[703]. La Harpe here anticipated the Malay chief whom Mr Wallace met in the farthest isles of the Bird of Paradise, and who chased him therefrom with contumely when he said he came from a place called “England.” “Unglung,” said the chief, was not a word that a man could pronounce. And therefore—this is La Harpe all over—there could be no such place, and Mr Wallace was a liar.
[704]. There is not, I think, even yet any complete edition of Rivarol, though M. de Lescure some years ago devoted much attention to him. All the work referred to below will be found in the older Œuvres de Rivarol (published by Delahays, Paris, 1857), with a useful selection of criticisms. The present writer contributed to the Fortnightly Review for January 1879 an essay on Rivarol and Chamfort, which will be found reprinted in Miscellaneous Essays (2nd ed., London, 1895). Chamfort himself can only be mentioned here as showing, in his Éloges on Molière and La Fontaine, how insignificant such things, written even by such a man, can be.
[705]. Ed. cit., p. 277 sq.
[706]. This is neo-classic criticism in its quintessence of corruption. What fit reader wants, or could endure, an episode between Per me si va and riveder le stelle? You might as well demand “half an hour’s interval for refreshments.” But your Epic must have your Episode. It is like “Where is your brown tree?”
[707]. Ed. cit., p. 79 sq.
[708]. This, however, is not in the Essay, but in a separate “Maxim.”
[709]. Cf., for instance, Batteux, quite a reasonable person on the whole. He has no doubt (i. 80, 81) of the excellence, the almost perfection, at which French taste has arrived; he only fears that it may be impossible to guard against falling from so high an estate. This extraordinary self-complacency is a little less noticeable in England, but only a little. When we thought that Mr Pope had improved even upon Mr Dryden, and was in a sort of Upper House of Literature as compared with Shakespeare and Chaucer, we could not throw many stones at those who considered Voltaire a better poet than Ronsard.
[710]. The corresponding chapter to this in that “History of Critical Ana,” which we must not write, would be particularly rich. Every branch of French literature at the time is full of such things; the most amusing of all, perhaps, being Crébillon’s malicious eulogy-satire on Marivaudage at the end of the 2nd book of L’Ecumoire, where Tanzäi condemns, and Néadarné is charmed with, the juxtaposition of words “that never met before, and thought they could not possibly get on together,” and the depicting “not merely of what everybody has done and said and thought, but of what they would like to have thought but did not!”
CHAPTER III.
CLASSICISM IN THE OTHER NATIONS.
PRELIMINARY REMARKS—TEMPORARY REVIVAL OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—GRAVINA—MURATORI: HIS ‘DELLA PERFETTA POESIA’—CRESCIMBENI—QUADRIO—THE EMERGENCE OF LITERARY HISTORY—FURTHER DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—METASTASIO—NEO-CLASSICISM TRIUMPHS IN SPAIN—THE ABSURDITIES OF ARTIGA—LUZÁN—THE REST UNINERESTING—FEYJÓO, ISLA, AND OTHERS—RISE AT LAST OF GERMAN CRITICISM—ITS SCHOOL TIME—CLASSICISM AT BAY ALMOST FROM THE FIRST: GOTTSCHED—THE ‘VERSUCH EINER CRITISCHEN DICHTKUNST’—ITS CHIEF IDEA—SPECIMEN DETAILS—GELLERT: HE TRANSACTS.