In other words Batteux, like the rest of them, is not so much a halter between two opinions as a man who has deliberately made up his mind to abide by one, but who will let in as much of the other as he thinks it safe to do, or cannot help doing. His incompleteness. Let him once extend his principle of observation in time, country, and kind, and, being a reasonably ingenious and ingenuous person, he must discover, first, that his elaborate double-check system of Rule and Taste will not work, and, secondly, that there is not the least need of it. You must charge epicycle on cycle before you can get, even with the freest play of Taste, the Iliad and the Æneid and the Orlando to work together under any Rule. Epicycle must be added to epicycle before you can get in the Chanson de Roland and the Morte d’Arthur as well. Drop your “rule,” ask simply, “Are the things put before me said poeticamente?” “Do they give me the poetic pleasure?” and there is no further difficulty. Batteux, though, as we have seen, by no means a bigot, would probably have stopped his ears and rent his clothes if such a suggestion had been made to him.
Batteux is a remarkable, and probably the latest, example of neo-classicism sitting at ease in Zion and promulgating laws for submissive nations; in La Harpe, with an even stronger dogmatism, we shall find, if not the full consciousness that the enemy is at the gates of the capital, at any rate distinct evidence of knowledge that there is sedition in the provinces.[[692]] Marmontel. Between the two, Marmontel[[693]] is a distinguished, and a not disagreeable, example of that middle state which we find everywhere in the late eighteenth century but which in France is distinguished at once by greater professed orthodoxy, and by concessions and compromises of a specially tell-tale kind. The critical work of the author of Bélisaire and Les Incas is very considerable in bulk. He has written an Essay on Romance in connection with the two very “anodyne” examples of the kind just referred to; an Essay (indeed two essays) on Taste; many book reviews for the Observateur Littéraire, &c.; prefaces and comments for some specimens of French early seventeenth-century drama—Mairet’s Sophonisbe, Du Ryer’s Scévole, &c.; and, besides other things, a mass of articles on literary and critical subjects for the Encyclopédie, which are generally known in their collected form as Éléments[Éléments] de Littérature. He has been rather variously judged as a critic. There is no doubt that he is a special sinner in that perpetual gabble about la vertu, la morale, and the rest, which is so sickening in the whole group; and which more than justified Mr Carlyle’s vigorous apostrophe, “Be virtuous, in the Devil’s name and his grandmother’s, and have done with it!” He has also that apparent inconsistency, something of which (as we have seen once for all in Dryden’s case) often shows itself in men of alert literary interests who do not very early work out for themselves a personal literary creed, and who are averse to swallowing a ready-made one. But at the same time he never openly quarrels with neo-classicism, and is sometimes one of its most egregious spokesmen; while he is “philosophastrous,” in the special eighteenth-century kind, to a point which closely approaches caricature. Oddities and qualities of his criticism. I have quoted elsewhere, but must necessarily quote again here, his three egregious and pyramidal reasons[[694]] for the puzzling excellence of English poetry. Either, it seems, the Englishman, being a glory-loving animal, sees that poetry adds to the lustre of nations, and so he goes and does it; or being naturally given to meditation and sadness, he needs to be moved and distracted by the illusions of this beautiful art; or [Shade of Molière!] it is because his genius in certain respects is proper for Poesy.
To comment on this would only spoil it; but let it be observed that Marmontel does admit the excellence of English poetry. So also, though he never swerves, in consciousness or conscience, from neo-classic orthodoxy, he insinuates certain doubts about Boileau, and quotes,[[695]] at full length, two pieces of the despised Ronsard as showing lyrical qualities in which the legislator of Parnassus is wanting. His article Poétique is, considering his standpoint, a quite extraordinarily just summary and criticism of the most celebrated authorities on the subject—Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Vauquelin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Gravina, &c.—and the attitude to Boileau,[[696]] visible, as has been said, elsewhere, is extremely noteworthy. Marmontel speaks of Despréaux with compliments: but some, even of his praises, are not a little equivocal, and he contrives to put his subject’s faults with perfect politeness indeed, but without a vestige of compromise. Boileau, he says, gives a precise and luminous notion of all the kinds, but he is not deep on a single one: his Art may contribute to form the taste if it be well understood, but to understand it well one must have the taste already formed.
It would be possible, of course,—indeed, very easy,—to select from Marmontel’s abundant critical writings, which covered great part of a long lifetime in their composition, a bundle of “classical” absurdities which would leave nothing to desire. But the critic is almost always better than his form of creed. He takes an obviously genuine, if of necessity not at first a thoroughly well instructed, interest in the Histoire du Théâtre of the Frères Parfait, the first systematic[[697]] dealing with old French literature since Fauchet and Pasquier: his Essai sur les Romans, though of course considered du côté moral, is, for his date, a noteworthy attempt in that comparative and historical study of literature which was to lead to the new birth of criticism. It is most remarkable to find him, in the early reviews of his Observateur,[[698]] dating from the midst of the fifth decade of the eighteenth century, observing, as to Hamlet in La Place’s translation, that the ghost-scene and the duel with Laertes inspire terror and pathetic interest at the very reading, asking why “our poets” should deny themselves the use of these great springs of the two tragic passions, admiring the taste and justice of the observations to the players, and actually finding Titus Andronicus, though “frightful and sanguinary,” a thing worth serious study. That it is possible to extract from these very places, as from others, the usual stuff about Shakespeare’s “want of order and decency,” &c., is of no moment. This is matter of course: it is not matter of course that, in the dead waist and middle of the eighteenth century, a French critic should write of the description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus: “Ce morceau présente Shakespeare sous un nouveau point de vue. On n’a connu jusqu'à présent que la force du génie de cet auteur: on ne s’attendait pas à tant de délicatesse et de légèreté.”[[699]]
I should like to dwell longer on Marmontel if it were only for two or three phrases which appear in one short article,[[700]] “Depuis que Pascal et Corneille, Racine et Boileau ont épuré et appauvri la langue de Marot et de Montaigne.... Boileau n’avait pas reçu de la nature l’organe avec lequel on sent les beautés simples et touchantes de notre divin fabuliste [La Fontaine of course].... Il est à souhaiter qu’on n’abandonne pas ce langage du bon vieux temps ... on ferait un joli dictionnaire des mots qu’on a tort d’abandonner et de laisser vieillir.” It must be clear to any one who reads these phrases that there is the germ of mil-huit-cent-trente in them—the first and hardly certain sound of the knell of narrow, colourless vocabulary and literature in France. But enough has probably been said. It would be difficult to make out a case for Marmontel as in any way a great critic. He has not cleared his mind of cant enough for that. But he is an instance, and an important instance, of the way in which the clearing agents were being gradually thrown into the minds of men of letters at this time, and of the reaction which they were—at first partially and accidentally—producing. Even his Essai sur le Goût, fantastically arbitrary as it is, wears at times almost an air of irony, as if the writer were really exposing the arbitrariness and the convention of the thing he is ostensibly praising. He is comparing and tasting, not simply deducing: and however much he may still be inclined to think with his master that the Satan, Sin, and Death piece is an unimaginable horror, and the citizen scenes in Shakespeare’s Roman plays a vulgar excrescence, he is far from the obstinate sublimity-in-absurdity of La Harpe. He at least does not hold that a beauty, not according to rule, has no business to be a beauty; that the tree is not to be judged by the fruit, but the fruit by the ticket on the tree.
In the mare magnum of critical writing at this period, constantly fed by books, literary periodicals, academic competitions, and what not, it would be idle to attempt to chronicle drops—individuals who are not in some special way interesting or representative. Others. It would be especially idle because—for reasons indicated more than once in passing already—the bulk of the criticism of this time in France is really of little value, being as doctrine make-believe, and destitute of thoroughness, and as appreciation injured by narrowness of reading and want of true literary interest. It cannot have been quite accidental, although the great collaborative Histoire de la Littérature Française of the late M. Petit de Julleville is not a model of methodic adequacy, that there is no strictly critical chapter in the volume on the eighteenth century. Thomas, Suard, &c. Take, for instance, two such representative men as Suard and Thomas, both of them born near the beginning of the second generation of the century, and therefore characteristic of its very central class and crû. Both enjoyed almost the highest reputation in the second rank. Marmontel somewhere speaks of Thomas’s Essai sur les Éloges as the best piece of critical inquiry which had appeared since Cicero on the Orator; but it is fair to remember that Thomas had refused to stand against Marmontel for the Academy. Suard, for many years Secretary of the Academy itself, seriously endeavoured, and was by his contemporaries thought not to have endeavoured in vain, to make that office a sort of Criticship Laureate or King’s Remembrancership of Literature. He has left volumes on volumes of critical work; and even now prefaces, introductions, &c., from his pen may be found in the older class of standard editions of French classics. Yet the work of neither of these would justify us in doing more than refer to them in this fashion. It is excellently written in the current style, inclining to declamation and solemnity in Thomas,[[701]] to persiflage and smartness in Suard. It says what an academic critic of the time was supposed to say, and knows what he was supposed to know. But it really is, in Miss Mills’ excellent figure, “the desert of Sahara,” and a desert without many, if any, oases.
La Harpe is a different person. He is not very kind to Batteux. La Harpe. He patronises his principles, and allows his scholarship to be sound; but finds fault with his style, calls his criticism commune—“lacking in distinction” is perhaps the best equivalent—his ideas narrow, and his prejudices pedantic. It would not be quite just to say De te fabula, but this is almost as much as we could say if we were judging La Harpe, after his own fashion of judgment, from a different standpoint. But the historian cannot judge thus. La Harpe is really an important person in the History of Criticism. He “makes an end,” as Mr Carlyle used to say; in other words, whether he is or is not the last eminent neo-classical critic of France, he puts this particular phase of criticism as sharply and as effectively as it can be put. Nay, he does even more than this for us; he shows us neo-classicism at bay. Already, by the time of his later lectures, when by the oddest coincidence he was defending Voltaire and abusing Diderot, making head at once against the Jacobins and against that party of revived mediævalism which was the surest antidote to Jacobinism, there were persons—Népomucène Lemercier, and others—who held that Boileau and Racine had killed French poetry. Against these La Harpe takes up his testimony; and the necessity of opposition makes it all the more decided.
His Cours de Littérature is a formidable—I had almost called it an impossible—book to tackle, composed of, or redacted from, the lectures of many years, and unfortunately, though not unnaturally, dwelling most fully on the parts of the subject that are of least real importance. His Cours de Littérature. Its first edition[[702]] was a shelf-full in itself. It now fills, with some fragments, nearly the whole of three great volumes of the Panthéon Littéraire, and nearly two-thirds, certainly three-fifths, of this are devoted to the French literature of the eighteenth century, a subject for which, to speak frankly, it may be doubted whether any posterity will have time corresponding to spare. Even in the earlier and more general parts there are defects, quite unconnected with the soundness or unsoundness of La Harpe’s general critical position. There is nothing which one should be slower to impute, save on the very clearest evidence, than ignorance of a subject of which a writer professes knowledge; and one should be slow, not merely on general principles of good manners, but because there is nothing which the baser kind of critic is so ready to impute. But I own that, after careful reading and reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that La Harpe’s knowledge of the classics left a very great deal to desire. That, in his survey of Epic, he omits Apollonius Rhodius in his proper place altogether and puts him in a postscript, might be a mere oversight, negligible by all but the illiberal: unfortunately the postscript itself shows no signs of critical appreciation. It is more unfortunate still that he should say that all the writers of ancient Rome loaded Catullus with eulogy, when we know that Horace only spares him a passing sneer, that Quintilian has no notice for anything but his “bitterness,” and that hardly anybody but Martial does him real justice. However, we need not dwell on this. If La Harpe was not very widely or deeply read in old-world or in old-French literature, he certainly knew the French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very well indeed.
On the other hand, it is significant, and awkward, that, in dealing with English, German, and other modern literatures, he always seems to refer to translations, and hardly ever ventures a criticism except on the mere matter of the poem. His critical position as ultimus suorum. Moreover, which is of even more importance for us, he was not in the slightest doubt about his point of view either of these or of any other literature. His censures and his praises are adjusted with almost unerring accuracy to the neo-classic creed, as we have defined and illustrated it in this volume. His Introduction pours all the scorn he could muster on those who contemn the art of writing. Even Shakespeare, coarse as he is, was not without learning. That poet, Dante, and Milton executed “monstrous” works; but in these monsters there were some beautiful parts done according to “the principles.” And, to do him justice, he never swerves or flinches from this. English has “an inconceivable pronunciation.”[[703]] The Odyssey is an Arabian Nights’ tale, puerile, languid, seriously extravagant, even ignoble in parts. The sojourns with Calypso and Circe offer nothing interesting to La Harpe. The wonderful descent to Hades is as bad as that of Æneas is admirable. La Harpe tells us that these and other similar judgments are proofs of his severe frankness. They certainly are; he has told us what he is.
That after this he should pronounce the Georgics “the most perfect poem transmitted to us by the Ancients”; fix on the Prometheus his favourite epithet of “monstrous,” and say that it “cannot even be called a tragedy”; think Plutarch thoroughly justified in his censure of Aristophanes; read Thucydides with less pleasure than Xenophon; and decide that Apuleius wrote vers le moyen age, which was un désert,—these things do not surprise us, nor that he should tolerate Ossian after not tolerating Milton. It is in his fragment on the last-named poet that he gives us his whole secret, with one of those intentional, yet really unconscious, bursts of frankness which have been already noticed. “La poésie,” he says, “ne doit me peindre que ce que je peux comprendre, admettre, ou supposer.” That “suspension of disbelief” in which, at no distant date, Coleridge was to discover the real poetic effect would, it is clear, have been vehemently resisted and refused by La Harpe, or rather it could never have entered his head as possible.