A Short History of French Literature
has, on the contrary, exalted it to almost the highest point of which it
is capable. Not many books have made and kept a more durable and solid
reputation. The few dissentient voices in the chorus of eulogy have been
those of eccentric crotcheteers like Rousseau, or sentimentalists like
Lamartine. It is, indeed, impossible to read the Fables without
prejudice and not be captivated by them. As mere narratives they are
charming, and the perpetual presence of an undercurrent of sly,
good-humoured, satirical meaning relieves them from all charge of
insipidity. La Fontaine, like Goldsmith, was with his pen in his hand as
shrewd and as deeply learned in human nature as without it he was simple
and _naif_.
Something has to be said of the form and strictly poetical value of
these two remarkable books--as remarkable, let it be remembered, for
their bulk as for their excellence, for between them they cannot contain
much less than 30,000 verses. The measure is almost always an irregular
mixture of lines of different lengths, rhyming sometimes in couplets,
sometimes in interlaced stanzas, which La Fontaine established as the
vehicle of serio-comic narration. For this, in his hands, it is
extraordinarily well fitted. As for the strictly poetic value of the
work, it is perhaps significant that though he is, taking quantity and
excellence together, the most important non-dramatic writer of verse of
the whole century in France, he is rarely thought of (out of France) as
a poet. A poet, indeed, in the highest sense of the word he is not. He
has hardly any passion, evidences of it being almost confined to the
elegy to Fouquet and, perhaps, as M. Theodore de Banville pleads, to the
'Faucon' and 'Courtisane Amoureuse' of the _Contes_. He has no
indefinite suggestion of beauty; even his descriptions of nature, though
always accurate and picturesque, being somewhat prosaic. He may be said
to be a prose writer of the very first class who chose to write in
verse, and who justified his choice by a wonderful technical ability in
the particular form of verse which he used. There is no greater mistake
than the supposition that La Fontaine's verse-writing is mere facile
improvisation.
[Sidenote: Boileau.]
Nicolas Boileau[232], who was long known in France as the 'Law-giver of
Parnassus,' and who, perhaps, exercised a more powerful and lasting
influence over the literature of his native country than any other
critic has ever enjoyed, was born at Paris on All Saints' Day, 1636. His
father held the post of registrar of one of the numerous courts of law,
and his family had legal connections of wide range and long date. He
himself was brought up to the law, but had not the least inclination
for it; and at his father's death, which happened exactly when he
attained his majority, his inheritance was considerable enough to allow
him to do as he pleased. The family was a large one, and, according to a
custom of the time, the brothers, or at least some of them, were
distinguished by additional surnames. That which Nicolas
took--Despreaux--was, at any rate during his youth, more frequently used
than his patronymic, and has continued to be applied to him
indifferently, thereby causing some odd blunders on the part of ignorant
people. He himself sometimes signed Despreaux and sometimes
Boileau-Despreaux. Besides law, he had also studied theology, and,
though he never took orders, he enjoyed for a considerable time a priory
at Beauvais, the profits of which, however, he returned when he
definitely abandoned the idea of the church as a profession. He very
early made attempts in literature, and when he was a man of seven- or
eight-and-twenty, he joined La Fontaine, Racine, and Moliere in the
celebrated society of four. Social and literary criticism was even thus
early his forte, and his first collections of Horatian satire were
published in 1666, though, owing to the influence of Chapelain, the
royal privilege was shortly after withdrawn from them. Boileau, however,
soon became a great favourite with the king, as, though in actual
conversation he retained his natural freedom of speech, he did not
hesitate to use the most grovelling flattery of expression in verse.
Pensions and places were given to him freely, so that, his own property
being not inconsiderable, he was one of the few wealthy men of letters
of the day. He was kept out of the Academy for some time by the fact
that he had libelled half its members and was unpopular with the other
half, but the royal influence at last got him in in 1684. In his later
years the morose arrogance, which was his chief characteristic,
increased on him, and was doubtless aggravated by the bad health from
which he suffered during the whole of his long life. He died in 1711,
having outlived all his friends except Louis himself.
Boileau's works consist of twelve satires, of the same number of
epistles, of an _Art Poetique_, of the _Lutrin_, a serio-comic poem, of
two odes, and of three or four score epigrams and miscellaneous pieces
in verse, with a translation of Longinus on the Sublime, some short
critical dissertations, and a number of letters in prose. With the
exception of the _Lutrin_ it will be observed that almost all his
poetical work is very closely modelled on Horace. His satire is
extremely clever, but, as necessarily happens when the frame and manner
of one time are used for the circumstances of another, it is altogether
artificial. The Horatian satire is nothing if not personal, and as
Boileau (even more than Pope, who strongly resembles him) had a bad
heart, his personalities are unusually reckless and offensive. Thus in a
couplet against parasites he inserted at one time the name of Colletet
(son of the Colletet mentioned above), at another that of Pelletier,
though both were notoriously free from the vice, and guilty of no fault
except poverty and a disposition to produce indifferent verse. Boileau's
crusade, too, against the minor poets of his day was unfortunately
followed by his own production of a ridiculous ode, excellently
burlesqued by Prior, on the taking of Namur in 1692 by the French. This,
with certain pieces of Young's, is perhaps the most glaring example
extant of how a writer of great talent and literary skill may combine
the basest flattery with the most abjectly bad verse. But where he
confined himself to his proper sphere, Boileau exhibited no small power.
He was, in fact, a slashing reviewer in verse, and there has rarely been
so effective a practitioner of the craft. Narrow as was his idea of
poetry, it was perfectly clear and precise, and, as his pupil Racine
showed, he could teach it to others with the most striking success. _Le
Lutrin_, too, is a poem which, in a rather trivial kind, is something of
a masterpiece. Its subject, the quarrel of a chapter of ecclesiastics
about the position of a _lutrin_ (lectern), afforded Boileau plenty of
opportunity for introducing that sarcasm on the upper middle classes
which was his forte; the verse is polished and correct, the satire,
though rather facile and conventional, agreeable enough. His satires and
epistles are full of striking traits evidently studied from the life,
but he is always personal and almost always artificial, never rising to
the large satiric conception of Regnier or of Dryden. So, too, most of
the stories which are recorded of him (and they are many) are stories of
ill-natured remarks. In his heart of hearts he knew and acknowledged
the greatness of Corneille, yet formally and in public he could not
refrain from directing unjust satire at the veteran whose masterpieces
had been produced when he was in his cradle, in order to exalt his own
pupil Racine, whom he privately owned to be simply a very clever and
docile rhymester. He himself was very much the same with the exception
of the docility. His good sense, his talents, his eye for the
ludicrous--except in his own work--were admirable, and the ill-nature of
his satires, with their frequent injustice and the strange ignorance
they display of all literature except the Latin classics and French and
Italian contemporary authors, does not prevent their being excellent
examples of French and of the art of polite libelling. It is probable
that Boileau might have fared better but for his inconceivable folly in
attempting, in the Namur ode, a style for which he had not the least
aptitude, and for the parrot-like monotony with which Frenchmen before
1830, and even some of them since that date, have lauded and quoted him
and accepted his dicta. But the most lenient estimate of him can hardly
amount to more than that he was an excellent writer of prose and
pedestrian verse, a critic of singular acuteness within a narrow range,
and a satirist who had a keen eye for the ludicrous aspect of things and
persons, and a remarkable skill at reproducing that aspect in words.
[Sidenote: Minor Poets of the later Seventeenth Century.]
The list of poets of the century has to be completed by some of more or
less importance who flourished in the later days of Louis XIV., and, in
some few cases, outlived him. Brebeuf might have been mentioned before,
as he was Boileau's elder, and, dying young, did not reach even the most
brilliant period of the reign. But he is unlike any of the three schools
who have been described, and his language is more modern than that of
most of the poets who wrote before or during the Fronde. His principal
work is a translation of the _Pharsalia_, in which both the defects and
the merits of the original are represented with remarkable fidelity.
Boileau, who found fault with his _fatras obscur_, allowed him frequent
flashes of genius, and these flashes are rather more frequent than might
be supposed, being also of a kind which Boileau was not usually inclined
to recognise. Brebeuf is decidedly of what may be called the right
school of French poets, though he is one of the least of that school.
His minor poetry displays the same characteristics as his translation,
but is of less importance. Madame Deshoulieres, still more unjustly
criticised by Boileau, is unquestionably one of the chief poetesses of
France; indeed, with Louise Labe and Marceline Desbordes Valmore, she is
almost the only one of importance. Her poems, like those of most of her
contemporaries, are of the occasional order, and have too much in them
that is artificial, but frequently also they have real pathos and
occasionally not a little vigour. 'Le Songe' is a very admirable ode,
having some of the characteristics of the English Caroline school.
Racine himself, independently of his dramas, and the choruses inserted
in them, wrote some poetry, chiefly religious, which has his usual
characteristics of refinement in language and versification. Anthony
Hamilton has left some verses (notably an exquisite song, beginning
'Celle qu'adore mon coeur n'est ni brune ni blonde') as dainty and
original as his prose. At the end of the century two poets, whose names
always occur together in literary history, the Abbe de Chaulieu and the
Marquis de la Fare, close the record. They were not only alike in their
literary work, but were personal friends, and not the worst of
Chaulieu's pieces is an elegy on La Fare, whom, though the older man of
the two, he survived. They were both members of the libertine society of
the Temple, over which the Duke de Vendome presided, and which, somewhat
later, formed Voltaire. The verses of both were strictly occasional.
Chaulieu, like many men of letters of the time, published nothing during
his long life, though his poems were known to French society in
manuscript. Besides the verses on La Fare, Chaulieu's best poem is,
perhaps, that 'On a Country Life' (the author being an inveterate
inhabitant of towns). La Fare, on the other hand, is best known by his