X. To M. Chapelain - Page 2

learned in the laws of
art--a perfect Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and
so favoured by the great?' Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good
faith to advertise your merits. Hard must have been the heart that could
resist the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de
Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur Godeau,
Bishop of Vence, or M. Colbert, who had such a genius for finance.

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 minor poet believes in himself on the testimony of his own
conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you listened to the plaudits of
your friends. Nay, you ventured to pronounce judgment on contemporaries whom
Posterity has preferred to your perfections. 'Molie're,' said you,
'understands the nature of comedy, and presents it in a natural style. The
plot of his best pieces is borrowed, but not without judgment; his _morale_ is
fair, and he has only to avoid scurrility.'

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?


In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
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