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 too much of the Jesuit schoolmaster, with his reverence towards boys, to mention that terrible scene between Zeus and Hera which had already distressed the compatriots of Aristophanes and Martial, and which remains one of the earliest examples of absolutely perfect poetry in a particular kind. But he makes up for it. We have, of course, the “wine-heavy, dog-eyed, hare-hearted” line to mourn over. How undignified of Homer to make Achilles anxious about the preservation of the body of Patroclus from corruption! How could Ulysses, with such an excellent wife and such an amiable son, waste time with Calypso and dangle after Circe, to whom the pudibund Rapin applies epithets which our Decorum prevents us from repeating, and for which he deserved to be both shipwrecked and turned into a Gryll. Was it quite nice of Priam, as a father, to wish all his children dead so Hector were alive? Nausicaa is too shocking. A Princess’s face should not show grace, the Jesuit thinks,[[392]] to men in Ulysses’ condition.
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.
Yet even here it is fair to observe that Rapin is at least trying to make the two ends of his “reason” and his “reflection” meet: and so it is always:—
“His reason rooted in unreason stands,
And sense insensate makes him idly wise.”
The consequences are patent on every page, and a chapter might be not disagreeably filled with them. 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 art. It is no wonder that, even of the ancient division of these, hardly one escapes scot-free, except those which were originally composed by men of great, but not the greatest, genius, on a somewhat similar scheme. Elsewhere the unfortunate critic is constantly catching himself in those bushes which he has himself planted, and bruising himself against obstacles which he has elaborately set up. In a general way he grants that Homer is the greatest of poets; but the Fetiches of “Design” and “Decorum” extort from him the sacrifice of this in detail, and the acknowledgment that Homer is frequently most indecorous, and that large parts of him are out of drawing. And so of all.
Le Bossu (to whom the English sometimes give a superfluous final t, whom they generally defraud of his rightful “Le,” and whom in the main they know only from the locus classicus of Sterne)[[396]] reapproximates to the Aubignacian level. Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic. But it is fair to say that his dulness arises from a different cause. He is not, like Hédelin, a stupid man—he is distinctly the reverse—nor is he spiteful. He is merely the hardiest and most thoroughgoing devotee of a certain kind of abstract criticism. He does, of course, give us chapters on some actual illustrations of Heroic or Epic; but they are scarcely more necessary to his book than the picture-illuminations of a poem or a novel. Being a writer of some esprit, he sometimes exercises it in rather dangerous fictions—for instance, his imagined epic of Meridarpax, where all the mouse-stories (mouse and lion, town and country mouse, &c.) are worked in, would be most sprightly, if it did not look sprightlier still as an exercise in laughing at his own side. But by far the greater bulk, and the whole vertebration and solid substance, of his argument are devoted to Epic in the Abstract. Design, definition, and parts; good fables and bad fables; episodes; the biology, so to speak, of the Action, the narration, the manners and characters, not forgetting the Machines, and at last something on the Thoughts and Expression—which have about one-ninth of the whole. In short, if we have not exactly Epic in vacuo, we have it as a dried preparation. The complexity, anti-sensuousness, and dispassionate character of it are almost abashing; one feels at the end that, to hanker after an actual poem, be it Iliad or Orlando, has something sinful—something of the lust of the flesh.
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, as favourable examples of bad schools generally do, he damages his cause more than less favourable ones, because its drawbacks are more obvious and intrinsic. On his principles you must ostracise the best, the noblest, the most charming, the most poetic things in poetry. Et c’est tout dire.
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.