CHAPTER II.
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF VOLTAIRE.
CLOSE CONNECTION OF FRENCH SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRITICISM: FONTENELLE—EXCEPTIONAL CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO THE “ANCIENT AND MODERN” QUARREL—THE ‘DIALOGUES DES MORTS’—OTHER CRITICAL WORK—LA MOTTE—HIS “UNITY OF INTEREST”—ROLLIN—BRUMOY—RÉMOND DE SAINT-MARD—L. RACINE—DU BOS—STIMULATING BUT DESULTORY CHARACTER OF HIS ‘RÉFLEXIONS’—MONTESQUIEU—VOLTAIRE: DISAPPOINTMENT OF HIS CRITICISM—EXAMPLES OF IT—CAUSES OF HIS FAILURE—OTHERS: BUFFON—“STYLE AND THE MAN”—VAUVENARGUES—BATTEUX—HIS ADJUSTMENT OF RULES AND TASTE—HIS INCOMPLETENESS—MARMONTEL—ODDITIES AND QUALITIES OF HIS CRITICISM—OTHERS: THOMAS, SUARD, ETC.—LA HARPE—HIS ‘COURS DE LITTÉRATURE’—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AS “ULTIMUS SUORUM”—THE ACADEMIC ESSAY—RIVAROL.
The later seventeenth and at least the earlier eighteenth century in France are perhaps more closely connected than any other literary periods, if, indeed, they are not practically one, like the two halves of our own so-called “Elizabethan” time. Close connection of French seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism. Fontenelle. And this connection we can duly demonstrate, as far as criticism is concerned. Boileau himself outlived the junction of the centuries by more than a decade: and the birth of Voltaire preceded it by more than a lustrum. The Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns—a very poor thing certainly—revived in the new century, as if on purpose to show the connection with the old. And, lastly, the prolonged life of one remarkable and representative critic was almost equally distributed over the two. Fontenelle is one of the most interesting, if not exactly one of the most important, figures in our whole long gallery; and if he has never yet held quite his proper place in literary history, this is due to the facts, first, that he was a critic more than he was anything else; and, secondly, that he forgot the great “Thou shalt not” which Criticism lays upon her sons, and would lay (if she had any) on her daughters. No critic is in the least bound to produce good work, or any work, of the constructive kind: but he is bound not to produce that which is not good. The author of Aspar and the Lettres du Chevalier d’Her ... forgot this, and paid the penalty.[[649]]
Yet his attractions are so great that few people who have paid him much attention have failed to be smitten with them. M. Rigault,[[650]] who does not approve of him generally, is a conspicuous example of this. Exceptional character of his criticism. But what we must look to is what he has actually written himself. His utterances are almost too tempting. In such a book as this the expatiation which they invite must be perforce denied them. Yet one may break proportion a little in order to do something like justice to a critic whose like, for suggestiveness, delicacy, and range, we shall hardly meet in the French eighteenth century. It is indeed curious that of the three men of his own earliest years from whom Voltaire inherits—Saint-Evremond, Hamilton, and Fontenelle—every one should have surpassed him in the finer traits, while all fall short of him in force and, as he himself said, diable au corps. Saint-Evremond we have dealt with; Hamilton[[651]] does not come into our story. Fontenelle is for the moment ours.
It must be confessed that he is an elusive if an agreeable possession. From wisdom, from worldly-wisdom, from whim, or from what not, he seems to have wished to be an enigma; and—to borrow one of Scott’s great sentences—“the wish of his heart was granted to his loss, and the hope of his pride has destroyed him”—at least has certainly made him rank lower than he would otherwise have ranked. However délié—to use a word of his own language for which we have no single English equivalent—however watchful, mercurial, sensitive the reader’s spirit may be, he will, over and over again in Fontenelle, meet passages where he cannot be sure whether his author is writing merely with tongue in cheek, or applying an all-dissolving irony, hardly inferior to Swift’s in power, and almost superior in quietness and subtlety. Moreover, his critical position is a very peculiar one, and constantly liable to be misunderstood—if, indeed, it be not safer to say that it is almost always difficult to apprehend with any certainty of escaping misprision. The good folk who magisterially rebuke Dryden as to Gorboduc, because he made mistakes about the form of the verse and the sex of the person—even those (one regrets to say this includes M. Rigault himself) who are shocked at that great critic’s laudatory citations of, and allusions to, Le Bossu—need never hope to understand Fontenelle.
Few things (except that he was the author of that Plurality of Worlds which happily does not concern us) are better known concerning him than that he was a champion of the Moderns. His attitude to the “Ancient and Modern” Quarrel. Yet, when we come to examine his numerous and elusive writings on the subject, the one principle of his that does emerge is a principle which, if it chastises the Ancients with whips, chastises the Moderns with scorpions. A man writing, as M. Rigault wrote, in 1856, would have been a wonderful person if he had not been misled by the great idol of Progress. But Fontenelle was at least as far from the delusion as he was from the date. His argument is just the contrary—that as human wisdoms and human follies, human powers and human weaknesses, are always the same, it is absurd to suppose that any one period can have general and intrinsic superiority over any other.
The Dialogues des Morts.
Assuredly no “modern,” whether of his days or of our own, can find aught but confusion of face in the quiet axiom of Laura at the end of her controversy with Sappho,[[652]] “Croyez moi, après qu’on a bien raisonné ou sur l’amour, ou sur telle autre matière qu’on voudra, on trouve au bout du compte que les choses sont bien comme elles sont, et que la réforme qu’on prétendroit y apporter gâterait tout.” Pulveris exigui jactus! but one with a fatally magical effect in the quarrels of criticism as of other things. And the same is the lesson of the dialogue which follows immediately—the best of the whole, and almost a sovereign document of our library,—that between Socrates and Montaigne. Not only is there no example in the literature of the dialogue, from Plato to Mr Traill, much more apt than the “maieutic” feat of Socrates, by which he induces Montaigne to commit himself to the dogma, “Partout où il y a des hommes, il y a des sottises, et les mêmes sottises”; but the rest of the piece is as powerfully, though as quietly, worked out as this crisis of it. There is no Progress; there is no Degeneration. The distribution may vary: the sum will not. Erasistratus maintains the same thesis on a different matter a little later in his dialogue with Harvey,[[653]] laying down the doctrine, outrageous to all the Royal Societies of the world (though they were glad to welcome Fontenelle as populariser, and have perhaps never had such an one since, except Mr Huxley), that “the things which are not necessary perhaps do get discovered in the course of ages, the others not.” And Charles V. preaches no very different sermon when he “makes a hare” of Erasmus by pointing out to that dilettante republican that les biens de l’esprit are just as much things of time and chance as crown and sceptre.[[654]]
It is, however, in Fontenelle’s actual concrete deliverances of criticism that the resemblance to Dryden comes in most. Other critical work. Those who insist that such deliverances shall be Medic-Persian, unalterable, mathematical, true without relation and adjustment, will not like him. To take his utterances down in a notebook, and reproduce them at the next examination (to provide for which process seems to be held the be-all and end-all of modern criticism), would not do at all. When Fontenelle praises Corneille at the expense of Racine, you have to think whether he is speaking what he thinks or merely as le neveu de son oncle; when he says other things, whether he is a “Modern” at the time and to the extent of saying something which he knows will cause the “Ancients” grinding torments; when he sketches[[655]] a theory of poetic criticism of the most sweeping a priori kind from Principles of Beauty down through Kinds to Rules, whether he really means this, or is conciliating somebody, or laughing in his sleeve at somebody, or the like. But this—at least for some tastes—only adds piquancy to his observations, and they have now and then surprising justice, freshness, freedom from the prejudices of time, country, and circumstance. The Histoire du Théâtre Français, for instance, which he has prefixed to his Vie de Corneille, may be based on second-hand information, and, with our fuller knowledge, it may not be very hard to pick holes in it. But it is an extraordinary production for a representative man of letters at a time when hardly any such man, in any country of Europe, was free from ignorant contempt of the early vernaculars. The brief eleven-articled “parallel between Racine and Corneille” is of course somewhat partisan; but it will give the partisans on the other side some trouble to prove it unjust. The “Remarks on Aristophanes,” and on the Greek theatre generally, are obviously “modern” and intended to tease; but they are uncommonly shrewd, and so are the Réflexions sur la Poétique and those on “Poetry in General.” It is wonderful that even an antagonist of Boileau, and a sworn paradoxer, should, at this time, have been able to see the beauty of the Père Le Moyne’s splendid couplet on the Sicilian Vespers,—
“Quand du Gibel ardent les noires Euménides