Chapter I: From Malherbe to Boileau (4)

The first is conditioned—unfavourably it may seem for our purpose—by its avowed limitation to _sacred_ eloquence. A young aspirant to the cloth has fallen in love with a fashionable preacher, wishes a cooler friend to share his enthusiasm, and, being rebuffed, elicits from that friend by degrees a complete criticism of the rhetoric of the pulpit, and the rules that should govern it. Since we have found discussions, even of profane oratory, surprisingly barren in pure literary criticism of old, this of sacred may seem still less promising. But though Fénelon’s interest in the soul-curing part of the matter is constant and intense, he does not allow it either to obscure or to adulterate his literary censure. At first, in particular, the arguments of his “A” (the critical friend who, no doubt, is Fénelon himself) not merely have nothing more to do with the pulpit than with the bar or the Senate, but have little if anything more to do with spoken than with written literature. The disdainful description (at p. 5 _ed. cit._) of that epigrammatic or enigmatic style, which is always with us, as _des tours de passe-passe_; the excellent passage (ibid., 7-9) on Demosthenes, Isocrates, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus himself—on whom Fénelon speaks with far more appreciation than Boileau, and probably with more knowledge than Dryden; the bold attitude taken up at p. 18 on the question of the perfect hero; the exaltation (perhaps the most noteworthy thing in the whole) of “painting,” of bringing the visual image home to the reader, at p. 35; the scorn of mere verbal fault-finding at p. 47; the ardent panegyric of the literary greatness of the Bible at p. 69; and of the Fathers at p. 86 _sq._—all these passages, which are almost pure gold of criticism, have nothing special to do with the mere _métier_ of the preacher. That Fénelon was neither perfect nor wholly beyond his time is quite true. He has here a deplorable assault on Gothic Architecture (which he repeats at greater length in the Academic letter, and for which, if he had not been so good and great a man, one could wish the stones of his cathedral to have fallen upon him), and his contempt extends to mediæval literature. But the same doom is on the best of archbishops and the most beautiful of girls: they can but give what they have.

And Fénelon gives very much. The Memoir and Letter above referred to were elicited by a demand on Academicians for proposals in regard to the reorganising of the work of the Academy. [Sidenote: Sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française.] Here, therefore, as in the other case, the immediate purpose is special; but the general literary interests of the critic again prevent it from being specialised in the dismal and deadly modern sense. He does not fail to deal with the daily dreadful line of the Dictionary; but he proposes, as supplements, divers things—a new _Poetic_, a new _Rhetoric_, Chrestomathies from the Ancients on both heads (things needed to this day), and above all, a complete Academic edition of the great classics of France, with really critical introduction and annotations, or at least a corpus of critical observations on them.

But, as usual, it is in the incidental remarks that the value of the piece lies; and these make it, I do not hesitate to say, the most valuable single piece of criticism that France had yet produced. Fénelon shows his acquaintance with other modern languages; and pays a particular compliment to Prior, who, it must be remembered, was about this time occupying his rather uneasy post of Ambassador. He may be too hasty in saying that the Italians and Spaniards will perhaps never make good tragedies or epigrams, nor the French good epics and sonnets, as he most certainly is too ignorant in saying that “after our ancient poets” [a very few, mostly undistinguished persons, in the latter part of the sixteenth century] had tried classical metres and failed, “we” [the French of course] “had to invent measures suitable to our words.” But he is astonishingly bold in his recurrence to Pléiade principles, and in actually urging English as a good example on the point of taking from neighbours any word found convenient. He says plumply “de telles usurpations _sont permises_” (p. 103 _ed. cit._) Alas! in England itself, and after two centuries, one uses this just liberty at personal risk. His Rhetoric section partly repeats the _Dialogues_, and is altogether more technical or professional than literary. [Sidenote: _And its challenge to correctness._] But his Poetical section is full of interest. It is marred by that not quite single-minded fancy for prose poetry which has already been glanced at, and to which we shall have to return. But the attack on rhyme is partly excused, and the, at first sight, bewildering remark (p. 123) that “rhyme is of itself more difficult than all the rules of Greek and Latin prosody” is rendered intelligible, by a remembrance of the extremely arbitrary rules which had by this time been imposed on the French rhymer. The paragraph on Ronsard,[385] the best known piece of the whole, is admirable in its tempering of sympathy with censure; and the acknowledgment of the “opposite extreme” into which French for more than a century had fallen,[386] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth.

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Footnote 385:

P. 125 _ed. cit._

Footnote 386:

“L’excès choquant de Ronsard nous a un peu jetés dans l’extrémité
opposée; on a appauvri, desséché et gâté notre langue.” And he
proceeds, with much humour and more truth, to stigmatise the prim
following of grammar, the “substantive hand in hand with its
adjective,” the verb “walking behind with an adverb at its heels, and
an accusative in a place unalterable.” “C’est ce,” this great _locus_
continues, “qui exclut toute suspension d’esprit, toute surprise,
toute variété, et souvent toute magnifique cadence.” 1830 could say no
more; and often said it with less authority.

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The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs (and Time’s) the complaints of _la basse plaisanterie de Plaute_, and the statement that _on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane_. The point is the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And, abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book, and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule. Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.

We have for some time been occupied with the critical work of great men of letters; we must now turn to that of four men who, if they had not been critics, would hardly have been heard of in their own day, and would certainly not be remembered by posterity out of their own country—or perhaps in it. As it was, all the four exercised immense influence, not merely in France but elsewhere, and three of them saw their work promptly translated into English, and received with almost touching deference in the country which had Dryden to look to for criticism, nay, by Dryden himself. The order in which we may take them shall be determined by that of the appearance of their principal critical works. The _Pratique du Théâtre_ of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, appeared in 1657; the first _Réflexions_ of Rapin in 1668; the _Entretiens d’Ariste_ of Bouhours in 1671; and the _Traité du Poème Epique_ of Le Bossu in 1675. All four, it is to be observed, were clerics of one sort or another, while Rapin and Bouhours were schoolmasters, and Hédelin was at least a private tutor. Taken together, they exhibit the hand-book and school-book side of the criticism of which Boileau is the contemporary satiric expositor to the world; and their criticism cannot properly be dissociated from his. As dates sufficiently show, they do not in any sense derive from him; nor, to do him justice, does he from them. The whole quintet, with others of less importance, are all the more valuable exponents of the strong contemporary set of the tide in the direction of hard-and-fast “classical” legislation for literature.

It is among the few and peculiar laurels of the Abbé D’Aubignac to have failed in more kinds of literature than most men try. [Sidenote: _The Abbé D’Aubignac._] His tragedy of _Zénobie_ (1647) was the occasion of a well-known epigram from the great Condé, which is not the less good for its obviousness, and which, with equal ease and justice,[387] can be adjusted to his criticism. He is more of an Aristotelian “know-nothing” than La Mesnardière, and has very much less talent. Not content with the _Pratique_ (which, as has been said, was really a belated contribution to the cabal against Corneille), he attacked two of the great tragedian’s later plays, _Sophonisbe_ and _Sertorius_, in his _Dissertations en forme de Remarques_ (1663), and he had many years earlier attempted to justify Terence against the strictures of Ménage. The historian of criticism would have been grateful to him had he confined himself to writing tractates “On the nature of Satyrs, Brutes, Monsters, and Demons,”[388] _Relations du Royaume de Coquetterie_, and novels like the rather well-named _Macarise_, or _the Queen of the Fortunate Isles_. For these we could simply have neglected.

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Footnote 387:

_Zénobie_ boasted herself to be impeccably “regular.” The Prince
observed that he was much obliged to the Abbé for paying such
attention to Aristotle, but that he could not excuse Aristotle for
making the Abbé write such a tragedy. This famous _mot_, like others,
is of disputed attribution. It is sometimes given to the Prince de
Rohan-Guémené.

Footnote 388:

A work of youth which appeared as early as 1627. Hédelin was never
elected to the Academy; and in 1664 endeavoured to start a new one of
his own from a coterie which he, in imitation of Conrart, had formed.
But “Trajan was” _not_ “content,” wisely enough: and France was spared
a skim-milk Forty.

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The _Pratique_, unfortunately, we cannot neglect wholly, because of its position as a symptom and an influence. [Sidenote: _His_ Pratique du Théâtre.] In reading it,[389] the generous mind oscillates between a sense of intolerable boredom, and a certain ruth at the obviously honest purpose and industry that underlie the heaps of misapplied learning, and season the gabble of foolish authority-citing. He begins by a demonstration that all great statesmen have always patronised stately games, of which scenic representation is one. Vulgar minds have nothing to do with it (this was a slap at Castelvetro and his horrible doctrine of pleasing the multitude, which is a real _lethalis arundo_ in the sides of all these Frenchmen). He is, we are rather surprised to hear, _not_ going to theorise. All the theory has been done, and done once for all, by the ancients. What he wants to do is to apply this theory to all the practical contingencies. And this he does through Unities and Episodes, through Acts and Scenes, through Narration, Discourse, Deliberation, everything, with sleuth-hound patience on his own part, and requiring Job’s variety on that of his readers. He is sometimes quite fair even to Corneille, he seems to be quite well-meaning; but he cannot help his nativity of dulness, and at his very best he is a critic of dramaturgy, not of drama.

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Footnote 389:

It forms the first volume of the Amsterdam edition, in 3 vols. (1715),
of Hédelin’s critical work. The second and third, which are together
about the size of the first, include the extensive and dismal
lucubrations on Terence, &c.

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René Rapin, hardly as one sometimes feels inclined to think and speak of him, was a person of an entirely different order. [Sidenote: _Rapin._] In fact, it is very much more on isolated and particular points than on generals that he lays himself open to reproach, though it may be retorted that the generals, which lead logically (as they usually do) to such absurd particulars, are thereby utterly condemned themselves. It was specially unfortunate for Rapin that his principles and precepts were at once caught up in England by a man like Rymer,[390] and expounded in coarse and blunted form to a people still green and unknowing in critical matters. [Sidenote: _His method partly good._] There is even much in his method which deserves high praise. It is very noteworthy that, before he presumed to draw up (or at least to give to the world) his _Réflexions_ on the _Poetics_ and on Poetry, on Eloquence, on History, and on Philosophy, he had preluded by elaborate examinations of the actual documents in the shape of “Comparisons”—“Of Homer and Virgil,” “Of Cicero and Demosthenes,” “Of Thucydides and Livy,” “Of Plato and Aristotle.” And though this sort of “cock-fight comparison” (as the more vernacular writers of his own time in English might have said) is “muchwhat” (as his translator Rymer actually does say) of a mistake, unless pursued with the greatest possible care—though it was already hackneyed in itself and constantly in need of extending, supplementing, blending—yet it is at any rate infinitely superior to the examination _in vacuo_, the rattling of dry bones and abstract kinds and qualities, to which too many of his contemporaries confined themselves.

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Footnote 390:

Who translated (with a preface not virulently Rymerical, _v. infra_,
p. 392) Rapin’s _Reflections upon Poetry_ almost as soon as it
appeared. Rapin was a copious theologian, an elegant and fertile Latin
versifier. Of his critical works in French, the _Comparaisons_ noted
above were produced annually between 1668 and 1671, except the
“Thucydides and Livy,” which appeared ten years later. The _Réflexions
sur l’Eloquence_ date from 1672: those, more famous, on Poetics and
Poets, from 1674. His critical _Works_ were early collected, and the
complete collection appeared in English, by various hands, including
Rymer’s, in 2 vols. (London, 1706). The Amsterdam ed. of the original
(3 vols., 1709-10) contains, in addition, a small treatise, _Du Grand
et du Sublime_, which must not be neglected, and some others, together
with the _Comparaison de Pindare_ et _d’Horace_ of the architect
Blondel.

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Unfortunately Rapin himself was always, consciously or unconsciously, tending towards this other method; and even in his comparisons—much more in the extended survey of ancient and modern writers which he subjoins to the _Réflexions_—he is still more constantly seduced by that labelling criticism which we have traced long ago to the “canonising” way of the Alexandrians, and for which we have said hard things of Fronto and others. [Sidenote: _His particular absurdities as to Homer in blame._] Yet further, both his general style of criticism, and his prepossessions of this or that kind, constantly draw him into pitfalls only less absurd than those in which Rymer himself wallows. I do not remember that Rapin ever lays it down that a hero must not be a black man; probably the French had not been afflicted—for I suppose they did not make Syphax black—with any poet daring enough to start the question. But he does other things which, though less conspicuously, are quite as really silly. In the moral section[391] of his comparison between Homer and Virgil he has too much of the Jesuit schoolmaster, with his reverence towards boys, to mention that terrible scene between Zeus and Hera which had already distressed the compatriots of Aristophanes and Martial, and which remains one of the earliest examples of absolutely perfect poetry in a particular kind. But he makes up for it. We have, of course, the “wine-heavy, dog-eyed, hare-hearted” line to mourn over. How undignified of Homer to make Achilles anxious about the preservation of the body of Patroclus from corruption! How could Ulysses, with such an excellent wife and such an amiable son, waste time with Calypso and dangle after Circe, to whom the pudibund Rapin applies epithets which _our_ Decorum prevents us from repeating, and for which he deserved to be both shipwrecked and turned into a Gryll. Was it quite nice of Priam, as a father, to wish all his children dead so Hector were alive? Nausicaa is too shocking. A Princess’s face should _not_ show grace, the Jesuit thinks,[392] to men in Ulysses’ condition.

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Footnote 391:

Chap. vii. In the preceding chapter there is one of those sentences
which ruin this kind of criticism, by and of themselves. “Games are of
the number of those actions which may occur in the lives of heroes.”
Most certainly: but one feels that Rapin said it simply because there
are games in Homer and Virgil, and that, if there had _not_ been, he
would probably have said, “Games are _not_,” &c.

Footnote 392:

“Cette Princesse oublie sa pudeur pour écouter sa compassion....” In
the rest of the clause the English translator softens the crudity of
the French _curiosité_. But it is still more pleasant to oppose to the
nasty niceness of the French Jesuit the words of the author of _The
Christian Year_: “_Nausicaa—cujus persona nihil usquam aut venustius
habet aut pudentius veterum Poesis_” (_Præl._ xii. vol. i. p. 195,
Oxford, 1844).

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Whereas with Virgil it is quite different. Everybody, including the Gods, behaves “like persons of Quality.” [Sidenote: _As to Virgil in praise._] Even in the case of _Dido dux et Trojanus_ there is no violation of modesty,[393] which certainly seems either a little Escobarish towards them, or a little severe to Circe and Calypso. Indeed, we sometimes find ourselves rather lost with Rapin’s morality. For, in another passage (Chap. XIII.), he actually discovers _un artifice des plus délicats et des plus fins_ in Virgil’s taking away Dido’s character, though History had made her a Lady of very good repute.[394] For he did it to bring into contempt the Carthaginians who were afterwards to become odious to Rome. “A nice marality!” indeed, as my Lord Foppington observed of another matter, not so very long after Rapin wrote this.

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Footnote 393:

_Mais la pudeur ni toutes les bienséances extérieures n’y sont point
blessées._

Footnote 394:

So the English: Fr. “femme de bien.” I like to read Rapin in both
versions, contemporary as they are, and antiphonal of the sentiment of
the time, in its two chief languages.

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Yet even here it is fair to observe that Rapin is at least trying to make the two ends of his “reason” and his “reflection” meet: and so it is always:—

“His reason rooted in unreason stands,
And sense insensate makes him idly wise.”

The consequences are patent on every page, and a chapter might be not disagreeably filled with them. [Sidenote: _As to others._] Pegasus is admirable, but the Hippogriff is the vain imagination of a sick brain: Camilla touching, but Bradamante absurd. Achilles retires from the Grecian army because he is discontented; Æneas goes to Italy because he is pious; and Medea kills her children because she is revengeful—a passage in which it is agreeable to perceive the obvious first draught of “I love my love with an A.” As for the moderns, Du Bartas and Ronsard had all the genius their age was capable of—a text for a sermon as long as this Book. “Scarce aught can be understood” of the _Agamemnon_! In fact, quotations[395] simply leap to the eye as one reads the page.

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Footnote 395:

These latter are mostly from the _Réflexions sur la Poétique_
(_Œuvres_, ii. 175 _sq._) It is quite at the beginning of these that
the unlucky charge against Dante of “wanting fire” (see i. 175 _note_)
occurs; it is followed later, and perhaps to some extent explained, if
not excused, by the further criticism that he has “l’air trop
profond,” “une ordonnance triste et morne.”

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It is more important, if less amusing, to inquire how a man, obviously of much ability, extremely well informed, freer, it would seem, from mere prejudice than most of his fellows, came in this way to be constantly stumbling over blocks that the veriest blockhead might, one would think, have avoided, and running against blank walls, of which a blind man might, it should seem, have been aware. [Sidenote: _The reading of his riddle._] Rapin is, perhaps, the main and appointed Helot of the neo-classic system. That system, instead of assembling all the great works of literary art, and giving an impartial hearing to each, takes one or two ancient treatises, themselves necessarily based upon but a partial examination, spins out of them a universal code, fills in that code, where it is wanting, with analogies and with perilous makeshifts of “decorum,” uniformity, and the like, and then proceeds to apply the result back to the actual works of art. It is no wonder that, even of the ancient division of these, hardly one escapes scot-free, except those which were originally composed by men of great, but not the greatest, genius, on a somewhat similar scheme. Elsewhere the unfortunate critic is constantly catching himself in those bushes which he has himself planted, and bruising himself against obstacles which he has elaborately set up. In a general way he grants that Homer is the greatest of poets; but the Fetiches of “Design” and “Decorum” extort from him the sacrifice of this in detail, and the acknowledgment that Homer is frequently most indecorous, and that large parts of him are out of drawing. And so of all.

Le Bossu (to whom the English sometimes give a superfluous final _t_, whom they generally defraud of his rightful “Le,” and whom in the main they know only from the _locus classicus_ of Sterne)[396] reapproximates to the Aubignacian level. [Sidenote: _Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic._] But it is fair to say that his dulness arises from a different cause. He is not, like Hédelin, a stupid man—he is distinctly the reverse—nor is he spiteful. He is merely the hardiest and most thoroughgoing devotee of a certain kind of abstract criticism. He does, of course, give us chapters on some actual illustrations of Heroic or Epic; but they are scarcely more necessary to his book than the picture-illuminations of a poem or a novel. Being a writer of some _esprit_, he sometimes exercises it in rather dangerous fictions—for instance, his imagined epic of Meridarpax, where all the mouse-stories (mouse and lion, town and country mouse, &c.) are worked in, would be most sprightly, if it did not look sprightlier still as an exercise in laughing at his own side. But by far the greater bulk, and the whole vertebration and solid substance, of his argument are devoted to Epic in the Abstract. Design, definition, and parts; good fables and bad fables; episodes; the biology, so to speak, of the Action, the narration, the manners and characters, not forgetting the Machines, and at last something on the Thoughts and Expression—which have about one-ninth of the whole. In short, if we have not exactly Epic _in vacuo_, we have it as a dried preparation. The complexity, anti-sensuousness, and dispassionate character of it are almost abashing; one feels at the end that, to hanker after an actual poem, be it _Iliad_ or _Orlando_, has something sinful—something of the lust of the flesh.

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Footnote 396:

_Tristram Shandy_, iii. 12. He was not always unknown among us.
Dryden, whether out of modesty, fashion, or humour, takes leave to
call him “the best of modern critics,” and he was translated in 1695.
The mistakes referred to above are all the worse because there was
actually a French writer named Bossut, a mathematician of distinction
in the eighteenth century.

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We have said that Le Bossu is rather a sprightly person of a hyper-scholastic kind. [Sidenote: _Bouhours._] His brother Father, Bouhours, is still more so; indeed, his famous inquiry, “Si un Allemand peut-être bel-esprit?”[397] has got him rather into trouble with a prevailing party, in and out of Germany. Beginning with the _Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène_ (1671), a collection of chiefly verbal criticism on French writers, he continued it with other works in _belles lettres_ and theology, the most important of which, to us, is _La Manière de Bien Penser dans les Ouvrages d’Esprit_ (1687).[398] The book, which is not short, consists of four Dialogues between Eudoxe and Philanthe, “deux hommes de lettres (as the author remarks in a phrase to which Time has given a piquant new meaning) _que la science n’a point gâtés_.” Eudoxe, as the name indicates, is the author’s mouthpiece—a judicious admirer of the Ancients, who can yet tolerate such moderns as Voiture. Philanthe (also a speaking name) is a partisan of florid modernity, who is, however, so little of a “stalwart” that he gives up Ariosto, and intrenches himself behind Tasso and Lope. In the First dialogue Eudoxe censures (with abundant citation, as throughout the book) Equivoques, Hyperboles, _pointes_, _concetti_, and, generally, thoughts that are “not _true_.” The Second and Third, starting from Longinus and Hermogenes, discuss the true and the false in Sublimity and Wit: and the Fourth is mainly devoted to Obscurity. Bouhours (whose influence on subsequent critics, especially on Addison, was very great) writes agreeably, is free from rudeness and pedantry, and is altogether rather a favourable example of the school of Good Sense, _quand même_. But, as favourable examples of bad schools generally do, he damages his cause more than less favourable ones, because its drawbacks are more obvious and intrinsic. On his principles you must ostracise the best, the noblest, the most charming, the most _poetic_ things in poetry. _Et c’est tout dire._

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Footnote 397:

_Not_, as it is constantly quoted, _peut avoir de l’esprit_. It will
be observed that the difference is considerable.

Footnote 398:

My copy is the 2nd ed. of next year in 12mo.

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As we approach the close of the chapter, we come upon classes and masses of work which is at once impossible to examine in particular and, as a whole, elusive. In [Sidenote: _Encyclopædias and Newspapers._] 1687 appeared the _Jugements des Savants_[399] of Baillet, and ten years later the still more famous _Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_ of Bayle, who had preluded it, from a time antecedent to that of Baillet’s publication, by _Nouvelles de la République de Lettres_, a regular literary review. Long before this latter the _Journal des Savants_[400] and the _Mercure Galant_[401] in France had provided criticism, good, bad, and indifferent, with regular outlets for itself. And in both kinds—that of the dictionary or encyclopædia, and that of the periodical—the flood has never ceased, but has always increased since. Fortunately for us the impossibility of treating all this is compensated by the fact that such treatment, if possible, would be superfluous. But of Bayle and Baillet at least something must be said particularly, and something also of a remarkable and much less known continuator of the latter.

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Footnote 399:

The standard edition is that of La Monnoye (7 vols. 4to, Paris, 1722,
with an 8th containing Ménage’s _Anti-Baillet_ &c.)

Footnote 400:

Jan. 1665—first weekly, then monthly. It became a government
publication in 1701. Gui Patin, in the March after its appearance, is
very angry (Let. DCLXV. iii. 517, _ed. cit. sup._) with it, and says
with voice prophetic of many injured ones to come, “nous verrons si
ces prétendus censeurs, _sine suffragio populi et Quiritium_, auront
le crédit et l’autorité de critiquer ainsi tous ceux qui n'écriront
pas à leur goût.”

Footnote 401:

1672-1820. Donneau de Visé was its first editor, and Thomas Corneille
its most distinguished writer.

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Bayle perhaps needed nothing but better taste, greater freedom from prejudice, and a more exclusive bent towards purely literary criticism, to be one of the great literary critics of the world. [Sidenote: _Bayle._] But, unluckily for himself, he had contracted, through corrupt following doubtless of the Latins (even such respectable persons as Pliny) and of the scholars of the Renaissance, a sort of perpetual itch and hankering after the indecent, which, to say nothing else, is as teasing and as tedious in the long-run as an itch for sermonising and a hankering after instruction. Equally tedious, and in much worse taste, is the perpetual undercurrent—not seldom becoming a very obvious top-flood—of sceptical girding and nagging at the Bible and at religion generally. In both these respects Bayle was followed by Voltaire. But Voltaire, though his own literary sympathies were perhaps not his strongest, had some. Of purely literary sympathies Bayle seldom shows much trace—by which it is not in the least meant that he is not a man of letters himself, for he is an excellent one, and the reproaches which have been addressed to his style are not of much importance. But it is not literature that he really loves: it is “philosophy” of a kind, and gossip of almost all kinds. His wits are always bright and alert, and his learning, though associated with so many qualities opposed to those of the mere pedant, and not impeccable, is pretty sound. He has the curiosity, the acuteness, the erudition, the industry of the true critic, but he has neither the enthusiasm, nor the disinterestedness, nor the grasp.

In both these respects, as in others, Baillet is very much a diminutive of him. [Sidenote: _Baillet._] In fact, brightness of wit has almost disappeared; and though Ménage—himself no infallible guide—has been both ill-mannered and hypercritical in the strictures of the _Anti-Baillet_, there is no doubt that the _Jugements des Savants_ is a book not to be used without verification on particular points. But this is almost a property, or, at worst, an inseparable accident, of these _Collectanea_; and a fair-minded reader cannot help admiring the extraordinary industry with which Baillet executed his task, while appreciating the significance of this record of a division of literature which, as we saw at the close of the last volume, had, scarcely two centuries before, the most meagre representation of all.[402]

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Footnote 402:

It can scarcely be necessary to give bricks of so large and rambling a
house. “Mr Borrichius témoigne aussi que le style [_of Ovid’s
Heroides_] est fort pur” is, and has to be, the kind of thing. Perhaps
such a glut of authorities may have insensibly nauseated men of
authority, and so Baillet may have worked both ways. He is good enough
to admit (v. 461) that “one cannot say this nation [the English] is
inferior even for Poetry to several others of the North,” and he has
heard of “Abraham Cowley, John Downe ou Jean Donne, Cleveland, Edmond,
[_sic_] Waller, Jean Denham, George Herbert, le Chancelier Bacon,
Shakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben, Johnson, Suckling, Jean Milton,”
&c. It is open to Shaconians to contend that as the comma at “Edmond”
is undoubtedly superfluous, so is that at “Bacon,” and that
Baillet—the learned Baillet—meant to rank “le Chancelier
Bacon-Shakespeare” among poets.

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Curiously enough the want of judgment with which Baillet has been, and to some extent may justly be, reproached shows itself exactly in the most unlikely place. [Sidenote: _The ethos of a Critical Pedant._] His opening volume on the nature, legitimacy, and so forth of Criticism, though too prolix, collects an extraordinary number of just and valuable things, and adds to them at least something of the author’s own. His Character of a Pedantic, Chicaning, Malicious Critic (partly borrowed from Le Bon, partly elaborated by himself) will be found at vol. i. p. 52., and has been justified by some seven generations of the persons it describes. It is Pedantry “to pick low and little faults, and to excite yourself over matters which are of no importance.” It is Pedantry “to steal from an author and insult him at the same time; to tear outrageously those who differ with you in opinion.” It is Pedantry “to endeavour to raise the whole world against some one who does not think enough of Cicero.” It is Pedantry “to take occasion by an author’s mistake to endeavour to humiliate him and ruin his reputation.” It is Pedantry “to send your author back in a haughty manner to the lowest class, and to menace him with whip and ferule for an error in chronology.” It is not merely Pedantry but Chicanery “to separate phrases in order to give them another sense,” to “impute printers’ errors,” to “neglect or change punctuation.” We need not go on to Baillet’s signs of “Malignity”: the cap is already a good cap, a very good cap, and one need not go far to find some one to wear it.

A boiling down of this volume—which, so far as I know, has never been executed—would be far superior to most general works on the subject with which I am acquainted. Nor is Baillet’s distribution of his scheme altogether a bad one. It is in the detailed carrying out (where one would suppose that for a man of such industry the least part of the difficulty lay) that he is most unsatisfactory. He neglects—in a manner surprising from one of that still scholastically educated generation of ecclesiastics, who were wont positively to abuse division and subdivision—the most obvious and mechanical assistances of method. His first sketch of subdivisions, though wanting succinctness, is not ill; but he never really carries it out, and stuffs in its stead long collections on “Precocious Persons,” “Authors in Disguise,” and “Les _Anti_” (books of a polemic character with titles so beginning), which belong only to the curiosities of Criticism. Further, he never seems to have set out, in any of the divisions, with a preliminary list of the authors he meant to handle, so that his omissions and inclusions are equally surprising. And, lastly, he never seems to have worked out any preliminary calculus of the amount of space which such authors as he does admit proportionately deserve. But the extent of his knowledge is astounding, and the way in which he communicates it not disagreeable.

Baillet’s unmethodical prosecution of his task was in this fortunate for us that it induced a somewhat younger contemporary, Balthasar Gibert, to take up the rhetorical-critical side of his work, and continue it in a book[403] not very much known but of great value. [Sidenote: _Gibert._] In strict date it belongs to the next century, and therefore to the next Book, but we have always taken, and shall always take, liberty of protracting or foreshortening our views as may be desirable; and this is avowedly a supplement to Baillet, though limited in subject, allowing, in consequence, fuller treatment of individuals, and displaying a good deal more originality and judgment. Gibert excellently supplies Baillet’s admitted insufficiency as to Longinus; he is very copious on Hermogenes, who had been coming, from Sturm downwards, into more and more estimation; and if in his accounts of the Italians he shows a traditional rather than an adequately comparative estimate,[404] he is sufficiently modern to give a quite considerable abstract of “M. Mackenze” (_sic_), _i.e._, Sir George Mackenzie’s _Idea Eloquentiæ Forensis Hodiernæ_. That he “but yaws neither” between Rhetoric and Criticism is a point of no importance against him; and it is a valuable document for the gradual transformation of the one into the other.

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Footnote 403:

_Jugements des Savants sur les auteurs qui ont traité de la
Rhétorique_ (3 vols., Paris, 1703-16). M. Bourgoin, I think, refers to
Gibert, but the book was first brought seriously to my notice by a
very kind private communication from Professor Scott of the University
of Michigan. Luckily it is in the British Museum; but it does not seem
easy to obtain a copy for oneself. Gibert taught for some half-century
in the Collége Mazarin, and was repeatedly rector of the University of
Paris. He wrote other books,—a formal “Rhetoric” _juxta Aristotelis
doctrinam_, strictures on Rollin, &c. Gibert is, it seems, appended to
some edd. of Baillet.

Footnote 404:

See, for instance, his reference to Patrizzi, who is evidently to him
rather _magni nominis umbra_ than anything tangible.

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We have to terminate this chapter, as we shall have to begin the corresponding one in the next Book, by saying something on the famous—the much too famous—Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns; but the space which we shall give it on both occasions will appear strangely, and perhaps scandalously, short to some readers. [Sidenote: _The Ancient and Modern Quarrel._] Neither idleness nor caprice, however, can be justly charged against the contraction. In the first place, things generally known may be justifiably passed with slighter notice in a continuous history, which has to deal with much that is very little known. From all sides, and in all ways, the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns is very well known indeed. It enjoys, and for more than a generation has enjoyed, the advantage of occupying one of the best monographs ever written. It engaged, on repeated occasions, the attention of the best equipped and the most readable of all French, if not of all, critics—Sainte-Beuve. It was arranged—not ill if not wholly well—for popular English consumption by the expert skill of Macaulay. As a result partly of Swift’s genuine literary sympathies, partly of his more or less accidental connections, the commentators of one of the greatest writers not only of England, but of the world, have been driven to expound it: as have, for more essential reasons, those of more than two or three great or interesting writers in France—Boileau, Perrault, Fontenelle, and others. From all this almost everybody must have learnt something about it, and to some of all this almost everybody can fairly be referred if he wishes to learn more.

For the matter is not really of so much importance in the History of Criticism as it may at first sight appear to possess. [Sidenote: _Its small critical value._] These quarrels rarely do much critical good; for the critical issues are almost always obscured in them, first by the _animus_ and prejudice of the combatants, and then by the mere dust of the fighting. But this particular combat did perhaps the least good of all; and could have done the least good. It was indeed sufficiently inevitable: for the sort of deification with which the whole of the sixteenth century, and most orthodox authority in the earlier seventeenth, had regarded antiquity, was sure to breed revolt. But it led to no conclusion; it evolved no truth. Truth is not the daughter of Ignorance; and it is really hard to say which party shows most ignorance in this matter. The defenders of the Ancients knew, as a rule, next to nothing of the Moderns; and the defenders of the moderns knew a great deal too little of the ancients. La Motte knew no Greek if Perrault[405] knew any; and with Boileau not only to all appearance was English literature a blank sheet, but almost the whole sheet of French literature before his own time was either blank or inscribed with fantastic fallacies. Still, this is not a condition entirely or commonly unknown in squabbles of this kind. The signal distinction and disqualification of the advocates in this famous cause is that, as a rule, neither any of the leaders, nor any of the juniors, had taken more than the slightest trouble to get up, or at least to understand, his _own_ brief. The Ancients are here in a little better case than the Moderns; but they were not in so very much better case. Most of them knew the Latin classics fairly well; and some of them (though by no means all, or even many) had a fair, while a few had a good, acquaintance with Greek.[406] But, with rarest, if with any exceptions, they persisted in exaggerating, if not in contemplating solely, that side of Classical Literature which has been and must be admitted to be its principal side, but which is not the only one. They would not see—or if they saw, they expressed positive distaste for—the vaguer, more imaginative, more “Romantic” beauty of Greek, and in a less degree of Latin. They never dreamt of turning the tables on their antagonists, as they might have done to no inconsiderable extent, from this point of view. And by holding up Design, Order, Decorum, and the rest, as paramount conditions of literary excellence, they laid themselves open to the most inconvenient retorts from well-equipped adversaries, and even received some on the score of Homer, badly as their adversaries were equipped as a rule.

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Footnote 405:

His _Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes_ (1688-98) is most
disappointing, even to fervent opponents of “the sect of the
Nicolaitans” and fervent lovers of the _Contes de ma Mère l’Oye_. That
he knew little and that his case was bad does not matter; but I at
least cannot find the _esprit_ which apologists plead.

Footnote 406:

J. Warton (_Adventurer_, No. 49) asserts, on the authority of Ménage,
that even Rapin was “totally ignorant” of Greek. M. does not quite say
this: but he does say that R. got his Greek quotations from
Tanneguy-Lefèvre, Madame Dacier’s father (_Ménagiana_, i. 175 of the
collected ed.)

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On the other hand, the Moderns were, for the most part, like men who have Toledos by their sides and choose to fight with cabbage-plants. The French ignored the English and sneered at the Italians and Spaniards since the Renaissance, indulging the while in placid but contemptuous ignorance or misrepresentation of everything before it out of Italy. The English were prepared to admit that nobody had achieved sweetness in English numbers before Mr Waller, apologised (except Dryden and Dryden only in a few moments) for Shakespeare, and thought Chaucer a good funny old savage.

Out of such a welter of blundering little good could come, and no good came save one. It is, I believe, absolutely impossible to trace, in so much as one single filament, the extension and deepening of critical appreciation which began in the next century to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. But that quarrel did excite and feed the critical spirit and appetite, and did give signs of an as yet half-blind craving for the possession of critical knowledge.[407]

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Footnote 407:

Perhaps it is still desirable, though almost for the last time, to
observe that the omission of casual criticism in non-critical work is
intentional and necessary. Nowhere could more interesting examples of
it, from Molière downwards, be produced; but this is only a
temptation, not a reason.

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