Chapter XXIV (1)

HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE PROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

_Italian Writers--Boccalini--Grammatical and Critical Works--Gracian-- French Writers--Balzac--Voiture--French Academy--Vaugelas--Patru and Le Maistre--Style of English Prose--Earl of Essex--Knolles--Several other English Writers_.

|Decline of taste in Italy.|

1. It would be vain, probably, to inquire from what general causes we should deduce the decline of taste in Italy. None, at least, have occurred to my mind, relating to political or social circumstances, upon which we could build more than one of those sophistical theories, which assume a causal relation between any concomitant events. Bad taste, in fact, whether in literature or the arts, is always ready to seize upon the public, being, in many cases, no more than a pleasure in faults which are really fitted to please us, and of which it can only be said that they hinder or impair the greater pleasure we should derive from beauties. Among these critical sins, none are so dangerous as the display of ingenious and novel thoughts, or turns of phrase. For as such enter into the definition of good writing, it seems very difficult to persuade the world that they can ever be the characteristics of bad writing. The metes and bounds of ornament, the fine shades of distinction which regulate a judicious choice, are only learned by an attentive as well as a naturally susceptible mind; and it is rarely, perhaps, that an unprepared multitude does not prefer the worse picture, the worse building, the worse poem, the worse speech to the better. Education, an acquaintance with just criticism, and still more the habitual observation of what is truly beautiful in nature or art, or in the literature of taste, will sometimes generate almost a national tact that rejects the temptations of a meretricious and false style; but experience has shown that this happy state of public feeling will not be very durable. Whatever might be the cause of it, this age of the Italian seicentisti has been reckoned almost as inauspicious to good writing in prose as in verse. “If we except,” says Tiraboschi, “the Tuscans and a very few more, never was our language so neglected as in this period. We can scarce bear to read most of the books that were published, so rude and full of barbarisms is their style. Few had any other aim than to exercise their wit in conceits and metaphors; and, so long as they could scatter them profusely over their pages, cared nothing for the choice of phrases or the purity of grammar. Their eloquence on public occasions was intended only for admiration and applause, not to persuade, or move.”[554] And this, he says, is applicable alike to their Latin and Italian, their sacred and profane harangues. The academical discourses, of which Dati has collected many in his Prose Fiorentine, are poor in comparison with those of the sixteenth.[555]

[554] Vol. xi., p. 415.

[555] Vol. xi., p. 415.

2. A later writer than Tiraboschi has thought this sentence against the seicentisti a little too severe, and condemning equally with him the bad taste characteristic of that age, endeavours to rescue a few from the general censure.[556] It is, at least, certain that the insipidity of the cinque cento writers, their long periods void of any but the most trivial meaning, their affectation of the faults of Cicero’s manner in their own language, ought not to be overlooked or wholly pardoned, while we dwell on an opposite defect of their successors, the perpetual desire to be novel, brilliant, or profound. These may, doubtless, be the more offensive of the two; but they are, perhaps, not less likely to be mingled with something really worth reading.

[556] Salfi, xiv., 11.

|Style of Galileo.|

3. It will not be expected that we can mention many Italian books, after what has been said, which come very precisely within the class of polite literature, or claim any praise on the ground of style. Their greatest luminary, Galileo, wrote with clearness, elegance, and spirit; no one among the moderns had so entirely rejected a dry and technical manner of teaching, and thrown such attractions round the form of truth. Himself a poet and a critic, he did not hesitate to ascribe his own philosophical perspicuity to the constant perusal of Ariosto. This I have mentioned in another place; but we cannot too much remember that all objects of intellectual pursuit are as bodies acting with reciprocal forces in one system, being all in relation to the faculties of the mind, which is itself but one; and that the most extensive acquaintance with the various provinces of literature will not fail to strengthen our dominion over those we more peculiarly deem our own. The school of Galileo, especially Torricelli and Redi, were not less distinguished than himself for their union of elegance with philosophy.[557]

[557] Salfi, xiv., 12.

|Bentivoglio.|

4. The letters of Bentivoglio are commonly known. This epistolary art was always cultivated by the Italians, first in the Latin tongue, and afterwards in their own. Bentivoglio has written with equal dignity and ease. Galileo’s letters are also esteemed on account of their style as well as of what they contain. In what is more peculiarly called eloquence, the Italians of this age are rather emulous of success than successful; the common defects of taste in themselves, and in those who heard or read them, as well as, in most instances, the uninteresting nature of their subjects exclude them from our notice.

|Boccalini’s News from Parnassus.|

5. Trajan Boccalini was by his disposition inclined to political satire, and possibly to political intrigue; but we have here only to mention the work by which he is best known, Advices from Parnassus (Ragguagli di Parnaso). If the idea of this once popular and celebrated book is not original, which I should rather doubt, though without immediately recognising a similarity to anything earlier (Lucian, the common prototype, excepted), it has at least been an original source. In the general turn of Boccalini’s fictions, and perhaps in a few particular inventions, we may sometimes perceive what a much greater man has imitated; they bear a certain resemblance to those of Addison, though the vast superiority of the latter in felicity of execution and variety of invention may almost conceal it. The Ragguagli are a series of despatches from the court of Apollo on Parnassus, where he is surrounded by eminent men of all ages. This fiction becomes in itself very cold and monotonous; yet there is much variety in the subjects of the decisions made by the god, with the advice of his counsellors, and some strokes of satire are well hit, though more perhaps fail of effect. But we cannot now catch the force of every passage. Boccalini is full of allusions to his own time, even where the immediate subject seems ancient. This book was published at Venice in 1612; at a time when the ambition of Spain was regarded with jealousy by patriotic Italians, who thought that pacific republic their bulwark and their glory. He inveighs, therefore, against the military spirit and the profession of war, “necessary sometimes, but so fierce and inhuman that no fine expressions can make it honourable.”[558] Nor is he less severe on the vices of kings, nor less ardent in his eulogies of liberty; the government of Venice, being reckoned, and not altogether untruly, an asylum of free-thought and action, in comparison with that of Spain. Aristotle, he reports in one of his despatches, was besieged in his villa on Parnassus by a number of armed men belonging to different princes, who insisted on his retracting the definition he had given of a tyrant, that he was one who governed for his own good and not that of the people, because it would apply to every prince, all reigning for their own good. The philosopher, alarmed by this demand, altered his definition; which was to run thus, that tyrants were certain persons of old time, whose race was now quite extinct.[559] Boccalini, however, takes care, in general, to mix something of playfulness with his satire, so that it could not be resented without apparent ill-nature. It seems, indeed, to us free from invective, and rather meant to sting than to wound. But this, if a common rumour be true, did not secure him against a beating of which he died. The style of Boccalini is said by the critics to be clear and fluent, rather than correct or elegant; and he displays the taste of his times by extravagant metaphors. But to foreigners, who regard this less, his News from Parnassus, unequal, of course, and occasionally tedious, must appear to contain many ingenious allusions, judicious criticisms, and acute remarks.

[558] Ragg, 75.

[559] Ragg, 76.

|His Pietra del Paragone.|

6. The Pietra del Paragone by the same author is an odd, and rather awkward mixture of reality and fiction, all levelled at the court of Spain, and designed to keep alive a jealousy of its ambition. It is a kind of episode or supplement to the Ragguagli di Parnaso, the leading invention being preserved. Boccalini is an interesting writer on account of the light he throws on the history and sentiments of Italy. He is in this work a still bolder writer than in the former; not only censuring Spain without mercy, but even the Venetian aristocracy, observing upon the insolence of the young nobles towards the citizens, though he justifies the senate for not punishing the former more frequently with death by public execution, which would lower the nobility in the eyes of the people. They were, however, he says, as severely punished, when their conduct was bad, by exclusion from offices of trust. The Pietra del Paragone is a kind of political, as the Ragguagli is a critical miscellany.

|Ferrante Pallavicino.|

7. About twenty years after Boccalini, a young man appeared, by name Ferrante Pallavicino, who, with a fame more local and transitory, with less respectability of character, and probably with inferior talents, trod to a certain degree in his steps. As Spain had been the object of satire to the one, so was Rome to the other. Urban VIII., an ambitious pontiff, and vulnerable in several respects, was attacked by an imprudent and self-confident enemy, safe, as he imagined, under the shield of Venice. But Pallavicino, having been trepanned into the power of the pope, lost his head at Avignon. None of his writings have fallen in my way; that most celebrated at the time, and not wholly dissimilar in the conception to the News from Parnassus, was entitled The Courier robbed; a series of imaginary letters which such a fiction gave him a pretext for bringing together. Perhaps we may consider Pallavicino as rather a counterpart to Jordano Bruno, in the satirical character of the latter, than to Boccalini.[560]

[560] Corniani, viii., 205. Salfi, xiv., 46.

|Dictionary Della Crusca.|

8. The Italian language itself, grammatically considered, was still assiduously cultivated. The Academicians of Florence published the first edition of their celebrated Vocabolario della Crusca, in 1613. It was avowedly founded on Tuscan principles, setting up the fourteenth century as the Augustan period of the language, which they disdained to call Italian; and though not absolutely excluding the great writers of the sixteenth age whom Tuscany had not produced, giving in general a manifest preference to their own. Italy has rebelled against this tyranny of Florence, as she did, in the Social War, against that of Rome. Her Lombard, and Romagnol, and Neapolitan writers, have claimed the rights of equal citizenship, and fairly won them in the field of literature. The Vocabulary itself was not received as a legislative code. Beni assailed it by his Anti-Crusca the same year; many invidiously published marginal notes to point out the inaccuracies; and in the frequent revisions and enlargements of this dictionary, the exclusive character it affected has, I believe, been nearly lost.

|Grammatical works.--Buonmattei Bartoli.|

9. Buonmattei, himself a Florentine, was the first who completed an extensive and methodical grammar, “developing,” says Tiraboschi, “the whole economy and system of our language.” It was published entire, after some previous impressions of parts, with the title, Della Lingua Toscana, in 1643. This has been reckoned a standard work, both for its authority, and for the clearness, precision, and elegance with which it is written; but it betrays something of an academical and Florentine spirit in the rigour of its grammatical criticism.[561] Bartoli, a Ferrarese Jesuit, and a man of extensive learning, attacked that dogmatic school, who were accustomed to proscribe common phrases with a Non si può (It cannot be used), in a treatise entitled Il torto ed il diritto del Non si può. His object was to justify many expressions thus authoritatively condemned, by the examples of the best writers. This book was a little later than the middle of the century.[562]

[561] Tiraboschi, xi., 409. Salfi, xiii., 398.

[562] Corniani, vii., 259. Salfi, xiii., 417.

|Tassoni’s remarks on Petrarch.|

10. Petrarch had been the idol, in general, of the preceding age; and above all, he was the peculiar divinity of the Florentines. But this seventeenth century was in the productions of the mind a period of revolutionary innovation; men dared to ask why, as well as what, they ought to worship; and sometimes the same who rebelled against Aristotle, as an infallible guide, were equally contumacious in dealing with the great names of literature. Tassoni published in 1609 his Observations on the Poems of Petrarch. They are not written, as we should now think, adversely to one whom he professes to honour above all lyric poets in the world, and though his critical remarks are somewhat minute, they seem hardly unfair. A writer like Petrarch, whose fame has been raised so high by his style, is surely amenable to this severity of examination. The finest sonnets Tassoni generally extols, but gives a preference, on the whole, to the odes; which, even if an erroneous judgment, cannot be called unfair upon the author of both.[563] He produces many parallel passages from the Latin poems of Petrarch himself, as well as from the ancients and from the earlier Italians and Provençals. The manner of Tassoni is often humorous, original, intrepid, satirical on his own times; he was a man of real taste, and no servile worshipper of names.

[563] Tutte le rime, tutti i versi in generale del Petrarca lo
fecero poeta; ma le canzoni, per quanto a mi ne pare, furono
quelle, che poeta grande e famoso lo fecero, p. 46.

|Galileo’s remarks on Tasso.|

|Sforza Pallavicino.|

|And other critical writers.|

11. Galileo was less just in his observations upon Tasso. They are written with severity and sometimes an insulting tone towards the great poet, passing over generally the most beautiful verses, though he sometimes bestows praise. The object is to point out the imitations of Tasso from Ariosto, and his general inferiority. The Observations on the Art of Writing by Sforza Pallavicino, the historian of the council of Trent, published at Rome, 1646, is a work of general criticism containing many good remarks. What he says of imitation is worthy of being compared with Hurd; though he will be found not to have analysed the subject with anything like so much acuteness, nor was this to be expected in his age. Pallavicino has an ingenious remark, that elegance of style is produced by short metaphors, or _metaforette_ as he calls them, which give us a more lively apprehension of an object than its proper name. This seems to mean only single words in a figurative sense, as opposed to phrases of the same kind. He writes in a pleasing manner, and is an accomplished critic without pedantry. Salfi has given rather a long analysis of this treatise.[564] The same writer, treading in the steps of Corniani has extolled some Italian critics of this period, whose writings I have never seen; Beni, author of a prolix commentary in Latin on the poetics of Aristotle; Peregrino, not inferior, perhaps, to Pallavicino, though less known, whose theories are just and deep, but not expressed with sufficient perspicuity; and Fioretti, who assumed the fictitious name of Udeno Nisieli, and presided over an academy at Florence denominated the Apatisti. The Progymnasmi Poetici of this writer, if we may believe Salfi, ascend to that higher theory of criticism which deduces its rules, not from precedents or arbitrary laws, but from the nature of the human mind, and has, in modern times, been distinguished by the name of æsthetic.[565]

[564] Vol. xiii., p. 440.

[565] Corniani, vii., 156; Salfi, xiii., 426.

|Prolusiones of Strada.|

12. In the same class of polite letters as these Italian writings, we may place the Prolusiones Academicæ of Famianus Strada. They are agreeably written, and bespeak a cultivated taste. The best is the sixth of the second book, containing the imitations of six Latin poets, which Addison has made well known (as I hope) to every reader in the 115th and 119th numbers of the Guardian. It is here that all may judge of this happy and graceful fiction; but those who have read the Latin imitations themselves, will perceive that Strada has often caught the tone of the ancients with considerable felicity. Lucan and Ovid are, perhaps, best counterfeited, Virgil not quite so well, and Lucretius worst of the six. The other two are Statius and Claudian.[566] In almost every instance the subject chosen is appropriated to the characteristic peculiarities of the poet.

[566] A writer quoted in Blount’s Censura Autorum, p. 859,
praises the imitation of Claudian above the rest, but thinks all
excellent.

|Spanish prose. Gracian.|

13. The style of Gongora which deformed the poetry of Spain extended its influence over prose. A writer named Gracian (it seems to be doubtful which of two brothers, Lorenzo and Balthazar) excelled Gongora himself in the affectation, the refinement, the obscurity of his style. “The most voluminous of his works,” says Bouterwek, “bears the affected title of El Criticón. It is an allegorical picture of the whole course of human life divided into Crises, that is, sections according to fixed points of view, and clothed in the formal garb of a pompous romance. It is scarcely possible to open any page of this book without recognising in the author a man who is in many respects far from common, but who, from the ambition of being entirely uncommon in thinking and writing, studiously and ingeniously, avoids nature and good taste. A profusion of the most ambiguous subtleties expressed in ostentatious language, are scattered throughout the work; and these are the more offensive, in consequence of their union with the really grand view of the relationship of man to nature and his Creator, which forms the subject of the treatise. Gracian would have been an excellent writer had not he so anxiously wished to be an extraordinary one.”[567]

[567] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 533.

14. The writings of Gracian seem in general to be the quintessence of bad taste. The worst of all, probably, is El Eroe, which is admitted to be almost unintelligible by the number of far-fetched expressions, though there is more than one French translation of it. El político Fernando, a panegyric on Ferdinand the catholic, seems as empty as it is affected and artificial. The style of Gracian is always pointed, emphatic, full of that which looks like profundity or novelty, though neither deep nor new. He seems to have written on a maxim he recommends to the man of the world: “if he desires that all should look up to him, let him permit himself to be known, but not to be understood.”[568] His treatise entitled Agudeza y arte di ingenio is a system of concetti, digested under their different heads, and selected from Latin, Italian, and Spanish writers of that and the preceding age. It is said in the Biographie Universelle that this work, though too metaphysical, is useful in the critical history of literature. Gracian obtained a certain degree of popularity in France and England.

[568] Si quiere que le veneren todos, permítase al conocimiento,
no a la comprehensión.

|French prose. Du Vair.|

15. The general taste of French writers in the sixteenth century, as we have seen, was simple and lively, full of sallies of natural wit and a certain archness of observation, but deficient in those higher qualities of language which the study of the ancients had taught men to admire. In public harangues, in pleadings, and in sermons, these characteristics of the French manner were either introduced out of place, or gave way to a tiresome pedantry. Du Vair was the first who endeavoured to bring in a more elaborate and elevated diction. Nor was this confined to the example he gave. In 1607, he published a treatise on French eloquence, and on the causes through which it had remained at so low a point. This work relates chiefly to the eloquence of the bar, or at least that of public speakers, and the causes which he traces are chiefly such as would operate on that kind alone. But some of his observations are applicable to style in the proper sense; and his treatise has been reckoned the first which gave France the rules of good writing, and the desire to practice them.[569] A modern critic who censures the Latinisms of Du Vair’s style, admits that his treatise on eloquence makes an epoch in the language.[570]

[569] Gibert, Jugemens des Savans sur les auteurs qui ont traité
de la rhétorique. This work is annexed to some editions of
Baillet. Goujet has copied or abridged Gibert, without distinct
acknowledgement, and not always carefully preserving the sense.

[570] Neufchateau, préface aux Œuvres de Pascal, p. 181.

|Balzac.|

|Character of his writings.|

16. A more distinguished æra, however, is dated from 1625, when the letters of Balzac were published.[571] There had indeed been a few intermediate works, which contributed, though now little known, to the improvement of the language. Among these, the translation of Florus by Coeffeteau was reckoned a masterpiece of French style, and Vaugelas refers more frequently to this than to any other book. The French were very strong in translations from the classical writers; and to this they are certainly much indebted for the purity and correctness they reached in their own language. These translators, however, could only occupy a secondary place. Balzac himself is hardly read. “The polite world,” it was said a hundred years since, “knows nothing now of these works, which were once its delight.”[572] But his writings are not formed to delight those, who wish either to be merry or wise, to laugh or to learn; yet he has real excellencies, besides those which may be deemed relative to the age in which he came. His language is polished, his sentiments are just but sometimes common, the cadence of his periods is harmonious, but too artificial and uniform; on the whole, he approaches to the tone of a languid sermon, and leaves a tendency to yawn. But in his time superficial truths were not so much proscribed as at present; the same want of depth belongs to almost all the moralists in Italian and in modern Latin. Balzac is a moralist with a pure heart and a love of truth and virtue, somewhat alloyed by the spirit of flattery towards persons, however he may declaim about courts and courtiers in general, a competent erudition and a good deal of observation of the world. In his Aristippe, addressed to Christina, and consequently a late work, he deals much in political precepts and remarks, some of which might be read with advantage. But he was accused of borrowing his thoughts from the ancients, which the author of an Apology for Balzac seems not wholly to deny. This apology indeed had been produced by a book on the Conformity of the eloquence of M. Balzac with that of the ancients.

[571] The same writer fixes on this as an epoch, and it was
generally admitted in the seventeenth century. The editor of
Balzac’s Works in 1665, says, after speaking of the unformed
state of the French language, full of provincial idioms and
incorrect phrases: M. de Balzac est venu en ce temps de confusion
et de désordre, où toutes les lectures qu’il faisoit, et toutes
les actions qu’il entendoit lui devoient être suspectes, où il
avoit à se défier de tous les maîtres et de tous les exemples; et
où il ne pouvoit arriver à son but qu’en s’éloignant de tous les
chemins battus, ni marcher dans la bonne route qu’après se l’être
ouverte à lui même. Il l’a ouverte en effet, et pour lui et pour
les autres; il y a fait entrer un grand nombre d’heureux génies,
dont il étoit le guide et le modèle: et si la France voit
aujourd’hui que ses écrivains sont plus polis et plus réguliers,
que ceux d’Espagne et d’Italie, il faut qu’elle en rende
l’honneur à ce grand homme, dont la mémoire lui doit être en
vénération.... La même obligation que nous avons a M. de Malherbe
pour la poésie, nous l’avons a M. de Balzac pour la prose; il lui
a prescrit des bornes et des régles; il lui a donné de la douceur
et de la force, il a montré que l’éloquence doit avoir des
accords, aussi bien que la musique, et il a sçu mêler si
adroitement cette diversité de sons et de cadences, qu’il n’est
point de plus délicieux concert que celui de ses paroles. C’est
en plaçant tous les mots avec tant d’ordre et de justesse qu’il
ne laisse rien de mol ni de foible dans son discours, &c. This
regard to the cadence of his periods is characteristic of Balzac.
It has not, in general, been much practised in France,
notwithstanding some splendid exceptions, especially in Bossuet.
Olivet observes, that it was the peculiar glory of Balzac to have
shown the capacity of the language for this rhythm. Hist. de
l’Acad. Française, p. 84. But has not Du Vair some claim also?
Neufchateau gives a much more limited eulogy of Balzac. Il avoit
pris à la lettre les reflections de Du Vair sur la trop grande
bassesse de notre éloquence. Il s’en forma une haute idée; mais
il se trompe d’abord dans l’application, car il porta dans le
style épistolaire qui doit être familier et leger, l’enflure
hyperbolique, la pompe, et le nombre, qui ne convient qu’aux
grandes déclamations et aux harangues oratoires.... Ce défaut de
Balzac contribua peut être à son succès; car le gout n’étoit pas
formé; mais il se corrigea dans la suite, et en parcourant son
recueil on s’aperçoit des progrès sensibles qu’il faisoit avec
l’age. Ce recueil si précieux pour l’histoire de notre
littérature a eu long temps une vogue extraordinaire. Nos plus
grands auteurs l’avoient bien étudié. Molière lui a emprunté
quelques idées.

[572] Goujet, i., 426.

|His letters.|

17. The letters of Balzac are in twenty-seven books; they begin in 1620 and end about 1653; the first portion having appeared in 1625. “He passed all his life,” says Vigneul-Marville, “in writing letters, without ever catching the right characteristics of that style.”[573] This demands a peculiar ease and naturalness of expression, for want of which they seem no genuine exponents of friendship or gallantry, and hardly of polite manners. His wit was not free from pedantry, and did not come from him spontaneously. Hence, he was little fitted to address ladies, even the Rambouillets; and indeed he had acquired so laboured and artificial a way of writing letters, that even those to his sister, though affectionate, smell too much of the lamp. His advocates admit that they are to be judged rather by the rules of oratorical than epistolary composition.

[573] Mélanges de Littérature, vol. i., p. 126. He adds, however,
that Balzac had “un talent particulier pour embellir notre
langue.” The writer whom I quote under the name of
Vigneul-Marville which he assumed was D’Argonne, a Benedictine of
Rouen.

18. In the moral dissertations, such as that entitled the Prince, this elaborate manner is of course not less discernible, but not so unpleasant or out of place. Balzac has been called the father of the French language, the master and model of the great men who have followed him. But it is confessed by all that he wanted the fine taste to regulate his style according to the subject. Hence, he is pompous and inflated upon ordinary topics; and in a country so quick to seize the ridiculous as his own, not all his nobleness, purity, and vigour of style, not the passages of eloquence which we often find, have been sufficient to redeem him from the sarcasms of those who have had more power to amuse. The stateliness, however, of Balzac is less offensive and extravagant than the affected intensity of language which distinguishes the style of the present age on both sides of the Channel, and which is in fact a much worse modification of the same fault.

|Voiture.--Hotel Rambouillet.|

19. A contemporary and rival of Balzac, though very unlike in most respects, was Voiture. Both one and the other were received with friendship and admiration in a celebrated society of Paris, the first which, on this side of the Alps, united the aristocracy of rank and of genius in one circle, that of the Hotel Rambouillet. Catherine de Vivonne, widow of the Marquis de Rambouillet, was the owner of this mansion. It was frequented, during the long period of her life, by all that was distinguished in France, by Richelieu and Condé, as much as by Corneille, and a long host of inferior men of letters. The heiress of this family, Julie d’Angennes, beautiful and highly accomplished, became the central star of so bright a galaxy. The love of intellectual attainments, both in mother and daughter, the sympathy and friendship they felt for those who displayed them, as well as their moral worth, must render their names respectable; but these were in some measure sullied by false taste and what we may consider an habitual affectation even in their conduct. We can scarcely give another name to the caprice of Julia, who, in the fashion of romance, compelled the Duke of Montausier to carry on a twelve years’ courtship, and only married him in the decline of her beauty. This patient lover, himself one of the most remarkable men in the court of Louis XIV., had many years before presented her with what has been called The Garland of Julia, a collection to which the poets and wits of Paris had contributed. Every flower, represented in a drawing, had its appropriate little poem, and all conspired to the praise of Julia.

20. Voiture is chiefly known by his letters; his other writings, at least, are inferior. These begin about 1627, and are addressed to Madame de Rambouillet and to several other persons of both sexes. Though much too laboured and affected, they are evidently the original type of the French epistolary school, including those in England who have formed themselves upon it. Pope very frequently imitated Voiture, Walpole not so much in his general correspondence, but he knew how to fall into it. The object was to say what meant little with the utmost novelty in the mode, and with the most ingenious compliment to the person addressed; so that he should admire himself, and admire the writer. They are, of course, very tiresome after a short time; yet their ingenuity is not without merit. Balzac is more solemn and dignified, and it must be owned that he has more meaning. Voiture seems to have fancied that good sense spoils a man of wit. But he has not so much wit as _esprit_; and his letters serve to exemplify the meaning of that word. Pope, in addressing ladies, was nearly the ape of Voiture. It was unfortunately thought necessary, in such a correspondence, either to affect despairing love, which was to express itself with all possible gaiety, or where love was too presumptuous, as with the Rambouillets, to pour out a torrent of nonsensical flattery, which was to be rendered tolerable by far-fetched turns of thought. Voiture has the honour of having rendered this style fashionable. But if the bad taste of others had not perverted his own, Voiture would have been a good writer. His letters, especially those written from Spain, are sometimes truly witty, and always vivacious. Voltaire, who speaks contemptuously of Voiture, might have been glad to have the author of some of his jeux d’esprit; that, for example, addressed to the Prince of Condé in the character of a pike, founded on a game where the Prince had played that fish. We should remember also, that Voiture held his place in good society upon the tacit condition that he should always strive to be witty.[574]

[574] Nothing, says Olivet, could be more opposite than Balzac
and Voiture. L’un se portoit toujours au sublime, l’autre
toujours au délicat. L’un avoit une imagination enjouée, qui
faisoit prendre à toutes ses pensées un air de galanterie. L’un
même lorsqu’il vouloit plaisanter, étoit toujours grave; l’autre,
dans les occasions même sérieuses, trouvoit à rire. Hist. de
l’Académie, p. 83.

|Establishment of French Academy.|

21. But the Hotel Rambouillet, with its false theories of taste derived in a great measure from the romances of Scudery and Calprenede, and encouraged by the agreeably artificial manner of Voiture, would have produced, in all probability, but a transient effect. A far more important event was the establishment of the French Academy. France was ruled by a great minister who loved her glory and his own. This, indeed, has been common to many statesmen, but it was a more peculiar honour to Richelieu, that he felt the dignity which letters confer on a nation. He was himself not deficient in literary taste; his epistolary style is manly and not without elegance; he wrote theology in his own name, and history in that of Mezeray; but, what is most to the present purpose, his remarkable fondness for the theatre led him not only to invent subjects for other poets, but, as it has been believed, to compose one forgotten tragi-comedy, Mirame, without assistance.[575] He availed himself fortunately of an opportunity which almost every statesman would have disregarded, to found the most illustrious institution in the annals of polite literature.

[575] Fontenelle, Hist. du Thèatre, p. 96.

22. The French Academy sprang from a private society of men of letters at Paris, who, about the year 1629, agreed to meet once a week, as at an ordinary visit, conversing on all subjects and especially on literature. Such among them as were authors communicated their works, and had the advantage of free and fair criticism. This continued for three or four years with such harmony and mutual satisfaction, that the old men, who remembered this period, says their historian, Pelisson, looked back upon it as a golden age. They were but nine in number, of whom Gombauld and Chapelain are the only names by any means famous, and their meetings were at first very private. More by degrees were added, among others Boisrobert, a favourite of Richelieu, who liked to hear from him the news of the town. The Cardinal, pleased with the account of this society, suggested their public establishment. This, it is said, was unpleasing to every one of them, and some proposed to refuse it; but the consideration that the offers of such a man were not to be slighted overpowered their modesty; and they consented to become a royal institution. They now enlarged their numbers, created officers, and began to keep registers of their proceedings. These records commence on March 13, 1634, and are the basis of Pelisson’s history. The name of French Academy was chosen after some deliberation. They were established by letters patent in January, 1635; which the parliament of Paris enregistered with great reluctance, requiring not only a letter from Richelieu, but an express order from the king; and when this was completed in July, 1637, it was with a singular proviso that the Academy should meddle with nothing but the embellishment and improvement of the French language, and such books as might be written by themselves, or by others who should desire their interference. This learned body of lawyers had some jealousy of the innovations of Richelieu; and one of them said it reminded him of the satire of Juvenal, where the senate, after ceasing to bear its part in public affairs, was consulted about the sauce for a turbot.[576]

[576] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Acadèmie Française.

|Its objects and constitution.|

23. The professed object of the Academy was to purify the language from vulgar, technical, or ignorant usages, and to establish a fixed standard. The Academicians undertook to guard scrupulously the correctness of their own works, examining the arguments, the method, the style, the structure of each particular word. It was proposed by one that they should swear not to use any word which had been rejected by a plurality of votes. They soon began to labour in their vocation, always bringing words to the test of good usage, and deciding accordingly. These decisions are recorded in their registers. Their number was fixed by the letters patent at forty, having a director, chancellor, and secretary; the two former changed every two, afterwards every three months, the last chosen for life. They read discourses weekly; which by the titles of some that Pelisson has given us, seem rather trifling and in the style of the Italian Academies; but this practise was soon disused. Their more important and ambitious occupations were to compile a dictionary and a grammar: Chapelain drew up the scheme of the former, in which it was determined, for the sake of brevity, to give no quotations, but to form it from about twenty-six good authors in prose, and twenty in verse. Vaugelas was entrusted with the chief direction of this work.

|It publishes a critique on the Cid.|

24. The Academy was subjected in its very infancy, to a severe trial of that literary integrity without which such an institution can only escape from being pernicious to the republic of letters, by becoming too despicable and odious to produce mischief. On the appearance of the Cid, Richelieu, who had taken up a strong prejudice against it, insisted that the Academy should publish their opinion on this play. The more prudent part of that body were very loth to declare themselves at so early a period of their own existence; but the Cardinal was not apt to take excuses; and a committee of three was appointed to examine the Cid itself and the observations upon it which Scudery had already published. Five months elapsed before the Sentimens de l’Académie Française sur la Tragédie du Cid were made public in November, 1637.[577] These are expressed with much respect for Corneille, and profess to be drawn up with his assent, as well as at the instance of Scudery. It has been not uncommon to treat this criticism as a servile homage to power. But a perusal of it will not lead us to confirm so severe a reproach. The Sentimens de l’Académie are drawn up with great good sense and dignity. The spirit indeed of critical orthodoxy is apparent; yet this was surely pardonable in an age when the violation of rules had as yet produced nothing but such pieces as those of Hardy. It in easy to sneer at Aristotle when we have a Shakspeare; but Aristotle formed his rules on the practice of Sophocles. The Academy could not have done better than by inculcating the soundest rules of criticism, but they were a little too narrow in their application. The particular judgments which they pass on each scene of the play, as well as those on the style, seem for the most part very just, and such as later critics have generally adopted; so that we can really see little ground for the allegation of undue compliance with the Cardinal’s prejudices, except in the frigid tone of their praise, and in their omission to proclaim that a great dramatic genius had arisen in France.[578] But this is so much the common vice or blindness of critics, that it may have sprung less from baseness, than from a fear to compromise their own superiority by vulgar admiration. The Academy had great pretensions, and Corneille was not yet the Corneille of France and of the world.

[577] Pelisson. The printed edition bears the date of 1638.

[578] They conclude by saying that in spite of the faults of this
play, la naïveté et la véhémence de les passions, la force et la
délicatesse de plusieurs de ses pensées, et cet agrément
inexplicable qui se mêle dans tous ses défauts lui ont acquis un
rang considérable entre les poèmes Français de ce genre qui ont
le plus donné de satisfaction. Si l’auteur ne doit pas toute sa
réputation à son mérite il ne la doit pas toute à son bonheur, et
la nature lui a été assez libérale pour excuser la fortune si
elle lui a été prodigue.

The Academy justly, in my opinion, blame Corneille for making
Chimène consent to marry Rodrigue the same day that he had killed
her father. Cela surpasse toute sorte de créance, et ne peut
vraisemblablement tomber dans l’ame non seulement d’une sage
fille, mais d’une qui seroit le plus dépouillée d’honneur et
d’humanité, &c., p. 49.

|Vaugelas’s remarks on the French language.|

25. Gibert, Goujet, and other writers enumerate several works on the grammar of the French language in this period. But they were superseded, and we may almost say that an æra was made in the national literature, by the publication of Vaugelas, Rémarques sur la Langue Française, in 1649. Thomas Corneille, who, as well as Patru, published notes on Vaugelas, observes that the language has only been written with politeness since the appearance of these remarks. They were not at first received with general approbation, and some even in later times thought them too scrupulous; but they gradually became of established authority. Vaugelas is always clear, modest, and ingenuous in stating his opinion. His remarks are 547 in number, no gross fault being noticed, nor any one which is not found in good authors. He seldom mentions those whom he censures. His test of correct language is the manner of speaking in use with the best part (la plus saine partie) of the court, conformably with the manner of writing in the best part of contemporary authors. But though we must have recourse to good authors in order to establish an indisputably good usage, yet the court contributes incomparably more than books; the consent of the latter being as it were the seal and confirmation of what is spoken at court, and deciding what is there doubtful. And those who study the best authors get rid of many faults common at court, and acquire a peculiar purity of style. None, however, can dispense with a knowledge of what is reckoned good language at court, since much that is spoken there will hardly be found in books. In writing, it is otherwise, and he admits that the study of good authors will enable us to write well, though we shall write still better by knowing how to speak well. Vaugelas tells us that his knowledge was acquired by long practice at court, and by the conversation of Cardinal Perron and of Coeffeteau.

|La Mothe le Vayer.|

26. La Mothe le Vayer in his Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française, 1647, has endeavoured to steer a middle course between the old and the new schools of French style, but with a marked desire to withstand the latter. He blames Du Vair for the strange and barbarous words he employs. He laughs also at the nicety of those who were beginning to object to a number of common French words. One would not use the conjunction Car; against which folly Le Vayer wrote a separate treatise.[579] He defends the use of quotations in a different language, which some purists in French style had in horror. But this treatise seems not to contain much that is valuable, and it is very diffuse.

[579] This was Gomberville, in whose immense romance, Polexandre,
it is said that this word only occurs three times; a discovery
which does vast honour to the person who took the pains to make
it.

|Legal speeches of Patru.|

27. Two French writers may be reckoned worthy of a place in this chapter, who are, from the nature of their works, not generally known out of their own country, and whom I cannot refer with absolute propriety to this rather than to the ensuing period, except by a certain character and manner of writing, which belongs more to the antecedent than the later moiety of the seventeenth century. These were two lawyers, Patru and Le Maistre. The pleadings of Patru appear to me excellent in their particular line of forensic eloquence, addressed to intelligent and experienced judges. They greatly resemble what are called the private orations of Demosthenes, and those of Lysias and Isæus, especially, perhaps, the last. No ambitious ornament, no appeal to the emotions of the heart, no bold figures of rhetoric are permitted in the Attic severity of this style; or, if they ever occur, it is to surprise us as things rather uncommon in the place where they appear than in themselves. Patru does not even employ the exordium usual in speeches, but rushes instantaneously, though always perspicuously, into his statement of the case. In the eyes of many this is no eloquence at all, and it requires perhaps some taste for legal reasoning to enter fully into its merit. But the Greek orators are masters whom a modern lawyer need not blush to follow, and to follow, as Patru did, in their respect for the tribunal they addressed. They spoke to rather a numerous body of judges; but those were Athenians, and, as we have reason to believe, the best and most upright, the salt of that vicious city. Patru again spoke to the parliament of Paris, men too well versed in the ways of law and justice to be the dupes of tinkling sound. He is, therefore, plain, lucid, well-arranged, but not emphatic or impetuous; the subjects of his published speeches would not admit of such qualities; though Patru is said to have employed on some occasions the burning words of the highest oratory. His style has always been reckoned purely and rigidly French; but I have been led rather to praise what has struck me in the substance of his pleadings; which, whether read at this day in France or not, are, I may venture to say, worthy to be studied by lawyers, like those to which I have compared them, the strictly forensic portion of Greek oratory. In some speeches of Patru which are more generally praised, that on his own reception in the Academy, and one complimentary to Christina, it has seemed to me that he falls very short of his judicial style; the ornaments are common-place, and such as belong to the panegyrical department of oratory, in all ages less important and valuable than the other two. It should be added, that Patru was not only one of the purest writers, but one of the best critics whom France possessed.[580]

[580] Perrault says of Patru in his Hommes Illustres de France,
vol. ii., p. 66. Ses plaidoyers servent _encore aujourd’hui_ de
modèle pour écrire correctement en notre langue. Yet they were
not much above thirty years old--so much had the language
changed, as to rules of writing, within that time.

|And of Le Maistre.|

28. The forensic speeches of Le Maistre are more eloquent, in a popular sense of the word, more ardent, more imaginative, than those of Patru; the one addresses the judges alone, the other has a view to the audience; the one seeks the success of his cause alone, the other, that and his own glory together. The one will be more prized by the lovers of legal reasoning, the other by the majority of mankind. The one more resembles the orations of Demosthenes for his private clients, the others those of Cicero. Le Maistre is fervid and brilliant, he hurries us with him; in all his pleadings, warmth is his first characteristic, and a certain elegance is the second. In the power of statement, I do not perceive that he is inferior to Patru; both are excellent. Wherever great moral or social topics, or extensive views of history and human nature can be employed, Le Maistre has the advantage. Both are concise, relatively to the common verbosity of the bar; but Le Maistre has much more that might be retrenched; not that it is redundant in expression, but unnecessary in substance. This is owing to his ambitious display of general erudition; his quotations are too frequent and too ornamental, partly drawn from the ancients, but more from the fathers. Ambrose, in fact, Jerome and Augustin, Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory, were the models whom the writers of this age were accustomed to study; and hence, they are often, and Le Maistre among the rest, too apt to declaim where they should prove, and to use arguments from analogy, rather striking to the common hearer, than likely to weigh much with a tribunal. He has less simplicity, less purity of taste than Patru; his animated language would, in our courts, be frequently effective with a jury, but would seem too indefinite and common-place to the judges; we should crowd to hear Le Maistre, we should be compelled to decide with Patru. They are both, however, very superior advocates, and do great honour to the French bar.

|Improvement in English style.|

29. A sensible improvement in the general style of English writers had come on before the expiration of the sixteenth century; the rude and rough phrases, sometimes requiring a glossary, which lie as spots of rust on the pages of Latimer, Grafton, Aylmer, or even Ascham, had been chiefly polished away; if we meet in Sydney, Hooker, or the prose of Spenser, with obsolete expressions or forms, we find none that are unintelligible, none that give us offence. But to this next period belong most of those whom we commonly reckon our old English writers; men often of such sterling worth for their sense, that we might read them with little regard to their language, yet, in some instances at least, possessing much that demands praise in this respect. They are generally nervous and effective, copious to redundancy in their command of words, apt to employ what seemed to them ornament with much imagination rather than judicious taste, yet seldom degenerating into common-place and indefinite phraseology. They have, however, many defects; some of them, especially the most learned, are full of pedantry, and deform their pages by an excessive and preposterous mixture of Latinisms unknown before;[581] at other times we are disgusted by colloquial and even vulgar idioms or proverbs; nor is it uncommon to find these opposite blemishes not only in the same author, but in the same passages. Their periods, except in a very few, are ill-constructed and tediously prolonged; their ears (again with some exceptions) seem to have been insensible to the beauty of rhythmical prose; grace is commonly wanting, and their notion of the artifices of style, when they thought at all about them, was not congenial to our own language. This may be deemed a general description of the English writers under James and Charles; we shall now proceed to mention some of the most famous, and who may, in a certain degree, be deemed to modify this censure.

[581] In Pratt’s edition of Bishop Hall’s works, we have a
glossary of obsolete or unusual words employed by him. They
amount to more than 1,100, the greater part being of Latin or
Greek origin; some are Gallicisms.

|Earl of Essex.|

30. I will begin with a passage of very considerable beauty, which is here out of its place, since it was written in the year 1598. It is found in the Apology for the Earl of Essex, published among the works of Lord Bacon, and passing, I suppose, commonly for his. It seems, nevertheless, in my judgment, far more probably genuine. We have nowhere in our early writers a flow of words so easy and graceful, a structure so harmonious, a series of antitheses so spirited without affectation, an absence of quaintness, pedantry, and vulgarity, so truly gentleman-like, a paragraph so worthy of the most brilliant man of his age. This could not have come from Bacon, who never divested himself of a certain didactic formality, even if he could have counterfeited that chivalrous generosity which it was not in his nature to feel. It is the language of a soldier’s heart, with the unstudied grace of a noble courtier.[582]