Vaugelas, to do him justice, has not the “pistolling ways” of Malherbe. Usage is his standard, but, as in the old jest, the coin is no sooner in the child’s pocket than he is told not to spend it. It is good usage only that you must follow; and the goodness of course is penes nos. It would be neither interesting nor proper here to discuss Vaugelas’ merely grammatical precepts, but it is permissible to point out that he, first of all moderns—or at any rate more than any early modern—contributed to bring about the disastrous idea that grammar exists independently, instead of being a generalisation, partly from the usage which even great writers cannot violate, partly from their own. But it is worth observing that, according to him, you must not use technical words, popular words, improper words (it is dreadful to say “breast,” for do we not talk of a “breast of mutton or veal”?), poetical words in prose, archaisms, neologisms, which last he hates more than anything else. And when he comes to style, Purity, Clearness, Sobriety, and so forth are of course his cardinal virtues.
Jean Guez de Balzac, who, in the rather idle nomenclature of traditional literary history, has usually been styled “the Malherbe of French prose,” is on the whole more important in the history of French style than in that of French criticism. Balzac. He was not, as we have seen from the phrase quoted above, by any means an indiscriminate admirer of his correspondent—in fact, though not exactly a Gascon,[[309]] he was enough of a Southerner to feel nettled at the Northern arrogance which undertook dégasconner la France. But he was himself an ardent disciple of “purity,” and the principal objection that even posterity has made to his Socrate Chrétien, his Aristippe, his Prince, and most of his elaborate Letters, all of which were fanatically admired by contemporaries, is that they are scarcely more than pieces of epideictic, with very little substance in them.
These same letters, moreover, contain numerous critical passages; while a whole division of his Works[[310]] is critical. His Letters. The interest, however, of the most literary part of the Letters, those to Chapelain, as a whole, is not so much on Balzac’s side as on Chapelain’s; and the subjects of them will, at any rate in part, be best treated when we come to discuss that (in the latter part of his own lifetime and since) much-enduring writer. To Bois-Robert Balzac confides (III. 7) that he only cares for verses as he does for melons—both must be in absolute perfection if they are to please him; also that the philosopher’s stone will be found as soon as the sort of eloquence that he values. The thousand pages of the Letters are sprinkled with finery of this sort; but better matter is not very common. The somewhat hollow elegance which the French allow to be the chief merit of Balzac does not lend itself well to real criticism: nor, to do him justice, does he much attempt this, even to men of letters like Conrart, Heinsius, Descartes, or to Chapelain himself. Sometimes he drops into verbal criticism, as in VI. 57, where he consents to call Mlle. de Gournay herself traductrice and rhétoricienne, but not poétesse or philosophesse. The letter to Scudéry in reference to his attacks on The Cid is very sensible and in good taste; but (as Balzac indeed generally is) much more ethical and “gentlemanly” than æsthetic (XII. 20). Even when he writes directly to Corneille (XVI. 9) about Cinna he cannot get much beyond elegant generalities as to this Rome being the Rome de Tite Live. So that it is not surprising, when we come to the Chapelain Letters themselves (of which, besides a few stray ones earlier, there are six entire Books, XVII.-XXII.) that although most of them touch literature, and many contain critical remarks or judgments,[[311]] there is little of much interest. Only now and then do we come across such a refreshment as: “Why, sir, what prodigy do you tell me of? Is it possible that any one with a drop of common-sense in him can prefer the Spanish poets to the Italians? and take the visions of a certain Lope de Vega for reasonable compositions?” (XX. 127). His remarks on Ronsard and Malherbe, “the Martyr and the Tyrant” (XXII. 20), are fair, and with room one might extend the anthology. But on the whole, though Balzac was a very handsome letter-writer, and could, and did, give all the Frank Churchills of Europe lessons in that art, he was not very much of a critic.
His set Critical Dissertations quite confirm this verdict. His Critical Dissertations. He opens them with a great deal about Discipline, Justesse, Bienséance, the Mean, and the like. He tells us (vol. ii. p. 537) that any one who likes Ariosto would prefer a Siren to a beautiful woman—the answer to which challenge may be justly suspended by the true critic till he has a Siren produced before him. There might be much to be said for her. He has some not unpleasant remarks on the obligatory subject of the great sonnet-duel between Voiture’s “Uranie” and Benserade’s “Job”: but he has not, so far as I remember, discovered the critical truth that their beauty lies in the singular charm of the first line of the one and the last of the other. He is in one place (ii. 597) almost savage with Montaigne, of whom he says that, though he be adopted father to Mlle. de Gournay, esteemed by Father Paul, and “allégué par le Chancelier Baccon” (sic), he can see nothing in his Essays but equivoques and mistakes of judgment. This, however, is said chiefly in reference to Montaigne’s Latinity and knowledge of Latin: and elsewhere (pp. 657-662) there is a set judgment much more favourable, though still smacking of the double prejudice against a prophet of his own country and a man of the last generation. But his Dissertation on or against the Burlesque[[312]] style, when one remembers the excesses in which, from Scarron down to Dassoucy, men were about to indulge, is not contemptible: and there are amusing things in his Barbon, a sort of elaborate Theophrastian portrait of a young pedant, from which Scriblerus may have borrowed.
Vaugelas, as we have seen, did not finally elaborate his work till some twenty years after Malherbe’s death, and Balzac, though a correspondent of the Norman poet, outlived him by more than a quarter of a century. Ogier and the Preface to Tyr et Sidon. But in the very year (1628) of that death appeared a document on the other side, and taking that side in flank at the point where it was, with the majority, to be most victorious. This was the Preface of François Ogier to the second edition of the Tyr et Sidon of Daniel d’Anchères, or rather (for this is a mere anagram) Jean de Schélandre.[[313]] The play is almost the only worthy representative, in French, of that English-Spanish drama which set the Unities at defiance;[[314]] the Preface, written twenty years after the first appearance of the play, but seven before the author’s death, is a brief but extraordinarily remarkable vindication, in principle, of Schélandre’s practice. Until M. Asselineau, in 1854, published an article on the subject, and the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, two years later, included both play and preface in the eighth volume of the invaluable Ancien Théâtre Français, both were practically unknown. Even then notice of them was for a long time confined to literary historians; and of late an attempt has been made to put the Preface aside as the mere freak of a student, in opposition to the taste of the time and the necessities of the stage. That the general course of literature in France followed for a time the line which Ogier argued against, and to which Schélandre ran counter, is perfectly true. But this is quite indifferent (except as a matter to be registered) to history, which knows perfectly well that Athanasius and his world are always changing places and principles. Moreover, it is quite a mistake to think that Ogier writes merely from the study, and with no consideration of the stage. Like Cinthio, like Patrizzi, like Castelvetro himself, he is no mere study-theorist. On the contrary he carries the war into the enemy’s camp with a refreshing audacity and no small force. It is the classical arrangement, he says, which offense le judicieux spectateur, with its improbable and unnatural coincidences and tallyings. How, he asks, in a passage interesting to compare with Sidney’s satirical description of the opposite style, do the identifying rings, the shepherd-fosterers, the good old nurses, always turn up comme par art de magie exactly at the right moment? How is it that Creon, and the old attendant of Laius, and the Corinthian who picked Œdipus up, all rendezvous at Athens in the nick of time? Is verisimilitude observed even in the Agamemnon? Is there anything dramatic at all—anything more than sheer narration—in the Persæ? Can the extreme defenders of the Unity of Time work out the Antigone on their lines? or the Heautontimoroumenos? Then he proceeds to account (not at all badly) for the practice of the ancients, and then to revert to the only sound argument—that of Cinthio and Pigna in the matter of the Romanzi, of Il Lasca in reference to Italian comedy—that Athens and Rome, and the lives and customs of both, are not modern countries and their lives and customs, that the practice of the one can give no final and prohibitive rule to the practice of the other.[[315]]
We are not in the least concerned to argue for this Preface. It is enough to point out its bold and independent spirit, and to lay special stress on the fact that Ogier fully admits that he is defending, if not a heresy, an orthodoxy which is not popular, offers to explain “pourquoi nous nous sommes jetez à quartier du chemin ordinaire,” speaks of the Unity of Time as “cette règle que nos critiques veulent nous faire garder si religieusement à cette heure,” indirectly condemns the Unity of Place in his arguments, and vindicates the full tragi-comic blending of Actions. Now, this was in 1628, eight years before the Cid and the Sentiments de l’Académie, even a year before Mairet’s Sophonisbe earned the reputation of being the first French piece that was absolutely “correct.” This is of itself enough to show how erroneous is the idea, once common and still repeated, that the discussion over the Cid, with Scudéry for mover, was in the nature of a surprise, and that Chapelain, if he most certainly did not invent the Unities, introduced them into France.
Although M. Bourgoin, and one or two others, have done something of late years to relieve Chapelain himself of the weight—not so much of obloquy as of contemptuous ignoring—which rested on him for nearly two centuries, even they have for the most part lain under that curious fear of Boileau which we shall have to notice so often. Chapelain: the hopelessness of his verse. Sainte-Beuve (who knew his French seventeenth century as no other man ever has known, or probably ever will know it, and who had in his own possession the MS. Letters which do Chapelain not a little credit) takes a kind of apologetic tone on the subject, and seems never to have made up his mind to treat Chapelain as a whole. It is, indeed, only on the prose side that he can be approached without fear of disaster. There are good things even in the Pucelle, but they are ill to win. You may read Le Moyne, Desmarets, Saint-Amant, not without satisfaction of the true poetic sort, especially in the first case. I think I once got through some part of Scudéry’s Alaric. But the Pucelle has a double touch-me-not-ishness—of niaiserie, and of what Boileau (for once justly) calls “hardness”; there is something really impregnable about her. And the minor pieces—fine as is the Richelieu Ode in parts—hardly save their captainess.
Chapelain as a critic is quite another person. He still writes somewhat heavily: and (among his other faithfulnesses to the Pléiade[[316]]) goes in the teeth of Malherbe and Vaugelas by his use of classicised words. The interest of his criticism. But he almost deserves the name of the first properly equipped critic of France in point of knowledge: and (shocking as the statement may appear) I am not sure that he was not the last, till almost within the memory of an aged man. Not only did he know Italian literature thoroughly—that was not in his time uncommon for Frenchmen—and Spanish—that also was not far to seek—but he was accurately drilled in the theory and practice of Italian criticism. He is constantly referring to it in his correspondence with Balzac; he (that is to say, the transparently identical author of the main part at least of the Censure of the Cid) not merely rests his objections on these critics, but refers to the controversies over the Gerusalemme and the Pastor Fido, as he does elsewhere to that between Castelvetro and Caro. Above all, he, almost alone of his time, knew old French literature. It has not been noticed, I think, either by M. Feillet, who published, or by M. Bourgoin, who discusses, his most interesting and remarkable dialogue, Sur la Lecture des Vieux Romans, that his devotion to Lancelot was almost certainly one of his debts to Ronsard. For the Prince of Poets, as we saw, expressly enjoined the reading of Lancelot and the other romances in order to enrich the vocabulary.
The blot on Chapelain’s critical record in the general estimation is, of course, his[[317]] Censure of the Cid above referred to. The Sentiments de l’Académie sur le Cid. Even those who admit that critical like other thought is free, and that a critic is not to be sentenced to Malebolge because he is unfortunate enough not to like the great work of a great man, must acknowledge a certain striking poetical justice in the spectacle of the censor of the Cid, for want of correctness, being pitilessly flogged thirty years later by a correcter than he. Nor, nowadays, do we admit much excuse in the undoubted fact that this censure was practically forced on the Academy, and on Chapelain, by the sordid jealousy of Richelieu.
But even in this censure it is possible, even for one who frankly puts Corneille at the head of all French Tragedy, to acknowledge some critical merits. The first (not perhaps quite the least) of these is that it is strictly civil; the second is that, meticulous, purblind, peddling, prudish—a score of similar epithets if you please—as it is, it does adopt an intelligible code of critical judgment, and does apply that code with legal propriety. Moreover, as we have seen, it is quite a mistake to represent this code as being invented for the occasion—suddenly foisted upon France to gratify the envy of Scudéry and Mairet, or the less excusable malignity of Richelieu. The code had been growing for more than a century; it had been gaining wider and wider acquiescence every day; the protests against it, however gallantly made, had fallen practically unheard. Eight years before we have Ogier explicitly admitting it as the code of nos critiques—as the accepted opinion. We may be fully entitled—some of us intend, for us and for our house, to do so, whether entitled or not—to hold the Unities things vainly invented in two cases, and mischievous, if exclusively and universally enforced, in the third.[[318]] We may think the objections to Corneille’s diction hypercritical, and the objection to Chimène’s conduct utterly absurd.[[319]] But Chapelain, and those about Chapelain, were also quite entitled to think differently, and there is no reason to believe their opinion feigned, though they might not have put it so forcibly save to curry favour with the Cardinal. After all, Corneille hardly disputed their verdict except in detail; and, whether luckily or unluckily, tried to do as they told him afterwards.