With one remarkable exception as almost a whole, and a certain number of scattered passages in some of them,[[344]] the most noteworthy thing in the other Ana, which has relation to Criticism, is the almost invariable connotation of the word in them. The Ana other than Ménage’s, especially Vigneul-Marville,[[345]] noticing a book, says that there are in it deux remarques de critique, one that Myconos is not so far from Delos as Ferrari says, being only two leagues instead of seven, and the other, that somebody else is wrong in saying that it belongs to the Venetians since it is in the power of the Turks. Of course in a sense these are “critical” observations; but one is a little reminded of Hegel and philosophical instruments. More unmistakable is the clear definition given by the author of the book above excepted. Huet (p. 232 ed. cit.) says explicitly that Critique is “that part of grammar which busies itself with re-establishing the text of ancient authors in its first integrity, and purging out changes due to ignorance,” &c. This, he goes on to say, is the art which Aristotle is said to have invented; and yet, further, he frankly declares that he himself has always looked on it as “a mean business.”[[346]] Yet, not merely in the well-known De l’Origine des Romans, which is not unfrequently found in connection with the Huetiana, but in these themselves, he shows that he had no mean conception of the higher and nobler branches of the Art. His remarks on the Quarrel[[347]] are among the most sensible that we have, as was to be expected from a man who was at once an excellent scholar in ancient, and a warm admirer of modern, literature. If he is less wise on rhyme,[[348]] let us remember that this is parcius objiciendum to a contemporary, although a younger contemporary, of Milton; and if he is responsible for the astonishing statement[[349]] that Greek poetry “a toujours décliné depuis Homère,” let us simply decline the attempt to construct any critical theodolite which will show us this line of constant declension through Sappho and Pindar, Æschylus and Aristophanes, Theocritus and the best of the Anthologists. the Huetiana. On the other hand, the assertion advanced in the Origine des Romans, and defended in the Ana, to the effect that a good judge of poetry is even rarer than a good poet, is too double-edged, in its apparent flattery of our own office, for us to make any difficulty in applauding it, while the defence itself is singularly good. The everlasting comparison of Virgil to Theocritus and Homer has seldom been better handled than by Huet. Indeed the whole book is worth reading for the critical passages it contains. The Traité des Romans is a little discursively and promiscuously erudite, and Huet is thinking too much of the bastard romance of his own time, too little of the true-bred romances of old: but he knows something even of these, and he is well acquainted with the attempts of Cinthio and Pigna in the previous century to make good at least the Italian form of the kind.
Valesiana,
In the Valesiana—amid much that is merely antiquarian or linguistic, and a fair though not excessive portion of the mere gossip and gabble which first made these things read and afterwards brought them into disrepute—there will be found a curious passage on the Latin hymns and their prosody, showing how dead the ear falls at certain times to the music of others, and the more curious selection of Palingenius and his Zodiacus Vitæ as a poem and a poet worth the pains of reading. Nor will the reputation for robustness of seventeenth-century erudition suffer from the patronising commendation of Baillet’s Jugements des Savants as a book which would be useful light reading for the giddy youth of the day who declined serious study. Scaligerana, Yet Scaliger himself (J. J., not J. C.), according to the collection[[350]] standing in his name (a quaint mosaic or macaronic of French and Latin), thought that nobody save Casaubon (and “another that shall be nameless,” no doubt) was really learned as men had been a hundred years earlier. He is himself nearly as untrustworthy on really critical points as his father, and had, I think, less true critical spirit. But he makes some amends for Julius Cæsar’s truculent assault on the Ciceronianus by confessing that Longolius (the main object of the Erasmian satire) could not really be said to write in Ciceronian style when he simply fitted Ciceronian phrases together.
Another member of the group to be noted very especially is the so-called Parrhasiana,[[351]] in the title of which “Théodore Parrhase” stands for a nom de guerre of the industrious pressman Jean Le Clerc. and Parrhasiana. It has very little in common with its class, being in part a reasoned treatise on general points of criticism, in part a defence of the author’s own works against the injurious remarks of Meibomius and others. The latter we can neglect; the former contains a really interesting exposition of general critical views by one of the most experienced of the new class of professional critics and reviewers at the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The distinction of the Parrhasiana is that it has so little distinction—that it is so thoroughly normal. Le Clerc is a thorough believer in the Ancients; but he wears his rue with this difference, that he does not believe in moderns who write Greek and Latin Verses, and that he is quite handsome and encouraging to those who do write in their mother tongue. They may be quite, or almost, as useful, he thinks—but as for reading for mere amusement, that is not a serious occupation. And Le Clerc is uncompromising in the prosaism of his views on poetry. In fact, I am not sure that there is anywhere else so naïf a confession of belief in the Lower Reason only. He finds improbabilities and absurdities, not merely in Homer, but in Virgil himself; he holds æternum servans sub pectore vulnus, which some not very fervid Maronites would admit as a great and poetic phrase, to be a mere surplusage; and he actually condoles with poets on the unlucky necessity under which they lie of inversions, metaphors, and so forth, metri gratia. I do not know whether Mr Arnold knew the Parrhasiana, and indeed should doubt it; but he certainly might have found chapter and verse for his strictures on the age of “prose and sense” almost anywhere in it.
Yet other groups or individuals in this abounding period might receive notice if this history were to be in twelve volumes instead of in three. Patru, Desmarets, and others. There is Patru, not merely in his time the glory of the French bar, but extolled, by Boileau and by his enemies alike, as a sort of Quintilian and Quintilius in one[[352]]—as a standard at once of style and of judgment. Yet his long life and his constant occupation with literature, in talk and in reading, seem to have left us hardly anything in the shape of written criticism. There is Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, a less belauded but more interesting and perhaps more genuine man of letters. Not merely did Desmarets compose the epics ridiculed by Boileau, not merely was he the author of the excellent Visionnaires (the best comedy in French before Molière except Corneille’s Le Menteur), not merely was he a “visionary” himself in his latter days, and a versifier, if not a poet, always, but he was a not inconsiderable critic. Those who choose to read his Défense du Poème Héroique[[353]] will find in it by no means the imbecility that they may expect, either in the dialogues defending the Christian poem, or in the somewhat meticulous, but sharp and not ill-deserved, “cutting-up” of Boileau which follows. But these, and much more the Conrarts and the Costars, the Maucroix, and the rest[[354]] must here be as silencieux as the first in his stock epithet. And one may confess even to doubts whether, with the amplest room and verge, they ought to have much space in a general History of Criticism as distinguished from one of special countries and periods. Hardly any of them is more than one of a numerus; hardly any has himself actual distinction, as persons of much inferior talents may have at other times. The Historian of Climate must have much to say about the delightful variety of that phenomenon which the British Isles display, about its causes, its phases, and the like, in general; but he would be lost, and would lose his readers in more than one sense, if he were to attempt to describe every shower or even every wet season.[[355]]
The attempts, not merely to make out a regular Æsthetic for Descartes, but to key this on to the great critical movement of the century, will be best dealt with later; but the greatest of the Cartesians must have a word.
Malebranche need not occupy us long; indeed, this great philosopher and admirable master of French has to be dealt with by us, at least in some part, because he has been dealt with by others. Malebranche. The invitation to do so, if we may say it without illiberality, seems to have consisted rather in the titles than in the contents of his work. The Second Book of the Recherche de la Vérité is, indeed, “De l’Imagination”; the Second Part of this Second Book has much to do with les personnes d'étude; and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth chapters of the Third Part deal with “the imagination of certain authors,” especially Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. But we have seen, and shall see, how treacherous the word Imagination is, and how people will misunderstand it, however frankly they are dealt with. Malebranche, as he always is, is quite frank and quite clear; he tells us definitely that imagination for him is “a little more and a little less than sense,” that it only consists in the power possessed by the soul of forming images of objects for itself. His quarrel with the “persons of study” is that they will read, write, and argue about the ancients, instead of recurring to primary truths; and when he deals with his three selected authors, it is not to criticise them from the literary point of view (though he finds fault with “irregular movements” in Tertullian’s figures), but to object to the paralogism of the De Pallio, the ill-regulated imagination and feeble reasoning of Seneca, the treacherous “cavalier” manner, the “criminal attraction born of concupiscence,” the disguised pedantry, the vanity, in Montaigne. Phrases here and there, in his own perfect style[[356]] (I doubt whether any prose writer of the grand siècle can give points to Malebranche), show what a critic was lost in him; but the critic—as indeed we should expect, and as is quite proper—is lost in the philosopher, the theologian, and the moralist.[[357]]
And so to Boileau.
It is desirable that we should examine Boileau’s critical work[[358]] with more than ordinary care. The history of Boileau’s reputation. The history of his reputation has, until recently, been on the whole not very different from that of many other eminent men of letters—that is to say, it has oscillated between extravagant reverence (during the entire eighteenth century, with rare exceptions, both in France and elsewhere) and a violent reaction (when the Romantic movement set in). Pope and Voltaire may stand as spokesmen of the former period; Keats and the men of 1830 of the latter. But of late years, and in England as well as in France, the cant of criticism (which is as protean, and as immortal, as most such Duessas) has devised another thing. Even in the extreme Romantic time, true critics, especially Sainte-Beuve, had recognised how germane, in wrong as in right, the taste and temper of Boileau were to the taste and temper of literary France generally, and to some extent of the Latin peoples old and new. But latterly, under the powerful influence of M. Ferdinand Brunetière—whom, though I often disagree with him, I always name for the sake of most unaffected honour, and as a critic of whom any country and time might have been proud—this tendency has gone much further, and we are even asked to accept Monsieur Nicolas as an adequate representative of the French literary genius. Let us remember what “adequate” means; it means to a great, at least, if not to the very fullest, extent commensurate, coextensive, and complete. And in England also there has been not wanting an affectation of deference to this estimate—of arguing that we ought to let the French know best in such points—that it is wicked, rude, uncritical, to intrude English judgment into such matters.
So be it, for the moment, and for the sake of argument. Let us then, as we do always, as from this point of view it is more specially necessary that we should do, inquire what the actual criticism of this “adequate” representative of the French genius is. The Art Poétique. And in doing this let us begin with the Art Poétique, that elaborately arranged code of neo-classic correctness, the composition of which occupied half the central decade[[359]] of its author’s life when he was in the full vigour of ripe age, which summed up all the doctrine of his earlier satires, and is practically repeated by most of his later.