On the whole, the only reasons for not ranking La Bruyère’s criticism very high indeed are that there is so little of it, and that it is obviously the work of a man to whom it is more a casual pastime than a business—who has not thought himself out all along the line in it, but has emitted a few observations. Still, those which express his deliberate opinions are almost always sound, and only some of those which he has adopted without examination are wholly or partially false.
The critical utterances of Fénelon[[384]] are much more voluminous, though in part, at least, not quite so disinterested, and they are of a very high critical interest and value. Fénelon. The Dialogues sur l’Eloquence. They are contained in two documents, the Dialogues sur l’Eloquence (which, though not known, is believed to be a work of his early manhood, but was only published after his death by the Chevalier Ramsay) and one of his very latest pieces, the Mémoire sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française, sent in, to obey a resolution of that body, in November 1713, with the much longer explanatory letter of the next year thereon to Dacier.
The first is conditioned—unfavourably it may seem for our purpose—by its avowed limitation to sacred eloquence. A young aspirant to the cloth has fallen in love with a fashionable preacher, wishes a cooler friend to share his enthusiasm, and, being rebuffed, elicits from that friend by degrees a complete criticism of the rhetoric of the pulpit, and the rules that should govern it. Since we have found discussions, even of profane oratory, surprisingly barren in pure literary criticism of old, this of sacred may seem still less promising. But though Fénelon’s interest in the soul-curing part of the matter is constant and intense, he does not allow it either to obscure or to adulterate his literary censure. At first, in particular, the arguments of his “A” (the critical friend who, no doubt, is Fénelon himself) not merely have nothing more to do with the pulpit than with the bar or the Senate, but have little if anything more to do with spoken than with written literature. The disdainful description (at p. 5 ed. cit.) of that epigrammatic or enigmatic style, which is always with us, as des tours de passe-passe; the excellent passage (ibid., 7-9) on Demosthenes, Isocrates, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus himself—on whom Fénelon speaks with far more appreciation than Boileau, and probably with more knowledge than Dryden; the bold attitude taken up at p. 18 on the question of the perfect hero; the exaltation (perhaps the most noteworthy thing in the whole) of “painting,” of bringing the visual image home to the reader, at p. 35; the scorn of mere verbal fault-finding at p. 47; the ardent panegyric of the literary greatness of the Bible at p. 69; and of the Fathers at p. 86 sq.—all these passages, which are almost pure gold of criticism, have nothing special to do with the mere métier of the preacher. That Fénelon was neither perfect nor wholly beyond his time is quite true. He has here a deplorable assault on Gothic Architecture (which he repeats at greater length in the Academic letter, and for which, if he had not been so good and great a man, one could wish the stones of his cathedral to have fallen upon him), and his contempt extends to mediæval literature. But the same doom is on the best of archbishops and the most beautiful of girls: they can but give what they have.
And Fénelon gives very much. The Memoir and Letter above referred to were elicited by a demand on Academicians for proposals in regard to the reorganising of the work of the Academy[Academy]. Sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française. Here, therefore, as in the other case, the immediate purpose is special; but the general literary interests of the critic again prevent it from being specialised in the dismal and deadly modern sense. He does not fail to deal with the daily dreadful line of the Dictionary; but he proposes, as supplements, divers things—a new Poetic, a new Rhetoric, Chrestomathies from the Ancients on both heads (things needed to this day), and above all, a complete Academic edition of the great classics of France, with really critical introduction and annotations, or at least a corpus of critical observations on them.
But, as usual, it is in the incidental remarks that the value of the piece lies; and these make it, I do not hesitate to say, the most valuable single piece of criticism that France had yet produced. Fénelon shows his acquaintance with other modern languages; and pays a particular compliment to Prior, who, it must be remembered, was about this time occupying his rather uneasy post of Ambassador. He may be too hasty in saying that the Italians and Spaniards will perhaps never make good tragedies or epigrams, nor the French good epics and sonnets, as he most certainly is too ignorant in saying that “after our ancient poets” sont permises” (p. 103 ed. cit.) Alas! in England itself, and after two centuries, one uses this just liberty at personal risk. His Rhetoric section partly repeats the Dialogues, and is altogether more technical or professional than literary. And its challenge to correctness. But his Poetical section is full of interest. It is marred by that not quite single-minded fancy for prose poetry which has already been glanced at, and to which we shall have to return. But the attack on rhyme is partly excused, and the, at first sight, bewildering remark (p. 123) that “rhyme is of itself more difficult than all the rules of Greek and Latin prosody” is rendered intelligible, by a remembrance of the extremely arbitrary rules which had by this time been imposed on the French rhymer. The paragraph on Ronsard,[[385]] the best known piece of the whole, is admirable in its tempering of sympathy with censure; and the acknowledgment of the “opposite extreme” into which French for more than a century had fallen,[[386]] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth.
The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs (and Time’s) the complaints of la basse plaisanterie de Plaute, and the statement that on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane. The point is the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And, abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book, and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule. Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.
We have for some time been occupied with the critical work of great men of letters; we must now turn to that of four men who, if they had not been critics, would hardly have been heard of in their own day, and would certainly not be remembered by posterity out of their own country—or perhaps in it. As it was, all the four exercised immense influence, not merely in France but elsewhere, and three of them saw their work promptly translated into English, and received with almost touching deference in the country which had Dryden to look to for criticism, nay, by Dryden himself. The order in which we may take them shall be determined by that of the appearance of their principal critical works. The Pratique du Théâtre of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, appeared in 1657; the first Réflexions of Rapin in 1668; the Entretiens d’Ariste of Bouhours in 1671; and the Traité du Poème Epique of Le Bossu in 1675. All four, it is to be observed, were clerics of one sort or another, while Rapin and Bouhours were schoolmasters, and Hédelin was at least a private tutor. Taken together, they exhibit the hand-book and school-book side of the criticism of which Boileau is the contemporary satiric expositor to the world; and their criticism cannot properly be dissociated from his. As dates sufficiently show, they do not in any sense derive from him; nor, to do him justice, does he from them. The whole quintet, with others of less importance, are all the more valuable exponents of the strong contemporary set of the tide in the direction of hard-and-fast “classical” legislation for literature.
It is among the few and peculiar laurels of the Abbé D’Aubignac to have failed in more kinds of literature than most men try. The Abbé D’Aubignac. His tragedy of Zénobie (1647) was the occasion of a well-known epigram from the great Condé, which is not the less good for its obviousness, and which, with equal ease and justice,[[387]] can be adjusted to his criticism. He is more of an Aristotelian “know-nothing” than La Mesnardière, and has very much less talent. Not content with the Pratique (which, as has been said, was really a belated contribution to the cabal against Corneille), he attacked two of the great tragedian’s later plays, Sophonisbe and Sertorius, in his Dissertations en forme de Remarques (1663), and he had many years earlier attempted to justify Terence against the strictures of Ménage. The historian of criticism would have been grateful to him had he confined himself to writing tractates “On the nature of Satyrs, Brutes, Monsters, and Demons,”[[388]] Relations du Royaume de Coquetterie, and novels like the rather well-named Macarise, or the Queen of the Fortunate Isles. For these we could simply have neglected.
The Pratique, unfortunately, we cannot neglect wholly, because of its position as a symptom and an influence. His Pratique du Théâtre. In reading it,[[389]] the generous mind oscillates between a sense of intolerable boredom, and a certain ruth at the obviously honest purpose and industry that underlie the heaps of misapplied learning, and season the gabble of foolish authority-citing. He begins by a demonstration that all great statesmen have always patronised stately games, of which scenic representation is one. Vulgar minds have nothing to do with it (this was a slap at Castelvetro and his horrible doctrine of pleasing the multitude, which is a real lethalis arundo in the sides of all these Frenchmen). He is, we are rather surprised to hear, not going to theorise. All the theory has been done, and done once for all, by the ancients. What he wants to do is to apply this theory to all the practical contingencies. And this he does through Unities and Episodes, through Acts and Scenes, through Narration, Discourse, Deliberation, everything, with sleuth-hound patience on his own part, and requiring Job’s variety on that of his readers. He is sometimes quite fair even to Corneille, he seems to be quite well-meaning; but he cannot help his nativity of dulness, and at his very best he is a critic of dramaturgy, not of drama.
René Rapin, hardly as one sometimes feels inclined to think and speak of him, was a person of an entirely different order. Rapin. In fact, it is very much more on isolated and particular points than on generals that he lays himself open to reproach, though it may be retorted that the generals, which lead logically (as they usually do) to such absurd particulars, are thereby utterly condemned themselves. It was specially unfortunate for Rapin that his principles and precepts were at once caught up in England by a man like Rymer,[[390]] and expounded in coarse and blunted form to a people still green and unknowing in critical matters. His method partly good. There is even much in his method which deserves high praise. It is very noteworthy that, before he presumed to draw up (or at least to give to the world) his Réflexions on the Poetics and on Poetry, on Eloquence, on History, and on Philosophy, he had preluded by elaborate examinations of the actual documents in the shape of “Comparisons”—“Of Homer and Virgil,” “Of Cicero and Demosthenes,” “Of Thucydides and Livy,” “Of Plato and Aristotle.” And though this sort of “cock-fight comparison” (as the more vernacular writers of his own time in English might have said) is “muchwhat” (as his translator Rymer actually does say) of a mistake, unless pursued with the greatest possible care—though it was already hackneyed in itself and constantly in need of extending, supplementing, blending—yet it is at any rate infinitely superior to the examination in vacuo, the rattling of dry bones and abstract kinds and qualities, to which too many of his contemporaries confined themselves.