Assuredly no “modern,” whether of his days or of our own, can find aught

but confusion of face in the quiet axiom of Laura at the end of her

controversy with Sappho,[652] “Croyez moi, après qu’on a bien raisonné

ou sur l’amour, ou sur telle autre matière qu’on voudra, on trouve au

bout du compte que les choses sont bien comme elles sont, et que la

réforme qu’on prétendroit y apporter gâterait tout.” _Pulveris exigui

jactus!_ but one with a fatally magical effect in the quarrels of

criticism as of other things. And the same is the lesson of the dialogue

which follows immediately—the best of the whole, and almost a sovereign

document of our library,—that between Socrates and Montaigne. Not only

is there no example in the literature of the dialogue, from Plato to Mr

Traill, much more apt than the “maieutic” feat of Socrates, by which he

induces Montaigne to commit himself to the dogma, “Partout où il y a des

hommes, il y a des sottises, et les mêmes sottises”; but the rest of the

piece is as powerfully, though as quietly, worked out as this crisis of

it. There is no Progress; there is no Degeneration. The distribution may

vary: the sum will not. Erasistratus maintains the same thesis on a

different matter a little later in his dialogue with Harvey,[653] laying

down the doctrine, outrageous to all the Royal Societies of the world

(though they were glad to welcome Fontenelle as populariser, and have

perhaps never had such an one since, except Mr Huxley), that “the things

which are not necessary perhaps do get discovered in the course of ages,

the others not.” And Charles V. preaches no very different sermon when

he “makes a hare” of Erasmus by pointing out to that dilettante

republican that _les biens de l’esprit_ are just as much things of time

and chance as crown and sceptre.[654]

-----

Footnote 652:

_Œuvres_, ed. cit., i. 234.

Footnote 653:

_Œuvres_, i. 249.

Footnote 654:

Ibid., p. 270. The _Dialogues_, it should perhaps be said, appeared

first, as early as 1683.

-----

It is, however, in Fontenelle’s actual concrete deliverances of

criticism that the resemblance to Dryden comes in most. [Sidenote:

_Other critical work._] Those who insist that such deliverances shall be

Medic-Persian, unalterable, mathematical, true without relation and

adjustment, will not like him. To take his utterances down in a

notebook, and reproduce them at the next examination (to provide for

which process seems to be held the be-all and end-all of modern

criticism), would not do at all. When Fontenelle praises Corneille at

the expense of Racine, you have to think whether he is speaking what he

thinks or merely as _le neveu de son oncle_; when he says other things,

whether he is a “Modern” at the time and to the extent of saying

something which he knows will cause the “Ancients” grinding torments;

when he sketches[655] a theory of poetic criticism of the most sweeping

_a priori_ kind from Principles of Beauty down through Kinds to Rules,

whether he really means this, or is conciliating somebody, or laughing

in his sleeve at somebody, or the like. But this—at least for some

tastes—only adds piquancy to his observations, and they have now and

then surprising justice, freshness, freedom from the prejudices of time,

country, and circumstance. The _Histoire du Théâtre Français_, for

instance, which he has prefixed to his _Vie de Corneille_, may be based

on second-hand information, and, with our fuller knowledge, it may not

be very hard to pick holes in it. But it is an extraordinary production

for a representative man of letters at a time when hardly any such man,

in any country of Europe, was free from ignorant contempt of the early

vernaculars. The brief eleven-articled “parallel between Racine and

Corneille” is of course somewhat partisan; but it will give the

partisans on the other side some trouble to prove it unjust. The

“Remarks on Aristophanes,” and on the Greek theatre generally, are

obviously “modern” and intended to tease; but they are uncommonly

shrewd, and so are the _Réflexions sur la Poétique_ and those on “Poetry

in General.” It is wonderful that even an antagonist of Boileau, and a

sworn paradoxer, should, at this time, have been able to see the beauty

of the Père Le Moyne’s splendid couplet on the Sicilian Vespers,—

“Quand du Gibel ardent les noires Euménides

Sonneront de leur cor ces Vêpres homicides,”—

where we are more than half-way from Du Bartas and Aubigné to Victor

Hugo. The mere image—this new “vision of the guarded mount,” with the

black Furies silhouetted against the flaming cone, and the explosions of

the volcano deepening the bugle-call to massacre—is fine: the means

taken to make it poetical are finer. The use of the proper names, and

the cunning arrangement of epithet and noun in _noires Euménides_ and

_Vêpres homicides_, and the sharp blasts of the long and short _o_'s in

the second line, are more than Hugonian, they are positively Miltonic:

and the couplet will serve to keep a man in Mr Arnold’s “torpid and

dismal” stage of later middle life cheerful for an evening, and

whensoever he remembers it afterwards. True, Fontenelle admits demurely

that he knows “vespers” and “Eumenides” are something of an anachronism

in conjunction, and proposes a slight alteration to suit this objection

of “correctness.” But this is his way; and the wonderful thing is that

he should have admired it at all—should have actually tasted this heady

wine of poetry. As he finishes the paragraph in his own quaint

style,[656] “Il était bien aisé, même à de grands poètes, de ne pas

trouver” this couplet: and in his time it would have been still easier

even for great critics not to do justice to it, and not to see that it

is to these things “so easy for the poet not to find” that it is the

critic’s business to look.

-----

Footnote 655:

Ed. cit., iii. 1-67.

Footnote 656:

Ed. cit., iii. 181.

-----

The general remarks on Comedy which he prefixed to a collection of his

efforts in that kind are not negligible; but in those on Eclogue,[657]

and still more in the _Digression sur Les Anciens et Les Modernes_, the

curse, or at least the gainsaying, of the Quarrel is upon him, and the

main drift is not merely digressive but aggressive and excessive. In the

_Digression_ he anticipates (as he did in so many things) the

materialist-rationalist explanations of the later eighteenth century by

climate, fibres of the brain, &c. Here he becomes scientific, and

therefore necessarily ceases to be of importance in literature.

-----

Footnote 657:

As if, however, to show that one must never speak of Fontenelle

without reserves, there are some extremely interesting things here

also. For instance, the characteristic _malice_, with a serious and

sensible side to it, of the law that the sentiments and language of

the artificial pastoral shall bear the same relation to nature as _ces

habits que l’on prend dans des ballets pour représenter les paysans_.

-----

But he always regains that importance before long—in his Discourse of

the Origin of Fable, in his Academic Discourses and Replies, in many a

fragment and isolated remark. Even in his _Eloges_—mostly devoted (there

are nearly two volumes of them) to scientific personages from Leibniz

and Newton downwards—the unconquerable critical power of the man shows

itself, subject to the limitations noted. The world is sometimes not

allowed to know anything of its greatest critics, and Fontenelle is an

example of this. But those who have won something of that knowledge of

criticism which it is the humble purpose of this book to facilitate,

will not slight the man who, at the junction of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, could flirt in the face of Ancients and Moderns

alike the suggestion (which Mr Rigmarole doubtless borrowed from him)

that all times are “pretty much like our own,” and could see and hear

the sable sisters sounding the tocsin on the flaming crest of Mongibel.

Fontenelle is elusive, but comprehensible by the imagination. La

Motte,[658] his inseparable companion in the renewed sacrilege of the

Moderns, seems an easier, but is really a harder, personage to lay hold

of. [Sidenote: _La Motte._] It is indeed not extremely difficult to

explain his attitude to the Ancients by the fact that he knew no Greek;

and his exaltation of prose by a consciousness (wherein he has left a

family by no means extinct) that his own verses were worth very little.

But it is so easy not to write verses if you cannot; and not to write

about Greek if you do not know it! And the problem is further

complicated by the facts that at least some judges, who are not exactly

the first comers, such as Fontenelle himself and Voltaire, maintained

that La Motte _could_ write verses,—and that, so far from being “a

fellow who had failed,” he had obtained the greatest scenic success of

the early eighteenth century with _Inès de Castro_, and, what is more,

had deserved it. But for once, as also again in Pope’s case, the

dangerous explanation of physical defects and constitutional weakness

seems to have some validity. The invulnerable nonchalance of his friend

Fontenelle had met the damnation of _Aspar_ by a cool tearing up of the

piece, and an undismayed advance upon the fate of the _plusquam semel

damnatus_; La Motte, at twenty or at little more, felt the similar

misfortune of _Les Originaux_ so severely that he actually went to La

Trappe for a time. Before middle life he was blind and a cripple. The

irritability which did not show itself in his temper (for he was the

most amiable of men) would seem to have transferred itself to his

literary attitude, not affecting his politeness of expression, but

inducing a sort of “rash” of paradox.

-----

Footnote 658:

My copy is the _Œuvres_ (Paris, 1754) in 10 vols. (the first divided

into two parts).

-----

To trace the vagaries of this might not be unamusing, but would

certainly be excessive here. [Sidenote: _His “Unity of Interest.”_] La

Motte, it seems to me, had considerably less natural literary taste than

Fontenelle; and of the controversy[659] (it was not his antagonist’s

fault if it was not a very acrimonious one) between him and Madame

Dacier one cannot say much more than that the lady is very aggressive,

very erudite, and very unintelligent; the gentleman very suave, rather

ignorant, and of an intelligence better, but not much better, directed;

while both are sufficiently distant from any true critical point of

view. Yet once, as was not unnatural in the case of a very clever man

who was at least endeavouring to form independent conclusions, La Motte

did hit upon a great critical truth when,[660] discussing the Three

Unities, he laid it down that there is after all only _one_ Unity which

is of real importance, and that this is the “Unity of Interest,” to

which all the others are subsidiary, and but as means to an end.

“Self-evident,” some one may say; but in how many critics have we found

the fact acknowledged hitherto? and by how many has it been frankly

acknowledged since? That the aim of the poet is to please, to satisfy

the thirst for pleasure—that is to say, to interest—all but the

extremest ethical prudery will admit. But critics, especially classical

and neo-classical critics, have always been in the mood of Christophero

Sly when he railed at the woman of the house and threatened her with

presentation at the leet,

“Because she brought stone jugs and no sealed quarts.”

Without the “sealed quart” of the Unity—of the Rule generally—these

critics will not slake, nor let others slake, their thirst. But the

affirmation of the Unity of Interest, in La Motte’s way, does inevitably

bring with it licence to use the stone jug or anything else, so only

that the good wine of poetry be made to do its good office.

-----

Footnote 659:

The main documents of which are Madame Dacier’s _Traité des causes de

la corruption du goût_ (Paris, 1714) and La Motte’s _Réflexions sur la

Critique_, which will be found in the third volume of the ed. just

mentioned.

Footnote 660:

In his _Premier Discours sur la Tragédie_, _ed. cit. sup._, iv. 23

_sq._

-----

The Quarrel left its traces for a long time on criticism, and seems to

have partly determined the composition, as late as 1730, of two books of

some note, the _Traité des Études_ of the excellent Rollin, and the

elaborate _Théâtre des Grecs_ of the Père Brumoy. [Sidenote: _Rollin._]

Of neither need we say very much. The first-named[661] had considerable

influence at home and abroad, especially in Germany; but Rollin’s

successor, Batteux, was justified in the good-humoured malice of his

observation,[662] “Je trouve à l’article de la Poésie un discours fort

sensé sur son origine et sa destination, qui doit être toute au profit

de la vertu. On y cite les beaux endroits d’Homère; on y donne la plus

juste idée de la sublime Poésie des Livres Saints; mais c'était une

définition que je demandais.” Alas! we have experienced the same

disappointment many times; nor is it Batteux himself who will cure us of

it.

-----

Footnote 661:

4 vols., Paris, 1720-1731.

Footnote 662:

_Op. cit._ _inf._, I. xx.

-----

Brumoy’s imposing quartos[663] have at least the advantage (how great a

one the same experience has shown us) of tackling a definite subject in

a business-like way. [Sidenote: _Brumoy._] His book consists of actual

translations of a certain number of Greek pieces, of analyses of all the

rest that we have, and of divers discourses. He leads off with a

forcible and well-founded complaint of the extreme ignorance of Greek

tragedy and drama generally which the Quarrel had shown; his

observations on individual writers and pieces are often very sensible;

and his “Discourse on the Parallel between the Theatres” has a bearing

which he probably did not suspect, and might not have relished. He

dwells with vigour and knowledge on the _differences_ between them in

order to show that not merely preference, as in the Quarrel, but even

strict comparison, is impossible between things so different. It could

not be but that sooner or later it would dawn, on some readers at least,

that it was even more ridiculous to try to make the two obey the same

laws.

-----

Footnote 663:

3 vols., Paris, 1730.

-----

As has been already shown in the last book, literary criticism had, even

by the middle of the seventeenth century, established so firm a hold on

French taste that the representative system becomes more and more

imperative upon the historian thereof. To represent the later days of

Fontenelle and those when Voltaire, though attaining, had not entirely

attained his almost European dictatorship of letters, three names will

serve very well; one perhaps new to many (if there be many) readers of

these pages, another one of the conscript names of literary history,

respected if not read, and the third a classic of the world—in plainer

words, Rémond de Saint-Mard, the Abbé Du Bos, and Montesquieu.

Saint-Mard has been rather badly treated by the books,—for instance,

Vapereau’s _Dictionnaire des Littératures_, often no despicable

compilation, not only dismisses him as _médiocre_, but misspells his

name Saint-Mar_c_. [Sidenote: _Rémond de Saint-Mard._] He had, however,

some influence in his own day, especially on the Germans;[664] and there

is an extremely pretty little edition[665] of his works, most of which

had been issued separately earlier. To some extent he is a follower of

Fontenelle, writes _Dialogues of Gods_, &c., _Lettres Galantes et

Philosophiques_, and the like, to please the town and the ladies, but

with a constant turning to criticism. In the “Discourse,” which precedes

his _Dialogues_ in the collected edition, there is a very odd and, as it

seems to me, a very noteworthy passage, in which, though there may be

some would-be fine-gentleman nonchalance, there is also a dawning of

that sense of the unnaturalness and inconvenience of “the rules” which

is constantly showing itself in the early eighteenth century. He

admits[666] that he has not followed his own rules; for the orthodox

dialogue ought to have one subject, led up to for some time, announced

at last. But somehow or other most of his dialogues have more. So few

ideas are fertile enough for a whole Dialogue!—a sentence which

obviously cuts away the theory of the rule, and not merely its practice.

-----

Footnote 664:

I have found him repeatedly quoted in those interesting early gropings

of the German nonage, which will be referred to in the next chapter.

Had he anything to do with Lady Mary W. Montagu’s tormentor, Rémond?

Footnote 665:

5 vols., Amsterdam, 1750. It is rather too pretty, and so rare. But it

is in the British Museum: and I have a copy (which I owe to the

kindness of Mr Gregory Smith) of the _Réflexions_ (_v. inf._) It has

only initials (“R. D. S. M.”) on the title-page.

Footnote 666:

i. 65, ed. cit. The Dialogues themselves had appeared as early as

1711.

-----

Nor are his other works by any means destitute of original ideas

worthily put. In one of his definition-descriptions of poetry,[667] if

there is something of eighteenth-century sensualism, there is much also

of the acute and practical psychology of the period. [Sidenote: _L.

Racine._]The words _do_ account—whether in “low” or “high” fashion—for

the poetic delight, as “Philosophy teaching by example” and other arid

abstractions do not. His theory elsewhere, that Custom communicates the

charm of versification (he does not quote _usus concinnat_, but

inevitably suggests it), has probably a great deal of truth in it, if it

is not the whole truth; and though we know that his explanation of the

origin of Poetry—that it came because Prose was too common—is

historically inaccurate, it is evidently only a false deduction,

uncorrected by actual historic knowledge, from the real fact that the

“discommoning of the common” _is_ a main source of the poetic pleasure.

In points such as these Rémond de Saint-Mard rises commendably above the

estimable dulness of his contemporary Louis Racine,[668] with his

admiration oddly distributed between Milton and his own papa, and in the

former case more oddly conditioned by respect for Addison and Voltaire;

his laborious rearrangement of most of the old commonplaces about poetry

and poets; and his obliging explanation that “Ces images de magiciennes

et de sorcières de Laponie ne paraissaient pas extravagantes aux Anglais

dans le temps que Milton écrivit.”

-----

Footnote 667:

The _Réflexions sur la poésie suivies de lettres_, &c., had originally

appeared in 1733-34 at The Hague. The passage is this: _On y rapproche

de nous les objets qui sont les plus éloignés—on leur donne du

corps—on les anime. Toute la Nature est agitée des mêmes passions que

nous._

Footnote 668:

6 vols., Paris, 1808. For in this kind of work one must often read six

volumes to justify the writing of six lines. And Racine, to do him

justice, if not a great genius, is no small symptom. When a Frenchman

of his time and associations reads Milton reverently, something will

happen soon.

-----

By this time “Æsthetics” were breaking the shell everywhere; but in many

cases, as we have seen, they did not consciously affect the critical

principles of writers. [Sidenote: _Du Bos._] Du Bos, a solid inquirer,

and a man of considerable ability in that striking out of wide

generalisations which delighted his time, could hardly have avoided

them. His _Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture_[669]

have sometimes been credited with considerable precursorship on the

literary side. It is certain that he lays some stress (Part II., § 14

_sq._) on the effect of Climate upon Art, and if this “seem such dear

delight, Beyond all other,” he must have the credit due therefor from

those to whom it so seems. To those who reflect on the climatic

authorship, say of _Romeo and Juliet_ and the sonnets of La Casa, doubts

may occur. Du Bos is certainly an interesting and stimulating writer;

but his very excursions into generality seem to have precluded him from

studying any particular author carefully; and the crotchet and paradox

which appear in his more famous and later _Histoire de la Monarchie

Française_ are not absent from the _Réflexions_. These take, moreover, a

distinctly “classic” bent. Dr Johnson would have loved, and very

possibly did love, him for arguing in a masterly manner that French

poetry simply _cannot_ equal Latin, either in style or in cadence and

harmony of verse; nor perhaps would Mr Matthew Arnold on this occasion

have disdained to say ditto to Dr Johnson. Latin words are more

beautiful than French. Harmony is easier to attain in Latin than in

French. The rules are less troublesome in Latin than in French, and

their observance results in more beauties in the mother than in the

daughter. This is “Thorough” with a vengeance.[670]

-----

Footnote 669:

2 vols., Paris, 1719. In English by T. Nugent: 3 vols., 1748.

Footnote 670:

_Op. cit._, Part I., § 35. His justest strictures are on the

extravagantly syllabic quality of French prosody, and its neglect of

quantity. His ear seems to have been good for rhythm, bad for rhyme.

-----

On the great question of _katharsis_ Du Bos holds the view that art

operates by imitating the things which would have excited strong

passions in us if real, but which, as not being real, only excite weak

ones; and makes fair fight for it (Part I., § 3). [Sidenote:

_Stimulating but desultory character of his_ Réflexions.] He thinks that

while execution is everything in painting it is not everything in

poetry, but still much. He quotes English critics, especially Addison,

pretty freely, and is not far from holding with them that French drama

deals too much with love. He has some really acute remarks on what he

calls poetry of style, distinguishing this style from mere diction and

versification, and connecting this directly with his Latin-French

paradox. He even ventures close to the sin unpardonable, in the eyes of

Classicism, by arguing that the beauty of the parts of a poem

contributes more to its effect than the justness and regularity of the

plan, and that a poem may be “regular” to the _n_^{th} and yet quite a

bad poem. He has respect for the popular judgment—a respect suggesting a

not impossible acquaintance with Gravina (_v. infra_, p. 538), who had

written a good many years before him: and he distinctly postulates,

after the manner of the century, an Æsthetic Sense existing in almost

all, and capable of deciding on points of taste (Part II., § 22). He has

some direct and more indirect observations in reference to the Quarrel,

speaking with trenchant, but not too trenchant, disapproval (Part II., §

36) of those who endeavour to judge works of art by translations and

criticisms. On the main question he is pretty sound. He is good on

genius, and on what he calls the _artisan_, the craftsman _without_

genius. Taking him altogether, Du Bos may be allowed the praise of a

really fertile and original writer,[671] who says many things which are

well worth attention and which seldom received it before him, in regard

to what may be called the previous questions of criticism. His

connection of poetry with painting sometimes helps him, and seldom leads

him absolutely wrong; but it to some extent distracts him, and

constantly gives an air of desultoriness and haphazard to his

observation. It is, moreover, quite remarkable how persistently he

abides _in generalibus_, scarcely ever descending below the mediate

examination of Kinds. When he touches on individual works of art he

confines himself in the most gingerly fashion to illustration merely;

there is never an appreciation in whole or in considerable part.

-----

Footnote 671:

Why did he think that _Hudibras_ was written _par un homme de la

maison Hovvart_? [_i.e._, Howard] (i. 132). I may note here that Père

Andrè, with his _Essai sur le Beau_, is postponed, as a pure

Æsthetician, to the next volume.

-----

When Voltaire denounced Montesquieu for _lèse-poésie_, the accused, if

he had chosen, might have brought formidable counter accusations; but

there was certainly some ground for the actual charge. [Sidenote:

_Montesquieu._] When a man says[672] that “the four great poets are

Plato, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, and Montaigne,” he is evidently either

a heretic or a paradoxer; and the hundred and thirty-seventh of the

_Lettres Persanes_ gives a sad colour to the worse supposition. There is

perhaps less actual high treason to poetry here than in the remarks of

Signor Pococurante, that noble Venetian, but there is more intended; the

whole treatment is ostentatiously contemptuous. Dramatists are allowed

some merit, but poets in general “put good sense in irons, and smother

reason in ornament.” As for epic poems, connoisseurs themselves say that

there never have been but two good ones, and never will be a third.[673]

Lyric poets are contemptible creatures who deal in nothing but

harmonious extravagance and so forth. As for romances in prose, they

have the faults of poems and others to boot. Elsewhere, in Letter

xlviii., a “poet is the grotesque of the human race.” It is scarcely

surprising that, when we turn to the _Essai sur le Goût_, there is

hardly any definite reference to literature at all, and that Montesquieu

is entirely occupied in tracing or imagining abstract reasons for the

attractiveness of abstract things like “surprise,” “symmetry,”

“variety,” and even of the _je ne sais quoi_. The _je ne sais quoi_ in

an attractive, but not technically beautiful, girl is, it seems, due to

surprise at finding her so attractive, which, with all respect to the

President, seems to be somewhat “circular.” In fact, Montesquieu is

chiefly interesting to us, first, because he made no literary use of his

own theories as to climate and the rest—which later writers have used

and abused in this way; and secondly, because he shows, _in excelsis_,

that radically unliterary as well as unpoetical vein which, for all its

remarkable literary performance, is characteristic of his time.

-----

Footnote 672:

_Pensées Diverses_ (_Œuvres_, ed. Laboulaye, Paris, 1875, 7 vols., or

with Vian’s _Life_ 8), vii. 171.

Footnote 673:

It has been thought that this passage, as glancing at the _Henriade_,

was one of the reasons of Voltaire’s affection for Montesquieu. It is

perhaps worth observing that there is a strong resemblance, with some

minor differences, between Montesquieu’s attitude to literature, and

that of his friend Chesterfield.

-----

It will surprise no one who has any acquaintance with the subject that

but a few lines should have been given to Montesquieu; it may shock some

to find but a very few pages given to Voltaire.[674] [Sidenote:

_Voltaire: Disappointments of his criticism._] But while I have never

been able to rank the Patriarch’s criticism high, a reperusal of it in

sequence, for the purpose of this book, has even reduced the level of my

estimate. The fact is that, consummate literary craftsman as he was, and

wanting only the _je ne sais quoi_ itself (or rather something that we

know too well) to rank with the very greatest men of letters, Voltaire

was not a man with whom literary interest by any means predominated. It

is not merely that his anti-crusade against _l’infâme_ constantly

colours his literary, as it does all his other, judgments; and that once

at least it made him certainly indorse, and possibly enounce, the

astounding statement that the Parables in the Gospels are “coarse and

low.”[675] But when this perpetually disturbing influence is at its

least active point, we can see perfectly that neither Voltaire’s

treasure nor his heart is anywhere, with the doubtful exception of the

drama division, in literature. In mathematics and in physical science

there is no doubt that he was genuinely interested; and he was perhaps

still more interested (as indeed men of his century generally were) in

what may be vaguely called anthropology, the moral, social, and (to

some, though only to some, extent) political history of mankind. But for

literature he had very little genuine love; though the vanity in which

he certainly was not lacking could not fail to be conscious of his own

excellence as a practitioner in it; and though he could not but

recognise its power—its almost omnipotence—as a weapon. It was probably

the more human character of the drama that attracted him there.

-----

Footnote 674:

I use the thirteen-vol. ed. of the _Panthéon Littéraire_ (Paris, 1876)

because, though cumbrous individually, it is the only one that will go

in moderate shelf-room.

Footnote 675:

This comes, it is true, from the _Sentiments du Curé Meslier_ (vi.

542). But it is allowed that Voltaire rewrote this, and I should not

be surprised if he did a little more.

-----

However this may be, it is impossible, for me at least, to rank him high

as a critic: and this refusal is hardly in the least due to his famous

blasphemies against Shakespeare and Milton. [Sidenote: _Examples of

it._] As we have seen—as we shall see—it is possible to disagree

profoundly with some, nay, with many, of a critic’s estimates, and yet

to think highly of his critical gifts. But Voltaire scarcely anywhere

shows the true _ethos_ of the critic: and that “smattering erudition” of

his is nowhere so much of a smattering, and so little of an erudition,

as here. His two famous surveys of English and French literature, in the

_Lettres sur les Anglais_ and the _Siècle de Louis Quatorze_, show, on

the French side at least, a more complete ignorance of literary history

than Boileau’s own: and the individual judgments, though admirably

expressed, are banal and without freshness of grasp. The extensive

_Commentary on Corneille_ contains, of course, interesting things, but

is of no high critical value. The _Essai sur la Poésie Épique_ opens

with some excellent ridicule of “the rules”—a subject which indeed might

seem to invite the Voltairian method irresistibly; but after this and

some serious good sense of the same kind, he practically deserts to the

rules themselves. He admits _fautes grossières_ in Homer, finds

“monstrosity and absurdity up to the limits of imagination” in

Shakespeare, thinks that Virgil is “Homer’s best work,” discovers in the

supernatural of Tasso and Camoens only “insipid stories fit to amuse

children,” dismisses, as everybody knows, the great Miltonic episode of

Satan, Death, and Sin as “disgusting and abominable,” and keeps up

throughout his survey that wearisome castanet-clatter of “fault and

beauty—beauty and fault” which, whensoever and wheresoever we find it,

simply means that the critic is not able to see his subject as a whole,

and tell us whether it is foul or fair.

Perhaps no better instance of the feebleness of Voltaire’s criticism can

be found than in his dealings with Rabelais.[676] Here there are

practically no disturbing elements. Yet no one is more responsible than

Voltaire is for the common notion, equally facile and false, of Rabelais

as a freethinker with a sharp eye to the main chance, who disguised his

freethinking in a cloak of popular obscenity, who is often amusing,

sometimes admirable, but as a whole coarse, tedious, and illegible, or

at best appealing to the most vulgar taste. Take the famous sentence

that Swift is a “Rabelais de bonne compagnie,”[677] work it out either

side, and it will be difficult to find anywhere words more radically

uncritical. Or turn to the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_. Not only are

the literary articles very few, and in some of these few cases mere

_rechauffés_ of the _Lettres sur Les Anglais_, &c., but the head

“Literature” itself contains the singular statement that criticism is

_not_ literature—because nobody speaks of “une belle critique.” The

articles “Esprit” and “Goût” are attractive—especially the latter,

because it is on the critical watchword of the century: but we are sent

away, worse than empty, with some abuse of Shakespeare, and with the

statement, “No man of letters can possibly fail to recognise the

_perfected_ taste of Boileau in the _Art Poétique_.” Only, perhaps, the

article on _Art Dramatique_ is worthy of its title, and the reason of

this has been indicated.

-----

Footnote 676:

These are to be found in more places than one: the _Lettres sur les

Anglais_ (originally _Lettres Philosophiques_), those to the Prince of

Brunswick, the dialogue in which Rabelais figures with Lucian and

Erasmus, &c.

-----

The numerous _Mélanges Littéraires_ are again interesting

reading—indeed, when is Voltaire _not_ interesting, save when he is

scientific, or when he shows that “the zeal of the _devil’s_ house” can

inspire a man of genius with forty-curate-power dulness? They include

almost every kind of writing, from actual reviews (_Lettres aux Auteurs

de La Gazette Littéraire_) on books French and foreign, upwards or

downwards. But all those that are probably genuine exhibit just the same

characteristics as the more elaborate works. The reviews of Sterne and

of Churchill will show how really superficial Voltaire’s literary grip

was; though both of them (as being Voltaire’s they could not well help

doing) contain acute remarks. The too famous argument-abstract of

_Hamlet_[678] is perhaps the most remarkable example of irony exploding

through the touch-hole that literature affords. The “Parallel of Horace,

Boileau, and Pope” from such a hand might seem as if it could not be

without value: but it has very little. And perhaps nowhere does Voltaire

appear to much less critical advantage than in the _Lettre de M. de La

Visclède_ on La Fontaine, where, as in the case of Rabelais, it might be

thought that no prejudice could possibly affect him. The superfine

condemnation of the _bonhomme’s_ style, as filled with expressions _plus

faites pour le peuple que pour les honnêtes gens_ (not, let it be

observed, in the _Fables_, but in the _Contes_), could hardly tell a

more disastrous tale. Philistia by its Goliath in Paris echoes Philistia

by its common folk in London, at this special time. La Fontaine and

Goldsmith are “low.”

-----

Footnote 677:

This, the usually quoted form, runs in the _Lettres sur les A._, “un

Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie.”

Footnote 678:

Ed. cit., ix. 56.

-----

The fact would appear to be that, independently of that lack of purely

literary interest which has been noted above, other causes kept Voltaire

back from really original and valuable criticism. [Sidenote: _Causes of

his failure._] The sense of the necessity of clinging to and conserving

_something_, which has often been shown by iconoclasts, seems to have

directed itself in him towards literary orthodoxy: while, on the other

hand, as we have already seen, his natural acuteness refused to blink

entirely some of the absurdities of the “Rule” system. His craftsmanship

made it possible for him to succeed in certain kinds of artificial

poetry—the regular tragedy, the formal heroic poem, the light piece,

epigram, or epistle, or what not—which were specially favoured by

Classical criticism. He was not well equipped by nature for success in

any Romantic kind—not to mention that Romance was almost indissolubly

connected with those Ages of Faith which he scorned. Moreover, though no

man has committed more faults of taste, in the wider and nobler sense,

than did Voltaire, yet within a narrower and more arbitrary circle of

“taste” of the conventional kind, no one could walk with more unerring

precision. Yet again, the Great Assumption by which the neo-classics

made a changeling of their Taste with Good Sense, and mothered it on

Nature, appealed strongly to such philosophical theories as he had.

Accordingly, both in public and private,[679] the great heretic, with

very few exceptions, plays the part of a very Doctor of the Literary

Sorbonne, and leaves the attempt at a new criticism to the more

audacious innovation, and the more thorough-going naturalism, of

Diderot.[680]

-----

Footnote 679:

I have not thought it necessary to waste time and space by selecting

additional justificatory pieces from his enormous _Correspondence_.

Footnote 680:

This attitude was emphasised (perhaps by his dislike of Rousseau) in

his later years; and was handed on to men like Condorcet and La Harpe.

-----

Of the other _Di majores_ of the _philosophe_ school, Rousseau would

always have been prevented by his temperament from expressing critically

the appreciations which the same temperament might have suggested: and,

if he had been a critic at all, he would have been on the revolting and

Romantic side. [Sidenote: _Others: Buffon._] Diderot actually was so.

The critical utterances of D’Alembert,[681] chiefly if not wholly given

in his _Éloges_, express the clear understanding and by no means trivial

good sense of their writer. But, like Voltaire’s, D’Alembert’s heart was

elsewhere. Buffon remains; and by a curious accident he, though _totus

in_ the things of mere science, has left us one of the most noteworthy

phrases of literary criticism in the history of literature. Moreover,

this phrase is contained in a discourse[682] which is all literary and

almost all critical, which is very admirable within its own range and on

its own side, and which practically provides us with one of the first,

and to this day one of the best, discussions of Style as such. That we

have in these latter days “heard too much of Style” is often said, and

may be true: “where” we have _seen_ too much of it “you shall tell me”

as Seithenin said to the Prince. But we, in the restricted sense of

students of criticism, have not “seen too much” of discussions of style

hitherto. On the contrary, we have seen that the ancients were

constantly shy of it in its quiddity; that even Longinus seems to prefer

to abstract and embody one of its qualities and discuss that; and that

after the revival of criticism the old avoidances, or the old apologies

for the _phortikon ti_, were too often renewed. Buffon has none of this

prudery: though he lays the greatest possible stress on the necessity of

there being something behind style, of style being “the burin that

graves the thought.”

-----

Footnote 681:

The gibe of Gautier (_Caprices et Zigzags_, “Un tour en Belgique”),

where he calls the Sun “un astre à qui M. de Malfilâtre fait une ode

trouvée admirable par D’Alembert” contains no doubt something of

youthful Romantic naughtiness in it: but also something more. The ode

_has_ a frigid Akensidish grace; but there is too much about axes and

orbits therein: and it is to be feared that this, rather than the

poetry, attracted the _philosophe_ critic.

Footnote 682:

His Academic _Discours de Réception_ (Aug. 25, 1753). It is easily

accessible—for instance in the Didot _Œuvres Choisies_, i. 19-25.

-----

Perhaps he does not quite keep at the height of his famous and often

misquoted[683] dictum—“Le style est l’homme même”—in itself the best

thing ever said on the subject, and, as is the case with most good

things, made better by the context. [Sidenote: “_Style and the man._”]

He has been showing why only well-written books go down to posterity.

Information can be transferred; fact becomes public property; novelty

ceases to be novel. _Ces choses sont hors de l’homme; le style est_

[_de_?] _l’homme même._ In other words, the style—the form—is that

which the author adds to the matter; it is that inseparable, but

separably intelligible, element which cannot be transferred, taken

away, or lost. It is clear that Buffon would not have lent himself to

that discountenancing of the distinction of Matter and Form which some

have attempted. Perhaps his other remarks are less uniformly, though

they are often, admirable. He should not, as a man of natural science,

have congratulated the Academicians on contemning “le vain son des

mots,” which, he should have known, always has something, and may have

much, to do with style; and it is certainly inadequate to say that

style is “the _order and movement_ given to our thoughts.” There is

much that is true, but also something of mere neo-classic orthodoxy,

in his painful repetitions of the necessity of unity and greatness of

subject; and to say that “l’esprit humain ne peut rien créer” is sheer

_lèse-littérature_. Rather is it true that, except God, the human mind

is the only thing that can create, and that it shows its divine origin

thereby. But Buffon was only a man of science, and we must excuse him.

The special curse of the time[684] is curiously visible in his

enumeration, among the causes of nobility in style, of “L’attention à

ne nommer les choses que par _les termes les plus généraux_.” The

“streak of the tulip” barred again! But he is certainly right when he

says that “jamais l’imitation n’a rien créé”: though here it may be

retorted, “Yes; but imitation teaches how to discard itself, and to

begin to create,” while, as he has just extended the disability to the

human faculties generally, his point seems a blunt one. Still, his

directions for _ordonnance_ as a preliminary to style, his cautions

against _pointes_, _traits saillants_, pomposity [he might have recked

this rede a little more himself], and other things, are excellent. The

piece is extraordinary in its combination of originality, brilliancy,

and sense, and in it Science has certainly lent Literature one of the

best critical essays of the eighteenth century.

-----

Footnote 683:

It is generally quoted “Le style c’est l’homme.” There is a further

dispute whether it ought to be “_de_ l’homme même.” For what is

probably the nearest anticipation of it, _v. sup._, p. 336.

Footnote 684:

So again in the remark, not made formally, but often thrown in his

face, that certain verses were “as fine as fine _prose_.” But this

heresy, as readers of this volume will know, is only that of Fénelon

and La Motte revived.

-----

Not an unimportant document of the time for the history of criticism is

the critical attitude of that remarkable Marcellus of philosophism,

Vauvenargues.[685] The few _Réflexions Critiques_ which he has left are

very curious. Vauvenargues was a man of an absolute independence of

spirit so far as he knew; but conditioned by the limits of his

knowledge. He had neither time nor opportunity for much reading; he

probably knew little of any literature but his own. It must be

remembered also that his main bent was ethical, not literary. Such a man

should give us the form and pressure of the time in an unusual and

interesting way.

-----

Footnote 685:

His literary work has only one small section to itself, the

_Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes_; but some of it appears in

the _Fragments_, the _Dialogues_, and elsewhere. All is in Gilbert’s

excellent edition of the _Œuvres_, (2 vols., Paris, 1857), some in

that volume of the Didot Collection which gives Vauvenargues’ _Maxims_

with those of La Rochefoucauld and Montesquieu.

-----

Vauvenargues does so. We find him, after a glowing and almost adequate

eulogy of La Fontaine, gibbeting him for showing _plus de style que

d’invention, et plus de négligence que d’exactitude_—not the happiest

pair of antitheses. [Sidenote: _Vauvenargues._] The subjects of his

_Tales_ are “low”—unfortunate word which “speaks” almost every one who

uses it—and they are not interesting, which is more surprising. Boileau,

on the contrary, is extolled to the skies. He has really too much genius

(like the 'Badian who was really too brave), and this excess, with a

smaller excess of fire, truth, solidity, _agrément_, may have perhaps

injured his range, depth, height, finesse, and grace. Molière again is

_trop bas_ (at least his subjects are), while La Bruyère escapes this

defect—you might as well set together Addison and Shakespeare, and no

doubt Vauvenargues would have done so. How different is Racine, who is

always “great”—“gallantly great,” let us add, like Mr Pepys in his new

suit. Voltaire, who had certainly prompted some of these sins, made a

little atonement by inducing Vauvenargues to admire Corneille to some

extent. But Corneille, he says, from his date, _could_ not have _le goût

juste_, and the parallel with Racine is one of the most interesting of

its numerous kind. J. B. Rousseau might have been nearly as good a poet

as Boileau, if Boileau had not taught him all he knew in poetry, but his

_vieux langage_ is most regrettable. Such were the opinions of a young

man of unusual ability, but with little taste in literature except that

which he found prevalent in the middle of the eighteenth century.

This middle, and the later part of it, saw in the Abbé Batteux the last

of that really remarkable, though not wholly estimable, line of

_législateurs du Parnasse_ which had begun with Boileau, and whose

edicts had been accepted, for the best part of a century, with almost

universal deference. [Sidenote: _Batteux._] Still later, and surviving

into the confines of the nineteenth century, La Harpe gives us almost

the last distinguished defender, and certainly a defender as

uncompromising as he was able, of neo-classic orthodoxy. Some attention

must be given to each of these, and to Marmontel between them, but we

need not say very much of others—except in the representative way.

Batteux began as an extoller of the _Henriade_, after many years spent

in schoolmastering and the occasional publication of Latin verses, but

before the century had reached the middle of its road. He essayed, a

little later, divers treatises[686] on Poetic and Rhetoric, all of which

were adjusted and collected in his _Principes de la Littérature_,[687]

while he also executed various minor works, the most useful of which was

_Les Quatre Poétiques_,[688] a translation, with critical notes, of

Aristotle, Horace, and Vida, with Boileau added. In so far as I am able

to judge, Batteux is about the best of the seventeenth-eighteenth

century “Preceptists.”[689] The Introduction to his introductory

tractate, _Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même Principe_, indulges in some

mild but by no means unbecoming irony on his predecessors,[690] and

expresses the candid opinion that few of them had really consulted

Aristotle at all. He admits the multiplicity and the galling character

of “rules”; but he thinks that these can be reduced to a tolerable and

innoxious, nay, in the highest degree useful, minimum, by keeping the

eye fixed on the Imitation of Nature, and of the best nature. But how is

this to guide us? Here Batteux shows real ingenuity by seizing on the

other great fetich of the eighteenth-century creed—Taste—as a regulator

to be in its turn regulated.

-----

Footnote 686:

_Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe_, Paris, 1746; _Cours de

Belles-Lettres_, 4 vols., Paris, 1750; _Traité de la Construction

Oratoire_, Paris, 1764.

Footnote 687:

5 vols., Paris, 1764. This is the edition I have used; later ones seem

to be in 6 vols., but without addition so far as I know.

Footnote 688:

2 vols., Paris, 1771.

Footnote 689:

It is perhaps right to warn the reader that this is not, I believe,

the general opinion.

Footnote 690:

See on Rollin, _sup._, p. 509.

-----

Indeed a careful perusal of Batteux cannot but force on us the

consideration that the mechanical age, the age of Arkwright and Watt,

was approaching, or had approached. [Sidenote: _His adjustment of Rules

and Taste._] His Rules and his Taste “clutch” each other by turns, like

the elaborate plant of the modern machinist. If the Rules are too narrow

and precise, Taste holds them open; if Taste shows any sign of getting

lawless, the Rules bring it to its bearings. It is extremely ingenious;

but the questions remain—Whether it is natural? and Whether any good

came from the exercise of the principles which it attempts to reconcile

and defend? The manner of Batteux, it must be allowed, is as much less

freezing and unsatisfactory than Le Bossu’s, as it is less arbitrary and

less aggressive than Boileau’s. These two would, in the face of fact and

history, have _identified_ Taste and a certain construction of Rule.

Batteux rather regards the two as reciprocal escapements, easing and

regulating each other. It is part of his merit that he recognises, to

some extent, the importance of observation. In fact, great part of this

introductory treatise is a naïf and interesting complaint of the

difficulty which the results of this observation are introducing into

Rule-criticism. “Rules are getting so many,” he admits in his opening

sentence; and, no doubt, so long as you find it necessary to make a new

rule whenever you find a new poet, the state of things must be more and

more parlous. But, like all his century-fellows without exception on the

Classical, and like too many on the other side, he does not think of

simply marching through the open door, and leaving the prison of Rule

and Kind behind him.

From these idols Batteux will not yet be separated: he hardens his heart

in a different manner from Pharaoh, and will not let himself go. The

_utile_ is never to be parted from the _dulce_; “the poems of Homer and

Virgil are not vain Romances, where the mind wanders at the will of a

mad imagination; they are great bodies of doctrine,” &c. Anacreon

[Heaven help us!] was himself determined to be a moral teacher.[691]

Again, there must be Action, and it must be single, united, simple, yet

of variety; the style must not be too low, or too high, &c., &c.

-----

Footnote 691:

_Op. cit._, i. 60.

-----

When Batteux has got into the old rut, he remains in it. We slip into

the well-known treatises by Kinds—Dialogue, Eclogue, Heroic Poem, and

the rest—with the equally well-known examination afterwards of

celebrated examples in a shamefaced kind of way—to the extent of two

whole volumes for poetry, and a third (actually the fourth) for prose.

Finally, we have what is really a separate tractate, _De la Construction

Oratoire_. The details in these later volumes are often excellent; but

obviously, and _per se_, they fall into quite a lower rank as compared

with the first. If we were to look at nothing but the fact, frankly

acknowledged by Batteux, that he is now considering French classical

literature only, we should be able to detect the error. In his first

volume he had at least referred to Milton.

In other words Batteux, like the rest of them, is not so much a halter

between two opinions as a man who has deliberately made up his mind to

abide by one, but who will let in as much of the other as he thinks it

safe to do, or cannot help doing. [Sidenote: _His incompleteness._] Let

him once extend his principle of observation in time, country, and kind,

and, being a reasonably ingenious and ingenuous person, he must

discover, first, that his elaborate double-check system of Rule and

Taste will not work, and, secondly, that there is not the least need of

it. You must charge epicycle on cycle before you can get, even with the

freest play of Taste, the _Iliad_ and the _Æneid_ and the _Orlando_ to

work together under any Rule. Epicycle must be added to epicycle before

you can get in the _Chanson de Roland_ and the _Morte d’Arthur_ as well.

Drop your “rule,” ask simply, “Are the things put before me said

_poeticamente_?” “Do they give me the poetic pleasure?” and there is no

further difficulty. Batteux, though, as we have seen, by no means a

bigot, would probably have stopped his ears and rent his clothes if such

a suggestion had been made to him.

Batteux is a remarkable, and probably the latest, example of

neo-classicism sitting at ease in Zion and promulgating laws for

submissive nations; in La Harpe, with an even stronger dogmatism, we

shall find, if not the full consciousness that the enemy is at the gates

of the capital, at any rate distinct evidence of knowledge that there is

sedition in the provinces.[692] [Sidenote: _Marmontel._] Between the

two, Marmontel[693] is a distinguished, and a not disagreeable, example

of that middle state which we find everywhere in the late eighteenth

century but which in France is distinguished at once by greater

professed orthodoxy, and by concessions and compromises of a specially

tell-tale kind. The critical work of the author of _Bélisaire_ and _Les

Incas_ is very considerable in bulk. He has written an Essay on Romance

in connection with the two very “anodyne” examples of the kind just

referred to; an Essay (indeed two essays) on Taste; many book reviews

for the _Observateur Littéraire_, &c.; prefaces and comments for some

specimens of French early seventeenth-century drama—Mairet’s

_Sophonisbe_, Du Ryer’s _Scévole_, &c.; and, besides other things, a

mass of articles on literary and critical subjects for the

_Encyclopédie_, which are generally known in their collected form as

_Éléments de Littérature_. He has been rather variously judged as a

critic. There is no doubt that he is a special sinner in that perpetual

gabble about _la vertu, la morale_, and the rest, which is so sickening

in the whole group; and which more than justified Mr Carlyle’s vigorous

apostrophe, “_Be_ virtuous, in the Devil’s name and his grandmother’s,

and have done with it!” He has also that apparent inconsistency,

something of which (as we have seen once for all in Dryden’s case) often

shows itself in men of alert literary interests who do not very early

work out for themselves a personal literary creed, and who are averse to

swallowing a ready-made one. But at the same time he never openly

quarrels with neo-classicism, and is sometimes one of its most egregious

spokesmen; while he is “philosophastrous,” in the special

eighteenth-century kind, to a point which closely approaches caricature.

[Sidenote: _Oddities and qualities of his criticism._] I have quoted

elsewhere, but must necessarily quote again here, his three egregious

and pyramidal reasons[694] for the puzzling excellence of English

poetry. Either, it seems, the Englishman, being a glory-loving animal,

sees that poetry adds to the lustre of nations, and so he goes and does

it; _or_ being naturally given to meditation and sadness, he needs to be

moved and distracted by the illusions of this beautiful art; _or_ [Shade

of Molière!] it is because his genius in certain respects is proper for

Poesy.

-----

Footnote 692:

He, with Condorcet and M. J. Chénier, is sometimes spoken of as

showing a classical _reaction_ against the eighteenth-century

toleration of English and other vagaries which we shall see in

Marmontel. I think “reaction” is rather too strong a word, though

“recrudescence” might do. Condorcet was only a critic _par interim_,

if even that, nor need we occupy ourselves with him: justice shall be

done (Fortune permitting) in the next volume to the person who had the

honour to be brother to André Chénier.

Footnote 693:

_Œuvres Complètes_, 7 vols., Paris 1819; _Éléments de Littérature_ by

themselves, 3 vols. in the Didot Collection.

Footnote 694:

_El. de Litt._, article _Poésie_.

-----

To comment on this would only spoil it; but let it be observed that

Marmontel _does_ admit the excellence of English poetry. So also, though

he never swerves, in consciousness or conscience, from neo-classic

orthodoxy, he insinuates certain doubts about Boileau, and quotes,[695]

at full length, two pieces of the despised Ronsard as showing lyrical

qualities in which the legislator of Parnassus is wanting. His article

_Poétique_ is, considering his standpoint, a quite extraordinarily just

summary and criticism of the most celebrated authorities on the

subject—Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Vauquelin,

Boileau, Le Bossu, Gravina, &c.—and the attitude to Boileau,[696]

visible, as has been said, elsewhere, is extremely noteworthy. Marmontel

speaks of Despréaux with compliments: but some, even of his praises, are

not a little equivocal, and he contrives to put his subject’s faults

with perfect politeness indeed, but without a vestige of compromise.

Boileau, he says, gives a precise and luminous notion of all the kinds,

but he is not deep on a single one: his _Art_ may contribute to form the

taste if it be well understood, but to understand it well one must have

the taste already formed.

-----

Footnote 695:

Ibid., art. _Anacréontique_.

Footnote 696:

The enemy will perhaps say, parodying Hegel: “With this historian of

criticism, anybody is a critic who does not believe in Boileau.” 'A

will have a little galled me: but not seriously.

-----

It would be possible, of course,—indeed, very easy,—to select from

Marmontel’s abundant critical writings, which covered great part of a

long lifetime in their composition, a bundle of “classical” absurdities

which would leave nothing to desire. But the critic is almost always

better than his form of creed. He takes an obviously genuine, if of

necessity not at first a thoroughly well instructed, interest in the

_Histoire du Théâtre_ of the Frères Parfait, the first systematic[697]

dealing with old French literature since Fauchet and Pasquier: his

_Essai sur les Romans_, though of course considered _du côté moral_, is,

for his date, a noteworthy attempt in that comparative and historical

study of literature which was to lead to the new birth of criticism. It

is most remarkable to find him, in the early reviews of his

_Observateur_,[698] dating from the midst of the fifth decade of the

eighteenth century, observing, as to _Hamlet_ in La Place’s translation,

that the ghost-scene and the duel with Laertes inspire terror and

pathetic interest at the very reading, asking why “our poets” should

deny themselves the use of these great springs of the two tragic

passions, admiring the taste and justice of the observations to the

players, and actually finding _Titus Andronicus_, though “frightful and

sanguinary,” a thing worth serious study. That it is possible to extract

from these very places, as from others, the usual stuff about

Shakespeare’s “want of order and decency,” &c., is of no moment. _This_

is matter of course: it is not matter of course that, in the dead waist

and middle of the eighteenth century, a French critic should write of

the description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus: “Ce morceau présente

Shakespeare sous un nouveau point de vue. On n’a connu jusqu'à présent

que la force du génie de cet auteur: on ne s’attendait pas à tant de

délicatesse et de légèreté.”[699]

-----

Footnote 697:

I use this word not as synonymous with “methodical,” but as

contrasting the book with fragmentary commentaries like those of La

Monnoye and Le Duchat.

Footnote 698:

These will be found in vol. vii. of ed. cit.

Footnote 699:

M. Texte must have forgotten these remarkable passages, or perhaps not

have known them, when in M. Petit de Julleville’s large _History_ (vi.

754) he wrote that La Place’s version could only confirm readers in

the idea that Shakespeare was a chaos of monstrosity and triviality.

Evidently it had quite a different effect on Marmontel.

-----

I should like to dwell longer on Marmontel if it were only for two or

three phrases which appear in one short article,[700] “Depuis que

Pascal et Corneille, Racine et Boileau ont _épuré et appauvri_ la

langue de Marot et de Montaigne.... Boileau n’avait pas reçu de la

nature l’organe avec lequel on sent les beautés simples et touchantes

de notre divin fabuliste [La Fontaine of course].... Il est à

souhaiter qu’on n’abandonne pas ce langage du bon vieux temps ... on

ferait un joli dictionnaire des mots qu’on a tort d’abandonner et de

laisser vieillir.” It must be clear to any one who reads these phrases

that there is the germ of _mil-huit-cent-trente_ in them—the first and

hardly certain sound of the knell of narrow, colourless vocabulary and

literature in France. But enough has probably been said. It would be

difficult to make out a case for Marmontel as in any way a great

critic. He has not cleared his mind of cant enough for that. But he is

an instance, and an important instance, of the way in which the

clearing agents were being gradually thrown into the minds of men of

letters at this time, and of the reaction which they were—at first

partially and accidentally—producing. Even his _Essai sur le Goût_,

fantastically arbitrary as it is, wears at times almost an air of

irony, as if the writer were really exposing the arbitrariness and the

convention of the thing he is ostensibly praising. He is comparing and

tasting, not simply deducing: and however much he may still be

inclined to think with his master that the Satan, Sin, and Death piece

is an unimaginable horror, and the citizen scenes in Shakespeare’s

Roman plays a vulgar excrescence, he is far from the obstinate

sublimity-in-absurdity of La Harpe. He at least does not hold that a

beauty, not according to rule, has no business to be a beauty; that

the tree is not to be judged by the fruit, but the fruit by the ticket

on the tree.

-----

Footnote 700:

Under the head _Marotique_.

-----

In the _mare magnum_ of critical writing at this period, constantly fed

by books, literary periodicals, academic competitions, and what not, it

would be idle to attempt to chronicle drops—individuals who are not in

some special way interesting or representative. [Sidenote: _Others._] It

would be especially idle because—for reasons indicated more than once in

passing already—the bulk of the criticism of this time in France is

really of little value, being as doctrine make-believe, and destitute of

thoroughness, and as appreciation injured by narrowness of reading and

want of true literary interest. It cannot have been quite accidental,

although the great collaborative _Histoire de la Littérature Française_

of the late M. Petit de Julleville is not a model of methodic adequacy,

that there is no strictly critical chapter in the volume on the

eighteenth century. [Sidenote: _Thomas, Suard, &c._] Take, for instance,

two such representative men as Suard and Thomas, both of them born near

the beginning of the second generation of the century, and therefore

characteristic of its very central class and _crû_. Both enjoyed almost

the highest reputation in the second rank. Marmontel somewhere speaks of

Thomas’s _Essai sur les Éloges_ as the best piece of critical inquiry

which had appeared since Cicero on the Orator; but it is fair to

remember that Thomas had refused to stand against Marmontel for the

Academy. Suard, for many years Secretary of the Academy itself,

seriously endeavoured, and was by his contemporaries thought not to have

endeavoured in vain, to make that office a sort of Criticship Laureate

or King’s Remembrancership of Literature. He has left volumes on volumes

of critical work; and even now prefaces, introductions, &c., from his

pen may be found in the older class of standard editions of French

classics. Yet the work of neither of these would justify us in doing

more than refer to them in this fashion. It is excellently written in

the current style, inclining to declamation and solemnity in

Thomas,[701] to _persiflage_ and smartness in Suard. It says what an

academic critic of the time was supposed to say, and knows what he was

supposed to know. But it really is, in Miss Mills’ excellent figure,

“the desert of Sahara,” and a desert without many, if any, oases.

-----

Footnote 701:

_L’emphatique Thomas_, as he is duly called in that traditional

distribution of epithets which is so dear to the French mind, and

which helps to explain why it is always, in its depths, neo-classic.

-----

La Harpe is a different person. He is not very kind to Batteux.

[Sidenote: _La Harpe._] He patronises his principles, and allows his

scholarship to be sound; but finds fault with his style, calls his

criticism _commune_—“lacking in distinction” is perhaps the best

equivalent—his ideas narrow, and his prejudices pedantic. It would not

be quite just to say _De te fabula_, but this is almost as much as we

could say if we were judging La Harpe, after his own fashion of

judgment, from a different standpoint. But the historian cannot judge

thus. La Harpe is really an important person in the History of

Criticism. He “makes an end,” as Mr Carlyle used to say; in other words,

whether he is or is not the last eminent neo-classical critic of France,

he puts this particular phase of criticism as sharply and as effectively

as it can be put. Nay, he does even more than this for us; he shows us

neo-classicism at bay. Already, by the time of his later lectures, when

by the oddest coincidence he was defending Voltaire and abusing Diderot,

making head at once against the Jacobins and against that party of

revived mediævalism which was the surest antidote to Jacobinism, there

were persons—Népomucène Lemercier, and others—who held that Boileau and

Racine had killed French poetry. Against these La Harpe takes up his

testimony; and the necessity of opposition makes it all the more

decided.

His _Cours de Littérature_ is a formidable—I had almost called it an

impossible—book to tackle, composed of, or redacted from, the lectures

of many years, and unfortunately, though not unnaturally, dwelling most

fully on the parts of the subject that are of least real importance.

[Sidenote: _His_ Cours de Littérature.] Its first edition[702] was a

shelf-full in itself. It now fills, with some fragments, nearly the

whole of three great volumes of the _Panthéon Littéraire_, and nearly

two-thirds, certainly three-fifths, of this are devoted to the French

literature of the eighteenth century, a subject for which, to speak

frankly, it may be doubted whether any posterity will have time

corresponding to spare. Even in the earlier and more general parts there

are defects, quite unconnected with the soundness or unsoundness of La

Harpe’s general critical position. There is nothing which one should be

slower to impute, save on the very clearest evidence, than ignorance of

a subject of which a writer professes knowledge; and one should be slow,

not merely on general principles of good manners, but because there is

nothing which the baser kind of critic is so ready to impute. But I own

that, after careful reading and reluctantly, I have come to the

conclusion that La Harpe’s knowledge of the classics left a very great

deal to desire. That, in his survey of Epic, he omits Apollonius Rhodius

in his proper place altogether and puts him in a postscript, might be a

mere oversight, negligible by all but the illiberal: unfortunately the

postscript itself shows no signs of critical appreciation. It is more

unfortunate still that he should say that all the writers of ancient

Rome loaded Catullus with eulogy, when we know that Horace only spares

him a passing sneer, that Quintilian has no notice for anything but his

“bitterness,” and that hardly anybody but Martial does him real justice.

However, we need not dwell on this. If La Harpe was not very widely or

deeply read in old-world or in old-French literature, he certainly knew

the French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very

well indeed.

-----

Footnote 702:

18 vols. (Paris, 1825 _sq._)

-----

On the other hand, it is significant, and awkward, that, in dealing with

English, German, and other modern literatures, he always seems to refer

to translations, and hardly ever ventures a criticism except on the mere

matter of the poem. [Sidenote: _His critical position as_ ultimus

suorum.] Moreover, which is of even more importance for us, he was not

in the slightest doubt about his point of view either of these or of any

other literature. His censures and his praises are adjusted with almost

unerring accuracy to the neo-classic creed, as we have defined and

illustrated it in this volume. His _Introduction_ pours all the scorn he

could muster on those who contemn the art of writing. Even Shakespeare,

coarse as he is, was not without learning. That poet, Dante, and Milton

executed “monstrous” works; but in these monsters there were some

beautiful parts done according to “the principles.” And, to do him

justice, he never swerves or flinches from this. English has “an

inconceivable pronunciation.”[703] The _Odyssey_ is an _Arabian Nights’_

tale, puerile, languid, seriously extravagant, even ignoble in parts.

The sojourns with Calypso and Circe offer nothing interesting to La

Harpe. The wonderful descent to Hades is as bad as that of Æneas is

admirable. La Harpe tells us that these and other similar judgments are

proofs of his severe frankness. They certainly are; he has told us what

he is.

-----

Footnote 703:

La Harpe here anticipated the Malay chief whom Mr Wallace met in the

farthest isles of the Bird of Paradise, and who chased him therefrom

with contumely when he said he came from a place called “England.”

“Unglung,” said the chief, was not a word that a man could pronounce.

And therefore—this is La Harpe all over—there could be no such place,

and Mr Wallace was a liar.

-----

That after this he should pronounce the _Georgics_ “the most perfect

poem transmitted to us by the Ancients”; fix on the _Prometheus_ his

favourite epithet of “monstrous,” and say that it “cannot even be called

a tragedy”; think Plutarch thoroughly justified in his censure of

Aristophanes; read Thucydides with less pleasure than Xenophon; and

decide that Apuleius wrote _vers le moyen age_, which was _un

désert_,—these things do not surprise us, nor that he should tolerate

_Ossian_ after not tolerating Milton. It is in his fragment on the

last-named poet that he gives us his whole secret, with one of those

intentional, yet really unconscious, bursts of frankness which have been

already noticed. “La poésie,” he says, “ne doit me peindre que ce que je

peux comprendre, admettre, ou supposer.” That “suspension of disbelief”

in which, at no distant date, Coleridge was to discover the real poetic

effect would, it is clear, have been vehemently resisted and refused by

La Harpe, or rather it could never have entered his head as possible.

He remains therefore hopelessly self-shut out of the gates of

Poetry—only admitting and comprehending those beauties which stray into

the precinct of Rhetoric; discerning with horror “monsters” within the

gates themselves; and in his milder moments conjecturing charitably

that, if Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton had only always observed the

rules, which they sometimes slipped into, they might have been nearly as

good poets—he will not say quite—as Racine and Voltaire. Never have we

met, nor shall we ever meet again, a critical Ephraim so utterly joined

to idols. It is unnecessary—it would even be useless—to argue about him;

he must be observed, registered, and passed. Yet I do not pretend to

regret the time which I have myself spent over him. He writes well; he

sees clearly through his “monstrous” spectacles and subject to their

laws; above all, he has, what is, for some readers at any rate, the

intense and unfailing charm of “Thorough.” He is no cowardly

Braggadochio or inconstant Paridell: he is Sansfoy and Sansloy in

one—defending his Duessa, and perfectly ready to draw sword and spend

blood for her at any moment. Nor does he wield the said sword by any

means uncraftsmanly. Give him his premisses and his postulates, his

Rules, his false Reason and sham Nature, his criterion of the admissible

and comprehensible, and he very seldom makes a false conclusion. Would

that all Gloriana’s own knights were as uncompromising, as hardy, and as

deft!

Of the immense mass of Academic _Éloges_, and prize Essays generally,

composed during the eighteenth century, no extended or minute account

will be expected here. [Sidenote: _The Academic Essay._] I have myself,

speaking without the slightest exaggeration, read hundreds of them:

indeed it is difficult to find a French man of letters, of any name

during the whole time, in whose works some specimens of the kind do not

figure. But—and it is at once a reason for dealing with them generally

and a reason for not dealing with them as individuals—there is hardly

any kind of publication which more fatally indicates the defects of the

Academic system, and of that phase of criticism and literary taste of

which it was the exponent. They were written in some cases—it is but

repeating in other words what has been just said—by men of the greatest

talent; they constituted with a play of one kind or another, the almost

invariable _début_ of every Frenchman who had literary talent, great or

small. They exhibit a relatively high level of a certain kind of

literary, or at least rhetorical, attainment. But the last adjective has

let slip the dogs on them, for they are almost always rhetorical in the

worst senses of the word. Extensive reading in literature was not wanted

by the forty guards of the Capitol; original thinking was quite certain

to alarm them. The elegant nullity of the Greek Declamation, and the

_ampullæ_ of the Roman, were the best things that were likely to be

found. Yet sometimes in literature, as in philosophy, the Academic Essay

produced remarkable things. And we may give some space to perhaps its

most remarkable writer towards the close of the time, a writer

symptomatic in the very highest degree, as showing the hold which

neo-classic ideas still had in France—that is to say, Rivarol.[704]

-----

Footnote 704:

There is not, I think, even yet any complete edition of Rivarol,

though M. de Lescure some years ago devoted much attention to him. All

the work referred to below will be found in the older _Œuvres de

Rivarol_ (published by Delahays, Paris, 1857), with a useful selection

of criticisms. The present writer contributed to the _Fortnightly

Review_ for January 1879 an essay on Rivarol and Chamfort, which will

be found reprinted in _Miscellaneous Essays_ (2nd ed., London, 1895).

Chamfort himself can only be mentioned here as showing, in his

_Éloges_ on Molière and La Fontaine, how insignificant such things,

written even by such a man, can be.

-----

That “the St George of the epigram” might have been really great as a

critic there can be little doubt; besides lesser exercises in this

vocation, which are always acute if not always quite just, he has left

us two fairly solid Essays, and a brilliant literary “skit,” to enable

us to judge. [Sidenote: _Rivarol._] The last of the three, the _Almanach

des Grands Hommes de nos jours_, does, with more wit, better temper, and

better manners, what Gifford was to do a little later in England; it is

a sort of sprinkling of an anodyne but potent Keating’s powder on the

small poets and men of letters of the time just before the Revolution.

But the treatise _De l’Universalité de la Langue Française_, laid before

the Academy of Berlin in 1783, and the Preface to the writer’s

Translation of the _Inferno_, are really solid documents. Both are

prodigies of ingenuity, acuteness, and command of phrase, conditioned by

want of knowledge and by _parti pris_. How praise Dante better than by

saying that Italian took in his hands “une _fierté_ qu’elle n’eut plus

après lui”?[705] how better describe what we miss even in Ariosto, even

in Petrarch? Yet how go further astray than in finding fault with the

_Inferno_ because “on ne rencontre pas assez d’épisodes”?[706] What a

critical piercing to the joints and marrow of the fault of

eighteenth-century poetry is the remark that Dante’s verses “se tiennent

debout par la seule force du substantif et du verbe sans le concours

d’une seule épithète!” And what a falling off is there when one passes

from this to the old beauty-and-fault jangles and jars!

-----

Footnote 705:

Ed. cit., p. 277 _sq._

Footnote 706:

This is neo-classic criticism in its quintessence of corruption. What

fit reader wants, or could endure, an _episode_ between _Per me si va_

and _riveder le stelle_? You might as well demand “half an hour’s

interval for refreshments.” But your Epic must have your Episode. It

is like “Where is your brown tree?”

-----

The _Universality of French_[707] has many points of curiosity; but we

must abide by those which are strictly literary. The temptation of the

style to rhetoric, and, at the same time, “the solace of this sin,”

could hardly be better shown than in Rivarol’s phrasing of the radical

and inseparable clearness of French, as “une probité attachée à son

génie.”[708] How happy is the admission that poets of other countries

“give their metaphors at a higher strength,” “embrace the figurative

style closer,” and are deeper and fuller in colour! Yet the history,

both of French and English literature, given in each case at some

length, is inadequate and incorrect, the comparisons are childish, and

the vaticinations absurd. In fact, Rivarol was writing up to certain

fixed ideas, the chief of which was that the French literature of

1660-1780 was the greatest that had ever existed—perhaps that ever could

exist—in the world.

-----

Footnote 707:

Ed. cit., p. 79 _sq._

Footnote 708:

This, however, is _not_ in the Essay, but in a separate “Maxim.”

-----

This notion—to which it is but just to admit that other nations had

given only too much countenance and support, though England and Germany

at least were fast emancipating themselves—and the numbing effect of the

general neo-classic creed from which it was no very extravagant

deduction, mar a very large proportion[709] of French criticism during

the century, and, almost without exception, the whole of what we here

call its orthodox criticism. So long as it, or anything like it,

prevails in any country, at any time, the best criticism is impossible;

the “He followeth not _us_” interferes with all due appreciation.[710]

-----

Footnote 709:

Cf., for instance, Batteux, quite a reasonable person on the whole. He

has no doubt (i. 80, 81) of the excellence, the almost perfection, at

which French taste has arrived; he only fears that it may be

impossible to guard against falling from so high an estate. This

extraordinary self-complacency is a little less noticeable in England,

but only a little. When we thought that Mr Pope had improved even upon

Mr Dryden, and was in a sort of Upper House of Literature as compared

with Shakespeare and Chaucer, we could not throw many stones at those

who considered Voltaire a better poet than Ronsard.

Footnote 710:

The corresponding chapter to this in that “History of Critical _Ana_,”

which we must not write, would be particularly rich. Every branch of

French literature at the time is full of such things; the most amusing

of all, perhaps, being Crébillon’s malicious eulogy-satire on

_Marivaudage_ at the end of the 2nd book of _L’Ecumoire_, where Tanzäi

condemns, and Néadarné is charmed with, the juxtaposition of words

“that never met before, and thought they could not possibly get on

together,” and the depicting “not merely of what everybody has done

and said and thought, but of what they would like to have thought but

did not!”

-----

CHAPTER III.

CLASSICISM IN THE OTHER NATIONS.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS—TEMPORARY REVIVAL OF ITALIAN

CRITICISM—GRAVINA—MURATORI: HIS ‘DELLA PERFETTA

POESIA’—CRESCIMBENI—QUADRIO—THE EMERGENCE OF LITERARY

HISTORY—FURTHER DECADENCE OF ITALIAN

CRITICISM—METASTASIO—NEO-CLASSICISM TRIUMPHS IN SPAIN—THE

ABSURDITIES OF ARTIGA—LUZÁN—THE REST UNINERESTING—FEYJÓO, ISLA, AND

OTHERS—RISE AT LAST OF GERMAN CRITICISM—ITS SCHOOL TIME—CLASSICISM

AT BAY ALMOST FROM THE FIRST: GOTTSCHED—THE ‘VERSUCH EINER

CRITISCHEN DICHTKUNST’—ITS CHIEF IDEA—SPECIMEN DETAILS—GELLERT: HE

TRANSACTS.

It would be scarcely more than one of those sweeping generalisations

which attract a certain class of readers, if one were to say that,

during the eighteenth century, England and France exercised a reciprocal

influence over one another in literature, the results of which the

remaining nations did little but imitate. [Sidenote: _Preliminary

remarks._] It is certainly true that, as regards the special subject of

this particular Book—the criticism of orthodox neo-classicism in the

eighteenth century—Germany, Italy, and Spain play a part to which

justice can be very briefly done, while the rest may well be silence.

Nor will Spain and Italy at least have much more to give us when, and

if, in the next volume, we turn from the setting to the rising sun. But

it will be very different with Germany, where almost the entire interest

lies in the restless struggles and obstinate questioning which lead to

Romanticism, and which practically show themselves from the very moment

when the Swiss School aroused German criticism from its long sleep after

Opitz. What has to be said of the Gottscheds and Gellerts of the

Northern Country had better be said last, so as to bring the matter into

closer juxtaposition with the account of the Romantic Revolt itself.

Italy (which has some interest in at least the beginning of the century)

and Spain, which has very little in any part of it, must be taken first.

For some reason, or for none, the closing years of the seventeenth

century, and the opening of the eighteenth, in Italy saw a very

considerable revival of that critical spirit which, as we know, had died

away so strangely, after its vigorous flourishing a hundred years

earlier. [Sidenote: _Temporary revival of Italian Criticism._] It is

true that this new Italian criticism is of a rather tell-tale kind—that

it is, in great part at least, criticism of erudition and of retrospect.

But Gravina, Muratori, Crescimbeni, and even Quadrio, form a group of no

small interest. The first is a real critic of great, if not always

well-directed, ability; the second, something of a real critic too, with

amazing erudition; the third, the author of the first really literary

history of a national literature; and the fourth, the first pioneer—no

Lynceus, certainly, but still a pioneer-guide—in the ways of general and

comparative literary study.

Gianvincenzo Gravina is one of those persons who particularly invite the

student to idle _ægri somnia_ as to what they might have been in other

times and circumstances. [Sidenote: _Gravina._] A lawyer, a

_littérateur_, the adoptive father of Metastasio, the joint founder of

the Arcadian Academy, a critic of remarkable shrewdness, who wrote

excellent things on tragedy, and thought his own bad tragedies

excellent—he tempts one strangely. His most famous and most often quoted

critical work is _Della Ragion Poetica_,[711] but it is necessary, in

order to appreciate his criticism, to go to his _Works_[712] and read

also the _Della Tragedia_ and the _Discorso delle Favole_. The total

effect is, as with most other eighteenth-century critics, a conclusion

that the writer has not “found his way”: though he is nearer to it than

some others writing later. The _Della Ragion Poetica_ is a most

interesting labyrinth of cross-purposes. The strongly scholastic

character of Italian serious thought, which we have noticed in Rinaldini

only a few years earlier,[713] betrays itself in Gravina’s opening _del

vero e del falso_; _del reale e del finto_; and in an episodic

discussion of the origin of Idolatry, which may seem absolutely

preposterous at first sight, but which works itself into the

consideration of Fable not so ill. The admirable description of Homer as

“the potentest of mages and the wisest of enchanters, in that he makes

use of words not so much for the complacency of the ear as for the

advantage of the imagination,”[714] is balanced, at a page or two’s

distance, by a fling at the _perniciosa turba de' Romanzi_. The utility

of poetry is gravely insisted on, and we are invited as usual to the

study of the Kinds; but section xiv., on “Popular Judgment,” is instinct

with that Italian common-sense which had shown itself in various ways

during the sixteenth century, through mouths so different as those of

Castelvetro and Cinthio Giraldi, a sense almost epigrammatically

concentrated in the phrase _ne con solo popolo ne senza il popolo_. In

these passages of Gravina’s there is to be found, put not indeed quite

clearly, but unmistakably on fair allowance, a doctrine which hardly any

critic of any day has sufficiently digested—that there is something in

poetry corresponding, in measure and degree, to a poetical sentiment

which only needs waking in all but the exceptions of mankind. What

libraries of vain or positively mischievous disquisition should we have

been spared, what unintelligent laudation of Burns when the intelligent

is so easy, what unintelligent depreciation of Béranger when the

abstinence from it is surely not so difficult, what idle and obstinate

questionings about Donne or Whitman, Macaulay or Moore, and a hundred

others of the most opposite kinds, if people would only have remembered

our author’s sound and sober law[715] that "in all men there gleams

through [_traspare_] I know not what discernment of the Good "to which

poets, if they know how, can appeal!

-----

Footnote 711:

My copy is the Naples edition of 1732. But the book had appeared some

four-and-twenty years earlier at Rome (some even quote a Roman ed. of

1704).

Footnote 712:

Leipsic, 1737.

Footnote 713:

_V. sup._, p. 330.

Footnote 714:

Ed. cit., p. 12.

Footnote 715:

Ibid., p. 45.

-----

A large part of Gravina’s work in the _Ragion_ consists of an actual

historical survey of poets and poetry in the spirit which, as we have

seen and shall see, was so prevalent in his day; and his judgments, if a

little traditional, are almost always sound, whether he is dealing with

the classics or with the great Renaissance group of Italian-Latin

poets.[716] Nor should he lack due meed for the word of praise he gives

to Folengo, a writer little likely to appeal to the ordinary

eighteenth-century spirit. When one thinks of the extreme inadequacy of

French judgments of Rabelais himself at this time, it is no small merit

in Gravina to have said, of one of not the least of Rabelais’ creditors,

that “he wanted only will, not strength, to write a noble poem,” and

actually possessed learning, invention, and fancy. The first book of the

_Della Ragion Poetica_ ends thus with an author who must have seemed, to

the usual eighteenth-century critic, nearly as sad and bad and mad as

Rabelais and Shakespeare,[717] and in whom it is not now difficult to

see much Rabelaisian and even some Shakespearian quality. The second

deals with the Italian vernacular. Gravina duly admires Dante; but his

elaborate apology for rhyme is noteworthy and amusing. It was the way of

the eighteenth century to apologise for all sorts of things—from the

Bible downwards—that were not in the least need of it. He is a little

less shamefaced on the question of the vulgar tongue; and says excellent

things about the _De Vulgari_ itself—that “discourse so subtle and so

true.” Indeed he conducts his whole discussion on the Vernacular, which

is long, in accordance with the principles of the tractate, and gives to

Dante in all nearly fifty pages, or more than half of the book,

announcing his deliberate intention _giudicare spediatamente_ of the

rest from Boiardo and Ariosto downwards. The whole forms a very

interesting survey of Italian poetry, though perhaps the most

interesting of Gravina’s separate critical utterances is to be found,

not in it but, in his short Latin Letter _De Poesi_ to Maffei, in which

he speaks of La Casa as _qui alter potest haberi a Petrarca Lyricorum

princeps_. It is a bold saying, but not hard to justify, concerning the

author of _Errai gran tempo_ and _O sonno, o de la queta_.

-----

Footnote 716:

He is very interesting on these, being the principal critic, between

their own times and those modern days which have forgotten them, to

deal with the subject.

Footnote 717:

Gravina calls the opposite style to Macaronic not, as most do,

_pedantesco_, but _Fidenziano_, from Fidentio, the _nom de guerre_ of

Camillo Scrofa, author of certain egregious pedantesque pieces.

-----

The monumental work of Muratori in history and antiquities has

overshadowed his accomplishment in literature; and some respectable

books of reference hardly mention this; but it is in fact considerable.

[Sidenote: _Muratori: his_ Della Perfetta Poesia.] We have already had

occasion to refer to the service that he did in editing the

miscellaneous critical papers of Castelvetro, and he also did important

work on the Italian Theatre; but his _Della Perfetta Poesia

Italiana_[718] is a more original title-deed. There is no doubt that it

had great influence: some have even thought that Luzán (_v. infra_, p.

548) was indebted to it for the impulse which enabled him finally to

overcome the remnants of Romantic resistance in Spain, and to seat

Neo-classicism at last triumphant in the country of Don Quixote. But it

does not need this doubtful and reflected honour. The book is, given its

lights and its time, a very good book. It accepts, without much or any

demur, that notion of Good Taste which the seventeenth century

excogitated and the eighteenth almost universally accepted, postponing

inquiry whether it were the false Florimel or the true. But Muratori is

both a historian and a philosopher; and he makes good use of both his

qualifications. He contrasts, effectively enough, the supposed

infallibility of Petrarch in Taste, the variety (without deserting this)

of the sixteenth century, and the _pessimo gusto_ of that which had just

closed when he wrote. He will have it that Poetry is “a daughter and

servant of Moral Philosophy”—in which case it must be sadly admitted

that the mother is too often not justified of the daughter, and that the

service is not seldom unprofitable. But he comes (perhaps inspired by

Tasso) nearer to universal acceptance when he tells us that Poetic

Beauty is “a new and marvellously delightful Truth,” and he is specially

copious on the Fancy—so much so that one imagines it not impossible that

Addison may have seen the treatise, more particularly as there is much

about “True and False Wit” in the Second Book of the _Perfetta Poesia_.

He is, in his Third Book, liberal on the question of Useful or

Delightful—the latter will do very well if it is healthy

delight[719]—and he discusses the defects of poets, and the various

parts of poetry, with sense and discrimination. All this is of course

still too much “in the air”; it makes the old mistake of taking for

granted that _poesis_ can be in some way strained off, or distilled

from, _poeta_ and _poema_. But this defect is to some extent repaired in

the sequel, and the whole is a book far from despicable. The chief

defect of it (a defect which extends also to Gravina) is the absence of

comparative criticism—of the attempt, at least, to study literature as a

whole.

-----

Footnote 718:

Modena, 1706.

Footnote 719:

Du Bos, a little later, with the apolausticism of the French

eighteenth century, says bluntly (_op. cit. sup._, i. 275) that “the

best poem is that which interests most,” and that “one hardly ever

opens a poem for the sake of instruction.”

-----

The two historians, especially Quadrio, are freer from this defect,

though by no means free from it; but they compensate for this advantage

by a much weaker dose of really critical spirit. [Sidenote:

_Crescimbeni._] Crescimbeni is not an unimportant figure in the History

of his own literature, to which he contributed, after writing in 1700 on

_La Bellezza del Volgar Poesia_, a regular work[720] on the whole

subject as far as poetry is concerned. Part, and the best part, of this

is made up of a refashioning of the _Bellezza_. Its contents, which are

not contemptible, though too like much that we have already gone through

to require minute attention, are almost indicated by its title—an

enumeration of poetical beauties, cautions against defects and mistakes

in the application of them, and the usual analysis of Kinds. The rest of

the book is a really valuable literary encyclopædia, with extracts,

commentaries, lists, indices, &c., “all very capital” in their own way,

but somewhat out of ours.

-----

Footnote 720:

_Istoria del Volgar Poesia_, Roma, 1698 and later.

-----

If Quadrio seems to invite more attention, it is partly because of his

goodly bulk which fills the eye, and partly because of the oddity of

some of his judgments, but partly also (in a third part) because he

really intends to be critical, and because he extends his view far

beyond Italian. [Sidenote: _Quadrio._] The _Della Storia e della Ragione

d’Ogni Poesia_[721] is a sufficiently ambitious attempt; and I do not

think I know anything of the kind, by a single man, which is at any rate

more voluminous. Seven big quartos, tightly packed, give Quadrio ample

room and verge enough for proceedings alike methodical and far-ranging

in their method; and his _Distinzioni_—the sub-divisions of his

Books—leave few things unattempted. He is able to include both branches

of Patrizzi’s old division, _Disputata_ and _Istoriale_, and he extends

the purview of the latter as widely as he can, if not as happily. The

good faith, and the less than doubtful judgment, of some of his

excursions will be sufficiently, and here most interestingly,

demonstrated by some instances from his English notes. After devoting

great space to the usual general questions of the nature, origin,

position, &c., of poetry, he has a proportionately large distribution of

Kinds, extending not merely into Acrostic-land but into Cento and

Macaronic. He deals further with Poetic Art and Poetic Fury, and, in

successive _Distinzioni_, with Plot and Manners, Erudition, Verse in

general, Italian verse, &c. Then he attacks the actual contents of his

subject, and devotes the whole of a volume of 800 pages to “Melic” or

Lyric poetry. It cannot but be interesting to the reader to note who

represented English Lyric poetry to the eyes of a learned and laborious

Italian Jesuit in the second quarter of the eighteenth century; but it

is pretty safe to say that not one of a hundred guessers would name the

trio in a hundred guesses each. They are Gower, “Arthur Kelton,” and

“Wicherley.”[722]

-----

Footnote 721:

7 vols. (Bologna and Milan, 1739-1752).

Footnote 722:

I shall own frankly that, when I first read this, I had either never

heard of Arthur Kelton, or had utterly forgotten him, and thought the

name must be a muddle of “Skelton.” What is known about him may be

found in Warton, iv. 159, ed. Hazlitt (taken, as was probably

Quadrio’s knowledge of him, from Wood and Bale), and also in the

_Dictionary of National Biography_. According to the latter, his poem

in praise of the Welsh nation is not now extant or discoverable; and

though a Chronicle exists I have never seen it. What made the Jesuit

name Kelton at all is as dark to me as what made him transform Gower

and “Wicherley” into “Melic” bards.

-----

He proceeds through all the divisions in the same way. His notice of

Shakespeare is obviously a recollection of the milder view of Voltaire,

who was a friend of Quadrio’s. Dryden wrote a “tragedy” entitled _King

Arthur_; Addison is treated at length, and with evident sympathy, as

well as with at least more direct knowledge than that shown of “Il

Benjanson” (_sic_). There is a whole chapter on Milton, in which Rapin

and the Chevalier Ramsay[723] are quoted. The critic is aware of (let us

hope he had not read) Glover’s _Leonidas_; and he is naturally copious

on Pope, though his section on _The Rape of the Lock_ shades itself off

in the oddest manner into a Discourse on Hair, with references to

Apuleius and the obliging Fotis, to Dion Chrysostom, and to Firenzuola.

But Chaucer and Spenser are not (unless I have missed them) discussed by

the citer of Arthur Kelton.

-----

Footnote 723:

If I have said nothing about this excellent Scoto-French disciple of

Fénelon, author of the _Voyages de Cyrus_ (which all good little

eighteenth-century boys and girls read), and writer of French which

was admitted by Frenchmen to be the best (except Hamilton’s) written

by any non-Frenchman, it is neither from ignorance nor from

_outre-cuidance_ He takes place in criticism for a _Discourse of Epic

Poetry_, prefixed to _Télémaque_.

-----

Of course there is no need to laugh at Quadrio; and if we do it must be

done only in the most good-humoured and politest way possible. Doubtless

we all make mistakes in dealing with foreign Literatures; and those of

us who have dealt most with them have doubtless sinned most. But what is

important to notice here about the Historian of All Poetry is—first,

that he has shrewdly seen and manfully accepted, if not the necessity,

at least the immense advantage, of comparative literary study; and

secondly, that while emancipating himself to this extent, he is still

under the domination of Kinds. If he had gone to A. Kelton himself, and

had examined that worthy’s works—not to range him under Melic or Epic or

anything _quod exit in ’ic_, but—to see whether he wrote good or bad

poetry, he would at least have been in a fairer way of escape. But the

mania for Kind- and Subject-division, instead of studying poetic

treatment, can hardly be better illustrated than in Quadrio, whose

schedule of narrative poetry, for instance, is as complicated and as

meticulous as a Government return.

Yet the value of his attempt, and in a less degree of Crescimbeni’s, is

very great: and it perhaps exceeds in _general_ critical importance the

results of the exercise of the superior talent of Muratori and Gravina.

[Sidenote: _The emergence of literary history._] These latter said more

noteworthy things than the others: but they said them in a kind of

criticism which, to speak our best for it, had already done all the good

that was in it to do. Nay, their method of handling was likely to stand

in the way of real critical advance or recovery, not to help it.

Crescimbeni and Quadrio, especially the latter, recognised indeed, if

they did not themselves quite understand, or lay down in so many words

for the instruction of others, the great fact that before all things,

and for some time at any rate instead of all things, it was time for

criticism to “take stock”—that instead of theorising at large, and

controlling the theory at best by a partial study of the classics and a

very limited and arbitrary selection of the literature of the student’s

own country, it was time for him to take the whole of that literature,

to compare it with the whole of the classics, and, so far as he possibly

could, with the whole of foreign modern literature as a third standard.

That is practically what we have been doing for nearly two hundred years

past, more or less—for more than a hundred years past, pretty steadily

and with a will. It is not done yet; and it never can be done wholly,

because every generation and every country adds, in its varying measure

and degree, fresh supplies of matter which cannot be digested all at

once, but which must sooner or later be added to the rest, and may

affect conclusions drawn from that rest, as vitally as did the work of

Dante or that of Shakespeare. But it has been done, and is being done,

after a fashion in which, before the time of these two Italian

historians, it had hardly been done by anybody.

The promise, however, of this group—the elder of whose members almost

belong to the seventeenth century, while the youngest does not come

below the middle of the eighteenth—was not fulfilled. [Sidenote:

_Further decadence of Italian Criticism._] Hardly a single person among

the other (and chiefly later) Italian critics of the time has achieved,

or, so far as I have been able to inform myself, has deserved to

achieve, any great reputation. Tiraboschi indeed continued the merely

historical part of Crescimbeni’s labour with an industry probably

unparalleled in any other country. [Sidenote: _Metastasio._] Metastasio,

in his later days, occupied himself a good deal with criticism, and at

an earlier time his _Estratto dell' Arte Poetica d’Aristotile_[724]

would have deserved a good deal of attention from us. At his own date

Metastasio is partly an eminent example of that halting between two

opinions which has been so often mentioned, partly an inheritor of

others’ thoughts. He is in hardly any sense a Romantic; yet he observes,

against the Dacierian extension and hardening of Aristotle’s definition

of poetry, that if this be so “it will be very difficult to find any

writer who is not a poet”, and a little farther he has excogitated, or

borrowed from the æestheticians, the all-important doctrine that the

object of the sculptor is “not the illusion of the spectator but his own

victory over the marble.” But these things are late, transitional, and,

perhaps, as has been hinted, borrowed. The earlier critical work of the

polygraphic, polyglottic, and polypragmatic Marquis Scipione Maffei has

no distinction: and the very names[725] of Palesi, Salio, Denina,

Zanotti are unknown to all but special students of Italian literature,

and probably to not a few of these. We must come to quite modern

times—to times indeed so near our own that the rule of silence as to

living contemporaries may often come into operation—before we can find

any heirs to the glory of Castelvetro and Patrizzi, if we can find them

then.

-----

Footnote 724:

It fills the greater part of the 12th and last vol. of the Paris ed.

(1782). The passages quoted are at pp. 29, 30, and 57 of this.

Footnote 725:

For instance, of these four only Denina occurs in Dr Garnett’s

excellent _Short History of Italian Literature_ (London, 1898), and

that for his historical, not his literary, work.

-----

The singularity which in so many ways besets Spanish literature shows

itself, perhaps not least, in the fact that the establishment of the

neo-classic creed in Spain does not take place till that creed is

beginning to be, in one way or another, deserted or undermined in other

countries. [Sidenote: _Neo-classicism triumphs in Spain._] It must be

admitted that there was some excuse for Don Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt

de Suelves y Gurrea, whose _Poética_ in 1737 argued Spain’s poetry away,

far more actually than Cervantes had ever laughed away her chivalry. It

has been usual to represent Luzán as a mere populariser of Boileau in

Spain: but this is not just. Any one who has followed the course of

reading which this book represents will see that it was the _antiqua

mater_ of Spanish criticism, Italy, which really started Luzán’s

inquiries—that Muratori, and perhaps Gravina, rather than Boileau and

the French schoolmen, were his masters. Indeed it seems that he had

actually sketched, in Italian and in Italy (or at least Sicily), certain

_Ragionamenti sopra la Poesia_, nearly a decade before his Spanish book

appeared.

There was, it has been said, some excuse for him. [Sidenote: _The

absurdities of Artiga._] We have seen in the last Book that, though

isolated expressions and _aperçus_ of remarkable promise and acuteness

appear in Spanish criticism of the seventeenth century, it was always

_impar sibi_, and was constantly aiming at the establishment of a kind

of illegitimate compromise between the national drama, which the critics

would not give up, and the general theories of literature which they did

not dare—perhaps did not wish—to impugn. In fact, this state of

compromise, by yet another of the anomalies above referred to,

anticipates the similar things which we see in England and in France, in

Italy and in Germany, much later. At the same time, Spain had been a

special victim, with Gongorism and Culteranism and Conceptism, of those

contortions of the Romantic agony which, all over Europe, invited the

tyranny of neo-classicism. Also its great creative period had closed for

some considerable time. Lastly, there had survived in Spain a kind of

childishly scholastic rhetoric, which the rest of Europe, with some

slight exceptions in Italy, had long outgrown. Ticknor, the most amiable

of Historians (when Protestantism is not in point), calls by the name of

“a really ridiculous book” the _Epitome de la Eloquencia Española_ of

Don Francisco José Artiga or Artieda, to which he gives the date of

1725, but of which the British Museum copy bears a date more than thirty

years earlier.[726] People are apt to be so unkind to technical

_Rhetorics_ and _Poetics_ that I own I had a faint hope, before I

actually read this book, of being able to remonstrate with the

Ticknorian judgment: but _no puede ser_. The work is dedicated to

Francesco Borgia, Duke of Gandia—the tragic elder associations of the

name serving, to those who are susceptible to such things, as a sort of

heightening of the farce. It consists of verse-dialogues, in

octosyllabic quatrain, between a _Hijo_ and a _Padre_ by way of question

and answer. Eloquence is angelic, celestial, ethereal, elementary,

mixed, dumb, and several other things. Receipts and formulas are given

for all sorts of compositions down to visiting cards: and the style of

exposition may perhaps best be appreciated from an extract of two

quatrains—

_P._ La Imágen o Icon se haze,

bosquejando una pintúra

de algúnas cosas con otras

con propriedád y hermosúra.

And a little later the Hijo says—

_H._ En entrambos ejempláres

resplandecen las figúras:

mostradme, si [la Apostrofe] la Adversion

encierra tanta hermosúra.

One is too apt to forget, in censuring eighteenth-century flippancy and

superficiality in regard to the past, that all over Europe, more or

less, this kind of childish stuff was still actually taught.

-----

Footnote 726:

Huesca, 1692, 12mo.

-----

Luzán is at least not childish, though he betrays the insufficient

historical examination and the hasty generalising which beset the

whole school. [Sidenote: _Luzán._] He devotes the principal attention

of his folio,[727] after generalities avowedly taken from Muratori, to

Epic and Tragedy, and while using complimentary words to Lope and

Calderon, indicates, without doubt or hesitation, that his heart is

with Corneille and Racine. It is true that he is himself—as all these

Eighteenth-century “classics” are without exception, save the mere

school dogmatists or the obstinate reactionaries like La

Harpe—inconsistent. Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly[728] goes so far as to say

that there is hardly a proposition in his book which is not

contradicted elsewhere in it. But that he at least meant to be a

neo-classic, a Unitarian, a Nicolaitan, there can be no doubt, nor any

that he met with no markworthy or effectual resistance.

-----

Footnote 727:

Published at Saragossa, date as above. A later edition is said to be

garbled.

Footnote 728:

_Op. cit._, p. 348.

-----

The rest of the Spanish criticism of the eighteenth century has, save

for special students of Spanish literature, and perhaps even for them,

very little interest; [Sidenote: _The rest uninteresting._] and it is

noticeable that, from this point, even the accomplished and

indefatigable historian of the subject[729] practically breaks away from

Spain itself, and gives a history of æsthetic ideas, not as they arose,

and developed, and changed, and fell there, but rather as they went

through these phases in Europe at large. The better known names of

Spanish authors of the time, such as Isla and Feyjóo, have a certain

right to figure here, but their literary critical work is only a part,

and not a very important or interesting part, of the extension of the

_Aufklärung_, especially in the forms which it assumed in France, to the

most bigoted and conservative (except its sister Portugal) of European

countries. This process, though perhaps necessary, is not in any

department, political, religious, or other, particularly grateful to

study; for Spain lost venerable and fascinating illusions—if illusions

they were—to gain a very shallow, dubious, and second-rate civilisation

and enlightenment. And this was almost more the case in literature than

anywhere else.

-----

Footnote 729:

Señor Menéndez y Pelayo, as cited before, in vols. 5 and 6 of his

_History_.

-----

Feyjóo’s _Teátro Crίtico_, a series of Essays published between 1726 and

1738, and his _Letters_, which after a short interval he began in 1742,

and continued at intervals for eighteen years more, are more

philosophical and “moral,” in the French sense, than literary.

[Sidenote: _The rest uninteresting._] But the “Spanish Hotel de

Rambouillet”—the “Academy of good taste” which met about the middle of

the century at the house of the Countess de Lemos—included not only

Luzán, but another _littérateur_ of high rank, Luis José Velasquez,

Marquis of Valdeflores, with Nasarre y Ferriz, and others. The whole

school was rather anti-national, but Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, their

contemporary, did great service to Spanish literature by publishing the

_Origins_, to which we have been indebted above,[730] and some by

compiling a _Rhetoric_, traditional enough, but not specially

“Gallo”-Classic. The famous Father Isla not only attacked the remnants

of extravagant style, which had sought refuge in the Spanish pulpit, in

_Fray Gerundio_, the one Spanish book of this time, which became a

European possession, but left unpublished other critical work,

especially in his poem of _Ciceron_, much of which is satirically

critical of literature. Isla was probably more of a patriot than of a

critic in his well-known attempt to claim _Gil Blas_ for Spain, not

merely in suggestion but in direct original. Nor should we omit to

mention with honour, as members of that invaluable class of restorers of

ancient literature which arose in almost all countries in the latter

half of the century, Sedano of the _Spanish Parnassus_, Sanchez of the

_Poesias Anteriores al Siglo_ XV, and Sarmiento, the first general

Historian of Old Spanish Poetry. Their work was, if a somewhat slow, a

sure and certain antidote to the Gallicism of Moratin (Luzán’s chief

successor) and others of the later time.[731]

-----

Footnote 730:

P. 333.

Footnote 731:

This Gallicism was not universal. As Mr Ticknor (III. v., opening)

says, while Moratin spoke contemptuously of the ballad of “Calaynos,”

his opponent Huerta pronounced _Athalie_ fit for nothing but its

original purpose of being acted by schoolgirls.

-----

Despite some exceptions (which only prove the rule rather more than is

usual), and despite the immense dead-lift which at one time they gave,

or helped to give, to criticism, the Germans have never been very good

critics. [Sidenote: _Rise at last of German Criticism._] There has

always been too much in them of the girl in the fable who jumped on the

floor to hunt mice, instead of attending to the more important business

and pleasure of the occasion. And though that dead-lift which has been

referred to began extremely early in the eighteenth century, its history

belongs to our next volume. It is, indeed, less easy to effect the

separation which our plan demands here than anywhere else; for hardly

had German vernacular criticism begun to exert itself once more, after

its long inertia since Opitz, than the double current of abstract

æstheticism, and of study of Romantic literature, began to appear. But

it would be impossible to omit from a gallery or panorama of

Neo-classicism such a typical specimen of the _perruque_ as Gottsched,

such an eminent example of the “man who looks over his shoulder” as

Gellert. And though we must leave substantive dealings with Bodmer,

Breitinger, and their fellows and followers to that early division of

the next volume in which, with leave of Nemesis, Germany will be

compensated for the little pride of place she has hitherto enjoyed, it

will be very proper here at least to mention the singular and

interesting process of novitiate by which the Germans vindicated their

character as the good boys of technical education; and, by sheer hard

study and omnivorous reading, put the national abilities into a

condition to turn out a Lessing and a Goethe.

The means—sufficiently obvious, but not often resorted to save by those

nations which have not “decayed through pride”—were those of abundant

translation from the more forward vernaculars, as well as from the

classics. [Sidenote: _Its school time._] The German _Sammlungen_ of the

first half of the eighteenth century[732] are very interesting things.

From French, from English, from the Latin writings of the previous

century, they selected, and batched together, critical tractates which

they thought might do them good, taking these to heart with Aristotle

and Horace, with Boileau and Vida. That the assemblage had sometimes

something of a “Groves of Blarney” character—that people like

Camusat[733] find themselves jostling Pope and Addison among writers of

Belles-Lettres, and Vossius and Casaubon among scholars, mattered not so

very much. Manure, seed, patterns (to take various lines of metaphor)

were what the German mind wanted; and it received them in plenty, and

certainly not without good result.

-----

Footnote 732:

One of the most important works of the Swiss school itself is Bodmer’s

_Sammlung Kritischer Schriften_, 1741, but this is for another time.

Nicolai’s _Bibliothek der Schönen Wissenschaften_ (Berlin, 1757) and

_Literaturbriefe_ (ibid., 1759-66) perhaps show the movement best.

Footnote 733:

I did not think it worth while to mention Camusat in the French

chapter, though he is not quite a contemptible person. He was one of

the tribe of French men of letters who, for this reason or that,

settled in Holland. He has the not small credit of being one of the

first to attempt a _Literary History_ (Amsterdam, 1722, 3 vols.) _of

France_. He edited part of the literary contents of Chapelain’s

letters, and did other things. But the Germans seem to have been

particularly attracted by a _Lettre sur les Poètes qui ont chanté la

Volupté_, which he wrote, I think, in connection with the work of

Chaulieu, but which I have only read in German. It may have had, for

them, the attraction of elegant naughtiness; but it has in reality

very little either of the adjective or of the noun.

-----

There are some very good authorities[734] who do not see much difference

between Gottsched and his adversaries of the Swiss school, Bodmer and

Breitinger. [Sidenote: _Classicism at bay almost from the first:

Gottsched._] I am not able to agree with them. That there are

characteristics in common nobody can deny,—that Gottsched is of the

evening and Bodmer and Breitinger of the morning of the same day on the

older arrangement, I do most sincerely think. And “the German

Johnson”—so _echt-deutsch_ and so little Johnsonian—is much too

characteristic and agreeable a figure not to have some substantive place

here. It is interesting no doubt—and it would give an excellent subject

for one of the many not-to-be-written _excursus_ of this history—that

he, the analogue, to some extent, in Germany, of Johnson himself in

England and of La Harpe in France, comes far earlier than these

representatives of the neo-classicism which “makes an end” in countries

far more accomplished in literature. But this is natural. The

seventeenth century in Germany had but been one long fallow, producing

nothing but not unfascinating weeds, like Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau,

or wildings like Grimmelshausen. But, as in other cases of fallow, the

rains of heaven had descended, and the winds had blown, and the worms

had done their work of breaking up, and the soil, if technically “foul,”

was also fertile. Its production was necessarily mixed; but it was at

any rate not subject to the desperate hook of the preceptist weeder, or

to the traditional courses of the orthodox agriculturist. The German man

of letters of 1700-1750 had the “Y” before him as few men of letters

have had.

-----

Footnote 734:

_E.g._, my friend Professor Elton, in his _Augustan Ages_ (Edinburgh,

1899), p. 348. It is, I trust, not immoral, I am sure it is not

illiberal, to edit a book without absolutely indorsing all its

opinions, or insisting that all these opinions shall be one’s own.

-----