Chapter II: Mil-Huit-Cent-Trente (2)

Towards the last he turned a little too much to the political, and though at the very end the long batch on Talleyrand is succeeded by one equally long on his old favourite, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, the amiable Marceline is not quite a poetess of importance enough, nor is the part actually devoted to her poetry large enough, to make the swan-song quite literary. But there is plenty of genuine matter everywhere, and even the contemporary articles afford room for justice at last to Gautier, and for a long and attractive review of _La Poesie en 1865_, where M. Sully Prudhomme, and others not even yet quite out of fashion, appear. It may be that something of the irrational and superstitious _guignon_ of continuations attaches to these _Nouveaux Lundis_: but surely very little.[607]

[Sidenote: _The conclusion of this matter._]

Why more? Indeed, save to observe the proportion and method of the book (which are of the first importance), and to pay proper respect to a prince in the critical Israel (which is hardly of less), why so much? Except for the vast bulk of his work, and for the fact that it is not collected into definite “Works,” but exists under a large number of separate headings, some of which may be overlooked, Sainte-Beuve’s criticism offers itself with almost every advantage and facility to the reader. It has to the full those superficial attractions of “readableness” which have given to French criticism its popular position; and it lacks those superficialities in the other sense, which detract from the value of French criticism so often. The immense variety not merely provides something specially interesting for almost everybody who has any literary, historical, or, one might almost say, intellectual interests at all, but prevents tedium or satiety in those whose interests are wider. The style, though neither coruscating, nor treacly, nor enigmatic, is—in its perfection and when it has outgrown some early defects—“the model of the middle style” in criticism, suitable for the purpose and the writer’s temperament. It can say anything that the author wishes to say, and does not try to say what he cannot.

But we must examine the results which he gives a little more closely before concluding, and, according to the good old plan, take the deficiencies, or the want of supremacies, first. As has been put, with examples, above, Sainte-Beuve is not entirely to be trusted with the out-of-the-way, the eccentric, even the abnormally great. The very _ethos_ of the critic exposes him to this, and the opposite fault—the _engouement_ for everything that _is_ out of the way, that _is_ eccentric, that _is_ abnormal, whether great or not—is not merely an excess of a critical virtue, but a serious, an almost disqualifying critical defect. Still, to be able to admire and recognise the “earth-born and absolute fire”[608] is, if not a critical _sine qua non_—for without it the critic may do good work—yet his rarest and noblest gift. Sainte-Beuve had it not quite.

There is room for more difference of competent opinion as to his abstinence from the most definite posing and placing—from the final arrangement of his portraits exactly as he wished to have them seen by his readers, and to stand in relation to each other. There is, of course, its own merit in that abstinence, which is (as it was in the earlier case of Villemain) something of a reaction from the fondness of his “Empire” predecessors for the trenchant, the peremptory, the official distinction and ticket. There had been very much too much of this during the Neo-classic period; and there has been, to put it mildly, quite enough and to spare of it since. Nevertheless, one may think that Sainte-Beuve, though he never, as his countrymen too often do, leaves you uninformed, does too often leave you floating—undecided even as to what his own definite view of the man’s or work’s value, relation, position, may be. Now this surely is a slight defect. When one wants a picture, one does not want merely a sheet of drawing-paper, with the most accurate and “genial” studies of eye, nose, chin, mouth, hair, scattered anyhow about it, but the complete, or at any rate the outlined, face made up from these studies.

I can think of no general fault save these two, and we are not now to hark back to particulars. The tale of general and particular excellences is more agreeable to construct, but more difficult to put in little. The head and front of Sainte-Beuve’s critical welldoing he has himself put excellently and more than once. To read; to understand; to love:—and then to facilitate reading, understanding, and loving on the part of others—these are the first and second great commandments of the critic. And few, surely, have obeyed them better. He may be a little cumbered about much serving—we do not (that is those of us who want criticism) always want such Persic apparatus of biography and history and gossip. But the Persic apparatus is very agreeable in itself, and sometimes even not useless. And there is plenty of the plain leg of critical mutton— well fed, well killed, well kept, and well dressed. Only perhaps a certain degree of expertness can fully appreciate, but ordinary sense and taste must surely not fail to perceive, the range of reading which is—be it again and again repeated—in all but the most extraordinary cases the _necessarium_, if not the _unum necessarium_, of the critic. Common-sense and taste are perhaps at least equally well prepared with the expertest _expertise_ to recognise, if they are given their way, the sanity and the equity, the patience and the thoroughness, the freedom from crotchet and caprice, from the merely parochial and the merely particularist, which distinguish Sainte-Beuve from almost all other critics. He was, as we have seen, very lucky; few have had at once his gifts, and his opportunities of exercising them, and that rarest and happiest gift of “the Hour,” without which Gift, and even in some sense Opportunity, will fail to estate a man in his proper place. But the Hour has seldom found the Man so ready: and the Man has in no single instance in our department, and in few throughout all, requited the Hour by leaving such fruits of it for all time to come.

The general discussion of the Classic-Romantic quarrel—so far as we can deal with it—will be for the Interchapters; and it is not even very easy here to make a methodic distinction between the names who will best appear in this chronicle side by side with Sainte-Beuve, and those who should figure in the corresponding chapter of the next Book as his successors. But applying something of the same method which has helped us before, we may perhaps most conveniently group beside him Victor Hugo as a matter of course, with, of the rest, five representative figures— Gautier for the Romantic farthest, the out-and-out partisans of “art-for-art”; Nisard for the Classical reaction; Saint-Marc Girardin as an example of that Academic criticism which has always been so important in France, and which with and after Villemain took a new colour; Planche, as the most noteworthy champion of the other school (yet not so “other” but that the two interpenetrate and overlap) of the critics who are purely men of letters, and almost purely journalists; and Magnin for the pure scholars. The rest, with one or two exceptions, but not excepting so famous a man as Janin, will bear postponement, can even be postponed with advantage. The chief exception is Mérimée; here, as always, by the joint efforts of Fate and himself, alone. But the great twin names of Michelet and Quinet may require a little mention here, and before proceeding even to Hugo.

[Sidenote: _Michelet and Quinet._]

These two inseparables—more inseparable even than the other pair, Cousin and Villemain—must, I fear, be also among those whom I shall seem to some readers to slight. Both, but especially Quinet,[609] were of course saturated with literature. From his first translation of Herder to his posthumous work on the Greek genius, Quinet was always dealing with the subject, often _nominatim_, seldom in very remote fashion. Michelet no doubt directed himself more to the purely historical side of that historical study of humanity which he learnt from Vico, and Quinet probably from Herder himself. Literary citations, literary parallels, literary suggestions swarm in Michelet; even the ’45 seems to him (the origin of the notion is obvious enough, but thinking it out will be found uncommonly difficult) “a Canto of _Ossian_.” But for our purposes the pair are almost disqualified—Michelet more than Quinet, but Quinet very mainly—by two things. The first is that confusion—whither derived from Vico or from the Germans does not matter—of literature with history, sociology, politics, psychology, and the like, which has seemed orthodox to the two last generations, but which to me appears a dangerous delusion and confusion. The other is the peculiar _voyant_ thought and style of both, which precludes them from taking anything like a clear and achromatic view of any literary matter, even if they had endeavoured to do so. Not that the prophet cannot be a critic, for we have been able to disentangle some extremely clear, trenchant, and (however disputable) orderly and logical dicta of criticism from Blake: and Carlyle’s deficiencies, where he is deficient as a critic, do not at all come from this cause. But maresnesting, and night-maresnesting in special, is the very worst possible—perhaps one might say the very most impossible—occupation for a critic; and while Quinet was often, Michelet was almost always, in quest of the variety and the sub-variety of nest.

[Sidenote: _Hugo._]

The temperament of Victor Hugo[610] was perhaps as uncritical a one as any man ever possessed, or as ever possessed any man: but the strength of his genius was such that it could hardly fail to confer mastery, at any rate for a time, on its various literary applications. When the sins of temperament had become besetting and habitual, and the genius was—in this respect, not others—a little failed, his criticism became scarcely more than a curiosity; when the genius was still in its prime, and the temperament had not broken through all control, it is sometimes of a very notable character. _William Shakespeare_[611] is the best text-book of the later and worse state; the _Prefaces_ to the _Cromwell_,[612] to the _Orientales_,[613] and the _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_[614] of the earlier and better. To take the worst first, though there are fine things in the _Shakespeare_ book,—there could not fail to be, seeing that it was written, _en regardant l’océan_, by Victor Hugo,—and though a sort of _aura_ of the right Romantic fury still breathes through it, it has nothing of criticism except a splendid concionatory harangue to admiration of the best things, and a great deal of Hugonism nearly at its worst. The colossal confidence in ignorance, which made the poet a laughing-stock to his enemies, permits him to observe (in arguing that England never knew her Shakespeare till Voltaire taught her better) that Dryden _parla de S. une fois pour le déclarer hors d’usage_. [Sidenote: William Shakespeare.] It would be a good examination question, “Translate into the French of Hugo ‘the largest and most universal soul,’ &c.,” and the dictionary resulting would be quite a useful cipher-code. Elsewhere you have the usual page-long strings of names, the usual staccato sentences, punctuated with _nons_ and _ouis_, and stripped of articles and particles, the usual abuse of England (whose life for one thing that she did, in giving Victor Hugo refuge, he will yet not wholly take), and also the usual bursts of verbal and imaginative inspiration which give us the _petite fièvre cérébrale_, and make us excuse, forget, welcome any nonsense, any bad taste, even any bad blood.

[Sidenote: Littérature et Philosophie.]

Nothing that I have said, or shall say, is to be construed as implying contempt of the remaining critical works of Hugo. On the contrary, “Read all the Prefaces of _Dryden_,” which Swift said in scorn, may be adapted here in utter seriousness. And the student who wishes to know must read the whole of _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_—that curious collection of the poet’s critical and other work from the age of seventeen to the age of thirty-two. The gods do not grant to any man to be a good critic at seventeen; but they do grant to a Victor Hugo not to be a negligible writer at any time. In the “Journal of a Young Jacobite” of 1819; in the “Opinions of a Revolutionary” of 1830; in the _Idées au Hasard_; above all, when the poet-critic was a little over age, in the articles on Scott and Voltaire, on Lamennais and Byron, on Mirabeau and Dovalle, there is matter which might have made twenty critics; though it did not please the Fates that it should actually make one. These things are a very open allegory; there should not be any need, and there is certainly here no space, to interpret them.[615]

[Sidenote: _The_ Cromwell _Preface,_]

If Victor Hugo had written no criticism but _William Shakespeare_, I think I should have put him, as I have put Balzac, in a note, and left him otherwise alone, out of respect, not of persons, but of the divinity of poetry. The two Prefaces that I have selected—there are others, but these will suffice us—would have given him a substantive place here, if he had written no poetry at all. That to _Cromwell_ is the longer, the more elaborate, and much the more famous: but I do not think that it is really quite so important as the later and shorter to the _Orientales_. In the first, with a proud humility which retains a little more of the noun, if it has not much less of the adjective, than the undisguised arrogance of the later work, Hugo, while professing not to defend himself at all, and to regard the Classic _v._ Romantic debate as practically fought out and over, as a fact fights the whole battle once more. It is observable that the word “art,” without being made exactly the battle-cry, recurs again and again throughout the piece, and is, in fact, its dominant. But he has a theory of poetry, not so very different in outline from that of the “Goliaths classiques,” of whom he affects not so much as to take notice. Man and poetry woke in primitive times; when man is singing he is close to God; and the rest of it. The voice is unmistakably Hugo’s, but the forms of thought which it chooses might almost be eighteenth, or even seventeenth, century. They work out the conclusion that Epic + Lyric = Drama—the latter being largely dealt with to show the rise of Comedy and the dignity of the Grotesque. Already we get Hugo’s name-triads flung at us (to use one of his beloved Spanish comparisons) like _bolas_. There is a great deal about Shakespeare. The “Two” Unities—Hugo has extended his grace to the original one—of Time and Place are too absurd to be spoken of: but they _are_ spoken of and shown to be absurd. A passage on rules, models, and imitations is perhaps the most effective of the whole, though it comes the best part of a century after Lessing. There is an excommunication of Delille (very interesting to compare with the glorification by Joubert, whose own theory of poetry fits Hugo as well, as it fits Delille, _to us_, strangely), leading to some remarks on _Cromwell_ itself, which have but minor interest, and a notable conclusion on Criticism. There is here more dignity than in those remarks in which he was wont to indulge later, when he drew upon himself the dignified reproof of M. Nisard: and they contain some really good observation on False Taste, old and new, a well-founded denunciation of critique by rule and kind, by faults and beauties, and a final protest against mere Authority.

The piece is of great interest even now: and one can readily understand the immense influence it must have had as a manifesto. But it is injured by its length, by its want of method, and by the constant presence of the two dissonances above indicated. That the poet should fight _pro domo sua_ is natural, desirable, laudable: but why are we to be disturbed by the constant assertion of a lofty indifference? It is again natural, desirable, laudable, that he should fight the general Romantic prize—there was every possible justification for it. But why, again, the pretence of not troubling himself about any such business, and of the business being really over?

[Sidenote: _and that to the_ Orientales.]

The Preface to the _Orientales_ escapes all these objections and, short as it is, is undoubtedly the most remarkable piece of criticism that Hugo has left, while it is also the boldest, the clearest, the least hampered with tricks and mannerisms, the most serious, the most really dignified. In it he “goes straight for the jugular.”[616] He questions, and denies point-blank, the right of the critic to interrogate the poet on his choice of subject or of treatment _at all_. “L’ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais: voilà tout le domaine de la critique.” Here we come again to one of the epoch-making sentences, one of the great _jalons_ of critical history. No ancient had ever dared to say it. Patrizzi had said it, hardly knowing what he had said. The German and English Romantics had cast about it, implied it, made themselves responsible for it, or something like it; but never posed it plumply as the Charter of Literature. And Hugo does not leave it as if he were afraid of it, or half-ignorant what it means. He turns it over and over, so as at each turn to give a fresh blow to the Neo-classics. Never mind the means employed: ask _how_ they are employed. There are no good or bad subjects in poetry: there are only good or bad poets. Everything is a subject. Poetry is a country of universal suffrage: examine _how_ the artist has worked, not _why_. Art has nothing to do with gags, leading-strings, handcuffs: he may go where he list, believe as he list, do what he lists. Kind, story, space, time, fashion, all are at his choice.

And then, amplifying more particularly the phrase about the _limits_ of art, Hugo has one of his most characteristic and finest passages of exuberant prose, expressing the wish to make his poetry like a Spanish city—half oriental, half mediæval—and finishes very briefly with some words on his actual book.

[Sidenote: _Capital position of this latter._]

This is the real _clou_, the central decisive point of Hugonic, and indeed of all Romantic, criticism. “Never mind the subject, the kind, anything of that sort: is the treatment good?” is practically the gospel of modern as opposed to ancient, of Romantic as opposed to Classical, criticism. Of course, like all hard-and-fast propositions and prescriptions as to things that are not hard-and-fast, and especially like all controversial propositions and aggressive prescriptions of all kinds, it does not contain the whole truth, and it does not even contain nothing but the truth. If it be construed in the sense that one subject is as good as another, it may, and probably will, lead wrong. If it be taken to mean that even the experience of our two thousand five hundred years (or whatever it is) of literature does not show that some subjects are so much more difficult and thankless than others that they are _practically_ impossible, it will entice the poet to useless and probably dangerous experiment. But then, with reasonable people, it does not mean either of these things. It is in reality a defensive much more than an offensive proposition,—a protest which must be allowed in any Court of Historical Criticism against the Classic and especially the Neo-classic notion of _a priori_ classification of Subject and Kind, and of referring to this instead of considering _the work_ first. [Sidenote: _The_ “work”.]I have known objection taken to the use—at least the frequent use—of this word “work” in literature, and as to literature. It is, in fact, something of a shibboleth: but, I think, a valuable one. No one who uses it intelligently is likely to forget that it is the _work_, the work_ing_, the art, not the material, that he is to look to first. And Victor Hugo, in the document before us, was practically the first to enjoin this duty with authority and conviction.

We may pass appropriately to his most distinguished opponent and his most enthusiastic disciple in regard to this gospel.

[Sidenote: _Nisard: his_ Ægri Somnia.]

The memories of a reviewer, however hard he may have tried to do his duty, are apt to lodge in a tomb from which there grow more briers than roses. It is not the most unpleasant of the thoughts of the present writer on his own reviewing period that the _Ægri Somnia_[617] of M. Désiré Nisard enabled him, not quite too late, to revise, in the right direction, his opinion of their author. There needed, and there needs, no grovelling palinode—Nisard still seemed, and still seems to me, to have taken on the whole the wrong side in criticism. And I am not quite certain that the reproach (which was brought against him and which he endeavoured to refute, almost as late as the publication of _Ægri Somnia_ itself, by boldly and wisely reprinting his early articles) of having “burnt what he had adored” was quite unjust. But in these last utterances there was a singular dignity, justice, and good taste, contrasting rather fortunately or unfortunately, according to the side on which one looked, with the insolences which Hugo had permitted himself during the senile apotheosis of his fifteen years’ restoration after the Année Terrible. And one saw—as indeed one always had seen more or less—that whatever had been faulty in M. Nisard’s earlier, but not earliest judgments, had been the result of an undue, an exclusive, a not quite intelligently catholic devotion to justice, dignity, good taste. There have been greater men who had worse gods.

[Sidenote: _His_ Essais sur le Romantisme.]

If one did not know how very differently personal matters strike the person and the not-person, it might be surprising to a reader of the reprinted _Essais sur le Romantisme_[618] that M. Nisard should have in any way complained of the charge of burning what he had adored. The first half of the book is occupied with articles dating from 1829 to 1831—on Hugo, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and even Musset. They are very good articles; they are, I think, better criticism than Sainte-Beuve’s own was at this time: but, though they are not wildly ultra-Romantic, they in each and every case—even in that of Musset himself—take the side and the defence of the innovators. It is true that there is, towards the last, a momentous and germinal doubt whether there is not something _excessive_ in Hugo—whether there is not _de trop_.

And in the Preface to the second part, written in 1838, the critic announces his conversion in terms which admit of no dispute. He speaks of his _retour aux doctrines classiques_, he says that he has “ranged himself,” that he “climbs back, with discouraged and dragging step, the road that he had run down in his intoxication.” Metaphor for metaphor, has this much change to give or to receive from that of “burning the adored”? And the substance of the remainder bears this out. Much in the manifesto _Contre la Littérature Facile_ is quite true—not merely of 1830: and the subsequent controversy with Jules Janin is not idle or one-sided. But as for the articles on Hugo himself which follow, an innocent person might suppose them to have been written by quite another M. Nisard than the author of those above referred to. The _Chants du Crépuscule_, we are told, “ont achevé de désespérer les amis de M. V. H.” (They contain, let it be remembered, _Napoleon II_.) There is a _caractère de décadence_ in them. His prose has a better chance than his verse. His _mort littéraire_ is _prochaine_ (so near, in fact, that he wrote the _Légende des Siècles_ twenty, and published the _Quatre Vents de l’Esprit_ more than forty years later).

Yes! M. Nisard was burning what he had adored; but it is fair to admit that for the rest of his long life he adored what he had certainly never burned. His most famous work, the _Histoire de la Littérature Française_,[619] is written in rigid confinement to the Classical house, with fresh windows opened, indeed, so that the critic could see the glory of Shakespeare and others outside, but with a strict regulation that nothing shall be changed in the furniture and regulations within. The capital studies of Latin Poets, the miscellaneous literary work— professorial and other—are all the consistent utterances of a man who has pulled himself up on the edge (or a little over the edge) of a precipice, and has resolved, for the rest of his life, to walk steadily in the other direction. No article of Sainte-Beuve’s is at once juster and more acute than that on M. Nisard’s _History_, with its exposition of the way in which the critic-historian has constructed an _a priori_ theory of the French literary genius, and has written his history accordingly—accepting and eulogising those writers who illustrate his conception, neglecting or denouncing those who run counter to it. And the conception itself is formed altogether according to the second manner of viewing—the view according to which _Les Chants du Crépuscule_ is, in another sense, a song of approaching night. M. Nisard tells us that his conversion was effected during a visit to England, and under the influence of Homer and La Fontaine. Surely never was there such a singular instance of _similia similibus_ in literature; nor has the country of Shakespeare—where, by the way, Tennyson and Browning had just brought out their first books—ever exercised a more remarkable influence upon a studious visitor.

By whatever process, M. Nisard had become a confirmed anti-Romantic, and such he remained to the end. He is one of the best of the breed: learned, consistent, courageous, courteous withal, as the critic who is or wishes to be considered “scholarly” too seldom is. But he has given himself up to an idol: he will not take the Work as the Work presents itself, and judge whether it is good or bad. And the result is inevitable.

[Sidenote: _Their_ culpa maxima.]

The conclusion of the reprinted _Essais_, with great temper and in excellent taste, practically confesses M. Nisard’s weakness as a critic. It is the weakness of the old “faults-and-beauties” method, joined to the moral heresy. Victor Hugo, he says, was a man with very grave moral faults. He was: and what is more, these moral faults were of a singularly disenchanting kind. Further, Victor Hugo’s works are full of faults not merely moral. They are: and sometimes these faults are almost inconceivable. But what M. Nisard forgot is that the critic, like the miner, is finally concerned with the quantity and quality of poetic gold which a poet—or, for the matter of that, with the quantity and quality of literary gold which any man of letters—will yield. No matter that it lies in a pestilential neighbourhood; no matter that you have to smelt out quartz, and far worse and uglier things than quartz, to get it. Is the gold there? That, and nothing else, is the question. Now, in Hugo the gold is there; it is there not by pennyweights, not by ounces, not by pounds, but by hundredweights to the ton. And the critical process, if only it be perfected, is after all not so laborious as the process of stamps and cyanide; the critic himself is not susceptible to wild beasts and malaria. Gold or no gold? much gold or little? these are his true questions. M. Nisard could not see them. The gold must be ready smelted to a certain orthodox French standard; it must be even brought in ingots, or ready worked into jewellery, according to pattern. Otherwise he would not have it. And of the many critics that have been, are, will be, like unto him, he was after all one of the best.

[Sidenote: _Gautier._]

France—I have been told frequently of late, and even not so very late, years—has forgotten her Théophile Gautier. And some of the voices have generally said that she has been quite right in doing so, whether urged to the forgetfulness by serious arguments such as those of M. Émile Faguet (whom, though I differ with him not seldom, I desire to take the opportunity here of saluting with all possible respect as an admirable critic, and to whom I could almost pay the doubtful compliment of wishing that he were dead in order that I might discuss him fully), or by the mere impertinences of quite trivial folk. I have never seen the least reason to change my own opinion to the contrary, that “Théo” was not only one of the most amiable and (with some peccadillos) estimable men of letters of the whole French century, but one of the greatest of its men of letters in verse and in prose, in romance and in travel-writing, in miscellanies and in criticism. He was not greatest in the function which here concerns us, but he was great. The common complaint that he was too good-natured, though it may have some faint colour, is mainly a blunder and the son of a blunder—that is to say, of the notion, far too often encouraged by critics themselves, that the critic is a schoolmaster, whose business is to say nothing but “Blockhead!” and “Sit down!” and “Come to me after school!” But the comparative ill-luck which pursued him, and forced him always to write for bread, partly turned him away from pure literary criticism,[620] and sometimes made him write smooth but not very significant things to please, though never at the cost of friendship and principle. Much that he wrote is not reprinted; he could not afford, like M. de Pontmartin, for instance, to “embook” all his _feuilletons_. Yet certain volumes of his printed works, the _Grotesques_, the _Histoire du Romantisme_, and its companion the _Portraits Contemporains_, with some separate articles, prefaces, &c., will give us good matter to indite of.[621]

[Sidenote: _His theory: “Art for Art’s sake,” &c._]

“Théo” has not been a favourite with the grave and precise sort among our fellowship as a rule: yet, if they could be consistent, they should at least admire him for his own consistency, and for the fact that, from the very first to the very last, his criticism, apparently so impressionist and occasional, was conducted on an almost rigid—on a quite logical and well co-ordinated—theory. This theory was the famous one of “L’Art pour l’Art,” with, for inseparable companion, the doctrine that _the_ instrument, _the_ medium, _the_ vehicle, almost _the_ constituent of literary art, is the Word, the beautiful word, furnished with its beauty by light and colour, by sound and form, and developing it by skilful and laborious arrangement, selection, and rejection. As for the major theory (the formulation of which is sometimes attributed to Hugo himself, and was admitted by him as late as _William Shakespeare_, but with an important qualification, and even, to a certain extent, disclaimer, as to its range and meaning) I have already said,[622] though I see that some critics have not observed the observation, that, especially with the addition “Art for Art’s sake _only_,” it is at best but a half truth, and may be a full half “error and curse.” And we all know to what sort of whole a half truth constantly turns. Art, after all, is a _means_: and “means for means’ sake only,” if not nonsense, is at any rate sense very incomplete. But it was necessary, and it was almost desirable, that the exaggeration should be formulated, because of the incessant intrusion of the opposite theories, which are scarcely even _quarter_-truths, that all depends on the subject, that art must serve morality, and the like. As for the second doctrine above formulated, I need not say that, with Longinus and with Dante, I accept it absolutely and _sans phrase_. To both doctrines, however, to the more disputable as to the less, Gautier flew at first, and clung at last, not more in the provocative youthfulness of the Preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ than in the famous and exquisite

“Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle”

of _Émaux et Camées_, many years afterwards, or in conversation and writing, more than as many years later still. The first is an eager and passionate sermon on the doctrine by a fervent neophyte; the second, its mature embodiment in imperishable verse by a master. Both together leave very little to be said on the matter save the single word “Read!”

[Sidenote: _His practice_: Les Grotesques.]

At any rate, what has to be said on them by way of comment belongs rather to Interchapter and Conclusion than to this place, where we are busy with Gautier’s application of his doctrines. The next considerable document to the Preface just noticed is the _Grotesques_ of 1844, a delightful book. After all that has been written since on Villon, one comes back to it about him. Scalion de Virbluneau and some others are mere _hors-d'œuvre_, agreeable enough, but no more. The _pièce de résistance_ of the book is the long, ardent, but at the same time humorous (Théo was one of the few indubitable humourists that France can boast) vindication of the critic’s namesake, Théophile de Viaud, one of the most luckless of the many luckless poets of genius. But Saint-Amant, Chapelain, Scudéry, Scarron, supply him with occasions for work scarcely inferior to the “Théophile.” The criticism is of course, on the whole, avowedly criticism of the lighter kind, gossip-criticism, criticism intended not to disgust those who do not take literature very seriously. But it is also intended to please those who do: and it does.

[Sidenote: Histoire du Romantisme, _&c._]

The various documents included under the general head of _Histoire du Romantisme_ and _Portraits Contemporains_ are of very different dates, covering nearly the whole of Gautier’s forty years of literary life. Being ranged rather by subject than by date,[623] they enable us to judge the singular evenness and continuity of his critical spirit, which (as Maxime Du Camp, I think, has urged, and as I myself have always held) was systematic by tendency and nature, though haphazard on the surface. The _Histoire_ itself was actually interrupted by the critic-poet’s death: and the masterly Essay on the French Poetry of the middle of the Century (which should be compared with Sainte-Beuve’s) is only five years before it: but some of its companions go back twenty years, and many of the _Portraits Contemporains_ recede to the legendary decade of the ’Thirties themselves.

[Sidenote: _Ubiquity of felicity in his criticism._]

In all, the same critical qualities are apparent—a central motive and directing power of belief in the two doctrines stated above, but at the same time a system of gearing, flexible enough to accommodate itself to the most widely different subjects, an unwearied and rejoicing faculty of appreciation proper, an unrivalled science of verse and of descriptive and decorative prose, an ever-present charm, and, over all and through all, the atmosphere of the sweet and sunny temper which it is so specially delightful and so rare to find in a competent critic. But for those who want sufficient yet not too copious examples, three long pieces—the article on French Poetry above mentioned, the “Balzac” of 1858 (which M. Montégut, I think, has justly called _magnifique_), and the Introduction to the posthumous edition of Baudelaire in 1867— will do excellently. Between them they would fill a not so very small volume, and there would be hardly a page in that volume destitute of the merits just enumerated, and others to boot. The first is perhaps the greatest example extant of reviewing, brought _sub specie æternitatis_, and made really higher criticism. From the _Légende des Siècles_ (and remember what Gautier writing on Hugo meant under the Second Empire!) to the _Odes Funambulesques_, from _Poèmes Evangéliques_ to _Fleurs du Mal_, on scores of poets and books of poetry besides, he finds always the suitable, and, at the same time, always the admirable word to say. On Balzac and Baudelaire alike—great as is the alteration of palette, and viewing-glass, and style of handling that the two require—he shows alike that “impeccability,” that “perfect magic in letters,” which the younger of his subjects had ascribed to him. I do not know any critic who deserves the older and now strangely altered epithet of “candid” (_i.e._, “_amiably_ just”) better than Gautier: but his amiability is never indulged at the expense of his justice. And perhaps it needs nothing more than the statement of this fact to express, συνετοῖσι, the infinite resources of his skill in thought and phrase.

[Sidenote: _Saint-Marc Giradin._]

Saint-Marc Girardin[624] (who was three or four years older than Sainte-Beuve, and outlived him by four or five) has, in a reference above, been coupled with Villemain, and the resemblance both of career and of critical quality is rather strong. Both were politicians, both professors, and both played their double part after a fashion to which there are few parallels in English history, and those few not very encouraging. But Saint-Marc Girardin was a really considerable person in politics—not least in the very last days of his life, when, in the National Assembly, charged with the reconstitution of France after the Prussian War, he was a strong monarchical and Orleanist partisan. Of his numerous works, our chief texts are his _Cours de Littérature Dramatique_ and his _Essais de Littérature et de Morale_ which appeared in succession[625] about the middle of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. It may be well to say frankly and plumply that he is one of our (or perhaps it were better not to avoid the _moi haïssable_, and say “my”) disappointments. I did not read him very early, and had a very fair conceit of him when I began: but I find little to recommend in him.[626] He is emphatically “clever”; must have been a stimulating and effectual professor; writes very well; has a real (and not, as is rather common, a painfully simulated) combination of the man of letters and the man of the world. But he does not give me the idea of having had any spontaneous, individual, love for literature, or any original personal views about it. He has everywhere the _juste milieu_, the opportunism of his time, and his party, and his profession. He is neither a _perruque_ nor an _échevelé_: he is, in fact, an accomplished Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. And Time is terribly of the Divine mind as to Laodicea and its angels.

Moreover, his method of dealing with Literature, and especially with that dramatic literature which chiefly interested him, is of the kind from which, as it seems to me, there come few good things—“De l’Amour Conjugal chez Shakespeare,” “Le Mariage au Théâtre dans Molière,” “La Jalousie” in this, that, and the other. It may be because of that “barrenness in the philosophic” with which I have been charged; but these things seem to me to be learning’s labour lost. Study Othello, study Leontes, study Posthumus as much as you like; but to see the life, the poetry, the passion in these live, poetic, passionate men and plays, not to extract a dead essence in a bottle and label it “Jealousy in Shakespeare”—or rather _in vacuo_. Still, there are others who have other tastes, and Saint-Marc Girardin’s half score of editions prove it, and perhaps justify them.

[Sidenote: _Planche._]

Gustave Planche, on the other hand—a critic probably much less known now, except vaguely and anecdotically, than Girardin—appears to me to have been a real critic, and to have missed, so narrowly that I do not quite know _how_ he missed it, being a very great critic. Probably it was _quia non multum amabat_: because he succumbed to that fatalest temptation of our kind to scratch and scoff and snarl instead of embracing. Anecdotically, as I have said, he is probably well enough known—his passion for George Sand, and his odd ways, and especially that most unlucky indifference to clean linen, and cleanliness generally, which he shared with the authors of the _Song to David_ and the _Rambler_, turn up in all the books. He appears in the _Comédie Humaine_,[627] and the more extreme Hugolaters shudder or storm at him as a blasphemer of Hugo. But I rather doubt whether many people read his criticism now.[628]

[Sidenote: _Weight of his criticism._]

Yet it deserves reading thoroughly: and it is only a pity that there is not more of it easily accessible. That Planche entirely avoids the quest of the mare’s-nest cannot be said; but some varieties of that curious structure are very tempting even to good critics. He may be thought to have found or built a famous one in the discovery that the three egregious books of the excellent Henry Mackenzie, instead of being Sterne _plus_ Rousseau, watered down with _quant. suff._ of artificial tears, are “a sorrowful and unique hymn on the insufficiency and obscurity of actual life,” the “confession of an immaculate soul.” One thinks of the entire pressgang lifting up its voice and weeping at the noble conduct of old Edwards, and the like, and one marvels—but not, in my case at least, contemptuously. It is perhaps not wonderful, after this, that Planche, though he admires Fielding, cannot tolerate _Jonathan Wild_. Yet in close context he gives us taste of his quality by a really admirable inquiry—one of the best I know—into the difference of Drama and Novel, and the light which is thrown by and on this difference, in regard to the inferiority of Fielding as a dramatist, and his greatness in prose fiction. No one who has been so kind as to interest himself in my views will think that I agree with Planche when he holds that “literary quality does not matter,” when he bids us seek “the will before the inspiration, the fatal irresistible _idea_.” He would certainly have anathematised, and does, I think, somewhere very nearly anathematise in terms, my favourite doctrine of the Poetic Moment. But what do such differences of opinion matter? You blaze away at the enemy, but, if he and you be of the right stamp, you salute the soldier.

And Planche (for all his most unfortunate objection to soap and water) is, I think, a “gentleman of the French Guard,” a _Black Mousquetaire_ of the doughtiest. His objection to Hugo[629] is not in the least fossil or stupid. He has a right to it: it is a legitimate and inevitable deduction from his general poetic creed and likings. No poet gives more “poetic moments” than Hugo: and Planche, as we have seen, does not hold with them. No poet has more of _poésie visible_ than Hugo: and Planche objects to this poetry _nominatim_, directly, again and again, and wants to go back to that _poésie intelligible_, in which, it must be admitted, Victor would not be quite so victorious. He argues—and I do not know that one can so easily deny it off-hand as point out that it is a dangerous suggestion of false issues—that beauty of form does sometimes “appeal to the very lowest passions”: while, on the other hand, a poet _doit toujours avoir une idée philosophique_, which (again we must confess) Hugo very seldom, if ever, had. Yet for all this he can say plumply, _pour le maniement de la langue, M. Hugo n’a pas de rival_, and he admires, little as he can have agreed with much of it, that remarkable Preface to _Littérature et Philosophie Mélées_ on which we have commented above.

He is nothing if not a daring critic. Some of us, who have studied French Literature very long, would hesitate to tell a Frenchman, as Planche unhesitatingly tells Bulwer,[630] not merely that he ought to be _plus serré, plus précis, et moins vague_, which is true and within any one’s competence, but _moins incorrect_, which from a foreigner seems going far. This _verbality_ of Planche’s is in fact one of his main notes. Lamartine,[631] one might think, was made for him as a poet: and he does indeed think that Lamartine’s position is _magnifique et incontesté_. But he does not scruple to say that _la grammaire est souvent offensée_ by the poet of the _Méditations_; that _l’indicatif se croise avec l’imparfait_ (think of the horror of this crime!) _à trois lignes de distance_; that the ambitious _Jocelyn_ is _un beau poème sans composition et sans style_. It may be more surprising that he is not cordial to Alfred de Vigny, and cannot in the least grasp _Dolorida_: but it must be remembered that Vigny’s earlier work (the posthumous Poems might have pleased Planche better, had he lived to see them) is distinctly inclined to that _poésie visible_, which the critic did not like because, I think, he could not himself “see” it. It must be admitted that he “gets home” on Leconte de Lisle’s Wardour Street Greek— though I do not know that his sharp correction is more fatal than “Théo’s” mild one.[632]

Lastly, we may mention the extremely remarkable paper[633] on _Les Royautés Littéraires_, with its notable classification of critics into those who gauge works of literature (1) by comparing them with the past, (2) as present things merely, (3) by looking to the future and the end that the author proposes to himself. Here it is enough to point out to the intelligent the curious difference between this classification and some others. For Planche, near as his terms may seem to come to it, does _not_ mean, by the criticism of his first class, what we mean by the Historic-Comparative method.

These specimens will, I hope, for all their scrappiness and want of context, give some idea of the force, weight, acuteness, and intellectual moment of Planche’s criticism. It is not in merely accidental and catalogue fashion that I have put him next to Saint-Marc Girardin. There is a real and a vital contrast. Planche may be right or he may be wrong, but what he says is coherent; it comes from a direct and real examination, intensely interested, of the subject under discussion; it is guided by and supplemented from a body of definite and, to some extent at any rate, reasoned literary preferences and principles. In short, once more, the live contact, the true, fruitful, critical embrace. It is a pity he did not wash!

[Sidenote: _Magnin._]

Of Magnin we need not say so much, but all that is said must be good. A librarian for many, and a professor for a few, years, he was, as we have called him, a pure scholar, but with his erudition mellowed and sweetened by literature. His _Origines du Théâtre en Europe_,[634] written in the early days of historical comparative study of mediæval literature, is a classic still: and his _Causeries et Méditations_[635] contain many things worth reading. He was much interested, as were so many Frenchmen, by the visit of the English company of actors, in which Miss Smithson was leading lady, to Paris: and he was led to study the older English theatre, though he misjudges _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, and rather staggers one’s notion of the necessary acquaintance with the language of the literature you are criticising, by talking about an English poem entitled “_The_ Greece” (not “_La Grèce_,” understand). But probably we all do things as bad or worse. And at any rate, Magnin, with this work, his _Origines_, the re-introduction of modern readers to Hroswitha,[636] and other things, is a protagonist of the historical and the comparative in the study of literature.

[Sidenote: _Mérimée._]

As we separated Beyle in a former chapter, so we may separate Beyle’s “most remarkable production,” Mérimée,[637] in this. His temperament, the very opposite in all ways to Hugo’s, was as critical as Hugo’s was uncritical, and his exquisite style—in some respects the most exquisite of the French nineteenth century—should have lent itself to criticism with a sort of pre-established harmony that could never have belonged to the merely plain, or to the mainly “fulgurous.” But, as in other ways, there was something suicidal, or at least self-silencing, in this same temperament, and Mérimée has not left us very much to deal with here. There are numerous strokes of it in the _Letters_ to Panizzi and the _Inconnues_, some of them not unprecious. We knew that Mérimée (ii. 205, to _the_ Inconnue) would think Hugo “words without ideas,” and recommend a dose of Madame de Sévigné as a remedy (why not enjoy both and turn them to profit?). But it is really interesting to find that he cannot like Baudelaire, and most of all to find his first (though even then rather lukewarm) approval of Renan as a brother in freethought lessening, till we have the famous description—worthy of a Veuillot who should cease to be a swashbuckler and become a gentleman of the sword—of the style of the _Vie de Jésus_ as “the delight of all the servant-girls of France.” But Mérimée, like some others whom we have noticed, was drawn away by his studies, no less than by those contradictions of cynical-sentimental temperament of which we have spoken, from pure literary criticism to things like History and Antiquities, where he had not to “distrust himself.” There may even have been some of the Congrevian affectation, which Voltaire not unjustly rebuked, in the caprice which made him, as M. Blaze de Bury[638] says, “causeur, érudit, archéologue, académicien, sénateur, tout ce qu’on voulait, mais homme de lettres! jamais!” which brought it about that “avec lui la littérature ne venait que par surcroît.” In his published things of the kind, _Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires_,[639] _Portraits Historiques et Littéraires_,[640] and the like, the literary side is studiously kept down and away from, though, as we see from the _Letters_, it was always really present. He imputes to Beyle[641] his own assumed detachment from it; the review[642] of Ticknor’s _Spanish Literature_, which he was so admirably qualified to write, is full of traits going in the same direction. One is rather sorry to find Mérimée siding with those who would have mediocre authors kept out of literary histories, pretending that a man may read too much (he was himself almost omnilegent), that you can understand French seventeenth-century theatre (you cannot) “without having read Campistron.” But this is the fanfaronade of a modern Signor Pococurante, with a difference; and in the piece Mérimée cannot help showing his own critical sense (whether consistently or not) in his demand for more on the early literature, in his contempt of symbolic and Germanising explanations of _Don Quixote_. Of the two papers[643] which, with the “Beyle,” are the longest of his literary essays, the “Cervantes” and the “Brantôme,” the latter has a mere _coda_, the briefest possible, of true literary criticism, and the former not very much of it. Even on his beloved Russians, Gogol,[644] Pouchkine, Tourguénieff—though there was bound to be more here in the case of an actual Introduction, so to say, at last by a Grand Master of the Ceremonies of a new language and literature—there is hardly so much, except perhaps on Pouchkine, as we should expect. Like Lockhart, to whom he had a great resemblance, Mérimée hated “your d—d literary man” so much, and feared so much to be mistaken for such a person, that he would not, perhaps at last could not, be what he might have been as a critic. But we could not do without the stories from _Charles IX._ to _Lokis_, and we can very well do without criticism from him. So all, once more, is for the best—a reflection which, when made in connection with Mérimée, has unwonted piquancy.