which hit at once the foible and the forte of the criticism of the century; but in the final sting—
“Mais, Rapin, à leur gout si les vieux sont profanes,—
Si Virgile, le Tasse, et Ronsard sont des ânes—
Sans perdre en ces discours les temps que nous perdons,
Allons comme eux aux champs, et mangeons des chardons!”
One might write a whole essay on these wonderfully prophetic and (no doubt to the writer half-unconsciously) many-sided[[304]] lines. After two centuries Europe did “go to the fields”—and she found something better to eat there than thistles.
For the moment, as we have seen before in other cases, the voice crying in the wilderness found only a wilderness to cry in. The contrast of the two a lasting one. Men could not mistake the vigour and verve of Regnier’s verse, but they either disregarded his doctrine or misunderstood it. Malherbe was their music-maker then; they understood him.[[305]] In the contrast of these two we have practically a contrast which subsists to the present day, and which we do not find by any means so sharply accentuated in ancient criticism—that of the critic who looks only at the stop-watch, and of the critic who looks beyond it; of the critic of form and the critic of spirit. But the curious thing is that for the last three centuries the antagonists have behaved exactly like Hamlet and Laertes, or even like that puzzling pair in the lower circles of the Inferno. They take from time to time each other’s parts, each other’s weapons, and renew the contest with changed persons, or at least rapiers. At first sight it may seem as if Malherbe and, after him, Boileau were simply insisting on form and expression; as if Regnier, and those who at longer intervals have followed him, were those who say that “all depends upon the subject.” But a more accurate acquaintance with the History which is to follow will show us that this is far from being the case. Malherbe had so little opportunity of shaping, or took such little trouble to shape, his critical ideas that it is perhaps the safer way not to draw up any complete creed for him, as M. Brunot and Mr Spingarn have done. But in Boileau, as we shall see, there is a distinct attempt, which has been practically followed by all of his side since, to prescribe expression, subject, spirit, and everything—to insist not merely that the work shall be good, but that it shall be good according to sealed patterns, in choice of subject as well as in method, in method as well as in form, in form as well as in language.
There can be very little doubt that the private discussions which, as we know from Racan, Malherbe used, for years before his death, to hold with Racan himself and others, and the letters which he also exchanged with younger men, had a very great deal to do with the wide development of criticism in the second third of the century. The diffusion of seventeenth century criticism. The fact of this development is certain; it is vouched for by the appearance of literary subjects in the Ana, and in Tallemant’s Historiettes, by the foundation of the Academy, by the Cid quarrel, practically by almost everything we know of the time that concerns literature. But we must deal, according to our wont, with the matter par personnages. Of such personages we have, in the first place, Vaugelas, Balzac, Ogier, and Chapelain, to whom we may join Ménage, Gui Patin, Tallemant himself, and the far greater names of Saint-Evremond and Corneille. Then we can take Boileau—at least in reputation one of the culminating points or personages of our history—and the less exclusively critical deliverances of La Bruyère, of Fénelon, and of Malebranche; can give some account of the Quarrel—tenacious of life, if scarcely vivacious—of the Ancients and Moderns; diverge to the scholastic and somewhat dismal but important performances of La Mesnardière and others, of Hédelin and Le Bossu, Rapin and Bouhours, and end by some account of the miscellaneous compilations and observations of journalists and savants. The matter is abundant in all conscience; it is at least sufficiently varied, and the real greatness of some at least of the persons concerned should save it from being insipid.
We may all the better pass directly from Malherbe to Vaugelas[[306]] because this is about the last place in this History where we can give special attention to merely verbal and grammatical criticism. Vaugelas. In this Malherbe had at least the absolute, and almost admirable, courage of his opinions. On the one hand he transfers the prudery of the Ciceronians (v. supra, p. 12) to French, and will not allow even an analogue such as accroît on the strength of surcroît. On the other he bars all the delightful Pléiade diminutives, likes not technical terms, is so horrified at any indelicate suggestion that his countrymen really need not have ridiculed our “sho[c]king,” and has a whole black list of “plebeian” expressions. Everything is to be “according to rule,” and the rule is to be drawn with as few exceptions as possible—and with as few inclusions.
It is no wonder that Regnier opened the full broadside of his magnificent poetical rhetoric against this system; and it is only a pity that nobody less fantastic than Mlle. de Gournay—Montaigne’s fille d’alliance, and almost the first as almost the oddest of blue-stockings—took up the parable more practically against it. But the set of the tide, as we have said, was with him. La Mothe le Vayer, a little later, in his Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française de ce temps “transacts,” though he is on the whole on the side of liberty. And enfin Vaugelas vint, the Savoyard[[307]] who was to teach France French. His famous Remarques did not appear till 1647, when he was fifty-two, and only three years before his death, but the book expresses work much older.[[308]]