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Nicholas Boileau Biography

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BOILEAU-DESPRÉAUX, Nicholas (1636-1711). The most distinguished of French critics in the age of Louis XIV, known as the "legislator of Parnassus." He was in criticism an incarnation of correct, commonplace common sense, a schoolmaster in careful workmanship, sworn enemy of all false sentiment and preciosity, such as marred the poetry and fiction of his immediate predecessors. He was born in Paris, Nov. 1, 1636, studied first for the priesthood, then for the law, but found his place instinctively in the rather Bohemian literary company of Molière, La Fontaine, Racine, the philologist and realistic novelist Furetière, and the witty Ninon de l'Enclos. Of the Hôtel Rambouillet and its literary coterie he made one trial and never another. Louis XIV liked his rare honesty and gave him a pension; but he shunned the court, save when he could serve a friend there (e.g., Corneille), for he was a bourgeois and not at case with the aristocracy. Feeble, asthmatic, in later life a little deaf, poetry was his aspiration, and criticism, justly weighed and carefully balanced, his delight. His life was uneventful. He never left Paris and its environs save at the command of the King, who made him a royal historiographer, and he died at Auteuil, March 13, 1711. His satire on the vices of Paris was his first success and by its date gave a name to the "school of 1660." Seven other satires appeared in 1666, and five more complete the list. They are in rhymed couplets, polished, harmonious, witty, with the maliciousness of merciless personalities. This was destructive criticism with a vengeance.

In the Art poétique (1674) he was constructive, and, following Horace’s Ars Poetica, gave a theory of poetic composition in four cantos, of which the first lays down general rules, the second applies these to lyric poetry, the third to the epic and the drama, while the fourth contains general reflections, advice, and cautions, all spiced with brilliant wit and barbed with personal allusion. He preached a reign of literary, law, truth in subject, conscientious workmanship in form, unity, clearness, proportion. He sought to establish literature on an unchanging foundation and to give canons of classicism for the ages. And indeed his work has a perennial reasonableness, though it allows scant scope for "the heat and height of sane emotion" and the unchartered play of genius. For Boileau’s mind was material, logical, lacking in imagination. He has been studied by generations because his is the art that can be learned, as Pope, his best pupil, learned it, though his own Horace might have taught him that the true poet could not be made. Boileau repeated and enforced his critical views in the prose Dialogue des héros de roman, whose authorship he at first concealed, and in Réflections critiques sur Longin (1693). His own best verses are 12 Epîtres and a mock-heroic epic, Le lutrin, which was his most popular work. It was published in part in 1673, but not in full till after his death. This and all the poems are filled with cleverly turned lines that remain as familiar quotations, but Boileau should be most gratefully remembered as the first systematic critic of France, the first to make criticism an art. See Criticism.

He was narrow and sometimes unjust, he never fully grasped the fundamental principles of the classic art he admired; but his honest, loyal, stubborn, rough good sense did much to direct the talent of Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine to its most fruitful channels and to guide the next generation to a true, though partial, naturalism. On the lyric poetry of succeeding generations its effect was to cultivate a formal technique and so to check inspiration that first fully revives in the Romantic school. The best edition of Boileau’s Works is by Gidel (4 vols., 1870-73); the Œuvres de Boileau (Strassburg and New York, 1909- ) may also be mentioned.