How contemptible are these verses on Bellona and the Dutchman, in comparison with those they are intended to imitate! Cupidum, pater optime, vires Deficiunt: neque enim quivis horrentia pilis de sang-froid. . . et sans être amoureux, Pour quelqu' Iris en l'air faire le langoureux. The superfluous on the superfluous! Boileau is one of the forty who have done the same thing. One would imagine that there had lived in Paris some lady of this name, either by baptism or convention. The French poets, if they wished to interest the reader, should at least have engaged a nameless hackneyed. Delia, Corinna, Lesbia, bring with them lively recollections. They are names Delille. This satire contains the line which has not taken in vain by the Romans in the days of been so often quoted, Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile, in which Boileau has scarcely his wonted discrimination. Surely Tasso is a superb poet. Landor. A few remarks on that foolish verse. Your poets have always felt a violent jealousy of the Italian. If Virgil had lived in the age of Tasso, and Tasso in the age of Virgil, Boileau would have transferred and commuted the designation, and have given the tinsel to Virgil, the gold to Tasso. There is little of tinsel in the Gierusalemme, and much of gold. The poet fails whenever he attempts the sublime, generally so called; but he seldom overloads his descriptions with idle words or frivolous decorations. His characters are more vivid and more distinct than Virgil's, and greatly more interesting. The heroes of the Eneid are like the half-extinct frescoes of Raphael; but what is wanting in the frescoes of the painter is effaced by time, what is wanting in the figures of the poet was wanting to his genius. No man ever formed in his mind an idea of Dido, or perhaps ever wished to form it; particularly on finding her memory so extensive and her years so mature, that she could recollect the arrival of Teucer at Sidon. Mezentius is called a despiser of the Gods; yet the most pious speech in the Eneid comes from the lips of Mezentius, the most heroical of all the characters in that poem, and the most resigned to the will of Heaven: Ast de me divom pater atque hominum rex But who would walk among the scenery of woods and waterfalls, of glades and forests, of valleys in their retirement, and of corn-fields in their richness and profusion, for the sake of bringing home a few sticks and stubble? or who could receive more pleasure from such an occupation, than from surveying the majestic growth of the trees and the infinite variety of the foliage? : Virgil has blemishes like Tasso, and Tasso has beauties like Virgil. The Æneid, I venture to affirm, is the most mis-shapen of epics; an epic of episodes for these constitute the greater and better part. The Gierusalemme Liberata is, of all such compositions, the most perfect in its plan. In regard to execution, read any one book attentively, and I am persuaded, M. l'Abbé, that you would rather have written it than all the poetry of Voltaire and Boileau. Let us go on with the volume before us. Roman glory; and the women to whom they were first given were not ideal. Synonymous with beauty, grace, fondness, tenderness, they delight the memory by locality: but we turn with indifference or with disgust from the common Palais Royal face of Iris. Boileau might have said to a patron, "you shall be my Apollo, my Richelieu, my Louis:" the expression has something to rest upon: and why should not love enjoy the same privilege as patronage? The judicious La Fontaine has committed this inexcusable fault, and rendered it worse than he found it in any preceding poet : for, in an Imitation of Anacreon he places Iris with Venus. Here he confuses the mythological Iris with the Iris to whom you raise, not a temple nor an altar (which I believe were never raised to the heavenly one) but a triangular hat over a buckled and powdered peruke. La Satire, en leçons, en nouveautés fertile, Sait seule assaisonner le plaisant et l'utile, Rhyme consists in similarity of sound, not in identity: an observation that has escaped all your poets, and, what is more wonderful, all the Italian. Satire is less fertile in novelty than any other kind of poetry; and possesses not alone the power attributed to it, but, on the contrary, in a less degree than the rest. If it alone were endowed with this faculty, why should poets employ any kind else? Who would write what cannot be pleasant? who, what cannot be useful? Satire alone would serve the purposes both of poetry and of prose and we might expect to find a good satire in every good treatise on geometry, or metaphysics, or music, or cookery. Hé! mon dieu ! craignez tout d'un auteur en courroux, Qui peut... Quoi?... Je m'entends... Mais encor? ... Taisez-vous. Thus ends this long monologue between Boilean and his Esprit, which must have rejoiced heartily at its dismissal. Perhaps no line is more suitable to the French taste than this last; so many short sentences, coming out singly and with breaks between them, like the notes in a cock's crow; so many things of which almost every man fancies that he alone is in the secret. I must confess, it is really one to me; and, after all the interpretations it will bear, I find neither wit nor satire in it, nor even the sting of a dead epigram. Delille. When you compare the tenth satire of Boileau with the manner in which women are attacked by Juvenal, you must be filled with admiration at perceiving how superior French morality is to Roman. Landor. That is a knotty question, M. l'Abbé: untrue. If an island can be entered once, it can we might bruise our hands, if we attempted to be entered twice. lay hold of it: it is safer to confine our observations to poetry. Que, si sous Adam même... et loin avant Noé. The same fault incessantly recurring! What was under Adam, was long before Noah. Your marquises were not very profound in chronology: but even the most ignorant of them probably knew this fact, notwithstanding the league between his confessor and his vices to keep him from reading the book where it is recorded. In Boileau there is really more of diffuseness than of brevity: few observe it, because it abounds in short sentences: and few are aware that sentences may be very short and the writer very prolix; as half a dozen stones rising out of a brook give the passenger more trouble than a plank across it, Villon et Saint-Gelais, Arioste, Marot, Bocace, Rabelais. One of the beauties at which Boileau aimed, was the nitching of several names together in a verse, without any other word. Caligula spoke justly and admirably, when he compared the sentences of Seneca to lime without sand. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and their imitators, Frederick of Prussia and Catharine of Russia, were perhaps unconscious how perversely they imitated this blameable model of style, and how far they were in general from his gravity and acuteness. Florus and Valerius Maximus seem chiefly to have captivated the attention, and to have formed the manner, of Voltaire; as the style of our historian Hume is evidently taken from a French translation of Machiavelli. Delille. Montesquieu, of whom Voltaire was among the earliest and best imitators, was a great admirer of Florus. Cardinal Duperon ranked him next to Tacitus, and above Tite-Live. Avec un air plus sombre S'en aller méditer une vole au jeu d'hombre. There is no reason, except the rhyme, for this air plus sombre. When the lady only thinks of playing, she has encountered no ill success, and expects none; otherwise she would not play. Comme ce magistrat de hideuse mémoire. The story of this magistrate is badly told: the How much progress of his passion is untraced. better is the Sir Balaam of Pope. Mais qui pourrait compter le nombre des haillons? This picture is overcharged. It appears to me that the author had written two descriptions, and not wishing to lose either, nor knowing what to do with both, tacked them together to compose the tenth satire. He confesses that "le récit passe un peu l'ordinaire," and desires to know whether it could be given in fewer words. Horace will answer that it can be given both in fewer and better. Mais qui la priverait huit jours de ses plaisirs, Et qui, loin d'un galânt... objet de ses désirs. It is natural enough that the lady's gallant should be the object of her desires: but what shall we think of a versification which permits de ses plaisirs to be followed by de ses désirs? Sa tranquille vertu conserve tous ses crimes. A violent counterpoint! Antithesis was always fond of making inroads on the borders of absurdity. Satire XII. Et partout sa doctrine en peu de tems portée what can be added to its extent if it was partout? why Fut du Gange, du Nil, et du Tage écoutée. Another falling off! Who in the world ever made a voyage to the Ganges for the purpose of arriving at the Tagus? The verse itself did not exact this penance: it could have been written as easily, Fut du Tage, du Nil, et du Gange écoutée. This would have described, as it was intended, the progress of the Christian faith. The same fault is committed (and none but a bad reasoner, to say nothing of a bad poet, could commit it) in another couplet, which at this moment comes into my mind, but which, with many more, I have Landor. Well, Abbé! let us go on, and we shall find, I warrant you, something as silly as that. We will leave the shallow red hat upon the peg. Voltaire owed much to Montesquieu, but greatly more to Le Sage, whose elegance, purity, and variety, never have been and never will be exceeded. We now come among clumsier valets than his. Seul avec des valets, souvent voleurs et traîtres, Et toujours, à coup sûr, ennemis de leurs maîtres. Why so? in any other respect than as voleurs turned over. et traîtres. Et, pour le rendre libre, il le faut enchaîner. This verse alone was worth a pension from Louis. It is indeed the most violent antithesis that ever was constructed: but, as a maxim in politics, it is admirably adapted to your nation, most happy ander a despot, and most faithful under a usurper. Et ne présume pas que Vénus ou Satan, &c. L'honneur est comme une île escarpée et sans bords: Delille. Surely so grave a fault could hardly have escaped him twice. Landor. What think you of De Pékin.. à Paris. . et de Paris. . à Rome! I know not where in any language to find such lethargic verses as the following: Sans simonie on peut contre un bien temporel Of all the wretched poets ridiculed by Boileau, not one, I believe, has written anything so signally stupid. Turn to the Discours au Roi. Je vais de toutes parts où me guide ma veine, Н This is untrue: if it were not, he would have written greatly worse than he did. Horace has misled him here, as on other occasions, by being misunderstood he says, : Ego apis Matinæ More modoque Grata carpentis thyma per laborem This relates to the diversity of subjects chosen by the lyric poet instead of which Boileau speaks Te livrer le Bosphore, et.. d'un vers incivil Can anyone doubt that, if the letter e could merely of satires, and tells us that he corrects the Yes, with the assistance of William. Quand je vois ta sagesse en ses justes projets Que je n'ai ni le ton, ni la voix assez forte. Je ne sçaurais trouver. . . de langue . . . ni de voix. He places the tone and the voice in contradis tinction but what is the difference? Where the tone is loud, the voice is loud, at least for the time. Here, as everywhere, you find the neverfailing characteristic of your verse. Your heroic line rises and falls at a certain pitch, like the handle of a pump. Delille. And yet our heroic verse is more generally read and applauded in Europe than the English. It must Landor. Or than the Italian, or than the Latin, or than the Greek. Admiration is no proof of excellence the point it comes from is its indication, and this point is one and narrow. proceed from reason: how few look for that! how few of those who look for it can find it in these regions. Where is the demonstration? who is the demonstrator? Epitre 1. Au Roi. Boileau had just issued a long and laborious writ against Equivoque; he had despatched against it Noah's ark by sea and Heresy by land, when Apollo éperdu makes him suddenly the prize of his adversary. He has the simplicity to tell Louis that Apollo has cautioned him thus : Cette mer où tu cours est célèbre en naufrages. I hope Louis read this line some years afterward, when the application of it would scourge him severely. Deprived of all he had acquired by his treachery, unless the nation that brought him upon his knees had permitted two traitors, Harley and St. John, to second the views of a weak, obstinate, drunken, old woman, and to obstruct those of policy and of England, he had been carted to condign punishment in the Place de Grève, or at Tyburn. Such examples are much wanted, and, as they can rarely be given, should never be omitted. This man is here called grand roi seven times within 200 lines; and to demonstrate that he really was so, the words are written in grand characters. Au devant de ton joug. Surely a beneficent prince has no occasion to impose a yoke upon those who run toward him willingly from all parts: nevertheless the sentiment is national. Iront de ta valeur effrayer l'univers . . . A wise, beneficent, godlike action! but what follows? Et camper devant Dôle au milieu des hivers ! ! ! C'est camper devant Dôle au milieu des hivers. Tantôt je tracerai tes pompeux bâtiments, Du loisir d'un héros nobles amusements. These noble amusements, with some others of the same hero, brought France into a state of poverty and wretchedness, which, neglected by his successors, hurled the least vicious of the family to the scaffold. thistle would have been little to be complained of the harshest verse in it is less so than these; and if it had only been in the guérets. Epitre Iv. Au Roi. Comment en vers heureux assiéger Doësbourg, Zutphen, Wagheninghen, Harderwic, Knotzembourg? These names are tacked together for no other purpose than the rhyme: he complains that they are difficult to pronounce, meaning to say difficult to spell; for certainly none of them is very harsh; but whenever a Frenchman finds a difficulty in spelling a word, he throws in a handful of consonants to help him over: these are the fascines of M. Boileau's approaches. The sound of Wurts is not offensive to the ear, without which the poet says, Que j'allais à tes yeux étaler de merveilles ! As you French pronounce Zutphen &c., they are truly harsh enough. But that is owing to your nasal twang, the most disagreeable and disgusting of sounds being produced by the same means as a stink is rejected, and thus reminding us of one. The syllable Zut is not harsher than the first in Zethes, or Phen other than the first in Phénix. In fact, the sounds of Grand Roi are harsher than any that so powerfully offend him, as to stop him with his raree-shew on his back, when he had promised the king a peep at it. I well remember the difficulty I experienced, in teaching a learned countryman of yours that, "Twas at the royal feast for Persia won ... is really a verse, and that 'twas should not be pronounced it was, inviting him to read the first line of the Iliad, in which he stumbled at @ea, and fell fat upon his face at Πηληϊάδεω. And let me ask here, in regard to your use of the alphabet, what man of what nation, ancient or modern, could imagine the existence of a people, on the same globe with himself, who employ the letters eaux to express a sound which he and all others would express by the single vowel o, and that furthermore oient should signify neither more nor less than another single Vowel e? And what is your barbarity to the most beautiful of the liquids! In fils you disinherit it in Versailles you pour two of them into a gargle. If there is a letter that ought to have more force and strength in it than any other, it is the letter x, which, in fact, is composed of two stout ones, k and 8: yet you make nothing of it. I will now show you what to any organs sensible of harmony is really disagreeable; four similar sounds for instance in one verse, which occur in the last of this Epistle, written (we may conjecture) while the din of the blacksmith's shop, before complained of, was ringing in his ears. Non, non, ne faisons plus de plaintes inutiles : Puisqu'ainsi dans deux mois tu prends quarante villes, Assuré des bons vers dont ton bras me répond, Je t'attends dans deux ans aux bords de l'Hellespont. I know nothing of the Dutch language: but I will venture a wager with you, M. l'Abbé, that a Greek or an Italian shall decide. There are dozens similar. Je vais faire la guerre aux habitans de l'air. The man must have been born in a sawmill, or in France, or under the falls of Niagara, whose car can suffer these. In the same Epistle we find, A ces mots, essuyant sa barbe limoneuse, Il prend d'un vieux guerrier la figure poudreuse. Another equivocation. Surely if Boileau had found such poetry in an author of small repute, he would have quoted it as a thing too low to kick up, too flat to ridicule. What does the Rhine, after wiping the mud off his whiskers with a clean cambric handkerchief, and assuming the powdered face of an old lieutenant-general? he Du fameux fort de Skink prend la route connue ! Louis, les animant du feu de son courage, Se plaint de sa grandeur . . . qui l'attache au rivage. his grandeur: Cæsar and Alexander had none. He had many such complaints to make against A Gascon ran away from a fortress about to be bombarded; he was intercepted and brought back; and, on his trial before a court-martial, said in his defence that he had wished to exhibit his courage in the plain. If this had been permitted, it would probably have been found to be of the same kind as that of Louis. Turn to the eighth Epistle, which is again addressed to the king. I pass over the intermediate, because it is reasonable to presume that if Boileau looks not well in a court dress, he never looks well. In other cases indeed it would be unjust to confound the poet with the courtier: in him the courtier is the better part. I observe too that these Epistles are particularly celebrated by the editor for "the suppleness and grace of the versification, and for the equality, solidity, and fulness of the style." Et mes vers en ce style, ennuyeux, sans appas, If the verses were ennuyeux et sans appas, it is evident enough that they dishonoured his pen; and what dishonoured his pen could not honour his prince. This thought, which Boileau has repeated so often and so ill, is better expressed by several other of your poets, and shortly before by Malleville, Mais je sçais quel effort demande cet ouvrage ; La grandeur du sujet me doit épouvanter; Je trahirais sa gloire au lieu de l'augmenter, Et ferais à son nom moins d'honneur que d'outrage. Delille. That sonnet of Malleville is very beautiful. Landor. Particularly in the conclusion: yet your critics preferred, to this and every other, one which displays Phillis and Aurora and Zephyr and Olympus, and in which a most polite apology is offered to the Sun, for the assertion that the brightness of Phillis was as much superior to his as his was superior to that of the stars. They who reason so profoundly, seem to argue thus: if it requires more skill in a tailor to give a fashionable cut and fresh glossiness to an old court-dress, than to make a new one, it requires a better poet to refurbish a trite thought than to exhibit an original. Dans les nobles douceurs d'un séjour plein de charmes Tu n'es pas moins héros qu'au milieu des alarmes. In the second line another equivocation! It is perfectly true that he was just as much a hero abed and asleep as in battle; but his heroism was chiefly displayed in these nobles douceurs. Pity that Boileau has written no ode on his marriage with a poor peasant girl, whom he met while he was hunting. The Virgin Mary would perhaps have been bridemaid, and Apollo would have presented the Gospel on which he swore. How many of your most glorious kings would, if they had been private men in any free country, or even in their own, have been condemned to the pillory and the galleys! De ton trône agrandi portant seul tout le faix. This is the favourite metaphor of your poet: he ought to have known that kings do not carry the burden of thrones, but that thrones carry theirs, and that consequently the metaphor here is not only inelegant, as usual, but imperfect and misapplied. J'amasse de tes faits le pénible volume. Again equivocation! In turning over the leaves to arrive at the Art Poétique, my eye rests on this verse in the twelfth Epistle : Qui n'eut jamais pour dieu que glace . . . A strange God enough! it is not to be wondered at if there should be no other in his company but there is who? et que froideur. There are follies on which it would be a greater folly to remark. Who would have the courage to ask whether there is not coldness where there is ice? A Latin poet however has written almost as ill : Alpes Frigidus aerias atque alta cacumina. Read the first lines in the "Art Poétique." C'est en vain qu'au Parnasse un téméraire auteur Pense de l'art des vers atteindre la hauteur. Auteur answers to hauteur. After this fashion an echo is the most accomplished of rhymers. S'il ne sent point du ciel l'influence secrète. In that case he is not téméraire, and the epithet is worse than useless. Fuyez de ces auteurs l'abondance stérile, Et ne vous chargez point d'un détail inutile. The first verse forestalls the second, which is flat; and the three following are worse. should be censured. Time ought to be represented with no modern inventions to designate him. I presume M. Boileau means the hour-glass by his "horloge à la main"; but although we often see in prints an allegorical figure of this description, no poet should think that a sufficient reason for adopting it, but rather (if a better were wanting) for its rejection. An hour-glass, in the hand of this mighty and awful power, is hardly less ridiculous than a watch and seals. Soyez vif et pressé dans vos narrations, Soyez riche et pompeux dans vos descriptions. I know not which to call the worse, the lines or the advice. But to recommend a man to be rich in anything, is a hint that can not always be taken, as we poets know better than most men. J'aime mieux Arioste et ses fables comiques Really! This he intends as a pis-aller. Ariosto is a plagiary, the most so of all poets; Ariosto is negligent; his plan inartificial, defective, bad: but divide the Orlando into three parts, and take the worst of them, and although it may contain a large portion of extremely vile poetry, it will contain more of good than the whole French language. M. de Voltaire, like M. Boileau, spoke flippantly and foolishly of Ariosto: he afterward gave his reasons for having done it. Delille. I do not remember them at present. Were they at all satisfactory, or at least ingenious? Landor. They were very good ones indeed, and exactly such as might have been expected from critic of his spirit and quickness. a Delille. Do you recollect the sum of them? Landor. He had never read him! To make amends, he took him kindly by the hand, and preferred him to Dante. Delille. He might have held back there. But where we have dirted one shoe we may dirt the other it does not cost a farthing more to clean a pair than an odd one. When, however, not contented with making the grasshopper so loud as to deafen the vales and mountains, Ariosto makes her deafen the sea and heavens, he says rather too much on this worst pest of Italy, this neutraliser of the nightingale. Cicala col noioso metro Le valli e i monti assorda, e'l mar e'l cielo. Landor. If he rises too high in one quarter, he falls in another too low. He speaks of Cardinal Ippolito di Este, magnanimo, sublime ... Gran cardinal della chiesa di Roma!! Since I love Ariosto next to Boccaccio, I am sorry at the discovery we have made together, that the two greatest personages in his Orlando are a cardinal and a grasshopper. But come along: we must go further, and may fare worse. Mais aussi pardonnez, si, plein de ce beau zèle, De tous vos pas fameux observateur fidèle, Quelquefois du bon or je sépare le faux. What has gold to do, false or sterling, with steps, zeal, and observation? And does he mean |
