Chapter I: From Malherbe to Boileau (2)

“Il faut observer l’Unité d’action, de lieu et de jour. Personne n’en doute.” But, out of France at least, and perhaps in it, it is possible that few people may know, or even doubt, whence this saying comes. [Sidenote: _Corneille._] It would be an insult to a Frenchman of letters to tell him that it comes from Pierre Corneille; long, it is true, after the debate over the _Cid_, but nearly a quarter of a century before the close of his glorious, if not too happy, life. It may be gathered—rather from a long and large induction than from any single utterance of a person of importance—that the French do not think very much of Corneille as a critic; it may be further gathered from this that a man should never submit his genius. _Tu contra audentior ito_ is the counsel of wisdom. He has written much the best things that have been written in favour of the “correct” theory; but its partisans (and small blame to them) suspect him. They see the eyes of Chimène behind the mask, and they distrust them—wisely also after their kind.

But we must not rhapsodise here on the admirable poetry of this great poet, and the way in which the critics not merely, as somebody said in his own day, _ont tari sa veine_, but made him in a way false to it. We have only to do with his actual criticism; and whatever view we take of the general question, it must be here pronounced great criticism of its kind. The three _Discours_, and the series of _Examens_ which appeared first in 1660, present an almost unique, an extremely touching, and (to men of English birth) a rather incomprehensible instance of a man of supreme genius crouching and curbing himself to obey the tendency of the time and the dictates of “the wits.”[325] _We_ are not kneaded of this dough. We cannot even conceive Shakespeare taking a copy of Sidney or going to Ben, and afterwards constructing dramas as regularly as he could, or apologising for their irregularity; Milton adjusting _Paradise Lost_ to Dryden’s views of rhyme; nay, even Dryden himself (who is in some ways, as we shall see, very close to Corneille) “looking first at the stop-watch” in any way. But “things are as they are,” and (a great saying from which sometimes the wrong inference has been drawn) “their consequences will be what they will be.”

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Footnote 325:

Tennyson paid almost greater heed to his critics in detail; but he
never made any formal or general concession.

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The three Discourses, “De l’Utilité et des parties du Poëme Dramatique,” “De la Tragédie,” and “Des Trois Unités,” and the _Examens_ of the different plays, are the result of this submission.[326] [Sidenote: _The Three_ Discourses.] Let us say at once that it is in no sense the mere submission of a man who recants, either with tongue in cheek or simply under fear of rack and gallows and fire. Corneille (and this is the interesting point of the French temperament as contrasted with the English) is really affected by authority, and by the _Zeitgeist_. He has been honestly converted; indeed he asserts (and we may believe him to a great extent) that he never needed conversion—it was only his green unknowing age that made him go wrong. In the three Discourses he examines the question with plentiful quotations from Aristotle, with some knowledge of Italians like Castelvetro and Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius. He is quite aware of the weak points of the ancients; he repeats, though he does not much dwell upon, the earlier comments on the singular rapidity with which Agamemnon[327] follows the beacon-fires, the astonishing patness of the turning up of the Corinthian in the _Œdipus_. And to any one who thinks little of Corneille as a critic I should like to prescribe the reading, marking, and inwardly digesting of his remarks in the _Discours des Trois Unités_ on the separation of acts and scenes, and the relation of the chorus to orchestral interludes. Elsewhere we may find the mark of the chain: as where the poet, pretending indifference, is evidently rather unhappy because he cannot tell exactly what the wicked Queen in _Rodogune_ (which some have thought his best play next to the _Cid_) was doing when she was not on the stage. This inquiry is of itself almost sufficient to show the sheer idiocy to which this kind of criticism is always on the point of descending. But on the whole, and since Giant Unity has long ceased even to gnash at the pilgrims, we can tolerate it.

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Footnote 326:

They will be found in all good editions. I always use the best, that
of M. Marty-Laveaux, where the _Discours_ appear conveniently, if
chronologically out of place, in Vol. I, and the _Examens_, each at
the head of its own play.

Footnote 327:

Let me, for one has always to guard these things, observe that no
charge is here brought against the _Agamemnon_, which is perhaps the
greatest tragedy in the world out of Shakespeare, and almost worthy to
be ranked with Shakespeare’s best. It is of the folly of the
commentators that Corneille was, and that I (_quam longo intervallo
post Cornelium!_) am thinking.

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The _Examens_ are of still greater importance; for we have had plenty of inquiries in general into the qualities and requirements of Kinds, though few from persons like Corneille. [Sidenote: _The_ Examens.] The system of elaborate critical reviews—for that is what it comes to—of his past work, by a great poet who has taken pains to acquaint himself with critical method, and is almost too respectful of its utterances, is practically a new one. There is a certain flavour of it in Spenser and Ronsard, much more than a flavour in Tasso; but it was not till the seventeenth century, when the critic was abroad in earnest, that it could be done on such a scale as this. For Corneille, though he never issued any _Examens_ till 1660, applied them to all but his very latest plays. To the mere general reader they may be rendered distasteful by the elaborate and most pathetic pains which Corneille takes to adjust himself to the theories which his reason docilely accepted, but to which his faith was always secretly recalcitrant. To the student of him, and to the student of criticism, they must always have a great attraction.

But for the latter, if he have but a little of the “rascally comparative” spirit, they have an attraction greater still. There is no doubt at all that they served as pattern, at a very brief interval, to the critical exercises of Dryden, and thereby opened a way which criticism is treading still. And there is more in them besides this accidental and extrinsic attraction. Corneille, though he really shows extraordinary impartiality as well as great acumen in his examinations, was by the mere force of nature driven to stick close to his actual work, to observe it narrowly, if only so as to put the best face on it. And, as we have seen, the great fault both of ancient and of mediæval criticism was the omission or the refusal to consider individual works of art minutely and exactly—the constant breaking off and escape to the type. The natural partiality of authors for their own work has not always been fortunate in its results. Here it was so.

Although we have had, and shall have, to question the exact importance assigned by some to the _Cid_ quarrel, there can be no doubt that it had a very important influence, extending far beyond the chief parties concerned, and helping, very particularly, that popularisation of criticism which is undoubtedly the work of France in general, and of the French Academy in particular. [Sidenote: _La Mesnardière—Sarrasin—Scudéry._] In the years almost immediately succeeding it we have, for 1639, the _Discours de la Tragédie_ of the ingenious and ill-fated Sarrasin, for 1640 the formal _Art Poétique_ of La Mesnardière, a treatise specially dealing with tragedy, strongly, almost idolatrously, Aristotelian in tone, and characterised by a lively polemic against the Spanish and Italian influences which had been so powerful for a generation in France. Scudéry followed up the pamphlets which had actually given occasion to the _Cid_ dispute, almost at the same period, with the Preface to _Ibrahim_, as well as years afterwards in that to _Alaric_. Nay, it was at this very time (about 1640) that the world was at least threatened with the birth of the dullest critical treatise of the century, that of Hédelin, though a respite of seventeen years was actually granted.

La Mesnardière had evidently made a careful study of the Italian critics. His very _format_—a handsome small quarto—reminds one of their favourite shape, and contrasts curiously with the tiny duodecimos of the sixteenth-century French critics. And he puts forth his whole strength in arguing for the Stagirite against the blasphemies of Castelvetro, whom, however, he declares that he honours _hors des intérêts d’Aristote_—an odd, but very characteristic, way of putting it. La Mesnardière, who follows out all the Aristotelian divisions, even to Music (with engraved airs), is equally odd and equally representative in identifying, or at least associating in his first Chapter, _Politesse_ with “Imagination.” Mere Understanding will make a Philosopher—the Poet must be polished up into an Imaginative condition. He does not neglect language and diction: and though he devotes himself to drama, illustrates copiously from non-dramatic poetry, and criticises his illustrations in the way which was becoming so common and is so important. But a specimen passage in a footnote[328] will explain, better than pages of discussion, the fatally parasitic character of most of his criticism.

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Footnote 328:

_Art Poét._, p. 233. “Si toutefois la Fable est telle que le Poëte
n’ait pas lieu d’y recompenser la Vertu, il doit pour le moins faire
en sorte que les Personnes vertueuses soient louées publiquement.”

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The Sarrasin and Scudéry documents are complementary as well as complimentary of this and of each other. For Sarrasin’s _Discours_[329] is devoted to Scudéry’s _Amour Tyrannique_, which is so perfect that Aristotle would have put it in the _Poetics_, instead of or beside the _Œdipus_, if he had only known it. And La Mesnardière is just going (see dates given) to write “divinely” on that art of poetry which those great men, Ronsard and Du Bellay, did not know, and therefore recommended the study of Romances.[330] Finally, “Armand” [Richelieu, of course] is _le Dieu tutélaire des lettres_. As for the great Georges de Scudéry himself, his Prefaces to _Ibrahim_ and _Alaric_ are quite worthy of the “Commander of the Fort of Notre Dame de La Garde and Kept-Captain to the King,” whose portrait guards the entrance of the stately folio of _Alaric_. That is to say, they are an odd mixture of bombast (he leads off that to this book with a list of critics and poets, all of whom he has read), crotchet, and real wits. Both are worth comparing with Davenant’s to _Gondibert_ (_v. infra_, p. 367), which came between them.[331]

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Footnote 329:

In his _Œuvres_ (Paris, 1694), pp. 301-344.

Footnote 330:

This is very interesting in connection with Sarrasin’s appearance in
Chapelain’s dialogue and his own other work (_v. supra_, p. 260).

Footnote 331:

Scudéry thinks Four things necessary to Epic—the authority of History,
the observance of received Religion, the exercise of Poetic Licence in
Fiction, and the provision of Great Events. He is not uninteresting
for his connection with his sister’s prose Romances in which he had
some, if not much, share, and which he never forgets. Also, he clings
to the Pléiade technicalities to some extent—kindly, however,
explaining such words as _Hune_, _Quille_ (which, he says rather
quaintly, is _un bois courbé qui est au plus bas d’un vaisseau_), and
_Calfater_. The _Ibrahim_ preface, thirteen years earlier, exhibits
the same obliging explanation of technicalities, and the same virtuous
adherence to The Rules. “Provided,” he says, “that an Architect takes
his measures right, he is assured of the beauty of his building,”
which would seem to dissuade any one from advancing beyond the
packing-case style of architecture. And he is sure that a Romance,
like an Epic, should never go beyond one year in time.

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Some years later the uncompromising Aristotelianism of La Mesnardière as to the Drama was continued and straitened yet further, in reference to the Epic, by Pierre Mambrun,[332] who was, like so many others of these French seventeenth-century critics, a Jesuit. [Sidenote: _Mambrun._] His principles (which he illustrated later by a _Constantinus sive De Idolatria debellata_) exhibit the French detestation of compromise in the most agreeable light: whether his practice does not also illustrate the non-epic character of the French head is another matter. Aristotle, and the whole Aristotle, so far as the _Poetics_ go, is Mambrun’s motto; if he cannot add “nothing but Aristotle,” that is merely because his text is admittedly meagre as to Epic. But he does what he can. He has read Scaliger and Voss, and has a proper respect for them as learned men, but he is shocked at both for their worshipping of idols—at Scaliger for wasting time on diction and metre, as well as for falling foul of Homer, at Voss for making the persons instead of the action the centre of Epic. On the other hand, the too famous Petronian passage is to him a kind of inspired postscript to the _Poetics_. In his handling of Poetry, which for him is first of all Epic Poetry, he is scholastic as to the frame. The Material cause is Action; the Formal cause the Fable; the Efficient cause a combination of Prudentia and Furor Poeticus; the Final Cause _not_ pleasure but the making of statesmen. In all these respects Homer and Virgil are perfect—Statius, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, sinners. The former always observe the Unity, the Integrity, the Magnitude of the Action. Mambrun has satisfied himself that the Action of the _Odyssey_ only includes fifty-five days—on which principle one would cheerfully undertake to write an _Arthuriad_, to include the whole of Malory and more, on an “action” of the time between Agravaine’s detection of Lancelot with the Queen and the last fight in Lyonnesse. He thinks that a woman may be a heroine of tragedy but cannot be of Epic (which seems unkind to Chapelain). He admits that to distinguish between the Action and the Fable is not easy; that even in Aristotle the two are sometimes identical. But properly the Fable is _actio culta et ornata_, and he has an ingenious receipt for stripping the matter of episodes and names. Epic is not Art, not Logic, not History; it is “Prudentia.” But _Furor Poeticus_? Mambrun’s section of _Furor Poeticus_ is by far the most interesting in his book. He distinguishes first the Kinds of Fury. Then he points out that the Epic Poet must not be furious in constituting his fable. Very much the reverse. “But in episodes and descriptions and speeches I shall not deny that a little fury may be sprinkled in”[333]—the fury-dredger, or poetic cruet, being thus authoritatively established as an implement of the Bard. Nor does he conceal the process. The poet thinks very hard about an episode, a description, &c. Then the black bile warms itself, flies up, inflames the brain, and the poet is poetically furious. But in another memorable passage, “being strong in black bile will not necessarily make you a poet.”[334] [Alas! it will not.] There must be discipline, &c. In short, the book is a precious one.

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Footnote 332:

_De Poemate Epico._ Paris, 4to, 1652.

Footnote 333:

_Aliquantum furoris aspergi non negaverim._—_De Poem. Ep._, p. 269.

Footnote 334:

_Neque, tamen si quis atra polleat bile ... continuo is in poetis
censendus est, nisi accesserit disciplina_, &c.—Ibid., _post_.

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There are few critics—not such by profession, and not precisely of the very highest rank—who, from the very first, and with an unbroken record, have enjoyed such a reputation as has been constantly maintained by Saint-Evremond.[335] [Sidenote: _Saint-Evremond._] Nor is there, perhaps, a single one who has better deserved this constancy on the part of the great inconstants, Time and Fortune. He was commended to his own time scarcely more by birth and station as a fine gentleman and soldier, or by his singular political and personal history, than by the admirable quality of his writing; to the eighteenth century by his touches of scepticism and libertinage; to the Romantic revival by his championship of Corneille against Racine, and by the _frondeur_ spirit which made him resist the tyranny of the classical creed. But it is also true that he has purely critical qualities of a very uncommon kind. It is perhaps a testimony to that spice of universal in him which has been noticed, that the particular stamp to be put on these qualities—the particular class to which Saint-Evremond is to be referred—is not quite matter of agreement among those who fully agree as to his general merits. To M. Bourgoin, for instance, his critical spirit seems to be nearer to that of Boileau and the critics of rule than to that of Fénelon, or even La Bruyère, and the critics of impression and _sens propre_. To me the approximation seems to be in the other direction.

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Footnote 335:

There is no absolutely complete and authentic edition—that of
Desmaiseaux (frequently reprinted in the fifty years after the
author’s death, from 3 vols. 4to at London, 1705, to 12 vols. 12mo at
Paris, 1753) was at least authorised. The critical matter will be
found well arranged in the 2nd vol. of Giraud’s _Œuvres Mêlées de
Saint-E._ (3 vols., Paris, 1865). I may refer to an essay of mine,
first published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for July 1879, and
reprinted in _Miscellaneous Essays_ (2nd ed., London, 1895).

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The acute and learned author of _Les Maîtres de la Critique_ has, I think, been a little deceived by superficial characteristics of form and method. [Sidenote: _His critical quality and accomplishment._] A young man of twenty at the date of the _Cid_, and the battle over it, Saint-Evremond, fine gentleman as he was, no more forgot the forms of the quarrel than the attractions of the play. He has something a little scholastic, something of the earlier century, in his manner. Perhaps the best piece of criticism which he has left us—the _Dissertation sur le mot “vaste”_—recalls the known or alleged subjects of the earlier conversations of Malherbe and Racan, and their fellows, the later of Vaugelas and Chapelain and the young Academy. We have a formal _Jugement sur Senèque, Plutarque, et Pétrone_, a quite academic study of _Alexandre le Grand_, discussions of the character of tragedy generally, and the like. But the accomplished, agile, and independent spirit of the author is perpetually escaping from the restraints of his forms and models, and taking its own way according to its own taste. Perhaps, indeed, the fatal equivocation or ambiguity which seems to beset so many critical terms has worked here also: for to the present day the word “Taste” seems to excite quite dissimilar ideas in different minds. To some (as to Boileau and his followers it certainly did) it seems to suggest an antecedent law, a bar to which subjects are to be brought, something to which it is almost improper to apply the terms “good” or “bad,” because there is only one taste, and anything else is not taste at all but _un_taste. In this sense, though he might not have allowed it, I do not think that Saint-Evremond ever judged by “taste.” In the other—where taste means the approbation and satisfaction of a competent judge, well-gifted, well-tried, and taking pains to keep his palate clean—I think he always judged by it. That he often gave reasons for his judgment is nothing; one should _almost_ always do that. But one should always also remember that these reasons may be totally inapplicable to the next instance.

Saint-Evremond, we have said, was a great admirer of Corneille, and a steady champion of him against Racine. His admiration has been set down to the mere “fallacy of first love,” as we may call it—the fact that the youth of the poet and the youth of the critic had coincided. [Sidenote: _His views on Corneille._] This is not fair. Inviolable constancy to first loves is not precisely the chief thing in an Epicurean temperament. Saint-Evremond, in his various utterances on the subject, makes it perfectly clear _why_ he preferred the older to the younger poet; and Cornelians and Racinians alike must agree that, whether his conclusions were right or wrong, his considerations were at any rate genuine and adequate. The variety and vigour of the one as opposed to the somewhat monotonous mould and soft (or, as some said, “creeping”) sentiment of the other, form a real difference: and so throughout.

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. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 336:

_V. inf._, p. 385 note.

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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] [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 337:

Ed. Réveillé, Paris, 3 vols. (Paris and London, 1846).

Footnote 338:

_Ed. cit._, i. 340, 354; ii. 35, 321.

Footnote 339:

“Certainement il faut en louer Dieu,” says his editor, himself a
doctor, with a kind of shudder, in reference to Patin’s pious
gratitude for the recovery of a colleague whom he had bled
_thirty-two_ times. His exploits in the direction of _ensuita purgare_
are too appalling to particularise.

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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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 340:

In the 8th satire. He had the extremely small grace, however, to drop
the _name_ in later editions, and it does not now appear.

Footnote 341:

_If_ the “Vadius” of the _Femmes Savantes_ is Ménage. He himself
denied it rather cleverly; but there is not much doubt.

Footnote 342:

See what he says on Castelvetro in the _Ménagiana_ (ed. La Monnoye,
Amsterdam, 1713), ii. 86.

Footnote 343:

Ibid., ii. 174.

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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. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 344:

See, for instance, in the otherwise trivial _Chevræana_, a rather
amusing string (p. 157) of criticisms passed on the great authors of
antiquity; in the _Fureteriana_ (p. 13), an acute and most just remark
on the folly of versifying scientific treatises and other things not
in the least suitable for the process; and not a few in
Vigneul-Marville—the absence of notes and justificatory citations in
ancient historians (ii. 116); the praise of Amyot (ib. 132); the
question of fully or partially formed verse in prose (ib. 188 sq.);
remarks on Sforza Pallavicini’s _Trattato dello stilo_ (ib. 260); on
“rhyme and reason” (ib. 330). (The references in this note and in the
above paragraphs of the text, except where otherwise indicated, are to
the collection of _Ana_ in ten vols. Amsterdam and Paris, An vii.)

Footnote 345:

_Ed. cit._, ii. 87.

Footnote 346:

P. 234, “_Ce travail m’a toujours paru bas, et peu digne de l’estime
qu’il s’est attirée, et de l’application d’un esprit noble et élevé._”

Footnote 347:

P. 20 and _passim_.

Footnote 348:

P. 33.

Footnote 349:

P. 31.

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[Sidenote: Valesiana,]

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. [Sidenote: 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.

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Footnote 350:

Not in the general edition above cited. My copy is that of Cologne,
1695, with no printer’s name, but with a nice red and black
title-page, an agreeable frontispiece (representing Joseph Justus, in
a chair and a long beard, addressing attentive standing periwig-pated
persons), and (as a MS. note of a former possessor informs me) a great
deal of matter not in any other ed.

-----

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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 351:

Also not in the collection. My copy is the Amsterdam edition, 2 vols.,
1699.

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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. [Sidenote: _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]

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Footnote 352:

The suggestion of this, though not the exact phrase, will be found in
Sainte-Beuve’s essay (_Causeries du Lundi_, v. 275).

Footnote 353:

Paris, 1675.

Footnote 354:

On all these, see Tallemant, Bayle, and others down to Sainte-Beuve.
For a typical literary and critical quarrel, beginning politely and
ending in something like Billingsgate, nothing can be better than that
battle of Costar and M. de Girac, first over the dead body of Voiture
and the live one of Balzac, and then over both these departed, which
Sainte-Beuve tells in his liveliest manner at pp. 210-231 of the 12th
vol. of the _Causeries_.

Footnote 355:

To those who are acquainted with the most interesting handling of
Desmarets in M. Rigault’s so often cited book (_Querelle des Anc. et
Mod._, pp. 80-103), my reference to him may seem too low and little.
As a matter of fact, I think rather better of Desmarets than M.
Rigault did. But the latter’s purpose of enlarging—I do not say
exaggerating—his portraits of everybody who had to do with the
“quarrel” sometimes, I think, throws them a little out of proportion,
if not of focus, for a general critical history. His chapter, however,
is excellent, if not quite just; and it should have by itself sufficed
to save those who will not read originals from a blunder into which
some writers have fallen—that of crediting Desmarets with the _first_
vindication of the Christian epic, and the _first_ denunciation of
heathen mythology as a poetic stuff. The mere name of Tasso ought to
suffice as a reminder of the falsity of this; the work of Gambara (_v.
supra_, p. 107 note), though I cannot speak of it at first hand, must
be got out of the way by them; and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (_v.
supra_, p. 131) had in France itself made the way plain, for the
author of _Clovis_. But he certainly drew a good bow in this not too
happy battle; and if he takes any pleasure in the progeniture, he may
probably claim John Dennis (_v. infra_, p. 436) as his son. That
Boileau’s treatment of him was quite unfair M. Rigault himself fully
admits; but to whom and to what (including those talents of his own
which he by turns prostitutes and cripples) is Boileau _not_ unfair?

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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. [Sidenote: _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]

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Footnote 356:

As this of the very authors he censures, “Leurs paroles, toutes mortes
qu’elles sont, ont plus de vigueur que la raison de certaines gens.”
II. 300, Ed. J. Simon, Paris, 1871.

Footnote 357:

The literary _Pensées_ of Pascal are still fewer, and in dealing with
Montaigne he is even further from the literary point of view than
Malebranche. His chief utterance is a piece of characteristic scorn at
poetical _clichés_ like _bel astre_, _fatal laurier_, &c.

-----

And so to Boileau.

It is desirable that we should examine Boileau’s critical work[358] with more than ordinary care. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 358:

Of the immense number (estimated years ago at nearly five hundred) of
editions of the Works in whole or part, that of Berriat de Saint-Prix
in 4 vols., 1830-34, is, I believe, as nearly the standard as any.
There is, however, a magnificent modern edition of the _Œuvres
Poétiques_, edited by M. Brunetière (Paris, 1889), which I am glad to
possess. The ordinary “Collection” editions, such as that of Garnier,
though complete enough on the verse side, are apt to omit what they
think the less interesting pieces of prose.

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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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 359:

He was thirty-three when he began it, and thirty-eight when it was
finished. A very excellent separate edition of it is that of the
Cambridge University Press, by Mr D. Nichol Smith (1898).

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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. [Sidenote: _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

“Durant les premiers ans du Parnasse Français,”

to

“Rendit plus retenus Desportes et Bertaut,”

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—

“J’appelle Horace Horace—et Boileau traducteur.”[360]

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Footnote 360:

Boileau did not merely “convey” from the ancients. He had the
specially ugly, though not so specially uncommon, trick of insulting a
man and stealing from him at the same time. (Cf. Théophile Gautier’s
article, in _Les Grotesques_, on his namesake.)

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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. [Sidenote: _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)—

“Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire.”

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Footnote 361:

“_C’est en vain qu’au Parnasse un témeraire auteur,
Pense de l’art des vers attendre la hauteur._”

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