BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE
The great name in criticism of the second half of the seventeenth
century is that of Boileau. But one of whom Boileau spoke harshly,
a soldier, a man of the world, the friend of Ninon de l'Enclos, a
sceptical Epicurean, an amateur in letters, Saint-Evremond
(1613-1703), among his various writings, aided the cause of criticism
by the intuition which he had of what is excellent, by a fineness
of judgment as far removed from mere licence as from the pedantry
of rules. Fallen into disfavour with the King, Saint-Evremond was
received into the literary society of London. His criticism is that
of a fastidious taste, of balance and moderation, guided by tradition,
yet open to new views if they approved themselves to his culture and
good sense. Had his studies been more serious, had his feelings been
more generous and ardent, had his moral sense been less shallow, he
might have made important contributions to literature. As it was,
to be a man of the world was his trade, to be a writer was only an
admirable foible.
NICOLAS BOILEAU, named DESPREAUX, from a field (pre) of his father's
property at Crosne, was born in Paris, 1636, son of the registrar
of the Grand Chambre du Palais. His choice of a profession lay between
the Church and that with which his father was connected--the law;
but though he made some study of theology, and was called to the bar,
his inclination for literature could not be resisted. His whole life,
indeed, was that of a man of letters--upright, honourable, serious,
dignified, simple; generous to the friends whose genius he could
justly applaud; merciless to books and authors condemned by his reason,
his good sense, his excellent judgment. He was allied by an ardent
admiration to Racine, and less intimately to Moliere, La Fontaine,
and Chapelle; Jansenist through his religious sympathies, and
closely attached to the venerable Arnauld; appointed historiographer
to the King (1677) together with Racine; an Academician by the King's
desire, notwithstanding the opposition of his literary enemies. In
his elder years his great position of authority in the world of letters
was assured, but he suffered from infirmities of body, and from an
increasing severity of temper. In 1711 he died, bequeathing a large
sum of money to the poor.
Boileau's literary career falls into three periods--the first,
militant and destructive, in which he waged successful war against
all that seemed to him false and despicable in art; the second,
reconstructive, in which he declared the doctrine of what may be
termed literary rationalism, and legislated for the French
Parnassus; the third, dating from his appointment as historiographer,
a period of comparative repose and, to some extent, of decline, but
one in which the principles of his literary faith were maintained
and pressed to new conclusions. His writings include twelve satires
(of which the ninth, "A son Esprit," is the chief masterpiece); twelve
epistles (that to Racine being pre-eminent); the literary-didactic
poem, _L'Art Poetique_; a heroi-comical epic, _Le Lutrin_;
miscellaneous shorter poems (among which may be noted the admirable
epitaph on Arnauld, and an unhappy ode, _Sur la Prise de Namur_, 1693);
and various critical studies in prose, his Lucianic dialogue _Les
Heros de Roman_, satirising the extravagant novels not yet dismissed
to oblivion, and his somewhat truculent _Reflexions sur Longin_ being
specially deserving of attention. The satires preceded in date the
epistles; of the former, the first nine belong to the years 1660-67;
the first nine of the epistles to the years 1669-77; three satires
and three epistles may be described as belated. The year 1674 is
memorable as that in which were published _L'Art Poetique_ and the
first four _chants_ of _Le Lutrin_.
The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intellectual, animated
by ideas; but it is an error to suppose that a sensuous element is
absent from his verse. It is verse of the classical school, firm and
clear, but it addresses the ear with a studied harmony, and what
Boileau saw he could render into exact, definite, and vivid expression.
His imagination was not in a large sense creative; he was wholly
lacking in tenderness and sensibility; his feeling for external
nature was no more than that of a Parisian bourgeois who enjoys for
a day the repose of the fields; but for Paris itself, its various
aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye and the
precise rendering of a realist in art; his faithful objective touch
is like that of a Dutch painter. As a moralist, he is not searching
or profound; he saw too little of the inner world of the heart, and
knew too imperfectly its agitations. When, however, he deals with
literature--and a just judgment in letters may almost be called an
element in morals--all his penetration and power become apparent.
To clear the ground for the new school of nature, truth and reason
was Boileau's first task. It was a task which called for courage and
skill. The public taste was still uncertain. Laboured and lifeless
epics like Chapelain's _La Pucelle_, petty ingenuities in metre like
those of Cotin, violence and over-emphasis, extravagances of
sentiment, faded preciosities, inane pastoralisms, gross or vulgar
burlesques, tragedies languorous and insipid, lyrics of pretended
passion, affectations from the degenerate Italian literature,
super-subtleties from Spain--these had still their votaries. And the
conduct of life and characters of men of letters were often unworthy
of the vocation they professed. "La haine d'un sot livre" was an
inspiration for Boileau, as it afterwards was for our English satirist
Pope; and he felt deeply that dignity of art is connected with dignity
of character and rectitude of life--"Le vers se sent toujours des
bassesses de coeur." He struck at the follies and affectations of
the world of letters, and he struck with force: it was a needful duty,
and one most effectively performed. Certain of the Epistles, which
are written with less pitiless severity and with a more accomplished
mastery of verse, continue the work of the Satires. From Horace he
derived much, something from Juvenal, and something from his
predecessor Regnier; but he had not the lightness nor the _bonhomie_
of Horace, nor his easy and amiable wisdom.
In the _Art Poetique_ Boileau is constructive; he exhibits the true
doctrine of literature, as he conceived it. Granted genius, fire,
imagination--the gifts of heaven--what should be the self-imposed
discipline of a poet? Above all, the cultivation of that power which
distinguishes false from true, and aids every other faculty--the
reason. "Nothing," declares Boileau, "is beautiful save what is
true;" nature is the model, the aim and end of art; reason and good
sense discern reality; they test the fidelity of the artistic
imitation of nature; they alone can vouch for the correspondence of
the idea with its object, and the adequacy of the expression to the
idea. What is permanent and universal in literature lives by the aid
of no fashion of the day, but by virtue of its truth to nature. And
hence is derived the authority of the ancient classics, which have
been tried by time and have endured; these we do not accept as tyrants,
but we may safely follow as guides.
To study nature is, however, before all else to study man--that is,
human nature--and to distinguish in human nature what is universal
and abiding from what is transitory and accidental; we cannot be
expected to discover things absolutely new; it suffices to give to
what is true a perfect expression. Unhappily, human nature, as
understood by Boileau, included little beyond the court and the town.
Unhappily his appreciation of classical literature was defective;
to justify as true and natural the mythology of Greece he has to regard
it as a body of symbols or a moral allegory. Unhappily his survey
of literature was too narrow to include the truths and the splendours
of Mediaeval poetry and art. For historical truth, indeed, he had
little sense; seeking for what is permanent and universal, he had
little regard for local colour and the truth of manners. To secure
assent from contemporary minds truth must assume what they take to
be its image, and a Greek or Roman on the stage must not shock the
demand for verisimilitude made by the courtly imagination of the days
of Louis Quatorze. Art which fails to please is no longer art.
To the workmanship, the technique of poetry, Boileau attaches a high
importance. Its several species--idyl, elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram,
rondeau, ballade, madrigal, satire, epic, tragedy, comedy--are
separated from one another by fixed boundaries, and each is subject
to its own rules; but genius, on occasion, may transcend those rules,
and snatch an unauthorised grace. It is difficult to understand why
from among the _genres_ of poetry Boileau omitted the fable; perhaps
he did not regard its form, now in verse and now in prose, as defined;
possibly he was insensible of the perfection to which the fable in
verse had been carried by La Fontaine. The fourth _chant_ of the _Art
Poetique_ is remarkable for its lofty conception of the position of
the poet; its counsels express the dignity of the writer's own
literary life. He has been charged not only with cruelty as a satirist,
but with the baseness of a flatterer of the great. It would be more
just to notice the honourable independence which he maintained,
notwithstanding his poetical homage to the King, which was an
inevitable requisition. Boileau's influence as a critic of
literature can hardly be overrated; it has much in common with the
influence of Pope on English literature--beneficial as regards his
own time, somewhat restrictive and even tyrannical upon later
generations.
_Le Lutrin_ (completed in 1683) is not a burlesque which degrades
a noble theme, but, like Pope's far more admirable _Rape of the Lock_,
a heroi-comic poem humorously exalting humble matter of the day. It
tells of the combats of ecclesiastics respecting the position of a
lectern, combats in which the books of a neighbouring publisher serve
as formidable projectiles. The scene is in the Sainte-Chapelle and
the Palais de Justice. Boileau's gift for the vivid presentation of
visible detail, and his skill in versification, served him here better
than did his choice of a subject. On the whole, we think of him less
as a poet than as the classical guardian and legislator of poetry.
He was an emancipator by directing art towards reason and truth; when
larger interpretations of truth and reason than his became possible,
his influence acted unfavourably as a constraint.
All that Boileau lacked as a poet was possessed by the most easy and
natural of the singers of his time--one whose art is like nature in
its freedom, while yet it never wrongs the delicate bounds of art.
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE was born in 1621 at Chateau-Thierry, in Champagne,
son of the "maitre des eaux et forets." His education was less of
a scholastic kind than an education derived from books read for his
own pleasure, and especially from observation or reverie among the
woods and fields, with their population of bird, beast, and insect,
so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slipping away from theology
and law, he passed ten years, from twenty-three to thirty-three, in
seeming indolence, a "bon garcon," irreclaimably wayward as regards
worldly affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed his
genius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of old poets,
story-tellers, translators, and already practising his art of verse.
Nothing that was not natural to him, and wholly to his liking, would
he or could he do; but happily he was born to write perfect verses,
and the labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a delight.
He allowed himself to be married to a pretty girl of fifteen, and
presently forgot that he had a wife and child, drifted away, and agreed
in 1659 to a division of goods; but his carelessness and egoism were
without a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child rather than
of a man.
In 1654 he published a translation of the _Eunuch_ of Terence of small
worth, and not long after was favoured with the patronage of Fouquet,
the superintendant of finance. To him La Fontaine presented his
_Adonis_, a narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious,
expressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to be found
in poetry of the time, and reviving some of the bright Renaissance
sense of antiquity. The genius of France is united in La Fontaine's
writings with the genius of Greece. But the verses written by command
for Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-constructed and
unfinished _Songe de Vaux_, partly in prose, partly in verse, was
designed to celebrate his patron's Chateau de Vaux.
Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue _Clymene_, a dramatic
fantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus learns by the aid of the
Muses the loves of Acante (La Fontaine) and Clymene (Madame X ...),
a rural beauty, whom the god had seen wandering on the banks of
Hippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La Fontaine did
not desert him, pleading in his _Elegie aux Nymphes de Vaux_ on behalf
of the disgraced minister. As a consequence, the poet retired for
a time from Paris to banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is again
in Paris or at Chateau-Thierry, his native place, where the Duchesse
de Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, young, gay, pleasure-loving, bestowed
on him a kind protection. His tedious paraphrase of _Psyche_, and
the poem _Quinquina_, in which he celebrates the recovery from illness
of the Duchess, were performances of duty and gratitude rather than
of native impulse; but the tendencies of her salon, restrained neither
by the proprieties of the classical doctrine in literature nor those
of religious strictness, may have encouraged him to the production
of his _Contes_.
In Paris, from 1661 to 1664 joyous meetings took place in Boileau's
rooms in the Rue du Colombier of a distinguished group, which included
Moliere, Chapelle, Racine, and La Fontaine. La Fontaine, the
_bonhomme_, who escaped from the toil of conversation which did not
interest him in shy or indolent taciturnity, could be a charming
talker with companions of his choice. Probably to Boileau's urgency
is due the first original publication of La Fontaine, a little volume
of _Nouvelles en Vers_ (1664-1665), containing the _Joconde_, a tale
from Ariosto, and a comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almost
immediately there followed a collection of ten _Contes_, with the
author's name upon the title-page, and at various later dates were
published added tales, until five parts completed the series. The
success was great, but great also was the scandal, for the _bonhomme_,
drawing from Boccaccio, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles,
Rabelais, Petronius, Athenaeus, and other sources, had exhibited no
more regard for decency than that which bestows the graces of
lightness, brightness, wit, and gaiety upon indecency. His unabashed
apology was that the artistic laws of the _conte_ obliged him to
decline the laws of modesty; and among those who applauded his tales
were the Duchess de Bouillon and Mme. de Sevigne. It is indeed
impossible not to applaud their skill in rapid and easy narrative,
and the grace, freedom, and spontaneity of the verse.
The first six books of the _Fables_ appeared in 1668; the next five
in two parts, in 1678 and 1679; the twelfth and last book in 1694.
When the _Psyche_ was published, soon after the first group of the
_Fables_, the prose and verse were placed in a graceful setting, which
tells of the converse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine,
and Moliere (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the unfinished
gardens of Versailles, where the author of _Psyche_, named happily
Polyphile (for he loved many things, and among them his friends),
will read his romance for his literary comrades.
"_J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique,
La ville et la campagne, enfin tout: il n'est rien
Qui ne me soit souverain bien
Jusq'aux sombres plaisirs d'un coeur melancolique._"
Some of his friends before long had passed away, but others came to
fill their places. For many years he was cared for and caressed by
the amiable and cultivated Mme. de Sabliere, and when she dismissed
other acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her La
Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its doors to him sooner than
to Boileau, but the King would not have it so, and he was admitted
(1684) only when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be _sage_.
When Mme. de Sabliere died, Hervart, maitre des requetes, one day
offered La Fontaine the hospitality of his splendid house. "I was
on my way there," replied the poet. After a season of conversion,
in which he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of _Contes_,
the _bonhomme_ tranquilly died in April 1693. "He is so simple," said
his nurse, "that God will not have courage to damn him." "He was the
most sincere and candid soul," wrote his friend Maucroix, who had
been intimate with him for more than fifty years, "that I have ever
known; never a disguise; I don't know that he spoke an untruth in
all his life."
All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be found in his
_Fables_. The comedies in which he collaborated, the _Captivite de
Saint Malc_, written on the suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the
miscellaneous poems, though some of these are admirable, even the
_Contes_, exhibit only a fragment of his mind; in the _Fables_ the
play of his faculties is exquisite, and is complete. His imagination
was unfitted for large and sustained creation; it operated most
happily in a narrow compass. The _Fables_, however, contain much in
little; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with narrative;
they give scope to his feeling for nature, and to his gift for the
observation of human character and society; they form, as he himself
has said--
"_Une ample comedie a cents actes divers
Et dont la scene est l'univers._"
He had not to invent his subjects; he found them in all the fabulists
who had preceded him--Greek, Latin, Oriental, elder French
writers--"j'en lis qui sont du Nord et qui sont du Midi;" but he may
be said to have recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to
an express moral, he converted the fable into a _conte_, in which
narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue have an
independent value, and the moral is little more than an accident.
This is especially true of the midmost portion of the collection--Books
vii.-ix.--which appeared ten years after the earliest group. He does
not impose new and great ideas on the reader; he does not interpret the
deepest passions; he takes life as he sees it, as an entertaining
comedy, touched at times with serious thought, with pathos, even with
melancholy, but in the main a comedy, which teaches us to smile at the
vanities, the follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the
same time something of tenderness and pity for all that is gentle or
weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat epicurean, a morality of
indulgence, of moderation, of good sense. His eye for what is
characteristic and picturesque in animal life is infallible; but his
humanised wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical
presentation of mankind and of the society of his own day, from the
grand monarch to the bourgeois or the lackey.
La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations of the classical
school of the seventeenth century; his manifold reading in elder
French literature enriched his vocabulary; he seems to light by
instinct upon the most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the
perfection of his art was attained only as the result of untiring
diligence; indolent and careless as he was in worldly affairs, he
was an indefatigable craftsman in poetry. His verse is as free as
it is fine; it can accomplish whatever it intends; now it is light
and swift, but when needful it can be grave and even magnificent:
"_Aurait-il imprime sur le front des etoiles
Ce que la nuit des temps enferme dans ses voiles?_"
It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules imposed from without;
its life and movement come from within, and the lines vary, like a
breeze straying among blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of
the writer's mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity,
he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other writer of his
century the genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of his
feeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. If
we do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer,"
we may at least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne,
"mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naif que le premier," and with
all the charm of verse superadded.