Chapter II: The Contemporaries of Voltaire (2)

Indeed a careful perusal of Batteux cannot but force on us the consideration that the mechanical age, the age of Arkwright and Watt, was approaching, or had approached. [Sidenote: _His adjustment of Rules and Taste._] His Rules and his Taste “clutch” each other by turns, like the elaborate plant of the modern machinist. If the Rules are too narrow and precise, Taste holds them open; if Taste shows any sign of getting lawless, the Rules bring it to its bearings. It is extremely ingenious; but the questions remain—Whether it is natural? and Whether any good came from the exercise of the principles which it attempts to reconcile and defend? The manner of Batteux, it must be allowed, is as much less freezing and unsatisfactory than Le Bossu’s, as it is less arbitrary and less aggressive than Boileau’s. These two would, in the face of fact and history, have _identified_ Taste and a certain construction of Rule. Batteux rather regards the two as reciprocal escapements, easing and regulating each other. It is part of his merit that he recognises, to some extent, the importance of observation. In fact, great part of this introductory treatise is a naïf and interesting complaint of the difficulty which the results of this observation are introducing into Rule-criticism. “Rules are getting so many,” he admits in his opening sentence; and, no doubt, so long as you find it necessary to make a new rule whenever you find a new poet, the state of things must be more and more parlous. But, like all his century-fellows without exception on the Classical, and like too many on the other side, he does not think of simply marching through the open door, and leaving the prison of Rule and Kind behind him.

From these idols Batteux will not yet be separated: he hardens his heart in a different manner from Pharaoh, and will not let himself go. The _utile_ is never to be parted from the _dulce_; “the poems of Homer and Virgil are not vain Romances, where the mind wanders at the will of a mad imagination; they are great bodies of doctrine,” &c. Anacreon [Heaven help us!] was himself determined to be a moral teacher.[691] Again, there must be Action, and it must be single, united, simple, yet of variety; the style must not be too low, or too high, &c., &c.

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Footnote 691:

_Op. cit._, i. 60.

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When Batteux has got into the old rut, he remains in it. We slip into the well-known treatises by Kinds—Dialogue, Eclogue, Heroic Poem, and the rest—with the equally well-known examination afterwards of celebrated examples in a shamefaced kind of way—to the extent of two whole volumes for poetry, and a third (actually the fourth) for prose. Finally, we have what is really a separate tractate, _De la Construction Oratoire_. The details in these later volumes are often excellent; but obviously, and _per se_, they fall into quite a lower rank as compared with the first. If we were to look at nothing but the fact, frankly acknowledged by Batteux, that he is now considering French classical literature only, we should be able to detect the error. In his first volume he had at least referred to Milton.

In other words Batteux, like the rest of them, is not so much a halter between two opinions as a man who has deliberately made up his mind to abide by one, but who will let in as much of the other as he thinks it safe to do, or cannot help doing. [Sidenote: _His incompleteness._] Let him once extend his principle of observation in time, country, and kind, and, being a reasonably ingenious and ingenuous person, he must discover, first, that his elaborate double-check system of Rule and Taste will not work, and, secondly, that there is not the least need of it. You must charge epicycle on cycle before you can get, even with the freest play of Taste, the _Iliad_ and the _Æneid_ and the _Orlando_ to work together under any Rule. Epicycle must be added to epicycle before you can get in the _Chanson de Roland_ and the _Morte d’Arthur_ as well. Drop your “rule,” ask simply, “Are the things put before me said _poeticamente_?” “Do they give me the poetic pleasure?” and there is no further difficulty. Batteux, though, as we have seen, by no means a bigot, would probably have stopped his ears and rent his clothes if such a suggestion had been made to him.

Batteux is a remarkable, and probably the latest, example of neo-classicism sitting at ease in Zion and promulgating laws for submissive nations; in La Harpe, with an even stronger dogmatism, we shall find, if not the full consciousness that the enemy is at the gates of the capital, at any rate distinct evidence of knowledge that there is sedition in the provinces.[692] [Sidenote: _Marmontel._] Between the two, Marmontel[693] is a distinguished, and a not disagreeable, example of that middle state which we find everywhere in the late eighteenth century but which in France is distinguished at once by greater professed orthodoxy, and by concessions and compromises of a specially tell-tale kind. The critical work of the author of _Bélisaire_ and _Les Incas_ is very considerable in bulk. He has written an Essay on Romance in connection with the two very “anodyne” examples of the kind just referred to; an Essay (indeed two essays) on Taste; many book reviews for the _Observateur Littéraire_, &c.; prefaces and comments for some specimens of French early seventeenth-century drama—Mairet’s _Sophonisbe_, Du Ryer’s _Scévole_, &c.; and, besides other things, a mass of articles on literary and critical subjects for the _Encyclopédie_, which are generally known in their collected form as _Éléments de Littérature_. He has been rather variously judged as a critic. There is no doubt that he is a special sinner in that perpetual gabble about _la vertu, la morale_, and the rest, which is so sickening in the whole group; and which more than justified Mr Carlyle’s vigorous apostrophe, “_Be_ virtuous, in the Devil’s name and his grandmother’s, and have done with it!” He has also that apparent inconsistency, something of which (as we have seen once for all in Dryden’s case) often shows itself in men of alert literary interests who do not very early work out for themselves a personal literary creed, and who are averse to swallowing a ready-made one. But at the same time he never openly quarrels with neo-classicism, and is sometimes one of its most egregious spokesmen; while he is “philosophastrous,” in the special eighteenth-century kind, to a point which closely approaches caricature. [Sidenote: _Oddities and qualities of his criticism._] I have quoted elsewhere, but must necessarily quote again here, his three egregious and pyramidal reasons[694] for the puzzling excellence of English poetry. Either, it seems, the Englishman, being a glory-loving animal, sees that poetry adds to the lustre of nations, and so he goes and does it; _or_ being naturally given to meditation and sadness, he needs to be moved and distracted by the illusions of this beautiful art; _or_ [Shade of Molière!] it is because his genius in certain respects is proper for Poesy.

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Footnote 692:

He, with Condorcet and M. J. Chénier, is sometimes spoken of as
showing a classical _reaction_ against the eighteenth-century
toleration of English and other vagaries which we shall see in
Marmontel. I think “reaction” is rather too strong a word, though
“recrudescence” might do. Condorcet was only a critic _par interim_,
if even that, nor need we occupy ourselves with him: justice shall be
done (Fortune permitting) in the next volume to the person who had the
honour to be brother to André Chénier.

Footnote 693:

_Œuvres Complètes_, 7 vols., Paris 1819; _Éléments de Littérature_ by
themselves, 3 vols. in the Didot Collection.

Footnote 694:

_El. de Litt._, article _Poésie_.

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To comment on this would only spoil it; but let it be observed that Marmontel _does_ admit the excellence of English poetry. So also, though he never swerves, in consciousness or conscience, from neo-classic orthodoxy, he insinuates certain doubts about Boileau, and quotes,[695] at full length, two pieces of the despised Ronsard as showing lyrical qualities in which the legislator of Parnassus is wanting. His article _Poétique_ is, considering his standpoint, a quite extraordinarily just summary and criticism of the most celebrated authorities on the subject—Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Vauquelin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Gravina, &c.—and the attitude to Boileau,[696] visible, as has been said, elsewhere, is extremely noteworthy. Marmontel speaks of Despréaux with compliments: but some, even of his praises, are not a little equivocal, and he contrives to put his subject’s faults with perfect politeness indeed, but without a vestige of compromise. Boileau, he says, gives a precise and luminous notion of all the kinds, but he is not deep on a single one: his _Art_ may contribute to form the taste if it be well understood, but to understand it well one must have the taste already formed.

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Footnote 695:

Ibid., art. _Anacréontique_.

Footnote 696:

The enemy will perhaps say, parodying Hegel: “With this historian of
criticism, anybody is a critic who does not believe in Boileau.” 'A
will have a little galled me: but not seriously.

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It would be possible, of course,—indeed, very easy,—to select from Marmontel’s abundant critical writings, which covered great part of a long lifetime in their composition, a bundle of “classical” absurdities which would leave nothing to desire. But the critic is almost always better than his form of creed. He takes an obviously genuine, if of necessity not at first a thoroughly well instructed, interest in the _Histoire du Théâtre_ of the Frères Parfait, the first systematic[697] dealing with old French literature since Fauchet and Pasquier: his _Essai sur les Romans_, though of course considered _du côté moral_, is, for his date, a noteworthy attempt in that comparative and historical study of literature which was to lead to the new birth of criticism. It is most remarkable to find him, in the early reviews of his _Observateur_,[698] dating from the midst of the fifth decade of the eighteenth century, observing, as to _Hamlet_ in La Place’s translation, that the ghost-scene and the duel with Laertes inspire terror and pathetic interest at the very reading, asking why “our poets” should deny themselves the use of these great springs of the two tragic passions, admiring the taste and justice of the observations to the players, and actually finding _Titus Andronicus_, though “frightful and sanguinary,” a thing worth serious study. That it is possible to extract from these very places, as from others, the usual stuff about Shakespeare’s “want of order and decency,” &c., is of no moment. _This_ is matter of course: it is not matter of course that, in the dead waist and middle of the eighteenth century, a French critic should write of the description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus: “Ce morceau présente Shakespeare sous un nouveau point de vue. On n’a connu jusqu'à présent que la force du génie de cet auteur: on ne s’attendait pas à tant de délicatesse et de légèreté.”[699]

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Footnote 697:

I use this word not as synonymous with “methodical,” but as
contrasting the book with fragmentary commentaries like those of La
Monnoye and Le Duchat.

Footnote 698:

These will be found in vol. vii. of ed. cit.

Footnote 699:

M. Texte must have forgotten these remarkable passages, or perhaps not
have known them, when in M. Petit de Julleville’s large _History_ (vi.
754) he wrote that La Place’s version could only confirm readers in
the idea that Shakespeare was a chaos of monstrosity and triviality.
Evidently it had quite a different effect on Marmontel.

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I should like to dwell longer on Marmontel if it were only for two or three phrases which appear in one short article,[700] “Depuis que Pascal et Corneille, Racine et Boileau ont _épuré et appauvri_ la langue de Marot et de Montaigne.... Boileau n’avait pas reçu de la nature l’organe avec lequel on sent les beautés simples et touchantes de notre divin fabuliste [La Fontaine of course].... Il est à souhaiter qu’on n’abandonne pas ce langage du bon vieux temps ... on ferait un joli dictionnaire des mots qu’on a tort d’abandonner et de laisser vieillir.” It must be clear to any one who reads these phrases that there is the germ of _mil-huit-cent-trente_ in them—the first and hardly certain sound of the knell of narrow, colourless vocabulary and literature in France. But enough has probably been said. It would be difficult to make out a case for Marmontel as in any way a great critic. He has not cleared his mind of cant enough for that. But he is an instance, and an important instance, of the way in which the clearing agents were being gradually thrown into the minds of men of letters at this time, and of the reaction which they were—at first partially and accidentally—producing. Even his _Essai sur le Goût_, fantastically arbitrary as it is, wears at times almost an air of irony, as if the writer were really exposing the arbitrariness and the convention of the thing he is ostensibly praising. He is comparing and tasting, not simply deducing: and however much he may still be inclined to think with his master that the Satan, Sin, and Death piece is an unimaginable horror, and the citizen scenes in Shakespeare’s Roman plays a vulgar excrescence, he is far from the obstinate sublimity-in-absurdity of La Harpe. He at least does not hold that a beauty, not according to rule, has no business to be a beauty; that the tree is not to be judged by the fruit, but the fruit by the ticket on the tree.

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Footnote 700:

Under the head _Marotique_.

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In the _mare magnum_ of critical writing at this period, constantly fed by books, literary periodicals, academic competitions, and what not, it would be idle to attempt to chronicle drops—individuals who are not in some special way interesting or representative. [Sidenote: _Others._] It would be especially idle because—for reasons indicated more than once in passing already—the bulk of the criticism of this time in France is really of little value, being as doctrine make-believe, and destitute of thoroughness, and as appreciation injured by narrowness of reading and want of true literary interest. It cannot have been quite accidental, although the great collaborative _Histoire de la Littérature Française_ of the late M. Petit de Julleville is not a model of methodic adequacy, that there is no strictly critical chapter in the volume on the eighteenth century. [Sidenote: _Thomas, Suard, &c._] Take, for instance, two such representative men as Suard and Thomas, both of them born near the beginning of the second generation of the century, and therefore characteristic of its very central class and _crû_. Both enjoyed almost the highest reputation in the second rank. Marmontel somewhere speaks of Thomas’s _Essai sur les Éloges_ as the best piece of critical inquiry which had appeared since Cicero on the Orator; but it is fair to remember that Thomas had refused to stand against Marmontel for the Academy. Suard, for many years Secretary of the Academy itself, seriously endeavoured, and was by his contemporaries thought not to have endeavoured in vain, to make that office a sort of Criticship Laureate or King’s Remembrancership of Literature. He has left volumes on volumes of critical work; and even now prefaces, introductions, &c., from his pen may be found in the older class of standard editions of French classics. Yet the work of neither of these would justify us in doing more than refer to them in this fashion. It is excellently written in the current style, inclining to declamation and solemnity in Thomas,[701] to _persiflage_ and smartness in Suard. It says what an academic critic of the time was supposed to say, and knows what he was supposed to know. But it really is, in Miss Mills’ excellent figure, “the desert of Sahara,” and a desert without many, if any, oases.

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Footnote 701:

_L’emphatique Thomas_, as he is duly called in that traditional
distribution of epithets which is so dear to the French mind, and
which helps to explain why it is always, in its depths, neo-classic.

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La Harpe is a different person. He is not very kind to Batteux. [Sidenote: _La Harpe._] He patronises his principles, and allows his scholarship to be sound; but finds fault with his style, calls his criticism _commune_—“lacking in distinction” is perhaps the best equivalent—his ideas narrow, and his prejudices pedantic. It would not be quite just to say _De te fabula_, but this is almost as much as we could say if we were judging La Harpe, after his own fashion of judgment, from a different standpoint. But the historian cannot judge thus. La Harpe is really an important person in the History of Criticism. He “makes an end,” as Mr Carlyle used to say; in other words, whether he is or is not the last eminent neo-classical critic of France, he puts this particular phase of criticism as sharply and as effectively as it can be put. Nay, he does even more than this for us; he shows us neo-classicism at bay. Already, by the time of his later lectures, when by the oddest coincidence he was defending Voltaire and abusing Diderot, making head at once against the Jacobins and against that party of revived mediævalism which was the surest antidote to Jacobinism, there were persons—Népomucène Lemercier, and others—who held that Boileau and Racine had killed French poetry. Against these La Harpe takes up his testimony; and the necessity of opposition makes it all the more decided.

His _Cours de Littérature_ is a formidable—I had almost called it an impossible—book to tackle, composed of, or redacted from, the lectures of many years, and unfortunately, though not unnaturally, dwelling most fully on the parts of the subject that are of least real importance. [Sidenote: _His_ Cours de Littérature.] Its first edition[702] was a shelf-full in itself. It now fills, with some fragments, nearly the whole of three great volumes of the _Panthéon Littéraire_, and nearly two-thirds, certainly three-fifths, of this are devoted to the French literature of the eighteenth century, a subject for which, to speak frankly, it may be doubted whether any posterity will have time corresponding to spare. Even in the earlier and more general parts there are defects, quite unconnected with the soundness or unsoundness of La Harpe’s general critical position. There is nothing which one should be slower to impute, save on the very clearest evidence, than ignorance of a subject of which a writer professes knowledge; and one should be slow, not merely on general principles of good manners, but because there is nothing which the baser kind of critic is so ready to impute. But I own that, after careful reading and reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that La Harpe’s knowledge of the classics left a very great deal to desire. That, in his survey of Epic, he omits Apollonius Rhodius in his proper place altogether and puts him in a postscript, might be a mere oversight, negligible by all but the illiberal: unfortunately the postscript itself shows no signs of critical appreciation. It is more unfortunate still that he should say that all the writers of ancient Rome loaded Catullus with eulogy, when we know that Horace only spares him a passing sneer, that Quintilian has no notice for anything but his “bitterness,” and that hardly anybody but Martial does him real justice. However, we need not dwell on this. If La Harpe was not very widely or deeply read in old-world or in old-French literature, he certainly knew the French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very well indeed.

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Footnote 702:

18 vols. (Paris, 1825 _sq._)

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On the other hand, it is significant, and awkward, that, in dealing with English, German, and other modern literatures, he always seems to refer to translations, and hardly ever ventures a criticism except on the mere matter of the poem. [Sidenote: _His critical position as_ ultimus suorum.] Moreover, which is of even more importance for us, he was not in the slightest doubt about his point of view either of these or of any other literature. His censures and his praises are adjusted with almost unerring accuracy to the neo-classic creed, as we have defined and illustrated it in this volume. His _Introduction_ pours all the scorn he could muster on those who contemn the art of writing. Even Shakespeare, coarse as he is, was not without learning. That poet, Dante, and Milton executed “monstrous” works; but in these monsters there were some beautiful parts done according to “the principles.” And, to do him justice, he never swerves or flinches from this. English has “an inconceivable pronunciation.”[703] The _Odyssey_ is an _Arabian Nights’_ tale, puerile, languid, seriously extravagant, even ignoble in parts. The sojourns with Calypso and Circe offer nothing interesting to La Harpe. The wonderful descent to Hades is as bad as that of Æneas is admirable. La Harpe tells us that these and other similar judgments are proofs of his severe frankness. They certainly are; he has told us what he is.

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Footnote 703:

La Harpe here anticipated the Malay chief whom Mr Wallace met in the
farthest isles of the Bird of Paradise, and who chased him therefrom
with contumely when he said he came from a place called “England.”
“Unglung,” said the chief, was not a word that a man could pronounce.
And therefore—this is La Harpe all over—there could be no such place,
and Mr Wallace was a liar.

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That after this he should pronounce the _Georgics_ “the most perfect poem transmitted to us by the Ancients”; fix on the _Prometheus_ his favourite epithet of “monstrous,” and say that it “cannot even be called a tragedy”; think Plutarch thoroughly justified in his censure of Aristophanes; read Thucydides with less pleasure than Xenophon; and decide that Apuleius wrote _vers le moyen age_, which was _un désert_,—these things do not surprise us, nor that he should tolerate _Ossian_ after not tolerating Milton. It is in his fragment on the last-named poet that he gives us his whole secret, with one of those intentional, yet really unconscious, bursts of frankness which have been already noticed. “La poésie,” he says, “ne doit me peindre que ce que je peux comprendre, admettre, ou supposer.” That “suspension of disbelief” in which, at no distant date, Coleridge was to discover the real poetic effect would, it is clear, have been vehemently resisted and refused by La Harpe, or rather it could never have entered his head as possible.

He remains therefore hopelessly self-shut out of the gates of Poetry—only admitting and comprehending those beauties which stray into the precinct of Rhetoric; discerning with horror “monsters” within the gates themselves; and in his milder moments conjecturing charitably that, if Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton had only always observed the rules, which they sometimes slipped into, they might have been nearly as good poets—he will not say quite—as Racine and Voltaire. Never have we met, nor shall we ever meet again, a critical Ephraim so utterly joined to idols. It is unnecessary—it would even be useless—to argue about him; he must be observed, registered, and passed. Yet I do not pretend to regret the time which I have myself spent over him. He writes well; he sees clearly through his “monstrous” spectacles and subject to their laws; above all, he has, what is, for some readers at any rate, the intense and unfailing charm of “Thorough.” He is no cowardly Braggadochio or inconstant Paridell: he is Sansfoy and Sansloy in one—defending his Duessa, and perfectly ready to draw sword and spend blood for her at any moment. Nor does he wield the said sword by any means uncraftsmanly. Give him his premisses and his postulates, his Rules, his false Reason and sham Nature, his criterion of the admissible and comprehensible, and he very seldom makes a false conclusion. Would that all Gloriana’s own knights were as uncompromising, as hardy, and as deft!

Of the immense mass of Academic _Éloges_, and prize Essays generally, composed during the eighteenth century, no extended or minute account will be expected here. [Sidenote: _The Academic Essay._] I have myself, speaking without the slightest exaggeration, read hundreds of them: indeed it is difficult to find a French man of letters, of any name during the whole time, in whose works some specimens of the kind do not figure. But—and it is at once a reason for dealing with them generally and a reason for not dealing with them as individuals—there is hardly any kind of publication which more fatally indicates the defects of the Academic system, and of that phase of criticism and literary taste of which it was the exponent. They were written in some cases—it is but repeating in other words what has been just said—by men of the greatest talent; they constituted with a play of one kind or another, the almost invariable _début_ of every Frenchman who had literary talent, great or small. They exhibit a relatively high level of a certain kind of literary, or at least rhetorical, attainment. But the last adjective has let slip the dogs on them, for they are almost always rhetorical in the worst senses of the word. Extensive reading in literature was not wanted by the forty guards of the Capitol; original thinking was quite certain to alarm them. The elegant nullity of the Greek Declamation, and the _ampullæ_ of the Roman, were the best things that were likely to be found. Yet sometimes in literature, as in philosophy, the Academic Essay produced remarkable things. And we may give some space to perhaps its most remarkable writer towards the close of the time, a writer symptomatic in the very highest degree, as showing the hold which neo-classic ideas still had in France—that is to say, Rivarol.[704]

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Footnote 704:

There is not, I think, even yet any complete edition of Rivarol,
though M. de Lescure some years ago devoted much attention to him. All
the work referred to below will be found in the older _Œuvres de
Rivarol_ (published by Delahays, Paris, 1857), with a useful selection
of criticisms. The present writer contributed to the _Fortnightly
Review_ for January 1879 an essay on Rivarol and Chamfort, which will
be found reprinted in _Miscellaneous Essays_ (2nd ed., London, 1895).
Chamfort himself can only be mentioned here as showing, in his
_Éloges_ on Molière and La Fontaine, how insignificant such things,
written even by such a man, can be.

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That “the St George of the epigram” might have been really great as a critic there can be little doubt; besides lesser exercises in this vocation, which are always acute if not always quite just, he has left us two fairly solid Essays, and a brilliant literary “skit,” to enable us to judge. [Sidenote: _Rivarol._] The last of the three, the _Almanach des Grands Hommes de nos jours_, does, with more wit, better temper, and better manners, what Gifford was to do a little later in England; it is a sort of sprinkling of an anodyne but potent Keating’s powder on the small poets and men of letters of the time just before the Revolution. But the treatise _De l’Universalité de la Langue Française_, laid before the Academy of Berlin in 1783, and the Preface to the writer’s Translation of the _Inferno_, are really solid documents. Both are prodigies of ingenuity, acuteness, and command of phrase, conditioned by want of knowledge and by _parti pris_. How praise Dante better than by saying that Italian took in his hands “une _fierté_ qu’elle n’eut plus après lui”?[705] how better describe what we miss even in Ariosto, even in Petrarch? Yet how go further astray than in finding fault with the _Inferno_ because “on ne rencontre pas assez d’épisodes”?[706] What a critical piercing to the joints and marrow of the fault of eighteenth-century poetry is the remark that Dante’s verses “se tiennent debout par la seule force du substantif et du verbe sans le concours d’une seule épithète!” And what a falling off is there when one passes from this to the old beauty-and-fault jangles and jars!

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Footnote 705:

Ed. cit., p. 277 _sq._

Footnote 706:

This is neo-classic criticism in its quintessence of corruption. What
fit reader wants, or could endure, an _episode_ between _Per me si va_
and _riveder le stelle_? You might as well demand “half an hour’s
interval for refreshments.” But your Epic must have your Episode. It
is like “Where is your brown tree?”

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The _Universality of French_[707] has many points of curiosity; but we must abide by those which are strictly literary. The temptation of the style to rhetoric, and, at the same time, “the solace of this sin,” could hardly be better shown than in Rivarol’s phrasing of the radical and inseparable clearness of French, as “une probité attachée à son génie.”[708] How happy is the admission that poets of other countries “give their metaphors at a higher strength,” “embrace the figurative style closer,” and are deeper and fuller in colour! Yet the history, both of French and English literature, given in each case at some length, is inadequate and incorrect, the comparisons are childish, and the vaticinations absurd. In fact, Rivarol was writing up to certain fixed ideas, the chief of which was that the French literature of 1660-1780 was the greatest that had ever existed—perhaps that ever could exist—in the world.

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Footnote 707:

Ed. cit., p. 79 _sq._

Footnote 708:

This, however, is _not_ in the Essay, but in a separate “Maxim.”

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This notion—to which it is but just to admit that other nations had given only too much countenance and support, though England and Germany at least were fast emancipating themselves—and the numbing effect of the general neo-classic creed from which it was no very extravagant deduction, mar a very large proportion[709] of French criticism during the century, and, almost without exception, the whole of what we here call its orthodox criticism. So long as it, or anything like it, prevails in any country, at any time, the best criticism is impossible; the “He followeth not _us_” interferes with all due appreciation.[710]

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Footnote 709:

Cf., for instance, Batteux, quite a reasonable person on the whole. He
has no doubt (i. 80, 81) of the excellence, the almost perfection, at
which French taste has arrived; he only fears that it may be
impossible to guard against falling from so high an estate. This
extraordinary self-complacency is a little less noticeable in England,
but only a little. When we thought that Mr Pope had improved even upon
Mr Dryden, and was in a sort of Upper House of Literature as compared
with Shakespeare and Chaucer, we could not throw many stones at those
who considered Voltaire a better poet than Ronsard.

Footnote 710:

The corresponding chapter to this in that “History of Critical _Ana_,”
which we must not write, would be particularly rich. Every branch of
French literature at the time is full of such things; the most amusing
of all, perhaps, being Crébillon’s malicious eulogy-satire on
_Marivaudage_ at the end of the 2nd book of _L’Ecumoire_, where Tanzäi
condemns, and Néadarné is charmed with, the juxtaposition of words
“that never met before, and thought they could not possibly get on
together,” and the depicting “not merely of what everybody has done
and said and thought, but of what they would like to have thought but
did not!”

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