CLOSE CONNECTION OF FRENCH SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRITICISM: FONTENELLE—EXCEPTIONAL CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO THE “ANCIENT AND MODERN” QUARREL—THE ‘DIALOGUES DES MORTS’—OTHER CRITICAL WORK—LA MOTTE—HIS “UNITY OF INTEREST”—ROLLIN—BRUMOY—RÉMOND DE SAINT-MARD—L. RACINE—DU BOS—STIMULATING BUT DESULTORY CHARACTER OF HIS ‘RÉFLEXIONS’—MONTESQUIEU—VOLTAIRE: DISAPPOINTMENT OF HIS CRITICISM—EXAMPLES OF IT—CAUSES OF HIS FAILURE—OTHERS: BUFFON—“STYLE AND THE MAN”—VAUVENARGUES—BATTEUX—HIS ADJUSTMENT OF RULES AND TASTE—HIS INCOMPLETENESS—MARMONTEL—ODDITIES AND QUALITIES OF HIS CRITICISM—OTHERS: THOMAS, SUARD, ETC.—LA HARPE—HIS ‘COURS DE LITTÉRATURE’—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AS “ULTIMUS SUORUM”—THE ACADEMIC ESSAY—RIVAROL.

The later seventeenth and at least the earlier eighteenth century in France are perhaps more closely connected than any other literary periods, if, indeed, they are not practically one, like the two halves of our own so-called “Elizabethan” time. Close connection of French seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism. Fontenelle. And this connection we can duly demonstrate, as far as criticism is concerned. Boileau himself outlived the junction of the centuries by more than a decade: and the birth of Voltaire preceded it by more than a lustrum. The Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns—a very poor thing certainly—revived in the new century, as if on purpose to show the connection with the old. And, lastly, the prolonged life of one remarkable and representative critic was almost equally distributed over the two. Fontenelle is one of the most interesting, if not exactly one of the most important, figures in our whole long gallery; and if he has never yet held quite his proper place in literary history, this is due to the facts, first, that he was a critic more than he was anything else; and, secondly, that he forgot the great “Thou shalt not” which Criticism lays upon her sons, and would lay (if she had any) on her daughters. No critic is in the least bound to produce good work, or any work, of the constructive kind: but he is bound not to produce that which is not good. The author of Aspar and the Lettres du Chevalier d’Her ... forgot this, and paid the penalty.^[649]

Yet his attractions are so great that few people who have paid him much attention have failed to be smitten with them. M. Rigault,^[650] who does not approve of him generally, is a conspicuous example of this. Exceptional character of his criticism. But what we must look to is what he has actually written himself. His utterances are almost too tempting. In such a book as this the expatiation which they invite must be perforce denied them. Yet one may break proportion a little in order to do something like justice to a critic whose like, for suggestiveness, delicacy, and range, we shall hardly meet in the French eighteenth century. It is indeed curious that of the three men of his own earliest years from whom Voltaire inherits—Saint-Evremond, Hamilton, and Fontenelle—every one should have surpassed him in the finer traits, while all fall short of him in force and, as he himself said, diable au corps. Saint-Evremond we have dealt with; Hamilton^[651] does not come into our story. Fontenelle is for the moment ours.

It must be confessed that he is an elusive if an agreeable possession. From wisdom, from worldly-wisdom, from whim, or from what not, he seems to have wished to be an enigma; and—to borrow one of Scott’s great sentences—“the wish of his heart was granted to his loss, and the hope of his pride has destroyed him”—at least has certainly made him rank lower than he would otherwise have ranked. However délié—to use a word of his own language for which we have no single English equivalent—however watchful, mercurial, sensitive the reader’s spirit may be, he will, over and over again in Fontenelle, meet passages where he cannot be sure whether his author is writing merely with tongue in cheek, or applying an all-dissolving irony, hardly inferior to Swift’s in power, and almost superior in quietness and subtlety. Moreover, his critical position is a very peculiar one, and constantly liable to be misunderstood—if, indeed, it be not safer to say that it is almost always difficult to apprehend with any certainty of escaping misprision. The good folk who magisterially rebuke Dryden as to Gorboduc, because he made mistakes about the form of the verse and the sex of the person—even those (one regrets to say this includes M. Rigault himself) who are shocked at that great critic’s laudatory citations of, and allusions to, Le Bossu—need never hope to understand Fontenelle.

Few things (except that he was the author of that Plurality of Worlds which happily does not concern us) are better known concerning him than that he was a champion of the Moderns. His attitude to the “Ancient and Modern” Quarrel. Yet, when we come to examine his numerous and elusive writings on the subject, the one principle of his that does emerge is a principle which, if it chastises the Ancients with whips, chastises the Moderns with scorpions. A man writing, as M. Rigault wrote, in 1856, would have been a wonderful person if he had not been misled by the great idol of Progress. But Fontenelle was at least as far from the delusion as he was from the date. His argument is just the contrary—that as human wisdoms and human follies, human powers and human weaknesses, are always the same, it is absurd to suppose that any one period can have general and intrinsic superiority over any other.

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]

It is, however, in Fontenelle’s actual concrete deliverances of criticism that the resemblance to Dryden comes in most. 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,—

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.

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.

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. 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.

To trace the vagaries of this might not be unamusing, but would certainly be excessive here. 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,

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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-Marc. 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.

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. 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.”

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. 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]

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). 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.

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. 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.

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] 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.

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. 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 ÉpiqueÉpique 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.

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.”

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. 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]

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. 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.”

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. “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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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] 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 ÉlémentsÉléments 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. 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.

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.

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]

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.

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. 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. 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.