11/7/2022 0 Comments Ancient space reviewsThere is no topic or matter that should escape the most rigorous examination: the art of poetry has its own axioms, its own theorems, corollaries, and demonstrations and though its forms and terms may appear in a different guise, it is always fundamentally the same steps of reasoning, the same method, however adorned they be, that result in true proofs (p. The geometric approach is certainly quite as valuable as that of literary commentary. In 1715 Terrason explained his view of both literary composition and criticism: 162) (and to prove the point, Perrault published in 1686 his devotional epic Saint Paulin.)ĭefenders of the remains of the classical past, from Boileau to the early 18th-century ‘Ancients’ Anne Dacier and Jean Boivin (combatants in the Battle's second phase, the so-called Querelle d'Homère) fought a rear-guard action in the face of ever more recalcitrant Moderns, especially the relentlessly rationalist ‘geometers’ Jean Terrasson and Antoine Houdar de La Motte. Homer would have been a better poet had he lived in Louis XIV's enlightened age, since ‘ a modern methodical writer, even of limited natural gifts, can surpass the most inspired geniiuses of the past, who relied on nothing but instinct’ (p. To Homer, declared Perrault, ‘it suffices for a general to have valor and swift feet’ his Achilles is ‘unjust, brutal, pitiless, impious, and lawless’ (p. Those who professed most loudly to feel such shock, Charles Perrault and (more wryly) Bernard de Fontenelle, were the ‘Moderns’ in the famous Querelle des anciens et des modernes (as it was named in 1859 by Hyppolite Rigault) which exploded into prominence in the 1670s and 1680s and soon engulfed all Europe. Playing on the title of Robert Hughes's popular history of modernist art, The Shock of the New (1980), Larry Norman recreates that moment in 17th- and 18th-century France when the classical literary texts that Renaissance humanists had treated as timeless vehicles of cultural value, and so put at the core of European education, came to many to seem shockingly ‘primitive,’ even ‘barbaric’ – superseded, in effect, by the progress of polite and rational modernity.
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