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._

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 309:

He was born in Angoulême.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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]

-----

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).

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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_.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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).

-----

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.”

-----

Footnote 325:

Tennyson paid almost greater heed to his critics in detail; but he

never made any formal or general concession.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

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]

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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_.

-----

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.

-----

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).

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 336:

_V. inf._, p. 385 note.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

[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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 351:

Also not in the collection. My copy is the Amsterdam edition, 2 vols.,

1699.

-----

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]

-----

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]

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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]

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

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.”

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 377:

Written in 1700 and published next year. Letter vi. of the ordinary

collection.

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 378:

The First and Sixth Satires are a little, and some smaller pieces

much, earlier than this, but they are indecisive and unimportant.

-----

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?

-----

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.

-----

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.