Chapter IV: Diderot and the French Transition (2)

And we very soon see that for all these remains of “the old man,” and for all a certain necessary ignorance (he thinks there is nothing mediæval before Dante but “a few poems in barbarous Latin),” despite also such antiquated arbitrarinesses as the admission as a fault in the Milton whom he so much admires, and in the Dante whom he admires rather less, that “the marvellous is the _subject_ and not the _machine_ of the poem”—we very soon see on what side Chateaubriand is fighting. He hazards at the very opening the doctrine—shocking to the whole French eighteenth century, and contrary to Aristotle—that the Epic is not only larger in bulk, but higher, greater, more varied, more universal indeed, in kind and range, than the drama. And perhaps this is as much a dividing principle of criticism as anything else. I hold myself, as has been made obvious, with those who think that the drama is only accidentally literary, though it has been so now and again, for long periods, in the very highest degree; while the epic is literary or nothing—it is, with lyric, the beginning of all literature. But, however this may be, the whole drift of his criticism is anti-neoclassic. Again and again he contrasts passages and long scenes from Homer and Milton,— not to show how superior Homer is, as the French neoclassics would have done, as Addison had done—not even to show how superior Milton himself is—not to defend Milton by Homer’s example,—but to show how they are _differently_ excellent. A most interesting and novel critical suggestion is that of trying to realise how a modern poet _would have_ done what an ancient poet _has_ done, the whole lesson of the comparative method being here in little.

I shall hardly be expected, though I should much like, to analyse and represent the whole of these twelve books, to which something has even to be added from the six last. The turning of the tables on the _Henriade_[199] (which is treated most politely), with a sincere lament that, while the finest places of its author’s poems are inspired by religion, he has not more fully inspired himself therewith in this particular poem (the subject of which so obviously requires it!) is ingeniously malicious. We may take mediocre interest in the contrasts of Lusignan and Andromaque, Guzman and Iphigénie,[200] but they are full of delicate and acute critical observation, which shows itself again in the comparison of Virgil and Racine.[201] So too we may dispute the epigram that “la barbarie et le polythéisme ont produit les héros d’Hómère; la barbarie et le Christianisme ont enfanté les chevaliers du Tasse”;[202] but the whole passage where this occurs is connected with the all-important devotion to Chivalry. When he comes to passion we may again desiderate something different from the comparison of Dido and Phèdre.[203] But this was what was wanted “for _them_”; and there is no fault to find with the treatment of Pope’s handling of Héloise.[204] With the author’s ecstacies over _Paul et Virginie_,[205] few people now living can sympathise; but once more _Paul et Virginie_ was good “for _them_.” Virginie is only a victim of nasty prudishness when you compare her to Nausicaa, but she might easily be taken for a mirror of purity in the age of Madame de Warens and Madame de Puisieux. The fine passage on “Le Vague des Passions” which serves to introduce _René_ is of great critical importance, though it may have been partly suggested by Bossuet.

The paradox of the beginning of the book on the Marvellous[206]—that mythology belittled nature and made description abortive—is at least exceedingly ingenious, as is what follows on Allegory; but Chateaubriand’s account of the history of modern descriptive poetry itself suffers from want of knowledge.[207] Still, in attacking the position that pagan mythology was a more poetic subject than Christian, it must be admitted that he is excellent on Angels,[208] and that his comparison of Venus in the Carthaginian woods and Raphael in Eden, is one of the best of those companion-pieces in which he so delights, and which are such engaging criticism. We cannot follow him through dreams and through “machines,” through Hell and through Tartarus; nor even give much space to the bold, elaborate, and often admirably critical comparison of Homer and the Bible.[209] But these things, like the others mentioned before, all illustrate the range, the height, the Pisgah quality—or rather that still higher quality of the mountain view in _Paradise Regained_—to which Chateaubriand’s criticism can justly pretend. These thirty pages are perhaps his most elaborate and ambitious critical attempt, and they deserve to be thoroughly studied.

Hardly less remarkable is the Third Part, which deals with a sort of clash of influences—that of Christianity on the Fine Arts, and that of the Fine Arts, Christianity, and Literature on each other. The wonderfully prophetic instinct of the writer is shown in what he says of the Gregorian chant, as well as of Gothic architecture, and he brings them very close to letters; but of course he comes closer still in dealing with History, Oratory, and the like. And he manages, in a surprising fashion, not to keep very far from it, even in his last part, that of “Worship.”

[Sidenote: _Single points of excellence,_]

These exercitations are diversified and illustrated by constant expressions and _aperçus_ of real critical power, showing, if, as we have said, necessarily not complete, yet very considerable, and for the time remarkable knowledge. Chateaubriand knows all about _Ossian_; and he corrects Madame de Staël’s amiable and ignorant enthusiasms with a politeness which must have been insufferable to the good lady. He has the right phrase exactly[210] for that singular failure of a genius the Père Lemoyne—a phrase which may not improbably have suggested Flaubert’s gorgeous _Tentation_, and which is, as it were, a keynote or _remarque_-index in relation to the critical imagination of modern times. He has not merely this altered tone in _excelsis_, but also in details:—as witness the very remarkable note at i. 260, on the effects of a particular vowel (whether “first discovered” or not does not matter). On the very same part his open-mindedness is shown in the warm and just praise given to André Chénier—dead and unpublished—and a little later in a delicate protest against the inconsistency of Rivarol’s translation of _Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante_. The characters of the ancient historians are sketched with a masterly brevity in III. iii. 3, and there is an astonishing moderation and justice, as well as a sort of chivalry, in his frequent encounters with Voltaire.

[Sidenote: _and general importance._]

But the greatest glory of Chateaubriand is that he is, if not the creator, the first brilliant exponent of what we have called above the Critical Imagination—the first great practitioner of imaginative criticism since Longinus himself. Lessing and Diderot had no doubt shown the way to this, but the first was not quite enthusiastic enough, and the second was enthusiastic to and over the verge of dithyramb. The Schlegels and Goethe had practised in it; but the two former were not great enough men of letters, and the most ambitious attempts of Goethe, such as that in _Wilhelm Meister_, are spoilt by deplorable longwindednesses and pedantries. Chateaubriand is one of the very first to take the new stream, _remis atque velis_, plying the oars of the intellect, and catching the wind of the spirit. His occasional delinquencies in the use of the phrase _mauvais goût_; his deference to the old opinion that the hero of tragedy must necessarily be what we called then in English “a high fellow”; other things of the same kind; do not matter in the very least. Every one of them could be set off against a corresponding expression of freedom from neo-classic prejudice; and there would remain a mighty balance of such utterances on the credit side.[211]

[Sidenote: _Joubert—his reputation._]

The critical position of Joubert, acclaimed soon after the posthumous publication of his work[212] by the greatest critical authorities, has sometimes been questioned in later days, but quite idly. Readers of these pages must have seen, if indeed they did not know it long before, that a large body of critical, as of other opinion, is merely negligible. It does not rest upon any solid knowledge or argument; it is in many cases not even the expression of a genuine personal preference, illusion, or impression of any kind. Sometimes the critic does not like the other critics who have expressed approval of the author; sometimes he does not like some individual utterance or group of utterances of the author’s own; more often he simply wishes “to be different”—to blame where his predecessors have praised, and to extol to the skies what they have disapproved or left unnoticed. In all such cases the verdict need not even be seriously fought before any court of cassation; it is self-quashed.

The remarkable body of judgment by French critics[213] from Sainte-Beuve downwards, which is prefixed to the usual editions of the _Correspondance_, especially if it be supplemented by Mr Arnold’s famous essay, is almost “document” enough of Joubert’s worth; but we cannot here avoid full examination of him, especially as hardly one of these critics has taken our exact point of view. We can neglect the great body of Joubert’s miscellaneous _Pensées_ and concentrate ourselves on those affecting literature, which practically begin[214] under the heading _De l’Antiquité_, appear both here and in the subsequent headings with general titles, and of course constitute the substance of “On Poetry,” “On Style,” “On the Qualities of the Writer,” and “Literary Judgments.”

[Sidenote: _His literary_ αὐτάρκεια.]

In literature, with an exception to be noticed presently, his time exerts remarkably little influence on Joubert. This is not the case elsewhere; in his religious, political, moral, social judgments we feel— and it could not be but that we should feel—the pressure, and the shadow, and the sting, of the Revolution everywhere. But the literature is—as literature is but too seldom and ought always to be—presented (except in one way) with a sort of _autarkeia_. Joubert was born in mid-eighteenth century, and he died just as the Romantic movement was in full bud and had begun to burst, with the _Odes et Ballades_. But he is neither a hard and fast classic, nor a revolter of the extreme kind against classicism, nor, like those not uninteresting contemporaries of his whom we shall group after him, blown hither and thither by the wind of this or that doctrine. He betrays, indeed, the enfranchising and widening influence of Diderot; but he has worked this out quite independently, and with a “horizontality” and comparative range of view in which the early Romantics themselves (except Sainte-Beuve) were conspicuously lacking, and which even Sainte-Beuve never fully attained. [Sidenote: _The Law of Poetry._] The famous, the immortal, ninth “Pensée” of the Poetry section,[215] “Rien de qui ne transporte pas n’est poésie: La lyre est en quelque manière un instrument ailé,” is positively startling. It is, of course, only Longinus, dashed a little with Plato, and transferred from the abstract Sublime to the sublimest part of literature Poetry. But generations had read and quoted Longinus without making the transfer; and when made it is _en quelque manière_ (to use the author’s judicious limitation, which some people dislike so much), final. Like other winged things, and more than any of them, poetry is itself hard to catch; it is difficult to avoid crushing and maiming it when you think to catch it. But this is as nearly perfect a definition by resultant, by form, as can be got at.

[Sidenote: _More on that subject._]

Of course all the utterances are not at this level. The fault of the “Pensée” itself in general, is that, in human necessity, it will miss, or only go near ten times (perhaps a hundred) for once that it hits; and it is easy enough for a hostile critic in turn to hit the misses. But it is the hits that count; and, as for them, how astonishing is it to come across at this date (No. xxv.), “Les beaux vers sont ceux qui s’exhalent comme des sons ou des parfums,” where you have, put perfectly, all the truth that exists in the “symbolist” theory of some seventy years later! Again (xxxviii.) “Dans le style poétique chaque mot retentit comme le son d’une lyre bien montée, et laisse toujours après lui un grand nombre d’ondulations”—where the great quality of the best nineteenth-century poetry, of that poetry of which hardly anything had been written in France and Germany, and of which Joubert could hardly know what had already been written in England—the contingent, additional music superadded to meaning,—is hit off perfectly once more. Then there is the second best known and most famous passage (xli.), forbidding the “lieu trop réel,” the “population trop historique,” and enjoining the “espèce de lieu fantastique,” in which the poet can move at pleasure; and that other fatal saying (xlvi.), “On ne peut trouver de poésie nulle part quand on n’en porte pas en soi,” and the reiteration (xlix.) of the capital doctrine as to the beauty of words—of words even detached from context. Taking them together, these ten pages of Joubert contain more truth—more stimulating, suggestive, germinal truth—about poetry, than any other single treatise from Aristotle down to the present day. This is the way a man must think of poetry if he is to be saved; though not every clause of the Joubertian creed is thus Athanasian.

[Sidenote: _On Style._]

The Style section is equally astonishing. I think I first read Joubert about thirty years ago; I know his ancestors and his successors much better now; but he astonishes me just as much as ever. In another rather longer[216] stretch you have the best things in Aristotle, Longinus, and others—some at least of which he pretty certainly had neither read nor heard of—revised and applied; you have the principles and the practice of Hugo, Gautier, Saint-Victor, Flaubert, of Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, put plumply or by suggestion beforehand in eighteen pages.

Here is everything: the necessity of choice which is the condition of good style, and which works so differently in ancient and modern times; the powers of “the word” in all their varied bearings; the excellence of archaism rightly understood, and the occasional charms of the _kuria_ as a rest and interval for refreshment; the right to reinvest an old word with new meaning; the “science of names”; the placing of words; the freedom which the reader possesses of improving on his author by keeping his word and adding to his sense; the difference between musical and pictorial style; the impossibility of literature when words are used with an absolutely fixed value; the unpardonable sin of mere purism; the natural and justifiable idiosyncrasy of dictionary and even grammar in good writers, with the due guards against its excess; the variety of degree in which ancient authors are to be followed; the value and the danger of idioms. These and a hundred other things will all be found, sometimes of course (the fault of the form again) put too absolutely; sometimes, though very rarely, intermixed with things more dubious—but always present at short, at all but the shortest notice. Never, I think, did any critical writer enter so much into the marrow of things in so limited a space: the section is a sort of _Tinctura Fortior_, as the pharmacopœias say, or even like those older “drop-cordials” of story, where a vial the size of the little finger contained the virtue of a whole pharmacy.

[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous Criticisms._]

These two sections form the _aureus libellus_ of Joubert—if I knew a wealthy and sensible, intelligent and obliging bibliophile, they should be printed on vellum and adorned by the greatest decorative artists of the age, and bound in the simplest but the most perfect coat obtainable. We decline slightly with the two remaining chapters—though there is still plenty of gold to be found—and the decline is continuous. In the section “Des Qualités de L’écrivain et des Compositions Littéraires” we once more approach the merely philosophic side, and it is Joubert himself who has left us, apropos of _Corinne_, the memorable proposition that sometimes “un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”[217] A fine distinction (not so expressed) between realist and idealist literature[218] is an instance of the consolation which is constantly occurring; but we must look for relapses. What do we learn by being told[219] that “Homer, Euripides, and Menander” (O groves of Blarney!) had more _facilité pour le beau_ than Hesiod and Sophocles; Æschylus, Dante, and La Bruyère less than Fénelon and J. J. Rousseau? The context indeed shows (not by any means in so many words) what gloss is to be put on _facilité_ and what on _beau_ to get out Joubert’s meaning; but the result is not worth the trouble. And when we find afterwards that _la facilité est opposée au sublime_ we agree, but, recurring, ask whether Homer is less sublime than Hesiod? The sub-sections on criticism (§ cxl. _sq._) are excellent, and a fairly severe winnowing would leave a residue not much less valuable than in the other two: but the winnowing is necessary.

[Sidenote: _His individual judgments more dubious._]

The fact may prepare the wary reader for some further inequality in the last section of “Jugements Littéraires,” with which should be taken certain letters to Molé in the _Correspondance_. To prevent disappointment and even puzzlement it is here necessary to remember Joubert’s “time, country, and circumstance.” He was a man, let it be repeated, of the mid-eighteenth century by birth; a Frenchman, and not, it would seem, by any means widely acquainted with foreign languages and literatures, except classics. He always speaks as if he could only read Milton in translations; his knowledge of Shakespeare, though he admired him, is derived from the same untrustworthy source; of any large part of English literature he necessarily knows nothing at all. Accordingly—in a fashion which is nearly unique in this history, but which is priceless in its unicity—the disadvantages which have been powerless to affect his general conceptions recover their hold upon him, to some extent, in particulars. He is still sound on what the _general_ merits of poetry and of literature should be; but he sees those merits in the wrong place. At first sight, to an English reader who is not thoroughly broken to the ways of our difficult art, it may seem impossible, inconceivable, a bad joke, that the author of the aphorisms above quoted as to the necessity of “transport,” the power of words, and all the rest of it, should admire Delille and not admire Milton. But remember, he understood the _words_ of Delille—they had, feeble as they were, the power to excite, according to his own true and profound theory, that poetry which was ready to answer and magnify them in his own soul. He did not understand the _words_ of Milton, and they could not touch him; while he is certainly not to blame for not being touched by the words of Louis Racine.

[Sidenote: _The reason for this._]

This is the most striking instance, the most astounding at first, the most illuminative afterwards; and it will give us a key to all the rest. It must for instance be a fresh stumbling-block, and no small one, to find Joubert, who could prefer Delille to Milton, quite cool, almost harsh, to Racine, saying that Racine is “the Virgil of the ignorant,” that those whom he suffices are “poor souls and poor wits.” But the way round the obstacle is perfectly clear to the practised traveller in our country. Racine’s was not the poetry of Joubert’s own time and generation; Delille’s was. His language, his words, his imagery could convey whatsoever of poetry was in them—though it might not be very much—to Joubert’s ears and wit and soul better than Racine’s could. And once more, as those ears and wit and soul were exquisitely sensitive to even a trace of poetry that _did_ reach them, the difficulty becomes no difficulty at all, but, on the contrary, a real paradox of the most illuminating and helpful kind, constantly to be remembered, and especially good against those estimable doctrinaires who will have a hard and fast hierarchy in poetry, a “best, better, good, not so good, bad,” arranged in rigid classes. _That is poetry to a man which produces on him such poetical effects as he is capable of receiving._ The reader takes it, as the writer makes it, _poeticamente_. You may possibly—it is not certain, but it is possible—_educate_ his poetic sense; say to it, “Friend, come up higher.” You may certainly remove merely mechanical obstacles, such as Joubert’s ignorance of English. But until something of this kind is done, it is better that the man should even excessively admire Burns or Béranger, Macaulay or Moore, than that he should simulate admiration of Shelley, or Hugo, or Heine. It would be pleasant to dwell on this, which has never, I think, been dwelt upon, or expounded fully before; but words to the wise must be here, as always, our motto: the hints given can easily here, as elsewhere, be expanded by those who have the wits and the inclination.

[Sidenote: _Additional illustrations._]

Some further instances, however, may and must be given of the working of this curious state of things, which makes a critic equal to the very greatest we have met in abstract appreciation of poetry and literature, the inferior of many we have met—if not of most who were good critics at all—in his appreciation of individuals. There is the germ of a most important general censure on “Naturalism” (a thing once more far ahead) in his remark on Boccaccio, that he “adds nothing to the story,” that he “respects the tale as he would respect a truth,” a position interesting to compare with the constant protests of the Goncourts and their fellows against what has been called “_dis_realising.”[220] “Boileau est un grand poète, mais dans la demi-poésie,” though a little epigrammatic, is true enough. His few remarks on Molière argue, as we should expect, a rather lukewarm admiration; but he is among the highest praisers of La Fontaine, ranking him as (of course this is before the nineteenth century) fuller of poetry than any other French author. (Note again that this means, “fuller of poetry _which can bring itself into contact with Joubert’s mind_.”) He admits that his beloved Delille has only “sounds and colours” in his head, but then they are the sounds and colours that Joubert can see and hear, and he knows rightly that sounds and colours make more than half of poetry. As for the ancients, he remarks with great truth, that Cicero, whom nevertheless he admired much, has “more taste and discernment than real criticism.” And then we find the moralist in the remark, that Catullus unites the “two things which make the worst mixture in the world, _mignardise_ and coarseness,” and that “ses airs sont jolis, mais son instrument est baroque,” another curious instance of the inability of the Latin race to value the second greatest poet of Latin. Joubert, you see, did not like the indecency of Catullus, and he did not like his “bitterness,” as Quintilian calls it; and the dislike barred the poetic contact. On the other hand, he could see and feel Tacitus. That Pascal is “exempt from all passion” seems an odd judgment, though I could, I think, explain it. He is excellent on Bossuet and Fénelon: less so, I think, on Malebranche.

On his own eighteenth century one turns to him with much interest, but the utterances are too detailed for us to linger on them. They have the perspicacity (if sometimes a little of the injustice) of an escaped pupil of the _philosophes_. He is very valuable on Rousseau, but that “a Voltaire is good for nothing at any time,” though he had acknowledged many literary gifts and graces in this Voltaire, is not merely unjust, but _saugrenu_. Still it certainly raises the point of law, whether “good for nothing” literature, which is good literature, is not good for something.

[Sidenote: _General remarks._]

A few more general remarks may perhaps be made on this critic, who contrasts so remarkably with all the rest of the critics of the Empire, and not least remarkably with his friend Chateaubriand and with Madame de Staël, beside whom alone of this numerous group he can be placed. It will be seen that while he is free from “Corinne’s” hasty generalisations and indigestible “philosophy of literature,” while he has a less extended knowledge of literatures (though probably a much more accurate one) than hers, he actually far transcends her in real philosophy of view, that he takes a sight of all poetry, all literature, and their qualities, which is aquiline alike in sweep and searchingness. Further, that though his knowledge is again more accurate than Chateaubriand’s, it is more circumscribed, and that he cannot relish some particular things which Chateaubriand could, yet that once more he excels his friend in clearness, ideality, comprehension, and depth. That finally (though the matter of this is to come), in comparison with all the other Empire critics, from Fontanes and Geoffroy downwards, a similar _distinguendum_ has to be observed. One Joubert—the Joubert of the general views and of the sections on style and poetry—is far over their heads, out of their sight and reach. The other Joubert—the Joubert of the particular judgments—is very much nearer them, though he is sometimes, not always, their superior.

What is certain, however, is, that this particular kind of doubleness (we have seen others more common) is extraordinarily rare—that though faint touches of it may appear here and there, they are not more than faint. Joubert’s descriptions of poetry and his admiration of Delille are no parallel to Longinus’ definitions of the Sublime and his failure fully to admire the _Odyssey_. There is no conflict of the higher and the lower rule, but only an unexampled—yet when we come to think of it, perfectly natural—inability to get the higher rule into play. If one could have had not merely the gift of tongues, but the gift of conferring it, it would have been perhaps the most interesting experiment possible in the critical sphere to have made Joubert a thorough proficient in English, and _then_ to have seen whether he failed to see the beauties of Milton. Meanwhile he remains isolated. I do not think Mr Arnold’s comparison of him to Coleridge a very happy one, though there are no doubt certain resemblances—the Coleridgean depreciation of French poetry in relation to the Joubertian of English is the most striking of these, and might seem sufficient. I do not think Coleridge depreciated French poetry because he could not hear it: Mr Arnold himself practically admitted that _he_ did, and he is therefore himself a better parallel. And Coleridge had the excuse, which Mr Arnold had not, that French had, in literature accessible to him, hardly tried the whole compass of its lyre at all. But this is a digression, only excused by its helping to point the assertion that there is no one like Joubert—for Mr Arnold himself knew French very well indeed.

[Sidenote: _The other “Empire Critics.”_]

To all these three remarkable writers the term “Empire Critics,” which has obtained a certain solid position in critical history from the use made of it by Sainte-Beuve,[221] might, as far as chronology goes, be applied. But they are not the writers who are generally denoted by the term, these being rather a group extending from Fontanes through Ginguené, Garat, Geoffroy, Dussault, Feletz, Lemercier, Marie-Joseph Chenier, Hoffman, and others, down to Villemain and Cousin, who belong in part even to the Second Empire, but still represent an older tradition than the men strictly of 1830. They have been of late somewhat forgotten and neglected, despite Sainte-Beuve’s weighty pleas for them;[222] and perhaps in hardly a single case (I am not forgetting the once mighty name of Villemain himself) do they supply us with a critic of the highest class. But they are extremely important to history; we cannot really understand the criticism of the last seventy years itself without them. And I do not regret the time that I have myself spent on them, though I do not propose, as Agamemnon would say, to equal my treatment of them to that time itself.

[Sidenote: _Fontanes._]

The novice in these matters who goes from Sainte-Beuve’s repeated and respectful notices of Fontanes to the latter’s _Œuvres_[223] may be a little puzzled, even if he take due heed to the fact that these Works are, as far as the criticism goes at any rate, only “selected.” There is not very much in bulk; and what there is may not seem, according to the severe Arnoldian standard, “chief and principal.” An introduction and some notes to his translation of the _Essay on Man_, articles on Chateaubriand, on Madame de Staël, on the “emphatic” Thomas, &c.:—“we can do all these for ourselves if we want them, which we mostly do not,” is likely to be the verdict of the impatient.

But it should not be allowed to stand. Fontanes shows us, in a manner made more historically important by the fact that for a long time he was a sort of Minister of Literature to Napoleon, that turning, that transition, which is the subject of this whole chapter. He still, and naturally, has a great deal of the eighteenth century in him; but he can see the vacuity and the frigidity of eighteenth-century “emphasis.” He is responsible[224] for teaching Victor Hugo that Voltaire taught _us_ to admire Shakespeare, one of the most remarkable mare’s-nests in critical history. But, his eyes perhaps sharpened a little by personal friendship, he perceived to a very large extent, if not fully, the importance of the _Génie du Christianisme_. So there may have been mixed motives in his different reception of Madame de Staël’s theories; but there is a singular and satisfactory compound of eighteenth-century good sense and nineteenth-century catholicity in his dealing with her fantasticalities about North and South. He is himself rather rhetorical at times, but seldom to the loss of sobriety; and he is altogether a good sample, a good tell-tale, of the attitude of the inhabitants of a landslip—as we may call it—who see their old marks changing relation and bearing, who do not wholly like it, but who are capable of adapting themselves, at any rate to some extent, to the change.

[Sidenote: _Geoffroy._]

Another interesting and representative person is Geoffroy,[225] who incurred the strictures of Joubert, and has had them “passed on” by Mr Arnold. Geoffroy—the pillar for many years of the _Année Littéraire_ and of the _Débats_, the “Folliculus” of Luce de Lancival—has received from Gosse (M. Etienne, not Mr Edmund) the praise of having “toujours marché dans la même route et à la lueur du flambeau qu’il avait choisi dès le commencement.” In other words _immutatus et immutabilis_—an attribution magnificent in some relations of life; not, perhaps, as we have before noted, in criticism. Geoffroy’s road and torch might have been better chosen.

He, too, feels his time—if he is by no means a Romantic before or at the birth of Romanticism, he is hardly more of a Voltairian. But he is first of all “against” everything and everybody—a child of Momus.[226] He is doubtful about Corneille and Molière; even Racine is not “perfect” for him. But his most characteristic passage is perhaps one which occurs at page 137, vol. ii., of his work cited below. It is a real _point de repère_, because it is one of the last authoritative expressions of a sentiment—no doubt not yet extinct, but for a long time kept to some extent in check—the French belief in the absolute superiority of French literature and the impossibility of a foreigner being a judge of it—the impertinence even of his attempting to judge it. Geoffroy rates Blair in the most approved pedagogic fashion for expressing the opinion—now probably entertained by the majority of Frenchmen themselves—that _Phèdre_ is a greater play than _Iphigénie_, and for assigning the reason that _Iphigénie_ is too French. He blames the Edinburgh professor roundly for “meddling with our authors”; the opinions are not disputable opinions merely—they are “errors”; Blair and Edinburgh “ought to be ashamed” of them; they show that the critic “knows nothing about the matter.” Similar things are, of course, said to-day in England as well as in France; but _they_ only show the temper of the particular critic, not the theory of prevailing criticism. Yet Geoffroy, if only from cross-grainedness, helped in the unsettling of the merely traditional view of literature: and so did service.

[Sidenote: _Dussault._]

His contemporary and fellow-worker on the _Débats_, Dussault, is of a different type.[227] He is much more amiable in his judgments—has, indeed, the credit of being a sort of maker of things pleasant all round; but he is in principle much more reactionary—he is perhaps the most so of this group of critics, till they were exacerbated by the Revolters, to whom he himself refers as _anarchistes littéraires_. He is a staunch Bolæan; and if he has to admit (as with the growth of literary history it was by his time almost impossible for any one not to admit) that the _Art Poétique_ is not complete, _c’est du moins bien écrit_. But he goes far beyond this elsewhere; and on the 26th of April, 1817— the very year when a certain _enfant sublime_ presented himself as a competitor for an Academic prize—he asks, undoubting of the fact, “Pourquoi la constitution du Parnasse est elle si solide et si durable?” That the disciples of the Greek and Latin Muses should have anything to learn by going to “Runes” and such like things is _nullement possible_. Fairy tales are “absurd.” Even the _avant-courriers_ of the French classic age meet with no mercy; and Balzac himself is credited merely with “bad taste.”

[Sidenote: _Hoffman, Garat, &c._]

Of another member of the staff of the _Débats_ in its early days, Hoffman, I know less than of these.[228] He was, like most of the group, a dramatist, and as might be expected, and as was the case with all of them, the double employments reacted not quite beneficially on each other. Like Geoffroy (with whom, however, he was at variance, and who told him in effect, with characteristic sweetness, to go back to his dramatic gallipots and leave criticism alone) he frowned on the youth of Romanticism, and seems generally to have been of the race and lineage of Rymer. Garat, not very weighty as a politician, possesses little more worth, if any, as a critic, though he had vogue as an _éloge_-writer. Daunou, who wrote noticeable notices on Ginguené and others, began his career by a critical essay, two years before the Revolution, on the influence of Boileau, and was during all his life more or less concerned with criticism. But he was more of a historian and student of the political sciences than of a literary critic of the pure breed. Etienne, Fiévée, Legouvé the elder, the two Lacretelles, Andrieux,[229] and others, we must also pass by, though I have matter for speaking of all of them: but Ginguené, M. J. Chénier, Népomucène Lemercier, and Feletz are not to be thus dismissed.

[Sidenote: _Ginguené._]

The first was an older man than most of the group—in fact, he was over forty at the date of the Revolution, from the tender mercies of which he was only saved by Thermidor. But he ranks in literature, and especially in critical literature, chiefly by his _Histoire Littéraire d’Italie_,[230] which did not begin to appear till the second decade of the nineteenth century had opened, and was one of the earliest of these comprehensive surveys of literature—other than the writer’s own or than that of antiquity—which have had almost more to do than anything else with the formation of modern criticism. He has been accused of relying too much on Tiraboschi for his material; but the vice of looking rather at the commentators than at the texts was an old one, inherited from classical scholarship, and is by no means extinct a hundred years after Ginguené's time; and he is rather less tinged with it than we might expect. His judgments on such—to a Frenchman of the eighteenth century— dangerous writers as Dante and La Casa have considerable merit.

[Sidenote: _M. J. Chénier._]

Marie-Joseph Chénier, in other respects besides his relations to his ill-fated and illustrious brother, appears to have been an unpopular and disputable person: nor, putting his considerable satiric power aside, can he be called a great man of letters. But, I think, his _Tableau de la Littérature Française depuis 1789_,[231] has been rather undervalued. It is not, of course, free from the common defects of these surveys, especially when taken _à bout portant_; it notices much that we do not want noticed at all, belittles important things, takes refuge in stock phrases and _clichés_ so as to get the business over. But it is often acute and very much less one-sided and hide-bound than La Harpe or Geoffroy—recognising, for instance, in opposition to the latter, that Blair is “always just” to French writers. And it supplies us, written as it was just before the dawn of Romanticism (for Chénier died in 1811), with some interesting and necessarily unbiassed views. People, he says,[232] do not read Le Bossu at all, and they read Bouhours very little. He greatly prefers Diderot and Marmontel (though he thinks them “paradoxical”) to Batteux; and if he is complimentary to Voltaire and even to Thomas, rejoices in Fénelon and Corneille. He cannot, or will not, understand Chateaubriand;[233] but he takes frequent opportunity, under the guise of noticing translations, to refer to and estimate English and German literature. In short, he is open to the reproach of “not knowing where he is,” but the very evidences of this are useful to us.

[Sidenote: _Lemercier._]

Still more relatively, and very much more intrinsically interesting, is Népomucène Lemercier—that singular first sketch of a Victor Hugo, who, naturally enough, would have none of Victor Hugo himself when he appeared, and who, in a cruel trick of Fate and Death, was actually supplanted by Hugo in his Academic Chair. It is unfortunate that Lemercier’s _Cours de Littérature Générale_[234] is not a very common book. It has something of the excessive generalisation of the eighteenth-century—men were struck by the effect of measured sounds and wrote poetry, &c.; and he still sticks to Kinds a good deal. But his independence is unmistakable. He slights the unities superbly; has what is, I think, the finest passage on Shakespeare written by a Frenchman up to his day, on “The English Aeschylus;” condemns _la pernicieuse manie de critiquer opiniâtrement_; qualifies and redeems his tendency to begin “in the air” with “_the_ chimerical,” “_the_ marvellous,” “_the_ allegoric,” &c., by invariably condescending upon particulars in the true critical way; and, as became the author of the _Panhypocrisiade_ and _Pinto_, defends Aristophanes against La Harpe. Unfortunately he followed (intentionally or not) Aristotle in confining himself to Drama and Epic. But he is a really stimulating and germinal writer, and represents the morrow among his own contemporaries.

[Sidenote: _Feletz._]

Our last critic, before we come to those who in a way stand for both Empires, is a curious contrast both to the critic of the type of Geoffroy and to the critic of the type of Lemercier. Charles Marie Dorimont, Abbé de Feletz,[235] who died in the very middle of the nineteenth century at the age of eighty-three, was with Geoffroy himself, Dussault, and Hoffman, one of the _Débats_ Four, and like them was something of an anti-Romantic. But he was a man of amiable temper, of many friends and of much addiction to society, so that he rather flicked than lashed. His information as to the foreign subjects which he often affected was not exhaustive, and the praise, as well as the blame, of his not quite novel remark that in the _pièces difformes et barbares_ of Shakespeare there are _beautés veritables_, are both weakened by the fact that he thinks Falstaff is hanged on the Stage in the _Merry Wives_. But he reviews novels obviously by preference, can like _Joseph Andrews_, and can enjoy Miss Edgeworth. In which things a door, great and effectual, is opened, though Feletz doubtless knew it not.[236]

[Sidenote: _Cousin._]

Of the remarkable pair[237]—united in their lives, their careers and their reputation—who, being first known under the first Empire, died in the same year a little before the close of the second, Cousin concerns us less than may be generally thought. He touched not a few literary subjects,[238] but always preferably, and for the most part exclusively, from the philosophical, social, or some other non-literary side. [Sidenote: _Villemain_:] With Villemain it is different. He, too, was a politician, a historian, and what not, but he was a man of letters, and a man of critical letters, first of all. His second Academic prize, as a very young man, was gained by a paper on “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Criticism;” of the fifteen volumes of his collected works[239] the greater part consists of literary history or estimate; he was Professor of “Eloquence Française,” that is to say French Literature; he was for a long period of years almost autocratic in the distribution of prizes and promotions at the Academy, of which he was “Secrétaire Perpetuel;” and it has long been, and to some extent still is, the correct and orthodox thing to speak of him as having initiated the modern critical movement in France, and shared with the Schlegels the credit of initiating that of Europe generally.

[Sidenote: _his claims_:]

From all this men must come to the fifteen volumes with high expectations—a little chequered perhaps in the case of the wary by some cautions of Sainte-Beuve’s.[240] To describe the result as unmixed disappointment would be unfair. The mere dates and contents of the books taken together establish the fact that the debt owed by literary and critical history to Villemain is great, and one of those which will never be written off the _grand livre_ of the subject. That between 1816, the year of his appointment as Professor, and 1828, that of the first publication of his _Cours de la Littérature Française_, French students first, and then French readers, had presented to them for the first time a survey of their literature, which included a historical view of its own origins and earlier achievements, and something like a comparative view of the achievements of other nations, is a thing the greatness of which is not likely to be denied or minimised here. Villemain’s style is always correct and agreeable, and he did much to establish, for French criticism in the nineteenth-century, that repute for “honeying the cup,” which has become something of a superstition. Sainte-Beuve, in the passage just referred to, may give him a little too much credit for acuteness and wit in his individual observations, but he has both.

[Sidenote: _Deductions to be made from them._]

Unluckily, however, the entries on the other side of the sheet are numerous and grave. There is not merely the fault, which his great successor justly brings against him—a fault from which, by the way, Sainte-Beuve himself was by no means free—that Villemain is afraid of _concluding_, that he seldom or never gives you a clear, “grasped,” summed-up view of his whole subject or man. Very few critics do. But in details also his work is too often unsatisfactory. His numerous “Reports” on academic competitions, which give opportunity for excellent criticism, are elegant, but hollow and rhetorical, as is his rather famous _Tableau de l’Eloquence Chrétienne au IVème Siècle_. His notices of various ancient and modern writers are much boiled down from others, with the result, not usual in physical boiling-down, of being not thick but thin—those of Lucretius, and of the tempting and almost virgin subject of the Greek Romances, especially so. Comparative and liberal as he is, his judgment of Shakespeare will not stand beside Lemercier’s (he says definitely that Shakespeare does _not_ provide, in the same proportion as the Greeks, “universal beauties”), and his estimate of Milton is beggarly beside Chateaubriand’s. With all his reputation for rehabilitating mediæval literature, he seems to have known it little: he is not merely very superficial on Chaucer, which might be pardonable in a Frenchman, but actually sweeps the mighty volume of the _Chansons de geste_ away at one stroke by the words “we had no poetry at once rude and vigorous.” He is sound upon _Ossian_—that craze was dying and could survive even rudimentary comparative study of literature in no one of talent; and his thirty-ninth and fortieth lectures in the _Cours_ on Criticism itself deserve to be very well spoken of. But on the whole he is disappointing. We must, of course, make allowance—very large allowance—for a pioneer who begins early, who finds others, during the course of his long life, extending his own explorations far beyond his own limits, and who, from other engagements, from routine, or from sheer disenchantment or worse, declines to follow them; we must increase it for his industry in other matters; we must give him his just part and royalty in the accomplishment of those who followed, and not a few of whom he actually taught, while all owed him something indirectly. But intrinsically and absolutely I do not find him a very great or even a very good critic. He is deficient in enthusiasm, in originality, in grasp: nor does he quite make up the deficiency by erudition and method.

[Sidenote: _Beyle._]

Two remarkable persons, one standing apart a little—as he, like his disciple Mérimée, always and in all things did—the other a polyhistoric talent just short of genius, have yet to be mentioned: and these are Henri Beyle and Charles Nodier. Beyle was, in a sense, nothing if not critical; and the spirit of criticism pervades all his work, both the earlier and better known novels and nondescripts, and the posthumous volumes (deserving very much the same alliteration), which have more recently been made known by the devoted labours of M. Stryienski. But the “place” for his literary criticism is, of course, _Racine et Shakespeare_, published in 1822, ere yet the Romantic party (to which Beyle himself never belonged) was fully formed, but when the principles “atmosphered” by Diderot, and held in various ways and degrees from Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael onward, had already begun to influence Frenchmen at large.

[Sidenote: _Racine et Shakespeare._]

The book itself[241] is a very curious one. Originally making its bow as a couple of review articles, it received all sorts of accretions, internal and appended, and, in its latest form especially, is something of a _potpourri_. The title so far applies to the whole that the author is generally supporting the _methods_ of Shakespeare against the _methods_ of Racine: but a very small portion of the book is directly occupied with either. And an unwary reader, expecting to find a straightforward and consistent Romantic propaganda, may be almost hopelessly puzzled, not merely by Beyle’s zigzag digressions striking in all directions like forked lightning, but by such things as his constant and sustained polemic against Molière, who has generally been the one writer of the _grand siècle_ (or with Corneille one of the two writers) taken under Romantic protection. In fact no book can better illustrate the confusion and yeastiness of thought in that early Romantic period, and the unconquerable, even when perverse, idiosyncrasy and individuality of Beyle himself. Much of the piece is an attack upon verse-tragedy _as_ verse, for here, as elsewhere, this partisan of the greatest of all poets distinctly frowns on poetry as such. He bases himself on Scott almost as much as on Shakespeare, yet he is terribly disturbed by Sir Walter’s politics, and recurs again and again, more in sorrow than in anger, but with singular lack of humour,[242] to the story of the glass that George IV. drank out of, and that Scott first pocketed and then sat upon. Politics, indeed, run very high throughout, and one is never quite sure that Beyle’s dislike of Racine and Molière is not mainly (he would himself admit it as partly) based on dislike of an absolute monarchy and a courtly state of society. Here he divagates into a long controversy with the unfortunate _perruque_ Auger: elsewhere into an almost totally irrelevant excursus on Lord Byron, Italy, and the wickedness of the English aristocracy. Yet he cannot help being critically valuable almost everywhere, and he generally “says true things,” though he constantly “calls them by wrong names.” How forcible and original is the definition of Scott’s[243] form of novel as “a romantic tragedy [or, we may add, ‘a romantic comedy’], with long inserted descriptions.” His battle[244] early in the piece with a “Classic” on the dramatic _illusion parfaite_ and _illusion imparfaite_, is conducted in a masterly and victorious manner, though some of us would like to challenge the victor to another duel, on the point whether _theatrical_ illusion is not always, and of necessity, even less than “imperfect,” and whether to obtain perfect “illusion” you must not _read_ and read only.[245] Excellently acute too, for his time, though to ours it may seem a truism, is his attribution of most critical errors to _l’habitude choquée_:[246] and though there is both exaggeration and undue restriction in saying that “Romanticism is the art of giving people themselves pleasure, Classicism that of giving them what pleased their grandfathers,”[247] we know what he means. He is very sound on taste and fashion; and his severity on Voltaire is refreshing, because it cannot be attributed, as it is the fashion to attribute severities on that patriarch, to the _odium theologicum_. The whole, even in its singularities and shortcomings, is an invaluable testimony to the set of the current at the time:[248] but its words are not lightly to be taken as other than “words to the wise,” and they are not invariably the words _of_ the wise.

[Sidenote: _His attitude here_]

Beyle’s attitude in this tract has been commented on in a fashion very illuminative (if you apply the proper checks in each case) by two persons of unsurpassed competence, but not of quite unsurpassed disinterestedness, Mérimée and Sainte-Beuve. The former[249] says plumply, “Pour lui la poésie était lettre close,” and quotes the famous _boutade_ in _De l’Amour_, that “Verse was invented as an aid to memory.” His objection, says his disciple, to Racine (who “met with his sovereign displeasure”) was that he had no character or local colour: his reasons of preference for Shakespeare, that poet’s knowledge of the human heart, the life and individuality of his characters, his command of the nicest shades of passion and sentiment. Sainte-Beuve, on his side,[250] affects rather to pooh-pooh the whole matter, as if it were a battle of kites and crows, where the blood (if any) has been long absorbed, the torn feathers blown away, and the dust settled to quietness. Beyle was a fairly early, but excited and not quite judicious partaker in it. He was unjust to La Harpe (Sainte-Beuve defending La Harpe is rather good!), too much on the side of the _Edinburgh Review_ (this is better,[251] the “Blue and Yellow” as a Romantic organ!). One remembers, of course, at once that both these great men of letters were, if not exactly deserters and traitors in regard to Romanticism, at any rate Romantics whose first love had grown pretty cold. Yet we must not forget to notice that Sainte-Beuve practically confirms Mérimée on Beyle’s “exclusion of poetry” in judging even Shakespeare.

[Sidenote: _and elsewhere._]

Nor do we need these great accuser-compurgators. The singular self-revelations which have been communicated so lavishly of late years, tell us, sometimes on every page, sometimes at longer, but never at very long, intervals, of Beyle’s abiding interest in literature, and of its curious character, Most part of the letters[252] which he, as little more than a boy, wrote to his younger sister, Pauline, is occupied with literary and educational advice, nearly as surprising in its meticulous and affectionate pedagogism as the writer’s almost contemporary _Journal_ is in very different ways. In both, and elsewhere, we find the ever-growing passion for Shakespeare, from the dramatic and psychological side, the ever-growing distaste for Racine, the admiration of Corneille, and the contempt of Voltaire—the latter an excellent subject for separate and careful study, inasmuch as we have in it Beyle’s Romanticism engaging and overcoming his anti-religiosity. Among the most curious documents noted here—where I think I have noted some that are curious—is the letter to Pauline of May 12, 1807, from Berlin, where Beyle has just discovered _Lenore_ “across the veil which covers the genius of the German tongue from” him, and thinks it very touching.