Chapter IV: Diderot and the French Transition (1)

THE POSITION OF DIDEROT—DIFFICULT TO AUTHENTICATE—BUT HARDLY TO BE
EXAGGERATED. HIS IMPRESSIONISM—THE RICHARDSON ÉLOGE—THE ‘REFLECTIONS
ON TERENCE’—THE REVIEW OF THE ‘LETTRES D’AMABED’—THE EXAMINATION OF
SENECA—THE QUALITY AND EMINENCE OF HIS CRITICAL POSITION— ROUSSEAU
REVISITED—MADAME DE STAEL— HER CRITICAL POSITION—AND WORK— THE
‘LETTRES SUR ROUSSEAU’—THE ‘ESSAI SUR LES FICTIONS’— THE ‘DE LA
LITTÉRATURE’—THE ‘DE L’ALLEMAGNE’— HER CRITICAL ACHIEVEMENT:
IMPUTED—AND ACTUAL— CHATEAUBRIAND: HIS DIFFICULTIES—HIS CRITICISM—
INDIRECT—AND DIRECT—THE ‘GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME’— ITS SATURATION
WITH LITERARY CRITICISM—SURVEY AND EXAMPLES— SINGLE POINTS OF
EXCELLENCE—AND GENERAL IMPORTANCE— JOUBERT: HIS REPUTATION—HIS
LITERARY αὐτάρκεια— THE LAW OF POETRY—MORE ON THAT SUJECT— ON STYLE—
MISCELLANEOUS CRITICISMS— HIS INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENTS MORE DUBIOUS— THE
REASON FOR THIS—ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS— GENERAL REMARKS—THE OTHER
‘EMPIRE CRITICS’— FONTANES—GEOFFROY—DUSSAULT—HOFFMAN, GARAT, ETC.—
GINGUENÉ—M.J. CHÉNIER—LEMERCIER—FELETZ— COUSIN—VILLEMAIN—HIS CLAIMS—
DEDUCTIONS TO BE MADE FROM THEM—BEYLE— RACINE ET SHAKESPEARE—HIS
ATTITUDE HERE— AND ELSEWHERE—NODIER.

[Sidenote: _The position of Diderot._]

One of those judgments of the Common Sense which, while sometimes finding it necessary to contest or correct them, we have also found in the main not untrustworthy, has long ago decided that for good or for ill, the weakening of the neo-classic tradition in its great stronghold, France, is due originally to Denis Diderot more than to any one else— nay, that the Germans themselves owe him a heavy quit-rent. With this decision we shall have no quarrel here; on the contrary, a long familiarity with the writings[161] of this voluminous and disorderly genius, has made the present writer one of its very strongest supporters. There is not the slightest need to engage either in controversy or in compromise with others, or to hark back upon our own demonstrations that in Fontenelle, in La Motte, and elsewhere, there are seeds and germs of a critical calculus very different from Boileau’s. We may at this stage take these things for granted. Far be it from us to say that “there’s nothing new or true, and it doesn’t matter.” But we may very modestly, but very unflinchingly say that there is nothing wholly new or old; that there are at least very few things wholly true or false; and that it matters very much that it should be so.

[Sidenote: _Difficult to authenticate._]

Therefore, or however (for either link of the argument would be defensible) it is reasonable or convenient to start this chapter with Diderot. Yet he can hardly have, in mere space, a treatment proportionate—as proportion has been in other cases observed—to his importance. It is an importance rather of attitude and suggestion than of explicit pronouncement; and the explicit pronouncements are so many, and so various, that to summarise and discuss them would require far more than the utmost room that we have given to our very greatest authorities. Moreover, that inadequate universality, that flawed all-round-ness, which every competent critic has noticed in Diderot, would make wildernesses of proviso and commentary necessary. It is not quite safe to leave unread a single page of the twenty big octavos of his works, in arriving at an independent estimate of his critical, as of his general quality: and those who do not care to undertake so considerable an investigation, must take the word of those who have undertaken it, to some extent on trust. Further, though Diderot is by no means a mere general aesthetician—though his very critical value consists largely in the fact that he flies upon the corporal work of art like a vulture—yet his utterances in different arts concern and condition one another after a fashion, of which, before his time, there was hardly any example. We cannot possibly here bestow space on the _Paradoxe sur le Comédien_ and the vast and tempting assemblage of the _Salons_. Yet the person who attempts to examine Diderot’s purely literary pronouncements without examining these, will do so at his peril certainly, and almost certainly to his damage. _Le Neveu de Rameau_ is imperative: nay, the much-abused _Jacques le Fataliste_ itself must not be neglected.[162]

[Sidenote: _But hardly to be exaggerated. His Impressionism._]

Diderot is the first considerable critic—it would hardly be too much to say the first critic—known to history who submits himself to any, to every work of art which attracts his attention, as if he were a “sensitised” plate, animated, conscious, possessing powers of development and variation, but absolutely faithful to the impression produced. To say that he has no theories may seem to those who know him a little, but only a little, the very reverse of the truth: for from some points of view he is certainly a _machine à théories_ as much as Piron was a _machine à saillies_. But then the theory is never a theory _precedent_; it never (or so seldom as to require no correction of these general statements) governs, still less originates, his impression; it follows the impression itself and is based thereon. Not seldom the substructure, if not even the foundation, of the impression itself may seem to us quite disproportionate to the originating work of art—be it book, or play, or picture; but that is not the point. Constantly, the enthusiasm which had made Diderot give himself up to the fascination of his new subject may seem to lead him into all sorts of extravagances. The best known and perhaps the best example of these extravagances, the almost famous _éloge_ of Richardson, has been drawn

upon by nearly everybody who has written on Diderot, and by most who have written on Richardson, for examples.

[Sidenote: _The Richardson éloge._]

This marvellous dithyramb[163] really exceeds, in the superlatives of its commendation of a work of originality and genius, the most “azure feats” of a modern reviewer on a tenth-rate novelist or minor poet. Richardson puts in action all the maxims of all the moralists: and yet all these maxims would not enable one to write a single page of him. Diderot was constantly going to cry out [He _does_ constantly cry out “O Richardson!”] “Don’t believe him! Don’t go there!” to the characters, and especially to Clarissa. This author sows in the mind whole crops of virtues, which are sure to come up sooner or later. He knows _every_ kind of life, and scrutinises its secrets infallibly. He preaches resignation, sympathy, justice. He has made Diderot so melancholy that his friends ask him tenderly “What is the matter?” But Diderot would not be cured for anything. To think that there should be pedantic, frivolous, insensible wretches who reproach Richardson with being long-winded! He must be read in the original. He should be discussed in society. Richardson is a new gospel: he will always be popular, though thoroughly appreciated only by the elect. He is truer than history; his intense interest hides his art; a friend of Diderot, who had only read the French translation, omitting the burial and will of Clarissa, wept, sobbed, abused the Harlowe family, walked up and down without knowing what he was doing, on perusing the original. Richardson simply haunts Diderot, stifles his genius, delays him from work and effort. Ye Ages! begone and hasten the full harvest of the honours due to Richardson!

Very extravagant, no doubt; rather absurd, if anybody likes. But fair and softly; let us, as usual, examine the nature and the circumstances of this extravagant, this absurd, critical fact.

In the first place, we have to remember that it _was_ a work of genius— whatever its faults—that was brought under Diderot’s notice; in the second, that as at least a majority, if not a consensus, of competent critics has long ago decided, it was an example or collection of examples of genius applied in a new way—that without going to the pedantic extremes to which some have gone in their definition of the novel, it has been found impossible to discover before Richardson the necessary mixture of incident and character-interest, the unity (not necessarily a dramatic or even an epic unity) of plot, the mingled appeal to, and play upon, passions and manners. Then let us ask ourselves whether the systems of criticism and the critics, with which and with whom we are up to this point familiar, have as a rule proved themselves equal to cope with new geniuses and new kinds of composition— whether their tendency has not rather been distinctly to frown upon such things; at any rate, to give them the coldest and most distrustful welcome. Let us remember that Hurd, about the same time as Diderot,[164] and in the very act of defending the older and more poetical romance, was throwing cold water on prose fiction as a clumsy upstart. And finally, let us ask ourselves whether all Diderot’s exaggerations are not, after all, exaggerations of the truth—owing their weak points to an excitable nature and a prevalent fashion of expression, their strong ones to a genius, and a perception of truth itself, not unfairly comparable in their way to Richardson’s own in his.

[Sidenote: _The_ Reflections on Terence.]

Side by side in the Works with this effusion there are some _Reflections on Terence_[165] written within a year of the other. In the famous Roman dramatist there is neither novelty, nor intense sentiment, nor multiplicity of individual character, nor volume of story. He was the darling of those critics from whom Diderot differed most. His faults—at least his shortcomings—are obvious to infinitely less acute, restless, and rapid judgments than that of the great Encyclopædist. His excellences are of the kind which might seem least likely to appeal to Diderot. Yet Diderot is not merely just to him, not merely bountiful, but not in the least clumsy or haphazard in his bounty. He will not have the time-honoured (or _dis_honoured) putting off of the praise of Terence on Scipio and Lælius. Admitting his “lack of verve,” he gives him full credit for its compensation of even humanity, for his “statuesque” and quiet perfection. He adds remarks on translation which are excellent; and if he may have taken the idea of holding up Terence _and_ Molière together for admiration from La Bruyère,[166] he escapes La Bruyère’s mistake of suggesting the _mixture_ of the immiscible.

[Sidenote: _The Review of the_ Lettres d’Amabed.]

Take a third example of a very different kind. We have a short review[167] by Diderot (first extracted by M. Assézat from MS.) of Voltaire’s _Lettres d’Amabed_. This book, it is hardly necessary to say, is anti-religious: and Diderot was violently anti-religious himself. It is saturated with Voltaire’s sniggering indecency: and Diderot was the author of _Les Bijoux Indiscrets_.[168] Lastly, it was by Voltaire, of whom Diderot, though an independent, was an eager and faithful champion. But it is “without taste, without _finesse_, without invention; a botching up of stale blackguardisms about Moses and Christ and the rest; it has no interest, no fire, no verisimilitude, but plenty of dirt and of clumsy fun.” This is the plain critical truth about the _Letters of Amabed_, and it is Diderot who says it in so many words, and says it moreover in MS.—which could curry no favour with, and obtain none from, public hypocrisy and cant.

[Sidenote: _The Examination of Seneca_.]

Turn the examining instrument from these short pieces to the long critical examination of Seneca,[169] which forms the second part of the _Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron_. It is open to any one to agree or disagree with Diderot’s uncompromising, though by no means indiscriminate, championship of the usurious philosopher-statesman; as a matter of fact, though it is a matter of only argumentative importance, I am, except on the head of style, one of those who disagree with it. But agree or disagree as he may with the conclusion, no competent critic, I should suppose, can fail to admire the thoroughness with which Diderot has taken in and digested his complicated literary subject, the range and extent of literary knowledge with which he illustrates it, the readiness of his argumentation and exposition, and, above all, the craftsmanlike and attractive fashion in which he combines analysis and criticism. Again, I doubt whether there is an earlier example of what we may call “freehand” criticism—the criticism which is not tethered to the necessity of applying or expounding rules in reference to its subject, but can take that subject in, can deal with it on its own plan and specification—can, in fact, _appreciate_, without being bound to refer to and obey some official book of prices. There are some two hundred pages of this appreciation, and one’s only reason (itself rather uncritical) for qualified satisfaction with it is that it does not handle some writer of greater intrinsic value and wider artistic appeal.

[Sidenote: _The quality and eminence of his critical position._]

I should be prepared to multiply the citation and discussion of the critical “places” in Diderot to almost any extent, if such multiplication were reconcilable with my plan; but, as has been said, to do so would be as superfluous logically as it is methodically impossible.[170] Diderot’s commanding position, in criticism as well as in aesthetics, is due not more to the number and variety of his individual utterances than to the fact that he certainly obtrudes, and in all probability conceals, no general æsthetic “preventions” (as the French would say, and as Dryden very wisely does say) whatsoever. One of the great resources and one of the great charms of his criticism is the way in which he draws it from, and returns it to, all the arts without letting any of them interfere with the other. The pedants of art-criticism have of course said that his is too literary; but the pedant is always pedantic, and always negligible, whether he draws his principles from French classrooms in the seventeenth century or from French studios in the nineteenth and twentieth. No matter whether he is talking of writing or of acting, of painting or of sculpture, the work of art is for Diderot something which ought to give the human sense and the human soul pleasure, which, if it does so, is to be welcomed and extolled, not without (if anybody feels thereto disposed) inquiry into the manner and the causes, rather mediate and immediate than ultimate, of that pleasure. He can everywhere display a really encyclopædic “curiosity,” in the good sense. He can be extremely inventive and subtle, as in the famous _Paradoxe_;[171] he can enter into infinite detail and yet never lose grasp of principle, as in the essay _De la Poésie Dramatique_;[172] he can glance and digress in lightning fashion as he does everywhere, but especially in the _Salons_. As good an instance of this as any is the admirable excursus on Mannerism in the _Salon_ of 1767,[173] which is applicable to literature quite as much as to painting.

Certainly, if any devout Arnoldian says that Diderot’s greatness is due to his “fertility in ideas,” no contradiction will be thought of here. But then we have the old difficulty as to what “ideas” mean. I do not remember that Mr Arnold himself makes much reference to our Denis; and, indeed, Diderot must have been, from some points of view, nearly as horrible—let us lay cards on table and say as incomprehensible—to him as to his friend M. Scherer. But it may be that the critical “idea” is neither more nor less than the result of that contact of subject and critic which has been glanced at before—a contact intimate, physical, uninterrupted, and resulting in conception and birth. This, if anything, is the “idea” of modern criticism; and while few have been more prolific of such results than Diderot, none before him and hardly any since have so invariably and consciously guided themselves by its law. I do not know that he has ever positively stated this law; I really do not know that it ever has been explicitly laid down by any of the constituted, or even the non-constituted, critical authorities. But his whole work is an exemplification of it.

And the result is, that this whole work, wherever it approaches criticism, is alive; and that he cannot help its becoming alive, even if he has apparently given hostages to Death by attempting set dissertations on cut-and-dried subjects, or by dallying with science, or atheism, or what not. It is a further reason why even such contemporaries as Lessing, and later, Goethe, found in him such an extraordinary stimulus. The dead, mechanical deductions of too many critics under the older system could produce nothing but copies, even more dead and more mechanical than themselves, though, as we have seen in many a figure of our gallery, the principle of life in human nature made the greater critics of the older dispensation sometimes quicken under it. But Diderot’s fecundity was contagious: his “cultures” have propagated themselves from generation to generation directly, have set the example of a similar creation of critical entities to fit subjects ever since. From a formula you will never get anything but formulas: from the living contact of critic and subject you will get live criticism.

[Sidenote: _Rousseau revisited._]

I was so severely rebuked by an excellent and friendly critic for dismissing Rousseau, with but a reference, from the last volume, that I thought it my duty to reconsider the matter, though the principal plea of the rebuker, that M. Texte had devoted some hundred pages to Jean-Jacques, appeared to me _nihil ad rem_. But I might have committed an error as to the _res_ itself, and so I took down the four quartos, and went through them to see if my memory had played me false, as that faculty sometimes does when one is walking in the browner shades. I need not have alarmed myself; but it is perhaps worth while to spare a page to put the _pièces_ actually before the reader. _There is in Rousseau practically no literary criticism at all from the first line of the “Confessions” to the last of the “Correspondence.”_[174] No writer known to me abstains with such an inevitable and tell-tale deflection from “judging of authors.” His attitude is that of his favourite Plutarch heightened to a Jean-Jacquian intensity. It is always of the moral, never of the literary, character and effect of a book that he is thinking. His fervid sensibility to the fascination of women, of scenery, of mere food and wine (for he admits this), does not seem to have extended to literature at all. By an extremely humorous coincidence (I do not know whether any one has noticed it before me, but probably some one has) he writes from Venice—the very place where he had just received, or was just to receive, the withering advice, “_Zanetto! studia la matematica!_”—to order books from Paris; and they are nearly all mathematics. The famous _Discours_ about arts and sciences blinks the literary point of view altogether. The famous Letter to D’Alembert on Plays would almost adjust itself to plays in dumb show, except that spoken words have an additional moral or immoral effect. When Saint-Preux writes to Julie about her studies, he never so much as glances at the literary value of books: nor is this touched in all the talk about Education in _Emile_. The everlasting moral has dinned the Muses out. So it is in the two only less famous letters to Voltaire; so everywhere. I replace my four quartos, having found just one really critical sentence, in allocation and application only, for Jean-Jacques, probably, was not thinking of literature at all. But when he asked himself, “Serais-je damné?” and replied, “Selon mes Jansénistes la chose était indubitable, mais selon ma conscience il me paraissait que non,” he does _mutatis mutandis_ suggest the revolt of the Romantic conscience against the Neoclassic.

“Ah, but,” they say, “Rousseau’s influence on the mind of Europe counted for so much in its changes of critical and creative taste.” _A la bonne heure!_ and I have recognised this, and shall recognise it in the proper places. But the agencies that bring about changes of critical and creative taste, proper to be mentioned, are not also as proper to be worked out here. Of such influences the capture of Constantinople is a famous and undoubted one. Was I bound to tell the story of Byzantine decadence, and the story of Mussulman progress? It has in innumerable instances, if not universally, influenced a man’s criticism, a man’s creation—whether he is in love at the time; whether he has arrived at that right and happy point, which Mr Thackeray would not call “a _pint_” in the drinking of good wine; whether he has been under the soothing influence of the Indian weed. Am I therefore bound to insert in this History a treatise on “Feminine Attraction,” a book on “The Wines of the World,” and an “Anti-Counterblast” to King James? In all seriousness, it may, I think, be requested once more of readers and of critics that they will “look at the bill of fare.” If the meat and the wine suit them, well and good; if not, are there not, in this particular instance, M. Texte and his hundred pages to make _quaere aliud diversorium_ no merely churlish or vindictive dismissal? While, as to such remarks as _are_ proper to be made here on the general critical temper and tendency of the Romantic movement, they were deliberately postponed in the last volume, and will find their proper place, not here, but in the Interchapters of the present.

This indirect influence of Rousseau, with the direct influence of Diderot, no doubt cast a mighty leaven into the mind of France during the later decades of the eighteenth century; and it is noteworthy that, of the three remarkable writers with whom we shall next deal, while Madame de Staël directly and Chateaubriand indirectly express the first, Joubert was much in contact with Diderot during his youth. But the dominant criticism of the last twenty or five-and-twenty years of the century remained neo-classic; and we have accordingly dealt with it[175] in the last volume. Nay, the dominant criticism of the first twenty or so of the next abode in no very different state. Here we shall deal with what has not yet been handled of this half century, or nearly so, in France, isolating more or less the three great figures above mentioned, and dealing more in group with these “Empire Critics,” who in different ways reflect the transition to Romanticism.

[Sidenote: _Madame de Staël._]

Of the interest, the influence, the significance, and, in so far as these important things go, the importance, of the work of Madame de Staël[176] in criticism, there can, as to their mere existence, be no two well-formed opinions. I wish that I could think this statement—made frankly in intention, and with deliberate consideration of the weight of every word—likely to obtain for the examination which follows the credit of impartiality which I think it deserves. Unfortunately, we are now approaching closely matters which are distinctly _cinis dolosus_. At every step the apparently irreconcilable difference between those who mean by criticism the judging and judicial enjoyment of literature, and those who mean by it theorising about the ultimate causes of such judgment and such enjoyment, is likely—is sure—to interfere. Nor does it seem possible for the philosophers to agree to keep these points of law for the appropriate tribunal, and to let the rest of the case be stated on its own merits.[177]

[Sidenote: _Her critical position._]

Now “Corinne” is about the first person in whose case this difficulty and this difference become acute and annoying. She is not quite so popular with the critics of “ideas” as she used to be; they have, belike, discovered at last her rather awkward sciolism of fact; her very theories are not theirs; the “hideous hum” of “Madame de Staël : ideas; Chateaubriand : images,” ceases to tire the weary ear quite to the same extent as it used to do in histories of literature and critical discussions thereof. But historically she is not to be denied; there is no doubt that no one has ever done the popularising of “metacritic” throughout Europe as she did.

[Sidenote: _And work._]

But if the painful historian were only left to his own hod-and-trowel work instead of having to draw the sword and don the helmet against metacritical raiders, his task would not be a difficult one. Madame de Staël, unlike her countryman and in some sort master, Rousseau, _is_ a critic, not merely indirectly, conjecturally, and by dint of the “must have,” but frankly, plainly, in honest straightforward deliverances _ad hoc_. The documents of her criticism are mainly four: the early _Letters_ on Rousseau himself, the later but still early _Essay on Fiction_, the famous _De La Littérature_, and the more famous _De l’Allemagne_. In all, but in increasing measure as they come, we see the curious and interesting development and production of a temperament originally no doubt possessing some masculine gifts of thought, as well as many feminine ones of feeling, excited and almost irritated to the highest activity by the word-fencing of the _philosophe_ salons, and presented with all the current doctrines or fancies in regard to literature and its precincts, by contact with the most active minds of Geneva, Paris, and Germany. With her half-masculine vigour and her wholly feminine receptivity, she absorbs and reproduces, _tant bien que mal_, all or a large part of the ideas which had been fermenting in all countries more or less, but especially in Germany, for the great part of a century,—French-Godwinian perfectibility, the æsthetic of Lessing and Winckelmann, the historical theories of Herder, as much as she could of the applied criticism of Goethe and Schiller and the Schlegels. Her different works show her of course at different stages of this influence. They show also—with equal necessity and undisguised by a system of explanatory and supplementary notes in the later editions—what actual knowledge of literature she had, what stock of material to expose and submit to all this complicated apparatus, all this varied range of reagency.

[Sidenote: _The_ Lettres sur Rousseau.]

The very early work on Rousseau is of course the most immature, and it meddles the least with purely literary criticism, but it is, for reasons obvious _à priori_, not the least interesting, and it is perhaps not the least satisfactory on acquaintance. The contrast between the modest (but not fairly to be called mock-modest) brevity of the original Preface, and the pomp and cant and claptrap of the second, twenty-six years later, may raise a sigh in amiable breasts. But the text, whether one agree or disagree with its sentiments and estimates, by no means lacks merit. The writer is well acquainted with the actual matter of discussion (which was by no means always the case with her later): she is in intelligent as well as emotional sympathy with it. She does not indeed take the purely literary side very strongly; she had her master’s own practice as warrant for not doing so. But her remarks (some of which are perhaps innocently borrowed from Longinus) on Rousseau’s style, and the inapplicability of the word “perfection” to it are not despicable: and the characterisations of the various works, though always tending to the moral and material side, are very far from negligible. It may be worth noting that while objecting, not without reason, to “les plaisanteries de Claire,”[178] she does not seem to know that they are only a corrupt following of Richardson. But the whole is a very fair _début_ in criticism, inclined as we should expect to the moral side, but not illegitimately so.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essai sur les Fictions.]

The _Essai sur les Fictions_, a sort of after-thought introduction to the three little stories, _Mirza_, _Adelaide et Théodore_, and _Pauline_, is a slight and rather curious defence of the novel of actual life moralised, as the most useful of fictitious or imitative writings, by means of a survey of such writings under three heads: “Marvellous and allegorical fictions,” “historical fictions,” and “natural fictions,” _i.e._ novels proper, where nothing is true, but everything _true-like_. The first two are very insufficiently treated, and her condemnation of the historical novel is deprived of all weight by the fact that she wrote too early to know any really good example of it. Perhaps the same may be said of the third.

[Sidenote: _The_ De La Littérature.]

The _Rousseau_, however, is but the work of a novice, and the _Sur Les Fictions_ is still something of an essay-piece: yet in both one may observe a _nisus_ towards large generalising, which was the natural result of the author’s time, temperament, and education. This _nisus_ turns into a full spread of wing in _De La Littérature_, published as the centuries met, and when the author was four and thirty. Its avowed central principle is a transformed “Modernism,”—the application of the favourite _philosophe_ doctrine of perfectibility to literature, with an inflexible determination that though Greek literature may be better than anything before it, Roman shall be better than Greek, and (though there is _hiatus valde lacrimabilis_ about mediæval), that modern literature shall be greater than either. To those who are not pure “ideologists,” and who do not think that an ounce of generalisation, however silly, however demonstrably false, is better than a ton of sober consideration and array of fact, this theory condemns itself at once. Here, at any rate, we may legitimately echo Mr Burchell and his “Fudge!” Yet Corinne’s attempts to prove it are interesting, and would be more so, if she had had skill enough to hide her ignorance of the facts themselves, or knowledge enough of them to gild her paradox. Her actual method is not merely characteristic of time and person, but has a certain ingenuity: indeed, it no doubt deceived herself. She will not take literature _per se_, but she takes it in its relations with “virtue,” “glory,” “liberty,” “happiness,” first in the abstract, and then under these categories as illustrated by Greek, Roman, “Northern,” “Southern,” and individual national literatures, paying special attention to English, and defending it from the objections of French eighteenth-century critics. It is, of course, easy to see how, by showing, or trying to show, that virtue, &c., is, _according to her_, better displayed in literature as it goes on, she proves, or attempts to prove, her general point.

Unfortunately, in the course of the argument, the most enormous errors of fact, the most startling assertions, which cannot take the benefit of _de gustibus_, simply pullulate. The book nearly drops from one’s hands when one reads “Eschyle ne présente aucun résultat moral”: and the reference to the _Prometheus_ by which this statement is supported, suggests very forcibly that the writer knew nothing else, and did not understand this. More allowance must be made, no doubt, for the point of view, when we read further that “les héros (of Greek tragedy) n’avaient pas cette grandeur soutenue que leur a donnée Racine”; but what a point of view it is![179] We are in full topsyturvydom with the statement[180] that “la philosophie des Grecs me paraît fort au-dessous de celle de leurs imitateurs les Romains,” and we do not get out of the country as long as the contrast of Greek and Roman continues. But here, it may be said, we are in the region of opinion. The plea cannot be urged for the astounding statements which diversify the defence of our own barbarous poetry. In believing _Ossian_ genuine, as in admiration for it, she, of course, had respectable companions: but the person who could say[181] “les poètes Anglais qui _ont succédés aux bardes écossais_ ont ajouté à leurs tableaux,” &c., could have possessed neither the faintest knowledge of literary, or even political, history, nor the least extensive acquaintance with actual examples. The note,[182] “le docteur Blair n’aurait pu juger en Angleterre Shakespere avec l’impartialité d’un étranger,” betrays the most obvious and complete ignorance of what _le docteur Blair_ had actually said. The description in the text[183] of Falstaff as a _charge_, a “caricature populaire,” a “plaisanterie grossière,” speaks the lady’s critical competence with a voice of doom. But the most utterly damning page is that[184] which denies inventive imagination to English poetry; airily dismisses Waller and Cowley as unsuccessful imitators of the Italians; adds _je pourrais y joindre Downe_ (sic), _Chaucer_, &c.; and a moment later despatches at a blow, as showing this want of inventive imagination, _The Rape of the Lock_ (full of faults of taste), _The Faërie Queene_ (the most tiresome thing in the world), _Hudibras_ (witty, but dwelling too long on its jokes). Admit (it is a good deal to admit) that there may be faults of taste in the _Rape_; admit that more than one Englishman has been unfortunate enough to find Spenser tedious; admit that there is even some justice in the charge against _Hudibras_. How (except by the easy method of having never read them) can you leash these three books together? and, most of all, by what prank of her own elves does “that Elfish Queen” find herself between Trulla and Belinda? I have myself not the slightest doubt that though Madame de Staël may have glanced at the _Rape_, and disliked the sylph machinery, she had never so much as opened “Downe” or Chaucer, Butler or Spenser, and I should not be surprised if she knew nothing, save at second-hand, of Waller or Cowley.

I could multiply examples _ad lib._, from the German chapters especially, but the “matter of Germany” had better be dealt with under the book exclusively devoted to it. As for general strictures on the _Littérature_, they also will best be postponed till the _De l’Allemagne_ has been dealt with.

[Sidenote: _The_ De l’Allemagne.]

That this book is, as far as criticism goes, her masterpiece, there can be no doubt, and it would be surprising if it were not so. She was older; she had read more; and she had enjoyed very distinguished “coaching.” This kept her fairly straight in matters of fact within the comparatively limited range which she here allowed herself as far as literature is concerned. German literature had taken itself by this time pretty seriously for a couple of generations: and the German men of letters whom she interrogated or “led about,” were perfectly competent and apparently not unwilling[185] to keep her from such absurdities as we have just been noticing. Very much of the book is plain, straightforward _compte rendu_, and generally _très bien rendu_, whatever minor faults one may find here and there. Above all, the expressed and very fairly carried out purpose of comparative study which made Napoleon so angry, and with such good reason,[186] gives the book an honourable place as a precursor, if not, indeed, an absolute origin, in a new way which had to be trodden. If Napoleon’s innate and colossal vulgarity had not been constantly tripping up his immense cleverness, he might have perceived that here was a new feather of some consequence to stick in his sham crown-imperial. The analyses and _précis_ of such short things as _Lenore_ and the _Braut von Korinth_ are rather excessive for a book: but neither piece is easily translatable into French, and Madame de Staël probably knew very well that few of her dear quasi-countrymen were likely to learn German, in order to read them.

The old leaven of French and _philosophe_ taste and culture shows itself at intervals interestingly. She cites[187] (a little generously perhaps in any case) the line in Raynouard’s _Les Templiers_, when the reprieve arrives too late to save the knights who have been chanting hymns on the pyre

“Mais il n'était plus temps; les chants avaient cessés,”

in connection with the yoke of the unities. But, strangely enough, she does not seem to notice the weakening and watering down of what she calls _l’un des mots les plus sublimes qu’on puisse entendre au théâtre_, by its being made part of the speech of a messenger. The voices of the warrior-priests ceasing one by one in agony, and the reprieve coming on the silence of the last, would be, though a rather _melo_-dramatic, a really dramatic moment. The recital of the situation is a little less ordinary than talk “of the rain and the fine time,” and that is all.

This, however, is succeeded by some really acute, and in French quite novel, criticism of Shakespeare as too subtle, too impartial, &c., for the stage—criticism which she had probably learnt from Schlegel,—and the whole chapter[188] is important; as is that on “Comedy,” though the definition[189] from Schlegel himself, with which it starts, is very nearly _galimatias_.

There is much good sense in the criticism of German romance, though the old leaven once more appears in the statement that “verse is required for the marvellous; prose will not do.”[190] Always on Goethe she is good, and, “philosophess” as she is, she has some very sensible remarks on the over-dose of metaphysic in Schiller’s criticism. On most of her subjects, indeed, from Wieland to Jean Paul, she is still worth reading.

[Sidenote: _Her critical achievement—Imputed._]

Her admirers, however,—or the partisans of the school of criticism, which, as has been said, she did so much to “vulgarise”—would no doubt regard this matter as merely, in Luther’s famous epithet of contempt, “stramineous.” It is on her attempt to grasp the principles not merely of kinds but of literatures, to identify or at least connect these with national characteristics, and to extend the definition and comparison beyond even the bounds of nations to national groups—that they would base her claims. Here, perhaps, we may find ourselves in a distressing inability to follow. Certainly, no one will deny that there are some apparent national characteristics in literature; certainly no one will say that it is useless or idle to attempt to separate the national and the generic from the individual. But, in the first place, there was nothing absolutely new in this, though it might be for almost the first time used as a frequent implement, and as a fertile store-cupboard, in literary research. Even the despised Middle Ages had had national tickets for the different states of the European republic—had discovered that the Englishman had a proud look and a high stomach, that he took his pleasure sadly, and so forth. And had it been newer than it was, it might still have been distrusted. After all, the literature of a nation, though we talk of it as if it were something existent _per se_, is merely the aggregate of the work of individuals. It is the work of those individuals that you have to judge; and it is open to the very gravest doubt whether, in trying the several cases, the general inductive-deductive ready-to-hand estimate of the national quality is not more of a snare than of a help. At any rate, experience proves that those who have been readiest to use it, from Madame de Staël to M. Taine and M. Texte—to name no living examples—have been more snared than helped by it. Your preoccupation with the idea that the Englishman will be insular and rebel to ideas, the German unpractical and “inner-conscious,” the Frenchman logical, witty, tasteful, may very likely, according to the weaknesses of the poor but constant creature Human Nature, rather lead you to dispense with inquiry into the fact whether he, the individual Briton, Teuton, or Gaul, does really exhibit these characteristics. It will tempt you in the same way to exaggerate what tendencies he may have to them—to force them on him if he has them not—or even to leave him out of consideration if he is so impudent as too incontestably not to have them.

And there is also the gravest possibility of doubt whether, even in themselves, they have sufficient truth to make them of more than the slightest value. After all, a man is a man before he is an Englishman or a Frenchman; it is scarcely too paradoxical to say that he is himself before he is even a man. The very greatest men of course carry this disconcerting triumph of individuality furthest; all but the very smallest help to flaunt its banner now and then. And when the hasty generaliser generalises still more hastily, and talks about Literature of the North and Literature of the South, the Rebellion of Fact is more inconvenient still. You lay it down that the literature of the North does not busy itself with frank youthful passion, and you have to settle matters with _Romeo and Juliet_; that the Italian is a light-hearted being whose only wants are sunshine, an olive or two, a flask of red wine with a wisp of tow in it, and a _donna leggiadra_, and there rises before you the _Divina Commedia_.

[Sidenote: _And actual._]

But this argument would tempt ourselves out of the way; and, even in so far as it is legitimate here at all, is rather for the Interchapters. Let it suffice that Madame de Staël is undoubtedly a notable figure in the mere History of Criticism, and that, like nearly all such figures, she has by no means lost her actual critical value; that she is no “shadow”; that she is still, dead as she is, a speaking voice of some of the perpetual forms and phases of criticism itself. That her intellectual ability, if only of the receptive and transmissive kind, was somewhat extraordinary, there can be little question. She frequently claims for herself the invention of the word “vulgarity”: and though she lived to be so unfortunate as to apply it[191] to Miss Austen—though it has perhaps been more misused than any other single word of criticism—it was needed. Nor was she herself much the dupe of words, though she often was of supposed ideas. She has somewhere quoted from Rousseau, and expanded, a wise protest against the requirement of a pedantic adherence to definition in terminology. It was unlucky for her, no doubt, that to some extent she came at, and could not but represent, one of those rather unsatisfactory transition periods which are neither quite one thing nor quite another. She has touches of classic “dignity” and of philosophic cant, harlequinned with others of Romantic _sehnsucht_ and “naturalistic” passion. Or rather she is like one of the picture-cleaners’ sign-portraits—half in eighteenth century shadow, half in nineteenth century light—or the other way about, if anybody chooses.

Yet the ill-luck is not total, and may perhaps even seem to be but apparent. For it is precisely this _bariolage_, this partition, this intermixture, which gives her not merely her historical position, but even, I think, her intrinsic attraction as a critic. She helps us by giving a fresh “triangulation,” a fresh aspect, a midway stage. Her perfectibilism keys on as interestingly from the literary side to the old Ancient-and-Modern dispute as on the political side to the Republican manias of the time. Her struggles to retain some conviction of the supremacy of Racine make more interesting, and are made more interesting by, her admiration for Shakespeare and the Germans. Her assimilations, or her attempts to assimilate, the new aesthetic, the new historical theories, the new wine generally, would have far less interest if she had put away all fancy for the old bottles. And so she figures worthily and interestingly in what we have called the French Transition, with a quaint enough contrast to Diderot, who opens it, and who taught her German teachers. She is a figure of far less originality, strangeness, and charm, but she has a more definite gospel, she is much less diffused and dissipated over the _orbis scientiarum_, she points more clearly to a clearly marked out path, and so she is much more likely to be followed by the multitude, if not by the elect.

[Sidenote: _Chateaubriand: his difficulties._]

But she does not figure in her place alone: for side by side with her, and with a face looking still more forward, is another figure, not less curious, not less blended in its composition, but to some at least far more interesting and far greater. Chateaubriand is one of those literary personages to whom it is peculiarly difficult to do justice, and to whom accordingly justice has very seldom been done. I admit that it was long before I could myself regard him through glasses sufficiently achromatic, or divest him of his accidents with a satisfactory thoroughness. His personality—that troublesome and disturbing factor from which we are so fortunately free in the case of most ancient writers, and with which we are so teasingly confronted in the case of most modern—is a little enigmatic and more than a little unsympathetic. He trails with him the trumpery of two different times—Classical emphasis, arbitrariness, even to some extent prejudice, Romantic tawdriness, inconsequence, gush. He has curious adulteries of pedantry and foppishness—strange and indecent communions of ignorance and knowledge. And yet he is, in literature, so great a man that one sometimes hardly knows how to construct any definition of greatness which shall keep him out of the highest class. He has, and has by anticipation, all the gifts of Byron except the gift of writing verse: he can write prose which is hardly inferior to Byron’s verse in the qualities where verse and prose touch nearest, and not much below all but Byron’s best in some where they are farther apart. And he has other gifts to which Byron can lay no claim.

[Sidenote: _His Criticism,_]

The chief of these gifts is criticism—a department in which Byron, for all his shrewdness, simply does not count, because of the waywardness, egotism, and personal prejudice which tinge every one of his critical utterances, eulogistic or depreciatory. Now Chateaubriand counts in criticism for a very great deal. By those who allow indirect critical influence to rank Rousseau as a great critic, Chateaubriand ought to be ranked as a critic infinitely greater; by those who observe a more rigid and legitimate calculus, he can, as we shall shortly show, be ranked almost, if not quite, in the first class. When a French critic or historian[192] pronounces him the father of modern criticism, the first to start the comparative method, and so forth, he is, as we are all inclined, and as French critics used to be extravagantly, and are still rather excessively inclined to do, speaking as if what is true of his own nation and literature were true universally. We must, of course, go a long way back in time, and some way afield in place—to the middle of the eighteenth century in the one case, to England and Germany in the other—for the real first appearances (“origins” is always a misleading word) of these things, and even if we cling to France we must deal with the vaguer but far older claims of Diderot. But Chateaubriand represents them powerfully. He represents them practically before Madame de Staël, in a much more literary fashion, and with much more literary power, and he represents them with a magic, with a contagious influence, to which she cannot pretend. Further, he possesses that claim which is the first, if not the sole claim for us, though it seems to be regarded by some with jealousy, and almost with resentment, the claim of having actually written criticism, and a great deal of it.

[Sidenote: _Indirect_]

The champions of the Indirect have, it must be confessed, not a little to rely upon in Chateaubriand. He was so much more intensely _literary_ than Rousseau, and even than Madame de Staël, that _Atala_, _René_, _Les Natchez_, _Le Dernier Abencérage_ still more, _Les Martyrs_ most of all, and even not a few things in the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_, may without violence be twisted into a literary bearing. All, in their different degrees and ways, exhibit the author’s insatiable curiosity as to the literature of different times, countries, religions, languages, and his indefatigable industry in staining and twining his own literature with the colours and the threads of these others. But it is quite unnecessary to twist and infer, to force the “this must have” and the “we can see,” when we have two such documents before us as the _Essai sur La Littérature Anglaise_, and, above all, the _Génie du Christianisme_.

[Sidenote: _and Direct._]

As a matter of fact, by far the larger part of this latter famous book, the _revanche_ for Voltairianism, the manifesto of the whole earlier, and not a little of the later nineteenth century, the main pillar of its author’s fame,[193] is literary criticism pure and simple. It is so odd a place to look for this that it sometimes escapes. Accounts of Chateaubriand have been written (I am, I fear, guilty of one myself) in which it has had no adequate recognition. But when we have once sighted our panther,[194] she cannot escape us; and we may try here to do justice to the real sweetness of her breath.[195]

[Sidenote: _The_ Génie du Christianisme.]

So odd a place: and that, too, in more ways than one. At first sight—and perhaps too hasty or not thoroughly informed readers permanently—the _Génie_[196] may appear an inextricable tangle, or a frank flinging together of fragments without even the connection of being tangled. It would be improved (and perhaps such a thing has been done) by a table like that which Burton wisely prefixed to the _Anatomy_. One has to realise the utter _terrassement_ in France of Christian doctrine and practice—the all but total triumph of that purely secular education and atmosphere for which a hundred years later some of our Nonconformists pant—to appreciate the real art and the practical necessity of the fashion in which Chateaubriand “lets everything go in” against Philosophism. It seems temerity, but was probably wisdom, to begin, as he begins, with the altitudes of faith and dogma. And he glides off from them, cunningly but most naturally, to those ceremonies, sacramental and other, for which the Republic had substituted unmeaning and unaffecting civil functions. Then he once more attacks the _philosophes_ on their own ground—on the subject of morals and that “virtue” which they had so tediously dinned into the

public ear, but of which they had made so little private exhibition,—and grapples courageously, though perhaps not rashly, considering the extreme sciolism of most of his adversaries, with cosmology and teleology, with physic and metaphysic, with Hell and Heaven themselves. In all, his rhetoric serves him admirably, if nothing else does; but we have as yet little or nothing to do with literature or with criticism. It is quite different when we come to the “Second Part,” _Poétique du Christianisme_, and here Chateaubriand begins to present his credentials as a critic. Nor, with some digressions, does he again drop the character throughout the book.

[Sidenote: _Its saturation with literary criticism._]

The proceeding[197] was probably more logical than it seems. On the one hand the attack on religion had been overwhelmingly, and the attack on civil order very largely, literary in its own character and weapons. In the second, the everlasting _philosophe_-republican chatter about the Greeks and the Romans had more than reconstituted the old classical and “ancient” prejudice. Madame de Staël had not shared this latter; but she had failed to share it principally because of her perfectibilism, which had put down the merits of the ancients chiefly to their republican constitutions. Here were a whole host of things for Chateaubriand to deal with; and in every case the literary way was an obvious line of attack, as well as one intensely congenial to the new champion. He is no perfectibilist, of course; in fact, one of the appendices of the _Génie_ is a _Letter to Fontanes_[198] on the second edition of the _De la Littérature_, combating its views. But his championship of “modern” literature is based upon its Christianisation, and he compares famous ancient with famous modern poets on purpose to show first, how Christianity has enabled the latter to rise to nobler heights; secondly, how some at least of the best points of the ancients themselves are to be found in contact with Christian ethics. Like his feminine opponent, he has some not quite cleanly rags of classicism and Gallicism about him. A too sanguine hope may be dashed when it finds him talking about the “bad taste” of Dante, and the “defects” of his age. But Romanticism, no more than its far-off godmother Rome, was to be built in a day.

[Sidenote: _Survey and examples._]