Chapter XXXIII (1)

HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE, FROM 1650 to 1700.

SECT. I.

_Italy--High Refinement of French Language--Fontenelle--St. Evremond-- Sevigné--Bouhours and Rapin--Miscellaneous Writers--English Style--and Criticism--Dryden._

|Low state of literature in Italy.|

1. If Italy could furnish no long list of conspicuous names in this department of literature to our last period, she is far more deficient in the present. The Prose Florentine of Dati, a collection of what seemed the best specimens of Italian eloquence in this century, served chiefly to prove its mediocrity, nor has that editor, by his own panegyric on Louis XIV. or any other of his writings, been able to redeem its name.[1009] The sermons of Segneri have already been mentioned; the eulogies bestowed on them seem to be founded, in some measure, on the surrounding barrenness. The letters of Magalotti, and still more of Redi, themselves philosophers, and generally writing on philosophy, seem to do more credit than anything else to this period.[1010]

[1009] Salfi, xiv. 25. Tiraboschi, xi, 412.

[1010] Salfi, xiv. 17. Corniani, viii. 71.

|Crescimbeni.|

2. Crescimbeni, the founder of the Arcadian Society, has made an honourable name by his exertions to purify the national taste, as well as by his diligence in preserving the memory of better ages than his own. His History of National Poetry is a laborious and useful work, to which I have sometimes been indebted. His treatise on the beauty of that poetry is only known to me through Salfi. It is written in dialogue, the speakers being Arcadians. Anxious to extirpate the school of the Marinists, without falling back altogether into that of Petrarch, he set up Costanzo as a model of poetry. Most of his precepts, Salfi observes, are very trivial at present; but at the epoch of its appearance, it was of great service towards the reform of Italian literature.[1011]

[1011] Salfi, xiii. 450.

|Age of Louis XIV. in France.|

3. This period, the second part of the seventeenth century, comprehends the most considerable, and in every sense the most important and distinguished portion of what was once called the great age in France, the reign of Louis XIV. In this period the literature of France was adorned by its most brilliant writers; since, notwithstanding the genius and popularity of some who followed, we generally find a still higher place awarded by men of fine taste to Bossuet and Pascal than to Voltaire and Montesquieu. The language was written with a care that might have fettered the powers of ordinary men, but rendered those of such as we have mentioned more resplendent. The laws of taste and grammar, like those of nature, were held immutable; it was the province of human genius to deal with them, as it does with nature, by a skilful employment, not by a preposterous and ineffectual rebellion against their control. Purity and perspicuity, simplicity and ease, were conditions of good writing; it was never thought that an author, especially in prose, might transgress the recognised idiom of his mother tongue, or invent words unknown to it, for the sake of effect or novelty; or, if in some rare occurrence so bold a course might be forgiven, these exceptions were but as miracles in religion, which would cease to strike us, or be no miracles at all, but for the regularity of the laws to which they bear witness even while they violate them. We have not thought it necessary to defer the praise which some great French writers have deserved on the score of their language for this chapter. Bossuet, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Pascal, have already been commemorated; and it is sufficient to point out two causes in perpetual operation during this period which ennobled and preserved in purity the literature of France; one, the salutary influence of the Academy, the other, that emulation between the Jesuits and Jansenists for public esteem, which was better displayed in their politer writings, than in the abstruse and endless controversy of the five propositions. A few remain to be mentioned, and as the subject of this chapter, in order to avoid frequent subdivisions, is miscellaneous, the reader must expect to find that we do not, in every instance, confine ourselves to what he may consider as polite letters.

|Fontenelle--his character.|

4. Fontenelle, by the variety of his talents, by their application to the pursuits most congenial to the intellectual character of his contemporaries, and by that extraordinary longevity which made those contemporaries not less than three generations of mankind, may be reckoned the best representative of French literature. Born in 1657, and dying within a few days of a complete century, in 1757, he enjoyed the most protracted life of any among the modern learned; and that a life in the full sunshine of Parisian literature, without care and without disease. In nothing was Fontenelle a great writer; his mental and moral disposition resembled each other; equable, without the capacity of performing, and hardly of conceiving, anything truly elevated, but not less exempt from the fruits of passion, from paradox, unreasonableness, and prejudice. His best productions are, perhaps, the eulogies on the deceased members of the Academy of Sciences, which he pronounced during almost forty years, but these nearly all belong to the eighteenth century; they are just and candid, with sufficient, though not very profound, knowledge of the exact sciences, and a style pure and flowing, which his good sense had freed from some early affectation, and his cold temper as well as sound understanding restrained from extravagance. In his first works we have symptoms of an infirmity belonging more frequently to age than to youth; but Fontenelle was never young in passion. He affects the tone of somewhat pedantic and frigid gallantry which seems to have survived the society of the Hôtel Rambouillet who had countenanced it, and which borders too nearly on the language which Molière and his disciples had well exposed in their coxcombs on the stage.

|His Dialogues of the Dead.|

5. The Dialogues of the Dead, published, I think, in 1685, are condemned by some critics for their false taste and perpetual strain at something unexpected, and paradoxical. The leading idea is, of course, borrowed from Lucian; but Fontenelle has aimed at greater poignancy by contrast; the ghosts in his dialogues are exactly those who had least in common with each other in life, and the general object is to bring, by some happy analogy which had not occurred to the reader, or by some ingenious defence of what he had been accustomed to despise, the prominences and depressions of historic characters to a level. This is what is always well received in the kind of society for which Fontenelle wrote; but if much is mere sophistry in his dialogues, if the general tone is little above that of the world, there is also, what we often find in the world, some acuteness and novelty, and some things put in a light which it may be worth while not to neglect.

|Those of Fenelon.|

6. Fenelon, not many years afterwards, copied the scheme, though not the style, of Fontenelle in his own Dialogues of the Dead, written for the use of his pupil the Duke of Burgundy. Some of these dialogues are not truly of the dead; the characters speak as if on earth, and with earthly designs. They have certainly more solid sense and a more elevated morality than those of Fontenelle, to which La Harpe has preferred them. The noble zeal of Fenelon not to spare the vices of kings, in writing for the heir of one so imperious and so open to the censure of reflecting minds, shines throughout these dialogues; but designed as they were for a boy, they naturally appear in some places rather superficial.

|Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds.|

7. Fontenelle succeeded better in his famous dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, Les Mondes; in which, if the conception is not wholly original, he has at least developed it with so much spirit and vivacity, that it would show as bad taste to censure his work, as to reckon it a model for imitation. It is one of those happy ideas which have been privileged monopolies of the first inventor; and it will be found accordingly that all attempts to copy this whimsical union of gallantry with science have been insipid almost to a ridiculous degree. Fontenelle throws so much gaiety and wit into his compliments to the lady whom he initiates in his theory, that we do not confound them with the nonsense of coxcombs; and she is herself so spirited, unaffected, and clever, that no philosopher could be ashamed of gallantry towards so deserving an object. The fascinating paradox, as then it seemed, though our children are now taught to lisp it, that the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, are full of inhabitants, is presented with no more show of science than was indispensable, but with a varying liveliness that, if we may judge by the consequences, has served to convince as well as amuse. The plurality of worlds had been suggested by Wilkins, and probably by some Cartesians in France; but it was first rendered a popular tenet by this agreeable little book of Fontenelle, which had a great circulation in Europe. The ingenuity with which he obviates the difficulties he is compelled to acknowledge, is worthy of praise; and a good deal of the popular truths of physical astronomy is found in these dialogues.

|His History of Oracles.|

8. The History of Oracles, which Fontenelle published in 1687, is worthy of observation as a sign of the change that was working in literature. In the provinces of erudition and of polite letters, long so independent, perhaps even so hostile, some tendency towards a coalition began to appear. The men of the world, especially after they had acquired a free temper of thinking in religion, and become accustomed to talk about philosophy, desired to know something of the questions which the learned disputed; but they demanded this knowledge by a short and easy road, with no great sacrifice of their leisure or attention. Fontenelle, in the History of Oracles, as in the dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, prepared a repast for their taste. A dull work of a learned Dutch physician, Van Dale, had taken up the subject of the ancient oracles, and explained them by human imposture instead of that of the devil, which had been the more orthodox hypothesis. A certain degree of paradox, or want of orthodoxy, already gave a zest to a book in France; and Fontenelle’s lively manner, with more learning than good society at Paris possessed, and about as much as it could endure, united to a clear and acute line of argument, created a popularity for his History of Oracles, which we cannot reckon altogether unmerited.[1012]

[1012] I have not compared, or indeed read, Van Dale’s work; but
I rather suspect that some of the reasoning, not the learning, of
Fontenelle is original.

|St. Evremond.|

9. The works of St. Evremond were collected after his death in 1705; but many had been printed before, and he evidently belongs to the latter half of the seventeenth century. The fame of St. Evremond as a brilliant star, during a long life, in the polished aristocracy of France and England, gave for a time a considerable lustre to his writings, the greater part of which are such effusions as the daily intercourse of good company called forth. In verse or in prose, he is the gallant friend, rather than lover, of ladies who, secure probably of love in some other quarter, were proud of the friendship of a wit. He never, to do him justice, mistakes his character which as his age was not a little advanced might have incurred ridicule. Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, is his heroine; but we take little interest in compliments to a woman neither respected in her life, nor remembered since. Nothing can be more trifling than the general character of the writings of St. Evremond; but sometimes he rises to literary criticism, or even civil history; and on such topics he is clear, unaffected, cold, without imagination or sensibility; a type of the frigid being, whom an aristocratic and highly polished society is apt to produce. The chief merit of St. Evremond is in his style and manner; he has less wit than Voiture who contributed to form him, or than Voltaire whom he contributed to form; but he shows neither the effort of the former, nor the restlessness of the latter. Voltaire, however, when he is most quiet, as in the earliest and best of his historical works, seems to bear a considerable resemblance to St. Evremond, and there can be no doubt that he was familiar with the latter’s writings.

|Madame de Sevigné.|

10. A woman has the glory of being full as conspicuous in the graces of style as any writer of this famous age. It is evident that this was Madame de Sevigné. Her letters, indeed, were not published till the eighteenth century, but they were written in the mid-day of Louis’s reign. Their ease and freedom from affectation are more striking, by contrast with the two epistolary styles which had been most admired in France, that of Balzac, which is laboriously tumid, and that of Voiture, which becomes insipid by dint of affectation. Everyone perceives that in the letters of a mother to her daughter, the public, in a strict sense, is not thought of; and yet the habit of speaking and writing what men of wit and taste would desire to hear and read, gives a certain mannerism, I will not say air of effort, even to the letters of Madame de Sevigné. The abandonment of the heart to its casual impulses is not so genuine as in some that have since been published. It is, at least, clear that it is possible to become affected in copying her unaffected style; and some of Walpole’s letters bear witness to this. Her wit and talent of painting by single touches are very eminent; scarcely any collection of letters, which contain so little that can interest a distant age, are read with such pleasure; if they have any general fault, it is a little monotony and excess of affection towards her daughter, which is reported to have wearied its object, and, in contrast with this, a little want of sensibility towards all beyond her immediate friends, and a readiness to find something ludicrous in the dangers and sufferings of others.[1013]

[1013] The proofs of this are numerous enough in her letters. In
one of them she mentions that a lady of her acquaintance, having
been bitten by a mad dog, had gone to be dipped in the sea, and
amuses herself by taking off the provincial accent with which she
will express herself on the first plunge. She makes a jest of La
Voisin’s execution; and though that person was as little entitled
to sympathy as anyone, yet, when a woman is burned alive, it is
not usual for another woman to turn it into drollery.

Madame de Sevigné’s taste has been arraigned for slighting
Racine; and she has been charged with the unfortunate prediction;
Il passera comme le café. But it is denied that these words can
be found, though few like to give up so diverting a
miscalculation of futurity. In her time, Corneille’s party was so
well supported, and he deserved so much gratitude and reverence,
that we cannot much wonder at her being carried a little too far
against his rival. Who has ever seen a woman just towards the
rivals of her friends, though many are just towards their own?

|The French Academy.|

11. The French Academy had been so judicious, both in the choice of its members, and in the general tenor of its proceedings, that it stood very high in public esteem, and a voluntary deference was commonly shown to its authority. The favour of Louis XIV., when he grew to manhood, was accorded as amply as that of Richelieu. The Academy was received by the king, when they approached him publicly, with the same ceremonies as the superior courts of justice. This body had, almost from its commencement, undertaken a national dictionary, which should carry the language to its utmost perfection, and trace a road to the highest eloquence that depended on purity and choice of words; more than this could not be given by man. The work proceeded very slowly; and dictionaries were published in the meantime, one by Richelet in 1680, another by Furetiére. The former seems to be little more than a glossary of technical, or otherwise doubtful words;[1014] but the latter, though pretending to contain only terms of art and science, was found, by its definitions and by the authorities it quoted, to interfere so much with the project of the academicians, who had armed themselves with an exclusive privilege, that they not only expelled Furetiére from their body, on the allegation that he had availed himself of materials intrusted to him by the Academy for its own dictionary, but instituted a long process at law to hinder his publication. This was in 1685, and the dictionary of Furetiére only appeared after his death, at Amsterdam, in 1690.[1015] Whatever may have been the delinquency, moral or legal, of this compiler, his dictionary is praised by Goujet as a rich treasure, in which almost everything is found that we can desire for a sound knowledge of the language. It has been frequently reprinted, and continued long in esteem. But the dictionary of the Academy, which was published in 1694, claimed an authority to which that of a private man could not pretend. Yet the first edition seems to have rather disappointed the public expectation. Many objected to the want of quotations, and to the observance of an orthography that had become obsolete. The Academy undertook a revision of its work in 1700; and, finally, profiting by the public opinion on which it endeavoured to act, rendered this dictionary the most received standard of the French language.[1016]

[1014] Goujet, Baillet, n. 762.

[1015] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Académie (continuation par Olivet),
p. 47. Goujet, Bibliothèque Française, i., 232, et post. Biogr.
Univers., art. Furetiére.

[1016] Pelisson, p. 69. Goujet, p. 261.

|French Grammars.|

12. The Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée of Lancelot, in which Arnauld took a considerable share, is rather a treatise on the philosophy of all language than one peculiar to the French. “The best critics,” says Baillet, “acknowledge that there is nothing written by either the ancient or the modern grammarians, with so much justness and solidity.”[1017] Vigneul-Marville bestows upon it an almost equal eulogy.[1018] Lancelot was copied in a great degree by Lami, in his Rhetoric or Art of Speaking, with little of value that is original.[1019] Vaugelas retained his place as the founder of sound, grammatical criticism, though his judgments have not been uniformly confirmed by the next generation. His remarks were edited with notes by Thomas Corneille, who had the reputation of an excellent grammarian.[1020] The observations of Ménage on the French language, in 1675 and 1676, are said to have the fault of reposing too much on obsolete authorities, even those of the sixteenth century, which had long been proscribed by a politer age.[1021] Notwithstanding the zeal of the Academy, no critical laws could arrest the revolutions of speech. Changes came in with the lapse of time, and were sanctioned by the imperious rule of custom. In a book on grammar, published as early as 1688, Balzac and Voiture, even Patru and the Port-Royal writers, are called semi-moderns;[1022] so many new phrases had since made their way into composition, so many of theirs had acquired a certain air of antiquity.

[1017] Jugemens des Sçavans, n. 606. Goujet copies Baillet’s
words.

[1018] Mélanges de Littérature, i., 124.

[1019] Goujet, i., 56. Gibert, p. 351.

[1020] Goujet, 146. Biogr. Univ.

[1021] Id. 153.

[1022] Bibliothèque Universelle, xv., 351. Perrault makes a
similar remark on Patru.

|Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.|

13. The genius of the French language, as it was estimated in this age, by those who aspired to the character of good critics, may be learned from one of the dialogues in a work of Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène. Bouhours was a Jesuit, who affected a polite and lively tone, according to the fashion of his time, so as to warrant some degree of ridicule; but a man of taste and judgment, whom, though La Harpe speaks of him with some disdain, his contemporaries quoted with respect. The first and the most interesting, at present, of these conversations, which are feigned to take place between two gentlemen of literary taste, turns on the French language.[1023] This he presumes to be the best of all modern; deriding the Spanish for its pomp, the Italian for its finical effeminacy.[1024] The French has the secret of uniting brevity with clearness, and with purity, and politeness. The Greek and Latin are obscure where they are concise. The Spanish is always diffuse. The Spanish is a turbid torrent, often over-spreading the country with great noise; the Italian a gentle rivulet, occasionally given to inundate its meadows; the French, a noble river, enriching the adjacent lands, but with an equal, majestic course of waters that never quits its level.[1025] Spanish, again, he compares to an insolent beauty, that holds her head high, and takes pleasure in splendid dress; Italian, to a painted coquette, always attired to please; French, to a modest and agreeable lady, who, if you may call her a prude, has nothing uncivil or repulsive in her prudery. Latin is the common mother; but while Italian has the sort of likeness to Latin which an ape bears to a man, in French we have the dignity, politeness, purity, and good sense of the Augustan age. The French have rejected almost all the diminutives once in use, and do not, like the Italians, admit the right of framing others. This language does not tolerate rhyming sounds in prose, nor even any kind of assonance, as amertume and fortune, near together. It rejects very bold metaphors, as the zenith of virtue, the apogée of glory; and it is remarkable that its poetry is almost as hostile to metaphor as its prose.[1026] “We have very few words merely poetical, and the language of our poets is not very different from that of the world. Whatever be the cause, it is certain that a figurative style is neither good among us in verse nor in prose.” This is evidently much exaggerated, and, in contradiction to the known examples, at least, of dramatic poetry. All affectation and labour, he proceeds to say, are equally repugnant to a good French style. “If we would speak the language well, we should not try to speak it too well. It detests excess of ornament; it would almost desire that words should be as it were naked; their dress must be no more than necessity and decency require. Its simplicity is averse to compound words; those adjectives which are formed by such a juncture of two, have long been exiled both from prose and verse. Our own pronunciation,” he affirms, “is the most natural and pleasing of any. The Chinese and other Asiatics sing; the Germans rattle (rallent); the Spaniards spout; the Italians sigh; the English whistle; the French alone can properly be said to speak; which arises, in fact, from our not accenting any syllable before the penultimate. The French language is best adapted to express the tenderest sentiments of the heart; for which reason our songs are so impassioned and pathetic, while those of Italy and Spain are full of nonsense. Other languages may address the imagination, but ours alone speaks to the heart, which never understands what is said in them.”[1027] This is literally amusing; and with equal patriotism, Bouhours in another place has proposed the question, whether a German can, by the nature of things, possess any wit.

[1023] Bouhours points out several innovations which had lately
come into use. He dislikes _avoir des ménagemens_, or _avoir de
la considération_, and thinks these phrases would not last; in
which he was mistaken. _Tour de visage_ and _tour d’esprit_ were
new: the words _fonds_, _mésures_, _amitiés_, _compte_, and many
more were used in new senses. Thus also _assez_ and _trop_; as
the phrase, _je ne suis pas trop de votre avis_. It seems, on
reflection, that some of the expressions he animadverts upon,
must have been affected while they were new, being in opposition
to the correct meaning of words; and it is always curious, in
other languages as well as our own, to observe the comparatively
recent _nobility_ of many things quite established by present
usage. Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène p. 95.

[1024] P. 52 (edit. 1671).

[1025] P. 77.

[1026] P. 60.

[1027] P. 68.

|Attacked by Barbier d’Aucour.|

14. Bouhours, not deficient, as we may perceive, in self-confidence and proneness to censure, presumed to turn into ridicule the writers of Port-Royal, at that time of such distinguished reputation as threatened to eclipse the credit which the Jesuits had always preserved in polite letters. He alludes to their long periods and the exaggerated phrases of invective which they poured forth in controversy.[1028] But the Jansenist party was well able to defend itself. Barbier d’Aucour retaliated on the vain Jesuit by his Sentimens de Cleanthe sur les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène. It seems to be the general opinion of French critics that he has well exposed the weak parts of his adversary, his affected air of the world, the occasional frivolity and feebleness of his observations; yet there seems something morose in the censures of the supposed Cleanthe, which renders this book less agreeable than that on which it animadverts.

[1028] P. 150. Vigneul-Marville observes that the Port-Royal
writers formed their style originally on that of Balzac (vol. i.,
p. 107); and that M. d’Andilly, brother of Antony Arnauld,
affected at one time a grand and copious manner like the
Spaniards, as being more serious and imposing, especially in
devotional writings; but afterwards finding the French were
impatient of this style, that party abandoned it for one more
concise, which it is by no means less difficult to write well, p.
139. Baillet seems to refer their love of long periods to the
famous advocate Le Maistre, who had employed them in his
pleadings, not only as giving more dignity, but also because the
public taste at that time favoured them. Jugemens des Sçavans,
n. 953.

|La Manière de Bien Penser.|

15. Another work of criticism by Bouhours La Manière de Bien Penser, which is also in dialogue, contains much that shows acuteness and delicacy of discrimination; though his taste was deficient in warmth and sensibility, which renders him somewhat too strict and fastidious in his judgments. He is an unsparing enemy of obscurity, exaggeration and nonsense, and laughs at the hyperbolical language of Balzac, while he has rather over-praised Voiture.[1029] The affected inflated thoughts, of which the Italian and Spanish writers afford him many examples, Bouhours justly condemns, and by the correctness of his judgment may deserve, on the whole, a respectable place in the second order of critics.

[1029] Voiture, he says, always takes a tone of raillery when he
exaggerates. Le faux devient vrai à la faveur de l’ironie, p. 29.
But we can hardly think that Balzac was not gravely ironical in
some of the strange hyperboles which Bouhours quotes from him.

In the fourth dialogue, Bouhours has many just observations on
the necessity of clearness. An obscurity arising from allusion to
things now unknown, such as we find in the ancients, is no fault
but a misfortune; but this is no excuse for one which may be
avoided, and arises from the writer’s indistinctness of
conception or language. Cela n’est pas intelligible, dit
Philinthe (after hearing a foolish rhapsody extracted from a
funeral sermon on Louis XIII.). Non, répondit Eudoxe, ce n’est
pas tout-à-fait de galimatias, ce n’est que du phébus. Vous
mettez donc, dit Philinthe, de la différence entre le galimatias
et le phébus? Oui, repartit Eudoxe, le galimatias renferme une
obscurité profonde, et n’a de soi-même nul sens raisonnable. Le
phébus n’est pas si obscur, et a un brillant qui signfie, ou
semble signifier quelque chose; le soleil y entre d’ordinaire, et
c’est peut-être ce qui a donné lieu en notre langue au nom de
phébus. Ce n’est pas que quelquefois le phébus ne devienne
obscur, jusqu’à n’être pas entendu; mais alors le galimatias s’en
joint; ce ne sont que brillans et que ténèbres de tous côtes,
p. 342.

|Rapin’s Reflections on Eloquence and Poetry.|

16. The Réflexions sur l’Eloquence et sur la Poësie of Rapin, another Jesuit, whose Latin poem on Gardens has already been praised, are judicious, though perhaps rather too diffuse; his criticism is what would appear severe in our times; but it was that of a man formed by the ancients, and who lived also in the best and most critical age of France. The reflections on poetry are avowedly founded on Aristotle, but with much that is new, and with examples from modern poets to confirm and illustrate it. The practice at this time in France was to depreciate the Italians; and Tasso is often the subject of Rapin’s censure; for want, among other things, of that grave and majestic character which epic poetry demands. Yet Rapin is not so rigorous, but that he can blame the coldness of modern precepts in regard to French poetry. After condemning the pompous tone of Brebœuf in his translation of the Pharsalia, he remarks that “we have gone since to an opposite extreme by too scrupulous a care for the purity of the language; for we have begun to take from poetry its force and dignity by too much reserve and a false modesty, which we have established as characteristics of our language, so as to deprive it of that judicious boldness which true poetry requires; we have cut off the metaphors and all those figures of speech which give force and spirit to words and reduced all the artifices of words to a pure regular style which exposes itself to no risk by bold expression. The taste of the age, the influence of women who are naturally timid, that of the court which had hardly anything in common with the ancients, on account of its usual antipathy for learning, accredited this manner of writing.”[1030] In this Rapin seems to glance at the polite but cold criticism of his brother Jesuit, Bouhours.

[1030] P. 147.

|His Parallels of Great Men.|

17. Rapin, in another work of criticism, the Parallels of Great Men of Antiquity, has weighed in the scales of his own judgment Demosthenes and Cicero, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Livy, Plato and Aristotle. Thus eloquence, poetry, history and philosophy pass under review. The taste of Rapin is for the Latins; Cicero he prefers to Demosthenes, Livy on the whole to Thucydides, though this he leaves more to the reader; but is confident that none except mere grammarians have ranked Homer above Virgil.[1031] The loquacity of the older poet, the frequency of his moral reflections, which Rapin thinks misplaced in an epic poem, his similes, the sameness of his traditions, are treated very freely; yet he gives him the preference over Virgil for grandeur and nobleness of narration, for his epithets, and the splendour of his language. But he is of opinion that Æneas is a much finer character than Achilles. These two epic poets he holds, however, to be the greatest in the world; as for all the rest, ancient and modern, he enumerates them one after another, and can find little but faults in them all.[1032] Nor does he esteem dramatic and lyric poets, at least modern, much better.

[1031] P. 158.

[1032] P. 175.

|Bossu on Epic Poetry.|

18. The Treatise on Epic Poetry by Bossu was once of some reputation. An English poet has thought fit to say that we should have stared, like Indians, at Homer, if Bossu had not taught us to understand him.[1033] The book is, however, long since forgotten; and we fancy that we understand Homer not the worse. It is in six books, which treat of the fable, the action, the narration, the manners, the machinery, the sentiments and expressions of an epic poem. Homer is the favourite poet of Bossu, and Virgil next to him; this preference of the superior model does him some honour in a generation which was becoming insensible to its excellence. Bossu is judicious and correct in taste, but without much depth, and he seems to want the acuteness of Bouhours.

[1033]
Had Bossu never writ, the world had still,
Like Indians, viewed this mighty piece of wit.
MULGRAVE’S _Essay on Poetry_.

|Fontenelle’s critical writings.|

19. Fontenelle is a critic of whom it may be said, that he did more injury to fine taste and sensibility in works of imagination and sentiment, than any man without his good sense and natural acuteness could have done. He is systematically cold; if he seems to tolerate any flight of the poet, it is rather by caprice than by a genuine discernment of beauty; but he clings, with the unyielding claw of a cold-blooded animal, to the faults of great writers, which he exposes with reason and sarcasm. His Reflections on Poetry relate mostly to dramatic composition, and to that of the French stage. Theocritus is his victim in the Dissertation on Pastoral Poetry; but Fontenelle gave the Sicilian his revenge; he wrote pastorals himself; and we have altogether forgotten, or, when we again look at, can very partially approve, the idylls of the Boulevards, while those Doric dactyls of Theocritus linger still, like what Schiller has called soft music of yesterday, from our school-boy reminiscences on our aged ears.

|Preference of French language to Latin.|

20. The reign of mere scholars was now at an end; no worse name than that of pedant could be imposed on those who sought for glory; the admiration of all that was national in arts, in arms, in manners, as well as in speech, carried away like a torrent those prescriptive titles to reverence which only lingered in colleges. The superiority of the Latin language to French had long been contested; even Henry Stephens has a dissertation in favour of the latter; and in this period, though a few resolute scholars did not retire from the field, it was generally held either that French was every way the better means of expressing our thoughts, or, at least, so much more convenient as to put nearly an end to the use of the other. Latin had been the privileged language of stone; but Louis XIV., in consequence of an essay by Charpentier, in 1676, replaced the inscriptions on his triumphal arches by others in French.[1034] This, of course, does not much affect the general question between the two languages.

[1034] Goujet, i., 13.

|General superiority of ancients disputed.|

|Charles Perrault.|

21. But it was not in language alone that the ancients were to endure the aggression of a disobedient posterity. It had long been a problem in Europe whether they had not been surpassed; one, perhaps, which began before the younger generations could make good their claim. But time, the nominal ally of the old possessors, gave his more powerful aid to their opponents; every age saw the proportions change, and new men rise up to strengthen the ranks of the assailants. In philosophy, in science, in natural knowledge, the ancients had none but a few mere pedants, or half-read lovers of paradox, to maintain their superiority; but in the beauties of language, in eloquence and poetry, the suffrage of criticism had long been theirs. It seemed time to dispute even this. Charles Perrault, a man of some learning, some variety of acquirement, and a good deal of ingenuity and quickness, published, in 1687, his famous “Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns in all that regards Arts and Sciences.” This is a series of dialogues, the parties being first, a president, deeply learned and prejudiced in all respects for antiquity; secondly, an abbé, not ignorant, but having reflected more than read, cool and impartial, always made to appear in the right, or, in other words, the author’s representative; thirdly, a man of the world, seizing the gay side of every subject, and apparently brought in to prevent the book from becoming dull. They begin with architecture and painting, and soon make it clear that Athens was a mere heap of pig-sties in comparison with Versailles; the ancient painters fare equally ill. They next advance to eloquence and poetry, and here, where the strife of war is sharpest, the defeat of antiquity is chanted with triumph. Homer, Virgil, Horace are successively brought forward for severe and often unjust censure; but, of course, it is not to be imagined that Perrault is always in the wrong; he had to fight against a pedantic admiration which surrenders sound taste; and having found the bow bent too much in one way, he forced it himself too violently into another direction. It is the fault of such books to be one-sided; they are not unfrequently right in censuring blemishes, but very uncandid in suppressing beauties. Homer has been worst used by Perrault, who had not the least power of feeling his excellence; but the advocate of the newer age in his dialogue admits that the Æneid is superior to any modern epic. In his comparison of eloquence, Perrault has given some specimens of both sides to contrast; comparing, by means, however, of his own versions, the funeral orations of Pericles and Plato with those of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier, the description by Pliny of his country seat with one by Balzac, an epistle of Cicero with another of Balzac. These comparisons were fitted to produce a great effect among those who could neither read the original text, nor place themselves in the midst of ancient feelings and habits. It is easy to perceive that a vast majority of the French in that age would agree with Perrault; the book was written for the times.

|Fontenelle.|

22. Fontenelle, in a very short digression on the ancients and moderns, subjoined to his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, followed the steps of Perrault. “The whole question as to pre-eminence between the ancients and moderns,” he begins, “reduces itself into another, whether the trees that used to grow in our woods were larger than those which grow now. If they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot be equalled in these ages; but if our trees are as large as trees were of old, then there is no reason why we may not equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes.” The sophistry of this is glaring enough; but it was logic for Paris. In the rest of this short essay, there are the usual characteristics of Fontenelle, cool, good sense, and an incapacity, by natural privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of taste.

|Boileau’s defence of antiquity.|

23. Boileau, in observations annexed to his translation of Longinus, as well as in a few sallies of his poetry, defended the great poets, especially Homer and Pindar, with dignity and moderation; freely abandoning the cause of antiquity where he felt it to be untenable. Perrault replied with courage, a quality meriting some praise where the adversary was so powerful in sarcasm and so little accustomed to spare it; but the controversy ceased in tolerable friendship.

|First Reviews--Journal des Sçavans.|

24. The knowledge of new accessions to literature which its lovers demanded, had hitherto been communicated only through the annual catalogues published at Frankfort or other places. But these lists of title-pages were unsatisfactory to the distant scholar, who sought to become acquainted with the real progress of learning, and to know what he might find it worth while to purchase. Denis de Sallo, a member of the parliament of Paris, and not wholly undistinguished in literature, though his other works are not much remembered, by carrying into effect a happy project of his own, gave birth, as it were, to a mighty spirit which has grown up in strength and enterprise, till it has become the ruling power of the literary world. Monday, the 5th of January, 1665, is the date of the first number of the first review, the Journal des Sçavans, published by Sallo, under the name of the Sieur de Hedouville, which some have said to be that of his servant.[1035] It was printed weekly, in a duodecimo or sexto-decimo form, each number containing from twelve to sixteen pages. The first book ever reviewed (let us observe the difference of subject between that and the last, whatever the last may be) was an edition of the works of Victor Vitensis and Vigilius Tapsensis, African bishops of the fifth century, by Father Chiflet, a Jesuit.[1036] The second is Spelman’s Glossary. According to the prospectus prefixed to the Journal des Sçavans, it was not designed for a mere review, but a literary miscellany; composed, in the first place, of an exact catalogue of the chief books which should be printed in Europe; not content with the mere titles, as the majority of bibliographers had hitherto been, but giving an account of their contents, and their value to the public; it was also to contain a necrology of distinguished authors, an account of experiments in physics and chemistry, and of new discoveries in arts and sciences, with the principal decisions of civil and ecclesiastical tribunals, the decrees of the Sorbonne and other French or foreign universities; in short, whatever might be interesting to men of letters. We find, therefore, some piece of news, more or less of a literary or scientific nature, subjoined to each number. Thus, in the first number, we have a double-headed child born near Salisbury; in the second, a question of legitimacy decided in the parliament of Paris; in the third, an experiment on a new ship or boat constructed by Sir William Petty; in the fourth, an account of a discussion in the College of Jesuits on the nature of comets. The scientific articles, which bear a large proportion to the rest, are illustrated by engravings. It was complained that the Journal des Sçavans did not pay much regard to polite or amusing literature; and this led to the publication of the Mercure Galant, by Visé, which gave reviews of poetry and of the drama.

[1035] Camusat, in his Histoire Critique des Journaux, in two
volumes, 1734, which, notwithstanding its general title, is
chiefly confined to the history of the Journal des Sçavans, and
wholly to such as appeared in France, has not been able to clear
up this interesting point; for there are not wanting those who
assert, that Hedouville was the name of an estate belonging to
Sallo; and he is called in some public description, without
reference to the journal, Dominus de Sallo d’Hedouville in
Parisiensi curia senator. Camusat, i., 13. Notwithstanding this,
there is evidence that leads us to the valet; so that “ampliùs
deliberandum censeo; Res magna est.”

[1036] Victoria Vitensis et Vigilii Tapsensis, Provinciæ Bisacenæ
Episcoporum Opera, edente R. P. Chifletio, Soc. Jesu. Presb., in
4to. Divione. The critique, if such it be, occupies but two pages
in small duodecimo. That on Spelman’s Glossary, which follows, is
but in half a page.

25. Though the notices in the Journal des Sçavans are very short, and when they give any character, for the most part of a laudatory tone, Sallo did not fail to raise up enemies by the mere assumption of power which a reviewer is prone to affect. Menage, on a work of whose he had made some criticism, and by no means, as it appears, without justice, replied in wrath; Patin and others rose up as injured authors against the self-erected censor; but he made more formidable enemies by some rather blunt declarations of a Gallican feeling, as became a counsellor of the parliament of Paris, against the court of Rome; and the privilege of publication was soon withdrawn from Sallo.[1037] It is said that he had the spirit to refuse the offer of continuing the journal under a previous censorship; and it passed into other hands, those of Gallois, who continued it with great success.[1038] It is remarkable that the first review, within a few months of its origin, was silenced for assuming too imperious an authority over literature, and for speaking evil of dignities. “In cunis jam Jove dignus erat.” The Journal des Sçavans, incomparably the most ancient of living reviews, is still conspicuous for its learning, its candour, and its freedom from those stains of personal and party malice which deform more popular works.

[1037] Camusat, p. 28. Sallo had also attacked the Jesuits.

[1038] Eloge de Gallois, par Fontenelle, in the latter’s works,
vol. v., p. 168. Biographie Universelle, arts. Sallo and Gallois.
Gallois is said to have been a coadjutor of Sallo from the
beginning, and some others are named by Camusat as its
contributors, among whom were Gomberville and Chapelain.

|Reviews established by Bayle.|

|And Le Clerc|

26. The path thus opened to all that could tempt a man who made writing his profession--profit, celebrity, a perpetual appearance in the public eye, the facility of pouring forth every scattered thought of his own, the power of revenge upon every enemy, could not fail to tempt more conspicuous men than Sallo or his successor Gallois. Two of very high reputation, at least of reputation that hence became very high, entered it, Bayle and Le Clerc. The former, in 1684, commenced a new review, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. He saw and was well able to improve the opportunities which periodical criticism furnished to a mind eminently qualified for it; extensively, and in some points, deeply learned; full of wit, acuteness, and a happy talent of writing in a lively tone without the insipidity of affected politeness. The scholar and philosopher of Rotterdam had a rival, in some respects, and ultimately an adversary, in a neighbouring city. Le Clerc, settled at Amsterdam as professor of belles lettres and of Hebrew in the Arminister seminary, undertook in 1686, at the age of twenty-nine, the first of those three celebrated series of reviews, to which he owes so much of his fame. This was the Bibliothèque Universelle, in all the early volumes of which La Croze, a much inferior person, was his coadjutor, published monthly in a very small form. Le Clerc had afterwards a disagreement with La Croze, and the latter part of the Bibliothèque Universelle (that after the tenth volume) is chiefly his own. It ceased to be published in 1693, and the Bibliothèque Choisie, which is perhaps even a more known work of Le Clerc, did not commence till 1708. But the fulness, the variety, the judicious analysis and selection, as well as the value of the original remarks, which we find in the Bibliothéque Universelle, renders it of signal utility to those who would embrace the literature of that short, but not unimportant period which it illustrates.

|Leipsic Acts.|

27. Meantime a less brilliant, but by no means less erudite, review, the Leipsic Acts, had commenced in Germany. The first volume of this series was published in 1682. But being written in Latin, with more regard to the past than to the growing state of opinions, and consequently almost excluding the most attractive, and indeed the most important, subject, with a Lutheran spirit of unchangeable orthodoxy in religion, and with an absence of anything like philosophy or even connected system in erudition, it is one of the most unreadable books, relatively to its utility in learning, which has ever fallen into my hands. Italy had entered earlier on this critical career; the Giornale de’ Litterati was begun at Rome in 1668; the Giornale Veneto de’ Litterati, at Venice in 1671. They continued for some time; but with less conspicuous reputation than those above mentioned. The Mercure Savant, published at Amsterdam in 1684, was an indifferent production, which induced Bayle to set up his own Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres in opposition to it. Two reviews were commenced in the German language within the seventeenth century, and three in English. The first of these latter was the “Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious,” London, 1682. This, I believe, lasted but a short time. It was followed by one, entitled “The Works of the Learned,” in 1691; and by another “History of the Works of the Learned,” in 1699. I have met with none of these, nor will any satisfactory account of them, I believe, be readily found.[1039]

[1039] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, cap. 9. Bibliothèque
Universelle, xiii. 41.

|Bayle’s Thoughts on the Comet.|

28. Bayle had first become known in 1682, by the Pensées Diverses sur la Comète de 1680; a work which I am not sure that he ever decidedly surpassed. Its purpose is one hardly worthy, we should imagine, to employ him; since those who could read and reason were not likely to be afraid of comets, and those who could do neither would be little the better for his book. But with this ostensible aim Bayle had others in view; it gave scope to his keen observation of mankind, if we may use the word observation for that which he chiefly derived from modern books, and to the calm philosophy which he professed. There is less of the love of paradox, less of a cavilling pyrrhonism, and though much diffuseness, less of pedantry and irrelevant instances in the Pensées Diverses than in his greater work. It exposed him, however, to controversy; Jurieu, a French minister in Holland, the champion of Calvinistic orthodoxy, waged a war that was only terminated with their lives; and Bayle’s defence of the Thoughts on the Comet is fully as long as the original performance, but far less entertaining.

|His Dictionary.|

29. He now projected an immortal undertaking, the Historical and Critical Dictionary. Moreri, a laborious scribe, had published in 1673 a kind of encyclopedic dictionary, biographical, historical, and geographical; Bayle professed to fill up the numerous deficiencies, and to rectify the errors of this compiler. It is hard to place his dictionary, which appeared in 1694, under any distinct head in a literary classification which does not make a separate chapter for lexicography. It is almost equally difficult to give a general character of this many-coloured web, that great erudition and still greater acuteness and strength of mind wove for the last years of the seventeenth century. The learning of Bayle was copious, especially in what most required it, the controversies, the anecdotes, the miscellaneous facts and sentences, scattered over the vast surface of literature for two preceding centuries. In that of antiquity he was less profoundly versed, yet so quick in application of his classical stores, that he passes for even a better scholar than he was. His original design may have been only to fill up the deficiencies of Moreri; but a mind so fertile and excursive could not be restrained in such limits. We may find however in this an apology for the numerous omissions of Bayle, which would, in a writer absolutely original, seem both capricious and unaccountable. We never can anticipate with confidence that we shall find any name in his dictionary. The notes are most frequently unconnected with the life to which they are appended; so that, under a name uninteresting to us, or inapposite to our purpose, we may be led into the richest vein of the author’s fine reasoning or lively wit. Bayle is admirable in exposing the fallacies of dogmatism, the perplexities of philosophy, the weaknesses of those who affect to guide the opinions of mankind. But, wanting the necessary condition of good reasoning, an earnest desire to reason well, a moral rectitude from which the love of truth must spring, he often avails himself of petty cavils, and becomes dogmatical in his very doubts. A more sincere spirit of inquiry could not have suffered a man of his penetrating genius to acquiesce, even contingently; in so superficial a scheme as the Manichean. The sophistry of Bayle, however, bears no proportion to his just and acute observations. Less excuse can be admitted for his indecency, which almost assumes the character of monomania, so invariably does it recur, even where there is least pretext for it.

|Baillet.--Morhof.|

30. The Jugemens des Sçavans by Baillet, published in 1685 and 1686, the Polyhistor of Morhof in 1689, are certainly works of criticism as well as of bibliography. But neither of these writers, especially the latter, are of much authority in matters of taste; their erudition was very extensive, their abilities respectable, since they were able to produce such useful and comprehensive works; but they do not greatly serve to enlighten or correct our judgments; nor is the original matter in any considerable proportion to that which they have derived from others. I have taken notice of both these in my preface.

|The Ana.|