[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.

Fontenelle’s critical writings. 19. Fontenelle is a critic of whom it may be said, that he did more injury to fine taste and sensibility in works of imagination and sentiment, than any man without his good sense and natural acuteness could have done. He is systematically cold; if he seems to tolerate any flight of the poet, it is rather by caprice than by a genuine discernment of beauty; but he clings, with the unyielding claw of a cold-blooded animal, to the faults of great writers, which he exposes with reason and sarcasm. His Reflections on Poetry relate mostly to dramatic composition, and to that of the French stage. Theocritus is his victim in the Dissertation on Pastoral Poetry; but Fontenelle gave the Sicilian his revenge; he wrote pastorals himself; and we have altogether forgotten, or, when we again look at, can very partially approve, the idylls of the Boulevards, while those Doric dactyls of Theocritus linger still, like what Schiller has called soft music of yesterday, from our school-boy reminiscences on our aged ears.

Preference of French language to Latin. 20. The reign of mere scholars was now at an end; no worse name than that of pedant could be imposed on those who sought for glory; the admiration of all that was national in arts, in arms, in manners, as well as in speech, carried away like a torrent those prescriptive titles to reverence which only lingered in colleges. The superiority of the Latin language to French had long been contested; even Henry Stephens has a dissertation in favour of the latter; and in this period, though a few resolute scholars did not retire from the field, it was generally held either that French was every way the better means of expressing our thoughts, or, at least, so much more convenient as to put nearly an end to the use of the other. Latin had been the privileged language of stone; but Louis XIV., in consequence of an essay by Charpentier, in 1676, replaced the inscriptions on his triumphal arches by others in French.[1034] This, of course, does not much affect the general question between the two languages.

[1034] Goujet, i., 13.

General superiority of ancients disputed. 21. But it was not in language alone that the ancients were to endure the aggression of a disobedient posterity. It had long been a problem in Europe whether they had not been surpassed; one, perhaps, which began before the younger generations could make good their claim. But time, the nominal ally of the old possessors, gave his more powerful aid to their opponents; every age saw the proportions change, and new men rise up to strengthen the ranks of the assailants. In philosophy, in science, in natural knowledge, the ancients had none but a few mere pedants, or half-read lovers of paradox, to maintain their superiority; but in the beauties of language, in eloquence and poetry, the suffrage of criticism had long been theirs. It seemed time to dispute even this. |Charles Perrault.| Charles Perrault, a man of some learning, some variety of acquirement, and a good deal of ingenuity and quickness, published, in 1687, his famous “Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns in all that regards Arts and Sciences.” This is a series of dialogues, the parties being first, a president, deeply learned and prejudiced in all respects for antiquity; secondly, an abbé, not ignorant, but having reflected more than read, cool and impartial, always made to appear in the right, or, in other words, the author’s representative; thirdly, a man of the world, seizing the gay side of every subject, and apparently brought in to prevent the book from becoming dull. They begin with architecture and painting, and soon make it clear that Athens was a mere heap of pig-sties in comparison with Versailles; the ancient painters fare equally ill. They next advance to eloquence and poetry, and here, where the strife of war is sharpest, the defeat of antiquity is chanted with triumph. Homer, Virgil, Horace are successively brought forward for severe and often unjust censure; but, of course, it is not to be imagined that Perrault is always in the wrong; he had to fight against a pedantic admiration which surrenders sound taste; and having found the bow bent too much in one way, he forced it himself too violently into another direction. It is the fault of such books to be one-sided; they are not unfrequently right in censuring blemishes, but very uncandid in suppressing beauties. Homer has been worst used by Perrault, who had not the least power of feeling his excellence; but the advocate of the newer age in his dialogue admits that the Æneid is superior to any modern epic. In his comparison of eloquence, Perrault has given some specimens of both sides to contrast; comparing, by means, however, of his own versions, the funeral orations of Pericles and Plato with those of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier, the description by Pliny of his country seat with one by Balzac, an epistle of Cicero with another of Balzac. These comparisons were fitted to produce a great effect among those who could neither read the original text, nor place themselves in the midst of ancient feelings and habits. It is easy to perceive that a vast majority of the French in that age would agree with Perrault; the book was written for the times.

First Reviews—Journal des Sçavans. 24. The knowledge of new accessions to literature which its lovers demanded, had hitherto been communicated only through the annual catalogues published at Frankfort or other places. But these lists of title-pages were unsatisfactory to the distant scholar, who sought to become acquainted with the real progress of learning, and to know what he might find it worth while to purchase. Denis de Sallo, a member of the parliament of Paris, and not wholly undistinguished in literature, though his other works are not much remembered, by carrying into effect a happy project of his own, gave birth, as it were, to a mighty spirit which has grown up in strength and enterprise, till it has become the ruling power of the literary world. Monday, the 5th of January, 1665, is the date of the first number of the first review, the Journal des Sçavans, published by Sallo, under the name of the Sieur de Hedouville, which some have said to be that of his servant.[1035] It was printed weekly, in a duodecimo or sexto-decimo form, each number containing from twelve to sixteen pages. The first book ever reviewed (let us observe the difference of subject between that and the last, whatever the last may be) was an edition of the works of Victor Vitensis and Vigilius Tapsensis, African bishops of the fifth century, by Father Chiflet, a Jesuit.[1036] The second is Spelman’s Glossary. According to the prospectus prefixed to the Journal des Sçavans, it was not designed for a mere review, but a literary miscellany; composed, in the first place, of an exact catalogue of the chief books which should be printed in Europe; not content with the mere titles, as the majority of bibliographers had hitherto been, but giving an account of their contents, and their value to the public; it was also to contain a necrology of distinguished authors, an account of experiments in physics and chemistry, and of new discoveries in arts and sciences, with the principal decisions of civil and ecclesiastical tribunals, the decrees of the Sorbonne and other French or foreign universities; in short, whatever might be interesting to men of letters. We find, therefore, some piece of news, more or less of a literary or scientific nature, subjoined to each number. Thus, in the first number, we have a double-headed child born near Salisbury; in the second, a question of legitimacy decided in the parliament of Paris; in the third, an experiment on a new ship or boat constructed by Sir William Petty; in the fourth, an account of a discussion in the College of Jesuits on the nature of comets. The scientific articles, which bear a large proportion to the rest, are illustrated by engravings. It was complained that the Journal des Sçavans did not pay much regard to polite or amusing literature; and this led to the publication of the Mercure Galant, by Visé, which gave reviews of poetry and of the drama.

[1035] Camusat, in his Histoire Critique des Journaux, in two volumes, 1734, which, notwithstanding its general title, is chiefly confined to the history of the Journal des Sçavans, and wholly to such as appeared in France, has not been able to clear up this interesting point; for there are not wanting those who assert, that Hedouville was the name of an estate belonging to Sallo; and he is called in some public description, without reference to the journal, Dominus de Sallo d’Hedouville in Parisiensi curia senator. Camusat, i., 13. Notwithstanding this, there is evidence that leads us to the valet; so that “ampliùs deliberandum censeo; Res magna est.”

[1036] Victoria Vitensis et Vigilii Tapsensis, Provinciæ Bisacenæ Episcoporum Opera, edente R. P. Chifletio, Soc. Jesu. Presb., in 4to. Divione. The critique, if such it be, occupies but two pages in small duodecimo. That on Spelman’s Glossary, which follows, is but in half a page.

25. Though the notices in the Journal des Sçavans are very short, and when they give any character, for the most part of a laudatory tone, Sallo did not fail to raise up enemies by the mere assumption of power which a reviewer is prone to affect. Menage, on a work of whose he had made some criticism, and by no means, as it appears, without justice, replied in wrath; Patin and others rose up as injured authors against the self-erected censor; but he made more formidable enemies by some rather blunt declarations of a Gallican feeling, as became a counsellor of the parliament of Paris, against the court of Rome; and the privilege of publication was soon withdrawn from Sallo.[1037] It is said that he had the spirit to refuse the offer of continuing the journal under a previous censorship; and it passed into other hands, those of Gallois, who continued it with great success.[1038] It is remarkable that the first review, within a few months of its origin, was silenced for assuming too imperious an authority over literature, and for speaking evil of dignities. “In cunis jam Jove dignus erat.” The Journal des Sçavans, incomparably the most ancient of living reviews, is still conspicuous for its learning, its candour, and its freedom from those stains of personal and party malice which deform more popular works.

[1037] Camusat, p. 28. Sallo had also attacked the Jesuits.

[1038] Eloge de Gallois, par Fontenelle, in the latter’s works, vol. v., p. 168. Biographie Universelle, arts. Sallo and Gallois. Gallois is said to have been a coadjutor of Sallo from the beginning, and some others are named by Camusat as its contributors, among whom were Gomberville and Chapelain.

Reviews established by Bayle. 26. The path thus opened to all that could tempt a man who made writing his profession—profit, celebrity, a perpetual appearance in the public eye, the facility of pouring forth every scattered thought of his own, the power of revenge upon every enemy, could not fail to tempt more conspicuous men than Sallo or his successor Gallois. Two of very high reputation, at least of reputation that hence became very high, entered it, Bayle and Le Clerc. The former, in 1684, commenced a new review, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. He saw and was well able to improve the opportunities which periodical criticism furnished to a mind eminently qualified for it; extensively, and in some points, deeply learned; full of wit, acuteness, and a happy talent of writing in a lively tone without the insipidity of affected politeness. The scholar and philosopher of Rotterdam had a rival, in some respects, and ultimately an adversary, in a neighbouring city. |And Le Clerc| Le Clerc, settled at Amsterdam as professor of belles lettres and of Hebrew in the Arminister seminary, undertook in 1686, at the age of twenty-nine, the first of those three celebrated series of reviews, to which he owes so much of his fame. This was the Bibliothèque Universelle, in all the early volumes of which La Croze, a much inferior person, was his coadjutor, published monthly in a very small form. Le Clerc had afterwards a disagreement with La Croze, and the latter part of the Bibliothèque Universelle (that after the tenth volume) is chiefly his own. It ceased to be published in 1693, and the Bibliothèque Choisie, which is perhaps even a more known work of Le Clerc, did not commence till 1708. But the fulness, the variety, the judicious analysis and selection, as well as the value of the original remarks, which we find in the Bibliothèque Universelle, renders it of signal utility to those who would embrace the literature of that short, but not unimportant period which it illustrates.

Leipsic Acts. 27. Meantime a less brilliant, but by no means less erudite, review, the Leipsic Acts, had commenced in Germany. The first volume of this series was published in 1682. But being written in Latin, with more regard to the past than to the growing state of opinions, and consequently almost excluding the most attractive, and indeed the most important, subject, with a Lutheran spirit of unchangeable orthodoxy in religion, and with an absence of anything like philosophy or even connected system in erudition, it is one of the most unreadable books, relatively to its utility in learning, which has ever fallen into my hands. Italy had entered earlier on this critical career; the Giornale de’ Litterati was begun at Rome in 1668; the Giornale Veneto de’ Litterati, at Venice in 1671. They continued for some time; but with less conspicuous reputation than those above mentioned. The Mercure Savant, published at Amsterdam in 1684, was an indifferent production, which induced Bayle to set up his own Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres in opposition to it. Two reviews were commenced in the German language within the seventeenth century, and three in English. The first of these latter was the “Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious,” London, 1682. This, I believe, lasted but a short time. It was followed by one, entitled “The Works of the Learned,” in 1691; and by another “History of the Works of the Learned,” in 1699. I have met with none of these, nor will any satisfactory account of them, I believe, be readily found.[1039]

[1039] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, cap. 9. Bibliothèque Universelle, xiii. 41.

Bayle’s Thoughts on the Comet. 28. Bayle had first become known in 1682, by the Pensées Diverses sur la Comète de 1680; a work which I am not sure that he ever decidedly surpassed. Its purpose is one hardly worthy, we should imagine, to employ him; since those who could read and reason were not likely to be afraid of comets, and those who could do neither would be little the better for his book. But with this ostensible aim Bayle had others in view; it gave scope to his keen observation of mankind, if we may use the word observation for that which he chiefly derived from modern books, and to the calm philosophy which he professed. There is less of the love of paradox, less of a cavilling pyrrhonism, and though much diffuseness, less of pedantry and irrelevant instances in the Pensées Diverses than in his greater work. It exposed him, however, to controversy; Jurieu, a French minister in Holland, the champion of Calvinistic orthodoxy, waged a war that was only terminated with their lives; and Bayle’s defence of the Thoughts on the Comet is fully as long as the original performance, but far less entertaining.

His Dictionary. 29. He now projected an immortal undertaking, the Historical and Critical Dictionary. Moreri, a laborious scribe, had published in 1673 a kind of encyclopedic dictionary, biographical, historical, and geographical; Bayle professed to fill up the numerous deficiencies, and to rectify the errors of this compiler. It is hard to place his dictionary, which appeared in 1694, under any distinct head in a literary classification which does not make a separate chapter for lexicography. It is almost equally difficult to give a general character of this many-coloured web, that great erudition and still greater acuteness and strength of mind wove for the last years of the seventeenth century. The learning of Bayle was copious, especially in what most required it, the controversies, the anecdotes, the miscellaneous facts and sentences, scattered over the vast surface of literature for two preceding centuries. In that of antiquity he was less profoundly versed, yet so quick in application of his classical stores, that he passes for even a better scholar than he was. His original design may have been only to fill up the deficiencies of Moreri; but a mind so fertile and excursive could not be restrained in such limits. We may find however in this an apology for the numerous omissions of Bayle, which would, in a writer absolutely original, seem both capricious and unaccountable. We never can anticipate with confidence that we shall find any name in his dictionary. The notes are most frequently unconnected with the life to which they are appended; so that, under a name uninteresting to us, or inapposite to our purpose, we may be led into the richest vein of the author’s fine reasoning or lively wit. Bayle is admirable in exposing the fallacies of dogmatism, the perplexities of philosophy, the weaknesses of those who affect to guide the opinions of mankind. But, wanting the necessary condition of good reasoning, an earnest desire to reason well, a moral rectitude from which the love of truth must spring, he often avails himself of petty cavils, and becomes dogmatical in his very doubts. A more sincere spirit of inquiry could not have suffered a man of his penetrating genius to acquiesce, even contingently; in so superficial a scheme as the Manichean. The sophistry of Bayle, however, bears no proportion to his just and acute observations. Less excuse can be admitted for his indecency, which almost assumes the character of monomania, so invariably does it recur, even where there is least pretext for it.

English style in this Period. 32. The characteristics of English writers in the first division of the century were not maintained in the second, though the change, as was natural, did not come on by very rapid steps. The pedantry of unauthorized Latinisms, the affectation of singular and not generally intelligible words from other sources, the love of quaint phrases, strange analogies, and ambitious efforts at antithesis, gave way by degrees; a greater ease of writing was what the public demanded, and what the writers after the Restoration sought to attain; they were more strictly idiomatic and English than their predecessors. But this ease sometimes became negligence and feebleness, and often turned to coarseness and vulgarity. The language of Sevigné and Hamilton is eminently colloquial; scarce a turn occurs in their writings which they would not have used in familiar society; but theirs was the colloquy of the gods, ours of men; their idiom, though still simple and French, had been refined in the saloons of Paris, by that instinctive rejection of all that is low which the fine tact of accomplished women dictates; while in our own contemporary writers, with little exception, theirs is what defaces the dialogue of our comedy, a tone not so much of provincialism, or even of what is called the language of the common people, as of one much worse, the dregs of vulgar ribaldry, which a gentleman must clear from his conversation before he can assert that name. Nor was this confined to those who led irregular lives; the general manners being unpolished, we find in the writings of the clergy, wherever they are polemic or satirical, the same tendency to what is called slang; a word which, as itself belongs to the vocabulary it denotes, I use with some unwillingness. The pattern of bad writing in this respect was Sir Roger L’Estrange; his Æsop’s Fables will present everything that is hostile to good taste; yet by a certain wit and readiness in raillery L’Estrange was a popular writer and may even now be read, perhaps, with some amusement. The translation of Don Quixote, published in 1682, may also be specified as incredibly vulgar, and without the least perception of the tone which the original author has preserved.

Evelyn. 35. Evelyn wrote in 1651 a little piece, purporting to be an account of England by a Frenchman. It is very severe on our manners, especially in London; his abhorrence of the late revolutions in church and state conspiring with his natural politeness which he had lately improved by foreign travel. It is worth reading as illustrative of social history; but I chiefly mention it here on account of the polish and gentlemanly elegance of the style, which very few had hitherto regarded in such light compositions. An answer by some indignant patriot has been reprinted together with this pamphlet of Evelyn, and is a good specimen of the bestial ribaldry which our ancestors seem to have taken for wit.[1040] The later writings of Evelyn are such as his character and habits would lead us to expect, but I am not aware that they often rise above that respectable level, nor are their subjects such as to require an elevated style.

[1040] Both these will be found in the late edition of Evelyn’s Miscellaneous Works.

Dryden. 36. Every poem and play of Dryden, as they successively appeared, was ushered into the world by those prefaces and dedications which have made him celebrated as a critic of poetry and a master of the English language. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and its subsequent Defence, the Origin and Progress of Satire, the Parallel of Poetry and Painting, the Life of Plutarch, and other things of minor importance, all prefixed to some more extensive work, complete the catalogue of his prose. The style of Dryden was very superior to any that England had seen. Not conversant with our old writers, so little, in fact, as to find the common phrases of the Elizabethan age unintelligible,[1041] he followed the taste of Charles’s reign, in emulating the politest and most popular writers in the French language. He seems to have formed himself on Montaigne, Balzac, and Voiture; but so ready was his invention, so vigorous his judgment, so complete his mastery over his native tongue, that, in point of style, he must be reckoned above all the three. He had the ease of Montaigne without his negligence and embarrassed structure of periods; he had the dignity of Balzac with more varied cadences, and without his hyperbolical tumour,—the unexpected turns of Voiture without his affectation and air of effort. In the dedications especially, we find paragraphs of extraordinary gracefulness, such as possibly have never been surpassed in our language. The prefaces are evidently written in a more negligent style; he seems, like Montaigne, to converse with the reader from his arm-chair, and passes onward with little connection from one subject to another.[1042] In addressing a patron, a different line is observable; he comes with the respectful air which the occasion seems to demand; but, though I do not think that Dryden ever, in language, forgets his own position, we must confess that the flattery is sometimes palpably untrue, and always offensively indelicate. The dedication of the Mock Astrologer to the Duke of Newcastle is a masterpiece of fine writing; and the subject better deserved these lavish commendations than most who received them. That of the State of Innocence to the Duchess of York is also very well written; but the adulation is excessive. It appears to me that, after the Revolution, Dryden took less pains with his style; the colloquial vulgarisms, and these are not wanting even in his earlier prefaces, become more frequent; his periods are often of more slovenly construction; he forgets even in his dedications that he is standing before a lord. Thus, remarking on the account Andromache gives to Hector of her own history, he observes, in a style rather unworthy of him, “The devil was in Hector if he knew not all this matter as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together; and if he knew it then, it must be confessed that Homer in this long digression has rather given us his own character, than that of the fair lady whom he paints.”[1043]

[1041] Malone has given several proofs of this. Dryden’s Prose Works, vol. i., part 2, p. 136, et alibi. Dryden thought expressions wrong and incorrect in Shakspeare and Johnson which were the current language of their age.

[1042] This is his own account. “The nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it.... This I have learned from the practice of honest Montaigne.” Vol. iii., p. 605.

[1043] Vol. iii., p. 286. This is in the dedication of his third Miscellany to Lord Ratcliffe.

His Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 37. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy, published in 1668, was reprinted sixteen years afterwards, and it is curious to observe the changes which Dryden made in the expression. Malone has carefully noted all these; they show both the care the author took with his own style, and the change which was gradually working in the English language.[1044] The Anglicism of terminating the sentence with a preposition is rejected.[1045] Thus “I cannot think so contemptibly of the age I live in,” is exchanged for “the age in which I live.” “A deeper expression of belief than all the actor can persuade us to,” is altered, “can insinuate into us.” And, though the old form continued in use long after the time of Dryden, it has of late years been reckoned inelegant and proscribed in all cases, perhaps with an unnecessary fastidiousness, to which I have not uniformly deferred, since our language is of a Teutonic structure, and the rules of Latin or French grammar are not always to bind us.

[1044] Vol. i., p. 136-142.

[1045] “The preposition in the end of the sentence, a common fault with him (Ben Johnson), and which I have but lately observed in my own writings,” p. 237. The form is, in my opinion, sometimes emphatic and spirited, though its frequent use appears slovenly. I remember my late friend, Mr. Richard Sharp, whose good taste is well known, used to quote an interrogatory of Hooker: “Shall there be a God to swear by, and none to pray to?” as an instance of the force which this arrangement, so eminently idiomatic, sometimes gives. It is unnecessary to say that it is derived from the German; and nothing but Latin prejudice can make us think it essentially wrong. In the passive voice, I think it better than in the active; nor can it always be dispensed with, unless we choose rather the feeble encumbering pronoun which.

Improvements in his style. 38. This Essay on Dramatic Poesy is written in dialogue; Dryden himself, under the name of Neander, being probably one of the speakers. It turns on the use of rhyme in tragedy, on the observation of the unities, and on some other theatrical questions. Dryden, at this time, was favourable to rhymed tragedies, which his practice supported. Sir Robert Howard having written some observations on that essay and taken a different view as to rhyme, Dryden published a defence of his essay in a masterly style of cutting scorn, but one hardly justified by the tone of the criticism, which had been very civil towards him; and, as he was apparently in the wrong, the air of superiority seems the more misplaced.

His critical character. 39. Dryden, as a critic, is not to be numbered with those who have sounded the depths of the human mind, hardly with those who analyse the language and sentiments of poets, and teach others to judge by showing why they have judged themselves. He scatters remarks, sometimes too indefinite, sometimes too arbitrary; yet his predominating good sense colours the whole; we find in them no perplexing subtlety, no cloudy nonsense, no paradoxes and heresies in taste to revolt us. Those he has made on translation in the preface to that of Ovid’s Epistles are valuable. “No man,” he says, “is capable of translating poetry, who besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author’s language and of his own. Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers.”[1046] We cannot pay Dryden the compliment of saying that he gave the example as well as precept, especially in his Virgil. He did not scruple to copy Segrais in his discourse on Epic Poetry. “Him I follow, and what I borrow from him am ready to acknowledge to him; for, impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English as they are worse poets.”[1047]

[1046] Vol. iii., p. 19.

[1047] P. 460. The quotations in this paragraph present two instances of the word to in an unauthorised usage; the second is a Gallicism; but the first has not even that excuse.

40. The greater part of his critical writings relates to the drama; a subject with which he was very conversant; but he had some considerable prejudices; he seems never to have felt the transcendent excellence of Shakspeare; and sometimes, perhaps, his own opinions, if not feigned, are biased by that sort of self-defence to which he thought himself driven in the prefaces to his several plays. He had many enemies on the watch; the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, a satire of great wit, had exposed to ridicule the heroic tragedies,[1048] and many were afterwards ready to forget the merits of the poet in the delinquencies of the politician. “What Virgil wrote,” he says, “in the vigour of his age, in plenty and in ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed by sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me by the lying character which has been given them of my morals.”[1049]

[1048] This comedy was published in 1672; the parodies are amusing; and though parody is the most unfair weapon that ridicule can use, they are in most instances warranted by the original. Bayes, whether he resembles Dryden or not, is a very comic personage: the character is said by Johnson to have been sketched for Davenant; but I much doubt this report; Davenant had been dead some years before the Rehearsal was published, and could have been in no way obnoxious to its satire.

[1049] Vol. iii., p. 557.

Rymer on Tragedy. 41. Dryden will hardly be charged with abandoning too hastily our national credit, when he said the French were better critics than the English. We had scarcely anything worthy of notice to alledge beyond his own writings. The Theatrum Poetarum by Philips, nephew of Milton, is superficial in every respect. Thomas Rymer, best known to mankind as the editor of the Fœdera, but a strenuous advocate for the Aristotelian principles in the drama, published, in 1678, “The Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the common Sense of all Ages.” This contains a censure of some plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakspeare and Jonson. “I have chiefly considered the fable or plot which all conclude to be the soul of a tragedy, which with the ancients is always found to be a reasonable soul, but with us for the most part a brutish, and often worse than brutish.”[1050] I have read only his criticisms on the Maid’s Tragedy, King and no King, and Rollo; and as the conduct and characters of all three are far enough from being invulnerable, it is not surprising that Rymer has often well exposed them.

[1050] P. 4.

Sir William Temple’s Essays. 42. Next to Dryden, the second place among the polite writers of the period, from the Restoration to the end of the century, has commonly been given to Sir William Temple. His Miscellanies, to which, principally, this praise belongs, are not recommended by more erudition than a retired statesman might acquire, with no great expense of time, nor by much originality of reflection. But if Temple has not profound knowledge, he turns all he possesses well to account; if his thoughts are not very striking, they are commonly just. He has less eloquence than Bolingbroke, but is also free from his restlessness and ostentation. Much, also, which now appears superficial in Temple’s historical surveys, was far less familiar in his age; he has the merit of a comprehensive and a candid mind. His style, to which we should particularly refer, will be found in comparison with his contemporaries highly polished, and sustained with more equability than they preserve, remote from anything either pedantic or humble. The periods are studiously rhythmical; yet they want the variety and peculiar charm that we admire in those of Dryden.

Style of Locke. 43. Locke is certainly a good writer, relatively to the greater part of his contemporaries; his plain and manly sentences often give us pleasure by the wording alone. But he has some defects; in his Essay on the Human Understanding he is often too figurative for the subject. In all his writings, and especially in the Treatise on Education, he is occasionally negligent, and though not vulgar, at least according to the idiom of his age, slovenly in the structure of his sentences as well as the choice of his words; he is not, in mere style, very forcible, and certainly not very elegant.

Sir George Mackenzie’s Essays. 44. The Essays of Sir George Mackenzie are empty and diffuse; the style is full of pedantic words to a degree of barbarism; and though they were chiefly written after the Revolution, he seems to have wholly formed himself on the older writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne, or even Feltham. He affects the obsolete and unpleasing termination of the third person of the verb in eth, which was going out of use even in the pulpit, besides other rust of archaism. Nothing can be more unlike the manner of Dryden, Locke, or Temple. In his matter he seems a mere declaimer, as if the world would any longer endure the trivial morality which the sixteenth century had borrowed from Seneca, or the dull ethics of sermons. It is probable that, as Mackenzie was a man who had seen and read much, he must have some better passages than I have found in glancing shortly at his works. |Andrew Fletcher.| His countryman, Andrew Fletcher, is a better master of English style; he writes with purity, clearness, and spirit; but the substance is so much before his eyes, that he is little solicitous about language. And a similar character may be given to many of the political tracts in the reign of William. They are well expressed for their purpose; their English is perspicuous, unaffected, often forcible, and, upon the whole, much superior to that of similar writings in the reign of Charles; but they do not challenge a place of which their authors never dreamed; they are not to be counted in the polite literature of England.

Walton’s Complete Angler. 45. I may have overlooked, or even never known, some books of sufficient value to deserve mention; and I regret that the list of miscellaneous literature should be so short. But it must be confessed that our golden age did not begin before the eighteenth century, and then with him who has never since been rivalled in grace, humour, and invention. Walton’s Complete Angler, published in 1653, seems by the title a strange choice out of all the books of half a century; yet its simplicity, its sweetness, its natural grace, and happy intermixture of graver strains with the precepts of angling, have rendered this book deservedly popular, and a model which one of the most famous among our late philosophers, and a successful disciple of Isaac Walton in his favourite art, has condescended to imitate.

Wilkin’s New World. 46. A book, not indeed remarkable for its style, but one which I could hardly mention in any less miscellaneous chapter than the present, though, since it was published in 1638, it ought to have been mentioned before, is Wilkin’s “Discovery of a New World, or a Discourse tending to prove that it is probable there may be another habitable World in the Moon, with a Discourse concerning the Possibility of a Passage thither.” This is one of the births of that inquiring spirit, that disdain of ancient prejudice, which the seventeenth century produced. Bacon was undoubtedly the father of it in England; but Kepler, and above all Galileo, by the new truths they demonstrated, made men fearless in investigation and conjecture. The geographical discoveries indeed of Columbus and Magellan had prepared the way for conjectures, hardly more astonishing in the eyes of the vulgar than those had been. Wilkins accordingly begins by bringing a host of sage writers who had denied the existence of antipodes. He expressly maintains the Copernican theory, but admits that it was generally reputed a novel paradox. The arguments on the other side he meets at some length, and knew how to answer, by the principles of compound motion, the plausible objection that stones falling from a tower were not left behind by the motion of the earth. The spots in the moon he took for sea, and the brighter parts for land. A lunar atmosphere he was forced to hold, and gives reasons for thinking it probable. As to inhabitants, he does not dwell long on the subject. Campanella, and long before him Cardinal Cusanus, had believed the sun and moon to be inhabited,[1051] and Wilkins ends by saying: “Being content for my own part to have spoken so much of it, as may conduce to show the opinion of others concerning the inhabitants of the moon, I dare not myself affirm anything of these Selenites, because I know not any ground whereon to build any probable opinion. But I think that future ages will discover more, and our posterity perhaps may invent some means for our better acquaintance with those inhabitants.” To this he comes as his final proposition, that it may be possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and if there be inhabitants there, to have communication with them. But this chapter is the worst in the book, and shows that Wilkins, notwithstanding his ingenuity, had but crude notions on the principles of physics. He followed this up by what I have not seen, a “Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove that it is possible our earth is one of the planets.” This appears to be a regular vindication of the Copernican theory, and was published in 1640.

[1051] Suspicamur in regione solis magis esse solares, claros et illuminatos intellectuales habitatores, spiritualiores etiam quam in luna, ubi magis lunatici, et in terra magis materiales et crassi, ut illi intellectualis naturæ solares sint multum in actu et parum in potentiâ, terreni vero magis in potentia et parum in actu, lunares in medio fluctuantes, &c. Cusanus apud Wilkins, p. 103 (edit. 1802).

Antiquity defended by Temple. 47. The cause of antiquity, so rudely found support in Sir William Temple, assailed abroad by Perrault and Fontenelle, who has defended it in one of his essays with more zeal than prudence or knowledge of the various subjects on which he contends for the rights of the past. It was in fact such a credulous and superficial view as might have been taken by a pedant of the sixteenth century. For it is in science, taking the word largely, full as much as in works of genius, that he denies the ancients to have been surpassed. Temple’s Essay, however, was translated into French, and he was supposed by many to have made a brilliant vindication of injured antiquity. But it was soon refuted in the most solid book that was written in any country upon this famous dispute. |Wotton’s Reflections.| William Wotton published in 1694 his Reflections on ancient and modern Learning.[1052] He draws very well in this the line between Temple and Perrault, avoiding the tasteless judgment of the latter in poetry and eloquence, but pointing out the superiority of the moderns in the whole range of physical science.

[1052] Wotton had been a boy of astonishing precocity; at six years old he could readily translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at seven he added some knowledge of Arabic and Syriac. He entered Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in his tenth year; at thirteen, when he took the degree of bachelor of arts, he was acquainted with twelve languages. There being no precedent of granting a degree to one so young, a special record of his extraordinary proficiency was made in the registers of the university. Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 7.

Sect. II.

ON FICTION.

French Romances—La Fayette and others—Pilgrim’s Progress—Turkish Spy.

Quevedo’s Visions. 48. Spain had about the middle of this century a writer of various literature, who is only known in Europe by his fictions, Quevedo. His visions and his life of the great Tacaño, were early translated, and became very popular.[1053] They may be reckoned superior to anything in comic romance, except Don Quixote, that the seventeenth century produced; and yet this commendation is not a high one. In the picaresque style, the life of Tacaño is tolerably amusing; but Quevedo, like others, has long since been surpassed. The Sueños, or Visions, are better; they show spirit and sharpness with some originality of invention. But Las Zahurdas de Pluton, which, like the other sueños, bears a general resemblance to the Pilgrim’s Progress, being an allegorical dream, is less powerfully and graphically written; the satire is also rather too obvious. “Lucian,” says Bouterwek, “furnished him with the original idea of satirical visions; but Quevedo’s were the first of their kind in modern literature. Owing to frequent imitations, their faults are no longer disguised by the charm of novelty, and even their merits have ceased to interest.”[1054]

[1053] The translation of this, “made English by a person of honour” takes great liberties with the original, and endeavours to excel it in wit by means of frequent interpolation.

[1054] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 471.

French heroic romances. 49. No species of composition seems less adapted to the genius of the French nation in the reign of Louis XIV. than the heroic romances so much admired in its first years. It must be confessed that this was but the continuance, and in some respect possibly, an improvement of a long established style of fiction. But it was not fitted to endure reason or ridicule, and the societies of Paris knew the use of both weapons. Molière sometimes tried his wit upon the romances; and Boileau, rather later in the day, when the victory had been won, attacked Mademoiselle Scudery with his sarcastic irony in a dialogue on the heroes of her invention.

Novels of Madame La Fayette. 50. The first step in descending from the heroic romance was to ground not altogether dissimilar. The feats of chivalry were replaced by less wonderful adventures; the love became less hyperbolical in expression, though not less intensely engrossing the personages; the general tone of manners was lowered down better to that of nature, or at least of an ideality which the imagination did not reject; a style already tried in the minor fictions of Spain. The earliest novels that demand attention in this line are those of the Countess de la Fayette, celebrated while Mademoiselle de la Vergne under the name of Laverna in the Latin poetry of Menage.[1055] Zayde, the first of these, is entirely in the Spanish style; the adventures are improbable, but various and rather interesting to those who carry no scepticism into fiction; the language is polished and agreeable, though not very animated; and it is easy to perceive that while that kind of novel was popular, Zayde would obtain a high place. It has, however, the usual faults; the story is broken by intervening narratives, which occupy too large a space; the sorrows of the principal characters excite, at least as I should judge, little sympathy; and their sentiments and emotions are sometimes too much refined in the alembic of the Hôtel Rambouillet. In a later novel, the Princess of Cleves, Madame La Fayette threw off the affectation of that circle to which she had once belonged, and though perhaps Zayde is, or was in its own age, the more celebrated novel, it seems to me that in this she has excelled herself. The story, being nothing else than the insuperable and insidious, but not guilty, attachment of a married lady to a lover, required a delicacy and correctness of taste which the authoress has well displayed in it. The probability of the incidents, the natural course they take, the absence of all complication and perplexity, give such an inartificial air to this novel, that we can scarcely help believing it to shadow forth some real event. A modern novelist would probably have made more of the story; the style is always calm, sometimes almost languid; a tone of decorous politeness, like that of the French stage, is never relaxed; but it is precisely by this means that the writer has kept up a moral dignity, of which it would have been so easy to lose sight. The Princess of Cleves is perhaps the first work of mere invention (for though the characters are historical, there is no known foundation for the story) which brought forward the manners of the aristocracy; it may be said, the contemporary manners; for Madame La Fayette must have copied her own times. As this has become a popular theme of fiction, it is just to commemorate the novel which introduced it.

[1055] The name Laverna, though well-sounding, was in one respect unlucky, being that given by antiquity to the goddess of thieves. An epigram on Menage, almost, perhaps, too trite to be quoted, is piquant enough:

Lesbia nulla tibi, nulla est tibi dicta Corinna;
Carmine laudatur Cynthia nulla tuo.
Sed cum doctorum compilas scrinia vatum,
Nil mirum, si sit culta Laverna tibi.

Scarron’s Roman Comique. 51. The French have few novels of this class in the seventeenth century which they praise; those of Madame Villedieu, or Des Jardins, may deserve to be excepted; but I have not seen them. Scarron, a man deformed and diseased, but endowed with vast gaiety, which generally exuberated in buffoon jests, has the credit of having struck out into a new path by his Roman Comique. The Spaniards, however, had so much like this that we cannot perceive any great originality in Scarron. The Roman Comique is still well known, and if we come to it in vacant moments, will serve its end in amusing us; the story and characters have no great interest, but they are natural; yet, without the least disparagement to the vivacity of Scarron, it is still true that he has been left at an immense distance in observation of mankind, in humorous character, and in ludicrous effect by the novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is said that Scarron’s romance is written in a pure style; and some have even pretended that he has not been without effect in refining the language. The Roman Bourgeois of Furetière appears to be a novel of middle life; it had some reputation, but I cannot speak of it with any knowledge.

Télémaque of Fenelon. 55. The Télémaque of Fenelon, after being suppressed in France, appeared in Holland clandestinely without the author’s consent in 1699. It is needless to say that it soon obtained the admiration of Europe, and perhaps there is no book in the French language that has been more read. Fenelon seems to have conceived that, metre not being essential, as he assumed, to poetry, he had, by imitating the Odyssey in Télémaque, produced an epic of as legitimate a character as his model. But the boundaries between epic poetry, especially such epics as the Odyssey, and romance were only perceptible by the employment of verse in the former; no elevation of character, no ideality of conception, no charm of imagery or emotion had been denied to romance. The language of poetry had for two centuries been seized for its use. Télémaque must therefore take its place among romances; but still it is true that no romance had breathed so classical a spirit, none had abounded so much with the richness of poetical language, much in fact of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles having been woven in with no other change than verbal translation, nor had any preserved such dignity in its circumstances, such beauty, harmony, and nobleness in its diction. It would be as idle to say that Fenelon was indebted to D’Urfé and Calprenède, as to deny that some degree of resemblance may be found in their poetical prose. The one belonged to the morals of chivalry, generous but exaggerated; the other to those of wisdom and religion. The one has been forgotten because its tone is false; the other is ever admired, and is only less regarded because it is true in excess; because it contains too much of what we know. Télémaque, like some other of Fenelon’s writings, is to be considered in reference to its object; an object of all the noblest, being to form the character of one to whom many must look up for their welfare, but still very different from the inculcation of profound truth. The beauties of Télémaque are very numerous; the descriptions, and indeed the whole tone of the book, have a charm of grace, something like the pictures of Guido; but there is also a certain languor which steals over us in reading, and though there is no real want of variety in the narration, it reminds us so continually of its source, the Homeric legends, as to become rather monotonous. The abandonment of verse has produced too much diffuseness; it will be observed, if we look attentively, that where Homer is circumstantial, Fenelon is more so; in this he sometimes approaches the minuteness of the romancers. But these defects are more than compensated by the moral, and even æsthetic excellence of this romance.