On what was then a burning subject—one which cannot be said to have been quite put out, though its ashes only smoulder—the suitableness of religious and especially Christian subjects for epic and drama, &c., Saint-Evremond’s opinion is a little tainted by his undoubted “philosophy,” to use the word which had already become fashionable for the various shades of unbelief. On Christian subjects, &c. But either from this cause, or from a general critical spirit, he escapes the inconsistency (in which Boileau for instance is entangled) of contending that the deorum ministeria are capital things in ancient, and very bad things in modern, poetry. His remarks on the theory of Purgation are a little irreverent but by no means irrational; and he makes strong play for the contention (of which, if he did not invent it, he was one of the strongest and most original champions) that “Admiration is a tragic passion” worthy of being seated beside Pity and Terror, and necessary to be kept in sight even when we deal with Love.
In respect of the Ancient and Modern dispute—of all three stages of which, v. infra, his long life made him a contemporary, while he actually took a sort of skirmishing part in the two earlier—his position is distinctly that of a true critic. On Ancients and Moderns. From what has been said already it will be clear that he could not be an out-and-out Ancient; but he is as little a Modern of the Perrault type. One sees that the Moderns gave him most pleasure, and in the Ancients whom he really likes, such as Petronius (supposing no merely unworthy motives to have entered into the preference), it is easy to discern the modern element. But in neither case does he “like grossly” and in the lump; he has his reasons and his affinities, and can state both easily. He is even not very far from that “horizontal” view of literature, without deceptive foreshortenings and distances, which is, up to his time, so rare. Nothing is more striking than his remarks on English literature—at least the English drama. Perhaps he did not himself know much English; and something of the kind seems to be insinuated in Dryden’s remarks[336] on the matter, though Dryden was naturally hurt at the selection of Shadwell for commendation. But if so he apprehended what Waller and others said to him about Ben Jonson’s comedy with almost miraculous divination, and reflects in his account of our tragedy rather less than the current mistakes on the subject among Englishmen of the Restoration period themselves. And here also, as in his remarks on Spanish and Italian, is noticeable this same horizontal and comparative spirit.
On his treatment of Opera I may be permitted to repeat what I wrote more than twenty years ago, that it really contains the substance of everything that has been said since on the literary side of the matter. As for the “Vaste” dissertation the best thing to say is Tolle, lege. I do not think it possible to have a better example of that rarest of things, literary philology, in the true and not the distorted sense of the substantive. The Academy opined—in fact had opined already (whence much of the salt of the piece)—against Saint-Evremond. But his Dissertation is, like all his criticism more or less, a really extraordinary example of the combination of all that was best in the French academic spirit with freedom from most of its faults. This union of freedom and delicacy, of precision and independent play, is Saint-Evremond’s glory as a critic, and it distinguishes him, not merely from Boileau, but from most others between 1660 and 1800. Addison had (and no doubt directly borrowed) something of the same touch; Fénelon, in a different spirit, had a great deal: we shall find something of it in Gravina. But it is very rare in the period, and it is precisely the absence of it as a “compensation balance” which vitiates neo-classic criticism as a whole.
It is common, if not universal, to glance at the redoubtable and satiric doctor, Gui Patin, as at least an outlier among French seventeenth-century critics; but the reader who, as Matthew Arnold says, “wants criticism” will not find much of it in his very amusing Letters.[337] Gui Patin—his judgment of Browne. An English reader may be specially disappointed because he is most likely to know the surprising, the repeated, the, to all appearance, fully genuine, and the very felicitous remarks[338] of Patin on the Religio Medici. A Frenchman who can appreciate Browne, who can see in the Religio a book not merely tout gentil et curieux but fort délicat et tout mystique, who can perceive its étranges et ravissantes pensées, who can pronounce il n’y a guère encore de livre de la sorte (alas! we may drop the guère and continue the encore), who can describe the author as a mélancolique agréable en ses pensées, who can say of his stupid commentators ce livre n’a pas besoin de tels écoliers, and even desire ardently to be acquainted with Sir Kenelm Digby’s reply—may seem to have handed in his credentials as a critic once and for all. But one soon finds that Patin’s interest in Browne was, first of all, esprit de corps (which was perhaps stronger in the Faculty of that time than in any profession of any other), and secondly, a certain coincidence of true but unconventional piety, different as were its forms in the two. Elsewhere Patin is a collector, an eager student of new books, a scholar even, with a conviction that Scaliger and Casaubon were “the two first men of their time,” and that Salmasius was a “grand héros des belles lettres”; but not a critic, and with a distinctly limited idea of belles lettres themselves. He speaks contemptuously of Descartes, he barely mentions Corneille. He was, in fact, generally too angry with antimony, opium, quinine, the English, and Mazarin, or else too much rapt in ecstasy at the divine powers of bleeding and purging,[339] to have time to think of poetry, or even of prose.
Nor can we afford much space to the main body of the Academicians, of the frequenters of “the” Hotel (par excellence), of the abbés, and marquis, and even marquises who crowd the middle of the seventeenth-century history of France, not disagreeably for posterity. Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, Madame de Sévigné. They must be sought in Tallemant (himself, as citations will have shown, interested in the matter, and not inept at it) as a main and single preserver, in a hundred other places, original and second-hand, from the contemporary records to the essays of Sainte-Beuve and his followers. We could fill this volume with them without the slightest difficulty; but, as in all true history, they must “speak by their foremen,” and even these foremen cannot have much place. The modest and amiable Pellisson, the historian of the Academy, whose personal ugliness Boileau had the insolent vulgarity to satirise,[340] but who had a “soul of gold,” was by no means a bad though a too amiable critic, and had the sense and courage not to deny Ronsard when the fashion turned against him, just as he clove to Fouquet when it was positively, and even extremely, dangerous to do so. Ménage, to whom his own unguardedness and the satire of Molière[341] have given something of a ridiculous position in literary history, had the wit to see the merit of Molière himself quite early, possessed very wide reading, and could make judicious reflections on it, had studied the Italian critics,[342] and could now and then (as in the brief obituary notice of Scarron[343]) hit off his stroke extremely well. As for Marie de Sévigné, adorable to all, and especially adored by these two, she is generally right, and always illustrates the saying of La Bruyère, which is quoted below, whether she is right or not. But her critical position is so close to that of Saint-Evremond that what we have said of him is almost equally applicable to her, though she invests the critical attitude with her own peculiar charm.
With one remarkable exception as almost a whole, and a certain number of scattered passages in some of them,[344] the most noteworthy thing in the other Ana, which has relation to Criticism, is the almost invariable connotation of the word in them. The Ana other than Ménage’s, especially Vigneul-Marville,[345] noticing a book, says that there are in it deux remarques de critique, one that Myconos is not so far from Delos as Ferrari says, being only two leagues instead of seven, and the other, that somebody else is wrong in saying that it belongs to the Venetians since it is in the power of the Turks. Of course in a sense these are “critical” observations; but one is a little reminded of Hegel and philosophical instruments. More unmistakable is the clear definition given by the author of the book above excepted. Huet (p. 232 ed. cit.) says explicitly that Critique is “that part of grammar which busies itself with re-establishing the text of ancient authors in its first integrity, and purging out changes due to ignorance,” &c. This, he goes on to say, is the art which Aristotle is said to have invented; and yet, further, he frankly declares that he himself has always looked on it as “a mean business.”[346] Yet, not merely in the well-known De l’Origine des Romans, which is not unfrequently found in connection with the Huetiana, but in these themselves, he shows that he had no mean conception of the higher and nobler branches of the Art. His remarks on the Quarrel[347] are among the most sensible that we have, as was to be expected from a man who was at once an excellent scholar in ancient, and a warm admirer of modern, literature. If he is less wise on rhyme,[348] let us remember that this is parcius objiciendum to a contemporary, although a younger contemporary, of Milton; and if he is responsible for the astonishing statement[349] that Greek poetry “a toujours décliné depuis Homère,” let us simply decline the attempt to construct any critical theodolite which will show us this line of constant declension through Sappho and Pindar, Æschylus and Aristophanes, Theocritus and the best of the Anthologists. the Huetiana. On the other hand, the assertion advanced in the Origine des Romans, and defended in the Ana, to the effect that a good judge of poetry is even rarer than a good poet, is too double-edged, in its apparent flattery of our own office, for us to make any difficulty in applauding it, while the defence itself is singularly good. The everlasting comparison of Virgil to Theocritus and Homer has seldom been better handled than by Huet. Indeed the whole book is worth reading for the critical passages it contains. The Traité des Romans is a little discursively and promiscuously erudite, and Huet is thinking too much of the bastard romance of his own time, too little of the true-bred romances of old: but he knows something even of these, and he is well acquainted with the attempts of Cinthio and Pigna in the previous century to make good at least the Italian form of the kind.
In the Valesiana—amid much that is merely antiquarian or linguistic, and a fair though not excessive portion of the mere gossip and gabble which first made these things read and afterwards brought them into disrepute—there will be found a curious passage on the Latin hymns and their prosody, showing how dead the ear falls at certain times to the music of others, and the more curious selection of Palingenius and his Zodiacus Vitæ as a poem and a poet worth the pains of reading. Nor will the reputation for robustness of seventeenth-century erudition suffer from the patronising commendation of Baillet’s Jugements des Savants as a book which would be useful light reading for the giddy youth of the day who declined serious study. Scaligerana, Yet Scaliger himself (J. J., not J. C.), according to the collection[350] standing in his name (a quaint mosaic or macaronic of French and Latin), thought that nobody save Casaubon (and “another that shall be nameless,” no doubt) was really learned as men had been a hundred years earlier. He is himself nearly as untrustworthy on really critical points as his father, and had, I think, less true critical spirit. But he makes some amends for Julius Cæsar’s truculent assault on the Ciceronianus by confessing that Longolius (the main object of the Erasmian satire) could not really be said to write in Ciceronian style when he simply fitted Ciceronian phrases together.
Another member of the group to be noted very especially is the so-called Parrhasiana,[351] in the title of which “Théodore Parrhase” stands for a nom de guerre of the industrious pressman Jean Le Clerc. and Parrhasiana. It has very little in common with its class, being in part a reasoned treatise on general points of criticism, in part a defence of the author’s own works against the injurious remarks of Meibomius and others. The latter we can neglect; the former contains a really interesting exposition of general critical views by one of the most experienced of the new class of professional critics and reviewers at the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The distinction of the Parrhasiana is that it has so little distinction—that it is so thoroughly normal. Le Clerc is a thorough believer in the Ancients; but he wears his rue with this difference, that he does not believe in moderns who write Greek and Latin Verses, and that he is quite handsome and encouraging to those who do write in their mother tongue. They may be quite, or almost, as useful, he thinks—but as for reading for mere amusement, that is not a serious occupation. And Le Clerc is uncompromising in the prosaism of his views on poetry. In fact, I am not sure that there is anywhere else so naïf a confession of belief in the Lower Reason only. He finds improbabilities and absurdities, not merely in Homer, but in Virgil himself; he holds æternum servans sub pectore vulnus, which some not very fervid Maronites would admit as a great and poetic phrase, to be a mere surplusage; and he actually condoles with poets on the unlucky necessity under which they lie of inversions, metaphors, and so forth, metri gratia. I do not know whether Mr Arnold knew the Parrhasiana, and indeed should doubt it; but he certainly might have found chapter and verse for his strictures on the age of “prose and sense” almost anywhere in it.
Yet other groups or individuals in this abounding period might receive notice if this history were to be in twelve volumes instead of in three. Patru, Desmarets, and others. There is Patru, not merely in his time the glory of the French bar, but extolled, by Boileau and by his enemies alike, as a sort of Quintilian and Quintilius in one[352]—as a standard at once of style and of judgment. Yet his long life and his constant occupation with literature, in talk and in reading, seem to have left us hardly anything in the shape of written criticism. There is Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, a less belauded but more interesting and perhaps more genuine man of letters. Not merely did Desmarets compose the epics ridiculed by Boileau, not merely was he the author of the excellent Visionnaires (the best comedy in French before Molière except Corneille’s Le Menteur), not merely was he a “visionary” himself in his latter days, and a versifier, if not a poet, always, but he was a not inconsiderable critic. Those who choose to read his Défense du Poème Héroique[353] will find in it by no means the imbecility that they may expect, either in the dialogues defending the Christian poem, or in the somewhat meticulous, but sharp and not ill-deserved, “cutting-up” of Boileau which follows. But these, and much more the Conrarts and the Costars, the Maucroix, and the rest[354] must here be as silencieux as the first in his stock epithet. And one may confess even to doubts whether, with the amplest room and verge, they ought to have much space in a general History of Criticism as distinguished from one of special countries and periods. Hardly any of them is more than one of a numerus; hardly any has himself actual distinction, as persons of much inferior talents may have at other times. The Historian of Climate must have much to say about the delightful variety of that phenomenon which the British Isles display, about its causes, its phases, and the like, in general; but he would be lost, and would lose his readers in more than one sense, if he were to attempt to describe every shower or even every wet season.[355]
The attempts, not merely to make out a regular Æsthetic for Descartes, but to key this on to the great critical movement of the century, will be best dealt with later; but the greatest of the Cartesians must have a word.
Malebranche need not occupy us long; indeed, this great philosopher and admirable master of French has to be dealt with by us, at least in some part, because he has been dealt with by others. Malebranche. The invitation to do so, if we may say it without illiberality, seems to have consisted rather in the titles than in the contents of his work. The Second Book of the Recherche de la Vérité is, indeed, “De l’Imagination”; the Second Part of this Second Book has much to do with les personnes d'étude; and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth chapters of the Third Part deal with “the imagination of certain authors,” especially Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. But we have seen, and shall see, how treacherous the word Imagination is, and how people will misunderstand it, however frankly they are dealt with. Malebranche, as he always is, is quite frank and quite clear; he tells us definitely that imagination for him is “a little more and a little less than sense,” that it only consists in the power possessed by the soul of forming images of objects for itself. His quarrel with the “persons of study” is that they will read, write, and argue about the ancients, instead of recurring to primary truths; and when he deals with his three selected authors, it is not to criticise them from the literary point of view (though he finds fault with “irregular movements” in Tertullian’s figures), but to object to the paralogism of the De Pallio, the ill-regulated imagination and feeble reasoning of Seneca, the treacherous “cavalier” manner, the “criminal attraction born of concupiscence,” the disguised pedantry, the vanity, in Montaigne. Phrases here and there, in his own perfect style[356] (I doubt whether any prose writer of the grand siècle can give points to Malebranche), show what a critic was lost in him; but the critic—as indeed we should expect, and as is quite proper—is lost in the philosopher, the theologian, and the moralist.[357]
And so to Boileau.
It is desirable that we should examine Boileau’s critical work[358] with more than ordinary care. The history of Boileau’s reputation. The history of his reputation has, until recently, been on the whole not very different from that of many other eminent men of letters—that is to say, it has oscillated between extravagant reverence (during the entire eighteenth century, with rare exceptions, both in France and elsewhere) and a violent reaction (when the Romantic movement set in). Pope and Voltaire may stand as spokesmen of the former period; Keats and the men of 1830 of the latter. But of late years, and in England as well as in France, the cant of criticism (which is as protean, and as immortal, as most such Duessas) has devised another thing. Even in the extreme Romantic time, true critics, especially Sainte-Beuve, had recognised how germane, in wrong as in right, the taste and temper of Boileau were to the taste and temper of literary France generally, and to some extent of the Latin peoples old and new. But latterly, under the powerful influence of M. Ferdinand Brunetière—whom, though I often disagree with him, I always name for the sake of most unaffected honour, and as a critic of whom any country and time might have been proud—this tendency has gone much further, and we are even asked to accept Monsieur Nicolas as an adequate representative of the French literary genius. Let us remember what “adequate” means; it means to a great, at least, if not to the very fullest, extent commensurate, coextensive, and complete. And in England also there has been not wanting an affectation of deference to this estimate—of arguing that we ought to let the French know best in such points—that it is wicked, rude, uncritical, to intrude English judgment into such matters.
So be it, for the moment, and for the sake of argument. Let us then, as we do always, as from this point of view it is more specially necessary that we should do, inquire what the actual criticism of this “adequate” representative of the French genius is. The Art Poétique. And in doing this let us begin with the Art Poétique, that elaborately arranged code of neo-classic correctness, the composition of which occupied half the central decade[359] of its author’s life when he was in the full vigour of ripe age, which summed up all the doctrine of his earlier satires, and is practically repeated by most of his later.
In making the examination we shall (not without considerable generosity) abstain from bearing too hardly upon the flagrant ignorance of literary history, even in his own country, which Boileau here displays. Its false literary history. His modern defenders (not, it must be confessed, till those who do not defend him had made uncompromising championship on this point impossible) practically confess and avoid it, pass it with a half-petulant “Agreed!” They cannot well do otherwise: for in the famous lines (I. 113-130) from
to
an amount of crass ignorance, or of impudent falsification, is amassed which is really curious, and almost creditable, at least to the audacity of the author’s party-spirit, or the serenity of his indifference. Even in the oldest French poetry that we possess, much more in the Roman de la Rose (which he adduces in a note, having obviously never read it), the “words” were not “arranged without measure”; there were “strict numbers”; and there was even a pretty strict cæsura. Villon did not do anything to “the art of the old romancers,” but wrote in precisely the same measures as men had written in for a hundred and fifty years before him. Marot simply adopted ballades, wrote no triolets, did nothing new to rondeaux, while we are only unable to convict Boileau of error as to mascarades, because nobody has yet discovered what, exactly, a mascarade is. The description of Ronsard’s action is rubbish: while it is quite certain that both Desportes and Bertaut went to their graves without the slightest doubt that he was Prince of French poets, and were not in the least “restrained” in following him. And the history of the French Drama in Canto Three only deserves less reprehension because it was really not very easy at the time for a man to know much about it.
But let this suffice. And let us also exercise our perhaps undeserved generosity on another point, that wholesale and unblushing imitation of Horace which made the Abbé Cotin, one of Boileau’s victims, retort with as much truth as wit, in the very form of one of Despréaux' own insolences—
After all, though a paradox, it is not an impossibility, that a man should be a great critic and yet most untrustworthy on literary history, and apt to make his own work, in great part, a mere mosaic of the work of others.
Let us then take the Art Poétique simply as criticism—not as a series of statements of fact, not as an original or a borrowed argument—and see how it looks this way. Abstract of it. The first Canto begins (in the teasing inverted style[361] which was one of Boileau’s worst legacies to French poetry, and which itself was a “corrupt following” of Latin) with a declaration of the necessity of genius, which has been counted to him for much righteousness. Everybody has not the genius for everything, and it does not follow that because you have a genius for convivial songs you have one for Epic. But good sense and reason are as necessary as genius. Indeed we are soon told that writing depends on these alone for its value: so that genius is like those tickets of admission which are quite useless till they are countersigned by somebody other than the issuer. Never try high flights or conceits. Do not describe your subjects or objects too minutely. Cultivate variety, but never be “low,” burlesque, or bombastic. Whatever you do, mind cæsura and avoid hiatus. Then follows the pseudo-history referred to above, capped by its phrase of Malherbe, in whose steps you are to walk. Clearness of expression is of the greatest value; but as a fact it depends on clearness of thought. Smart things will not ransom faults. If you fear criticism, anticipate it by yourself and your friends; but beware of flatteries, and, above all, do not take the part of your own faults simply because your friends have noticed them. The First Canto ends with the really excellent line, in Boileau’s true vein (for, whatsoe’er the failings on his part as a critic, he was a satirist born and bred)—
The Second Canto begins, apropos of nothing (indeed Boileau was frankly troubled about his “transitions”), with a discussion, partly metaphorical, of the Idyll, Eclogue, and Pastoral, followed by a similar account of other kinds of shorter pieces—Elegy, Ode, Sonnet, Epigram, and others, down to Vaudeville—the Fable being absent, to the discomfort and laborious excuse-making of the disciples. The Idyll must be neither too pompous nor too trivial: follow Theocritus and Virgil and all will be right. Elegy is proper for Death and Love; but you must not, in regard to the latter, be frigid and hackneyed. Imitate Tibullus and Ovid, and again all will be right. The ode is worthy of Achilles or Louis; but do not be too historical—which indeed would be difficult in regard to Achilles, and might be inconvenient in regard to Louis. Sonnets are very difficult, but a sonnet without fault is by itself worth an Epic.[362] The epigram may have pointes, which are elsewhere to be utterly rejected. The other kinds are lightly treated till the Satire, descending to the vaudeville, has a longer discussion. Satire, the apologist pro domo declares, is the voice of Truth. Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, are characterised. Regnier is our best man; but his style is antiquated, and his subjects and language are really shocking.[363] Then “the Frenchman, né malin,” made the Vaudeville. It is only fair to Boileau to say that, could he have foreseen the tedious abuse of this mot, he would certainly either have forborne it, or have given us a capital line or couplet to tie to the tail of the culprits. Canto Three passes, with no less abruptness, to the drama, which occupies the first half, the latter part being given to the Epic. Boileau is at first vague. In fact, he does not seem at all thoroughly to have appreciated the Aristotelian doctrine, which in the main he runs up as his flag. Dramatic art in teaching must please and touch, which it may do by exciting pity and terror. Do not make a long and obscure introduction; keep the Unities as you value your dramatic salvation; never be incredible; and let everything contribute to the development of your story.
The Historic Muse reappears, but in such case, as hinted above, that we shall magnanimously abstain from further vengeance on her. If only Boileau had omitted the unhappy note which says that leurs pièces (those of his imaginary pélerins) sont imprimées, thereby suggesting that he had read them! You must have Love: but do not be doucereux; keep the stock characters; do not modernise the ancients; and if you invent a personage let him be constant to himself. The theatre really is very difficult. But Epic is still more so. It depends entirely upon action, upon fable; and in order to make it noble you put in the deorum ministerium.[364] Æneas’ voyage would have been quite an ordinary thing without Juno, and Neptune, and Æolus:—
But the modern deity will not do at all; and devils and angels are worse. Do let us keep our Tritons, our Parcæ, our Pan, and our Charon! If not, in a short time we shall not be able to tie a bandage on the eyes of Themis, or put a balance in her hand![366] Further, be very careful of your names. There was a person once who actually called his hero Childebrand! Minor receipts for handling follow; and then we find ourselves back on the stage with Comedy, as to which Boileau extols Nature, and tells us that Molière would have been the best of comic dramatists—if he had been other than he was.
The Fourth Canto returns to the generalities of the first, and, taking advantage of this wider scope, begins an attack, not unamusing but in very bad taste, on Claude Perrault, architect, doctor, and, like his more celebrated brother Charles, and a third not so well known as either, a champion on the modern side (v. infra). It ends, in accordance with the habits of the age, in an elaborate and rather well-declaimed panegyric of the king, wherein the adroit historiographer supplies an epilogue to the perhaps not quite so adroit critic.
For some lines in the middle Boileau, though constantly returning to the crutch of Horace, does occupy himself with literature. His precepts may be thus summarised. Whatever you are, be not a bad writer, and if you must be, be rather bombastic than cold; but, on the whole, degrees of mediocrity do not much matter. Here the satirist once more comes to the rescue and dictates the (in application insolent,[367] but) intrinsically good couplet—
Do not pay attention to flatterers (we had heard this before), do not excuse your verses, but keep an open ear for every comment: though you must be careful to separate foolish from wise criticisms. Join the solid and useful to the pleasant. Let your morality be of the very first water. You may introduce love; but respect principle and the young person. Do not be jealous of your rivals; do not put literature above its proper place; for heaven’s sake do not endeavour to make profit out of your writings [except by pensions].[368] Be not avaricious, but attend to Reason. If you do, Louis will give you pensions; and you will not have to tremble, like Colletet,[369] for your dinner, which depends on the success of a sonnet. Of this last ignoble gibe (too much imitated, alas! by our own Pope) we need take no further notice; and we shall say nothing more on any of the other points in Boileau which invite unfavourable comment, but are not strictly critical. Let us judge him as a critic only, and first on this piece.
Is it good criticism?
This of course is far too large a question to answer off-hand. Critical examination of it. We must hunt the answer to it by the way of minor questions, such as, Is it original? (the least important but of some importance). If it is not, What does it add to, and how ingeniously and usefully does it apply, the original from which it borrows? What methods does it use? To what extent and in what fashion would a poet adopting it as a manual be qualified for his art? And lastly (though perhaps some minor questions may crop up in our passage), What incidental excellences does it contain? What is the merit of the critical estimates which the author makes, in passing or with deliberation, of the authors, great and small, of the past and the present?
Let us take these questions in order, and see what answers the Art Poétique, examined without prejudice, but without fear[370] or favour, can give to them.
As to the first question there is, to a certain extent, no difference of opinion. Want of originality. The injured Cotin undoubtedly had truth on his side, in the parody quoted above, as to a large part of the Art Poétique. But what has not been quite sufficiently recognised is that this is the best part. Take away the almost (sometimes quite) literal translations from Horace, and you will take away Boileau’s backbone; take away the Horatian suggestions, and you will go far to deprive his criticism of its skeleton altogether, and leave it a mere jumble of promiscuous observations. It would be interesting and by no means otiose—if one only had the money and the time—to print the Art Poétique with the direct Horatian borrowment in rubric, the suggested passages in black italic, and the mere personalities, illustrations, flatteries, lampoons, and the like, in, say, blue. But I fear the remains in ordinary print would be wofully small, and still more wofully unimportant. This, however, would not matter so very much if Boileau had been strikingly original in what he adds, or had applied the Horatian doctrine with striking appropriateness to the altered condition of literature. One would think it impossible, if distinguished instances to the contrary were not known, for any one to maintain that he has done either. By far the greater part of the achievements of modern, and practically the whole of the achievements of mediæval, literature up to his time, are simply ignored, or, where referred to, ridiculously misdescribed. Nay more, Horatian parallels are got in by inventing a history of what never existed.
Nor could anything else possibly happen, considering the methods which Boileau chose to adopt. Faults of method. These methods are, First, the construction of a Horatian-Aristotelian bed to which everything has to be adjusted in point of principle; and of this it is not necessary to say more. Secondly, the suggestion as models, at every turn, of Latin and (much less often) Greek poets, utterly regardless of the change of circumstances. Thirdly, the method of criticism by Kinds—of laying down the rules for, and discussing the ends of, the abstract Pastoral, the abstract Elegy, the abstract Sonnet, Ode, and so forth, with only a few perfunctory eulogies of actual examples. In regard to the first and second it is enough to quote the critic’s own words against him, and ask him how Ovid or Tibullus can be a sufficient, can be even a safe, guide to a French love-poet, and how the marvels of ancient mythology can become the “machinery” of a modern epic? In regard to the third, the old battering-ram must be once more applied. Pastoral, Elegy, Ode, and the rest (except “Sonnet,” which is a form) are not unequivocal names applied to abstractly existing things, but mere tickets. Give me a poem, and I will tell you whether I think it a good or a bad poem, and why. You may, after that, if you have the time and care to take the trouble, classify it as epic or elegy, epigram or ode. But the box in which you choose to deposit it does not really matter in the least; and if it should so happen that there is no box ready, you must either make, or do without, one. Is the poem good or bad as poetry?—that is the articulus stantis vel cadentis criticismi.
But the most surprising thing in Boileau’s method, and the most fatal, is the thing on which he prides himself most, and which has been most commended in him—the perpetual appeal to Good Sense and Reason.[371] Obsession of good sense. It is surprising, because Longinus, whom he strangely assumed to be a prophet after his own heart, had warned him amply, and one might think irresistibly, some fifteen hundred years before. “Heights of eloquence or of poetry, but especially of poetry,” that mighty critic had said, “do not lead to persuasion but to ecstasy.” Now it is with Persuasion only—in the Greek sense, which includes intellectual conviction and practical influence—that Good Sense and Reason, in Boileau’s sense, can deal. It is true that very glaring offences against them may sometimes (by no means always) interfere with Ecstasy; but the most heroic doses of either or both will never cause it. Generally speaking—the saying has of course the danger of the double edge, but it is true for all that—when Good Sense comes in at the door Ecstasy flies out of the window, and when Ecstasy flies in at the window, Good Sense and (the lower) Reason retire prudishly by the door. At any rate, if they remain, it will be necessary for them to keep themselves very much in the background, and wait till they are called for. They may very well act as detectives and catchpolls when False Ecstasy usurps the place of true; but like other police-officers they have rather an awkward habit of mistaking their men. Every respect is of course to be paid to them; their assistance is sometimes very welcome and valuable even to the poet, while the prose-writer can seldom dispense with their constant surveillance. But even the latter may sometimes be hindered of his finest effects by looking first to them; while the Poet who does so will never rise beyond the lower-middle slopes of Parnassus, if he even reaches these.
Now, unless these considerations can be got out of the way, the answer to yet a further question, What help does Boileau give the Poet? will be a most meagre and disappointing one. Some of the positive helps which he offers—the rule of Good Sense, and the empty forms of Kinds—are likely to be, in the first case positively mischievous, in the second rather hindering than helpful. His historical doctrine is usually wrong, and, where not wrong, inadequate. His constant prescription of “the ancients”—not merely as general guides in literature—nobody need ask for better—but as immediate and particular models for all kinds of literary exercise, will in its most rigorous observation make a mere translating anachronist, and even if more freely construed, will again hinder much more than it helps.
But the majority of Boileau’s counsels are not positive at all, they are simply negative: and negative counsels in art, when the pupil is once out of schoolboyhood, never did much good yet, and have often done a great deal of harm. Arbitrary proscriptions. Why should his risus ineptus at the name “Childebrand” proscribe that name, which is euphonious enough to unprejudiced ears? What “sensible and reasonable” (we may thank him for these words) criterion of sound makes “Philis” preferable to “Toinon” or, prettier still, Toinette? It is true, doubtless, that, for a continuance, the long Alexandrine divides best at the middle; but what reason, what sense is there in the absolute proscription of a penthemimeral or hephthemimeral cæsura? In what does the welcoming of Pan and Charon, and the banishing of Ashtaroth and Beelzebub, differ from the immortal decision that “blue uniforms are only good for the artillery and the Blue Horse”? And so throughout.
But, it will be said, the Art Poétique is not Boileau’s sole critical deliverance. Boileau’s other works. It is most true; in fact, though his work is for a man who went safely beyond the three score years and ten and half-way to the four score,[372] a rather scanty work, it is pervaded with literature and with criticism. By a curious contrast to those Roman satirists, of whom we spoke erstwhile, his criticism of life is always turning to literature. The admirable heroi-comic satire of the Lutrin itself gravitates somehow or other to the battle in the book-shop, which enables the poet to gibbet his victims once more; not to mention that the whole fun of this very Lutrin is (though Boileau did not in the least know it) a sort of reductio ad absurdum of his own critical doctrines in the Art. Most of the other pieces are either directly critical of a kind, or the expression of brief and rather reluctantly obeyed avocations from criticism. Let us examine them,—though with somewhat less minuteness.
The dominance of the literary subject in the Satires is well known, though it is equally notorious that illiberal personality too often takes the place of liberal criticism. The Satires. Colletet’s poverty and parasitism; Saint-Amant’s death from fever, brought on by his ill-success (he would have died of hunger anyhow, says the satirist good-naturedly)—these are the subjects that interest him in the First. In the Second to Molière, with oblique censure of, or at least surprise at the easy versification of the dramatist, he bewails (being evidently proud of it) his own studious “difficulty”[373] in rhyming, jests at the stock phrases and chevilles of others from Ménage to Scudéry. Even in the Third—the old bad-dinner satire of Horace and Regnier—he brings in a literary quarrel about Théophile and Ronsard and Quinault. The Fifth, to Dangeau, is one of the few which have hardly any literary touches. But he will drag the luckless Abbé de Pure into the Sixth on the noises and nuisances of Paris, while the Seventh is wholly literary, and is one of the earliest (1663) of his explosions at bad poets, and the Eighth, on the follies of humanity, naturally takes shots at the old target.
All these, however, much more the awkward Tenth, on Women, and the very inferior Eleventh, must give place to the Ninth, an imitation of Horace, II. vii., written in the author’s fortieth or forty-first year, nominally to defend himself for his former attacks on his compeers, but really, of course, to renew them. Once more his favourite equivalents (only mentioned infamiæ causa) for Gyas and Cloanthus—Colletet, Pelletier, Quinault, and the rest—appear. Once more Racan receives partial, and Théophile almost total, insult. Here is the famous contrast of le clinquant du Tasse and l’or de Virgile; and here the still more famous lines on the Cid, embedded in—and plainly owing their complimentary tone to the fact that they are embedded in—an onslaught on Chapelain. Again and again the luckless Cotin is “horsed” and justified: while the almost equally luckless Pelletier[374] serves as a foil to “d’Ablancourt et Patru.” The singular posthumous piece Sur l'Équivoque, appended usually as the Twelfth satire, is a sort of attempt to generalise and amplify the author’s horror of conceit and obscurity.
To dwell on the minor pieces of verse, which are often literary, would be here impossible; it is enough to say that they include the two epigrams on Corneille’s Agésilas and Attila, and numerous assaults on Perrault. The Epigrams and Epistles. The Epistles are not nearly so full of our matter as the Satires; but the Seventh (to Racine on the success of the opposition Phèdre by the hated Pradon) and the Tenth (on his own verses) belong to us. The first of these has been very highly, and in part quite deservedly, praised. The reference to the death and the almost dishonoured grave of Molière, though slightly theatrical, is both vigorous and really touching; the eulogy of Racine himself is, in the circumstances, but allowably excessive; and the half-flattering, half-boasting mention of his own enjoyment of the favour of the “great,” from Louis to La Rochefoucauld, would be tolerable if it were not mainly a vehicle for fresh abuse of Linière and Tallemant, of Perrin and Pradon himself.