Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

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Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Born(1636-11-01)1 November 1636
Paris, Kingdom of France
Died13 March 1711(1711-03-13) (aged 74)
Paris, Kingdom of France
OccupationPoet, critic
Alma materCollege of Sorbonne, Paris
Coat of arms of Boileau-Despréaux family

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (French: [nikɔla bwalo depʁeo]; 1 November 1636 – 13 March 1711), often known simply as Boileau (UK: /ˈbwʌloʊ/,[1] US: /bwɑːˈloʊ, ˈbwɑːloʊ/[2][3]), was a French poet and critic. He did much to reform the prevailing form of French poetry, in the same way that Blaise Pascal did to reform the prose. He was greatly influenced by Horace.

Family and education

Boileau was the fifteenth child of Gilles Boileau, a clerk in the

Despréaux" was derived from a small property at Crosne near Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. His mother died when he was two years old; and Nicolas Boileau, who had a delicate constitution, seems to have suffered something from want of care.[4]

Sorbonne. He exchanged theology for law, however, and was called to the bar on December 4, 1656. From the profession of law, after a short trial, he recoiled in disgust, complaining bitterly of the amount of chicanery which passed under the name of law and justice. His father died in 1657, leaving him a small fortune, and thenceforward he devoted himself to letters.[4]

1660s

Les satires

Much of Boileau's early poems as have been preserved hardly contain the promise of what he ultimately became. The first piece in which his peculiar powers were displayed was the first satire (1660), in imitation of the

Francois de Malherbe, there had been no attempt to fashion French versification according to rule or method. In Boileau for the first time appeared terseness and vigour of expression, with perfect regularity of verse structure.[4]

His admiration for

Mlle de Scudéry. To these early days belong the reunions at the Mouton Blanc and the Pomme du Pin, where Boileau, Molière, Jean Racine, Jean de La Chapelle and Antoine Furetière met to discuss literary questions. To Molière and Racine he proved a constant friend, and supported their interests on many occasions.[4]

In 1666, prompted by the publication of two unauthorized editions, he published Satires du Sieur D...., containing seven satires and the Discours au roi. From 1669 onwards appeared his epistles, graver in tone than the satires, maturer in thought, more exquisite and polished in style. The Épîtres gained for him the favour of

Louis XIV, who desired his presence at court. The king asked him which he thought his best verses. Whereupon Boileau diplomatically selected as his "least bad" some still unprinted lines in honour of the grand monarch and proceeded to recite them. He received forthwith a pension of 2000 livres.[4]

1670s

In 1674 Boileau's L'Art poétique (in imitation of the

Essay on Criticism.[4]

Of the four books of L'Art poétique, the first and last consist of general precepts, inculcating mainly the great rule of bon sens; the second treats of the pastoral, the elegy, the ode, the epigram and satire; and the third of tragic and epic poetry. Though the rules laid down are of value, their tendency is rather to hamper and render too mechanical the efforts of poetry. Boileau himself, a great, though, by no means infallible critic in verse, cannot be considered a great poet. He rendered the utmost service in destroying the exaggerated reputations of the mediocrities of his time, but his judgment was sometimes at fault. The Lutrin, a mock heroic poem, of which four cantos appeared in 1674, is sometimes said to have furnished Alexander Pope with a model for the

Rape of the Lock, but the English poem is superior in richness of imagination and subtlety of invention. The fifth and sixth cantos, afterwards added by Boileau, rather detract from the beauty of the poem; the last canto in particular is quite unworthy of his genius.[4]

In 1674 Boileau published his translation of

Longinus' On the Sublime, making Longinus' ideas available to a wider audience, and influencing Edmund Burke's work on the same subject.[7] In 1693 he added some critical reflections to the translation, chiefly directed against the theory of the superiority of the moderns over the ancients as advanced by Charles Perrault.[4]

Boileau was made historiographer to the king in 1677. From this time the amount of his production diminished. To this period of his life belong the satire, Sur les femmes, the ode, Sur la prise de Namur, the epistles, A mes vers and Sur l'amour de Dieu, and the satire Sur l'homme. The satires had raised up a crowd of enemies against Boileau. The 10th satire, on women, provoked an Apologie des femmes from Charles Perrault. Antoine Arnauld in the year of his death wrote a letter in defence of Boileau, but when at the desire of his friends he submitted his reply to Bossuet, the bishop pronounced all satire to be incompatible with the spirit of Christianity, and the 10th satire to be subversive of morality. The friends of

Académie française, and then only by the king's wish. In 1687 he retired to a country-house he had bought at Auteuil, which Jean Racine, because of the numerous guests, calls his hôtellerie d'Auteuil.[4]

1700–1711

In 1705 Boileau sold his house and returned to Paris, where he lived with his confessor in the

Notre Dame. In the 12th satire, Sur l'équivoque, he attacked the Jesuits in verses which Sainte-Beuve called a recapitulation of the Lettres provinciales of Pascal. This was written about 1705. He then gave his attention to the arrangement of a complete and definitive edition of his works. But the Jesuit fathers obtained from Louis XIV the withdrawal of the privilege already granted for the publication, and demanded the suppression of the 12th satire. These annoyances are said to have hastened his death, which took place on 13 March 1711.[4]

He was a man of warm and kindly feelings, honest, outspoken and benevolent. Many anecdotes are told of his frankness of speech at court, and of his generous actions. He holds a well-defined place in French literature, as the first who reduced its versification to rule, and taught the value of workmanship for its own sake. His influence on English literature, through Pope and his contemporaries, was not less strong, though less durable. After much undue depreciation, Boileau's critical work has been rehabilitated by recent writers, perhaps to the extent of some exaggeration in the other direction. It has been shown that in spite of undue harshness in individual cases most of his criticisms have been substantially adopted by his successors.[4]

Numerous editions of Boileau's works were published during his lifetime. The last of these, l'Œuvres diverses (1701), known as the "favourite" edition of the poet, was reprinted with variants and notes by Alphonse Pauly (2 vols., 1894). The critical text of his works was established by Berriat Saint-Prix, Œuvres de Boileau (4 vols., 1830–1837), who made use of some 350 editions. This text, edited with notes by

Sainte-Beuve, was reprinted by Garnier frères (1860).[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Boileau, Nicholas". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 2022-08-28.
  2. ^ "Boileau-Despréaux". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins. Retrieved 29 August 2019.
  3. ^ "Boileau-Despréaux". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Retrieved 29 August 2019.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  5. ^ Crane, Thomas Frederick, ed. (1902). Les héros de roman: dialogue de Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (in French). Ginn & Co. p. 33. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  6. ^ Crane, Thomas Frederick, ed. (1902). Les héros de roman: dialogue de Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (in French). Ginn & Co. p. 38. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  7. ^ Boulton, James T., ed. (2008). Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Routledge Classics. pp. xlii.

Sources

Further reading

  • Doran, Robert. "Boileau" in The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
  • Boileau's Works, (in French) illustrated by Rémy Lejeune (Ladoré), edited by Pierre et Berthe Bricage (1961), in 5 volumes.
  • Hatzfeld, H. (1961). "Three national deformations of Aristotle: Tesauro, Gracián, Boileau". Studi secenteschi. II: 3–21.

External links

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