At a time when France largely set the terms for literary debate in Europe, the quarrel naturally spread abroad. Its influence was particularly powerful in Britain, where it made a deep impact on writers such as Alexander Pope, whose landmark 1715 translation of the Iliad borrowed substantially from Anne Dacier and other French critics engaged in the debate. Jonathan Swift, while slyly skewing his humor in favor of the ancient cause, famously satirized the whole affair in 1704 with his mock-epic The Battle of the Books. Swift’s title became synonymous in the English-speaking world with the whole conflict, but his caustic derision of some of the quarrel’s polemical excesses should not lead us to underestimate its considerable sway throughout the eighteenth century. The most substantive arguments elaborated by Boileau, Perrault, and their allies and heirs proved an inescapable reference, indeed often a fundamental groundwork, for the literary and aesthetic thought of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and, beyond France, Vico and Hume.
To understand the enduring hold of the quarrel on the literary imagination, one must appreciate the seriousness of the stakes. First, the conflict engaged the most fundamental and complex issues concerning the relationship of literature to history. This complexity is unfortunately belied by the reductive dichotomy evoked by the quarrel’s own name, which conjures up the kind of trivial rivalry associated with a beauty contest. In this case, it would be one where each of the two contestants, Greco-Roman antiquity and modern Europe, awaits its crowning as something like Western civilization’s best overall epoch. But if one scratches the surface, the chronological paradigms under debate suggest a much more nuanced and fertile vision of cultural history.
Indeed, a surprisingly rich historical consciousness was at play even among those most enamored of modern times. Ironically enough, it was often their very admiration for the present that caused them to seriously reflect on the intricacies of the past. Modern partisans, impressed by recent political, scientific, and social advances, developed a theory of human progress that, though it attained perfection only in the present age, began in antiquity itself. They configured the past as a series of dynamic stages: classical Athens presented a leap of progress over the primitive Homeric world, just as imperial Rome presented yet another advance over the ages of Pericles or Alexander. They of course scorned the Middle Ages (as did the classical-loving ancient partisans) as a temporary regression. But whereas the defenders of antiquity hailed the advent of the Renaissance as a restitution of previous glory, modern partisans tended to leapfrog over the humanist recovery of pagan classics directly to the current century’s unprecedented achievements, heralded by the arrival of Descartes.
This vision of progress led to some powerful paradoxes. The modern apologists, despite the apparent interests of their party, often heaped praise on classical Rome, now seen as the most advanced stage in the evolution of antiquity. This surprising praise could admittedly serve their purposes, for it allowed them to better decry the primitiveness of Rome’s predecessor, Greece, now viewed as what Perrault called the “most ancient among the ancients.” But something deeper was also at work. If the key indications of progress were, as Perrault argued, to be found in methodical reason, moral propriety, and exactitude of linguistic expression, then it follows that Virgil could truly be counted a “modern” before his time. Or rather a modern very much of his time, of that first modernity constituted by Augustan Rome. So Perrault affirmed in the Parallèle: “I find a great difference between the works of Homer and those of Virgil. To the same degree that the first, though admirable in certain spots, seem full of vulgarity, puerility, and foolishness, so the second seem to me filled with refinement, seriousness, and reason; all of which is explained by the different time periods in which they wrote, and that Virgil is more modern than Homer by eight or nine hundred years.”
As Perrault’s comparison shows, modernity proved to be a fundamentally relative term in the quarrel. First, it was historically or chronologically relative: eight centuries of progress made imperial Rome quite “modern” in comparison with Homeric Greece. But the term also entailed a relation of values as well as of eras: it implied a judgment concerning comparative degrees of rationality, methodical order, and sophisticated elegance. Given the impossibility of entirely dismissing the classical past—it was after all still the basis under Louis XIV for elite education and cultural production—the champions of French superiority made the most of a state of affairs that they could not, and perhaps did not entirely wish, to change. They thus promoted their own preferred brand of antiquity. Seen from this angle, the whole affair was a conflict between two wings of a global Ancient party, where the Modern party was the Roman party, or Augustan party, hailing the first apex of reason and refinement and the literary values of clarity and decorum it incarnated.
The ancient partisans in turn naturally had their own preferred antiquity. As the name of their cause would seem to require, it was precisely the “most ancient among the ancients” that they embraced: antiquity in the superlative. The choice was bold. Rather than cling to the pillar of Latin authority, rather than cut their losses and abandon their most vulnerable flank, that distant epoch Perrault dubbed as “full of vulgarity, puerility, and foolishness,” Boileau and his allies instead doubled down, and celebrated above all the most remote antiquity, that of Homer and the Greeks. Boileau drives the point home in a 1701 letter to Perrault, where he fashions his own parallel between Augustan Rome and modern France. Here the Ancient party leader, despite his admiration for certain Latin poets, shows astonishingly little mercy in his disparagement of classical Rome. The irony, however, lies only on the surface. For frequently the first beneficiary of Boileau’s parallel between Latin and French culture is an even more ancient one, that of Greece. Boileau had already made clear a quarter century earlier his preference for the primordial. In the 1674 Art poétique, for example, he decisively confers “to the Greeks this divine elevation / Which Latin frailty never attained” (chez les Grecs cette hauteur divine / Où jamais n’atteignit la faiblesse latine).
Boileau’s letter to Perrault expands considerably on this cutting couplet by cataloging the “frailties” of a derivative Augustan culture. When snubbing imperial Rome, Boileau sometimes gives the prize to an earlier, more inventive Latin literature of less “modern” times: under Augustus, Boileau claims, “there was not a single comic playwright whose name is worth remembering: the Plautuses, Ceciliuses and Terences were dead a century before.” The rebuke is revelatory. Unlike Perrault, Boileau chooses not to equate military and political grandeur (which he too concedes to Augustus) with literary excellence: sometimes poetry and drama peek before a nation’s power does. Even here, the earlier Greek source no doubt lurks in Boileau’s mind, and he might have cited his ally, Longepierre, who claimed in his 1687 Discours sur les anciens (Discourse on the ancients) that Terence himself is “nothing but a shadow and weak copy” of the Athenian playwright Menander, thereby affirming the Ancient party’s principle that “the shadow is less than the body,” the imitator less than the inventor. So too, for Boileau, the Greek past is always ready to emerge from the shadows as the true source of creativity. When, for example, he turns to the visual arts, Boileau cannot resist remarking that the only successful artists under Augustus were imported from the Hellenized east; they were “the Greeks of Europe and Asia, who came to Rome to practice the arts that the Romans, so to speak, did not know.”
Taken as a whole, the two parties’ wide-ranging debate over the relative value of Homeric originality and Virgilian refinement has deep implications for the evolving understanding of cultural and literary history. The stark divisions that emerge during the quarrel between Greek and Roman epochs (and between their subtler chronological subdivisions) demonstrate the extent to which any idealization of a Greco-Roman synthetic whole largely dissolved during the debate. In this sense, the whole conflict represents a crisis, and a certain collapse, of Renaissance humanism. As the eighteenth century progressed, this Greco-Roman divi
de would widen, with German neoclassicism and the later Romantics firmly handing the prize to the Hellenophiles (or at least doing so in the literary and aesthetic realm, while Roman models continue to hold considerable sway in the political domain, as the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods would later so abundantly illustrate). And the quarrel, with its interest not only in classical Greece, but more important, with the preclassical world of the Homeric age—what Fontenelle called in his essay “Sur la poésie en général” (On poetry in general) “the most ancient Greeks, still savage”—also opens the path for the various primitivisms and “noble savages” of the Enlightenment.
Turning from the evolving conceptions of the past to those concerning the present day, Boileau’s letter to Perrault holds yet another lesson. If Augustan Rome proves at times too “modern” for the ancients’ apologist, he is nevertheless at pains to demonstrate that there is in fact a certain modernity, indeed a French modernity, that he not only respects but frankly admires. Just as we have seen the Modern party embrace its own preferred antiquity, so too did the Ancient party laud its own favored modernity. On this point, Boileau’s concession to Perrault is stunning: “You and I are not so far apart in our thinking as you think. … Your intention is to show that … the Age of Louis XIV [le Grand] is not only comparable but also superior to all the most illustrious ages of antiquity and even to the Age of Augustus. You’ll be quite surprised when I tell you that I am entirely of your opinion on this matter.”
Just how “modern” was the champion of the ancients? In terms of political history, Boileau readily accepts the advantage of Louis XIV, affirming that the original Augustus could not defeat the modern monarch whom he applauds as the “French Augustus.” But Boileau goes considerably further. He eagerly extols the advances of modern sciences, proclaiming himself delighted to join in the moderns’ self-congratulation and to “triumph with Perrault” over the defeated ancients. He likewise agrees on the superiority of contemporary philosophy, elevating far above the Romans both Descartes and Gassendi. There should be no surprise here. Boileau had long displayed an enlightened scorn concerning the reactionary neo-Aristotelianism of the hidebound Sorbonne, even penning a satire lampooning its benighted rejection of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood.
But for Boileau the sciences are one thing, and literature and the arts entirely another. Though he willingly grants the best modern French writers an edge over the ancients in certain genres, he still refuses to tightly join literary progress to that of the sciences or philosophy. From this angle, the quarrel is one of the first great tremors to rip asunder what C. P. Snow would later call “the two cultures.” Indeed, Boileau suspected at times that the advancing reach of rationalist and scientific inquiry might perhaps not only be irrelevant, but even detrimental, to poetic inspiration and creativity. Thus while he praised Descartes for his mathematical and deductive achievements, Boileau was concerned, according to his friend Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (not to be confused with the later and more illustrious Jean-Jacques), about what he feared was the philosopher’s baleful effect on the vitality of literature: “I have often heard M. Despréaux [Boileau] say that the philosophy of Descartes had cut poetry’s throat; and it is certain that what poetry has borrowed from mathematics has desiccated its spirit and accustomed it to a concrete or material precision that has nothing to do with what might be called the properly metaphysical precision of poets and orators. Geometry and poetry have their separate and distinct rules, and those who wish to judge Homer by Euclid are no less impertinent than those who wish to judge Euclid by Homer.”
By the final phase of the quarrel, the modern partisan Jean Terrasson affirmed in his 1715 Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homère (Critical Dissertation on Homer’s “Iliad”) that the rancorous divorce between the humanities and the sciences seemed irrevocable: “We see that those learned in different sorts of knowledge believe each other useless to society. Let them burn all the poets and all the historians, exclaims a physicist or a geometer, but let us keep all the books of geometry and physics! The sentiment is reciprocated by the poet and the historian, who use the same terms against the works of geometry and physics.” From a more global perspective, the whole debate may be seen here as yet another battle in an enduring struggle between rational philosophy and imaginative literature, dating back at least to Plato’s denunciation of Homer in The Republic and to what Ernst Robert Curtius aptly termed the “rebellion of Logos against Myth—but also against poetry.”
Or at least “against” a certain definition of “poetry,” one whose perimeters open another key set of issues at stake in the quarrel. How, in the age of triumphant reason and scientific revolution, was one to understand the peculiar nature and function of imaginative literature, huddled here on the sidelines together with its sister arts? Along with the questioning of literary and cultural history, the interrogation of aesthetic values thus emerged with equal vigor. The term “aesthetics” might admittedly appear in this context somewhat anachronistic: it was after all a creation of the mid-eighteenth century. Yet that new conceptualization arose seamlessly out of the reflection undertaken during the quarrel concerning the necessity of a separate category for creative works whose secretive appeal to the senses and imagination profoundly distinguished them from the purely rational and cognitive pursuits associated with other branches of human knowledge and endeavor.
On the modern side, Perrault eagerly tackled the problem. As a sensitive critic of both literature and the visual arts (he composed in 1668 a verse treatise on painting, La peinture), and furthermore as a poet himself, he was quite aware of the sensuous and imaginative charms that defined aesthetic beauty. But he consistently placed such verbal and visual attractions under the stern tutelage of rigorous reason. The hierarchy of disciplines, he affirmed in the Parallèle, is clear: “it is up to the philosopher to lead the poet, not the poet to lead the philosopher.” It was a maxim his allies and heirs would repeatedly trumpet. Rather than two cultures, the new age was to have only one, that of philosophy (understood at the time to include all logical investigation, including the sciences). To its empire all others were naturally to submit. As Fontenelle phrased it in “Sur la poésie en général”:
There is no doubt that philosophy has now attained new degrees of perfection. It has thus shed a light that is not limited to the domain of philosophy alone, but that instead gains new territory every day, and ultimately spreads over the entire world of letters. Order, clarity, correctness, which were once qualities rare even among the best writers, are now much more common. … Will poetry take pride in the glorious privilege of being exempt from this improvement? Ancient philosophers were more poets than philosophers. They reasoned very little, and they taught whatever they wanted with complete freedom. When modern poets prove to be more philosophers than poets, we can say that each side has its own turn.
“Order, clarity, correctness” are also the watchwords of Perrault’s literary criticism. And the Parallèle, despite its conversational framework, sets out a surprisingly systematic modern rationalist aesthetics based on these principles. The system is grounded in a tripartite hierarchy of the faculties deployed in the arts, ascending in value from the bodily senses to the emotions of the heart and ultimately to the crowning gift of human reason. In a section of the first volume dedicated to the visual arts, Perrault’s spokesperson in the Parallèle, the Abbé, first lays out this hierarchy, which he will later apply to literature. He does so by distinguishing three principal elements in a canvas. First is the use of colors, which appeals to the visual senses. Second is the portrayal of various emotions through the depicted subjects’ expressions and gestures, which touches the viewer’s heart. And finally there is the careful arrangement of all the parts of the composition, whose deliberate design is appreciated by the mind alone. This last element represents for Perrault the highest aspect of art. The “overall plan and … the attractive order of a composition that is judiciously organized” constitute
the only aspect of painting that “pleases our reason, and makes us feel a joy that is admittedly less intense, but more intellectual and spiritual, and thus more worthy of man.”
Perrault proceeds to apply this same tripartite hierarchy to the other arts. In music, the tone of a beautiful voice delights the ears; variation in movements touch the heart; and, most important, the “admirable economy” of a complex musical arrangement pleases the intellect. Likewise, in poetry and eloquence, the sound of words gratifies the audience’s senses; the swelling figures of rhetoric stir the passions; while finally, and much more edifyingly, the “beautiful economy of a discourse’s design rises to the highest part of the soul and gives it a completely intellectual and spiritual joy.”
It is important to appreciate here the abstract, immaterial character of literature’s highest function: sensorial and emotional pleasures have their place in Perrault’s system, but the stylistic virtuosity that produces them is always subordinated to intellectual design. Indeed, Perrault goes so far in his favoring of conceptual precision over seductive form as to proclaim his preference for clarifying translations over the suggestive but hazy ambiguities of works in their original language. “Modern languages are more clear and less prone to foolish nonsense than ancient ones.” It is only in recent times, of course, that writers have attained the linguistic, narrative, and intellectual instruments necessary for this kind of unerring exactitude. At the base of these instruments’ success, the Abbé explains in the second volume, is the perfection of what he heralds as modern “method.” “Clear, precise [nette], and methodical” literary expression, so absent in antiquity and so universal in the present day, owes its triumph to recent mathematical and logical innovations, Perrault affirms, crediting above all Descartes. Although the Modern party leader contested some of the specific philosophic positions of the author of the Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), Perrault believed that Descartes’s construction of that method, so securely based in geometric principles, had rightly revolutionized literature. Deductive rigor now trumped mere talent or instinct. It is no surprise that Perrault’s Modern party followers would soon be known as the “geometers.” Houdar de La Motte would go so far in his Réflexions sur la critique (Reflections on criticism) as to describe poetry in these Euclidian terms: “The geometric approach is certainly quite as valuable as that of literary commentary. … The art of poetry has its own axioms, its own theorems, corollaries, and demonstrations; and though its forms and terms may appear in a different guise, it is always fundamentally the same steps of reasoning, the same method, however adorned they be, that result in true proofs.”
A History of Modern French Literature Page 34