Chapter I: From Malherbe to Boileau (3)

The Second Canto begins, _apropos_ of nothing (indeed Boileau was frankly troubled about his “transitions”), with a discussion, partly metaphorical, of the Idyll, Eclogue, and Pastoral, followed by a similar account of other kinds of shorter pieces—Elegy, Ode, Sonnet, Epigram, and others, down to Vaudeville—the Fable being absent, to the discomfort and laborious excuse-making of the disciples. The Idyll must be neither too pompous nor too trivial: follow Theocritus and Virgil and all will be right. Elegy is proper for Death and Love; but you must not, in regard to the latter, be frigid and hackneyed. Imitate Tibullus and Ovid, and again all will be right. The ode is worthy of Achilles or Louis; but do not be too historical—which indeed would be difficult in regard to Achilles, and might be inconvenient in regard to Louis. Sonnets are very difficult, but a sonnet without fault is by itself worth an Epic.[362] The epigram may have _pointes_, which are elsewhere to be utterly rejected. The other kinds are lightly treated till the Satire, descending to the _vaudeville_, has a longer discussion. Satire, the apologist _pro domo_ declares, is the voice of Truth. Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, are characterised. Regnier is _our_ best man; but his style is antiquated, and his subjects and language are really shocking.[363] Then “the Frenchman, _né malin_,” made the Vaudeville. It is only fair to Boileau to say that, could he have foreseen the tedious abuse of this _mot_, he would certainly either have forborne it, or have given us a capital line or couplet to tie to the tail of the culprits. Canto Three passes, with no less abruptness, to the drama, which occupies the first half, the latter part being given to the Epic. Boileau is at first vague. In fact, he does not seem at all thoroughly to have appreciated the Aristotelian doctrine, which in the main he runs up as his flag. Dramatic art in teaching must please and touch, which it may do by exciting pity and terror. Do not make a long and obscure introduction; keep the Unities as you value your dramatic salvation; never be incredible; and let everything contribute to the development of your story.

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Footnote 362:

It may be sometimes forgotten in the quotation of this famous line,
that _long poem_ was a technical term in French criticism, from the
days of the Pléiade downwards, and means definitely an Epic, or Heroic
Poem, not a long piece of verse. It is characteristic of Boileau to
hit backwards at the _modern_ epic, of which he was no admirer, in
this rather treacherous praise of the sonnet, towards which he was
equally lukewarm.

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The Historic Muse reappears, but in such case, as hinted above, that we shall magnanimously abstain from further vengeance on her. If only Boileau had omitted the unhappy note which says that _leurs pièces_ (those of his imaginary _pélerins_) _sont imprimées_, thereby suggesting that he had read them! You must have Love: but do not be _doucereux_; keep the stock characters; do not modernise the ancients; and if you invent a personage let him be constant to himself. The theatre really is very difficult. But Epic is still more so. It depends entirely upon action, upon fable; and in order to make it noble you put in the _deorum ministerium_.[364] Æneas’ voyage would have been quite an ordinary thing without Juno, and Neptune, and Æolus:—

“C’est là ce qui surprend, frappe, saisit, attache.”[365]

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Footnote 363:

As it takes ten lines (171-180) in the French to explain our single
epithet, they need not make fun of it.

Footnote 364:

See on the Petronian passage, vol. i. p. 245, and on its mischievous
influence the present chapter, _passim_.

Footnote 365:

I like to vary Boileau’s stale criticism with his admirably fresh and
vigorous verse.

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But the modern deity will not do at all; and devils and angels are worse. Do let us keep our Tritons, our Parcæ, our Pan, and our Charon! If not, in a short time we shall not be able to tie a bandage on the eyes of Themis, or put a balance in her hand![366] Further, be very careful of your names. There was a person once who actually called his hero Childebrand! Minor receipts for handling follow; and then we find ourselves back on the stage with Comedy, as to which Boileau extols Nature, and tells us that Molière would have been the best of comic dramatists—if he had been other than he was.

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Footnote 366:

“She can do without them,” as L. Arruntius most excellently remarked
on a parallel occasion. _Vide_ i. 238.

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The Fourth Canto returns to the generalities of the first, and, taking advantage of this wider scope, begins an attack, not unamusing but in very bad taste, on Claude Perrault, architect, doctor, and, like his more celebrated brother Charles, and a third not so well known as either, a champion on the modern side (_v. infra_). It ends, in accordance with the habits of the age, in an elaborate and rather well-declaimed panegyric of the king, wherein the adroit historiographer supplies an epilogue to the perhaps not quite so adroit critic.

For some lines in the middle Boileau, though constantly returning to the crutch of Horace, does occupy himself with literature. His precepts may be thus summarised. Whatever you are, be not a bad writer, and if you _must_ be, be rather bombastic than cold; but, on the whole, degrees of mediocrity do not much matter. Here the satirist once more comes to the rescue and dictates the (in application insolent,[367] but) intrinsically good couplet—

“Un fou du moins fait rire et peut nous égayer,
Mais un froid écrivain ne sait rien qu’ennuyer.”

Do not pay attention to flatterers (we had heard this before), do not excuse your verses, but keep an open ear for every comment: though you must be careful to separate foolish from wise criticisms. Join the solid and useful to the pleasant. Let your morality be of the very first water. You may introduce love; but respect principle and the young person. Do not be jealous of your rivals; do not put literature above its proper place; for heaven’s sake do not endeavour to make profit out of your writings [except by pensions].[368] Be not avaricious, but attend to Reason. If you do, Louis will give you pensions; and you will not have to tremble, like Colletet,[369] for your dinner, which depends on the success of a sonnet. Of this last ignoble gibe (too much imitated, alas! by our own Pope) we need take no further notice; and we shall say nothing more on any of the other points in Boileau which invite unfavourable comment, but are not strictly critical. Let us judge him as a critic only, and first on this piece.

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Footnote 367:

As usual Boileau gives the actual names of half a score inhabitants of
the French Grub Street, of whom Cyrano de Bergerac (he was long dead,
and Boileau was safe) has the consolation prize of being merely _fou_.

Footnote 368:

They were probably the _tribut légitime_ which a _noble esprit_ might
derive from his work.

Footnote 369:

This refers to the _son_, François (1628-1680), of a more poetic
pair—Guillaume (1598-1659) and Claudine Colletet. The former of these
was also a critic in his way, and left, besides an _Art Poétique_
(1658) of no great value, a _Histoire des Poètes Français_ which,
strangely enough, was never printed, and the MS. of which was burnt by
the Vandals of the Commune in 1871.

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Is it good criticism?

This of course is far too large a question to answer off-hand. [Sidenote: _Critical examination of it._] We must hunt the answer to it by the way of minor questions, such as, Is it original? (the least important but of some importance). If it is not, What does it add to, and how ingeniously and usefully does it apply, the original from which it borrows? What methods does it use? To what extent and in what fashion would a poet adopting it as a manual be qualified for his art? And lastly (though perhaps some minor questions may crop up in our passage), What incidental excellences does it contain? What is the merit of the critical estimates which the author makes, in passing or with deliberation, of the authors, great and small, of the past and the present?

Let us take these questions in order, and see what answers the _Art Poétique_, examined without prejudice, but without fear[370] or favour, can give to them.

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Footnote 370:

A humourist might maintain the two opposite theses, “That Boileau has
genuine authority,” and “That the French are always craving for a
tyrant,” on the strength of a curious _catena_ of evidence from
Voltaire’s “Ça porte malheur” to Marmontel, who had presumed to speak
lightly of Despréaux, down to M. Bourgoin’s “On a difficilement raison
contre Boileau.” But to those who “bear an English heart” these
terrors are idle.

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As to the first question there is, to a certain extent, no difference of opinion. [Sidenote: _Want of originality._] The injured Cotin undoubtedly had truth on his side, in the parody quoted above, as to a large part of the _Art Poétique_. But what has not been quite sufficiently recognised is that this is the best part. Take away the almost (sometimes quite) literal translations from Horace, and you will take away Boileau’s backbone; take away the Horatian suggestions, and you will go far to deprive his criticism of its skeleton altogether, and leave it a mere jumble of promiscuous observations. It would be interesting and by no means otiose—if one only had the money and the time—to print the _Art Poétique_ with the direct Horatian borrowment in rubric, the suggested passages in black italic, and the mere personalities, illustrations, flatteries, lampoons, and the like, in, say, blue. But I fear the remains in ordinary print would be wofully small, and still more wofully unimportant. This, however, would not matter so very much if Boileau had been strikingly original in what he adds, or had applied the Horatian doctrine with striking appropriateness to the altered condition of literature. One would think it impossible, if distinguished instances to the contrary were not known, for any one to maintain that he has done either. By far the greater part of the achievements of modern, and practically the whole of the achievements of mediæval, literature up to his time, are simply ignored, or, where referred to, ridiculously misdescribed. Nay more, Horatian parallels are got in by inventing a history of what never existed.

Nor could anything else possibly happen, considering the methods which Boileau chose to adopt. [Sidenote: _Faults of method._] These methods are, First, the construction of a Horatian-Aristotelian bed to which everything has to be adjusted in point of principle; and of this it is not necessary to say more. Secondly, the suggestion as models, at every turn, of Latin and (much less often) Greek poets, utterly regardless of the change of circumstances. Thirdly, the method of criticism by Kinds—of laying down the rules for, and discussing the ends of, the abstract Pastoral, the abstract Elegy, the abstract Sonnet, Ode, and so forth, with only a few perfunctory eulogies of actual examples. In regard to the first and second it is enough to quote the critic’s own words against him, and ask him how Ovid or Tibullus can be a sufficient, can be even a safe, guide to a French love-poet, and how the marvels of ancient mythology can become the “machinery” of a modern epic? In regard to the third, the old battering-ram must be once more applied. Pastoral, Elegy, Ode, and the rest (except “Sonnet,” which is a _form_) are not unequivocal names applied to abstractly existing things, but mere tickets. Give me a poem, and I will tell you whether I think it a good or a bad poem, and why. You may, after that, if you have the time and care to take the trouble, classify it as epic or elegy, epigram or ode. But the box in which you choose to deposit it does not really matter in the least; and if it should so happen that there is no box ready, you must either make, or do without, one. Is the poem good or bad as poetry?—that is the _articulus stantis vel cadentis criticismi_.

But the most surprising thing in Boileau’s method, and the most fatal, is the thing on which he prides himself most, and which has been most commended in him—the perpetual appeal to Good Sense and Reason.[371] [Sidenote: _Obsession of good sense._] It is surprising, because Longinus, whom he strangely assumed to be a prophet after his own heart, had warned him amply, and one might think irresistibly, some fifteen hundred years before. “Heights of eloquence or of poetry, but especially of poetry,” that mighty critic had said, “do not lead to persuasion _but to ecstasy_.” Now it is with Persuasion only—in the Greek sense, which includes intellectual conviction and practical influence—that Good Sense and Reason, in Boileau’s sense, can deal. It is true that very glaring offences against them may sometimes (by no means always) interfere with Ecstasy; but the most heroic doses of either or both will never cause it. Generally speaking—the saying has of course the danger of the double edge, but it is true for all that—when Good Sense comes in at the door Ecstasy flies out of the window, and when Ecstasy flies in at the window, Good Sense and (the lower) Reason retire prudishly by the door. At any rate, if they remain, it will be necessary for them to keep themselves very much in the background, and wait till they are called for. They may very well act as detectives and catchpolls when False Ecstasy usurps the place of true; but like other police-officers they have rather an awkward habit of mistaking their men. Every respect is of course to be paid to them; their assistance is sometimes very welcome and valuable even to the poet, while the prose-writer can seldom dispense with their constant surveillance. But even the latter may sometimes be hindered of his finest effects by looking first to them; while the Poet who does so will never rise beyond the lower-middle slopes of Parnassus, if he even reaches these.

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Footnote 371:

It is interesting and significant that Boileau’s defenders generally
drop “Good Sense,” and use, whenever they can, the more ambiguous and
high-sounding “Reason.” It is sufficient to say that their author
repeats “Good Sense” again and again, and obviously uses Reason as a
mere synonym for it.

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Now, unless these considerations can be got out of the way, the answer to yet a further question, What help does Boileau give the Poet? will be a most meagre and disappointing one. Some of the positive helps which he offers—the rule of Good Sense, and the empty forms of Kinds—are likely to be, in the first case positively mischievous, in the second rather hindering than helpful. His historical doctrine is usually wrong, and, where not wrong, inadequate. His constant prescription of “the ancients”—not merely as _general_ guides in literature—nobody need ask for better—but as immediate and particular models for all kinds of literary exercise, will in its most rigorous observation make a mere translating anachronist, and even if more freely construed, will again hinder much more than it helps.

But the majority of Boileau’s counsels are not positive at all, they are simply negative: and negative counsels in art, when the pupil is once out of schoolboyhood, never did much good yet, and have often done a great deal of harm. [Sidenote: _Arbitrary proscriptions._] Why should his _risus ineptus_ at the name “Childebrand” proscribe that name, which is euphonious enough to unprejudiced ears? What “sensible and reasonable” (we may thank him for these words) criterion of sound makes “Philis” preferable to “Toinon” or, prettier still, Toinette? It is true, doubtless, that, for a continuance, the long Alexandrine divides best at the middle; but what reason, what sense is there in the absolute proscription of a penthemimeral or hephthemimeral cæsura? In what does the welcoming of Pan and Charon, and the banishing of Ashtaroth and Beelzebub, differ from the immortal decision that “blue uniforms are only good for the artillery and the Blue Horse”? And so throughout.

But, it will be said, the _Art Poétique_ is not Boileau’s sole critical deliverance. [Sidenote: _Boileau’s other works._] It is most true; in fact, though his work is for a man who went safely beyond the three score years and ten and half-way to the four score,[372] a rather scanty work, it is pervaded with literature and with criticism. By a curious contrast to those Roman satirists, of whom we spoke erstwhile, his criticism of life is always turning to literature. The admirable heroi-comic satire of the _Lutrin_ itself gravitates somehow or other to the battle in the book-shop, which enables the poet to gibbet his victims once more; not to mention that the whole fun of this very _Lutrin_ is (though Boileau did not in the least know it) a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ of his own critical doctrines in the _Art_. Most of the other pieces are either directly critical of a kind, or the expression of brief and rather reluctantly obeyed avocations from criticism. Let us examine them,—though with somewhat less minuteness.

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Footnote 372:

If I have seemed, or may seem, too bitter in any remarks on Boileau,
let me here observe that few things in literary history are more
pathetic than these last years of his, when, _ultimus suorum_, amid
the ruins of the political glories which he had celebrated, and in a
transition period between the great literature of the seventeenth
century and that of the eighteenth, with no one but his foolish
Boswell-Eckermann, Brossette, to comfort him, and no one at all to
whom to look as his successor, he held—unconquered and
unconquerable—to his principles, and died, as one of the poets to whom
he was so unjust had said,

“Sans bouger, debout et dans son rang.”

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The dominance of the literary subject in the _Satires_ is well known, though it is equally notorious that illiberal personality too often takes the place of liberal criticism. [Sidenote: _The_ Satires.] Colletet’s poverty and parasitism; Saint-Amant’s death from fever, brought on by his ill-success (he would have died of hunger anyhow, says the satirist good-naturedly)—these are the subjects that interest him in the First. In the Second to Molière, with oblique censure of, or at least surprise at the easy versification of the dramatist, he bewails (being evidently proud of it) his own studious “difficulty”[373] in rhyming, jests at the stock phrases and _chevilles_ of others from Ménage to Scudéry. Even in the Third—the old bad-dinner satire of Horace and Regnier—he brings in a literary quarrel about Théophile and Ronsard and Quinault. The Fifth, to Dangeau, is one of the few which have hardly any literary touches. But he will drag the luckless Abbé de Pure into the Sixth on the noises and nuisances of Paris, while the Seventh is wholly literary, and is one of the earliest (1663) of his explosions at bad poets, and the Eighth, on the follies of humanity, naturally takes shots at the old target.

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Footnote 373:

That he had taught Racine _rimer difficilement_ is the well-known
boast in that uncomplimentary comparison of his pupil with Corneille,
by which he appears to have administered a sort of private unction to
his soul to atone for his public injustice.

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All these, however, much more the awkward Tenth, on Women, and the very inferior Eleventh, must give place to the Ninth, an imitation of Horace, II. vii., written in the author’s fortieth or forty-first year, nominally to defend himself for his former attacks on his compeers, but really, of course, to renew them. Once more his favourite equivalents (only mentioned _infamiæ causa_) for Gyas and Cloanthus—Colletet, Pelletier, Quinault, and the rest—appear. Once more Racan receives partial, and Théophile almost total, insult. Here is the famous contrast of _le clinquant du Tasse_ and _l’or de Virgile_; and here the still more famous lines on the _Cid_, embedded in—and plainly owing their complimentary tone to the fact that they are embedded in—an onslaught on Chapelain. Again and again the luckless Cotin is “horsed” and justified: while the almost equally luckless Pelletier[374] serves as a foil to “d’Ablancourt et Patru.” The singular posthumous piece _Sur l'Équivoque_, appended usually as the Twelfth satire, is a sort of attempt to generalise and amplify the author’s horror of conceit and obscurity.

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Footnote 374:

Not of course Boileau’s worthy predecessor in Art-Poetic writing (_v.
supra_, pp. 117, 118), but an advocate of the mid-seventeenth century,
who was unfortunate enough to commit sonnets, and to be disliked by
the satirist.

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To dwell on the minor pieces of verse, which are often literary, would be here impossible; it is enough to say that they include the two epigrams on Corneille’s _Agésilas_ and _Attila_, and numerous assaults on Perrault. [Sidenote: _The_ Epigrams _and_ Epistles.] The _Epistles_ are not nearly so full of our matter as the _Satires_; but the Seventh (to Racine on the success of the opposition _Phèdre_ by the hated Pradon) and the Tenth (on his own verses) belong to us. The first of these has been very highly, and in part quite deservedly, praised. The reference to the death and the almost dishonoured grave of Molière, though slightly theatrical, is both vigorous and really touching; the eulogy of Racine himself is, in the circumstances, but allowably excessive; and the half-flattering, half-boasting mention of his own enjoyment of the favour of the “great,” from Louis to La Rochefoucauld, would be tolerable if it were not mainly a vehicle for fresh abuse of Linière and Tallemant, of Perrin and Pradon himself.

[Sidenote: _Prose—The_ Héros de Roman; _the_ Réflexions sur Longin.]

The prose is equally saturated with criticism. The dialogue on _Les Héros de Roman_, which Fontenelle could have done admirably, Boileau has not done very well; but his satire on the extraordinary bastard kind of romance with which France at this time deluged Europe is not ill-founded, though rather ill-informed.[375] The Letters are full enough of criticism. But the two chief prose documents from which (at least from their titles) something really important may be expected, are the _Dissertation_ on the story of Giocondo, as told by its inventor and by La Fontaine, and the _Réflexions sur Longin_. These last, however, the reader need hardly trouble himself with: they may even be classed among the impieties of criticism. Boileau, little as he could have appreciated, did at least know the Great Unknown. He translated him; he calls him very truly _le plus grand_, and more questionably _le plus sévère_, of ancient critics. But these _Réflexions_ on Longinus are in fact reflections on Charles Perrault, a very clever person, but not in the least like Longinus: and the texts from the Περὶ Ὕψους, which are put at the head of each chapter, often have nothing to do with the subject at all, and in almost every case might almost as well have been selected from the first book he picked up. In the particular dispute I am with him, and not with Perrault; but the first exclamation of any real lover of the real classics who reads the piece must be _Non tali auxilio_! Boileau, as always, is arrogant and rude; as sometimes elsewhere his scholarship is not beyond suspicion, though it had an easy triumph over the almost total absence of the same quality in his adversary; but, as he is very seldom, he is confused, desultory, heavy. To those who think that criticism is the art of scolding, the _Réflexions sur Longin_ may seem to be a creditable exercise in it: hardly to others.

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Footnote 375:

Even his admirers admit his strange ignoring of the fact that
Madeleine de Scudéry _intended_ her personages to be modern—that they
were mere disguises of Condé and others, not attempts to re-create
antiquity. This of course does not exempt them from blame; but it
requires a different sort of blame.

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Almost the only critical essay of the proper kind that we have from this famous critic is the other piece mentioned above—the “Dissertation on the _Joconde_.” [Sidenote: _The “Dissertation on_ Joconde.”] The occasion was not unpromising. A certain M. de Saint-Gilles, seriously or otherwise, had preferred the version of Ariosto’s tale by one Bouillon to that of La Fontaine, and the question (which had taken the form of a bet between Saint-Gilles and La Mothe le Vayer de Bretigny) was referred to Boileau for decision. I confess that I have never taken the trouble to look up the works of M. de Bouillon: the specimens that Boileau gives are quite enough, and he exercises his ferule like the vigorous and (within limits) accurate and useful pedagogue that he is. But, unluckily, he thinks it necessary not merely to prefer La Fontaine to Bouillon, but to belittle Ariosto[376] in favour of La Fontaine. I defy anybody—Frenchman or non-Frenchman—to have, within certain limits, a greater admiration for La Fontaine than I have; and I am heretical enough to like the _Contes_ even better than the _Fables_. But why this miserable setting of two great things against each other? Why not like both? This is what critics of the Boileau type cannot do: they must have their rat-pit of false comparison, their setting-by-the-ears, their belittling in order to exalt. It must be said that Boileau is justly punished. His usual critical censures are so vague and general—he is so apt to tell us that So-and-so is a bad poet without showing us _how_ he is bad—that he escapes confutation. Not so here. In the first place he shows, as perhaps we might have anticipated, that worst of critical defects, an inability to “take” his author. He is very angry with the famous grave beginning of the tavern-keeper’s much less than grave story—the stately _Astolfo, re de' Longobardi_, and the rest. He thinks that “le bon messer Ludovico” had forgotten, or rather did not care for, the precept of his Horace, “Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.”

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Footnote 376:

The condescending praise of “Arioste _et ses fables comiques_,” in _A.
P._, iii. 291, can hardly be regarded as a set-off, especially as just
before (l. 218) he had stigmatised him, emphasising the stigma by a
note, as “follement idolâtre et païen.”

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Undoubtedly Messer Ludovico did not care one of his favourite turnips for it! And, according to the key of humour in which he was writing—a key struck before him, but never so well as by him, in Italian, familiar in English, but unknown in French till recently—he was quite right in this negligence. Boileau proceeds to give rules for “telling an absurd thing in such a manner as to intimate to the reader that you do not yourself believe it.” Very good; that is the _Lutrin_ way—a capital way too; but not the only one. And Ariosto is at least entitled to try this other, in which he succeeds so admirably to all who have eyes or ears and will use them. The critic, again, is very angry with Ariosto for making Giocondo abstain from poniarding his wife because of the love he bore her. “Il n’y a point de passion plus tragique et plus violente que la jalousie qui naît d’un extrème amour.” Let us not remark too unkindly that Despréaux' knowledge of _un extrème amour_ was, by all accounts, including his own, the reverse of experimental. His error is more widespreading. It is part of that unlucky arrangement of “typed” kinds—not less of character and passion than of writing—which the neo-classic system insists upon. Your passions, like your poetic forms, are all pigeon-holed, and their conduct prescribed to them. You must “keep the type” once more. _Pour le bonheur du genre humain_, Ariosto knew better.

We must not, tempting as it is, dwell on the plea that Giocondo’s honest agony, “a quelque chose de tragique qui ne vaut rien dans un conte à rire,” while La Fontaine’s easy-going wittol is quite a cheerful object; on the inestimable cry of outraged verisimilitude, “Où est-ce que Joconde trouve si vite une hostie sacrée pour faire jurer le roi?” or on the extraordinary casuistry as to the time occupied, in the two versions, by the climax of the triple arrangement of Fiammetta. In this, as in the remarkable letter of reconciliation to Perrault,[377] one is at first inclined to suspect irony; but in neither case will the hypothesis work out. Here Boileau presents what looks like a caricature of the “classical” criticism; yet it exactly coincides with his general precepts elsewhere. There he gives away almost, not quite, the whole of the Ancient case by admitting the superiority of the moderns after a fashion which, if we took it to be ironical, would reflect upon his own familiar friends and patterns—Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine.

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Footnote 377:

Written in 1700 and published next year. Letter vi. of the ordinary
collection.

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In fact, recent and repeated reading of Boileau has made me doubt whether he had _any_ critical principle, except that of Good Sense. [Sidenote: _A “Solifidian of Good Sense.”_] He almost says so in so many words in the _Art Poétique_; his general or particular sayings elsewhere say it over again with mere change of name and instance. If he loved the classics, it was because the classics he knew best—the Latins of the Augustan age—do probably observe this “good-sense” standard more than any other great writers of any time but his own. And if he was unjust to the great writers of the time just before his own, and savage to the small among his contemporaries, it was because the prevailing fashion, for two or three generations, had set in a direction which Good Sense alone must constantly disapprove. Now Good Sense is not a high tribunal, but a very low one,—we were better off with our old friend Furor Poeticus, though he did sometimes talk, and encourage the talking of, nonsense. The mere “Solifidian” of Good Sense knows nothing, and can know nothing, about poetry.

Nay more, one may ask without real impertinence, Is Boileau’s _Art Poétique_ in any vital and important sense an Art of Poetry at all, any more than it is an Art of Pig-breeding, or of Pottery-making, or of Pyrotechnics? In all these useful and agreeable pursuits—for the matter of that in all other arts, trades, professions, employments, and vocations—it is desirable to know what you are about, to proceed cautiously and sensibly, to choose the right materials, to combine them in the right way, not to go beyond your powers and means, to vary your appeals to the public, to take good advice, to observe the practice of proved success in the particular department, to study its kinds and species carefully, not to launch out too far nor restrain your operations too much, and to observe the laws of morality and propriety throughout. But what is there specially _poetical_ in all this? Or what does Boileau add to this to make his treatise specially poetical? A few—decidedly few—technical cautions of the lower kind, not all of them unquestionable; some general or mediate rules, mostly borrowed from Horace, and not a few of them more questionable still; some literary history which, as we have seen, is utterly worthless; and a seasoning of mostly spiteful hits at poets he dislikes.

But, they say—and this is practically the stronghold to which they all retire—“Look at his practical services to French literature and French poetry. [Sidenote: _The plea for his practical services._] Look at the badness of the styles he attacked, and the completeness with which he cleared them away. What a reformer! What a Hercules purging the poetic country of monsters and malefactors! Can you possibly deny this merit?”

Let nothing be denied—or, for the matter of that, affirmed—before everything has been considered. [Sidenote: _Historical examination of this._] What are the facts? Boileau came at the end—at the very end—of a stage of French poetry which had been rather a long one, and unquestionably one of very chequered and not very highly distinguished performance. The somewhat hasty theories, and the often splendid, but nearly always unequal, practice of the _Pléiade_, had given place to a sort of rococo individualism, to the bastard and easily ignoble kinds of parody and burlesque, or to corrupt followings of Spanish and Italian practice. Many charming, and some fine, things (including that stately passage of Chapelain’s which many classical critics, who scoff at his name, have admired when all but literally translated in _The Deserted Village_) had been written; but the writers had constantly dropped from them to the trivial and the bombastic. But when Boileau began seriously to write in 1663-64,[378] this period was in its very last stage. It could not have lasted much, or any, longer if there had been no Boileau at all. Of his actual victims some were long dead; others were very old men; the younger were persons of no importance, _ephemera_, whether critical or poetical, which would have died with the day. The smoky torch of Théophile—a true poetic torch for all its smoke—had flickered out nearly forty years before. Cyrano, to whom Boileau gives contemptuous blessing in part, only that he may ban him and others more effectively, had slept in peace for eight years. Saint-Amant, who had real poetic gift, and who, if he was no scholar in the ancient tongues, knew the modern in a fashion which puts Boileau’s ignorance of their literatures to shame, had met the end described so feelingly by his critic some three years earlier. Chapelain was a man of sixty-seven; Cotin one of sixty. It is by attacking not the dead and decrepit, but the young and rising, that a man shows himself a great warrior and a useful citizen in criticism. In fact, the principles of correctness which Boileau espoused had, as we have seen, been practically taken up long before, even by poor creatures like the Abbé d’Aubignac, in certain departments, and Chapelain himself had smitten in this sense before he felt the wounds.

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Footnote 378:

The First and Sixth Satires are a little, and some smaller pieces
much, earlier than this, but they are indecisive and unimportant.

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Still less can Boileau be allowed any credit for the great achievements which undoubtedly took place during his own middle life. The glories of French literature in verse (and, as far as the three first go, in poetry), about 1664, are Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Molière. Corneille had been writing before Boileau was born: the only piece of his which Boileau praises generously was produced in the year of the critic’s birth; and that critic is silent about most of the Master’s work, and sneers ignobly at its later examples. The magnificent genius of Molière owed nothing to Boileau in its beginnings, and accepted little, if anything, from his criticism in its perfection; while not all of its results were cordially welcomed by the critic, personal friends as they were. La Fontaine, an older man than Boileau by fifteen years, was still more independent of him at the beginning, shows extremely little mark of any influence from him at any time, and, for all their friendship, experienced from him the almost unaccountable omission of his favourite kind, the Fable (unlike the _Conte_, a perfectly “unobjectionable” one), in the _Art Poétique_ itself. There remains Racine, and, if the schooling and training of Racine seem to any one so great a thing that his schoolmaster and trainer becomes, _ipso facto_, one of the _Di majores_ of criticism, there is not much more to be said. But there is something: and it is this. In the first place, to assume that Racine’s genius could not have made its own way without Boileau’s mentorship, is to pay a far worse compliment to that genius than some not very fervent Racinians can allow; and, in the second, the spirit, if not the letter, of his criticism is against that of Racine’s very best work. If I cared to do so, I think I could show that _Phèdre_ herself comes within the Bolæan[379] maledictions. As for _Athalie_, the very admirers of Boileau have asked how, after his unsparing censure of the religious epic, he could tolerate the religious drama?

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Footnote 379:

Cf. _Bolæana._ On the other hand, the Rev. J. Garbett, whom
anti-Tractarian feeling made Professor of Poetry at Oxford when Isaac
Williams was a candidate, has “Bollevian” (_De Re Critica
Prælectiones_, Oxford, 1847, _Præl._ iv. i.) I am not bigoted on the
point.

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Have we done? Not quite. After such a reformation, after such labours of Hercules as we have held up to us, we are entitled to expect a new crop, a new breed of poets rising everywhere from the purged and heartened land. Is the poetic product of the last quarter of the seventeenth century in France so admirable, so refreshing, such a contrast to the period of Chapelain and Saint-Amant? I have some small acquaintance with French literature, but I am unable to supply the names of the “Poets like Shakespeare, Beautiful souls,” who, formed by the precepts of the _Art Poétique_, rush in crowds upon the sight during that period. But, it will be said, time must be given—the French poetry of the _eighteenth_ century is the work of Boileau through his disciples. It is: and by these fruits may he and they be justly judged. He cannot, indeed, claim the admirable light work of Piron and the rest: some of it very nearly, or quite, incurs his anathemas, and all is composed more or less outside his precepts, and in accordance with the practice of La Fontaine rather than with his. But he can claim the _Henriade_, and, _in part_, the odes of J. B. Rousseau—he may be permitted even to assume the laurels of Delille and of Le Brun—_Pindare_. Perhaps, despite the sacred adage, the growth of the thorn does indicate the strength and genuineness of the vine, and, perhaps, it can only be a fig which is so fertile in such stately thistles.

But the real weakness of Boileau’s criticism does not fully appear till we come to examine him on the true ground. [Sidenote: _Concluding remarks on him._] What are his actual critical deliverances, on concrete critical points, worth? We have seen something of the answer to this already. A certain amount of his condemning censure—though nearly always expressed without urbaneness, without humanity, with the hectoring and bullying tone of an ill-conditioned schoolmaster, or the venom of a spiteful rival—must be validated; there is no lack of bad writers at any time, and Boileau’s provided a plentiful crop of them. But in most instances these writers were unimportant weeds, who would have been cast into the oven on the morrow of their flourishing, if Boileau had never written a line. On the other hand, in regard to the two greatest writers, in verse or drama, of his own day and country, Corneille and Molière, he loses no opportunity of censuring the one, and accords, till after his death, but faint and limited praise to the other. Even his misbeloved ancients he cannot praise with the mingled enthusiasm and acuteness that mark Longinus, or even Dionysius. The great merit of Virgil, in his eyes, is that Virgil manages mythological “machines” so deftly: and, if we look elsewhere at what he says of writers so different as Æschylus and Ovid, we shall find a flat generality, with no attempt even at the _mot propre_. Only on the satirists, at least on Horace and Juvenal, is he better. For Boileau, as we have said, was a satirist to the core, to the finger-tips, and here he speaks as he feels. If we want his opinion on great modern foreign poets, we have it explicitly on Tasso and Ariosto, implicitly in his silence about almost everybody else.

I am not conscious of any unfairness or omission, though I do not pretend to a mere colourless impartiality, in this survey; and after it I think we may go back to the general question, may ask, Is this a great or even a good critic? and may answer it in the negative. That Boileau was important to his own time may be granted; that he was no ill scavenger of certain sorts of literary rubbish may be granted; that he gave help to those who chose to tread in the limited path to which France was confining herself, so that they might tread it with somewhat more grace, with much more of firmness and confidence than they would otherwise have done—that, in short, he did for France something of the same kind as that which Dryden did for England, may be granted. This is not exactly a small thing. But before we call it a great one we must look at the other side. Boileau did not, like Dryden, leave escapes and safety-valves to the spirit that was too mighty for the narrower channels of poetic style; he exhibited none of his contemporary’s catholicity of mind and taste; he had none of his noble enthusiasms, none of his constructive power and progressive flexibility in positive critical estimate. The good that he did is terribly chequered by the consideration that, in sharpening certain edges of the French mind, he blunted and distorted others in a fashion which, after two hundred years, has not been fully remedied. A great man of letters, perhaps; a craftsmanlike “finisher of the law,” and no ill pedagogue in literature certainly: but a great critic? Scarcely, I think.

Two writers at least, whom few would call lesser men of letters than Boileau, and in whom some may see greater qualifications for criticism, must be much more briefly dealt with, partly because in their case no controversy is needed, partly because their actual contributions to criticism form but a very small part of their work, and partly also because neither aimed at for himself, or has received from posterity and tradition, any very prominent place as a critic. [Sidenote: _La Bruyère and Fénelon._] These are La Bruyère and Fénelon. It would not be correct to say that either is in deliberate or conscious opposition to the _législateur du Parnasse_. Their general conscious principles are much the same as his; they are, like him, uncompromising defenders of the Ancients, and though Fénelon has a private crotchet about poetic prose, yet the non-essentiality of verse to poetry had been a general, if not a universal, tenet with antiquity. But whether in consequence of that impatience of despotism which those who love to mix literary and political history have seen in the second generation of the _siècle de Louis XIV._, as compared with the first; or from the fact that, as compared with Boileau, they were much more of Greek,[380] and less of purely Latin students; or simply as a result of what has been justly attributed to both,[381] the predominance of the _sens propre_ over mere observation of the _communis sensus_—it is certain that both, and especially Fénelon, display much more individualism, and at the same time much more catholicity. It may be added that they know more, and are to some extent (though to no large one) free from that hopeless ignoring of older French literature which was Boileau’s greatest fault.

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Footnote 380:

“Greek, the Alpha and Omega of all knowledge,” as Dr Folliott calls
it, is certainly not less so in criticism than elsewhere.

Footnote 381:

By M. Bourgoin in the interesting book cited above.

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La Bruyère’s[382] contribution is contained in the opening section, “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit,” of his famous _Caractères_. [Sidenote: _The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit.”_] It is not very long; it is—according to the plan of the work it is not merely entitled but obliged to be—studiously desultory; and it is not perhaps improved by the other necessity of throwing much of it into portraits of imaginary persons, who are sometimes no doubt very close copies of real ones. But it contains some open and undisguised judgments of the great writers of the past, and a number of astonishingly original, pregnant, and monumentally phrased observations of a general character. In fact I should not hesitate to say that La Bruyère is, after Dryden, who had preceded him by twenty years, the first very great man of letters in modern times who gave himself to Criticism with a comparatively unshackled mind, and who has put matter of permanent value in her treasuries without being a professional rhetorician or commentator. [Sidenote: _General observations._] We need not dwell on the famous overture _Tout est dit_, for it is merely a brilliant example of the kind of paradox-shell or rocket, half truth, half falsehood, which a writer of the kind explodes at the beginning of his entertainment, to attract the attention of his readers, and let them see the brilliancy of the stars that drop from it. But how astonishing is it, in the 17th section, to find, two hundred years and more ago, the full Flaubertian doctrine of the “single word” laid down with confidence, and without an apparent sense that the writer is saying anything new![383] No matter that soon after, in 20, we find an old fallacy, ever new, put in the words, “Le plaisir de la critique nous ôte celui d'être vivement touchés de très-belles choses.” If criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism _à la_ Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the _Morte d’Arthur_ says) in every direction of literature, in reading always critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word.

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Footnote 382:

Editions again innumerable; but none, I think, can compare with that
of M. Servois in the _Grands Écrivains de la France_ (Paris,
1865-1882).

Footnote 383:

“Entre toutes les différentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule
de nos pensées _il n’y en a qu’une_ qui soit la bonne,” &c.—_Ed.
cit._, i. 118.

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But how well he recovers himself, among other things, with the remarks on the _Cid_, and the difference between the fine and the faultless at 30! with the declaration of independence immediately following in 31, and practically drawing a cancel through the whole critical teaching of Boileau! “Quand une lecture vous élève l’esprit, ... ne cherchez pas une autre règle pour juger; il est bon.” How delicate his remarks in 37 on the delicacy of touch, the illogical but impeccable concatenation, the justice of phrase, of the best feminine writing! Not a few of his observations are paraphrases or, as it were, echoes of Longinus himself, whom he has assimilated as Longinus’ translator never could have done. And if some further remarks on criticism in 63 seem to regard rather the abuse than the nature of the art—if the famous “Un homme né Chrétien et Français se trouve contraint dans la satire; les grands sujets lui sont défendus,” is half a political grumble and half a paralogism, which was to be accepted with fatal results in the next century—both this and other things are redeemed throughout by the general independence and freshness of the judgment, the vigour and decision of the phrase. In the judgments of authors above referred to (which begin at 38 and continue for some eight or nine numbers, to be resumed with special reference to dramatists and dramas a little later), it is especially possible to appreciate La Bruyère’s idiosyncrasy as a critic, the vivacity and power of his natural endowments in this direction, and his drawback, arising partly from sheer acceptance of prevailing opinion, and partly from the fact that he is merely coasting the subject on his way to others.

In the joint or contrasted judgment of Terence and Molière the modern man, according to his kind, may find something either to laugh or to be irritated at. [Sidenote: _Judgments of authors._] Some would as soon think of comparing the dribbling tap of a jar of distilled water to the Falls of Schaffhausen. But La Bruyère practically shows himself as conscious of the truth as his time would let him be when, allowing Terence purity, exactness to rule, polish, elegance, character (_i.e._, type-character), he ruins all by admitting that “il n’a manqué à lui que d'être moins froid.” And if (as many did then, and some do now) he takes that wrong view of style and language which permits them to accuse Molière of “jargon,” of barbarism, he gives him fire, naïveté, a fount of real pleasantry, exact representation (“imitation”) of manners, imagery, and “the scourge of ridicule.” “What a man,” he says, “you could have made of these two!” though how you can join fire and _froid_, and what would have been left of Terence’s old-maidish neatness when joined to such a husband, Heaven and Apollo only know! But we can see very well that La Bruyère admires Molière because he does admire him, and Terence because he is told to do so.

The conjunction, even in contrast, of Malherbe and Théophile has puzzled some folk; but, as M. Servois points out, it is a mere matter of chronology, and Boileau had done it before. And it is very noteworthy that La Bruyère does not bear hardly on Théophile. The remark that Marot seems more modern than Ronsard is perfectly well founded. And if there is some oddity in his surprise that Marot, “natural and easy as he is, did not make of Ronsard, so full of _verve_ and fire, a poet better than either of them actually is,” it is much less odd, and much more acute, than it looks at first sight. The judgment of Rabelais, a famous one, if not wholly wide-eyed, keeps its eyes singularly wide open for so artificial an age: and there is a whole volume in the double defence of Montaigne against opposite criticisms, to the effect that he is too full of thought for some men, and too natural in his mode of thinking for others.

It is by no means certain that the unnamed author aimed at in 52 is Molière, and the most fervent of “Cornelians” can hardly quarrel with the judgment that Corneille is unequalled where he is good, but more often unequal to himself. La Bruyère seems, though rather furtively, to set the awful Unities at nought in this great dramatist’s favour; and he is both just and happy in praising the variety of Corneille as compared to the monotony of Racine. The whole article, which is a long one, is distinctly on the Cornelian side, though far from unjust to Racine; and one can well understand the disconcerting effect which it seems to have produced on Voltaire.

On the whole, the only reasons for not ranking La Bruyère’s criticism very high indeed are that there is so little of it, and that it is obviously the work of a man to whom it is more a casual pastime than a business—who has not thought himself out all along the line in it, but has emitted a few observations. Still, those which express his deliberate opinions are almost always sound, and only some of those which he has adopted without examination are wholly or partially false.

The critical utterances of Fénelon[384] are much more voluminous, though in part, at least, not quite so disinterested, and they are of a very high critical interest and value. [Sidenote: _Fénelon. The_ Dialogues sur l’Eloquence.] They are contained in two documents, the _Dialogues sur l’Eloquence_ (which, though not known, is believed to be a work of his early manhood, but was only published after his death by the Chevalier Ramsay) and one of his very latest pieces, the _Mémoire sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française_, sent in, to obey a resolution of that body, in November 1713, with the much longer explanatory letter of the next year thereon to Dacier.

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Footnote 384:

It is a pity that in the best modern account known to me, that of M.
Bourgoin, the question of Fénelon’s character and of his relations
with Bossuet is brought in. It is really quite extraneous to the
matter. Very favourable reference can be made to the notice by the
Cardinal de Bausset, prefixed to the most accessible edition of
Fénelon’s critical work (in _Œuvres Choisies_, Paris, Garnier, n.d.)
Bausset, who wrote, besides an extensive life of Fénelon, one of
Bossuet, and died in 1824, came before the Renaissance of criticism in
France: but he was no _perruque_.

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