he and his contemporaries did not seek from
poetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of the
early eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, but
what they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatest
of them, considered the "epopee heroi-comique" the top-stone of modern
practical effort; we know what astonishing feats he was himself guilty
of in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching and
practice tended towards an identity of speech between prose and verse,
the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature which
distinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it was
not fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, it
did not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time,
Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very much
to prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, in
such hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in the
ascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in which
precision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, and
he employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, but
which enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues.

The taste of the age of Louis XV. affected to admire Corneille to the
disadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far from
blaming Vauvenargues for his "extreme predilection" for Racine. But
Vauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, and
accused the divine Corneille of "painting only the austere, stern,
inflexible virtues," and of falling into the affectation of mistaking
bravado for nobility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremely
severe on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blames
Corneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoring
the tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the point
of view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; they
show us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtue
and military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelian
point of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely
"fastueux" conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatrical
ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "a
detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No
doubt the fact is that Vauvenargue