Now, unless these considerations can be got out of the way, the answer to yet a further question, What help does Boileau give the Poet? will be a most meagre and disappointing one. Some of the positive helps which he offers—the rule of Good Sense, and the empty forms of Kinds—are likely to be, in the first case positively mischievous, in the second rather hindering than helpful. His historical doctrine is usually wrong, and, where not wrong, inadequate. His constant prescription of “the ancients”—not merely as _general_ guides in literature—nobody need ask for better—but as immediate and particular models for all kinds of literary exercise, will in its most rigorous observation make a mere translating anachronist, and even if more freely construed, will again hinder much more than it helps. But the majority of Boileau’s counsels are not positive at all, they are simply negative: and negative counsels in art, when the pupil is once out of schoolboyhood, never did much good yet, and have often done a great deal of harm. [Sidenote: _Arbitrary proscriptions._] Why should his _risus ineptus_ at the name “Childebrand” proscribe that name, which is euphonious enough to unprejudiced ears? What “sensible and reasonable” (we may thank him for these words) criterion of sound makes “Philis” preferable to “Toinon” or, prettier still, Toinette? It is true, doubtless, that, for a continuance, the long Alexandrine divides best at the middle; but what reason, what sense is there in the absolute proscription of a penthemimeral or hephthemimeral cæsura? In what does the welcoming of Pan and Charon, and the banishing of Ashtaroth and Beelzebub, differ from the immortal decision that “blue uniforms are only good for the artillery and the Blue Horse”? And so throughout. But, it will be said, the _Art Poétique_ is not Boileau’s sole critical deliverance. [Sidenote: _Boileau’s other works._] It is most true; in fact, though his work is for a man who went safely beyond the three score years and ten and half-way to the four score,[372] a rather scanty work, it is pervaded with literature and with criticism. By a curious contrast to those Roman satirists, of whom we spoke erstwhile, his criticism of life is always turning to literature. The admirable heroi-comic satire of the _Lutrin_ itself gravitates somehow or other to the battle in the book-shop, which enables the poet to gibbet his victims once more; not to mention that the whole fun of this very _Lutrin_ is (though Boileau did not in the least know it) a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ of his own critical doctrines in the _Art_. Most of the other pieces are either directly critical of a kind, or the expression of brief and rather reluctantly obeyed avocations from criticism. Let us examine them,—though with somewhat less minuteness. ----- Footnote 372: