His teaching, however, so valuable in its own day, is not important as a
contribution towards a general theory of æesthetics. Boileau attempted
to lay down the principles universally binding upon writers of poetry;
but he had not the equipment necessary for such a task. His knowledge
was limited, his sympathies were narrow, and his intellectual powers
lacked profundity. The result was that he committed the common fault of
writers immersed in the business of contemporary controversy--he erected
the precepts, which he saw to be salutary so far as his own generation
was concerned, to the dignity of universal rules. His message, in
reality, was for the France of Louis XIV; he enunciated it as if it was
the one guide to literary salvation for all ages and in all
circumstances; and it so happened that for about a century it was
accepted at his own valuation by the majority of civilized mankind.
Boileau detested--and rightly detested--the extravagant affectations of
the _précieux_ school, the feeble pomposities of Chapelain, the
contorted, inflated, logic-chopping heroes of Corneille's later style;
and the classical reaction against these errors appeared to him in the
guise of a return to the fundamental principles of Nature, Reason, and
Truth. In a sense he was right: for it is certain that the works of
Molière and Racine were more natural, more reasonable, and more truthful
than those of l'Abbé Cotin and Pradon; his mistake lay in his assumption
that these qualities were the monopoly of the Classical school.
Perceiving the beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he
jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature
herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong.
Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and
beauty is often--perhaps more often than not--complex, obscure,
fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a
hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been
asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity. He could write,