Sonneront de leur cor ces Vêpres homicides,”—
where we are more than half-way from Du Bartas and Aubigné to Victor Hugo. The mere image—this new “vision of the guarded mount,” with the black Furies silhouetted against the flaming cone, and the explosions of the volcano deepening the bugle-call to massacre—is fine: the means taken to make it poetical are finer. The use of the proper names, and the cunning arrangement of epithet and noun in noires Euménides and Vêpres homicides, and the sharp blasts of the long and short o's in the second line, are more than Hugonian, they are positively Miltonic: and the couplet will serve to keep a man in Mr Arnold’s “torpid and dismal” stage of later middle life cheerful for an evening, and whensoever he remembers it afterwards. True, Fontenelle admits demurely that he knows “vespers” and “Eumenides” are something of an anachronism in conjunction, and proposes a slight alteration to suit this objection of “correctness.” But this is his way; and the wonderful thing is that he should have admired it at all—should have actually tasted this heady wine of poetry. As he finishes the paragraph in his own quaint style,[[656]] “Il était bien aisé, même à de grands poètes, de ne pas trouver” this couplet: and in his time it would have been still easier even for great critics not to do justice to it, and not to see that it is to these things “so easy for the poet not to find” that it is the critic’s business to look.
The general remarks on Comedy which he prefixed to a collection of his efforts in that kind are not negligible; but in those on Eclogue,[[657]] and still more in the Digression sur Les Anciens et Les Modernes, the curse, or at least the gainsaying, of the Quarrel is upon him, and the main drift is not merely digressive but aggressive and excessive. In the Digression he anticipates (as he did in so many things) the materialist-rationalist explanations of the later eighteenth century by climate, fibres of the brain, &c. Here he becomes scientific, and therefore necessarily ceases to be of importance in literature.
But he always regains that importance before long—in his Discourse of the Origin of Fable, in his Academic Discourses and Replies, in many a fragment and isolated remark. Even in his Eloges—mostly devoted (there are nearly two volumes of them) to scientific personages from Leibniz and Newton downwards—the unconquerable critical power of the man shows itself, subject to the limitations noted. The world is sometimes not allowed to know anything of its greatest critics, and Fontenelle is an example of this. But those who have won something of that knowledge of criticism which it is the humble purpose of this book to facilitate, will not slight the man who, at the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could flirt in the face of Ancients and Moderns alike the suggestion (which Mr Rigmarole doubtless borrowed from him) that all times are “pretty much like our own,” and could see and hear the sable sisters sounding the tocsin on the flaming crest of Mongibel.
Fontenelle is elusive, but comprehensible by the imagination. La Motte,[[658]] his inseparable companion in the renewed sacrilege of the Moderns, seems an easier, but is really a harder, personage to lay hold of. La Motte. It is indeed not extremely difficult to explain his attitude to the Ancients by the fact that he knew no Greek; and his exaltation of prose by a consciousness (wherein he has left a family by no means extinct) that his own verses were worth very little. But it is so easy not to write verses if you cannot; and not to write about Greek if you do not know it! And the problem is further complicated by the facts that at least some judges, who are not exactly the first comers, such as Fontenelle himself and Voltaire, maintained that La Motte could write verses,—and that, so far from being “a fellow who had failed,” he had obtained the greatest scenic success of the early eighteenth century with Inès de Castro, and, what is more, had deserved it. But for once, as also again in Pope’s case, the dangerous explanation of physical defects and constitutional weakness seems to have some validity. The invulnerable nonchalance of his friend Fontenelle had met the damnation of Aspar by a cool tearing up of the piece, and an undismayed advance upon the fate of the plusquam semel damnatus; La Motte, at twenty or at little more, felt the similar misfortune of Les Originaux so severely that he actually went to La Trappe for a time. Before middle life he was blind and a cripple. The irritability which did not show itself in his temper (for he was the most amiable of men) would seem to have transferred itself to his literary attitude, not affecting his politeness of expression, but inducing a sort of “rash” of paradox.
To trace the vagaries of this might not be unamusing, but would certainly be excessive here. His “Unity of Interest.” La Motte, it seems to me, had considerably less natural literary taste than Fontenelle; and of the controversy[[659]] (it was not his antagonist’s fault if it was not a very acrimonious one) between him and Madame Dacier one cannot say much more than that the lady is very aggressive, very erudite, and very unintelligent; the gentleman very suave, rather ignorant, and of an intelligence better, but not much better, directed; while both are sufficiently distant from any true critical point of view. Yet once, as was not unnatural in the case of a very clever man who was at least endeavouring to form independent conclusions, La Motte did hit upon a great critical truth when,[[660]] discussing the Three Unities, he laid it down that there is after all only one Unity which is of real importance, and that this is the “Unity of Interest,” to which all the others are subsidiary, and but as means to an end. “Self-evident,” some one may say; but in how many critics have we found the fact acknowledged hitherto? and by how many has it been frankly acknowledged since? That the aim of the poet is to please, to satisfy the thirst for pleasure—that is to say, to interest—all but the extremest ethical prudery will admit. But critics, especially classical and neo-classical critics, have always been in the mood of Christophero Sly when he railed at the woman of the house and threatened her with presentation at the leet,
“Because she brought stone jugs and no sealed quarts.”
Without the “sealed quart” of the Unity—of the Rule generally—these critics will not slake, nor let others slake, their thirst. But the affirmation of the Unity of Interest, in La Motte’s way, does inevitably bring with it licence to use the stone jug or anything else, so only that the good wine of poetry be made to do its good office.
The Quarrel left its traces for a long time on criticism, and seems to have partly determined the composition, as late as 1730, of two books of some note, the Traité des Études of the excellent Rollin, and the elaborate Théâtre des Grecs of the Père Brumoy. Rollin. Of neither need we say very much. The first-named[[661]] had considerable influence at home and abroad, especially in Germany; but Rollin’s successor, Batteux, was justified in the good-humoured malice of his observation,[[662]] “Je trouve à l’article de la Poésie un discours fort sensé sur son origine et sa destination, qui doit être toute au profit de la vertu. On y cite les beaux endroits d’Homère; on y donne la plus juste idée de la sublime Poésie des Livres Saints; mais c'était une définition que je demandais.” Alas! we have experienced the same disappointment many times; nor is it Batteux himself who will cure us of it.
Brumoy’s imposing quartos[[663]] have at least the advantage (how great a one the same experience has shown us) of tackling a definite subject in a business-like way. Brumoy. His book consists of actual translations of a certain number of Greek pieces, of analyses of all the rest that we have, and of divers discourses. He leads off with a forcible and well-founded complaint of the extreme ignorance of Greek tragedy and drama generally which the Quarrel had shown; his observations on individual writers and pieces are often very sensible; and his “Discourse on the Parallel between the Theatres” has a bearing which he probably did not suspect, and might not have relished. He dwells with vigour and knowledge on the differences between them in order to show that not merely preference, as in the Quarrel, but even strict comparison, is impossible between things so different. It could not be but that sooner or later it would dawn, on some readers at least, that it was even more ridiculous to try to make the two obey the same laws.