If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers skilled in finance, and some critics (Ménage and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), 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. “Molière,” said you, “understands the genius 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 creation. First you gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for five whole years. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium? What says the Précieuse 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 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 Longueville, 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 Abbé at Ménage’s had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.