Letters to Dead Authors | ||
X.
To M. Chapelain.
Monsieur,--You were a popular writer, and an honourable, over-educated, upright gentleman. Of the latter character you can never be deprived, and I doubt not it stands you in better stead where you are, than the laurels which flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.
But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel out-lives not May.
I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but your laurel certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus and where Homer are. Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot doubt it, awaited un si bon homme. But the moral excellence that even Boileau admitted, ladfoi, l'honneur, la probiite', do
If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should have been that fortunately manufactured article. You were, in matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers. Never, since Adam's day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child. Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbie're his wife with the future author of 'La Pucelle.' Oh futile hopes of men, O pectora caeca! All was done that education could do for a genius which, among other qualities, 'especially lacked fire and imagination,' and an ear for verse--sad defects these in a child of the Muses. Your training in all the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like Rasselas, 'Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a Poet.' Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of the Cardinal's minstrels, as M. de Tre'ville was Captain of the King's Musketeers.
Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more richly endowed than ever
If bishops and politicians and prime ministers skilled in finance, and some critics, Me'nage and Sarrazin and Vaugetas, if ladies of birth and taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and appraising yourself at the public estimate?
It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops especially, and when every
Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!
Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that your 'courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work not absolutely good.' And yet you regarded 'La Pucelle' with some complacency.
On the 'Pucelle' you were occupied during a generation of mortal men. I marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creations. First you gravely wrote out (it was the task of five years) all the compositions in prose. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium? What says the Pre'cieuse about you in Boileau's satire?
She finds but one defect, he can't be read;
Yet thinks the world might taste his maiden's woes,
If only he would turn his verse to prose!
The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained. Yet for this precious 'Pucelle,' in the age when 'Paradise Lost' was sold for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand. Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a wise man who first spoke of aurea mediocritas. At length the great work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of portraits and engravings, and culs de lampe, the great work was given to the world, and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are figures which fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then, alas! the bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longveille, hearing the 'Pucelle' read aloud, murmured that it was 'perfect indeed, but perfectly wearisome.' Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbe' at Me'nage's had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.
I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the onslaught on your 'Pucelle.' These qualities, alas! are not strange to literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us 'potter hates potter, and poet hates poet'? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius. Who suffered more than Molie're from cabals? Yet neither the court nor the town ever deserted
Depuis que tu fais imprimer.
But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance. I almost blush to think that M. Despre'aux, M. Racine, and M. de Molie're, the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor jest, and madden you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay puts forth his
I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect posterity to reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice? You answered your earliest assailant, Linie're, and, by a few changes of words, turned his epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself. According to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you 'conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious veneration for yourself and your genius.' Probably you were protected by this invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that mere jealousy dictates the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain's real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success, Qu'il soit le mieux rente' de tous les beaux-esprits.
This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not altogether mistaken. Yet
Monsieur,
Votre tre's humble serviteur,
Andrew Lang.
Letters to Dead Authors | ||