As has been already shown in the last book, literary criticism had, even by the middle of the seventeenth century, established so firm a hold on French taste that the representative system becomes more and more imperative upon the historian thereof. To represent the later days of Fontenelle and those when Voltaire, though attaining, had not entirely attained his almost European dictatorship of letters, three names will serve very well; one perhaps new to many (if there be many) readers of these pages, another one of the conscript names of literary history, respected if not read, and the third a classic of the world—in plainer words, Rémond de Saint-Mard, the Abbé Du Bos, and Montesquieu.

Saint-Mard has been rather badly treated by the books,—for instance, Vapereau’s Dictionnaire des Littératures, often no despicable compilation, not only dismisses him as médiocre, but misspells his name Saint-Marc. Rémond de Saint-Mard. He had, however, some influence in his own day, especially on the Germans;[[664]] and there is an extremely pretty little edition[[665]] of his works, most of which had been issued separately earlier. To some extent he is a follower of Fontenelle, writes Dialogues of Gods, &c., Lettres Galantes et Philosophiques, and the like, to please the town and the ladies, but with a constant turning to criticism. In the “Discourse,” which precedes his Dialogues in the collected edition, there is a very odd and, as it seems to me, a very noteworthy passage, in which, though there may be some would-be fine-gentleman nonchalance, there is also a dawning of that sense of the unnaturalness and inconvenience of “the rules” which is constantly showing itself in the early eighteenth century. He admits[[666]] that he has not followed his own rules; for the orthodox dialogue ought to have one subject, led up to for some time, announced at last. But somehow or other most of his dialogues have more. So few ideas are fertile enough for a whole Dialogue!—a sentence which obviously cuts away the theory of the rule, and not merely its practice.

Nor are his other works by any means destitute of original ideas worthily put. In one of his definition-descriptions of poetry,[[667]] if there is something of eighteenth-century sensualism, there is much also of the acute and practical psychology of the period. L. Racine.The words do account—whether in “low” or “high” fashion—for the poetic delight, as “Philosophy teaching by example” and other arid abstractions do not. His theory elsewhere, that Custom communicates the charm of versification (he does not quote usus concinnat, but inevitably suggests it), has probably a great deal of truth in it, if it is not the whole truth; and though we know that his explanation of the origin of Poetry—that it came because Prose was too common—is historically inaccurate, it is evidently only a false deduction, uncorrected by actual historic knowledge, from the real fact that the “discommoning of the common” is a main source of the poetic pleasure. In points such as these Rémond de Saint-Mard rises commendably above the estimable dulness of his contemporary Louis Racine,[[668]] with his admiration oddly distributed between Milton and his own papa, and in the former case more oddly conditioned by respect for Addison and Voltaire; his laborious rearrangement of most of the old commonplaces about poetry and poets; and his obliging explanation that “Ces images de magiciennes et de sorcières de Laponie ne paraissaient pas extravagantes aux Anglais dans le temps que Milton écrivit.”

By this time “Æsthetics” were breaking the shell everywhere; but in many cases, as we have seen, they did not consciously affect the critical principles of writers. Du Bos. Du Bos, a solid inquirer, and a man of considerable ability in that striking out of wide generalisations which delighted his time, could hardly have avoided them. His Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture[[669]] have sometimes been credited with considerable precursorship on the literary side. It is certain that he lays some stress (Part II., § 14 sq.) on the effect of Climate upon Art, and if this “seem such dear delight, Beyond all other,” he must have the credit due therefor from those to whom it so seems. To those who reflect on the climatic authorship, say of Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets of La Casa, doubts may occur. Du Bos is certainly an interesting and stimulating writer; but his very excursions into generality seem to have precluded him from studying any particular author carefully; and the crotchet and paradox which appear in his more famous and later Histoire de la Monarchie Française are not absent from the Réflexions. These take, moreover, a distinctly “classic” bent. Dr Johnson would have loved, and very possibly did love, him for arguing in a masterly manner that French poetry simply cannot equal Latin, either in style or in cadence and harmony of verse; nor perhaps would Mr Matthew Arnold on this occasion have disdained to say ditto to Dr Johnson. Latin words are more beautiful than French. Harmony is easier to attain in Latin than in French. The rules are less troublesome in Latin than in French, and their observance results in more beauties in the mother than in the daughter. This is “Thorough” with a vengeance.[[670]]

On the great question of katharsis Du Bos holds the view that art operates by imitating the things which would have excited strong passions in us if real, but which, as not being real, only excite weak ones; and makes fair fight for it (Part I., § 3). Stimulating but desultory character of his Réflexions. He thinks that while execution is everything in painting it is not everything in poetry, but still much. He quotes English critics, especially Addison, pretty freely, and is not far from holding with them that French drama deals too much with love. He has some really acute remarks on what he calls poetry of style, distinguishing this style from mere diction and versification, and connecting this directly with his Latin-French paradox. He even ventures close to the sin unpardonable, in the eyes of Classicism, by arguing that the beauty of the parts of a poem contributes more to its effect than the justness and regularity of the plan, and that a poem may be “regular” to the nth and yet quite a bad poem. He has respect for the popular judgment—a respect suggesting a not impossible acquaintance with Gravina (v. infra, p. 538), who had written a good many years before him: and he distinctly postulates, after the manner of the century, an Æsthetic Sense existing in almost all, and capable of deciding on points of taste (Part II., § 22). He has some direct and more indirect observations in reference to the Quarrel, speaking with trenchant, but not too trenchant, disapproval (Part II., § 36) of those who endeavour to judge works of art by translations and criticisms. On the main question he is pretty sound. He is good on genius, and on what he calls the artisan, the craftsman without genius. Taking him altogether, Du Bos may be allowed the praise of a really fertile and original writer,[[671]] who says many things which are well worth attention and which seldom received it before him, in regard to what may be called the previous questions of criticism. His connection of poetry with painting sometimes helps him, and seldom leads him absolutely wrong; but it to some extent distracts him, and constantly gives an air of desultoriness and haphazard to his observation. It is, moreover, quite remarkable how persistently he abides in generalibus, scarcely ever descending below the mediate examination of Kinds. When he touches on individual works of art he confines himself in the most gingerly fashion to illustration merely; there is never an appreciation in whole or in considerable part.

When Voltaire denounced Montesquieu for lèse-poésie, the accused, if he had chosen, might have brought formidable counter accusations; but there was certainly some ground for the actual charge. Montesquieu. When a man says[[672]] that “the four great poets are Plato, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, and Montaigne,” he is evidently either a heretic or a paradoxer; and the hundred and thirty-seventh of the Lettres Persanes gives a sad colour to the worse supposition. There is perhaps less actual high treason to poetry here than in the remarks of Signor Pococurante, that noble Venetian, but there is more intended; the whole treatment is ostentatiously contemptuous. Dramatists are allowed some merit, but poets in general “put good sense in irons, and smother reason in ornament.” As for epic poems, connoisseurs themselves say that there never have been but two good ones, and never will be a third.[[673]] Lyric poets are contemptible creatures who deal in nothing but harmonious extravagance and so forth. As for romances in prose, they have the faults of poems and others to boot. Elsewhere, in Letter xlviii., a “poet is the grotesque of the human race.” It is scarcely surprising that, when we turn to the Essai sur le Goût, there is hardly any definite reference to literature at all, and that Montesquieu is entirely occupied in tracing or imagining abstract reasons for the attractiveness of abstract things like “surprise,” “symmetry,” “variety,” and even of the je ne sais quoi. The je ne sais quoi in an attractive, but not technically beautiful, girl is, it seems, due to surprise at finding her so attractive, which, with all respect to the President, seems to be somewhat “circular.” In fact, Montesquieu is chiefly interesting to us, first, because he made no literary use of his own theories as to climate and the rest—which later writers have used and abused in this way; and secondly, because he shows, in excelsis, that radically unliterary as well as unpoetical vein which, for all its remarkable literary performance, is characteristic of his time.

It will surprise no one who has any acquaintance with the subject that but a few lines should have been given to Montesquieu; it may shock some to find but a very few pages given to Voltaire.[[674]] Voltaire: Disappointments of his criticism. But while I have never been able to rank the Patriarch’s criticism high, a reperusal of it in sequence, for the purpose of this book, has even reduced the level of my estimate. The fact is that, consummate literary craftsman as he was, and wanting only the je ne sais quoi itself (or rather something that we know too well) to rank with the very greatest men of letters, Voltaire was not a man with whom literary interest by any means predominated. It is not merely that his anti-crusade against l’infâme constantly colours his literary, as it does all his other, judgments; and that once at least it made him certainly indorse, and possibly enounce, the astounding statement that the Parables in the Gospels are “coarse and low.”[[675]] But when this perpetually disturbing influence is at its least active point, we can see perfectly that neither Voltaire’s treasure nor his heart is anywhere, with the doubtful exception of the drama division, in literature. In mathematics and in physical science there is no doubt that he was genuinely interested; and he was perhaps still more interested (as indeed men of his century generally were) in what may be vaguely called anthropology, the moral, social, and (to some, though only to some, extent) political history of mankind. But for literature he had very little genuine love; though the vanity in which he certainly was not lacking could not fail to be conscious of his own excellence as a practitioner in it; and though he could not but recognise its power—its almost omnipotence—as a weapon. It was probably the more human character of the drama that attracted him there.

However this may be, it is impossible, for me at least, to rank him high as a critic: and this refusal is hardly in the least due to his famous blasphemies against Shakespeare and Milton. Examples of it. As we have seen—as we shall see—it is possible to disagree profoundly with some, nay, with many, of a critic’s estimates, and yet to think highly of his critical gifts. But Voltaire scarcely anywhere shows the true ethos of the critic: and that “smattering erudition” of his is nowhere so much of a smattering, and so little of an erudition, as here. His two famous surveys of English and French literature, in the Lettres sur les Anglais and the Siècle de Louis Quatorze, show, on the French side at least, a more complete ignorance of literary history than Boileau’s own: and the individual judgments, though admirably expressed, are banal and without freshness of grasp. The extensive Commentary on Corneille contains, of course, interesting things, but is of no high critical value. The Essai sur la Poésie Épique[Épique] opens with some excellent ridicule of “the rules”—a subject which indeed might seem to invite the Voltairian method irresistibly; but after this and some serious good sense of the same kind, he practically deserts to the rules themselves. He admits fautes grossières in Homer, finds “monstrosity and absurdity up to the limits of imagination” in Shakespeare, thinks that Virgil is “Homer’s best work,” discovers in the supernatural of Tasso and Camoens only “insipid stories fit to amuse children,” dismisses, as everybody knows, the great Miltonic episode of Satan, Death, and Sin as “disgusting and abominable,” and keeps up throughout his survey that wearisome castanet-clatter of “fault and beauty—beauty and fault” which, whensoever and wheresoever we find it, simply means that the critic is not able to see his subject as a whole, and tell us whether it is foul or fair.

Perhaps no better instance of the feebleness of Voltaire’s criticism can be found than in his dealings with Rabelais.[[676]] Here there are practically no disturbing elements. Yet no one is more responsible than Voltaire is for the common notion, equally facile and false, of Rabelais as a freethinker with a sharp eye to the main chance, who disguised his freethinking in a cloak of popular obscenity, who is often amusing, sometimes admirable, but as a whole coarse, tedious, and illegible, or at best appealing to the most vulgar taste. Take the famous sentence that Swift is a “Rabelais de bonne compagnie,”[[677]] work it out either side, and it will be difficult to find anywhere words more radically uncritical. Or turn to the Dictionnaire Philosophique. Not only are the literary articles very few, and in some of these few cases mere rechauffés of the Lettres sur Les Anglais, &c., but the head “Literature” itself contains the singular statement that criticism is not literature—because nobody speaks of “une belle critique.” The articles “Esprit” and “Goût” are attractive—especially the latter, because it is on the critical watchword of the century: but we are sent away, worse than empty, with some abuse of Shakespeare, and with the statement, “No man of letters can possibly fail to recognise the perfected taste of Boileau in the Art Poétique.” Only, perhaps, the article on Art Dramatique is worthy of its title, and the reason of this has been indicated.

The numerous Mélanges Littéraires are again interesting reading—indeed, when is Voltaire not interesting, save when he is scientific, or when he shows that “the zeal of the devil’s house” can inspire a man of genius with forty-curate-power dulness? They include almost every kind of writing, from actual reviews (Lettres aux Auteurs de La Gazette Littéraire) on books French and foreign, upwards or downwards. But all those that are probably genuine exhibit just the same characteristics as the more elaborate works. The reviews of Sterne and of Churchill will show how really superficial Voltaire’s literary grip was; though both of them (as being Voltaire’s they could not well help doing) contain acute remarks. The too famous argument-abstract of Hamlet[[678]] is perhaps the most remarkable example of irony exploding through the touch-hole that literature affords. The “Parallel of Horace, Boileau, and Pope” from such a hand might seem as if it could not be without value: but it has very little. And perhaps nowhere does Voltaire appear to much less critical advantage than in the Lettre de M. de La Visclède on La Fontaine, where, as in the case of Rabelais, it might be thought that no prejudice could possibly affect him. The superfine condemnation of the bonhomme’s style, as filled with expressions plus faites pour le peuple que pour les honnêtes gens (not, let it be observed, in the Fables, but in the Contes), could hardly tell a more disastrous tale. Philistia by its Goliath in Paris echoes Philistia by its common folk in London, at this special time. La Fontaine and Goldsmith are “low.”