To be told that we’ve the true poetic fire.
But once, to one whose name I shall not mention,
I said, regarding some verse of his invention,
That gentlemen should rigorously control
The itch to write which often afflicts the soul.]
Ordered to testify before the King’s Marshals in a dispute that, for Oronte, has escalated into an affaire d’honneur, Alceste justifies his criticism by pointing out that he did not call into doubt Oronte’s personal credibility as an “honnête homme” in questioning his skills as a poet; after all, what could possibly be the connection?
De quoi s’offense-t-il? Et que veut-il me dire?
Y va-t-il de sa gloire à ne pas bien écrire?
Que lui fait mon avis, qu'il a pris de travers?
On peut être honnête homme et faire mal des vers:
Ce n’est point à l’honneur que touchent ces matières;
Je le tiens galant homme en toutes les manières,
Homme de qualité, de mérite et de coeur,
Tout ce qu’il vous plaira, mais fort méchant auteur.85
[His verse is bad, extremely bad, in fact.
Surely it does the man no harm to know it.
Does it disgrace him, not to be a poet?
A gentleman may be respected still,
Whether he writes a sonnet well or ill.
That I dislike his verse should not offend him;
He’s noble, brave, and virtuous—but I fear
He can’t in truth be called a sonneteer.]
At the same time, Alceste does not hesitate to praise other activities and aspects of the courtier:
Je louerai, si l’on veut, son train et sa dépense,
Son adresse à cheval, aux armes, à la danse;86
[I’ll gladly praise his wardrobe; I’ll endorse
His dancing, or the way he sits on a horse;]
not because, it would seem, Oronte is any better at these; we have no indication at all that he is a more talented horseman, swordsman, or dancer than a poet. But for Alceste these represent traditional vehicles of aristocratic self-expression and established forms for advancing claims to social and cultural preeminence. Writing poetry, on the other hand, does not: “But, gentlemen, I cannot praise his rhyme.”87
Signifying his preference for older practices over new and thus his outdatedness—Philinte repeatedly describes his friend as being out of touch with “the ways of the time [les moeurs du temps]”—Alceste’s antipathy correlatively measures the recent nature of writing’s rise as a medium for the projection of personal quality, contrasted against a set of more obviously traditional activities, with the startling ascendancy of this medium, its surging importance, further reflected in Oronte’s decision to take the matter before the King’s justice. Moreover, it is not only Oronte’s desire to write poetry that is in dispute but more specifically, his intention to circulate the sonnet. Oronte’s approach to the Misanthrope was not just about getting the latter’s feedback but about securing his approbation before “going public” with his verse:
Et, comme votre esprit a de grandes lumières,
Je viens, pour commencer entre nous ce beau noeud,
Vous montrer un sonnet que j’ai fait depuis peu,
Et savoir s’il est bon qu’au public je l’expose.88
[Since you have such fine judgment, I intend
To please you, if I can, with a small sonnet
I wrote not long ago. Please comment on it,
And tell me whether I ought to publish it.]
In other words, the activity in question is not simply the honnête writing of a poem but its honnête publication with the requisite inscription of the act of “faire paraître” in a friendship that would compel and authorize it. And clearly what is being figured by “exposer au public” here is publication in print; Alceste’s questions suggest that there is no ambiguity on this point:
Quel besoin si pressant avez-vous de rimer?
Et qui diantre, vous pousse à vous faire imprimer?89
[What pressing need do you have to compose rhymes?
And what on earth pushes you to have them printed?]
Reimagined in this way, and invested with a newfound significance for the construction of an identity whose status would be a function of its positioning at the intersections of “literary” and aristocratic life, the print publication of writing was, however, defined by two problems that would fundamentally orient its seventeenth-century practice. First, in having their works printed, writers who aspired to elite social standing ran the risk of projecting not their intelligence or their ennobling esprit, but an arrogant belief in the enduring value of their self-expression such that it deserved the permanence of ink. The danger of publication was, in other words, the danger of publishing nothing more than one’s inflated self-esteem. And indeed, central to the figuration of the “Author” in this period, as this denoted the activity of “bringing to light [mettre en lumière]” a book, was a collection of attributes that were all acute symptoms of the ethical flaw of amour-propre.90 In the passage to print, the author was assumed to be driven by vanity, pride, greed, and jealousy. Thus Boileau counseled aspiring poets, “Rid yourself … of authorial arrogance.”91 To publish was to confront moral opprobrium, a fact that Boisrobert makes clear in the avis to the 1659 reedition of his Epîtres en vers: “I know that I have been accused in high society [dans le Monde] of not neglecting myself in the love that one ordinarily has for oneself and for one’s works.”92 Consequently, expressions of modesty downplaying the merit of one’s writing as well as one’s role in its publication were essential. These, of course, abound in the writings of the period, and countless examples could be given. “In all ways, Reader, you are very little obliged to me. I am giving you a rather bad work, and I am only giving it to you with regret,” La Calprenède affirms in the preface to an edition of his 1637 tragedy, La mort de Mithridate, explaining his embarrassment as an “ignorant soldier” to be distributing an unworthy text, and that he did so only once he knew that unauthorized copies, “with two thousand mistakes,” had began to circulate.93
Second, publication might imply that one appealed to a broader public than the audience gathered at court or in the salon, and no doubt more crucially, that one addressed this public as a stranger to it. That is, the move to print introduced an image of the writer elaborated through a sharp differentiation with the reader, one understood spatially, of course, inasmuch as publication bridged but also called attention to the distance separating the two figures. But this distance indicated
