Chapelain’s other critical exercises are numerous: they are quite interesting, and there ought to be some accessible collection of them, for at present they have to be hunted up in half-a-dozen different books or collections, some of them very hard to get at. Prefaces. It is probable, though disputed, that he wrote the Introduction to a translation of Guzman d’Alfarache, which may have been done in his twentieth year, and in which the author (according to the Pléiade view) by no means magnifies his office as translator. He certainly wrote, some years later, the prefatory panegyric to Marini’s Adone, where he practises, in a fashion familiar to students of Italian criticism, an elaborate scholastic division of kinds and qualities, with definitions and connections of them. Sur les Vieux Romans. We need not trouble ourselves with his Academic discourse, against Love and for Glory, which is full of précieuse personification, but pass to his most interesting works, the Dialogue on the Romances and the critical Letters. In the first[[320]] he maintains the case of the Arthurian romances against Ménage and Sarrasin, not with a thorough-going championship (that would be wholly anachronistic), but with singular sense, knowledge, and even, as far as it goes, appreciation. He does not affect to admire the composition or the style in Lancelot. But he knows something of the origin (it is extraordinary that he allows it to be, in part at least, English). He will not allow that, barring style and expression, there is any necessary gulf between Lancelot and Homer (wherein he is a hundred years ahead in sense of Blair, who was a hundred years ahead of him in time), delights (taught to do so, as we said, by Ronsard) in the vocabulary, and feels and rejoices in the point of honour (“la crainte perpetuelle qu’ils ont de rien faire et de rien dire dont leur reputation puisse souffrir la moindre tache”),[[321]] their jealousy of their word, their devotion (so different from “our galanterie”) to their ladies. Quia multum amavit! Moreover, the document is connected in a rather fascinating manner with another,[[322]] in which the same interlocutors, with others, appear, which refers to it, and in which not only does Sarrasin confess that he had been brought by Chapelain to a state of mind different from that which is to be seen in his Discours noticed below, but Chapelain himself reinforces his argument with a long citation from, and discussion of, an episode in Perceforest—that huge and interesting romance which is almost inaccessible to modern readers, in consequence of the depraved persistence of modern scholars and Societies in reprinting the same text in idle emulation of each other, instead of giving what are practically anecdota.
The Letters (published, with some omissions, by M. Tamizey de la Roque in 1880, and supplemented fourteen years later by some more in the Transactions of a learned Society[[323]]) are crammed with references to books, and contain not a little real criticism. Letters, &c. And lastly, the famous list[[324]] of characterisations of French men of letters which Chapelain drew up for Colbert’s use in allotting pensions, though it has been laughed at in parts, is for its date (some of its subjects, including Molière, had not yet done anything like their best work) as sound, as sensible, and, at the same time, as benevolent a hand-list of the kind as you shall discover in the records of the centuries.
On the whole we may say that Chapelain only wanted the proverbial “That!” to make a good and perhaps a really great critic. Not all, though a good deal, of the deficiency must be put down to the transition character of time, taste, literary diction, and everything, in midst of which he found himself. The point of critical genius, the ability to grasp and focus and methodise, must have been wanting too. But he had knowledge, both of literature and of criticism; he had obviously catholic, if not unerring, sympathies; he had acuteness and penetration, if not quite combination and the architectonic; and he was entirely free from that ill-nature which, while it may seem to assist the critic, really disables him. Critique manqué, perhaps, on the whole; but still on his day a critic and no mean one.
“Il faut observer l’Unité d’action, de lieu et de jour. Personne n’en doute.” But, out of France at least, and perhaps in it, it is possible that few people may know, or even doubt, whence this saying comes. Corneille. It would be an insult to a Frenchman of letters to tell him that it comes from Pierre Corneille; long, it is true, after the debate over the Cid, but nearly a quarter of a century before the close of his glorious, if not too happy, life. It may be gathered—rather from a long and large induction than from any single utterance of a person of importance—that the French do not think very much of Corneille as a critic; it may be further gathered from this that a man should never submit his genius. Tu contra audentior ito is the counsel of wisdom. He has written much the best things that have been written in favour of the “correct” theory; but its partisans (and small blame to them) suspect him. They see the eyes of Chimène behind the mask, and they distrust them—wisely also after their kind.
But we must not rhapsodise here on the admirable poetry of this great poet, and the way in which the critics not merely, as somebody said in his own day, ont tari sa veine, but made him in a way false to it. We have only to do with his actual criticism; and whatever view we take of the general question, it must be here pronounced great criticism of its kind. The three Discours, and the series of Examens which appeared first in 1660, present an almost unique, an extremely touching, and (to men of English birth) a rather incomprehensible instance of a man of supreme genius crouching and curbing himself to obey the tendency of the time and the dictates of “the wits.”[[325]] We are not kneaded of this dough. We cannot even conceive Shakespeare taking a copy of Sidney or going to Ben, and afterwards constructing dramas as regularly as he could, or apologising for their irregularity; Milton adjusting Paradise Lost to Dryden’s views of rhyme; nay, even Dryden himself (who is in some ways, as we shall see, very close to Corneille) “looking first at the stop-watch” in any way. But “things are as they are,” and (a great saying from which sometimes the wrong inference has been drawn) “their consequences will be what they will be.”
The three Discourses, “De l’Utilité et des parties du Poëme Dramatique,” “De la Tragédie,” and “Des Trois Unités,” and the Examens of the different plays, are the result of this submission.[[326]] The Three Discourses. Let us say at once that it is in no sense the mere submission of a man who recants, either with tongue in cheek or simply under fear of rack and gallows and fire. Corneille (and this is the interesting point of the French temperament as contrasted with the English) is really affected by authority, and by the Zeitgeist. He has been honestly converted; indeed he asserts (and we may believe him to a great extent) that he never needed conversion—it was only his green unknowing age that made him go wrong. In the three Discourses he examines the question with plentiful quotations from Aristotle, with some knowledge of Italians like Castelvetro and Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius. He is quite aware of the weak points of the ancients; he repeats, though he does not much dwell upon, the earlier comments on the singular rapidity with which Agamemnon[[327]] follows the beacon-fires, the astonishing patness of the turning up of the Corinthian in the Œdipus. And to any one who thinks little of Corneille as a critic I should like to prescribe the reading, marking, and inwardly digesting of his remarks in the Discours des Trois Unités on the separation of acts and scenes, and the relation of the chorus to orchestral interludes. Elsewhere we may find the mark of the chain: as where the poet, pretending indifference, is evidently rather unhappy because he cannot tell exactly what the wicked Queen in Rodogune (which some have thought his best play next to the Cid) was doing when she was not on the stage. This inquiry is of itself almost sufficient to show the sheer idiocy to which this kind of criticism is always on the point of descending. But on the whole, and since Giant Unity has long ceased even to gnash at the pilgrims, we can tolerate it.
The Examens are of still greater importance; for we have had plenty of inquiries in general into the qualities and requirements of Kinds, though few from persons like Corneille. The Examens. The system of elaborate critical reviews—for that is what it comes to—of his past work, by a great poet who has taken pains to acquaint himself with critical method, and is almost too respectful of its utterances, is practically a new one. There is a certain flavour of it in Spenser and Ronsard, much more than a flavour in Tasso; but it was not till the seventeenth century, when the critic was abroad in earnest, that it could be done on such a scale as this. For Corneille, though he never issued any Examens till 1660, applied them to all but his very latest plays. To the mere general reader they may be rendered distasteful by the elaborate and most pathetic pains which Corneille takes to adjust himself to the theories which his reason docilely accepted, but to which his faith was always secretly recalcitrant. To the student of him, and to the student of criticism, they must always have a great attraction.
But for the latter, if he have but a little of the “rascally comparative” spirit, they have an attraction greater still. There is no doubt at all that they served as pattern, at a very brief interval, to the critical exercises of Dryden, and thereby opened a way which criticism is treading still. And there is more in them besides this accidental and extrinsic attraction. Corneille, though he really shows extraordinary impartiality as well as great acumen in his examinations, was by the mere force of nature driven to stick close to his actual work, to observe it narrowly, if only so as to put the best face on it. And, as we have seen, the great fault both of ancient and of mediæval criticism was the omission or the refusal to consider individual works of art minutely and exactly—the constant breaking off and escape to the type. The natural partiality of authors for their own work has not always been fortunate in its results. Here it was so.
Although we have had, and shall have, to question the exact importance assigned by some to the Cid quarrel, there can be no doubt that it had a very important influence, extending far beyond the chief parties concerned, and helping, very particularly, that popularisation of criticism which is undoubtedly the work of France in general, and of the French Academy in particular. La Mesnardière—Sarrasin—Scudéry. In the years almost immediately succeeding it we have, for 1639, the Discours de la Tragédie of the ingenious and ill-fated Sarrasin, for 1640 the formal Art Poétique of La Mesnardière, a treatise specially dealing with tragedy, strongly, almost idolatrously, Aristotelian in tone, and characterised by a lively polemic against the Spanish and Italian influences which had been so powerful for a generation in France. Scudéry followed up the pamphlets which had actually given occasion to the Cid dispute, almost at the same period, with the Preface to Ibrahim, as well as years afterwards in that to Alaric. Nay, it was at this very time (about 1640) that the world was at least threatened with the birth of the dullest critical treatise of the century, that of Hédelin, though a respite of seventeen years was actually granted.
La Mesnardière had evidently made a careful study of the Italian critics. His very format—a handsome small quarto—reminds one of their favourite shape, and contrasts curiously with the tiny duodecimos of the sixteenth-century French critics. And he puts forth his whole strength in arguing for the Stagirite against the blasphemies of Castelvetro, whom, however, he declares that he honours hors des intérêts d’Aristote—an odd, but very characteristic, way of putting it. La Mesnardière, who follows out all the Aristotelian divisions, even to Music (with engraved airs), is equally odd and equally representative in identifying, or at least associating in his first Chapter, Politesse with “Imagination.” Mere Understanding will make a Philosopher—the Poet must be polished up into an Imaginative condition. He does not neglect language and diction: and though he devotes himself to drama, illustrates copiously from non-dramatic poetry, and criticises his illustrations in the way which was becoming so common and is so important. But a specimen passage in a footnote[[328]] will explain, better than pages of discussion, the fatally parasitic character of most of his criticism.