[368]. They were probably the tribut légitime which a noble esprit might derive from his work.
[369]. This refers to the son, François (1628-1680), of a more poetic pair—Guillaume (1598-1659) and Claudine Colletet. The former of these was also a critic in his way, and left, besides an Art Poétique (1658) of no great value, a Histoire des Poètes Français which, strangely enough, was never printed, and the MS. of which was burnt by the Vandals of the Commune in 1871.
[370]. A humourist might maintain the two opposite theses, “That Boileau has genuine authority,” and “That the French are always craving for a tyrant,” on the strength of a curious catena of evidence from Voltaire’s “Ça porte malheur” to Marmontel, who had presumed to speak lightly of Despréaux, down to M. Bourgoin’s “On a difficilement raison contre Boileau.” But to those who “bear an English heart” these terrors are idle.
[371]. It is interesting and significant that Boileau’s defenders generally drop “Good Sense,” and use, whenever they can, the more ambiguous and high-sounding “Reason.” It is sufficient to say that their author repeats “Good Sense” again and again, and obviously uses Reason as a mere synonym for it.
[372]. If I have seemed, or may seem, too bitter in any remarks on Boileau, let me here observe that few things in literary history are more pathetic than these last years of his, when, ultimus suorum, amid the ruins of the political glories which he had celebrated, and in a transition period between the great literature of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth, with no one but his foolish Boswell-Eckermann, Brossette, to comfort him, and no one at all to whom to look as his successor, he held—unconquered and unconquerable—to his principles, and died, as one of the poets to whom he was so unjust had said,
“Sans bouger, debout et dans son rang.”
[373]. That he had taught Racine rimer difficilement is the well-known boast in that uncomplimentary comparison of his pupil with Corneille, by which he appears to have administered a sort of private unction to his soul to atone for his public injustice.[injustice.]
[374]. Not of course Boileau’s worthy predecessor in Art-Poetic writing (v. supra, pp. 117, 118), but an advocate of the mid-seventeenth century, who was unfortunate enough to commit sonnets, and to be disliked by the satirist.
[375]. Even his admirers admit his strange ignoring of the fact that Madeleine de Scudéry intended her personages to be modern—that they were mere disguises of Condé and others, not attempts to re-create antiquity. This of course does not exempt them from blame; but it requires a different sort of blame.
[376]. The condescending praise of “Arioste et ses fables comiques,” in A. P., iii. 291, can hardly be regarded as a set-off, especially as just before (l. 218) he had stigmatised him, emphasising the stigma by a note, as “follement idolâtre et païen.”