Madame de Pompadour. He was made editor of
the _Mercure_, which gave him an influential position and a competence.
He afterwards succeeded Duclos as historiographer, notwithstanding the
outcry which had been made against his _Belisaire_. He had contributed
almost all the minor articles on literary subjects to the Encyclopaedia,
and these were collected and published as _Elements de Litterature_ in
1787. He died in 1799. The _Elements de Litterature_ are, with the
_Cours de Litterature_ of La Harpe, the chief source of information as
to eighteenth-century criticism of the fashionable kind in France. They
are very voluminous, and, from the circumstances of their original form,
deal with a vast number of subjects. The style is for the most part
simple and good, destitute alike of the dryness and of the bombast which
were the two faults of contemporary writing. But Marmontel's system of
criticism will not bear a moment's examination. It consists simply in
the assumption that Racine, Boileau (though he was at first recalcitrant
to Boileau, and had to be admonished by Voltaire that _ca porte
malheur_), and their contemporaries are infallible models, and in the
application of this principle to all other nations. The passion for
finding plausible general reasons also leads Marmontel into grotesque
aberrations, as where he gives three reasons for English success in
poetry as contrasted with our inferiority in the other arts. First,
Englishmen, loving glory, saw early that poetry acquired glory for a
nation. Secondly, being naturally given to sadness and meditation, they
wish for emotions to distract and move them. Thirdly, their genius is
proper to poetry. This last remark, the reader should observe, comes
from a countryman of Moliere, a man who must have read the _Malade
Imaginaire_, and who was moreover a man of much more than ordinary
talent. Marmontel often has acute remarks, and his blunders and
absurdities are rather symptomatic of the false state in which criticism
was at the time than of individual shortcomings.

[Sidenote: La Harpe.]

Somewhat younger than Marmontel was La Harpe, who pursued the same lines
of dramatic poetry and literary criticism, the latter with more success
in his kind, so much so, that Malherbe, Boileau, and he may be ranked
together as the three representatives of the infancy, flourishing, and
decadence of the 'classical' theory of literary criticism in France. La
Harpe was born at Paris in 1739,