La Manière de Bien Penser. 15. Another work of criticism by Bouhours La Manière de Bien Penser, which is also in dialogue, contains much that shows acuteness and delicacy of discrimination; though his taste was deficient in warmth and sensibility, which renders him somewhat too strict and fastidious in his judgments. He is an unsparing enemy of obscurity, exaggeration and nonsense, and laughs at the hyperbolical language of Balzac, while he has rather over-praised Voiture.[1029] The affected inflated thoughts, of which the Italian and Spanish writers afford him many examples, Bouhours justly condemns, and by the correctness of his judgment may deserve, on the whole, a respectable place in the second order of critics.
[1029] Voiture, he says, always takes a tone of raillery when he exaggerates. Le faux devient vrai à la faveur de l’ironie, p. 29. But we can hardly think that Balzac was not gravely ironical in some of the strange hyperboles which Bouhours quotes from him.
In the fourth dialogue, Bouhours has many just observations on the necessity of clearness. An obscurity arising from allusion to things now unknown, such as we find in the ancients, is no fault but a misfortune; but this is no excuse for one which may be avoided, and arises from the writer’s indistinctness of conception or language. Cela n’est pas intelligible, dit Philinthe (after hearing a foolish rhapsody extracted from a funeral sermon on Louis XIII.). Non, répondit Eudoxe, ce n’est pas tout-à-fait de galimatias, ce n’est que du phébus. Vous mettez donc, dit Philinthe, de la différence entre le galimatias et le phébus? Oui, repartit Eudoxe, le galimatias renferme une obscurité profonde, et n’a de soi-même nul sens raisonnable. Le phébus n’est pas si obscur, et a un brillant qui signfie, ou semble signifier quelque chose; le soleil y entre d’ordinaire, et c’est peut-être ce qui a donné lieu en notre langue au nom de phébus. Ce n’est pas que quelquefois le phébus ne devienne obscur, jusqu’à n’être pas entendu; mais alors le galimatias s’en joint; ce ne sont que brillans et que ténèbres de tous côtes, p. 342.
Rapin’s Reflections on Eloquence and Poetry. 16. The Réflexions sur l’Eloquence et sur la Poësie of Rapin, another Jesuit, whose Latin poem on Gardens has already been praised, are judicious, though perhaps rather too diffuse; his criticism is what would appear severe in our times; but it was that of a man formed by the ancients, and who lived also in the best and most critical age of France. The reflections on poetry are avowedly founded on Aristotle, but with much that is new, and with examples from modern poets to confirm and illustrate it. The practice at this time in France was to depreciate the Italians; and Tasso is often the subject of Rapin’s censure; for want, among other things, of that grave and majestic character which epic poetry demands. Yet Rapin is not so rigorous, but that he can blame the coldness of modern precepts in regard to French poetry. After condemning the pompous tone of Brebœuf in his translation of the Pharsalia, he remarks that “we have gone since to an opposite extreme by too scrupulous a care for the purity of the language; for we have begun to take from poetry its force and dignity by too much reserve and a false modesty, which we have established as characteristics of our language, so as to deprive it of that judicious boldness which true poetry requires; we have cut off the metaphors and all those figures of speech which give force and spirit to words and reduced all the artifices of words to a pure regular style which exposes itself to no risk by bold expression. The taste of the age, the influence of women who are naturally timid, that of the court which had hardly anything in common with the ancients, on account of its usual antipathy for learning, accredited this manner of writing.”[1030] In this Rapin seems to glance at the polite but cold criticism of his brother Jesuit, Bouhours.
[1030] P. 147.
His Parallels of Great Men. 17. Rapin, in another work of criticism, the Parallels of Great Men of Antiquity, has weighed in the scales of his own judgment Demosthenes and Cicero, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Livy, Plato and Aristotle. Thus eloquence, poetry, history and philosophy pass under review. The taste of Rapin is for the Latins; Cicero he prefers to Demosthenes, Livy on the whole to Thucydides, though this he leaves more to the reader; but is confident that none except mere grammarians have ranked Homer above Virgil.[1031] The loquacity of the older poet, the frequency of his moral reflections, which Rapin thinks misplaced in an epic poem, his similes, the sameness of his traditions, are treated very freely; yet he gives him the preference over Virgil for grandeur and nobleness of narration, for his epithets, and the splendour of his language. But he is of opinion that Æneas is a much finer character than Achilles. These two epic poets he holds, however, to be the greatest in the world; as for all the rest, ancient and modern, he enumerates them one after another, and can find little but faults in them all.[1032] Nor does he esteem dramatic and lyric poets, at least modern, much better.
[1031] P. 158.
[1032] P. 175.
Bossu on Epic Poetry. 18. The Treatise on Epic Poetry by Bossu was once of some reputation. An English poet has thought fit to say that we should have stared, like Indians, at Homer, if Bossu had not taught us to understand him.[1033] The book is, however, long since forgotten; and we fancy that we understand Homer not the worse. It is in six books, which treat of the fable, the action, the narration, the manners, the machinery, the sentiments and expressions of an epic poem. Homer is the favourite poet of Bossu, and Virgil next to him; this preference of the superior model does him some honour in a generation which was becoming insensible to its excellence. Bossu is judicious and correct in taste, but without much depth, and he seems to want the acuteness of Bouhours.
[1033] Had Bossu never writ, the world had still,
Like Indians, viewed this mighty piece of wit.
Mulgrave’s Essay on Poetry.