and give it rules, the age
had no knowledge till he came: the age fastened upon him, and insisted
upon making him a master.
A full twenty years from 1607 he governed the transformation, not of
thought, for that he little changed, but of method and of expression. He
decided what should be called the typical metres, the alternative of
feminine and masculine in verse, the order of emphasis, the proportion
of inversion tolerable, the propriety, the modernity, the archaism of
words. It is a function to our time meaningless and futile: to such a
period as that, indispensable and even noble. He interpreted and
published the national sentiment upon this major thing, the architecture
of letters. The power of his mind, tortured and insufficient in actual
production, was supreme in putting forth clearly and finally that
criticism which ran as an unspoken and obscure current of opinion in the
mind of his age. This was his glory, and it was true.
His dryness was extraordinary. In a life of seventy-two years, during
which he wrote and erased incessantly, he, the poet, wrote just so much
verse as will fill in large type a little pocket volume of 250 pages; to
be accurate, forty-three lines a year. Of this scraping and pumice stone
in the mind a better example than his verse is to be found in his
letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different
men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored--they cost him,
to our knowledge, many days--the rest are slipshod notes that any man
might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the
majority of his editors have had the piety to suppress them.
No one will understand Malherbe who only hears of how, like a dusty
workman, he cut and polished, and so fixed the new jewel of letters. In
our less happy age the academic spirit is necessarily associated with a
lethargic stupidity. In his it was not so. His force, by which this work
was carried through, lay in a character of penetration. His face
expresses it. His very keen and ready eyes, his high lifted brow, his
sharp nose, and the few active lines of his cheek and forehead, the
poise of his head, the disdain of his firm mouth, all build him back
alive for us. His talk, which stammered in its volubility, was incessant
and varied; his temper ready; his bodily command of gesture and
definition perfect in old age: he was of good metal all those years.
Of his intense Toryism, his vivacity, his love
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