Monsieur,--You were a popular writer, and an honourable, over-educated,
upright gentleman. Of the latter character you can never be deprived,
and I doubt not it stands you in better stead where you are, than the
laurels which flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.
Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day,
But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel out-lives not May.
I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but _your_ laurel
certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus
and where Homer are. Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot
doubt it, awaited _un si bon homme_. But the moral excellence that even
Boileau admitted, _ladfoi, l'honneur, la probiité,_ do not in Parnassus
avail the popular poet, and some luckless Musset or Théophile, Regnier
or Villars attains a kind of immortality denied to the man of many
contemporary editions, and of a great commercial success.
If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir,
should have been that fortunately manufactured article. You were, in
matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers. Never, since Adam's
day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child. Then Destiny,
that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers in particular,
heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbiére his
wife with the future author of 'La Pucelle.' Oh futile hopes of men, _O
pectora caeca!_ All was done that education could do for a genius which,
among other qualities, 'especially lacked fire and imagination,' and an
ear for verse--sad defects these in a child of the Muses. Your training
in all the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you
exclaim, like Rasselas, 'Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human
being can ever be a Poet.' Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing
Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you
received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of
the Cardinal's minstrels, as M. de Tréville was Captain of the King's
Musketeers.
Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more
richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in Prehistoric
English, among us niggard moderns! How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or,
even as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise and pension me; but
Envy be still! Your existence was more happy indeed; you constructed
odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Ho'tel Rambouillet, while the
learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious
celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic. 'Who, indeed,' says
a sympathetic author, M. Théophile Gautier, 'who could expect less than
a miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art--a perfect
Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so
favoured by the great?' Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good
faith to advertise your merits. Hard must have been the heart that could
resist the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de
Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur
Godeau, Bishop of Vence, or M. Colbert, who had such a genius for
finance.
If bishops and politicians and prime ministers skilled in finance, and
some critics, Ménage and Sarrazin and Vaugetas, if ladies of birth and
taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were
a great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and
appraising yourself at the public estimate?
It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops
especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the
testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you
listened to the plaudits of your friends. Nay, you ventured to pronounce
judgment on contemporaries whom Posterity has preferred to your
perfections. 'Moliére,' said you, 'understands the nature of comedy, and
presents it in a natural style. The plot of his best pieces is borrowed,
but not without judgment; his _morale_ is fair, and he has only to avoid
scurrility.'
Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!
Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that
your 'courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work
not absolutely good.' And yet you regarded 'La Pucellé with some
complacency.
On the 'Pucellé you were occupied during a generation of mortal men.
I marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly
pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no
Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creations. First you
gravely wrote out (it was the task of five years) all the compositions
in prose. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but
appropriate medium? What says the Précieuse about you in Boileau's
satire?
In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
She finds but one defect, he can't be read;
Yet thinks the world might taste his maiden's woes,
If only he would turn his verse to prose!
The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.
Yet for this precious 'Pucelle,' in the age when 'Paradise Lost' was
sold for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four
thousand. Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and
he was a wise man who first spoke of _aurea mediocritas_. At length the
great work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that
divine Maiden to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire
have recompensed so strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of
portraits and engravings, and _culs de lampe_, the great work was given
to the world, and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are
figures which fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then,
alas! the bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longveille, hearing the
'Pucellé read aloud, murmured that it was 'perfect indeed, but perfectly
wearisome.' Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you
till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbé at Ménagés
had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.
I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the
onslaught on your 'Pucelle.' These qualities, alas! are not strange to
literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us 'potter hates potter, and
poet hates poet'? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius. Who
suffered more than Moliére from cabals? Yet neither the court nor the
town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I admit
that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault and Le
Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Visé, what were they all compared
to your enemy, Boileau? Brossette tells a story which really makes a man
pity you. There was a M. de Puimorin who, to be in the fashion, laughed
at your once popular Epic. 'It is all very well for a man to laugh who
cannot even read.' Whereon M. de Puimorin replied: 'Qu'il n'avoit que
trop su' lire, depuis que Chapelain s'étoit avisé de faire imprimer.'
A new horror had been added to the accomplishment of reading since
Chapelain had published. This repartee was applauded, and M. de Puimorin
tried to turn it into an epigram. He did complete the last couplet,
Hélas! pour mes péchés, je n'ai su' que trop lire
Depuis que tu fais imprimer.
But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his
epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance. I
almost blush to think that M. Despréaux, M. Racine, and M. de Moliére,
the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor
jest, and madden you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud
that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other
poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay
puts forth his hand, and 'Satan Montgomery' was no more. It did not need
a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow
into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary
failures or successes I do not speak.
I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you
doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of
Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets
has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect posterity to reverse
the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice? You answered your
earliest assailant, Liniére, and, by a few changes of words, turned his
epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm,
unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself. According to M. de
Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead,
you 'conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious
veneration for yourself and your genius.' Probably you were protected by
this invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that
mere jealousy dictates the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain's real
fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success, Qu'il soit le mieux
renté de tous les beaux-esprits.
This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not
altogether mistaken. Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours,
and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with that eternal
problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry? Burns was a poet, and
popular. Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict
of their own generation. But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no
poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality.
Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy
left Chiméne as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that
perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes
ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the
malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who
takes? Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet? I doubt it, Sir,
holding that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own
nature. Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as bad poets are
successful, and bad poets will assuredly reflect that their assailants
are merely envious, and, while their vogue lasts, that Prime Ministers
and the purchasing public are the only judges.
Monsieur,
Votre trés humble serviteur,
Andrew Lang.