Volume 2 / Book 5 — CHAPTER I. FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU. (continued 2)

Nor could anything else possibly happen, considering the methods which Boileau chose to adopt. Faults of method. These methods are, First, the construction of a Horatian-Aristotelian bed to which everything has to be adjusted in point of principle; and of this it is not necessary to say more. Secondly, the suggestion as models, at every turn, of Latin and (much less often) Greek poets, utterly regardless of the change of circumstances. Thirdly, the method of criticism by Kinds—of 288laying down the rules for, and discussing the ends of, the abstract Pastoral, the abstract Elegy, the abstract Sonnet, Ode, and so forth, with only a few perfunctory eulogies of actual examples. In regard to the first and second it is enough to quote the critic’s own words against him, and ask him how Ovid or Tibullus can be a sufficient, can be even a safe, guide to a French love-poet, and how the marvels of ancient mythology can become the “machinery” of a modern epic? In regard to the third, the old battering-ram must be once more applied. Pastoral, Elegy, Ode, and the rest (except “Sonnet,” which is a form) are not unequivocal names applied to abstractly existing things, but mere tickets. Give me a poem, and I will tell you whether I think it a good or a bad poem, and why. You may, after that, if you have the time and care to take the trouble, classify it as epic or elegy, epigram or ode. But the box in which you choose to deposit it does not really matter in the least; and if it should so happen that there is no box ready, you must either make, or do without, one. Is the poem good or bad as poetry?—that is the articulus stantis vel cadentis criticismi.

But the most surprising thing in Boileau’s method, and the most fatal, is the thing on which he prides himself most, and which has been most commended in him—the perpetual appeal to Good Sense and Reason.^[371] Obsession of good sense. It is surprising, because Longinus, whom he strangely assumed to be a prophet after his own heart, had warned him amply, and one might think irresistibly, some fifteen hundred years before. “Heights of eloquence or of poetry, but especially of poetry,” that mighty critic had said, “do not lead to persuasion but to ecstasy.” Now it is with Persuasion only—in the Greek sense, which includes intellectual conviction and practical influence—that Good Sense and Reason, in Boileau’s sense, can deal. It is true that very glaring offences against them may sometimes (by no means always) interfere with Ecstasy; but the most 289heroic doses of either or both will never cause it. Generally speaking—the saying has of course the danger of the double edge, but it is true for all that—when Good Sense comes in at the door Ecstasy flies out of the window, and when Ecstasy flies in at the window, Good Sense and (the lower) Reason retire prudishly by the door. At any rate, if they remain, it will be necessary for them to keep themselves very much in the background, and wait till they are called for. They may very well act as detectives and catchpolls when False Ecstasy usurps the place of true; but like other police-officers they have rather an awkward habit of mistaking their men. Every respect is of course to be paid to them; their assistance is sometimes very welcome and valuable even to the poet, while the prose-writer can seldom dispense with their constant surveillance. But even the latter may sometimes be hindered of his finest effects by looking first to them; while the Poet who does so will never rise beyond the lower-middle slopes of Parnassus, if he even reaches these.

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

But the majority of Boileau’s counsels are not positive at all, they are simply negative: and negative counsels in art, when the pupil is once out of schoolboyhood, never did much good yet, and have often done a great deal of harm. Arbitrary proscriptions. Why should his risus ineptus at the name “Childebrand” proscribe that name, which is euphonious enough to 290unprejudiced ears? What “sensible and reasonable” (we may thank him for these words) criterion of sound makes “Philis” preferable to “Toinon” or, prettier still, Toinette? It is true, doubtless, that, for a continuance, the long Alexandrine divides best at the middle; but what reason, what sense is there in the absolute proscription of a penthemimeral or hephthemimeral cæsura? In what does the welcoming of Pan and Charon, and the banishing of Ashtaroth and Beelzebub, differ from the immortal decision that “blue uniforms are only good for the artillery and the Blue Horse”? And so throughout.

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

The dominance of the literary subject in the Satires is well known, though it is equally notorious that illiberal personality too often takes the place of liberal criticism. The Satires. Colletet’s poverty and parasitism; Saint-Amant’s 291death from fever, brought on by his ill-success (he would have died of hunger anyhow, says the satirist good-naturedly)—these are the subjects that interest him in the First. In the Second to Molière, with oblique censure of, or at least surprise at the easy versification of the dramatist, he bewails (being evidently proud of it) his own studious “difficulty”^[373] in rhyming, jests at the stock phrases and chevilles of others from Ménage to Scudéry. Even in the Third—the old bad-dinner satire of Horace and Regnier—he brings in a literary quarrel about Théophile and Ronsard and Quinault. The Fifth, to Dangeau, is one of the few which have hardly any literary touches. But he will drag the luckless Abbé de Pure into the Sixth on the noises and nuisances of Paris, while the Seventh is wholly literary, and is one of the earliest (1663) of his explosions at bad poets, and the Eighth, on the follies of humanity, naturally takes shots at the old target.

All these, however, much more the awkward Tenth, on Women, and the very inferior Eleventh, must give place to the Ninth, an imitation of Horace, II. vii., written in the author’s fortieth or forty-first year, nominally to defend himself for his former attacks on his compeers, but really, of course, to renew them. Once more his favourite equivalents (only mentioned infamiæ causa) for Gyas and Cloanthus—Colletet, Pelletier, Quinault, and the rest—appear. Once more Racan receives partial, and Théophile almost total, insult. Here is the famous contrast of le clinquant du Tasse and l’or de Virgile; and here the still more famous lines on the Cid, embedded in—and plainly owing their complimentary tone to the fact that they are embedded in—an onslaught on Chapelain. Again and again the luckless Cotin is “horsed” and justified: while the almost equally luckless Pelletier^[374] serves as a foil to “d’Ablancourt et Patru.” The singular posthumous piece Sur l'Équivoque, appended usually as 292the Twelfth satire, is a sort of attempt to generalise and amplify the author’s horror of conceit and obscurity.

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

Prose—The Héros de Roman; the Réflexions sur Longin.

The prose is equally saturated with criticism. The dialogue on Les Héros de Roman, which Fontenelle could have done admirably, Boileau has not done very well; but his satire on the extraordinary bastard kind of romance with which France at this time deluged Europe is not ill-founded, though rather ill-informed.^[375] The Letters are full enough of criticism. But the two chief prose documents from which (at least from their titles) something really important may be expected, are the Dissertation on the story of Giocondo, as told by its inventor and by La Fontaine, and the Réflexions sur Longin. These last, however, the reader need hardly trouble himself with: they may even be classed among the impieties of criticism. Boileau, little as he could have appreciated, did at least know the Great Unknown. He translated him; he calls him very truly le plus grand, and more questionably le plus sévère, of ancient critics. 293But these Réflexions on Longinus are in fact reflections on Charles Perrault, a very clever person, but not in the least like Longinus: and the texts from the Περὶ Ὕψους, which are put at the head of each chapter, often have nothing to do with the subject at all, and in almost every case might almost as well have been selected from the first book he picked up. In the particular dispute I am with him, and not with Perrault; but the first exclamation of any real lover of the real classics who reads the piece must be Non tali auxilio! Boileau, as always, is arrogant and rude; as sometimes elsewhere his scholarship is not beyond suspicion, though it had an easy triumph over the almost total absence of the same quality in his adversary; but, as he is very seldom, he is confused, desultory, heavy. To those who think that criticism is the art of scolding, the Réflexions sur Longin may seem to be a creditable exercise in it: hardly to others.

Almost the only critical essay of the proper kind that we have from this famous critic is the other piece mentioned above—the “Dissertation on the Joconde.” The “Dissertation on Joconde.” The occasion was not unpromising. A certain M. de Saint-Gilles, seriously or otherwise, had preferred the version of Ariosto’s tale by one Bouillon to that of La Fontaine, and the question (which had taken the form of a bet between Saint-Gilles and La Mothe le Vayer de Bretigny) was referred to Boileau for decision. I confess that I have never taken the trouble to look up the works of M. de Bouillon: the specimens that Boileau gives are quite enough, and he exercises his ferule like the vigorous and (within limits) accurate and useful pedagogue that he is. But, unluckily, he thinks it necessary not merely to prefer La Fontaine to Bouillon, but to belittle Ariosto^[376] in favour of La Fontaine. I defy anybody—Frenchman or non-Frenchman—to have, within certain limits, a greater admiration for La Fontaine than I have; and I am heretical enough to like the Contes even better than the Fables. 294But why this miserable setting of two great things against each other? Why not like both? This is what critics of the Boileau type cannot do: they must have their rat-pit of false comparison, their setting-by-the-ears, their belittling in order to exalt. It must be said that Boileau is justly punished. His usual critical censures are so vague and general—he is so apt to tell us that So-and-so is a bad poet without showing us how he is bad—that he escapes confutation. Not so here. In the first place he shows, as perhaps we might have anticipated, that worst of critical defects, an inability to “take” his author. He is very angry with the famous grave beginning of the tavern-keeper’s much less than grave story—the stately Astolfo, re de' Longobardi, and the rest. He thinks that “le bon messer Ludovico” had forgotten, or rather did not care for, the precept of his Horace, “Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.”

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

295We must not, tempting as it is, dwell on the plea that Giocondo’s honest agony, “a quelque chose de tragique qui ne vaut rien dans un conte à rire,” while La Fontaine’s easy-going wittol is quite a cheerful object; on the inestimable cry of outraged verisimilitude, “Où est-ce que Joconde trouve si vite une hostie sacrée pour faire jurer le roi?” or on the extraordinary casuistry as to the time occupied, in the two versions, by the climax of the triple arrangement of Fiammetta. In this, as in the remarkable letter of reconciliation to Perrault,^[377] one is at first inclined to suspect irony; but in neither case will the hypothesis work out. Here Boileau presents what looks like a caricature of the “classical” criticism; yet it exactly coincides with his general precepts elsewhere. There he gives away almost, not quite, the whole of the Ancient case by admitting the superiority of the moderns after a fashion which, if we took it to be ironical, would reflect upon his own familiar friends and patterns—Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine.

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

Nay more, one may ask without real impertinence, Is Boileau’s 296Art Poétique in any vital and important sense an Art of Poetry at all, any more than it is an Art of Pig-breeding, or of Pottery-making, or of Pyrotechnics? In all these useful and agreeable pursuits—for the matter of that in all other arts, trades, professions, employments, and vocations—it is desirable to know what you are about, to proceed cautiously and sensibly, to choose the right materials, to combine them in the right way, not to go beyond your powers and means, to vary your appeals to the public, to take good advice, to observe the practice of proved success in the particular department, to study its kinds and species carefully, not to launch out too far nor restrain your operations too much, and to observe the laws of morality and propriety throughout. But what is there specially poetical in all this? Or what does Boileau add to this to make his treatise specially poetical? A few—decidedly few—technical cautions of the lower kind, not all of them unquestionable; some general or mediate rules, mostly borrowed from Horace, and not a few of them more questionable still; some literary history which, as we have seen, is utterly worthless; and a seasoning of mostly spiteful hits at poets he dislikes.

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

Let nothing be denied—or, for the matter of that, affirmed—before everything has been considered. Historical examination of this. What are the facts? Boileau came at the end—at the very end—of a stage of French poetry which had been rather a long one, and unquestionably one of very chequered and not very highly distinguished performance. The somewhat hasty theories, and the often splendid, but nearly always unequal, practice of the Pléiade, had given place to a sort of rococo individualism, to the bastard and easily ignoble kinds of parody and burlesque, or to corrupt followings of Spanish and Italian practice. Many charming, and some fine, things 297(including that stately passage of Chapelain’s which many classical critics, who scoff at his name, have admired when all but literally translated in The Deserted Village) had been written; but the writers had constantly dropped from them to the trivial and the bombastic. But when Boileau began seriously to write in 1663-64,^[378] this period was in its very last stage. It could not have lasted much, or any, longer if there had been no Boileau at all. Of his actual victims some were long dead; others were very old men; the younger were persons of no importance, ephemera, whether critical or poetical, which would have died with the day. The smoky torch of Théophile—a true poetic torch for all its smoke—had flickered out nearly forty years before. Cyrano, to whom Boileau gives contemptuous blessing in part, only that he may ban him and others more effectively, had slept in peace for eight years. Saint-Amant, who had real poetic gift, and who, if he was no scholar in the ancient tongues, knew the modern in a fashion which puts Boileau’s ignorance of their literatures to shame, had met the end described so feelingly by his critic some three years earlier. Chapelain was a man of sixty-seven; Cotin one of sixty. It is by attacking not the dead and decrepit, but the young and rising, that a man shows himself a great warrior and a useful citizen in criticism. In fact, the principles of correctness which Boileau espoused had, as we have seen, been practically taken up long before, even by poor creatures like the Abbé d’Aubignac, in certain departments, and Chapelain himself had smitten in this sense before he felt the wounds.

Still less can Boileau be allowed any credit for the great achievements which undoubtedly took place during his own middle life. The glories of French literature in verse (and, as far as the three first go, in poetry), about 1664, are Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Molière. Corneille had been writing before Boileau was born: the only piece of his which Boileau praises generously was produced in the year of the critic’s birth; and that critic is silent about most of the Master’s work, and sneers ignobly at its later examples. The magnificent 298genius of Molière owed nothing to Boileau in its beginnings, and accepted little, if anything, from his criticism in its perfection; while not all of its results were cordially welcomed by the critic, personal friends as they were. La Fontaine, an older man than Boileau by fifteen years, was still more independent of him at the beginning, shows extremely little mark of any influence from him at any time, and, for all their friendship, experienced from him the almost unaccountable omission of his favourite kind, the Fable (unlike the Conte, a perfectly “unobjectionable” one), in the Art Poétique itself. There remains Racine, and, if the schooling and training of Racine seem to any one so great a thing that his schoolmaster and trainer becomes, ipso facto, one of the Di majores of criticism, there is not much more to be said. But there is something: and it is this. In the first place, to assume that Racine’s genius could not have made its own way without Boileau’s mentorship, is to pay a far worse compliment to that genius than some not very fervent Racinians can allow; and, in the second, the spirit, if not the letter, of his criticism is against that of Racine’s very best work. If I cared to do so, I think I could show that Phèdre herself comes within the Bolæan^[379] maledictions. As for Athalie, the very admirers of Boileau have asked how, after his unsparing censure of the religious epic, he could tolerate the religious drama?

Have we done? Not quite. After such a reformation, after such labours of Hercules as we have held up to us, we are entitled to expect a new crop, a new breed of poets rising everywhere from the purged and heartened land. Is the poetic product of the last quarter of the seventeenth century in France so admirable, so refreshing, such a contrast to the period of Chapelain and Saint-Amant? I have some small acquaintance with French literature, but I am unable to supply the names of the “Poets like Shakespeare, Beautiful souls,” who, formed by the precepts of the Art Poétique, rush in crowds 299upon the sight during that period. But, it will be said, time must be given—the French poetry of the eighteenth century is the work of Boileau through his disciples. It is: and by these fruits may he and they be justly judged. He cannot, indeed, claim the admirable light work of Piron and the rest: some of it very nearly, or quite, incurs his anathemas, and all is composed more or less outside his precepts, and in accordance with the practice of La Fontaine rather than with his. But he can claim the Henriade, and, in part, the odes of J. B. Rousseau—he may be permitted even to assume the laurels of Delille and of Le Brun—Pindare. Perhaps, despite the sacred adage, the growth of the thorn does indicate the strength and genuineness of the vine, and, perhaps, it can only be a fig which is so fertile in such stately thistles.

But the real weakness of Boileau’s criticism does not fully appear till we come to examine him on the true ground. Concluding remarks on him. What are his actual critical deliverances, on concrete critical points, worth? We have seen something of the answer to this already. A certain amount of his condemning censure—though nearly always expressed without urbaneness, without humanity, with the hectoring and bullying tone of an ill-conditioned schoolmaster, or the venom of a spiteful rival—must be validated; there is no lack of bad writers at any time, and Boileau’s provided a plentiful crop of them. But in most instances these writers were unimportant weeds, who would have been cast into the oven on the morrow of their flourishing, if Boileau had never written a line. On the other hand, in regard to the two greatest writers, in verse or drama, of his own day and country, Corneille and Molière, he loses no opportunity of censuring the one, and accords, till after his death, but faint and limited praise to the other. Even his misbeloved ancients he cannot praise with the mingled enthusiasm and acuteness that mark Longinus, or even Dionysius. The great merit of Virgil, in his eyes, is that Virgil manages mythological “machines” so deftly: and, if we look elsewhere at what he says of writers so different as Æschylus and Ovid, we shall find a flat generality, with no attempt even at the mot propre. Only on the satirists, at least on Horace 300and Juvenal, is he better. For Boileau, as we have said, was a satirist to the core, to the finger-tips, and here he speaks as he feels. If we want his opinion on great modern foreign poets, we have it explicitly on Tasso and Ariosto, implicitly in his silence about almost everybody else.

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

Two writers at least, whom few would call lesser men of letters than Boileau, and in whom some may see greater qualifications for criticism, must be much more briefly dealt with, partly because in their case no controversy is needed, partly because their actual contributions to criticism form but a very small part of their work, and partly also because neither aimed at for himself, or has received from posterity and tradition, 301any very prominent place as a critic. La Bruyère and Fénelon. These are La Bruyère and Fénelon. It would not be correct to say that either is in deliberate or conscious opposition to the législateur du Parnasse. Their general conscious principles are much the same as his; they are, like him, uncompromising defenders of the Ancients, and though Fénelon has a private crotchet about poetic prose, yet the non-essentiality of verse to poetry had been a general, if not a universal, tenet with antiquity. But whether in consequence of that impatience of despotism which those who love to mix literary and political history have seen in the second generation of the siècle de Louis XIV., as compared with the first; or from the fact that, as compared with Boileau, they were much more of Greek,^[380] and less of purely Latin students; or simply as a result of what has been justly attributed to both,^[381] the predominance of the sens propre over mere observation of the communis sensus—it is certain that both, and especially Fénelon, display much more individualism, and at the same time much more catholicity. It may be added that they know more, and are to some extent (though to no large one) free from that hopeless ignoring of older French literature which was Boileau’s greatest fault.

La Bruyère’s^[382] contribution is contained in the opening section, “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit,” of his famous Caractères. The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit.” It is not very long; it is—according to the plan of the work it is not merely entitled but obliged to be—studiously desultory; and it is not perhaps improved by the other necessity of throwing much of it into portraits of imaginary persons, who are sometimes no doubt very close copies of real ones. But it contains some open and undisguised judgments of the great writers of the past, and a number of astonishingly original, pregnant, and monumentally phrased observations of a general character. In fact I should not hesitate to say that La Bruyère is, after Dryden, who had preceded him by twenty years, the first very great man of letters in 302modern times who gave himself to Criticism with a comparatively unshackled mind, and who has put matter of permanent value in her treasuries without being a professional rhetorician or commentator. General observations. We need not dwell on the famous overture Tout est dit, for it is merely a brilliant example of the kind of paradox-shell or rocket, half truth, half falsehood, which a writer of the kind explodes at the beginning of his entertainment, to attract the attention of his readers, and let them see the brilliancy of the stars that drop from it. But how astonishing is it, in the 17th section, to find, two hundred years and more ago, the full Flaubertian doctrine of the “single word” laid down with confidence, and without an apparent sense that the writer is saying anything new!^[383] No matter that soon after, in 20, we find an old fallacy, ever new, put in the words, “Le plaisir de la critique nous ôte celui d'être vivement touchés de très-belles choses.” If criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism à la Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the Morte d’Arthur says) in every direction of literature, in reading always critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word.

But how well he recovers himself, among other things, with the remarks on the Cid, and the difference between the fine and the faultless at 30! with the declaration of independence immediately following in 31, and practically drawing a cancel through the whole critical teaching of Boileau! “Quand une lecture vous élève l’esprit, ... ne cherchez pas une autre règle pour juger; il est bon.” How delicate his remarks in 37 on the delicacy of touch, the illogical but impeccable concatenation, the justice of phrase, of the best feminine writing! Not a few of his observations are paraphrases or, as it were, echoes of Longinus himself, whom he has assimilated as Longinus’ translator never could have done. And if some further remarks on criticism in 63 seem to regard rather the abuse than the nature 303of the art—if the famous “Un homme né Chrétien et Français se trouve contraint dans la satire; les grands sujets lui sont défendus,” is half a political grumble and half a paralogism, which was to be accepted with fatal results in the next century—both this and other things are redeemed throughout by the general independence and freshness of the judgment, the vigour and decision of the phrase. In the judgments of authors above referred to (which begin at 38 and continue for some eight or nine numbers, to be resumed with special reference to dramatists and dramas a little later), it is especially possible to appreciate La Bruyère’s idiosyncrasy as a critic, the vivacity and power of his natural endowments in this direction, and his drawback, arising partly from sheer acceptance of prevailing opinion, and partly from the fact that he is merely coasting the subject on his way to others.

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

The conjunction, even in contrast, of Malherbe and Théophile has puzzled some folk; but, as M. Servois points out, it is a mere matter of chronology, and Boileau had done it before. And it is very noteworthy that La Bruyère does not bear hardly 304on Théophile. The remark that Marot seems more modern than Ronsard is perfectly well founded. And if there is some oddity in his surprise that Marot, “natural and easy as he is, did not make of Ronsard, so full of verve and fire, a poet better than either of them actually is,” it is much less odd, and much more acute, than it looks at first sight. The judgment of Rabelais, a famous one, if not wholly wide-eyed, keeps its eyes singularly wide open for so artificial an age: and there is a whole volume in the double defence of Montaigne against opposite criticisms, to the effect that he is too full of thought for some men, and too natural in his mode of thinking for others.

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

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

The critical utterances of Fénelon^[384] are much more voluminous, 305though in part, at least, not quite so disinterested, and they are of a very high critical interest and value. Fénelon. The Dialogues sur l’Eloquence. They are contained in two documents, the Dialogues sur l’Eloquence (which, though not known, is believed to be a work of his early manhood, but was only published after his death by the Chevalier Ramsay) and one of his very latest pieces, the Mémoire sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française, sent in, to obey a resolution of that body, in November 1713, with the much longer explanatory letter of the next year thereon to Dacier.

The first is conditioned—unfavourably it may seem for our purpose—by its avowed limitation to sacred eloquence. A young aspirant to the cloth has fallen in love with a fashionable preacher, wishes a cooler friend to share his enthusiasm, and, being rebuffed, elicits from that friend by degrees a complete criticism of the rhetoric of the pulpit, and the rules that should govern it. Since we have found discussions, even of profane oratory, surprisingly barren in pure literary criticism of old, this of sacred may seem still less promising. But though Fénelon’s interest in the soul-curing part of the matter is constant and intense, he does not allow it either to obscure or to adulterate his literary censure. At first, in particular, the arguments of his “A” (the critical friend who, no doubt, is Fénelon himself) not merely have nothing more to do with the pulpit than with the bar or the Senate, but have little if anything more to do with spoken than with written literature. The disdainful description (at p. 5 ed. cit.) of that epigrammatic or enigmatic style, which is always with us, as des tours de passe-passe; the excellent passage (ibid., 7-9) on Demosthenes, Isocrates, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus himself—on whom Fénelon speaks with far more appreciation than Boileau, and probably with more knowledge than Dryden; the bold attitude taken up at p. 18 on the question of the perfect hero; the exaltation (perhaps the most noteworthy thing in the whole) of “painting,” of bringing the visual image home to the reader, at p. 35; the scorn of mere verbal fault-finding at p. 47; the ardent panegyric of the literary greatness of the Bible at p. 69; and of the Fathers at p. 86 sq.—all these 306passages, which are almost pure gold of criticism, have nothing special to do with the mere métier of the preacher. That Fénelon was neither perfect nor wholly beyond his time is quite true. He has here a deplorable assault on Gothic Architecture (which he repeats at greater length in the Academic letter, and for which, if he had not been so good and great a man, one could wish the stones of his cathedral to have fallen upon him), and his contempt extends to mediæval literature. But the same doom is on the best of archbishops and the most beautiful of girls: they can but give what they have.

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

But, as usual, it is in the incidental remarks that the value of the piece lies; and these make it, I do not hesitate to say, the most valuable single piece of criticism that France had yet produced. Fénelon shows his acquaintance with other modern languages; and pays a particular compliment to Prior, who, it must be remembered, was about this time occupying his rather uneasy post of Ambassador. He may be too hasty in saying that the Italians and Spaniards will perhaps never make good tragedies or epigrams, nor the French good epics and sonnets, as he most certainly is too ignorant in saying that “after our ancient poets” [a very few, mostly undistinguished persons, in the latter part of the sixteenth century] had tried classical metres and failed, “we” [the French of course] “had to invent 307measures suitable to our words.” But he is astonishingly bold in his recurrence to Pléiade principles, and in actually urging English as a good example on the point of taking from neighbours any word found convenient. He says plumply “de telles usurpations sont permises” (p. 103 ed. cit.) Alas! in England itself, and after two centuries, one uses this just liberty at personal risk. His Rhetoric section partly repeats the Dialogues, and is altogether more technical or professional than literary. And its challenge to correctness. But his Poetical section is full of interest. It is marred by that not quite single-minded fancy for prose poetry which has already been glanced at, and to which we shall have to return. But the attack on rhyme is partly excused, and the, at first sight, bewildering remark (p. 123) that “rhyme is of itself more difficult than all the rules of Greek and Latin prosody” is rendered intelligible, by a remembrance of the extremely arbitrary rules which had by this time been imposed on the French rhymer. The paragraph on Ronsard,^[385] the best known piece of the whole, is admirable in its tempering of sympathy with censure; and the acknowledgment of the “opposite extreme” into which French for more than a century had fallen,^[386] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth.

The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs (and Time’s) the complaints of la basse plaisanterie de Plaute, and the statement 308that on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane. The point is the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And, abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book, and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule. Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.

We have for some time been occupied with the critical work of great men of letters; we must now turn to that of four men who, if they had not been critics, would hardly have been heard of in their own day, and would certainly not be remembered by posterity out of their own country—or perhaps in it. As it was, all the four exercised immense influence, not merely in France but elsewhere, and three of them saw their work promptly translated into English, and received with almost touching deference in the country which had Dryden to look to for criticism, nay, by Dryden himself. The order in which we may take them shall be determined by that of the appearance of their principal critical works. The Pratique du Théâtre of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, appeared in 1657; the first Réflexions of Rapin in 1668; the Entretiens d’Ariste of Bouhours in 1671; and the Traité du Poème Epique of Le Bossu in 1675. All four, it is to be observed, were clerics of one sort or another, while Rapin and Bouhours were schoolmasters, and Hédelin was at least a private tutor. Taken together, they exhibit the hand-book and school-book side of the criticism of which Boileau is the contemporary satiric expositor to the world; and their criticism cannot properly be dissociated from his. As dates sufficiently show, they do not in any sense derive from him; nor, to do him justice, does 309he from them. The whole quintet, with others of less importance, are all the more valuable exponents of the strong contemporary set of the tide in the direction of hard-and-fast “classical” legislation for literature.

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

The Pratique, unfortunately, we cannot neglect wholly, because of its position as a symptom and an influence. His Pratique du Théâtre. In reading it,^[389] the generous mind oscillates between a sense of intolerable boredom, and a certain ruth at the obviously honest purpose and industry that underlie the 310heaps of misapplied learning, and season the gabble of foolish authority-citing. He begins by a demonstration that all great statesmen have always patronised stately games, of which scenic representation is one. Vulgar minds have nothing to do with it (this was a slap at Castelvetro and his horrible doctrine of pleasing the multitude, which is a real lethalis arundo in the sides of all these Frenchmen). He is, we are rather surprised to hear, not going to theorise. All the theory has been done, and done once for all, by the ancients. What he wants to do is to apply this theory to all the practical contingencies. And this he does through Unities and Episodes, through Acts and Scenes, through Narration, Discourse, Deliberation, everything, with sleuth-hound patience on his own part, and requiring Job’s variety on that of his readers. He is sometimes quite fair even to Corneille, he seems to be quite well-meaning; but he cannot help his nativity of dulness, and at his very best he is a critic of dramaturgy, not of drama.

René Rapin, hardly as one sometimes feels inclined to think and speak of him, was a person of an entirely different order. Rapin. In fact, it is very much more on isolated and particular points than on generals that he lays himself open to reproach, though it may be retorted that the generals, which lead logically (as they usually do) to such absurd particulars, are thereby utterly condemned themselves. It was specially unfortunate for Rapin that his principles and precepts were at once caught up in England by a man like Rymer,^[390] and expounded in coarse and blunted form to a people still green and unknowing in critical matters. His method partly good. There is even much in his 311method which deserves high praise. It is very noteworthy that, before he presumed to draw up (or at least to give to the world) his Réflexions on the Poetics and on Poetry, on Eloquence, on History, and on Philosophy, he had preluded by elaborate examinations of the actual documents in the shape of “Comparisons”—“Of Homer and Virgil,” “Of Cicero and Demosthenes,” “Of Thucydides and Livy,” “Of Plato and Aristotle.” And though this sort of “cock-fight comparison” (as the more vernacular writers of his own time in English might have said) is “muchwhat” (as his translator Rymer actually does say) of a mistake, unless pursued with the greatest possible care—though it was already hackneyed in itself and constantly in need of extending, supplementing, blending—yet it is at any rate infinitely superior to the examination in vacuo, the rattling of dry bones and abstract kinds and qualities, to which too many of his contemporaries confined themselves.

Unfortunately Rapin himself was always, consciously or unconsciously, tending towards this other method; and even in his comparisons—much more in the extended survey of ancient and modern writers which he subjoins to the Réflexions—he is still more constantly seduced by that labelling criticism which we have traced long ago to the “canonising” way of the Alexandrians, and for which we have said hard things of Fronto and others. His particular absurdities as to Homer in blame. Yet further, both his general style of criticism, and his prepossessions of this or that kind, constantly draw him into pitfalls only less absurd than those in which Rymer himself wallows. I do not remember that Rapin ever lays it down that a hero must not be a black man; probably the French had not been afflicted—for I suppose they did not make Syphax black—with any poet daring enough to start the question. But he does other things which, though less conspicuously, are quite as really silly. In the moral section^[391] of his comparison between Homer and Virgil he has 312too much of the Jesuit schoolmaster, with his reverence towards boys, to mention that terrible scene between Zeus and Hera which had already distressed the compatriots of Aristophanes and Martial, and which remains one of the earliest examples of absolutely perfect poetry in a particular kind. But he makes up for it. We have, of course, the “wine-heavy, dog-eyed, hare-hearted” line to mourn over. How undignified of Homer to make Achilles anxious about the preservation of the body of Patroclus from corruption! How could Ulysses, with such an excellent wife and such an amiable son, waste time with Calypso and dangle after Circe, to whom the pudibund Rapin applies epithets which our Decorum prevents us from repeating, and for which he deserved to be both shipwrecked and turned into a Gryll. Was it quite nice of Priam, as a father, to wish all his children dead so Hector were alive? Nausicaa is too shocking. A Princess’s face should not show grace, the Jesuit thinks,^[392] to men in Ulysses’ condition.

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

313Yet even here it is fair to observe that Rapin is at least trying to make the two ends of his “reason” and his “reflection” meet: and so it is always:—

“His reason rooted in unreason stands,

And sense insensate makes him idly wise.”

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

It is more important, if less amusing, to inquire how a man, obviously of much ability, extremely well informed, freer, it would seem, from mere prejudice than most of his fellows, came in this way to be constantly stumbling over blocks that the veriest blockhead might, one would think, have avoided, and running against blank walls, of which a blind man might, it should seem, have been aware. The reading of his riddle. Rapin is, perhaps, the main and appointed Helot of the neo-classic system. That system, instead of assembling all the great works of literary art, and giving an impartial hearing to each, takes one or two ancient treatises, themselves necessarily based upon but a partial examination, spins out of them a universal code, fills in that code, where it is wanting, with analogies and with perilous makeshifts of “decorum,” uniformity, and the like, and then proceeds to apply the result back to the actual works of 314art. It is no wonder that, even of the ancient division of these, hardly one escapes scot-free, except those which were originally composed by men of great, but not the greatest, genius, on a somewhat similar scheme. Elsewhere the unfortunate critic is constantly catching himself in those bushes which he has himself planted, and bruising himself against obstacles which he has elaborately set up. In a general way he grants that Homer is the greatest of poets; but the Fetiches of “Design” and “Decorum” extort from him the sacrifice of this in detail, and the acknowledgment that Homer is frequently most indecorous, and that large parts of him are out of drawing. And so of all.

Le Bossu (to whom the English sometimes give a superfluous final t, whom they generally defraud of his rightful “Le,” and whom in the main they know only from the locus classicus of Sterne)^[396] reapproximates to the Aubignacian level. Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic. But it is fair to say that his dulness arises from a different cause. He is not, like Hédelin, a stupid man—he is distinctly the reverse—nor is he spiteful. He is merely the hardiest and most thoroughgoing devotee of a certain kind of abstract criticism. He does, of course, give us chapters on some actual illustrations of Heroic or Epic; but they are scarcely more necessary to his book than the picture-illuminations of a poem or a novel. Being a writer of some esprit, he sometimes exercises it in rather dangerous fictions—for instance, his imagined epic of Meridarpax, where all the mouse-stories (mouse and lion, town and country mouse, &c.) are worked in, would be most sprightly, if it did not look sprightlier still as an exercise in laughing at his own side. But by far the greater bulk, and the whole vertebration and solid substance, of his argument are devoted to Epic in the Abstract. Design, definition, and parts; good fables and bad fables; episodes; the biology, so to speak, of the Action, the narration, the manners and characters, not forgetting the 315Machines, and at last something on the Thoughts and Expression—which have about one-ninth of the whole. In short, if we have not exactly Epic in vacuo, we have it as a dried preparation. The complexity, anti-sensuousness, and dispassionate character of it are almost abashing; one feels at the end that, to hanker after an actual poem, be it Iliad or Orlando, has something sinful—something of the lust of the flesh.

We have said that Le Bossu is rather a sprightly person of a hyper-scholastic kind. Bouhours. His brother Father, Bouhours, is still more so; indeed, his famous inquiry, “Si un Allemand peut-être bel-esprit?”^[397] has got him rather into trouble with a prevailing party, in and out of Germany. Beginning with the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), a collection of chiefly verbal criticism on French writers, he continued it with other works in belles lettres and theology, the most important of which, to us, is La Manière de Bien Penser dans les Ouvrages d’Esprit (1687).^[398] The book, which is not short, consists of four Dialogues between Eudoxe and Philanthe, “deux hommes de lettres (as the author remarks in a phrase to which Time has given a piquant new meaning) que la science n’a point gâtés.” Eudoxe, as the name indicates, is the author’s mouthpiece—a judicious admirer of the Ancients, who can yet tolerate such moderns as Voiture. Philanthe (also a speaking name) is a partisan of florid modernity, who is, however, so little of a “stalwart” that he gives up Ariosto, and intrenches himself behind Tasso and Lope. In the First dialogue Eudoxe censures (with abundant citation, as throughout the book) Equivoques, Hyperboles, pointes, concetti, and, generally, thoughts that are “not true.” The Second and Third, starting from Longinus and Hermogenes, discuss the true and the false in Sublimity and Wit: and the Fourth is mainly devoted to Obscurity. Bouhours (whose influence on subsequent critics, especially on Addison, was very great) writes agreeably, is free from rudeness and pedantry, and is altogether rather a favourable example of the school of Good Sense, quand même. But, 316as favourable examples of bad schools generally do, he damages his cause more than less favourable ones, because its drawbacks are more obvious and intrinsic. On his principles you must ostracise the best, the noblest, the most charming, the most poetic things in poetry. Et c’est tout dire.

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

Bayle perhaps needed nothing but better taste, greater freedom from prejudice, and a more exclusive bent towards purely literary criticism, to be one of the great literary critics of the world. Bayle. But, unluckily for himself, he had contracted, through corrupt following doubtless of the Latins (even such respectable persons as Pliny) and of the scholars of the Renaissance, a sort of perpetual itch and hankering 317after the indecent, which, to say nothing else, is as teasing and as tedious in the long-run as an itch for sermonising and a hankering after instruction. Equally tedious, and in much worse taste, is the perpetual undercurrent—not seldom becoming a very obvious top-flood—of sceptical girding and nagging at the Bible and at religion generally. In both these respects Bayle was followed by Voltaire. But Voltaire, though his own literary sympathies were perhaps not his strongest, had some. Of purely literary sympathies Bayle seldom shows much trace—by which it is not in the least meant that he is not a man of letters himself, for he is an excellent one, and the reproaches which have been addressed to his style are not of much importance. But it is not literature that he really loves: it is “philosophy” of a kind, and gossip of almost all kinds. His wits are always bright and alert, and his learning, though associated with so many qualities opposed to those of the mere pedant, and not impeccable, is pretty sound. He has the curiosity, the acuteness, the erudition, the industry of the true critic, but he has neither the enthusiasm, nor the disinterestedness, nor the grasp.

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

318Curiously enough the want of judgment with which Baillet has been, and to some extent may justly be, reproached shows itself exactly in the most unlikely place. The ethos of a Critical Pedant. His opening volume on the nature, legitimacy, and so forth of Criticism, though too prolix, collects an extraordinary number of just and valuable things, and adds to them at least something of the author’s own. His Character of a Pedantic, Chicaning, Malicious Critic (partly borrowed from Le Bon, partly elaborated by himself) will be found at vol. i. p. 52., and has been justified by some seven generations of the persons it describes. It is Pedantry “to pick low and little faults, and to excite yourself over matters which are of no importance.” It is Pedantry “to steal from an author and insult him at the same time; to tear outrageously those who differ with you in opinion.” It is Pedantry “to endeavour to raise the whole world against some one who does not think enough of Cicero.” It is Pedantry “to take occasion by an author’s mistake to endeavour to humiliate him and ruin his reputation.” It is Pedantry “to send your author back in a haughty manner to the lowest class, and to menace him with whip and ferule for an error in chronology.” It is not merely Pedantry but Chicanery “to separate phrases in order to give them another sense,” to “impute printers’ errors,” to “neglect or change punctuation.” We need not go on to Baillet’s signs of “Malignity”: the cap is already a good cap, a very good cap, and one need not go far to find some one to wear it.

A boiling down of this volume—which, so far as I know, has never been executed—would be far superior to most general works on the subject with which I am acquainted. Nor is Baillet’s distribution of his scheme altogether a bad one. It is in the detailed carrying out (where one would suppose that for a man of such industry the least part of the difficulty lay) that he is most unsatisfactory. He neglects—in a manner surprising 319from one of that still scholastically educated generation of ecclesiastics, who were wont positively to abuse division and subdivision—the most obvious and mechanical assistances of method. His first sketch of subdivisions, though wanting succinctness, is not ill; but he never really carries it out, and stuffs in its stead long collections on “Precocious Persons,” “Authors in Disguise,” and “Les Anti” (books of a polemic character with titles so beginning), which belong only to the curiosities of Criticism. Further, he never seems to have set out, in any of the divisions, with a preliminary list of the authors he meant to handle, so that his omissions and inclusions are equally surprising. And, lastly, he never seems to have worked out any preliminary calculus of the amount of space which such authors as he does admit proportionately deserve. But the extent of his knowledge is astounding, and the way in which he communicates it not disagreeable.

Baillet’s unmethodical prosecution of his task was in this fortunate for us that it induced a somewhat younger contemporary, Balthasar Gibert, to take up the rhetorical-critical side of his work, and continue it in a book^[403] not very much known but of great value. Gibert. In strict date it belongs to the next century, and therefore to the next Book, but we have always taken, and shall always take, liberty of protracting or foreshortening our views as may be desirable; and this is avowedly a supplement to Baillet, though limited in subject, allowing, in consequence, fuller treatment of individuals, and displaying a good deal more originality and judgment. Gibert excellently supplies Baillet’s admitted insufficiency as to Longinus; he is very copious on Hermogenes, who had been coming, from Sturm downwards, into more and more estimation; and if in his accounts of the Italians he shows a traditional 320rather than an adequately comparative estimate,^[404] he is sufficiently modern to give a quite considerable abstract of “M. Mackenze” (sic), i.e., Sir George Mackenzie’s Idea Eloquentiæ Forensis Hodiernæ. That he “but yaws neither” between Rhetoric and Criticism is a point of no importance against him; and it is a valuable document for the gradual transformation of the one into the other.

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

For the matter is not really of so much importance in the History of Criticism as it may at first sight appear to possess. 321Its small critical value. These quarrels rarely do much critical good; for the critical issues are almost always obscured in them, first by the animus and prejudice of the combatants, and then by the mere dust of the fighting. But this particular combat did perhaps the least good of all; and could have done the least good. It was indeed sufficiently inevitable: for the sort of deification with which the whole of the sixteenth century, and most orthodox authority in the earlier seventeenth, had regarded antiquity, was sure to breed revolt. But it led to no conclusion; it evolved no truth. Truth is not the daughter of Ignorance; and it is really hard to say which party shows most ignorance in this matter. The defenders of the Ancients knew, as a rule, next to nothing of the Moderns; and the defenders of the moderns knew a great deal too little of the ancients. La Motte knew no Greek if Perrault^[405] knew any; and with Boileau not only to all appearance was English literature a blank sheet, but almost the whole sheet of French literature before his own time was either blank or inscribed with fantastic fallacies. Still, this is not a condition entirely or commonly unknown in squabbles of this kind. The signal distinction and disqualification of the advocates in this famous cause is that, as a rule, neither any of the leaders, nor any of the juniors, had taken more than the slightest trouble to get up, or at least to understand, his own brief. The Ancients are here in a little better case than the Moderns; but they were not in so very much better case. Most of them knew the Latin classics fairly well; and some of them (though by no means all, or even many) had a fair, while a few had a good, acquaintance with Greek.^[406] But, with rarest, if with any exceptions, they persisted in exaggerating, if not in contemplating solely, that side of Classical Literature which 322has been and must be admitted to be its principal side, but which is not the only one. They would not see—or if they saw, they expressed positive distaste for—the vaguer, more imaginative, more “Romantic” beauty of Greek, and in a less degree of Latin. They never dreamt of turning the tables on their antagonists, as they might have done to no inconsiderable extent, from this point of view. And by holding up Design, Order, Decorum, and the rest, as paramount conditions of literary excellence, they laid themselves open to the most inconvenient retorts from well-equipped adversaries, and even received some on the score of Homer, badly as their adversaries were equipped as a rule.

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

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

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