The Sarrasin and Scudéry documents are complementary as well as complimentary of this and of each other. For Sarrasin’s Discours[[329]] is devoted to Scudéry’s Amour Tyrannique, which is so perfect that Aristotle would have put it in the Poetics, instead of or beside the Œdipus, if he had only known it. And La Mesnardière is just going (see dates given) to write “divinely” on that art of poetry which those great men, Ronsard and Du Bellay, did not know, and therefore recommended the study of Romances.[[330]] Finally, “Armand” [Richelieu, of course] is le Dieu tutélaire des lettres. As for the great Georges de Scudéry himself, his Prefaces to Ibrahim and Alaric are quite worthy of the “Commander of the Fort of Notre Dame de La Garde and Kept-Captain to the King,” whose portrait guards the entrance of the stately folio of Alaric. That is to say, they are an odd mixture of bombast (he leads off that to this book with a list of critics and poets, all of whom he has read), crotchet, and real wits. Both are worth comparing with Davenant’s to Gondibert (v. infra, p. 367), which came between them.[[331]]
Some years later the uncompromising Aristotelianism of La Mesnardière as to the Drama was continued and straitened yet further, in reference to the Epic, by Pierre Mambrun,[[332]] who was, like so many others of these French seventeenth-century critics, a Jesuit. Mambrun. His principles (which he illustrated later by a Constantinus sive De Idolatria debellata) exhibit the French detestation of compromise in the most agreeable light: whether his practice does not also illustrate the non-epic character of the French head is another matter. Aristotle, and the whole Aristotle, so far as the Poetics go, is Mambrun’s motto; if he cannot add “nothing but Aristotle,” that is merely because his text is admittedly meagre as to Epic. But he does what he can. He has read Scaliger and Voss, and has a proper respect for them as learned men, but he is shocked at both for their worshipping of idols—at Scaliger for wasting time on diction and metre, as well as for falling foul of Homer, at Voss for making the persons instead of the action the centre of Epic. On the other hand, the too famous Petronian passage is to him a kind of inspired postscript to the Poetics. In his handling of Poetry, which for him is first of all Epic Poetry, he is scholastic as to the frame. The Material cause is Action; the Formal cause the Fable; the Efficient cause a combination of Prudentia and Furor Poeticus; the Final Cause not pleasure but the making of statesmen. In all these respects Homer and Virgil are perfect—Statius, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, sinners. The former always observe the Unity, the Integrity, the Magnitude of the Action. Mambrun has satisfied himself that the Action of the Odyssey only includes fifty-five days—on which principle one would cheerfully undertake to write an Arthuriad, to include the whole of Malory and more, on an “action” of the time between Agravaine’s detection of Lancelot with the Queen and the last fight in Lyonnesse. He thinks that a woman may be a heroine of tragedy but cannot be of Epic (which seems unkind to Chapelain). He admits that to distinguish between the Action and the Fable is not easy; that even in Aristotle the two are sometimes identical. But properly the Fable is actio culta et ornata, and he has an ingenious receipt for stripping the matter of episodes and names. Epic is not Art, not Logic, not History; it is “Prudentia.” But Furor Poeticus? Mambrun’s section of Furor Poeticus is by far the most interesting in his book. He distinguishes first the Kinds of Fury. Then he points out that the Epic Poet must not be furious in constituting his fable. Very much the reverse. “But in episodes and descriptions and speeches I shall not deny that a little fury may be sprinkled in”[[333]]—the fury-dredger, or poetic cruet, being thus authoritatively established as an implement of the Bard. Nor does he conceal the process. The poet thinks very hard about an episode, a description, &c. Then the black bile warms itself, flies up, inflames the brain, and the poet is poetically furious. But in another memorable passage, “being strong in black bile will not necessarily make you a poet.”[[334]] [Alas! it will not.] There must be discipline, &c. In short, the book is a precious one.
There are few critics—not such by profession, and not precisely of the very highest rank—who, from the very first, and with an unbroken record, have enjoyed such a reputation as has been constantly maintained by Saint-Evremond.[[335]] Saint-Evremond. Nor is there, perhaps, a single one who has better deserved this constancy on the part of the great inconstants, Time and Fortune. He was commended to his own time scarcely more by birth and station as a fine gentleman and soldier, or by his singular political and personal history, than by the admirable quality of his writing; to the eighteenth century by his touches of scepticism and libertinage; to the Romantic revival by his championship of Corneille against Racine, and by the frondeur spirit which made him resist the tyranny of the classical creed. But it is also true that he has purely critical qualities of a very uncommon kind. It is perhaps a testimony to that spice of universal in him which has been noticed, that the particular stamp to be put on these qualities—the particular class to which Saint-Evremond is to be referred—is not quite matter of agreement among those who fully agree as to his general merits. To M. Bourgoin, for instance, his critical spirit seems to be nearer to that of Boileau and the critics of rule than to that of Fénelon, or even La Bruyère, and the critics of impression and sens propre. To me the approximation seems to be in the other direction.
The acute and learned author of Les Maîtres de la Critique has, I think, been a little deceived by superficial characteristics of form and method. His critical quality and accomplishment. A young man of twenty at the date of the Cid, and the battle over it, Saint-Evremond, fine gentleman as he was, no more forgot the forms of the quarrel than the attractions of the play. He has something a little scholastic, something of the earlier century, in his manner. Perhaps the best piece of criticism which he has left us—the Dissertation sur le mot “vaste”—recalls the known or alleged subjects of the earlier conversations of Malherbe and Racan, and their fellows, the later of Vaugelas and Chapelain and the young Academy. We have a formal Jugement sur Senèque, Plutarque, et Pétrone, a quite academic study of Alexandre le Grand, discussions of the character of tragedy generally, and the like. But the accomplished, agile, and independent spirit of the author is perpetually escaping from the restraints of his forms and models, and taking its own way according to its own taste. Perhaps, indeed, the fatal equivocation or ambiguity which seems to beset so many critical terms has worked here also: for to the present day the word “Taste” seems to excite quite dissimilar ideas in different minds. To some (as to Boileau and his followers it certainly did) it seems to suggest an antecedent law, a bar to which subjects are to be brought, something to which it is almost improper to apply the terms “good” or “bad,” because there is only one taste, and anything else is not taste at all but untaste. In this sense, though he might not have allowed it, I do not think that Saint-Evremond ever judged by “taste.” In the other—where taste means the approbation and satisfaction of a competent judge, well-gifted, well-tried, and taking pains to keep his palate clean—I think he always judged by it. That he often gave reasons for his judgment is nothing; one should almost always do that. But one should always also remember that these reasons may be totally inapplicable to the next instance.
Saint-Evremond, we have said, was a great admirer of Corneille, and a steady champion of him against Racine. His admiration has been set down to the mere “fallacy of first love,” as we may call it—the fact that the youth of the poet and the youth of the critic had coincided. His views on Corneille. This is not fair. Inviolable constancy to first loves is not precisely the chief thing in an Epicurean temperament. Saint-Evremond, in his various utterances on the subject, makes it perfectly clear why he preferred the older to the younger poet; and Cornelians and Racinians alike must agree that, whether his conclusions were right or wrong, his considerations were at any rate genuine and adequate. The variety and vigour of the one as opposed to the somewhat monotonous mould and soft (or, as some said, “creeping”) sentiment of the other, form a real difference: and so throughout.
On what was then a burning subject—one which cannot be said to have been quite put out, though its ashes only smoulder—the suitableness of religious and especially Christian subjects for epic and drama, &c., Saint-Evremond’s opinion is a little tainted by his undoubted “philosophy,” to use the word which had already become fashionable for the various shades of unbelief. On Christian subjects, &c. But either from this cause, or from a general critical spirit, he escapes the inconsistency (in which Boileau for instance is entangled) of contending that the deorum ministeria are capital things in ancient, and very bad things in modern, poetry. His remarks on the theory of Purgation are a little irreverent but by no means irrational; and he makes strong play for the contention (of which, if he did not invent it, he was one of the strongest and most original champions) that “Admiration is a tragic passion” worthy of being seated beside Pity and Terror, and necessary to be kept in sight even when we deal with Love.
In respect of the Ancient and Modern dispute—of all three stages of which, v. infra, his long life made him a contemporary, while he actually took a sort of skirmishing part in the two earlier—his position is distinctly that of a true critic. On Ancients and Moderns. From what has been said already it will be clear that he could not be an out-and-out Ancient; but he is as little a Modern of the Perrault type. One sees that the Moderns gave him most pleasure, and in the Ancients whom he really likes, such as Petronius (supposing no merely unworthy motives to have entered into the preference), it is easy to discern the modern element. But in neither case does he “like grossly” and in the lump; he has his reasons and his affinities, and can state both easily. He is even not very far from that “horizontal” view of literature, without deceptive foreshortenings and distances, which is, up to his time, so rare. Nothing is more striking than his remarks on English literature—at least the English drama. Perhaps he did not himself know much English; and something of the kind seems to be insinuated in Dryden’s remarks[[336]] on the matter, though Dryden was naturally hurt at the selection of Shadwell for commendation. But if so he apprehended what Waller and others said to him about Ben Jonson’s comedy with almost miraculous divination, and reflects in his account of our tragedy rather less than the current mistakes on the subject among Englishmen of the Restoration period themselves. And here also, as in his remarks on Spanish and Italian, is noticeable this same horizontal and comparative spirit.
On his treatment of Opera I may be permitted to repeat what I wrote more than twenty years ago, that it really contains the substance of everything that has been said since on the literary side of the matter. As for the “Vaste” dissertation the best thing to say is Tolle, lege. I do not think it possible to have a better example of that rarest of things, literary philology, in the true and not the distorted sense of the substantive. The Academy opined—in fact had opined already (whence much of the salt of the piece)—against Saint-Evremond. But his Dissertation is, like all his criticism more or less, a really extraordinary example of the combination of all that was best in the French academic spirit with freedom from most of its faults. This union of freedom and delicacy, of precision and independent play, is Saint-Evremond’s glory as a critic, and it distinguishes him, not merely from Boileau, but from most others between 1660 and 1800. Addison had (and no doubt directly borrowed) something of the same touch; Fénelon, in a different spirit, had a great deal: we shall find something of it in Gravina. But it is very rare in the period, and it is precisely the absence of it as a “compensation balance” which vitiates neo-classic criticism as a whole.
It is common, if not universal, to glance at the redoubtable and satiric doctor, Gui Patin, as at least an outlier among French seventeenth-century critics; but the reader who, as Matthew Arnold says, “wants criticism” will not find much of it in his very amusing Letters.[[337]] Gui Patin—his judgment of Browne. An English reader may be specially disappointed because he is most likely to know the surprising, the repeated, the, to all appearance, fully genuine, and the very felicitous remarks[[338]] of Patin on the Religio Medici. A Frenchman who can appreciate Browne, who can see in the Religio a book not merely tout gentil et curieux but fort délicat et tout mystique, who can perceive its étranges et ravissantes pensées, who can pronounce il n’y a guère encore de livre de la sorte (alas! we may drop the guère and continue the encore), who can describe the author as a mélancolique agréable en ses pensées, who can say of his stupid commentators ce livre n’a pas besoin de tels écoliers, and even desire ardently to be acquainted with Sir Kenelm Digby’s reply—may seem to have handed in his credentials as a critic once and for all. But one soon finds that Patin’s interest in Browne was, first of all, esprit de corps (which was perhaps stronger in the Faculty of that time than in any profession of any other), and secondly, a certain coincidence of true but unconventional piety, different as were its forms in the two. Elsewhere Patin is a collector, an eager student of new books, a scholar even, with a conviction that Scaliger and Casaubon were “the two first men of their time,” and that Salmasius was a “grand héros des belles lettres”; but not a critic, and with a distinctly limited idea of belles lettres themselves. He speaks contemptuously of Descartes, he barely mentions Corneille. He was, in fact, generally too angry with antimony, opium, quinine, the English, and Mazarin, or else too much rapt in ecstasy at the divine powers of bleeding and purging,[[339]] to have time to think of poetry, or even of prose.
Nor can we afford much space to the main body of the Academicians, of the frequenters of “the” Hotel (par excellence), of the abbés, and marquis, and even marquises who crowd the middle of the seventeenth-century history of France, not disagreeably for posterity. Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, Madame de Sévigné. They must be sought in Tallemant (himself, as citations will have shown, interested in the matter, and not inept at it) as a main and single preserver, in a hundred other places, original and second-hand, from the contemporary records to the essays of Sainte-Beuve and his followers. We could fill this volume with them without the slightest difficulty; but, as in all true history, they must “speak by their foremen,” and even these foremen cannot have much place. The modest and amiable Pellisson, the historian of the Academy, whose personal ugliness Boileau had the insolent vulgarity to satirise,[[340]] but who had a “soul of gold,” was by no means a bad though a too amiable critic, and had the sense and courage not to deny Ronsard when the fashion turned against him, just as he clove to Fouquet when it was positively, and even extremely, dangerous to do so. Ménage, to whom his own unguardedness and the satire of Molière[[341]] have given something of a ridiculous position in literary history, had the wit to see the merit of Molière himself quite early, possessed very wide reading, and could make judicious reflections on it, had studied the Italian critics,[[342]] and could now and then (as in the brief obituary notice of Scarron[[343]]) hit off his stroke extremely well. As for Marie de Sévigné, adorable to all, and especially adored by these two, she is generally right, and always illustrates the saying of La Bruyère, which is quoted below, whether she is right or not. But her critical position is so close to that of Saint-Evremond that what we have said of him is almost equally applicable to her, though she invests the critical attitude with her own peculiar charm.