Chapter IV: Diderot and the French Transition (3)

Indeed Beyle in point of criticism is _polypidax_: though the streams are, as it were, underground for the most part, they gush out in the most apparently unlikely places. I have dozens of noted passages, for instance, in that singular and most readable book the _Mémoires d’un Touriste_,[253] certainly not a probable title-source of our matter, and some even in the _Promenades dans Rome_. He resembled Hazlitt in the way in which his criticism was liable to be distorted and poisoned by extra-literary prejudice, more particularly of the anti-clerical kind. I never knew a man so tormented with the idea of something in which he did not—or said he did not—believe, as Beyle is with the idea of Hell. It sometimes makes him very nearly silly, and constantly makes him lose occasions of combined magnanimity and pure literary judgment, as wherever he speaks of Joseph de Maistre.[254] But, as in Hazlitt’s case also, you seldom or never find a literary judgment of Beyle’s, free from prejudice, which is not sound.

[Sidenote: _Nodier._]

For those who like _Vitae Parallelae_, with a spice, or more than a spice, of contrast, Nodier[255] makes an excellent pendant to Beyle: and while his influence was much more rapid, it was wider also, if not deeper. Nodier began his romantic and “xenomaniac” excursions with the century, writing on Shakespeare in 1801 and on Goethe in 1802. I have chased in the catalogues, but without bagging, a collection of early reviews of his, published by Barginet of Grenoble in 1822, which ought to be of very considerable interest for our purpose. It is well known how, especially after his appointment to the librarianship of the Arsenal in 1823, his abode became a rallying-place, and he himself a sort of Nestor-Ulysses of Romanticism, while his delightful fantastic, or half-fantastic stories (the best of them to my thinking is _Inès de las Sierras_), which are Sterne _plus_ Hoffmann _plus_ something else, form no small part of the choicest outcome of the movement. But in criticism proper, Nodier, though a great propelling and inspiring force, has left rather inadequate recorded examples of this force in application. This is partly due to the fact that his intense interest in pure bibliography, and in the “curiosities of literature,” drew him, as similar interests have often drawn others, a little away from that severer altar on which burns the fire of pure literary and critical appreciation. His principal book of this kind, perhaps his principal non-creative work, _Mélanges tirés d’une Petite Bibliothèque_,[256] shows this very clearly: and it may rather be feared that Nodier would have preferred a perfectly worthless book, of which he possessed an unique copy, or an extremely eccentric one, of which hardly anybody had ever heard, to the greatest work which everybody knew and had on their shelves. But still he did like much of the best of what was known, and, fortunately, directed his liking most to that of the best which was not so well known as it ought to be. And so there are few more characteristic names—and few names of more power—than his in the French Transition.