Boileau, NICOLAS

Boileau, NICOLAS, was born at Paris, where his father was a registrar in one of the law-courts, on the 1st November 1636. He was educated at Beauvais, and received both a legal and a theological training. In his twenty-first year, however, he inherited a competence, and decided to follow a life of purely literary activity. In his youth he appears to have been most generally known by the surname Despréaux, which he had taken in accordance with a practice of the time. He published his satirical Adieux d'un Poète à la Ville de Paris in 1660, and in 1663 we find him united with Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine, in the famous 'society of four.' In 1666 he published a collection of satires from which the royal privilege was for a time withdrawn, through the influence of Chapelain, one of the writers whom he had gibbeted. Boileau, however, soon gained the favour of the king, who awarded him various pensions, and in 1677 appointed him, along with Racine, to the post of royal historiographer. L'Art Poétique, which contains the exposition of his literary creed, and which was imitated by Pope in the Essay on Criticism, was published in 1674, along with four cantos of the Lutrin, a clever serio-comic description of an ecclesiastical squabble over a reading-desk. Two cantos, concluding the poem, appeared in 1681. Between 1669 and 1677 Boileau published nine epistles, written, like his satires, on the Horatian model. To celebrate the capture of Namur in 1692, he composed an ode which remains a glaring example of servile flattery and bad verse. This deplorable production was admirably burlesqued by Prior. In his last years Boileau retired to Auteuil, where he died on 13th March 1711. His works include several critical dissertations in prose, a collection of epigrams, a translation of Longinus On the Sublime, a Dialogue des Héros de Roman, and a series of letters, a number of which are addressed to Racine, extending from 1672 to 1710. He appears to have been of a jealous, arrogant nature, but not without generosity. Though he secretly preferred Corneille to Racine, he did his best to exalt the younger at the expense of the elder dramatist. Nevertheless, when Corneille's pension was stopped, he is said to have made a courageous protest to the king against 'so barbarous a spoliation.' His verse has wit and vigour, but he never rises to the level of the great satirists. His influence as a critic has been profound. The 16th century had flooded French literature with new words and new ideas. The riches which it had imported and developed required to be sifted, refined, and reduced to order. This task, which had been begun by Malherbe, was carried out with drastic energy by Boileau. He set up good sense, sobriety, elegance and dignity of style as the cardinal literary virtues. He discountenanced the conceits of the salon coteries, and the grossness and grotesqueness of the earlier writers. Through his influence more than any other man's, French prose became almost identical with clear, precise, and polished composition. But for more than a hundred years, while his authority was at its height, there was a distinct falling-off in poetry. Verse was robbed of fire and melody and the power of vague suggestion. The drama was divorced from real life, and restricted to certain prescribed situations and conventional characters. Boileau led Frenchmen to look with ignorant contempt on the nation's early literature. While he refined he impoverished the vocabulary. The language lost its old pith, colour, and flexibility, and became for a time incapable of reflecting vivid passion or complex character. Boileau's immense influence has thus been both beneficial and hurtful to French letters. For more than a hundred years he was accepted by his countrymen as the infallible 'lawgiver of Parnassus.' His authority has been reduced to a closer conformity with his deserts since the rise of the French Romantic school. See Fournier's edition of Boileau (Paris, 1873), and Laverdet's Correspondance de Boileau (Paris, 1858).