The fact would appear to be that, independently of that lack of purely literary interest which has been noted above, other causes kept Voltaire back from really original and valuable criticism. Causes of his failure. The sense of the necessity of clinging to and conserving something, which has often been shown by iconoclasts, seems to have directed itself in him towards literary orthodoxy: while, on the other hand, as we have already seen, his natural acuteness refused to blink entirely some of the absurdities of the “Rule” system. His craftsmanship made it possible for him to succeed in certain kinds of artificial poetry—the regular tragedy, the formal heroic poem, the light piece, epigram, or epistle, or what not—which were specially favoured by Classical criticism. He was not well equipped by nature for success in any Romantic kind—not to mention that Romance was almost indissolubly connected with those Ages of Faith which he scorned. Moreover, though no man has committed more faults of taste, in the wider and nobler sense, than did Voltaire, yet within a narrower and more arbitrary circle of “taste” of the conventional kind, no one could walk with more unerring precision. Yet again, the Great Assumption by which the neo-classics made a changeling of their Taste with Good Sense, and mothered it on Nature, appealed strongly to such philosophical theories as he had. Accordingly, both in public and private,[[679]] the great heretic, with very few exceptions, plays the part of a very Doctor of the Literary Sorbonne, and leaves the attempt at a new criticism to the more audacious innovation, and the more thorough-going naturalism, of Diderot.[[680]]
Of the other Di majores of the philosophe school, Rousseau would always have been prevented by his temperament from expressing critically the appreciations which the same temperament might have suggested: and, if he had been a critic at all, he would have been on the revolting and Romantic side. Others: Buffon. Diderot actually was so. The critical utterances of D’Alembert,[[681]] chiefly if not wholly given in his Éloges, express the clear understanding and by no means trivial good sense of their writer. But, like Voltaire’s, D’Alembert’s heart was elsewhere. Buffon remains; and by a curious accident he, though totus in the things of mere science, has left us one of the most noteworthy phrases of literary criticism in the history of literature. Moreover, this phrase is contained in a discourse[[682]] which is all literary and almost all critical, which is very admirable within its own range and on its own side, and which practically provides us with one of the first, and to this day one of the best, discussions of Style as such. That we have in these latter days “heard too much of Style” is often said, and may be true: “where” we have seen too much of it “you shall tell me” as Seithenin said to the Prince. But we, in the restricted sense of students of criticism, have not “seen too much” of discussions of style hitherto. On the contrary, we have seen that the ancients were constantly shy of it in its quiddity; that even Longinus seems to prefer to abstract and embody one of its qualities and discuss that; and that after the revival of criticism the old avoidances, or the old apologies for the phortikon ti, were too often renewed. Buffon has none of this prudery: though he lays the greatest possible stress on the necessity of there being something behind style, of style being “the burin that graves the thought.”
Perhaps he does not quite keep at the height of his famous and often misquoted[[683]] dictum—“Le style est l’homme même”—in itself the best thing ever said on the subject, and, as is the case with most good things, made better by the context. “Style and the man.” He has been showing why only well-written books go down to posterity. Information can be transferred; fact becomes public property; novelty ceases to be novel. Ces choses sont hors de l’homme; le style est [de?] l’homme même. In other words, the style—the form—is that which the author adds to the matter; it is that inseparable, but separably intelligible, element which cannot be transferred, taken away, or lost. It is clear that Buffon would not have lent himself to that discountenancing of the distinction of Matter and Form which some have attempted. Perhaps his other remarks are less uniformly, though they are often, admirable. He should not, as a man of natural science, have congratulated the Academicians on contemning “le vain son des mots,” which, he should have known, always has something, and may have much, to do with style; and it is certainly inadequate to say that style is “the order and movement given to our thoughts.” There is much that is true, but also something of mere neo-classic orthodoxy, in his painful repetitions of the necessity of unity and greatness of subject; and to say that “l’esprit humain ne peut rien créer” is sheer lèse-littérature. Rather is it true that, except God, the human mind is the only thing that can create, and that it shows its divine origin thereby. But Buffon was only a man of science, and we must excuse him. The special curse of the time[[684]] is curiously visible in his enumeration, among the causes of nobility in style, of “L’attention à ne nommer les choses que par les termes les plus généraux.” The “streak of the tulip” barred again! But he is certainly right when he says that “jamais l’imitation n’a rien créé”: though here it may be retorted, “Yes; but imitation teaches how to discard itself, and to begin to create,” while, as he has just extended the disability to the human faculties generally, his point seems a blunt one. Still, his directions for ordonnance as a preliminary to style, his cautions against pointes, traits saillants, pomposity [he might have recked this rede a little more himself], and other things, are excellent. The piece is extraordinary in its combination of originality, brilliancy, and sense, and in it Science has certainly lent Literature one of the best critical essays of the eighteenth century.
Not an unimportant document of the time for the history of criticism is the critical attitude of that remarkable Marcellus of philosophism, Vauvenargues.[[685]] The few Réflexions Critiques which he has left are very curious. Vauvenargues was a man of an absolute independence of spirit so far as he knew; but conditioned by the limits of his knowledge. He had neither time nor opportunity for much reading; he probably knew little of any literature but his own. It must be remembered also that his main bent was ethical, not literary. Such a man should give us the form and pressure of the time in an unusual and interesting way.
Vauvenargues does so. We find him, after a glowing and almost adequate eulogy of La Fontaine, gibbeting him for showing plus de style que d’invention, et plus de négligence que d’exactitude—not the happiest pair of antitheses. Vauvenargues. The subjects of his Tales are “low”—unfortunate word which “speaks” almost every one who uses it—and they are not interesting, which is more surprising. Boileau, on the contrary, is extolled to the skies. He has really too much genius (like the 'Badian who was really too brave), and this excess, with a smaller excess of fire, truth, solidity, agrément, may have perhaps injured his range, depth, height, finesse, and grace. Molière again is trop bas (at least his subjects are), while La Bruyère escapes this defect—you might as well set together Addison and Shakespeare, and no doubt Vauvenargues would have done so. How different is Racine, who is always “great”—“gallantly great,” let us add, like Mr Pepys in his new suit. Voltaire, who had certainly prompted some of these sins, made a little atonement by inducing Vauvenargues to admire Corneille to some extent. But Corneille, he says, from his date, could not have le goût juste, and the parallel with Racine is one of the most interesting of its numerous kind. J. B. Rousseau might have been nearly as good a poet as Boileau, if Boileau had not taught him all he knew in poetry, but his vieux langage is most regrettable. Such were the opinions of a young man of unusual ability, but with little taste in literature except that which he found prevalent in the middle of the eighteenth century.
This middle, and the later part of it, saw in the Abbé Batteux the last of that really remarkable, though not wholly estimable, line of législateurs du Parnasse which had begun with Boileau, and whose edicts had been accepted, for the best part of a century, with almost universal deference. Batteux. Still later, and surviving into the confines of the nineteenth century, La Harpe gives us almost the last distinguished defender, and certainly a defender as uncompromising as he was able, of neo-classic orthodoxy. Some attention must be given to each of these, and to Marmontel between them, but we need not say very much of others—except in the representative way.
Batteux began as an extoller of the Henriade, after many years spent in schoolmastering and the occasional publication of Latin verses, but before the century had reached the middle of its road. He essayed, a little later, divers treatises[[686]] on Poetic and Rhetoric, all of which were adjusted and collected in his Principes de la Littérature,[[687]] while he also executed various minor works, the most useful of which was Les Quatre Poétiques,[[688]] a translation, with critical notes, of Aristotle, Horace, and Vida, with Boileau added. In so far as I am able to judge, Batteux is about the best of the seventeenth-eighteenth century “Preceptists.”[[689]] The Introduction to his introductory tractate, Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même Principe, indulges in some mild but by no means unbecoming irony on his predecessors,[[690]] and expresses the candid opinion that few of them had really consulted Aristotle at all. He admits the multiplicity and the galling character of “rules”; but he thinks that these can be reduced to a tolerable and innoxious, nay, in the highest degree useful, minimum, by keeping the eye fixed on the Imitation of Nature, and of the best nature. But how is this to guide us? Here Batteux shows real ingenuity by seizing on the other great fetich of the eighteenth-century creed—Taste—as a regulator to be in its turn regulated.
Indeed a careful perusal of Batteux cannot but force on us the consideration that the mechanical age, the age of Arkwright and Watt, was approaching, or had approached. His adjustment of Rules and Taste. His Rules and his Taste “clutch” each other by turns, like the elaborate plant of the modern machinist. If the Rules are too narrow and precise, Taste holds them open; if Taste shows any sign of getting lawless, the Rules bring it to its bearings. It is extremely ingenious; but the questions remain—Whether it is natural? and Whether any good came from the exercise of the principles which it attempts to reconcile and defend? The manner of Batteux, it must be allowed, is as much less freezing and unsatisfactory than Le Bossu’s, as it is less arbitrary and less aggressive than Boileau’s. These two would, in the face of fact and history, have identified Taste and a certain construction of Rule. Batteux rather regards the two as reciprocal escapements, easing and regulating each other. It is part of his merit that he recognises, to some extent, the importance of observation. In fact, great part of this introductory treatise is a naïf and interesting complaint of the difficulty which the results of this observation are introducing into Rule-criticism. “Rules are getting so many,” he admits in his opening sentence; and, no doubt, so long as you find it necessary to make a new rule whenever you find a new poet, the state of things must be more and more parlous. But, like all his century-fellows without exception on the Classical, and like too many on the other side, he does not think of simply marching through the open door, and leaving the prison of Rule and Kind behind him.
From these idols Batteux will not yet be separated: he hardens his heart in a different manner from Pharaoh, and will not let himself go. The utile is never to be parted from the dulce; “the poems of Homer and Virgil are not vain Romances, where the mind wanders at the will of a mad imagination; they are great bodies of doctrine,” &c. Anacreon [Heaven help us!] was himself determined to be a moral teacher.[[691]] Again, there must be Action, and it must be single, united, simple, yet of variety; the style must not be too low, or too high, &c., &c.
When Batteux has got into the old rut, he remains in it. We slip into the well-known treatises by Kinds—Dialogue, Eclogue, Heroic Poem, and the rest—with the equally well-known examination afterwards of celebrated examples in a shamefaced kind of way—to the extent of two whole volumes for poetry, and a third (actually the fourth) for prose. Finally, we have what is really a separate tractate, De la Construction Oratoire. The details in these later volumes are often excellent; but obviously, and per se, they fall into quite a lower rank as compared with the first. If we were to look at nothing but the fact, frankly acknowledged by Batteux, that he is now considering French classical literature only, we should be able to detect the error. In his first volume he had at least referred to Milton.