Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/279

Rh still active in England and Holland, is the appearance of quite a number of elaborate epics—poems that of all others demand the greatest intensity of imagination to vivify and sustain. Lemoyne's Saint Louis (1651-53), Scudéry's Alaric (1654), the notorious La Pucelle of Chapelain (1656), Saint-Amant's Moyse Sauvé (1653), and Godeau's Saint Paul (1654), are only some of the epics in from fifteen to forty-two cantos, on subjects heroic and sacred, which appeared during the first half of the century. The explanation is to be found partly in the taste for the heroic, which was one aspect of the movement to elevate and refine social taste,—an aspect most perfectly reflected in the work of "le grand Corneille,"—in great measure in the enthusiasm felt for the "heroic poem" of Italian literature and critical theory. It was a natural mistake to think that a better knowledge of poetic theory should produce better poetry, and the "rules" which critics and scholars had deduced from Aristotle, regarded as the mouthpiece of reason, were taken very seriously indeed. When this critical spirit came in contact with genius, as in the shaping of Milton's Paradise Lost and Corneille's tragedies, the result was interesting in the highest degree, whatever view we may take as to its influence on the final outcome. When the genius was wanting, the result is merely pedantic and tedious. The "correct" epics of the Renaissance are, with the exception of Milton's, more dead than the "correct" Senecan tragedies. Of those mentioned, the Saint Louis of the Jesuit Lemoyne—