnardière, who follows out all the Aristotelian divisions, even to Music (with engraved airs), is equally odd and equally representative in identifying, or at least associating in his first Chapter, _Politesse_ with “Imagination.” Mere Understanding will make a Philosopher—the Poet must be polished up into an Imaginative condition. He does not neglect language and diction: and though he devotes himself to drama, illustrates copiously from non-dramatic poetry, and criticises his illustrations in the way which was becoming so common and is so important. But a specimen passage in a footnote[328] will explain, better than pages of discussion, the fatally parasitic character of most of his criticism.
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Footnote 328:
_Art Poét._, p. 233. “Si toutefois la Fable est telle que le Poëte n’ait pas lieu d’y recompenser la Vertu, il doit pour le moins faire en sorte que les Personnes vertueuses soient louées publiquement.”
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The Sarrasin and Scudéry documents are complementary as well as complimentary of this and of each other. For Sarrasin’s _Discours_[329] is devoted to Scudéry’s _Amour Tyrannique_, which is so perfect that Aristotle would have put it in the _Poetics_, instead of or beside the _Œdipus_, if he had only known it. And La Mesnardière is just going (see dates given) to write “divinely” on that art of poetry which those great men, Ronsard and Du Bellay, did not know, and therefore recommended the study of Romances.[330] Finally, “Armand” [Richelieu, of course] is _le Dieu tutélaire des lettres_. As for the great Georges de Scudéry himself, his Prefaces to _Ibrahim_ and _Alaric_ are quite worthy of the “Commander of the Fort of Notre Dame de La Garde and Kept-Captain to the King,” whose portrait guards the entrance of the stately folio of _Alaric_. That is to say, they are an odd mixture of bombast (he leads off that to this book with a list of critics and poets, all of whom he has read), crotchet, and real wits. Both are worth comparing with Davenant’s to _Gondibert_ (_v. infra_, p. 367), which came between them.[331]
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Footnote 329:
In his _Œuvres_ (Paris, 1694), pp. 301-344.
Footnote 330:
This is very interesting in connection with Sarrasin’s appearance in Chapelain’s dialogue and his own other work (_v. supra_, p. 260).
Footnote 331:
Scudéry thinks Four things necessary to Epic—the authority of History, the observance of received Religion, the exercise of Poetic Licence in Fiction, and the provision of Great Events. He is not uninteresting for his connection with his sister’s prose Romances in which he had some, if not much, share, and which he never forgets. Also, he clings to the Pléiade technicalities to some extent—kindly, however, explaining such words as _Hune_, _Quille_ (which, he says rather quaintly, is _un bois courbé qui est au plus bas d’un vaisseau_), and _Calfater_. The _Ibrahim_ preface, thirteen years earlier, exhibits the same obliging explanation of technicalities, and the same virtuous adherence to The Rules. “Provided,” he says, “that an Architect takes his measures right, he is assured of the beauty of his building,” which would seem to dissuade any one from advancing beyond the packing-case style of architecture. And he is sure that a Romance, like an Epic, should never go beyond one year in time.
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Some years later the uncompromising Aristotelianism of La Mesnardière as to the Drama was continued and straitened yet further, in reference to the Epic, by Pierre Mambrun,[332] who was, like so many others of these French seventeenth-century critics, a Jesuit. [Sidenote: _Mambrun._] His principles (which he illustrated later by a _Constantinus sive De Idolatria debellata_) exhibit the French detestation of compromise in the most agreeable light: whether his practice does not also illustrate the non-epic character of the French head is another matter. Aristotle, and the whole Aristotle, so far as the _Poetics_ go, is Mambrun’s motto; if he cannot add “nothing but Aristotle,” that is merely because his text is admittedly meagre as to Epic. But he does what he can. He has read Scaliger and Voss, and has a proper respect for them as learned men, but he is shocked at both for their worshipping of idols—at Scaliger for wasting time on diction and metre, as well as for falling foul of Homer, at Voss for making the persons instead of the action the centre of Epic. On the other hand, the too famous Petronian passage is to him a kind of inspired postscript to the _Poetics_. In his handling of Poetry, which for him is first of all Epic Poetry, he is scholastic as to the frame. The Material cause is Action; the Formal cause the Fable; the Efficient cause a combination of Prudentia and Furor Poeticus; the Final Cause _not_ pleasure but the making of statesmen. In all these respects Homer and Virgil are perfect—Statius, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, sinners. The former always observe the Unity, the Integrity, the Magnitude of the Action. Mambrun has satisfied himself that the Action of the _Odyssey_ only includes fifty-five days—on which principle one would cheerfully undertake to write an _Arthuriad_, to include the whole of Malory and more, on an “action” of the time between Agravaine’s detection of Lancelot with the Queen and the last fight in Lyonnesse. He thinks that a woman may be a heroine of tragedy but cannot be of Epic (which seems unkind to Chapelain). He admits that to distinguish between the Action and the Fable is not easy; that even in Aristotle the two are sometimes identical. But properly the Fable is _actio culta et ornata_, and he has an ingenious receipt for stripping the matter of episodes and names. Epic is not Art, not Logic, not History; it is “Prudentia.” But _Furor Poeticus_? Mambrun’s section of _Furor Poeticus_ is by far the most interesting in his book. He distinguishes first the Kinds of Fury. Then he points out that the Epic Poet must not be furious in constituting his fable. Very much the reverse. “But in episodes and descriptions and speeches I shall not deny that a little fury may be sprinkled in”[333]—the fury-dredger, or poetic cruet, being thus authoritatively established as an implement of the Bard. Nor does he conceal the process. The poet thinks very hard about an episode, a description, &c. Then the black bile warms itself, flies up, inflames the brain, and the poet is poetically furious. But in another memorable passage, “being strong in black bile will not necessarily make you a poet.”[334] [Alas! it will not.] There must be discipline, &c. In short, the book is a precious one.
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Footnote 332:
_De Poemate Epico._ Paris, 4to, 1652.
Footnote 333:
_Aliquantum furoris aspergi non negaverim._—_De Poem. Ep._, p. 269.
Footnote 334:
_Neque, tamen si quis atra polleat bile ... continuo is in poetis censendus est, nisi accesserit disciplina_, &c.—Ibid., _post_.
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There are few critics—not such by profession, and not precisely of the very highest rank—who, from the very first, and with an unbroken record, have enjoyed such a reputation as has been constantly maintained by Saint-Evremond.[335] [Sidenote: _Saint-Evremond._] Nor is there, perhaps, a single one who has better deserved this constancy on the part of the great inconstants, Time and Fortune. He was commended to his own time scarcely more by birth and station as a fine gentleman and soldier, or by his singular political and personal history, than by the admirable quality of his writing; to the eighteenth century by his touches of scepticism and libertinage; to the Romantic revival by his championship of Corneille against Racine, and by the _frondeur_ spirit which made him resist the tyranny of the classical creed. But it is also true that he has purely critical qualities of a very uncommon kind. It is perhaps a testimony to that spice of universal in him which has been noticed, that the particular stamp to be put on these qualities—the particular class to which Saint-Evremond is to be referred—is not quite matter of agreement among those who fully agree as to his general merits. To M. Bourgoin, for instance, his critical spirit seems to be nearer to that of Boileau and the critics of rule than to that of Fénelon, or even La Bruyère, and the critics of impression and _sens propre_. To me the approximation seems to be in the other direction.
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Footnote 335:
There is no absolutely complete and authentic edition—that of Desmaiseaux (frequently reprinted in the fifty years after the author’s death, from 3 vols. 4to at London, 1705, to 12 vols. 12mo at Paris, 1753) was at least authorised. The critical matter will be found well arranged in the 2nd vol. of Giraud’s _Œuvres Mêlées de Saint-E._ (3 vols., Paris, 1865). I may refer to an essay of mine, first published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for July 1879, and reprinted in _Miscellaneous Essays_ (2nd ed., London, 1895).
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The acute and learned author of _Les Maîtres de la Critique_ has, I think, been a little deceived by superficial characteristics of form and method. [Sidenote: _His critical quality and accomplishment._] A young man of twenty at the date of the _Cid_, and the battle over it, Saint-Evremond, fine gentleman as he was, no more forgot the forms of the quarrel than the attractions of the play. He has something a little scholastic, something of the earlier century, in his manner. Perhaps the best piece of criticism which he has left us—the _Dissertation sur le mot “vaste”_—recalls the known or alleged subjects of the earlier conversations of Malherbe and Racan, and their fellows, the later of Vaugelas and Chapelain and the young Academy. We have a formal _Jugement sur Senèque, Plutarque, et Pétrone_, a quite academic study of _Alexandre le Grand_, discussions of the character of tragedy generally, and the like. But the accomplished, agile, and independent spirit of the author is perpetually escaping from the restraints of his forms and models, and taking its own way according to its own taste. Perhaps, indeed, the fatal equivocation or ambiguity which seems to beset so many critical terms has worked here also: for to the present day the word “Taste” seems to excite quite dissimilar ideas in different minds. To some (as to Boileau and his followers it certainly did) it seems to suggest an antecedent law, a bar to which subjects are to be brought, something to which it is almost improper to apply the terms “good” or “bad,” because there is only one taste, and anything else is not taste at all but _un_taste. In this sense, though he might not have allowed it, I do not think that Saint-Evremond ever judged by “taste.” In the other—where taste means the approbation and satisfaction of a competent judge, well-gifted, well-tried, and taking pains to keep his palate clean—I think he always judged by it. That he often gave reasons for his judgment is nothing; one should _almost_ always do that. But one should always also remember that these reasons may be totally inapplicable to the next instance.
Saint-Evremond, we have said, was a great admirer of Corneille, and a steady champion of him against Racine. His admiration has been set down to the mere “fallacy of first love,” as we may call it—the fact that the youth of the poet and the youth of the critic had coincided. [Sidenote: _His views on Corneille._] This is not fair. Inviolable constancy to first loves is not precisely the chief thing in an Epicurean temperament. Saint-Evremond, in his various utterances on the subject, makes it perfectly clear _why_ he preferred the older to the younger poet; and Cornelians and Racinians alike must agree that, whether his conclusions were right or wrong, his considerations were at any rate genuine and adequate. The variety and vigour of the one as opposed to the somewhat monotonous mould and soft (or, as some said, “creeping”) sentiment of the other, form a real difference: and so throughout.
On what was then a burning subject—one which cannot be said to have been quite put out, though its ashes only smoulder—the suitableness of religious and especially Christian subjects for epic and drama, &c., Saint-Evremond’s opinion is a little tainted by his undoubted “philosophy,” to use the word which had already become fashionable for the various shades of unbelief. [Sidenote: _On Christian subjects, &c._] But either from this cause, or from a general critical spirit, he escapes the inconsistency (in which Boileau for instance is entangled) of contending that the _deorum ministeria_ are capital things in ancient, and very bad things in modern, poetry. His remarks on the theory of Purgation are a little irreverent but by no means irrational; and he makes strong play for the contention (of which, if he did not invent it, he was one of the strongest and most original champions) that “Admiration is a tragic passion” worthy of being seated beside Pity and Terror, and necessary to be kept in sight even when we deal with Love.
In respect of the Ancient and Modern dispute—of all three stages of which, _v. infra_, his long life made him a contemporary, while he actually took a sort of skirmishing part in the two earlier—his position is distinctly that of a true critic. [Sidenote: _On Ancients and Moderns._] From what has been said already it will be clear that he could not be an out-and-out Ancient; but he is as little a Modern of the Perrault type. One sees that the Moderns gave him most pleasure, and in the Ancients whom he really likes, such as Petronius (supposing no merely unworthy motives to have entered into the preference), it is easy to discern the modern element. But in neither case does he “like grossly” and in the lump; he has his reasons and his affinities, and can state both easily. He is even not very far from that “horizontal” view of literature, without deceptive foreshortenings and distances, which is, up to his time, so rare. Nothing is more striking than his remarks on English literature—at least the English drama. Perhaps he did not himself know much English; and something of the kind seems to be insinuated in Dryden’s remarks[336] on the matter, though Dryden was naturally hurt at the selection of Shadwell for commendation. But if so he apprehended what Waller and others said to him about Ben Jonson’s comedy with almost miraculous divination, and reflects in his account of our tragedy rather less than the current mistakes on the subject among Englishmen of the Restoration period themselves. And here also, as in his remarks on Spanish and Italian, is noticeable this same horizontal and comparative spirit.
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Footnote 336:
_V. inf._, p. 385 note.
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On his treatment of Opera I may be permitted to repeat what I wrote more than twenty years ago, that it really contains the substance of everything that has been said since on the literary side of the matter. As for the “Vaste” dissertation the best thing to say is _Tolle, lege_. I do not think it possible to have a better example of that rarest of things, literary philology, in the true and not the distorted sense of the substantive. The Academy opined—in fact had opined already (whence much of the salt of the piece)—against Saint-Evremond. But his Dissertation is, like all his criticism more or less, a really extraordinary example of the combination of all that was best in the French academic spirit with freedom from most of its faults. This union of freedom and delicacy, of precision and independent play, is Saint-Evremond’s glory as a critic, and it distinguishes him, not merely from Boileau, but from most others between 1660 and 1800. Addison had (and no doubt directly borrowed) something of the same touch; Fénelon, in a different spirit, had a great deal: we shall find something of it in Gravina. But it is very rare in the period, and it is precisely the absence of it as a “compensation balance” which vitiates neo-classic criticism as a whole.
It is common, if not universal, to glance at the redoubtable and satiric doctor, Gui Patin, as at least an outlier among French seventeenth-century critics; but the reader who, as Matthew Arnold says, “wants criticism” will not find much of it in his very amusing _Letters_.[337] [Sidenote: _Gui Patin—his judgment of Browne._] An _English_ reader may be specially disappointed because he is most likely to know the surprising, the repeated, the, to all appearance, fully genuine, and the very felicitous remarks[338] of Patin on the _Religio Medici_. A Frenchman who can appreciate Browne, who can see in the _Religio_ a book not merely _tout gentil et curieux_ but _fort délicat et tout mystique_, who can perceive its _étranges et ravissantes pensées_, who can pronounce _il n’y a guère encore de livre de la sorte_ (alas! we may drop the _guère_ and continue the _encore_), who can describe the author as a _mélancolique agréable en ses pensées_, who can say of his stupid commentators _ce livre n’a pas besoin de tels écoliers_, and even desire ardently to be acquainted with Sir Kenelm Digby’s reply—may seem to have handed in his credentials as a critic once and for all. But one soon finds that Patin’s interest in Browne was, first of all, _esprit de corps_ (which was perhaps stronger in the Faculty of that time than in any profession of any other), and secondly, a certain coincidence of true but unconventional piety, different as were its forms in the two. Elsewhere Patin is a collector, an eager student of new books, a scholar even, with a conviction that Scaliger and Casaubon were “the two first men of their time,” and that Salmasius was a “grand héros des belles lettres”; but not a critic, and with a distinctly limited idea of _belles lettres_ themselves. He speaks contemptuously of Descartes, he barely mentions Corneille. He was, in fact, generally too angry with antimony, opium, quinine, the English, and Mazarin, or else too much rapt in ecstasy at the divine powers of bleeding and purging,[339] to have time to think of poetry, or even of prose.
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Footnote 337:
Ed. Réveillé, Paris, 3 vols. (Paris and London, 1846).
Footnote 338:
_Ed. cit._, i. 340, 354; ii. 35, 321.
Footnote 339:
“Certainement il faut en louer Dieu,” says his editor, himself a doctor, with a kind of shudder, in reference to Patin’s pious gratitude for the recovery of a colleague whom he had bled _thirty-two_ times. His exploits in the direction of _ensuita purgare_ are too appalling to particularise.
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Nor can we afford much space to the main body of the Academicians, of the frequenters of “the” Hotel (_par excellence_), of the abbés, and _marquis_, and even _marquises_ who crowd the middle of the seventeenth-century history of France, not disagreeably for posterity. [Sidenote: _Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, Madame de Sévigné._] They must be sought in Tallemant (himself, as citations will have shown, interested in the matter, and not inept at it) as a main and single preserver, in a hundred other places, original and second-hand, from the contemporary records to the essays of Sainte-Beuve and his followers. We could fill this volume with them without the slightest difficulty; but, as in all true history, they must “speak by their foremen,” and even these foremen cannot have much place. The modest and amiable Pellisson, the historian of the Academy, whose personal ugliness Boileau had the insolent vulgarity to satirise,[340] but who had a “soul of gold,” was by no means a bad though a too amiable critic, and had the sense and courage not to deny Ronsard when the fashion turned against him, just as he clove to Fouquet when it was positively, and even extremely, dangerous to do so. Ménage, to whom his own unguardedness and the satire of Molière[341] have given something of a ridiculous position in literary history, had the wit to see the merit of Molière himself quite early, possessed very wide reading, and could make judicious reflections on it, had studied the Italian critics,[342] and could now and then (as in the brief obituary notice of Scarron[343]) hit off his stroke extremely well. As for Marie de Sévigné, adorable to all, and especially adored by these two, she is generally right, and always illustrates the saying of La Bruyère, which is quoted below, whether she is right or not. But her critical position is so close to that of Saint-Evremond that what we have said of him is almost equally applicable to her, though she invests the critical attitude with her own peculiar charm.
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Footnote 340:
In the 8th satire. He had the extremely small grace, however, to drop the _name_ in later editions, and it does not now appear.
Footnote 341:
_If_ the “Vadius” of the _Femmes Savantes_ is Ménage. He himself denied it rather cleverly; but there is not much doubt.
Footnote 342:
See what he says on Castelvetro in the _Ménagiana_ (ed. La Monnoye, Amsterdam, 1713), ii. 86.
Footnote 343:
Ibid., ii. 174.
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With one remarkable exception as almost a whole, and a certain number of scattered passages in some of them,[344] the most noteworthy thing in the other _Ana_, which has relation to Criticism, is the almost invariable connotation of the word in them. [Sidenote: _The_ Ana _other than Ménage’s, especially_] Vigneul-Marville,[345] noticing a book, says that there are in it _deux remarques de critique_, one that Myconos is not so far from Delos as Ferrari says, being only two leagues instead of seven, and the other, that somebody else is wrong in saying that it belongs to the Venetians since it is in the power of the Turks. Of course in a sense these are “critical” observations; but one is a little reminded of Hegel and philosophical instruments. More unmistakable is the clear definition given by the author of the book above excepted. Huet (p. 232 _ed. cit._) says explicitly that _Critique_ is “that part of grammar which busies itself with re-establishing the text of ancient authors in its first integrity, and purging out changes due to ignorance,” &c. _This_, he goes on to say, is the art which Aristotle is said to have invented; and yet, further, he frankly declares that he himself has always looked on it as “a mean business.”[346] Yet, not merely in the well-known _De l’Origine des Romans_, which is not unfrequently found in connection with the _Huetiana_, but in these themselves, he shows that he had no mean conception of the higher and nobler branches of the Art. His remarks on the Quarrel[347] are among the most sensible that we have, as was to be expected from a man who was at once an excellent scholar in ancient, and a warm admirer of modern, literature. If he is less wise on rhyme,[348] let us remember that this is _parcius objiciendum_ to a contemporary, although a younger contemporary, of Milton; and if he is responsible for the astonishing statement[349] that Greek poetry “a toujours décliné depuis Homère,” let us simply decline the attempt to construct any critical theodolite which will show us this line of constant declension through Sappho and Pindar, Æschylus and Aristophanes, Theocritus and the best of the Anthologists. [Sidenote: _the_ Huetiana.] On the other hand, the assertion advanced in the _Origine des Romans_, and defended in the _Ana_, to the effect that a good judge of poetry is even rarer than a good poet, is too double-edged, in its apparent flattery of our own office, for us to make any difficulty in applauding it, while the defence itself is singularly good. The everlasting comparison of Virgil to Theocritus and Homer has seldom been better handled than by Huet. Indeed the whole book is worth reading for the critical passages it contains. The _Traité des Romans_ is a little discursively and promiscuously erudite, and Huet is thinking too much of the bastard romance of his own time, too little of the true-bred romances of old: but he knows something even of these, and he is well acquainted with the attempts of Cinthio and Pigna in the previous century to make good at least the Italian form of the kind.
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Footnote 344:
See, for instance, in the otherwise trivial _Chevræana_, a rather amusing string (p. 157) of criticisms passed on the great authors of antiquity; in the _Fureteriana_ (p. 13), an acute and most just remark on the folly of versifying scientific treatises and other things not in the least suitable for the process; and not a few in Vigneul-Marville—the absence of notes and justificatory citations in ancient historians (ii. 116); the praise of Amyot (ib. 132); the question of fully or partially formed verse in prose (ib. 188 sq.); remarks on Sforza Pallavicini’s _Trattato dello stilo_ (ib. 260); on “rhyme and reason” (ib. 330). (The references in this note and in the above paragraphs of the text, except where otherwise indicated, are to the collection of _Ana_ in ten vols. Amsterdam and Paris, An vii.)
Footnote 345:
_Ed. cit._, ii. 87.
Footnote 346:
P. 234, “_Ce travail m’a toujours paru bas, et peu digne de l’estime qu’il s’est attirée, et de l’application d’un esprit noble et élevé._”
Footnote 347:
P. 20 and _passim_.
Footnote 348:
P. 33.
Footnote 349:
P. 31.
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[Sidenote: Valesiana,]
In the _Valesiana_—amid much that is merely antiquarian or linguistic, and a fair though not excessive portion of the mere gossip and gabble which first made these things read and afterwards brought them into disrepute—there will be found a curious passage on the Latin hymns and their prosody, showing how dead the ear falls at certain times to the music of others, and the more curious selection of Palingenius and his _Zodiacus Vitæ_ as a poem and a poet worth the pains of reading. Nor will the reputation for robustness of seventeenth-century erudition suffer from the patronising commendation of Baillet’s _Jugements des Savants_ as a book which would be useful light reading for the giddy youth of the day who declined serious study. [Sidenote: Scaligerana,] Yet Scaliger himself (J. J., not J. C.), according to the collection[350] standing in his name (a quaint mosaic or macaronic of French and Latin), thought that nobody save Casaubon (and “another that shall be nameless,” no doubt) was really learned as men had been a hundred years earlier. He is himself nearly as untrustworthy on really critical points as his father, and had, I think, less true critical spirit. But he makes some amends for Julius Cæsar’s truculent assault on the _Ciceronianus_ by confessing that Longolius (the main object of the Erasmian satire) could not really be said to write in Ciceronian style when he simply fitted Ciceronian phrases together.
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Footnote 350:
Not in the general edition above cited. My copy is that of Cologne, 1695, with no printer’s name, but with a nice red and black title-page, an agreeable frontispiece (representing Joseph Justus, in a chair and a long beard, addressing attentive standing periwig-pated persons), and (as a MS. note of a former possessor informs me) a great deal of matter not in any other ed.
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Another member of the group to be noted very especially is the so-called _Parrhasiana_,[351] in the title of which “Théodore Parrhase” stands for a _nom de guerre_ of the industrious pressman Jean Le Clerc. [Sidenote: _and_ Parrhasiana.] It has very little in common with its class, being in part a reasoned treatise on general points of criticism, in part a defence of the author’s own works against the injurious remarks of Meibomius and others. The latter we can neglect; the former contains a really interesting exposition of general critical views by one of the most experienced of the new class of professional critics and reviewers at the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The distinction of the _Parrhasiana_ is that it has so little distinction—that it is so thoroughly normal. Le Clerc is a thorough believer in the Ancients; but he wears his rue with this difference, that he does _not_ believe in moderns who write Greek and Latin Verses, and that he is quite handsome and encouraging to those who do write in their mother tongue. They may be quite, or almost, as useful, he thinks—but as for reading for mere amusement, that is not a serious occupation. And Le Clerc is uncompromising in the prosaism of his views on poetry. In fact, I am not sure that there is anywhere else so _naïf_ a confession of belief in the Lower Reason only. He finds improbabilities and absurdities, not merely in Homer, but in Virgil himself; he holds _æternum servans sub pectore vulnus_, which some not very fervid Maronites would admit as a great and poetic phrase, to be a mere surplusage; and he actually condoles with poets on the unlucky necessity under which they lie of inversions, metaphors, and so forth, _metri gratia_. I do not know whether Mr Arnold knew the _Parrhasiana_, and indeed should doubt it; but he certainly might have found chapter and verse for his strictures on the age of “prose and sense” almost anywhere in it.
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Footnote 351:
Also not in the collection. My copy is the Amsterdam edition, 2 vols., 1699.
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Yet other groups or individuals in this abounding period might receive notice if this history were to be in twelve volumes instead of in three. [Sidenote: _Patru, Desmarets, and others._] There is Patru, not merely in his time the glory of the French bar, but extolled, by Boileau and by his enemies alike, as a sort of Quintilian and Quintilius in one[352]—as a standard at once of style and of judgment. Yet his long life and his constant occupation with literature, in talk and in reading, seem to have left us hardly anything in the shape of written criticism. There is Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, a less belauded but more interesting and perhaps more genuine man of letters. Not merely did Desmarets compose the epics ridiculed by Boileau, not merely was he the author of the excellent _Visionnaires_ (the best comedy in French before Molière except Corneille’s _Le Menteur_), not merely was he a “visionary” himself in his latter days, and a versifier, if not a poet, always, but he was a not inconsiderable critic. Those who choose to read his _Défense du Poème Héroique_[353] will find in it by no means the imbecility that they may expect, either in the dialogues defending the Christian poem, or in the somewhat meticulous, but sharp and not ill-deserved, “cutting-up” of Boileau which follows. But these, and much more the Conrarts and the Costars, the Maucroix, and the rest[354] must here be as _silencieux_ as the first in his stock epithet. And one may confess even to doubts whether, with the amplest room and verge, they ought to have much space in a general History of Criticism as distinguished from one of special countries and periods. Hardly any of them is more than one of a _numerus_; hardly any has himself actual distinction, as persons of much inferior talents may have at other times. The Historian of Climate must have much to say about the delightful variety of that phenomenon which the British Isles display, about its causes, its phases, and the like, in general; but he would be lost, and would lose his readers in more than one sense, if he were to attempt to describe every shower or even every wet season.[355]
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Footnote 352:
The suggestion of this, though not the exact phrase, will be found in Sainte-Beuve’s essay (_Causeries du Lundi_, v. 275).
Footnote 353:
Paris, 1675.
Footnote 354:
On all these, see Tallemant, Bayle, and others down to Sainte-Beuve. For a typical literary and critical quarrel, beginning politely and ending in something like Billingsgate, nothing can be better than that battle of Costar and M. de Girac, first over the dead body of Voiture and the live one of Balzac, and then over both these departed, which Sainte-Beuve tells in his liveliest manner at pp. 210-231 of the 12th vol. of the _Causeries_.
Footnote 355:
To those who are acquainted with the most interesting handling of Desmarets in M. Rigault’s so often cited book (_Querelle des Anc. et Mod._, pp. 80-103), my reference to him may seem too low and little. As a matter of fact, I think rather better of Desmarets than M. Rigault did. But the latter’s purpose of enlarging—I do not say exaggerating—his portraits of everybody who had to do with the “quarrel” sometimes, I think, throws them a little out of proportion, if not of focus, for a general critical history. His chapter, however, is excellent, if not quite just; and it should have by itself sufficed to save those who will not read originals from a blunder into which some writers have fallen—that of crediting Desmarets with the _first_ vindication of the Christian epic, and the _first_ denunciation of heathen mythology as a poetic stuff. The mere name of Tasso ought to suffice as a reminder of the falsity of this; the work of Gambara (_v. supra_, p. 107 note), though I cannot speak of it at first hand, must be got out of the way by them; and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (_v. supra_, p. 131) had in France itself made the way plain, for the author of _Clovis_. But he certainly drew a good bow in this not too happy battle; and if he takes any pleasure in the progeniture, he may probably claim John Dennis (_v. infra_, p. 436) as his son. That Boileau’s treatment of him was quite unfair M. Rigault himself fully admits; but to whom and to what (including those talents of his own which he by turns prostitutes and cripples) is Boileau _not_ unfair?
-----
The attempts, not merely to make out a regular Æsthetic for Descartes, but to key this on to the great critical movement of the century, will be best dealt with later; but the greatest of the Cartesians must have a word.
Malebranche need not occupy us long; indeed, this great philosopher and admirable master of French has to be dealt with by us, at least in some part, because he has been dealt with by others. [Sidenote: _Malebranche._] The invitation to do so, if we may say it without illiberality, seems to have consisted rather in the titles than in the contents of his work. The Second Book of the _Recherche de la Vérité_ is, indeed, “De l’Imagination”; the Second Part of this Second Book has much to do with _les personnes d'étude_; and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth chapters of the Third Part deal with “the imagination of certain authors,” especially Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. But we have seen, and shall see, how treacherous the word Imagination is, and how people will misunderstand it, however frankly they are dealt with. Malebranche, as he always is, is quite frank and quite clear; he tells us definitely that imagination for him is “a little more and a little less than sense,” that it only consists in the power possessed by the soul of forming images of objects for itself. His quarrel with the “persons of study” is that they _will_ read, write, and argue about the ancients, instead of recurring to primary truths; and when he deals with his three selected authors, it is not to criticise them from the literary point of view (though he finds fault with “irregular movements” in Tertullian’s figures), but to object to the paralogism of the _De Pallio_, the ill-regulated imagination and feeble reasoning of Seneca, the treacherous “cavalier” manner, the “criminal attraction born of concupiscence,” the disguised pedantry, the vanity, in Montaigne. Phrases here and there, in his own perfect style[356] (I doubt whether any prose writer of the _grand siècle_ can give points to Malebranche), show what a critic was lost in him; but the critic—as indeed we should expect, and as is quite proper—_is_ lost in the philosopher, the theologian, and the moralist.[357]
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Footnote 356:
As this of the very authors he censures, “Leurs paroles, toutes mortes qu’elles sont, ont plus de vigueur que la raison de certaines gens.” II. 300, Ed. J. Simon, Paris, 1871.
Footnote 357:
The literary _Pensées_ of Pascal are still fewer, and in dealing with Montaigne he is even further from the literary point of view than Malebranche. His chief utterance is a piece of characteristic scorn at poetical _clichés_ like _bel astre_, _fatal laurier_, &c.
-----
And so to Boileau.
It is desirable that we should examine Boileau’s critical work[358] with more than ordinary care. [Sidenote: _The history of Boileau’s reputation._] The history of his reputation has, until recently, been on the whole not very different from that of many other eminent men of letters—that is to say, it has oscillated between extravagant reverence (during the entire eighteenth century, with rare exceptions, both in France and elsewhere) and a violent reaction (when the Romantic movement set in). Pope and Voltaire may stand as spokesmen of the former period; Keats and the men of 1830 of the latter. But of late years, and in England as well as in France, the cant of criticism (which is as protean, and as immortal, as most such Duessas) has devised another thing. Even in the extreme Romantic time, true critics, especially Sainte-Beuve, had recognised how germane, in wrong as in right, the taste and temper of Boileau were to the taste and temper of literary France generally, and to some extent of the Latin peoples old and new. But latterly, under the powerful influence of M. Ferdinand Brunetière—whom, though I often disagree with him, I always name for the sake of most unaffected honour, and as a critic of whom any country and time might have been proud—this tendency has gone much further, and we are even asked to accept Monsieur Nicolas as an adequate representative of the French literary genius. Let us remember what “adequate” means; it means to a great, at least, if not to the very fullest, extent commensurate, coextensive, and complete. And in England also there has been not wanting an affectation of deference to this estimate—of arguing that we ought to let the French know best in such points—that it is wicked, rude, uncritical, to intrude English judgment into such matters.
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Footnote 358:
Of the immense number (estimated years ago at nearly five hundred) of editions of the Works in whole or part, that of Berriat de Saint-Prix in 4 vols., 1830-34, is, I believe, as nearly the standard as any. There is, however, a magnificent modern edition of the _Œuvres Poétiques_, edited by M. Brunetière (Paris, 1889), which I am glad to possess. The ordinary “Collection” editions, such as that of Garnier, though complete enough on the verse side, are apt to omit what they think the less interesting pieces of prose.
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So be it, for the moment, and for the sake of argument. Let us then, as we do always, as from this point of view it is more specially necessary that we should do, inquire what the _actual_ criticism of this “adequate” representative of the French genius is. [Sidenote: _The_ Art Poétique.] And in doing this let us begin with the _Art Poétique_, that elaborately arranged code of neo-classic correctness, the composition of which occupied half the central decade[359] of its author’s life when he was in the full vigour of ripe age, which summed up all the doctrine of his earlier satires, and is practically repeated by most of his later.
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Footnote 359:
He was thirty-three when he began it, and thirty-eight when it was finished. A very excellent separate edition of it is that of the Cambridge University Press, by Mr D. Nichol Smith (1898).
-----
In making the examination we shall (not without considerable generosity) abstain from bearing too hardly upon the flagrant ignorance of literary history, even in his own country, which Boileau here displays. [Sidenote: _Its false literary history._] His modern defenders (not, it must be confessed, till those who do not defend him had made uncompromising championship on this point impossible) practically confess and avoid it, pass it with a half-petulant “Agreed!” They cannot well do otherwise: for in the famous lines (I. 113-130) from
“Durant les premiers ans du Parnasse Français,”
to
“Rendit plus retenus Desportes et Bertaut,”
an amount of crass ignorance, or of impudent falsification, is amassed which is really curious, and almost creditable, at least to the audacity of the author’s party-spirit, or the serenity of his indifference. Even in the oldest French poetry that we possess, much more in the _Roman de la Rose_ (which he adduces in a note, having obviously never read it), the “words” were _not_ “arranged without measure”; there _were_ “strict numbers”; and there was even a pretty strict cæsura. Villon did not do anything to “the art of the old romancers,” but wrote in precisely the same measures as men had written in for a hundred and fifty years before him. Marot simply adopted ballades, wrote no triolets, did nothing new to rondeaux, while we are only unable to convict Boileau of error as to _mascarades_, because nobody has yet discovered what, exactly, a _mascarade_ is. The description of Ronsard’s action is rubbish: while it is quite certain that both Desportes and Bertaut went to their graves without the slightest doubt that he was Prince of French poets, and were not in the least “restrained” in following him. And the history of the French Drama in Canto Three only deserves less reprehension because it was really not very easy at the time for a man to know much about it.
But let this suffice. And let us also exercise our perhaps undeserved generosity on another point, that wholesale and unblushing imitation of Horace which made the Abbé Cotin, one of Boileau’s victims, retort with as much truth as wit, in the very form of one of Despréaux' own insolences—
“J’appelle Horace Horace—et Boileau traducteur.”[360]
-----
Footnote 360:
Boileau did not merely “convey” from the ancients. He had the specially ugly, though not so specially uncommon, trick of insulting a man and stealing from him at the same time. (Cf. Théophile Gautier’s article, in _Les Grotesques_, on his namesake.)
-----
After all, though a paradox, it is not an impossibility, that a man should be a great critic and yet most untrustworthy on literary history, and apt to make his own work, in great part, a mere mosaic of the work of others.
Let us then take the _Art Poétique_ simply as criticism—not as a series of statements of fact, not as an original or a borrowed argument—and see how it looks this way. [Sidenote: _Abstract of it._] The first Canto begins (in the teasing inverted style[361] which was one of Boileau’s worst legacies to French poetry, and which itself was a “corrupt following” of Latin) with a declaration of the necessity of genius, which has been counted to him for much righteousness. Everybody has not the genius for everything, and it does not follow that because you have a genius for convivial songs you have one for Epic. But good sense and reason are as necessary as genius. Indeed we are soon told that writing depends on these _alone_ for its value: so that genius is like those tickets of admission which are quite useless till they are countersigned by somebody other than the issuer. Never try high flights or conceits. Do not describe your subjects or objects too minutely. Cultivate variety, but never be “low,” burlesque, or bombastic. Whatever you do, mind cæsura and avoid hiatus. Then follows the pseudo-history referred to above, capped by its phrase of Malherbe, in whose steps you are to walk. Clearness of expression is of the greatest value; but as a fact it depends on clearness of thought. Smart things will not ransom faults. If you fear criticism, anticipate it by yourself and your friends; but beware of flatteries, and, above all, do not take the part of your own faults simply because your friends have noticed them. The First Canto ends with the really excellent line, in Boileau’s true vein (for, whatsoe’er the failings on his part as a critic, he was a satirist born and bred)—
“Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire.”
-----
Footnote 361:
“_C’est en vain qu’au Parnasse un témeraire auteur, Pense de l’art des vers attendre la hauteur._”
-----
The Second Canto begins, _apropos_ of nothing (indeed Boileau was frankly troubled about his “transitions”), with a discussion, partly metaphorical, of the Idyll, Eclogue, and Pastoral, followed by a similar account of other kinds of shorter pieces—Elegy, Ode, Sonnet, Epigram, and others, down to Vaudeville—the Fable being absent, to the discomfort and laborious excuse-making of the disciples. The Idyll must be neither too pompous nor too trivial: follow Theocritus and Virgil and all will be right. Elegy is proper for Death and Love; but you must not, in regard to the latter, be frigid and hackneyed. Imitate Tibullus and Ovid, and again all will be right. The ode is worthy of Achilles or Louis; but do not be too historical—which indeed would be difficult in regard to Achilles, and might be inconvenient in regard to Louis. Sonnets are very difficult, but a sonnet without fault is by itself worth an Epic.[362] The epigram may have _pointes_, which are elsewhere to be utterly rejected. The other kinds are lightly treated till the Satire, descending to the _vaudeville_, has a longer discussion. Satire, the apologist _pro domo_ declares, is the voice of Truth. Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, are characterised. Regnier is _our_ best man; but his style is antiquated, and his subjects and language are really shocking.[363] Then “the Frenchman, _né malin_,” made the Vaudeville. It is only fair to Boileau to say that, could he have foreseen the tedious abuse of this _mot_, he would certainly either have forborne it, or have given us a capital line or couplet to tie to the tail of the culprits. Canto Three passes, with no less abruptness, to the drama, which occupies the first half, the latter part being given to the Epic. Boileau is at first vague. In fact, he does not seem at all thoroughly to have appreciated the Aristotelian doctrine, which in the main he runs up as his flag. Dramatic art in teaching must please and touch, which it may do by exciting pity and terror. Do not make a long and obscure introduction; keep the Unities as you value your dramatic salvation; never be incredible; and let everything contribute to the development of your story.
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Footnote 362:
It may be sometimes forgotten in the quotation of this famous line, that _long poem_ was a technical term in French criticism, from the days of the Pléiade downwards, and means definitely an Epic, or Heroic Poem, not a long piece of verse. It is characteristic of Boileau to hit backwards at the _modern_ epic, of which he was no admirer, in this rather treacherous praise of the sonnet, towards which he was equally lukewarm.
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The Historic Muse reappears, but in such case, as hinted above, that we shall magnanimously abstain from further vengeance on her. If only Boileau had omitted the unhappy note which says that _leurs pièces_ (those of his imaginary _pélerins_) _sont imprimées_, thereby suggesting that he had read them! You must have Love: but do not be _doucereux_; keep the stock characters; do not modernise the ancients; and if you invent a personage let him be constant to himself. The theatre really is very difficult. But Epic is still more so. It depends entirely upon action, upon fable; and in order to make it noble you put in the _deorum ministerium_.[364] Æneas’ voyage would have been quite an ordinary thing without Juno, and Neptune, and Æolus:—
“C’est là ce qui surprend, frappe, saisit, attache.”[365]
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Footnote 363:
As it takes ten lines (171-180) in the French to explain our single epithet, they need not make fun of it.
Footnote 364:
See on the Petronian passage, vol. i. p. 245, and on its mischievous influence the present chapter, _passim_.
Footnote 365:
I like to vary Boileau’s stale criticism with his admirably fresh and vigorous verse.
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But the modern deity will not do at all; and devils and angels are worse. Do let us keep our Tritons, our Parcæ, our Pan, and our Charon! If not, in a short time we shall not be able to tie a bandage on the eyes of Themis, or put a balance in her hand![366] Further, be very careful of your names. There was a person once who actually called his hero Childebrand! Minor receipts for handling follow; and then we find ourselves back on the stage with Comedy, as to which Boileau extols Nature, and tells us that Molière would have been the best of comic dramatists—if he had been other than he was.
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Footnote 366:
“She can do without them,” as L. Arruntius most excellently remarked on a parallel occasion. _Vide_ i. 238.
-----
The Fourth Canto returns to the generalities of the first, and, taking advantage of this wider scope, begins an attack, not unamusing but in very bad taste, on Claude Perrault, architect, doctor, and, like his more celebrated brother Charles, and a third not so well known as either, a champion on the modern side (_v. infra_). It ends, in accordance with the habits of the age, in an elaborate and rather well-declaimed panegyric of the king, wherein the adroit historiographer supplies an epilogue to the perhaps not quite so adroit critic.
For some lines in the middle Boileau, though constantly returning to the crutch of Horace, does occupy himself with literature. His precepts may be thus summarised. Whatever you are, be not a bad writer, and if you _must_ be, be rather bombastic than cold; but, on the whole, degrees of mediocrity do not much matter. Here the satirist once more comes to the rescue and dictates the (in application insolent,[367] but) intrinsically good couplet—
“Un fou du moins fait rire et peut nous égayer, Mais un froid écrivain ne sait rien qu’ennuyer.”
Do not pay attention to flatterers (we had heard this before), do not excuse your verses, but keep an open ear for every comment: though you must be careful to separate foolish from wise criticisms. Join the solid and useful to the pleasant. Let your morality be of the very first water. You may introduce love; but respect principle and the young person. Do not be jealous of your rivals; do not put literature above its proper place; for heaven’s sake do not endeavour to make profit out of your writings [except by pensions].[368] Be not avaricious, but attend to Reason. If you do, Louis will give you pensions; and you will not have to tremble, like Colletet,[369] for your dinner, which depends on the success of a sonnet. Of this last ignoble gibe (too much imitated, alas! by our own Pope) we need take no further notice; and we shall say nothing more on any of the other points in Boileau which invite unfavourable comment, but are not strictly critical. Let us judge him as a critic only, and first on this piece.
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Footnote 367:
As usual Boileau gives the actual names of half a score inhabitants of the French Grub Street, of whom Cyrano de Bergerac (he was long dead, and Boileau was safe) has the consolation prize of being merely _fou_.
Footnote 368:
They were probably the _tribut légitime_ which a _noble esprit_ might derive from his work.
Footnote 369:
This refers to the _son_, François (1628-1680), of a more poetic pair—Guillaume (1598-1659) and Claudine Colletet. The former of these was also a critic in his way, and left, besides an _Art Poétique_ (1658) of no great value, a _Histoire des Poètes Français_ which, strangely enough, was never printed, and the MS. of which was burnt by the Vandals of the Commune in 1871.
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Is it good criticism?
This of course is far too large a question to answer off-hand. [Sidenote: _Critical examination of it._] We must hunt the answer to it by the way of minor questions, such as, Is it original? (the least important but of some importance). If it is not, What does it add to, and how ingeniously and usefully does it apply, the original from which it borrows? What methods does it use? To what extent and in what fashion would a poet adopting it as a manual be qualified for his art? And lastly (though perhaps some minor questions may crop up in our passage), What incidental excellences does it contain? What is the merit of the critical estimates which the author makes, in passing or with deliberation, of the authors, great and small, of the past and the present?
Let us take these questions in order, and see what answers the _Art Poétique_, examined without prejudice, but without fear[370] or favour, can give to them.
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Footnote 370:
A humourist might maintain the two opposite theses, “That Boileau has genuine authority,” and “That the French are always craving for a tyrant,” on the strength of a curious _catena_ of evidence from Voltaire’s “Ça porte malheur” to Marmontel, who had presumed to speak lightly of Despréaux, down to M. Bourgoin’s “On a difficilement raison contre Boileau.” But to those who “bear an English heart” these terrors are idle.
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As to the first question there is, to a certain extent, no difference of opinion. [Sidenote: _Want of originality._] The injured Cotin undoubtedly had truth on his side, in the parody quoted above, as to a large part of the _Art Poétique_. But what has not been quite sufficiently recognised is that this is the best part. Take away the almost (sometimes quite) literal translations from Horace, and you will take away Boileau’s backbone; take away the Horatian suggestions, and you will go far to deprive his criticism of its skeleton altogether, and leave it a mere jumble of promiscuous observations. It would be interesting and by no means otiose—if one only had the money and the time—to print the _Art Poétique_ with the direct Horatian borrowment in rubric, the suggested passages in black italic, and the mere personalities, illustrations, flatteries, lampoons, and the like, in, say, blue. But I fear the remains in ordinary print would be wofully small, and still more wofully unimportant. This, however, would not matter so very much if Boileau had been strikingly original in what he adds, or had applied the Horatian doctrine with striking appropriateness to the altered condition of literature. One would think it impossible, if distinguished instances to the contrary were not known, for any one to maintain that he has done either. By far the greater part of the achievements of modern, and practically the whole of the achievements of mediæval, literature up to his time, are simply ignored, or, where referred to, ridiculously misdescribed. Nay more, Horatian parallels are got in by inventing a history of what never existed.
Nor could anything else possibly happen, considering the methods which Boileau chose to adopt. [Sidenote: _Faults of method._] These methods are, First, the construction of a Horatian-Aristotelian bed to which everything has to be adjusted in point of principle; and of this it is not necessary to say more. Secondly, the suggestion as models, at every turn, of Latin and (much less often) Greek poets, utterly regardless of the change of circumstances. Thirdly, the method of criticism by Kinds—of laying down the rules for, and discussing the ends of, the abstract Pastoral, the abstract Elegy, the abstract Sonnet, Ode, and so forth, with only a few perfunctory eulogies of actual examples. In regard to the first and second it is enough to quote the critic’s own words against him, and ask him how Ovid or Tibullus can be a sufficient, can be even a safe, guide to a French love-poet, and how the marvels of ancient mythology can become the “machinery” of a modern epic? In regard to the third, the old battering-ram must be once more applied. Pastoral, Elegy, Ode, and the rest (except “Sonnet,” which is a _form_) are not unequivocal names applied to abstractly existing things, but mere tickets. Give me a poem, and I will tell you whether I think it a good or a bad poem, and why. You may, after that, if you have the time and care to take the trouble, classify it as epic or elegy, epigram or ode. But the box in which you choose to deposit it does not really matter in the least; and if it should so happen that there is no box ready, you must either make, or do without, one. Is the poem good or bad as poetry?—that is the _articulus stantis vel cadentis criticismi_.
But the most surprising thing in Boileau’s method, and the most fatal, is the thing on which he prides himself most, and which has been most commended in him—the perpetual appeal to Good Sense and Reason.[371] [Sidenote: _Obsession of good sense._] It is surprising, because Longinus, whom he strangely assumed to be a prophet after his own heart, had warned him amply, and one might think irresistibly, some fifteen hundred years before. “Heights of eloquence or of poetry, but especially of poetry,” that mighty critic had said, “do not lead to persuasion _but to ecstasy_.” Now it is with Persuasion only—in the Greek sense, which includes intellectual conviction and practical influence—that Good Sense and Reason, in Boileau’s sense, can deal. It is true that very glaring offences against them may sometimes (by no means always) interfere with Ecstasy; but the most heroic doses of either or both will never cause it. Generally speaking—the saying has of course the danger of the double edge, but it is true for all that—when Good Sense comes in at the door Ecstasy flies out of the window, and when Ecstasy flies in at the window, Good Sense and (the lower) Reason retire prudishly by the door. At any rate, if they remain, it will be necessary for them to keep themselves very much in the background, and wait till they are called for. They may very well act as detectives and catchpolls when False Ecstasy usurps the place of true; but like other police-officers they have rather an awkward habit of mistaking their men. Every respect is of course to be paid to them; their assistance is sometimes very welcome and valuable even to the poet, while the prose-writer can seldom dispense with their constant surveillance. But even the latter may sometimes be hindered of his finest effects by looking first to them; while the Poet who does so will never rise beyond the lower-middle slopes of Parnassus, if he even reaches these.
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Footnote 371:
It is interesting and significant that Boileau’s defenders generally drop “Good Sense,” and use, whenever they can, the more ambiguous and high-sounding “Reason.” It is sufficient to say that their author repeats “Good Sense” again and again, and obviously uses Reason as a mere synonym for it.
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Now, unless these considerations can be got out of the way, the answer to yet a further question, What help does Boileau give the Poet? will be a most meagre and disappointing one. Some of the positive helps which he offers—the rule of Good Sense, and the empty forms of Kinds—are likely to be, in the first case positively mischievous, in the second rather hindering than helpful. His historical doctrine is usually wrong, and, where not wrong, inadequate. His constant prescription of “the ancients”—not merely as _general_ guides in literature—nobody need ask for better—but as immediate and particular models for all kinds of literary exercise, will in its most rigorous observation make a mere translating anachronist, and even if more freely construed, will again hinder much more than it helps.
But the majority of Boileau’s counsels are not positive at all, they are simply negative: and negative counsels in art, when the pupil is once out of schoolboyhood, never did much good yet, and have often done a great deal of harm. [Sidenote: _Arbitrary proscriptions._] Why should his _risus ineptus_ at the name “Childebrand” proscribe that name, which is euphonious enough to unprejudiced ears? What “sensible and reasonable” (we may thank him for these words) criterion of sound makes “Philis” preferable to “Toinon” or, prettier still, Toinette? It is true, doubtless, that, for a continuance, the long Alexandrine divides best at the middle; but what reason, what sense is there in the absolute proscription of a penthemimeral or hephthemimeral cæsura? In what does the welcoming of Pan and Charon, and the banishing of Ashtaroth and Beelzebub, differ from the immortal decision that “blue uniforms are only good for the artillery and the Blue Horse”? And so throughout.
But, it will be said, the _Art Poétique_ is not Boileau’s sole critical deliverance. [Sidenote: _Boileau’s other works._] It is most true; in fact, though his work is for a man who went safely beyond the three score years and ten and half-way to the four score,[372] a rather scanty work, it is pervaded with literature and with criticism. By a curious contrast to those Roman satirists, of whom we spoke erstwhile, his criticism of life is always turning to literature. The admirable heroi-comic satire of the _Lutrin_ itself gravitates somehow or other to the battle in the book-shop, which enables the poet to gibbet his victims once more; not to mention that the whole fun of this very _Lutrin_ is (though Boileau did not in the least know it) a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ of his own critical doctrines in the _Art_. Most of the other pieces are either directly critical of a kind, or the expression of brief and rather reluctantly obeyed avocations from criticism. Let us examine them,—though with somewhat less minuteness.
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Footnote 372:
If I have seemed, or may seem, too bitter in any remarks on Boileau, let me here observe that few things in literary history are more pathetic than these last years of his, when, _ultimus suorum_, amid the ruins of the political glories which he had celebrated, and in a transition period between the great literature of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth, with no one but his foolish Boswell-Eckermann, Brossette, to comfort him, and no one at all to whom to look as his successor, he held—unconquered and unconquerable—to his principles, and died, as one of the poets to whom he was so unjust had said,
“Sans bouger, debout et dans son rang.”
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The dominance of the literary subject in the _Satires_ is well known, though it is equally notorious that illiberal personality too often takes the place of liberal criticism. [Sidenote: _The_ Satires.] Colletet’s poverty and parasitism; Saint-Amant’s death from fever, brought on by his ill-success (he would have died of hunger anyhow, says the satirist good-naturedly)—these are the subjects that interest him in the First. In the Second to Molière, with oblique censure of, or at least surprise at the easy versification of the dramatist, he bewails (being evidently proud of it) his own studious “difficulty”[373] in rhyming, jests at the stock phrases and _chevilles_ of others from Ménage to Scudéry. Even in the Third—the old bad-dinner satire of Horace and Regnier—he brings in a literary quarrel about Théophile and Ronsard and Quinault. The Fifth, to Dangeau, is one of the few which have hardly any literary touches. But he will drag the luckless Abbé de Pure into the Sixth on the noises and nuisances of Paris, while the Seventh is wholly literary, and is one of the earliest (1663) of his explosions at bad poets, and the Eighth, on the follies of humanity, naturally takes shots at the old target.
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Footnote 373:
That he had taught Racine _rimer difficilement_ is the well-known boast in that uncomplimentary comparison of his pupil with Corneille, by which he appears to have administered a sort of private unction to his soul to atone for his public injustice.
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All these, however, much more the awkward Tenth, on Women, and the very inferior Eleventh, must give place to the Ninth, an imitation of Horace, II. vii., written in the author’s fortieth or forty-first year, nominally to defend himself for his former attacks on his compeers, but really, of course, to renew them. Once more his favourite equivalents (only mentioned _infamiæ causa_) for Gyas and Cloanthus—Colletet, Pelletier, Quinault, and the rest—appear. Once more Racan receives partial, and Théophile almost total, insult. Here is the famous contrast of _le clinquant du Tasse_ and _l’or de Virgile_; and here the still more famous lines on the _Cid_, embedded in—and plainly owing their complimentary tone to the fact that they are embedded in—an onslaught on Chapelain. Again and again the luckless Cotin is “horsed” and justified: while the almost equally luckless Pelletier[374] serves as a foil to “d’Ablancourt et Patru.” The singular posthumous piece _Sur l'Équivoque_, appended usually as the Twelfth satire, is a sort of attempt to generalise and amplify the author’s horror of conceit and obscurity.
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Footnote 374:
Not of course Boileau’s worthy predecessor in Art-Poetic writing (_v. supra_, pp. 117, 118), but an advocate of the mid-seventeenth century, who was unfortunate enough to commit sonnets, and to be disliked by the satirist.
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To dwell on the minor pieces of verse, which are often literary, would be here impossible; it is enough to say that they include the two epigrams on Corneille’s _Agésilas_ and _Attila_, and numerous assaults on Perrault. [Sidenote: _The_ Epigrams _and_ Epistles.] The _Epistles_ are not nearly so full of our matter as the _Satires_; but the Seventh (to Racine on the success of the opposition _Phèdre_ by the hated Pradon) and the Tenth (on his own verses) belong to us. The first of these has been very highly, and in part quite deservedly, praised. The reference to the death and the almost dishonoured grave of Molière, though slightly theatrical, is both vigorous and really touching; the eulogy of Racine himself is, in the circumstances, but allowably excessive; and the half-flattering, half-boasting mention of his own enjoyment of the favour of the “great,” from Louis to La Rochefoucauld, would be tolerable if it were not mainly a vehicle for fresh abuse of Linière and Tallemant, of Perrin and Pradon himself.
[Sidenote: _Prose—The_ Héros de Roman; _the_ Réflexions sur Longin.]
The prose is equally saturated with criticism. The dialogue on _Les Héros de Roman_, which Fontenelle could have done admirably, Boileau has not done very well; but his satire on the extraordinary bastard kind of romance with which France at this time deluged Europe is not ill-founded, though rather ill-informed.[375] The Letters are full enough of criticism. But the two chief prose documents from which (at least from their titles) something really important may be expected, are the _Dissertation_ on the story of Giocondo, as told by its inventor and by La Fontaine, and the _Réflexions sur Longin_. These last, however, the reader need hardly trouble himself with: they may even be classed among the impieties of criticism. Boileau, little as he could have appreciated, did at least know the Great Unknown. He translated him; he calls him very truly _le plus grand_, and more questionably _le plus sévère_, of ancient critics. But these _Réflexions_ on Longinus are in fact reflections on Charles Perrault, a very clever person, but not in the least like Longinus: and the texts from the Περὶ Ὕψους, which are put at the head of each chapter, often have nothing to do with the subject at all, and in almost every case might almost as well have been selected from the first book he picked up. In the particular dispute I am with him, and not with Perrault; but the first exclamation of any real lover of the real classics who reads the piece must be _Non tali auxilio_! Boileau, as always, is arrogant and rude; as sometimes elsewhere his scholarship is not beyond suspicion, though it had an easy triumph over the almost total absence of the same quality in his adversary; but, as he is very seldom, he is confused, desultory, heavy. To those who think that criticism is the art of scolding, the _Réflexions sur Longin_ may seem to be a creditable exercise in it: hardly to others.
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Footnote 375:
Even his admirers admit his strange ignoring of the fact that Madeleine de Scudéry _intended_ her personages to be modern—that they were mere disguises of Condé and others, not attempts to re-create antiquity. This of course does not exempt them from blame; but it requires a different sort of blame.
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Almost the only critical essay of the proper kind that we have from this famous critic is the other piece mentioned above—the “Dissertation on the _Joconde_.” [Sidenote: _The “Dissertation on_ Joconde.”] The occasion was not unpromising. A certain M. de Saint-Gilles, seriously or otherwise, had preferred the version of Ariosto’s tale by one Bouillon to that of La Fontaine, and the question (which had taken the form of a bet between Saint-Gilles and La Mothe le Vayer de Bretigny) was referred to Boileau for decision. I confess that I have never taken the trouble to look up the works of M. de Bouillon: the specimens that Boileau gives are quite enough, and he exercises his ferule like the vigorous and (within limits) accurate and useful pedagogue that he is. But, unluckily, he thinks it necessary not merely to prefer La Fontaine to Bouillon, but to belittle Ariosto[376] in favour of La Fontaine. I defy anybody—Frenchman or non-Frenchman—to have, within certain limits, a greater admiration for La Fontaine than I have; and I am heretical enough to like the _Contes_ even better than the _Fables_. But why this miserable setting of two great things against each other? Why not like both? This is what critics of the Boileau type cannot do: they must have their rat-pit of false comparison, their setting-by-the-ears, their belittling in order to exalt. It must be said that Boileau is justly punished. His usual critical censures are so vague and general—he is so apt to tell us that So-and-so is a bad poet without showing us _how_ he is bad—that he escapes confutation. Not so here. In the first place he shows, as perhaps we might have anticipated, that worst of critical defects, an inability to “take” his author. He is very angry with the famous grave beginning of the tavern-keeper’s much less than grave story—the stately _Astolfo, re de' Longobardi_, and the rest. He thinks that “le bon messer Ludovico” had forgotten, or rather did not care for, the precept of his Horace, “Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.”
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Footnote 376:
The condescending praise of “Arioste _et ses fables comiques_,” in _A. P._, iii. 291, can hardly be regarded as a set-off, especially as just before (l. 218) he had stigmatised him, emphasising the stigma by a note, as “follement idolâtre et païen.”
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Undoubtedly Messer Ludovico did not care one of his favourite turnips for it! And, according to the key of humour in which he was writing—a key struck before him, but never so well as by him, in Italian, familiar in English, but unknown in French till recently—he was quite right in this negligence. Boileau proceeds to give rules for “telling an absurd thing in such a manner as to intimate to the reader that you do not yourself believe it.” Very good; that is the _Lutrin_ way—a capital way too; but not the only one. And Ariosto is at least entitled to try this other, in which he succeeds so admirably to all who have eyes or ears and will use them. The critic, again, is very angry with Ariosto for making Giocondo abstain from poniarding his wife because of the love he bore her. “Il n’y a point de passion plus tragique et plus violente que la jalousie qui naît d’un extrème amour.” Let us not remark too unkindly that Despréaux' knowledge of _un extrème amour_ was, by all accounts, including his own, the reverse of experimental. His error is more widespreading. It is part of that unlucky arrangement of “typed” kinds—not less of character and passion than of writing—which the neo-classic system insists upon. Your passions, like your poetic forms, are all pigeon-holed, and their conduct prescribed to them. You must “keep the type” once more. _Pour le bonheur du genre humain_, Ariosto knew better.
We must not, tempting as it is, dwell on the plea that Giocondo’s honest agony, “a quelque chose de tragique qui ne vaut rien dans un conte à rire,” while La Fontaine’s easy-going wittol is quite a cheerful object; on the inestimable cry of outraged verisimilitude, “Où est-ce que Joconde trouve si vite une hostie sacrée pour faire jurer le roi?” or on the extraordinary casuistry as to the time occupied, in the two versions, by the climax of the triple arrangement of Fiammetta. In this, as in the remarkable letter of reconciliation to Perrault,[377] one is at first inclined to suspect irony; but in neither case will the hypothesis work out. Here Boileau presents what looks like a caricature of the “classical” criticism; yet it exactly coincides with his general precepts elsewhere. There he gives away almost, not quite, the whole of the Ancient case by admitting the superiority of the moderns after a fashion which, if we took it to be ironical, would reflect upon his own familiar friends and patterns—Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine.
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Footnote 377:
Written in 1700 and published next year. Letter vi. of the ordinary collection.
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In fact, recent and repeated reading of Boileau has made me doubt whether he had _any_ critical principle, except that of Good Sense. [Sidenote: _A “Solifidian of Good Sense.”_] He almost says so in so many words in the _Art Poétique_; his general or particular sayings elsewhere say it over again with mere change of name and instance. If he loved the classics, it was because the classics he knew best—the Latins of the Augustan age—do probably observe this “good-sense” standard more than any other great writers of any time but his own. And if he was unjust to the great writers of the time just before his own, and savage to the small among his contemporaries, it was because the prevailing fashion, for two or three generations, had set in a direction which Good Sense alone must constantly disapprove. Now Good Sense is not a high tribunal, but a very low one,—we were better off with our old friend Furor Poeticus, though he did sometimes talk, and encourage the talking of, nonsense. The mere “Solifidian” of Good Sense knows nothing, and can know nothing, about poetry.
Nay more, one may ask without real impertinence, Is Boileau’s _Art Poétique_ in any vital and important sense an Art of Poetry at all, any more than it is an Art of Pig-breeding, or of Pottery-making, or of Pyrotechnics? In all these useful and agreeable pursuits—for the matter of that in all other arts, trades, professions, employments, and vocations—it is desirable to know what you are about, to proceed cautiously and sensibly, to choose the right materials, to combine them in the right way, not to go beyond your powers and means, to vary your appeals to the public, to take good advice, to observe the practice of proved success in the particular department, to study its kinds and species carefully, not to launch out too far nor restrain your operations too much, and to observe the laws of morality and propriety throughout. But what is there specially _poetical_ in all this? Or what does Boileau add to this to make his treatise specially poetical? A few—decidedly few—technical cautions of the lower kind, not all of them unquestionable; some general or mediate rules, mostly borrowed from Horace, and not a few of them more questionable still; some literary history which, as we have seen, is utterly worthless; and a seasoning of mostly spiteful hits at poets he dislikes.
But, they say—and this is practically the stronghold to which they all retire—“Look at his practical services to French literature and French poetry. [Sidenote: _The plea for his practical services._] Look at the badness of the styles he attacked, and the completeness with which he cleared them away. What a reformer! What a Hercules purging the poetic country of monsters and malefactors! Can you possibly deny this merit?”
Let nothing be denied—or, for the matter of that, affirmed—before everything has been considered. [Sidenote: _Historical examination of this._] What are the facts? Boileau came at the end—at the very end—of a stage of French poetry which had been rather a long one, and unquestionably one of very chequered and not very highly distinguished performance. The somewhat hasty theories, and the often splendid, but nearly always unequal, practice of the _Pléiade_, had given place to a sort of rococo individualism, to the bastard and easily ignoble kinds of parody and burlesque, or to corrupt followings of Spanish and Italian practice. Many charming, and some fine, things (including that stately passage of Chapelain’s which many classical critics, who scoff at his name, have admired when all but literally translated in _The Deserted Village_) had been written; but the writers had constantly dropped from them to the trivial and the bombastic. But when Boileau began seriously to write in 1663-64,[378] this period was in its very last stage. It could not have lasted much, or any, longer if there had been no Boileau at all. Of his actual victims some were long dead; others were very old men; the younger were persons of no importance, _ephemera_, whether critical or poetical, which would have died with the day. The smoky torch of Théophile—a true poetic torch for all its smoke—had flickered out nearly forty years before. Cyrano, to whom Boileau gives contemptuous blessing in part, only that he may ban him and others more effectively, had slept in peace for eight years. Saint-Amant, who had real poetic gift, and who, if he was no scholar in the ancient tongues, knew the modern in a fashion which puts Boileau’s ignorance of their literatures to shame, had met the end described so feelingly by his critic some three years earlier. Chapelain was a man of sixty-seven; Cotin one of sixty. It is by attacking not the dead and decrepit, but the young and rising, that a man shows himself a great warrior and a useful citizen in criticism. In fact, the principles of correctness which Boileau espoused had, as we have seen, been practically taken up long before, even by poor creatures like the Abbé d’Aubignac, in certain departments, and Chapelain himself had smitten in this sense before he felt the wounds.
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Footnote 378:
The First and Sixth Satires are a little, and some smaller pieces much, earlier than this, but they are indecisive and unimportant.
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Still less can Boileau be allowed any credit for the great achievements which undoubtedly took place during his own middle life. The glories of French literature in verse (and, as far as the three first go, in poetry), about 1664, are Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Molière. Corneille had been writing before Boileau was born: the only piece of his which Boileau praises generously was produced in the year of the critic’s birth; and that critic is silent about most of the Master’s work, and sneers ignobly at its later examples. The magnificent genius of Molière owed nothing to Boileau in its beginnings, and accepted little, if anything, from his criticism in its perfection; while not all of its results were cordially welcomed by the critic, personal friends as they were. La Fontaine, an older man than Boileau by fifteen years, was still more independent of him at the beginning, shows extremely little mark of any influence from him at any time, and, for all their friendship, experienced from him the almost unaccountable omission of his favourite kind, the Fable (unlike the _Conte_, a perfectly “unobjectionable” one), in the _Art Poétique_ itself. There remains Racine, and, if the schooling and training of Racine seem to any one so great a thing that his schoolmaster and trainer becomes, _ipso facto_, one of the _Di majores_ of criticism, there is not much more to be said. But there is something: and it is this. In the first place, to assume that Racine’s genius could not have made its own way without Boileau’s mentorship, is to pay a far worse compliment to that genius than some not very fervent Racinians can allow; and, in the second, the spirit, if not the letter, of his criticism is against that of Racine’s very best work. If I cared to do so, I think I could show that _Phèdre_ herself comes within the Bolæan[379] maledictions. As for _Athalie_, the very admirers of Boileau have asked how, after his unsparing censure of the religious epic, he could tolerate the religious drama?
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Footnote 379:
Cf. _Bolæana._ On the other hand, the Rev. J. Garbett, whom anti-Tractarian feeling made Professor of Poetry at Oxford when Isaac Williams was a candidate, has “Bollevian” (_De Re Critica Prælectiones_, Oxford, 1847, _Præl._ iv. i.) I am not bigoted on the point.
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Have we done? Not quite. After such a reformation, after such labours of Hercules as we have held up to us, we are entitled to expect a new crop, a new breed of poets rising everywhere from the purged and heartened land. Is the poetic product of the last quarter of the seventeenth century in France so admirable, so refreshing, such a contrast to the period of Chapelain and Saint-Amant? I have some small acquaintance with French literature, but I am unable to supply the names of the “Poets like Shakespeare, Beautiful souls,” who, formed by the precepts of the _Art Poétique_, rush in crowds upon the sight during that period. But, it will be said, time must be given—the French poetry of the _eighteenth_ century is the work of Boileau through his disciples. It is: and by these fruits may he and they be justly judged. He cannot, indeed, claim the admirable light work of Piron and the rest: some of it very nearly, or quite, incurs his anathemas, and all is composed more or less outside his precepts, and in accordance with the practice of La Fontaine rather than with his. But he can claim the _Henriade_, and, _in part_, the odes of J. B. Rousseau—he may be permitted even to assume the laurels of Delille and of Le Brun—_Pindare_. Perhaps, despite the sacred adage, the growth of the thorn does indicate the strength and genuineness of the vine, and, perhaps, it can only be a fig which is so fertile in such stately thistles.
But the real weakness of Boileau’s criticism does not fully appear till we come to examine him on the true ground. [Sidenote: _Concluding remarks on him._] What are his actual critical deliverances, on concrete critical points, worth? We have seen something of the answer to this already. A certain amount of his condemning censure—though nearly always expressed without urbaneness, without humanity, with the hectoring and bullying tone of an ill-conditioned schoolmaster, or the venom of a spiteful rival—must be validated; there is no lack of bad writers at any time, and Boileau’s provided a plentiful crop of them. But in most instances these writers were unimportant weeds, who would have been cast into the oven on the morrow of their flourishing, if Boileau had never written a line. On the other hand, in regard to the two greatest writers, in verse or drama, of his own day and country, Corneille and Molière, he loses no opportunity of censuring the one, and accords, till after his death, but faint and limited praise to the other. Even his misbeloved ancients he cannot praise with the mingled enthusiasm and acuteness that mark Longinus, or even Dionysius. The great merit of Virgil, in his eyes, is that Virgil manages mythological “machines” so deftly: and, if we look elsewhere at what he says of writers so different as Æschylus and Ovid, we shall find a flat generality, with no attempt even at the _mot propre_. Only on the satirists, at least on Horace and Juvenal, is he better. For Boileau, as we have said, was a satirist to the core, to the finger-tips, and here he speaks as he feels. If we want his opinion on great modern foreign poets, we have it explicitly on Tasso and Ariosto, implicitly in his silence about almost everybody else.
I am not conscious of any unfairness or omission, though I do not pretend to a mere colourless impartiality, in this survey; and after it I think we may go back to the general question, may ask, Is this a great or even a good critic? and may answer it in the negative. That Boileau was important to his own time may be granted; that he was no ill scavenger of certain sorts of literary rubbish may be granted; that he gave help to those who chose to tread in the limited path to which France was confining herself, so that they might tread it with somewhat more grace, with much more of firmness and confidence than they would otherwise have done—that, in short, he did for France something of the same kind as that which Dryden did for England, may be granted. This is not exactly a small thing. But before we call it a great one we must look at the other side. Boileau did not, like Dryden, leave escapes and safety-valves to the spirit that was too mighty for the narrower channels of poetic style; he exhibited none of his contemporary’s catholicity of mind and taste; he had none of his noble enthusiasms, none of his constructive power and progressive flexibility in positive critical estimate. The good that he did is terribly chequered by the consideration that, in sharpening certain edges of the French mind, he blunted and distorted others in a fashion which, after two hundred years, has not been fully remedied. A great man of letters, perhaps; a craftsmanlike “finisher of the law,” and no ill pedagogue in literature certainly: but a great critic? Scarcely, I think.
Two writers at least, whom few would call lesser men of letters than Boileau, and in whom some may see greater qualifications for criticism, must be much more briefly dealt with, partly because in their case no controversy is needed, partly because their actual contributions to criticism form but a very small part of their work, and partly also because neither aimed at for himself, or has received from posterity and tradition, any very prominent place as a critic. [Sidenote: _La Bruyère and Fénelon._] These are La Bruyère and Fénelon. It would not be correct to say that either is in deliberate or conscious opposition to the _législateur du Parnasse_. Their general conscious principles are much the same as his; they are, like him, uncompromising defenders of the Ancients, and though Fénelon has a private crotchet about poetic prose, yet the non-essentiality of verse to poetry had been a general, if not a universal, tenet with antiquity. But whether in consequence of that impatience of despotism which those who love to mix literary and political history have seen in the second generation of the _siècle de Louis XIV._, as compared with the first; or from the fact that, as compared with Boileau, they were much more of Greek,[380] and less of purely Latin students; or simply as a result of what has been justly attributed to both,[381] the predominance of the _sens propre_ over mere observation of the _communis sensus_—it is certain that both, and especially Fénelon, display much more individualism, and at the same time much more catholicity. It may be added that they know more, and are to some extent (though to no large one) free from that hopeless ignoring of older French literature which was Boileau’s greatest fault.
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Footnote 380:
“Greek, the Alpha and Omega of all knowledge,” as Dr Folliott calls it, is certainly not less so in criticism than elsewhere.
Footnote 381:
By M. Bourgoin in the interesting book cited above.
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La Bruyère’s[382] contribution is contained in the opening section, “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit,” of his famous _Caractères_. [Sidenote: _The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit.”_] It is not very long; it is—according to the plan of the work it is not merely entitled but obliged to be—studiously desultory; and it is not perhaps improved by the other necessity of throwing much of it into portraits of imaginary persons, who are sometimes no doubt very close copies of real ones. But it contains some open and undisguised judgments of the great writers of the past, and a number of astonishingly original, pregnant, and monumentally phrased observations of a general character. In fact I should not hesitate to say that La Bruyère is, after Dryden, who had preceded him by twenty years, the first very great man of letters in modern times who gave himself to Criticism with a comparatively unshackled mind, and who has put matter of permanent value in her treasuries without being a professional rhetorician or commentator. [Sidenote: _General observations._] We need not dwell on the famous overture _Tout est dit_, for it is merely a brilliant example of the kind of paradox-shell or rocket, half truth, half falsehood, which a writer of the kind explodes at the beginning of his entertainment, to attract the attention of his readers, and let them see the brilliancy of the stars that drop from it. But how astonishing is it, in the 17th section, to find, two hundred years and more ago, the full Flaubertian doctrine of the “single word” laid down with confidence, and without an apparent sense that the writer is saying anything new![383] No matter that soon after, in 20, we find an old fallacy, ever new, put in the words, “Le plaisir de la critique nous ôte celui d'être vivement touchés de très-belles choses.” If criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism _à la_ Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the _Morte d’Arthur_ says) in every direction of literature, in reading always critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word.
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Footnote 382:
Editions again innumerable; but none, I think, can compare with that of M. Servois in the _Grands Écrivains de la France_ (Paris, 1865-1882).
Footnote 383:
“Entre toutes les différentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule de nos pensées _il n’y en a qu’une_ qui soit la bonne,” &c.—_Ed. cit._, i. 118.
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But how well he recovers himself, among other things, with the remarks on the _Cid_, and the difference between the fine and the faultless at 30! with the declaration of independence immediately following in 31, and practically drawing a cancel through the whole critical teaching of Boileau! “Quand une lecture vous élève l’esprit, ... ne cherchez pas une autre règle pour juger; il est bon.” How delicate his remarks in 37 on the delicacy of touch, the illogical but impeccable concatenation, the justice of phrase, of the best feminine writing! Not a few of his observations are paraphrases or, as it were, echoes of Longinus himself, whom he has assimilated as Longinus’ translator never could have done. And if some further remarks on criticism in 63 seem to regard rather the abuse than the nature of the art—if the famous “Un homme né Chrétien et Français se trouve contraint dans la satire; les grands sujets lui sont défendus,” is half a political grumble and half a paralogism, which was to be accepted with fatal results in the next century—both this and other things are redeemed throughout by the general independence and freshness of the judgment, the vigour and decision of the phrase. In the judgments of authors above referred to (which begin at 38 and continue for some eight or nine numbers, to be resumed with special reference to dramatists and dramas a little later), it is especially possible to appreciate La Bruyère’s idiosyncrasy as a critic, the vivacity and power of his natural endowments in this direction, and his drawback, arising partly from sheer acceptance of prevailing opinion, and partly from the fact that he is merely coasting the subject on his way to others.
In the joint or contrasted judgment of Terence and Molière the modern man, according to his kind, may find something either to laugh or to be irritated at. [Sidenote: _Judgments of authors._] Some would as soon think of comparing the dribbling tap of a jar of distilled water to the Falls of Schaffhausen. But La Bruyère practically shows himself as conscious of the truth as his time would let him be when, allowing Terence purity, exactness to rule, polish, elegance, character (_i.e._, type-character), he ruins all by admitting that “il n’a manqué à lui que d'être moins froid.” And if (as many did then, and some do now) he takes that wrong view of style and language which permits them to accuse Molière of “jargon,” of barbarism, he gives him fire, naïveté, a fount of real pleasantry, exact representation (“imitation”) of manners, imagery, and “the scourge of ridicule.” “What a man,” he says, “you could have made of these two!” though how you can join fire and _froid_, and what would have been left of Terence’s old-maidish neatness when joined to such a husband, Heaven and Apollo only know! But we can see very well that La Bruyère admires Molière because he does admire him, and Terence because he is told to do so.
The conjunction, even in contrast, of Malherbe and Théophile has puzzled some folk; but, as M. Servois points out, it is a mere matter of chronology, and Boileau had done it before. And it is very noteworthy that La Bruyère does not bear hardly on Théophile. The remark that Marot seems more modern than Ronsard is perfectly well founded. And if there is some oddity in his surprise that Marot, “natural and easy as he is, did not make of Ronsard, so full of _verve_ and fire, a poet better than either of them actually is,” it is much less odd, and much more acute, than it looks at first sight. The judgment of Rabelais, a famous one, if not wholly wide-eyed, keeps its eyes singularly wide open for so artificial an age: and there is a whole volume in the double defence of Montaigne against opposite criticisms, to the effect that he is too full of thought for some men, and too natural in his mode of thinking for others.
It is by no means certain that the unnamed author aimed at in 52 is Molière, and the most fervent of “Cornelians” can hardly quarrel with the judgment that Corneille is unequalled where he is good, but more often unequal to himself. La Bruyère seems, though rather furtively, to set the awful Unities at nought in this great dramatist’s favour; and he is both just and happy in praising the variety of Corneille as compared to the monotony of Racine. The whole article, which is a long one, is distinctly on the Cornelian side, though far from unjust to Racine; and one can well understand the disconcerting effect which it seems to have produced on Voltaire.
On the whole, the only reasons for not ranking La Bruyère’s criticism very high indeed are that there is so little of it, and that it is obviously the work of a man to whom it is more a casual pastime than a business—who has not thought himself out all along the line in it, but has emitted a few observations. Still, those which express his deliberate opinions are almost always sound, and only some of those which he has adopted without examination are wholly or partially false.
The critical utterances of Fénelon[384] are much more voluminous, though in part, at least, not quite so disinterested, and they are of a very high critical interest and value. [Sidenote: _Fénelon. The_ Dialogues sur l’Eloquence.] They are contained in two documents, the _Dialogues sur l’Eloquence_ (which, though not known, is believed to be a work of his early manhood, but was only published after his death by the Chevalier Ramsay) and one of his very latest pieces, the _Mémoire sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française_, sent in, to obey a resolution of that body, in November 1713, with the much longer explanatory letter of the next year thereon to Dacier.
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Footnote 384:
It is a pity that in the best modern account known to me, that of M. Bourgoin, the question of Fénelon’s character and of his relations with Bossuet is brought in. It is really quite extraneous to the matter. Very favourable reference can be made to the notice by the Cardinal de Bausset, prefixed to the most accessible edition of Fénelon’s critical work (in _Œuvres Choisies_, Paris, Garnier, n.d.) Bausset, who wrote, besides an extensive life of Fénelon, one of Bossuet, and died in 1824, came before the Renaissance of criticism in France: but he was no _perruque_.
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The first is conditioned—unfavourably it may seem for our purpose—by its avowed limitation to _sacred_ eloquence. A young aspirant to the cloth has fallen in love with a fashionable preacher, wishes a cooler friend to share his enthusiasm, and, being rebuffed, elicits from that friend by degrees a complete criticism of the rhetoric of the pulpit, and the rules that should govern it. Since we have found discussions, even of profane oratory, surprisingly barren in pure literary criticism of old, this of sacred may seem still less promising. But though Fénelon’s interest in the soul-curing part of the matter is constant and intense, he does not allow it either to obscure or to adulterate his literary censure. At first, in particular, the arguments of his “A” (the critical friend who, no doubt, is Fénelon himself) not merely have nothing more to do with the pulpit than with the bar or the Senate, but have little if anything more to do with spoken than with written literature. The disdainful description (at p. 5 _ed. cit._) of that epigrammatic or enigmatic style, which is always with us, as _des tours de passe-passe_; the excellent passage (ibid., 7-9) on Demosthenes, Isocrates, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus himself—on whom Fénelon speaks with far more appreciation than Boileau, and probably with more knowledge than Dryden; the bold attitude taken up at p. 18 on the question of the perfect hero; the exaltation (perhaps the most noteworthy thing in the whole) of “painting,” of bringing the visual image home to the reader, at p. 35; the scorn of mere verbal fault-finding at p. 47; the ardent panegyric of the literary greatness of the Bible at p. 69; and of the Fathers at p. 86 _sq._—all these passages, which are almost pure gold of criticism, have nothing special to do with the mere _métier_ of the preacher. That Fénelon was neither perfect nor wholly beyond his time is quite true. He has here a deplorable assault on Gothic Architecture (which he repeats at greater length in the Academic letter, and for which, if he had not been so good and great a man, one could wish the stones of his cathedral to have fallen upon him), and his contempt extends to mediæval literature. But the same doom is on the best of archbishops and the most beautiful of girls: they can but give what they have.
And Fénelon gives very much. The Memoir and Letter above referred to were elicited by a demand on Academicians for proposals in regard to the reorganising of the work of the Academy. [Sidenote: Sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française.] Here, therefore, as in the other case, the immediate purpose is special; but the general literary interests of the critic again prevent it from being specialised in the dismal and deadly modern sense. He does not fail to deal with the daily dreadful line of the Dictionary; but he proposes, as supplements, divers things—a new _Poetic_, a new _Rhetoric_, Chrestomathies from the Ancients on both heads (things needed to this day), and above all, a complete Academic edition of the great classics of France, with really critical introduction and annotations, or at least a corpus of critical observations on them.
But, as usual, it is in the incidental remarks that the value of the piece lies; and these make it, I do not hesitate to say, the most valuable single piece of criticism that France had yet produced. Fénelon shows his acquaintance with other modern languages; and pays a particular compliment to Prior, who, it must be remembered, was about this time occupying his rather uneasy post of Ambassador. He may be too hasty in saying that the Italians and Spaniards will perhaps never make good tragedies or epigrams, nor the French good epics and sonnets, as he most certainly is too ignorant in saying that “after our ancient poets” [a very few, mostly undistinguished persons, in the latter part of the sixteenth century] had tried classical metres and failed, “we” [the French of course] “had to invent measures suitable to our words.” But he is astonishingly bold in his recurrence to Pléiade principles, and in actually urging English as a good example on the point of taking from neighbours any word found convenient. He says plumply “de telles usurpations _sont permises_” (p. 103 _ed. cit._) Alas! in England itself, and after two centuries, one uses this just liberty at personal risk. His Rhetoric section partly repeats the _Dialogues_, and is altogether more technical or professional than literary. [Sidenote: _And its challenge to correctness._] But his Poetical section is full of interest. It is marred by that not quite single-minded fancy for prose poetry which has already been glanced at, and to which we shall have to return. But the attack on rhyme is partly excused, and the, at first sight, bewildering remark (p. 123) that “rhyme is of itself more difficult than all the rules of Greek and Latin prosody” is rendered intelligible, by a remembrance of the extremely arbitrary rules which had by this time been imposed on the French rhymer. The paragraph on Ronsard,[385] the best known piece of the whole, is admirable in its tempering of sympathy with censure; and the acknowledgment of the “opposite extreme” into which French for more than a century had fallen,[386] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth.
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Footnote 385:
P. 125 _ed. cit._
Footnote 386:
“L’excès choquant de Ronsard nous a un peu jetés dans l’extrémité opposée; on a appauvri, desséché et gâté notre langue.” And he proceeds, with much humour and more truth, to stigmatise the prim following of grammar, the “substantive hand in hand with its adjective,” the verb “walking behind with an adverb at its heels, and an accusative in a place unalterable.” “C’est ce,” this great _locus_ continues, “qui exclut toute suspension d’esprit, toute surprise, toute variété, et souvent toute magnifique cadence.” 1830 could say no more; and often said it with less authority.
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The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs (and Time’s) the complaints of _la basse plaisanterie de Plaute_, and the statement that _on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane_. The point is the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And, abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book, and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule. Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.
We have for some time been occupied with the critical work of great men of letters; we must now turn to that of four men who, if they had not been critics, would hardly have been heard of in their own day, and would certainly not be remembered by posterity out of their own country—or perhaps in it. As it was, all the four exercised immense influence, not merely in France but elsewhere, and three of them saw their work promptly translated into English, and received with almost touching deference in the country which had Dryden to look to for criticism, nay, by Dryden himself. The order in which we may take them shall be determined by that of the appearance of their principal critical works. The _Pratique du Théâtre_ of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, appeared in 1657; the first _Réflexions_ of Rapin in 1668; the _Entretiens d’Ariste_ of Bouhours in 1671; and the _Traité du Poème Epique_ of Le Bossu in 1675. All four, it is to be observed, were clerics of one sort or another, while Rapin and Bouhours were schoolmasters, and Hédelin was at least a private tutor. Taken together, they exhibit the hand-book and school-book side of the criticism of which Boileau is the contemporary satiric expositor to the world; and their criticism cannot properly be dissociated from his. As dates sufficiently show, they do not in any sense derive from him; nor, to do him justice, does he from them. The whole quintet, with others of less importance, are all the more valuable exponents of the strong contemporary set of the tide in the direction of hard-and-fast “classical” legislation for literature.
It is among the few and peculiar laurels of the Abbé D’Aubignac to have failed in more kinds of literature than most men try. [Sidenote: _The Abbé D’Aubignac._] His tragedy of _Zénobie_ (1647) was the occasion of a well-known epigram from the great Condé, which is not the less good for its obviousness, and which, with equal ease and justice,[387] can be adjusted to his criticism. He is more of an Aristotelian “know-nothing” than La Mesnardière, and has very much less talent. Not content with the _Pratique_ (which, as has been said, was really a belated contribution to the cabal against Corneille), he attacked two of the great tragedian’s later plays, _Sophonisbe_ and _Sertorius_, in his _Dissertations en forme de Remarques_ (1663), and he had many years earlier attempted to justify Terence against the strictures of Ménage. The historian of criticism would have been grateful to him had he confined himself to writing tractates “On the nature of Satyrs, Brutes, Monsters, and Demons,”[388] _Relations du Royaume de Coquetterie_, and novels like the rather well-named _Macarise_, or _the Queen of the Fortunate Isles_. For these we could simply have neglected.
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Footnote 387:
_Zénobie_ boasted herself to be impeccably “regular.” The Prince observed that he was much obliged to the Abbé for paying such attention to Aristotle, but that he could not excuse Aristotle for making the Abbé write such a tragedy. This famous _mot_, like others, is of disputed attribution. It is sometimes given to the Prince de Rohan-Guémené.
Footnote 388:
A work of youth which appeared as early as 1627. Hédelin was never elected to the Academy; and in 1664 endeavoured to start a new one of his own from a coterie which he, in imitation of Conrart, had formed. But “Trajan was” _not_ “content,” wisely enough: and France was spared a skim-milk Forty.
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The _Pratique_, unfortunately, we cannot neglect wholly, because of its position as a symptom and an influence. [Sidenote: _His_ Pratique du Théâtre.] In reading it,[389] the generous mind oscillates between a sense of intolerable boredom, and a certain ruth at the obviously honest purpose and industry that underlie the heaps of misapplied learning, and season the gabble of foolish authority-citing. He begins by a demonstration that all great statesmen have always patronised stately games, of which scenic representation is one. Vulgar minds have nothing to do with it (this was a slap at Castelvetro and his horrible doctrine of pleasing the multitude, which is a real _lethalis arundo_ in the sides of all these Frenchmen). He is, we are rather surprised to hear, _not_ going to theorise. All the theory has been done, and done once for all, by the ancients. What he wants to do is to apply this theory to all the practical contingencies. And this he does through Unities and Episodes, through Acts and Scenes, through Narration, Discourse, Deliberation, everything, with sleuth-hound patience on his own part, and requiring Job’s variety on that of his readers. He is sometimes quite fair even to Corneille, he seems to be quite well-meaning; but he cannot help his nativity of dulness, and at his very best he is a critic of dramaturgy, not of drama.
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Footnote 389:
It forms the first volume of the Amsterdam edition, in 3 vols. (1715), of Hédelin’s critical work. The second and third, which are together about the size of the first, include the extensive and dismal lucubrations on Terence, &c.
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René Rapin, hardly as one sometimes feels inclined to think and speak of him, was a person of an entirely different order. [Sidenote: _Rapin._] In fact, it is very much more on isolated and particular points than on generals that he lays himself open to reproach, though it may be retorted that the generals, which lead logically (as they usually do) to such absurd particulars, are thereby utterly condemned themselves. It was specially unfortunate for Rapin that his principles and precepts were at once caught up in England by a man like Rymer,[390] and expounded in coarse and blunted form to a people still green and unknowing in critical matters. [Sidenote: _His method partly good._] There is even much in his method which deserves high praise. It is very noteworthy that, before he presumed to draw up (or at least to give to the world) his _Réflexions_ on the _Poetics_ and on Poetry, on Eloquence, on History, and on Philosophy, he had preluded by elaborate examinations of the actual documents in the shape of “Comparisons”—“Of Homer and Virgil,” “Of Cicero and Demosthenes,” “Of Thucydides and Livy,” “Of Plato and Aristotle.” And though this sort of “cock-fight comparison” (as the more vernacular writers of his own time in English might have said) is “muchwhat” (as his translator Rymer actually does say) of a mistake, unless pursued with the greatest possible care—though it was already hackneyed in itself and constantly in need of extending, supplementing, blending—yet it is at any rate infinitely superior to the examination _in vacuo_, the rattling of dry bones and abstract kinds and qualities, to which too many of his contemporaries confined themselves.
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Footnote 390:
Who translated (with a preface not virulently Rymerical, _v. infra_, p. 392) Rapin’s _Reflections upon Poetry_ almost as soon as it appeared. Rapin was a copious theologian, an elegant and fertile Latin versifier. Of his critical works in French, the _Comparaisons_ noted above were produced annually between 1668 and 1671, except the “Thucydides and Livy,” which appeared ten years later. The _Réflexions sur l’Eloquence_ date from 1672: those, more famous, on Poetics and Poets, from 1674. His critical _Works_ were early collected, and the complete collection appeared in English, by various hands, including Rymer’s, in 2 vols. (London, 1706). The Amsterdam ed. of the original (3 vols., 1709-10) contains, in addition, a small treatise, _Du Grand et du Sublime_, which must not be neglected, and some others, together with the _Comparaison de Pindare_ et _d’Horace_ of the architect Blondel.
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Unfortunately Rapin himself was always, consciously or unconsciously, tending towards this other method; and even in his comparisons—much more in the extended survey of ancient and modern writers which he subjoins to the _Réflexions_—he is still more constantly seduced by that labelling criticism which we have traced long ago to the “canonising” way of the Alexandrians, and for which we have said hard things of Fronto and others. [Sidenote: _His particular absurdities as to Homer in blame._] Yet further, both his general style of criticism, and his prepossessions of this or that kind, constantly draw him into pitfalls only less absurd than those in which Rymer himself wallows. I do not remember that Rapin ever lays it down that a hero must not be a black man; probably the French had not been afflicted—for I suppose they did not make Syphax black—with any poet daring enough to start the question. But he does other things which, though less conspicuously, are quite as really silly. In the moral section[391] of his comparison between Homer and Virgil he has too much of the Jesuit schoolmaster, with his reverence towards boys, to mention that terrible scene between Zeus and Hera which had already distressed the compatriots of Aristophanes and Martial, and which remains one of the earliest examples of absolutely perfect poetry in a particular kind. But he makes up for it. We have, of course, the “wine-heavy, dog-eyed, hare-hearted” line to mourn over. How undignified of Homer to make Achilles anxious about the preservation of the body of Patroclus from corruption! How could Ulysses, with such an excellent wife and such an amiable son, waste time with Calypso and dangle after Circe, to whom the pudibund Rapin applies epithets which _our_ Decorum prevents us from repeating, and for which he deserved to be both shipwrecked and turned into a Gryll. Was it quite nice of Priam, as a father, to wish all his children dead so Hector were alive? Nausicaa is too shocking. A Princess’s face should _not_ show grace, the Jesuit thinks,[392] to men in Ulysses’ condition.
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Footnote 391:
Chap. vii. In the preceding chapter there is one of those sentences which ruin this kind of criticism, by and of themselves. “Games are of the number of those actions which may occur in the lives of heroes.” Most certainly: but one feels that Rapin said it simply because there are games in Homer and Virgil, and that, if there had _not_ been, he would probably have said, “Games are _not_,” &c.
Footnote 392:
“Cette Princesse oublie sa pudeur pour écouter sa compassion....” In the rest of the clause the English translator softens the crudity of the French _curiosité_. But it is still more pleasant to oppose to the nasty niceness of the French Jesuit the words of the author of _The Christian Year_: “_Nausicaa—cujus persona nihil usquam aut venustius habet aut pudentius veterum Poesis_” (_Præl._ xii. vol. i. p. 195, Oxford, 1844).
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Whereas with Virgil it is quite different. Everybody, including the Gods, behaves “like persons of Quality.” [Sidenote: _As to Virgil in praise._] Even in the case of _Dido dux et Trojanus_ there is no violation of modesty,[393] which certainly seems either a little Escobarish towards them, or a little severe to Circe and Calypso. Indeed, we sometimes find ourselves rather lost with Rapin’s morality. For, in another passage (Chap. XIII.), he actually discovers _un artifice des plus délicats et des plus fins_ in Virgil’s taking away Dido’s character, though History had made her a Lady of very good repute.[394] For he did it to bring into contempt the Carthaginians who were afterwards to become odious to Rome. “A nice marality!” indeed, as my Lord Foppington observed of another matter, not so very long after Rapin wrote this.
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Footnote 393:
_Mais la pudeur ni toutes les bienséances extérieures n’y sont point blessées._
Footnote 394:
So the English: Fr. “femme de bien.” I like to read Rapin in both versions, contemporary as they are, and antiphonal of the sentiment of the time, in its two chief languages.
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Yet even here it is fair to observe that Rapin is at least trying to make the two ends of his “reason” and his “reflection” meet: and so it is always:—
“His reason rooted in unreason stands, And sense insensate makes him idly wise.”
The consequences are patent on every page, and a chapter might be not disagreeably filled with them. [Sidenote: _As to others._] Pegasus is admirable, but the Hippogriff is the vain imagination of a sick brain: Camilla touching, but Bradamante absurd. Achilles retires from the Grecian army because he is discontented; Æneas goes to Italy because he is pious; and Medea kills her children because she is revengeful—a passage in which it is agreeable to perceive the obvious first draught of “I love my love with an A.” As for the moderns, Du Bartas and Ronsard had all the genius their age was capable of—a text for a sermon as long as this Book. “Scarce aught can be understood” of the _Agamemnon_! In fact, quotations[395] simply leap to the eye as one reads the page.
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Footnote 395:
These latter are mostly from the _Réflexions sur la Poétique_ (_Œuvres_, ii. 175 _sq._) It is quite at the beginning of these that the unlucky charge against Dante of “wanting fire” (see i. 175 _note_) occurs; it is followed later, and perhaps to some extent explained, if not excused, by the further criticism that he has “l’air trop profond,” “une ordonnance triste et morne.”
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It is more important, if less amusing, to inquire how a man, obviously of much ability, extremely well informed, freer, it would seem, from mere prejudice than most of his fellows, came in this way to be constantly stumbling over blocks that the veriest blockhead might, one would think, have avoided, and running against blank walls, of which a blind man might, it should seem, have been aware. [Sidenote: _The reading of his riddle._] Rapin is, perhaps, the main and appointed Helot of the neo-classic system. That system, instead of assembling all the great works of literary art, and giving an impartial hearing to each, takes one or two ancient treatises, themselves necessarily based upon but a partial examination, spins out of them a universal code, fills in that code, where it is wanting, with analogies and with perilous makeshifts of “decorum,” uniformity, and the like, and then proceeds to apply the result back to the actual works of art. It is no wonder that, even of the ancient division of these, hardly one escapes scot-free, except those which were originally composed by men of great, but not the greatest, genius, on a somewhat similar scheme. Elsewhere the unfortunate critic is constantly catching himself in those bushes which he has himself planted, and bruising himself against obstacles which he has elaborately set up. In a general way he grants that Homer is the greatest of poets; but the Fetiches of “Design” and “Decorum” extort from him the sacrifice of this in detail, and the acknowledgment that Homer is frequently most indecorous, and that large parts of him are out of drawing. And so of all.
Le Bossu (to whom the English sometimes give a superfluous final _t_, whom they generally defraud of his rightful “Le,” and whom in the main they know only from the _locus classicus_ of Sterne)[396] reapproximates to the Aubignacian level. [Sidenote: _Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic._] But it is fair to say that his dulness arises from a different cause. He is not, like Hédelin, a stupid man—he is distinctly the reverse—nor is he spiteful. He is merely the hardiest and most thoroughgoing devotee of a certain kind of abstract criticism. He does, of course, give us chapters on some actual illustrations of Heroic or Epic; but they are scarcely more necessary to his book than the picture-illuminations of a poem or a novel. Being a writer of some _esprit_, he sometimes exercises it in rather dangerous fictions—for instance, his imagined epic of Meridarpax, where all the mouse-stories (mouse and lion, town and country mouse, &c.) are worked in, would be most sprightly, if it did not look sprightlier still as an exercise in laughing at his own side. But by far the greater bulk, and the whole vertebration and solid substance, of his argument are devoted to Epic in the Abstract. Design, definition, and parts; good fables and bad fables; episodes; the biology, so to speak, of the Action, the narration, the manners and characters, not forgetting the Machines, and at last something on the Thoughts and Expression—which have about one-ninth of the whole. In short, if we have not exactly Epic _in vacuo_, we have it as a dried preparation. The complexity, anti-sensuousness, and dispassionate character of it are almost abashing; one feels at the end that, to hanker after an actual poem, be it _Iliad_ or _Orlando_, has something sinful—something of the lust of the flesh.
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Footnote 396:
_Tristram Shandy_, iii. 12. He was not always unknown among us. Dryden, whether out of modesty, fashion, or humour, takes leave to call him “the best of modern critics,” and he was translated in 1695. The mistakes referred to above are all the worse because there was actually a French writer named Bossut, a mathematician of distinction in the eighteenth century.
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We have said that Le Bossu is rather a sprightly person of a hyper-scholastic kind. [Sidenote: _Bouhours._] His brother Father, Bouhours, is still more so; indeed, his famous inquiry, “Si un Allemand peut-être bel-esprit?”[397] has got him rather into trouble with a prevailing party, in and out of Germany. Beginning with the _Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène_ (1671), a collection of chiefly verbal criticism on French writers, he continued it with other works in _belles lettres_ and theology, the most important of which, to us, is _La Manière de Bien Penser dans les Ouvrages d’Esprit_ (1687).[398] The book, which is not short, consists of four Dialogues between Eudoxe and Philanthe, “deux hommes de lettres (as the author remarks in a phrase to which Time has given a piquant new meaning) _que la science n’a point gâtés_.” Eudoxe, as the name indicates, is the author’s mouthpiece—a judicious admirer of the Ancients, who can yet tolerate such moderns as Voiture. Philanthe (also a speaking name) is a partisan of florid modernity, who is, however, so little of a “stalwart” that he gives up Ariosto, and intrenches himself behind Tasso and Lope. In the First dialogue Eudoxe censures (with abundant citation, as throughout the book) Equivoques, Hyperboles, _pointes_, _concetti_, and, generally, thoughts that are “not _true_.” The Second and Third, starting from Longinus and Hermogenes, discuss the true and the false in Sublimity and Wit: and the Fourth is mainly devoted to Obscurity. Bouhours (whose influence on subsequent critics, especially on Addison, was very great) writes agreeably, is free from rudeness and pedantry, and is altogether rather a favourable example of the school of Good Sense, _quand même_. But, as favourable examples of bad schools generally do, he damages his cause more than less favourable ones, because its drawbacks are more obvious and intrinsic. On his principles you must ostracise the best, the noblest, the most charming, the most _poetic_ things in poetry. _Et c’est tout dire._
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Footnote 397:
_Not_, as it is constantly quoted, _peut avoir de l’esprit_. It will be observed that the difference is considerable.
Footnote 398:
My copy is the 2nd ed. of next year in 12mo.
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As we approach the close of the chapter, we come upon classes and masses of work which is at once impossible to examine in particular and, as a whole, elusive. In [Sidenote: _Encyclopædias and Newspapers._] 1687 appeared the _Jugements des Savants_[399] of Baillet, and ten years later the still more famous _Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_ of Bayle, who had preluded it, from a time antecedent to that of Baillet’s publication, by _Nouvelles de la République de Lettres_, a regular literary review. Long before this latter the _Journal des Savants_[400] and the _Mercure Galant_[401] in France had provided criticism, good, bad, and indifferent, with regular outlets for itself. And in both kinds—that of the dictionary or encyclopædia, and that of the periodical—the flood has never ceased, but has always increased since. Fortunately for us the impossibility of treating all this is compensated by the fact that such treatment, if possible, would be superfluous. But of Bayle and Baillet at least something must be said particularly, and something also of a remarkable and much less known continuator of the latter.
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Footnote 399:
The standard edition is that of La Monnoye (7 vols. 4to, Paris, 1722, with an 8th containing Ménage’s _Anti-Baillet_ &c.)
Footnote 400:
Jan. 1665—first weekly, then monthly. It became a government publication in 1701. Gui Patin, in the March after its appearance, is very angry (Let. DCLXV. iii. 517, _ed. cit. sup._) with it, and says with voice prophetic of many injured ones to come, “nous verrons si ces prétendus censeurs, _sine suffragio populi et Quiritium_, auront le crédit et l’autorité de critiquer ainsi tous ceux qui n'écriront pas à leur goût.”
Footnote 401:
1672-1820. Donneau de Visé was its first editor, and Thomas Corneille its most distinguished writer.
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Bayle perhaps needed nothing but better taste, greater freedom from prejudice, and a more exclusive bent towards purely literary criticism, to be one of the great literary critics of the world. [Sidenote: _Bayle._] But, unluckily for himself, he had contracted, through corrupt following doubtless of the Latins (even such respectable persons as Pliny) and of the scholars of the Renaissance, a sort of perpetual itch and hankering after the indecent, which, to say nothing else, is as teasing and as tedious in the long-run as an itch for sermonising and a hankering after instruction. Equally tedious, and in much worse taste, is the perpetual undercurrent—not seldom becoming a very obvious top-flood—of sceptical girding and nagging at the Bible and at religion generally. In both these respects Bayle was followed by Voltaire. But Voltaire, though his own literary sympathies were perhaps not his strongest, had some. Of purely literary sympathies Bayle seldom shows much trace—by which it is not in the least meant that he is not a man of letters himself, for he is an excellent one, and the reproaches which have been addressed to his style are not of much importance. But it is not literature that he really loves: it is “philosophy” of a kind, and gossip of almost all kinds. His wits are always bright and alert, and his learning, though associated with so many qualities opposed to those of the mere pedant, and not impeccable, is pretty sound. He has the curiosity, the acuteness, the erudition, the industry of the true critic, but he has neither the enthusiasm, nor the disinterestedness, nor the grasp.
In both these respects, as in others, Baillet is very much a diminutive of him. [Sidenote: _Baillet._] In fact, brightness of wit has almost disappeared; and though Ménage—himself no infallible guide—has been both ill-mannered and hypercritical in the strictures of the _Anti-Baillet_, there is no doubt that the _Jugements des Savants_ is a book not to be used without verification on particular points. But this is almost a property, or, at worst, an inseparable accident, of these _Collectanea_; and a fair-minded reader cannot help admiring the extraordinary industry with which Baillet executed his task, while appreciating the significance of this record of a division of literature which, as we saw at the close of the last volume, had, scarcely two centuries before, the most meagre representation of all.[402]
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Footnote 402:
It can scarcely be necessary to give bricks of so large and rambling a house. “Mr Borrichius témoigne aussi que le style [_of Ovid’s Heroides_] est fort pur” is, and has to be, the kind of thing. Perhaps such a glut of authorities may have insensibly nauseated men of authority, and so Baillet may have worked both ways. He is good enough to admit (v. 461) that “one cannot say this nation [the English] is inferior even for Poetry to several others of the North,” and he has heard of “Abraham Cowley, John Downe ou Jean Donne, Cleveland, Edmond, [_sic_] Waller, Jean Denham, George Herbert, le Chancelier Bacon, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben, Johnson, Suckling, Jean Milton,” &c. It is open to Shaconians to contend that as the comma at “Edmond” is undoubtedly superfluous, so is that at “Bacon,” and that Baillet—the learned Baillet—meant to rank “le Chancelier Bacon-Shakespeare” among poets.
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Curiously enough the want of judgment with which Baillet has been, and to some extent may justly be, reproached shows itself exactly in the most unlikely place. [Sidenote: _The ethos of a Critical Pedant._] His opening volume on the nature, legitimacy, and so forth of Criticism, though too prolix, collects an extraordinary number of just and valuable things, and adds to them at least something of the author’s own. His Character of a Pedantic, Chicaning, Malicious Critic (partly borrowed from Le Bon, partly elaborated by himself) will be found at vol. i. p. 52., and has been justified by some seven generations of the persons it describes. It is Pedantry “to pick low and little faults, and to excite yourself over matters which are of no importance.” It is Pedantry “to steal from an author and insult him at the same time; to tear outrageously those who differ with you in opinion.” It is Pedantry “to endeavour to raise the whole world against some one who does not think enough of Cicero.” It is Pedantry “to take occasion by an author’s mistake to endeavour to humiliate him and ruin his reputation.” It is Pedantry “to send your author back in a haughty manner to the lowest class, and to menace him with whip and ferule for an error in chronology.” It is not merely Pedantry but Chicanery “to separate phrases in order to give them another sense,” to “impute printers’ errors,” to “neglect or change punctuation.” We need not go on to Baillet’s signs of “Malignity”: the cap is already a good cap, a very good cap, and one need not go far to find some one to wear it.
A boiling down of this volume—which, so far as I know, has never been executed—would be far superior to most general works on the subject with which I am acquainted. Nor is Baillet’s distribution of his scheme altogether a bad one. It is in the detailed carrying out (where one would suppose that for a man of such industry the least part of the difficulty lay) that he is most unsatisfactory. He neglects—in a manner surprising from one of that still scholastically educated generation of ecclesiastics, who were wont positively to abuse division and subdivision—the most obvious and mechanical assistances of method. His first sketch of subdivisions, though wanting succinctness, is not ill; but he never really carries it out, and stuffs in its stead long collections on “Precocious Persons,” “Authors in Disguise,” and “Les _Anti_” (books of a polemic character with titles so beginning), which belong only to the curiosities of Criticism. Further, he never seems to have set out, in any of the divisions, with a preliminary list of the authors he meant to handle, so that his omissions and inclusions are equally surprising. And, lastly, he never seems to have worked out any preliminary calculus of the amount of space which such authors as he does admit proportionately deserve. But the extent of his knowledge is astounding, and the way in which he communicates it not disagreeable.
Baillet’s unmethodical prosecution of his task was in this fortunate for us that it induced a somewhat younger contemporary, Balthasar Gibert, to take up the rhetorical-critical side of his work, and continue it in a book[403] not very much known but of great value. [Sidenote: _Gibert._] In strict date it belongs to the next century, and therefore to the next Book, but we have always taken, and shall always take, liberty of protracting or foreshortening our views as may be desirable; and this is avowedly a supplement to Baillet, though limited in subject, allowing, in consequence, fuller treatment of individuals, and displaying a good deal more originality and judgment. Gibert excellently supplies Baillet’s admitted insufficiency as to Longinus; he is very copious on Hermogenes, who had been coming, from Sturm downwards, into more and more estimation; and if in his accounts of the Italians he shows a traditional rather than an adequately comparative estimate,[404] he is sufficiently modern to give a quite considerable abstract of “M. Mackenze” (_sic_), _i.e._, Sir George Mackenzie’s _Idea Eloquentiæ Forensis Hodiernæ_. That he “but yaws neither” between Rhetoric and Criticism is a point of no importance against him; and it is a valuable document for the gradual transformation of the one into the other.
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Footnote 403:
_Jugements des Savants sur les auteurs qui ont traité de la Rhétorique_ (3 vols., Paris, 1703-16). M. Bourgoin, I think, refers to Gibert, but the book was first brought seriously to my notice by a very kind private communication from Professor Scott of the University of Michigan. Luckily it is in the British Museum; but it does not seem easy to obtain a copy for oneself. Gibert taught for some half-century in the Collége Mazarin, and was repeatedly rector of the University of Paris. He wrote other books,—a formal “Rhetoric” _juxta Aristotelis doctrinam_, strictures on Rollin, &c. Gibert is, it seems, appended to some edd. of Baillet.
Footnote 404:
See, for instance, his reference to Patrizzi, who is evidently to him rather _magni nominis umbra_ than anything tangible.
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We have to terminate this chapter, as we shall have to begin the corresponding one in the next Book, by saying something on the famous—the much too famous—Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns; but the space which we shall give it on both occasions will appear strangely, and perhaps scandalously, short to some readers. [Sidenote: _The Ancient and Modern Quarrel._] Neither idleness nor caprice, however, can be justly charged against the contraction. In the first place, things generally known may be justifiably passed with slighter notice in a continuous history, which has to deal with much that is very little known. From all sides, and in all ways, the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns is very well known indeed. It enjoys, and for more than a generation has enjoyed, the advantage of occupying one of the best monographs ever written. It engaged, on repeated occasions, the attention of the best equipped and the most readable of all French, if not of all, critics—Sainte-Beuve. It was arranged—not ill if not wholly well—for popular English consumption by the expert skill of Macaulay. As a result partly of Swift’s genuine literary sympathies, partly of his more or less accidental connections, the commentators of one of the greatest writers not only of England, but of the world, have been driven to expound it: as have, for more essential reasons, those of more than two or three great or interesting writers in France—Boileau, Perrault, Fontenelle, and others. From all this almost everybody must have learnt something about it, and to some of all this almost everybody can fairly be referred if he wishes to learn more.
For the matter is not really of so much importance in the History of Criticism as it may at first sight appear to possess. [Sidenote: _Its small critical value._] These quarrels rarely do much critical good; for the critical issues are almost always obscured in them, first by the _animus_ and prejudice of the combatants, and then by the mere dust of the fighting. But this particular combat did perhaps the least good of all; and could have done the least good. It was indeed sufficiently inevitable: for the sort of deification with which the whole of the sixteenth century, and most orthodox authority in the earlier seventeenth, had regarded antiquity, was sure to breed revolt. But it led to no conclusion; it evolved no truth. Truth is not the daughter of Ignorance; and it is really hard to say which party shows most ignorance in this matter. The defenders of the Ancients knew, as a rule, next to nothing of the Moderns; and the defenders of the moderns knew a great deal too little of the ancients. La Motte knew no Greek if Perrault[405] knew any; and with Boileau not only to all appearance was English literature a blank sheet, but almost the whole sheet of French literature before his own time was either blank or inscribed with fantastic fallacies. Still, this is not a condition entirely or commonly unknown in squabbles of this kind. The signal distinction and disqualification of the advocates in this famous cause is that, as a rule, neither any of the leaders, nor any of the juniors, had taken more than the slightest trouble to get up, or at least to understand, his _own_ brief. The Ancients are here in a little better case than the Moderns; but they were not in so very much better case. Most of them knew the Latin classics fairly well; and some of them (though by no means all, or even many) had a fair, while a few had a good, acquaintance with Greek.[406] But, with rarest, if with any exceptions, they persisted in exaggerating, if not in contemplating solely, that side of Classical Literature which has been and must be admitted to be its principal side, but which is not the only one. They would not see—or if they saw, they expressed positive distaste for—the vaguer, more imaginative, more “Romantic” beauty of Greek, and in a less degree of Latin. They never dreamt of turning the tables on their antagonists, as they might have done to no inconsiderable extent, from this point of view. And by holding up Design, Order, Decorum, and the rest, as paramount conditions of literary excellence, they laid themselves open to the most inconvenient retorts from well-equipped adversaries, and even received some on the score of Homer, badly as their adversaries were equipped as a rule.
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Footnote 405:
His _Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes_ (1688-98) is most disappointing, even to fervent opponents of “the sect of the Nicolaitans” and fervent lovers of the _Contes de ma Mère l’Oye_. That he knew little and that his case was bad does not matter; but I at least cannot find the _esprit_ which apologists plead.
Footnote 406:
J. Warton (_Adventurer_, No. 49) asserts, on the authority of Ménage, that even Rapin was “totally ignorant” of Greek. M. does not quite say this: but he does say that R. got his Greek quotations from Tanneguy-Lefèvre, Madame Dacier’s father (_Ménagiana_, i. 175 of the collected ed.)
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On the other hand, the Moderns were, for the most part, like men who have Toledos by their sides and choose to fight with cabbage-plants. The French ignored the English and sneered at the Italians and Spaniards since the Renaissance, indulging the while in placid but contemptuous ignorance or misrepresentation of everything before it out of Italy. The English were prepared to admit that nobody had achieved sweetness in English numbers before Mr Waller, apologised (except Dryden and Dryden only in a few moments) for Shakespeare, and thought Chaucer a good funny old savage.
Out of such a welter of blundering little good could come, and no good came save one. It is, I believe, absolutely impossible to trace, in so much as one single filament, the extension and deepening of critical appreciation which began in the next century to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. But that quarrel did excite and feed the critical spirit and appetite, and did give signs of an as yet half-blind craving for the possession of critical knowledge.[407]
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Footnote 407:
Perhaps it is still desirable, though almost for the last time, to observe that the omission of casual criticism in non-critical work is intentional and necessary. Nowhere could more interesting examples of it, from Molière downwards, be produced; but this is only a temptation, not a reason.
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