He remains therefore hopelessly self-shut out of the gates of Poetry—only admitting and comprehending those beauties which stray into the precinct of Rhetoric; discerning with horror “monsters” within the gates themselves; and in his milder moments conjecturing charitably that, if Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton had only always observed the rules, which they sometimes slipped into, they might have been nearly as good poets—he will not say quite—as Racine and Voltaire. Never have we met, nor shall we ever meet again, a critical Ephraim so utterly joined to idols. It is unnecessary—it would even be useless—to argue about him; he must be observed, registered, and passed. Yet I do not pretend to regret the time which I have myself spent over him. He writes well; he sees clearly through his “monstrous” spectacles and subject to their laws; above all, he has, what is, for some readers at any rate, the intense and unfailing charm of “Thorough.” He is no cowardly Braggadochio or inconstant Paridell: he is Sansfoy and Sansloy in one—defending his Duessa, and perfectly ready to draw sword and spend blood for her at any moment. Nor does he wield the said sword by any means uncraftsmanly. Give him his premisses and his postulates, his Rules, his false Reason and sham Nature, his criterion of the admissible and comprehensible, and he very seldom makes a false conclusion. Would that all Gloriana’s own knights were as uncompromising, as hardy, and as deft!

Of the immense mass of Academic Éloges, and prize Essays generally, composed during the eighteenth century, no extended or minute account will be expected here. The Academic Essay. I have myself, speaking without the slightest exaggeration, read hundreds of them: indeed it is difficult to find a French man of letters, of any name during the whole time, in whose works some specimens of the kind do not figure. But—and it is at once a reason for dealing with them generally and a reason for not dealing with them as individuals—there is hardly any kind of publication which more fatally indicates the defects of the Academic system, and of that phase of criticism and literary taste of which it was the exponent. They were written in some cases—it is but repeating in other words what has been just said—by men of the greatest talent; they constituted with a play of one kind or another, the almost invariable début of every Frenchman who had literary talent, great or small. They exhibit a relatively high level of a certain kind of literary, or at least rhetorical, attainment. But the last adjective has let slip the dogs on them, for they are almost always rhetorical in the worst senses of the word. Extensive reading in literature was not wanted by the forty guards of the Capitol; original thinking was quite certain to alarm them. The elegant nullity of the Greek Declamation, and the ampullæ of the Roman, were the best things that were likely to be found. Yet sometimes in literature, as in philosophy, the Academic Essay produced remarkable things. And we may give some space to perhaps its most remarkable writer towards the close of the time, a writer symptomatic in the very highest degree, as showing the hold which neo-classic ideas still had in France—that is to say, Rivarol.[[704]]

That “the St George of the epigram” might have been really great as a critic there can be little doubt; besides lesser exercises in this vocation, which are always acute if not always quite just, he has left us two fairly solid Essays, and a brilliant literary “skit,” to enable us to judge. Rivarol. The last of the three, the Almanach des Grands Hommes de nos jours, does, with more wit, better temper, and better manners, what Gifford was to do a little later in England; it is a sort of sprinkling of an anodyne but potent Keating’s powder on the small poets and men of letters of the time just before the Revolution. But the treatise De l’Universalité de la Langue Française, laid before the Academy of Berlin in 1783, and the Preface to the writer’s Translation of the Inferno, are really solid documents. Both are prodigies of ingenuity, acuteness, and command of phrase, conditioned by want of knowledge and by parti pris. How praise Dante better than by saying that Italian took in his hands “une fierté qu’elle n’eut plus après lui”?[[705]] how better describe what we miss even in Ariosto, even in Petrarch? Yet how go further astray than in finding fault with the Inferno because “on ne rencontre pas assez d’épisodes”?[[706]] What a critical piercing to the joints and marrow of the fault of eighteenth-century poetry is the remark that Dante’s verses “se tiennent debout par la seule force du substantif et du verbe sans le concours d’une seule épithète!” And what a falling off is there when one passes from this to the old beauty-and-fault jangles and jars!

The Universality of French[[707]] has many points of curiosity; but we must abide by those which are strictly literary. The temptation of the style to rhetoric, and, at the same time, “the solace of this sin,” could hardly be better shown than in Rivarol’s phrasing of the radical and inseparable clearness of French, as “une probité attachée à son génie.”[[708]] How happy is the admission that poets of other countries “give their metaphors at a higher strength,” “embrace the figurative style closer,” and are deeper and fuller in colour! Yet the history, both of French and English literature, given in each case at some length, is inadequate and incorrect, the comparisons are childish, and the vaticinations absurd. In fact, Rivarol was writing up to certain fixed ideas, the chief of which was that the French literature of 1660-1780 was the greatest that had ever existed—perhaps that ever could exist—in the world.

This notion—to which it is but just to admit that other nations had given only too much countenance and support, though England and Germany at least were fast emancipating themselves—and the numbing effect of the general neo-classic creed from which it was no very extravagant deduction, mar a very large proportion[[709]] of French criticism during the century, and, almost without exception, the whole of what we here call its orthodox criticism. So long as it, or anything like it, prevails in any country, at any time, the best criticism is impossible; the “He followeth not us” interferes with all due appreciation.[[710]]

[649]. The standard edition of Fontenelle (8 vols., Paris, 1790) is an agreeable book, excellent in print and paper.

[650]. Op. cit. sup., especially Part I., chaps, ix. and xi.

[651]. Though there is a good deal of the critical spirit in him, too, and the famous advice to “Bélier, mon ami” has fellows of critical application.

[652]. Œuvres, ed. cit., i. 234.