But where he
confined himself to his proper sphere, Boileau exhibited no small power.
He was, in fact, a slashing reviewer in verse, and there has rarely been
so effective a practitioner of the craft. Narrow as was his idea of
poetry, it was perfectly clear and precise, and, as his pupil Racine
showed, he could teach it to others with the most striking success. _Le
Lutrin_, too, is a poem which, in a rather trivial kind, is something of
a masterpiece. Its subject, the quarrel of a chapter of ecclesiastics
about the position of a _lutrin_ (lectern), afforded Boileau plenty of
opportunity for introducing that sarcasm on the upper middle classes
which was his forte; the verse is polished and correct, the satire,
though rather facile and conventional, agreeable enough. His satires and
epistles are full of striking traits evidently studied from the life,
but he is always personal and almost always artificial, never rising to
the large satiric conception of Regnier or of Dryden. So, too, most of
the stories which are recorded of him (and they are many) are stories of
ill-natured remarks. In his heart of hearts he knew and acknowledged
the greatness of Corneille, yet formally and in public he could not
refrain from directing unjust satire at the veteran whose masterpieces
had been produced when he was in his cradle, in order to exalt his own
pupil Racine, whom he privately owned to be simply a very clever and
docile rhymester. He himself was very much the same with the exception
of the docility. His good sense, his talents, his eye for the
ludicrous--except in his own work--were admirable, and the ill-nature of
his satires, with their frequent injustice and the strange ignorance
they display of all literature except the Latin classics and French and
Italian contemporary authors, does not prevent their being excellent
examples of French and of the art of polite libelling. It is probable
that Boileau might have fared better but for his inconceivable folly in
attempting, in the Namur ode, a style for which he had not the least
aptitude, and for the parrot-like monotony with which Frenchmen before
1830, and even some of them since that date, have lauded and quoted him
and accepted his dicta. But the most lenient estimate of him can hardly
amount to more than that he was an excellent writer of prose and
pedestrian verse, a critic of singular acuteness within a narrow range,
and a satirist who had a keen eye for the ludicrous aspect o