United States or Côte d'Ivoire ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Where the ancients themselves found them, after much groping. The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus.
The enlightenment of the present age surpasses that of antiquity, this is the theme. La docte Antiquite dans toute sa duree A l'egal de nos jours ne fut point eclairee. Perrault adopts a more polite attitude to "la belle antiquite" than Saint Sorlin, but his criticism is more insidious.
What does concern us is that Saint Sorlin was aware of the wider aspects of the question, though he was not seriously interested in them.
This seems to be true even of Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, who, a good many years after the discourse of Boisrobert, opened the campaign. Rigault, Hist. de la querelle, p. 106. His thesis was that the history of Christianity offered subjects far more inspiring to a poet than those which had been treated by Homer and Sophocles, and that Christian poetry must bear off the palm from pagan.
His own Clovis and Mary Magdalene or the Triumph of Grace were the demonstration of Homer's defeat. Few have ever heard of these productions; how many have read them? Curiously, about the same time an epic was being composed in England which might have given to the foolish contentions of Saint Sorlin some illusory plausibility. But the literary dispute does not concern us here.
Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If trees are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what about the minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the same?
The permanence of the forces of Nature had been asserted by Saint Sorlin and Perrault; they had offered no proof, and had used the principle rather incidentally and by way of illustration. But the whole inquiry hinged on it. If it can be shown that man has not degenerated, the cause of the Moderns is practically won. The issue of the controversy must be decided not by rhetoric but by physics.
How seriously the question between the Moderns and the Ancients on whose behalf Boileau had come forward and crossed swords with Saint Sorlin was taken is shown by the fact that Saint Sorlin, before his death, solemnly bequeathed the championship of the Moderns to a younger man, Charles Perrault. We shall see how he fulfilled the trust.
Word Of The Day