Chapter I: The Successors of Sainte-Beuve (1)

“ORDONNANCE” OF THIS CHAPTER—PHILARÈTE CHASLES—BARBEY D’AURÉVILLY—ON
HUGO—ON OTHERS—STRONG REDEEMING POINTS IN HIM—DOUDAN—INTEREST OF HIS
GENERAL ATTITUDE, AND PARTICULAR UTTERANCES—RENAN—TAINE—HIS “CULPA”—
HIS MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WORK—HIS ‘HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE
ANGLAISE’—ITS SHORTCOMINGS—INSTANCES OF THEM—MONTÉGUT: HIS
PECULIARITIES—DELICACY AND RANGE OF HIS WORK—SCHERER: PECULIAR
“MORAL” CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—ITS CONSEQUENT LIMITATIONS—THE
SOLID MERITS ACCOMPANYING THEM—SAINTE-BEUVE + GAUTIER—BANVILLE—
SAINT-VICTOR—BAUDELAIRE—CRÉPET’S ‘LES POÈTES FRANÇAIS’—FLAUBERT: THE
“SINGLE WORD”—“NATURALISM”—ZOLA—‘LE ROMAN EXPÉRIMENTAL’—EXAMPLES OF
HIS CRITICISM—THE REASONS OF HIS CRITICAL INCOMPETENCY—“LES DEUX
GONCOURT”—“SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM”: HENNEQUIN—“COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE”: TEXTE—ACADEMIC CRITICISM: GASTON PARIS—CARO,
TAILLANDIER, ETC.—THE “LIGHT HORSEMEN”: JANIN—PONTMARTIN—VEUILLOT—
NOT SO BLACK AS, ETC.—THE PRESENT.

[Sidenote: Ordonnance _of this chapter_.]

It may be barely worth while to repeat the caution given above—that “successors” in the title of this chapter is not to be taken too literally; though, in fact, “Beware of the _Letter_” would be the best possible continuous heading for every page of every History of Literature or of Criticism. Construed, however, with some elasticity, the term has more than enough truth in it. Some of Sainte-Beuve’s elders, most of his contemporaries, practically all his juniors, felt the influence of the flood of criticism that welled, gently but irresistibly, from the fountainheads of the _Causeries_ and their companion- or forerunner-volumes. Indeed, Taine—the most influential critic purely of the second half of the century in France—is only Sainte-Beuve methodised and formulated. Before him, we shall deal with three interesting individualities belonging to each of the groups just indicated. Then a sufficiently natural grouping will give us a notable quartette in Renan, Taine himself, Montégut, and Scherer. We may then diverge to another group, who represent the influence of Sainte-Beuve very strongly blended with that of Gautier, the most distinguished of these being Saint-Victor, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. Then we may take the “Naturalists”; then two notable theorists who pushed Taine’s own theory further, one in a less, the other in a more fruitful direction; then a fresh batch of critics of the generally academic or specially erudite kind. After which we may cast back to a kind of “Cossack” division— écheloned over the century,—and finish with at least a salute to certain famous living representatives of French criticism, of whom it is not, according to our plan, lawful to speak further.

The trio first referred to were more or less contemporaries, and present various tendencies of literature and criticism in the nineteenth century strikingly enough. Two of them, Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly and Victor Euphémion Philarète Chasles, were men of letters by profession, and in constant practice and publicity, for the greater part of the period: the third, Ximénès Doudan, published hardly anything in his lifetime, and was suddenly revealed, after his death and within the last quarter of the century, as one of those observers of the λάθε βίωσας who tend to become rarer and rarer in modern life.

[Sidenote: _Philarète Chasles._]

The eldest of the three, Philarète Chasles,[827] was at an early period of his life a refugee in England for political reasons, and acquired there a knowledge of our literature and institutions which stood him in good stead for literary purposes ever afterwards. He was, however, at least as well acquainted with the literature of his own country, and in the summer of 1828 he divided the Academy’s prize, for a study of French literature in the sixteenth century, with an Essay[828] which is still worth studying, not merely as a foil to Sainte-Beuve’s famous and epoch-making book, but in itself. Some hold that, in one piece or another of a man’s early work, his whole literary development is, so to say, _acorned_; there is certainly something of the phenomenon in this tractate of Chasles. It has plenty of knowledge; it is well written; it abounds in intelligent _aperçus_; and it inclines (if with a limitation to be stated immediately) in the Romantic direction not obscurely, in the catholic, comparative, historical direction beyond all question. But there is a certain deficiency in grasp; the style, though often brilliant and forcible in a way, too seldom concentrates itself to light up, or to blast home, an important proposition; and in the principles there is a certain transaction and trimming to catch the favour of the judges. These merits and these defects alike continued to mark Chasles' work for the fifty years during which he unweariedly performed it: but the defects, if they did not exactly get the upper hand, made him more of a journalist than of a representative of literature. He was useful and important to his contemporaries, especially as a populariser of that English literature which was needed as an alterative by French, at least as much as French was by English. But even some special interest[829] cannot make me rank him very high as a critic.

[Sidenote: _Barbey d’Aurévilly._]

If Chasles gave some occasion to those who charged him with being a “Swiss of Letters,” a journalist ready to do any journey-work—this was certainly not the case with Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the most considerable eccentrics of recent literature. A dandy and an apostle of Dandyism, a practitioner of the most “precious” style, a transgressor as to forbidden subjects, and at the same time one of the most formidable of those free lances of Catholicism of whom Ourliac, Pontmartin, and Veuillot are the chief others in his time and country, Barbey d’Aurévilly did a good deal to invite the title of charlatan, which was freely bestowed on him by his numerous and recklessly provoked enemies. But I do not think he quite deserved it at any time: and in a very large part of his extensive work[830] he did not deserve it at all. Nor are many people likely to follow me in reading this without acknowledging him as a chief example of that steady improvement in critical power with age, which has been so often noted. He never, indeed, became a good critic _sans phrase_—that is to say, a trustworthy one. In his country the danger-flag is constantly flying; or, rather, there are all sorts of danger-flags, some of which even the tolerably wary may not always recognise as such.

[Sidenote: _On Hugo._]

Not the most difficult case is that of the attacks on Hugo, which provoked the poet to some of his most undignified Billingsgate in reply. It may seem indeed odd that a person who, though with a difference, was himself a _romantique enragé_—a man who calls Villemain _un eunuque littéraire opéré par le goût_—should dislike Hugo. But, first of all, there is the religious and political grudge against Hugo as a deserter: and Barbey never forgets his grudges, though he deplores the effect of other grudges on Chasles. And, secondly, one begins to wonder whether, in the soul of his soul, he cared much for poetry. One of his epigrams on Hugo himself,[831] clever as it is, gives more than a hint of this. The poet is _un puits artésien de poésie—intarissable, mais de la même eau_. This is to a very great extent true; but who ever quarrelled with a fountain of living water because it is a fountain of living water, and does not, like an artificial one on a holiday, alternately play milk, and milk-punch, and raspberry vinegar? Certainly no one who had ever thoroughly realised what the Water of Poetry—the Water of Life for the soul—is. So, too, no one, whatever his political and religious views, who can taste this Water of Life, could possibly dismiss the _Contemplations_ as _un livre accablant, un livre qui doit descendre vite dans l’oubli des hommes_. And his distaste leads him into puerilities and almost stupidities of verbal criticism, such as the question, when Hugo has written, “O chiens! qu’avez vous donc dans les dents? C’est son nom.” “Comment s’y est on pris pour l’y faire entrer?”

[Sidenote: _On others._]

But his dislike for Hugo does not, in the least, conciliate him to, for instance, Mérimée—the same prejudices working in a different way, and summoning others to their aid. This exquisite master of style and irony, this ice-covered volcano, is at one time[832] _un morceau de bois_ (I wish some one would show me the Broceliande where such wood grows!), at another a “wading bird” (_échassier_) who occasionally fishes up a _Carmen_! (“O lead us to those ponds where _Carmens_ swarm!”) A writer who is at least as different from Mérimée as from Hugo, George Sand, is _le plus grand préjugé contemporain_ (another example of Barbey’s successes, at least in epigram) _la grande routine dans l’admiration de ce siècle_, nay, actually _commune_—which even those who have no mania for the lady or her work may think extravagant.[833] One stares as one reads that Southey’s _Nelson_ is _bêtement raconté_, till one remembers Barbey’s intense, flaming, roaring Byronism, or, perhaps, till one reads the rather tell-tale statement that “stern” [Sterne] _veut dire sérieux en Anglais_, which certainly does not argue a nice acquaintance with the _nuances_ of the English language. As for the other statement, that “Johnson, l’affreux docteur Johnson, l’hippopotame de la lourde critique Anglaise, fut un de ceux qui se moquèrent le plus de Sterne,” it is sufficient to answer, “Why, no, sir!”

[Sidenote: _Strong redeeming points in him._]

It may seem strange, after my citing these instances of wrong-going, which might be very largely multiplied, that I should have given even partial praise to Barbey d’Aurévilly as a critic. Yet I cannot withdraw it. In the first place, as examples already given will have shown, he was really a great master of the critical epigram—a thing capable of much abuse, and of late specially abused and vulgarised and brought into discredit, but (when well-bred, and well-trained, and well-ridden) a great battle-horse in the critical stable for all that. His own critical axioms, though generally requiring correction and completion, are often most valuable, as when he says[834] that the two great critical qualities are Penetration and Weight. Only he should have added (but the addition would have hit himself hard) “Directing Judgment,” without which diamond-point and battering-ram momentum can but waste themselves or do mischief. Indeed, in his own most misguided criticisms, penetration and weight themselves are seldom wanting. His ninth volume, _Les Critiques ou les Juges jugés_, is often quite admirable, almost always noteworthy, on the most different people—on Joubert as on Villemain, on Nisard as on Sainte-Beuve. And almost everywhere the writing is _alive_; the liking, if it be only crotchet, the dislike, if it be only prejudice, is, _pro tanto_ and for the moment, real, felt, _vécu_. He is rather a bad example; he has, I think, like Veuillot, already done harm, not merely in France but in England. But I should be loath to lose him: for he is not as the scribes.

[Sidenote: _Doudan._]

It is impossible to imagine a more curious contrast to the often by no means ignoble hack-work of Chasles, and the restless and somewhat “posing” activity of Barbey, than the fireside and library arm-chair quiet which pervades the writings of Doudan.[835] Critically, indeed, that work is chiefly valuable as a placid and agreeable reflection of the workings of such a life on an intellect above the average, but of no gigantic force or “genial” individuality, and a taste for literature which never raised itself to very active or deliberate discharges of the critical function. His two most regular critical exercises, the early article “De la nouvelle école poétique”[836] occasioned by Sainte-Beuve’s _Tableau_, and the later but (unless I mistake) not precisely dated “Les Révolutions du Goût,”[837] are more curious than exactly important. They exhibit, as the work of these half-recluses often does, an odd mixture of reflection of the time-movements and reaction against them. His style of opposition (for he does oppose it) to the Romantic movement is double, and in each case rather unexpected. [Sidenote: _Interest of his general attitude,_] One horn is pure Chauvinism. “Who are these Germans and English, that we Frenchmen should imitate them?” This he shed later. But he always lifted up the other—a curious form of belief in progress and development, which once more almost persuades us to believe that no believer in Progress _can_ be a critic as such and for the time. In the “De la Nouvelle École” this takes the cruder form, common in the early nineteenth century, of asking why we, with all our glorious gains, should go back to, if not exactly barbarous ages, yet less favoured ones? In the _Révolutions_ it becomes a subtler, but perhaps more dangerous, heresy, which draws to its aid the fashionable fancies about time and climate and the like. According to Doudan, it would seem, a real historical criticism is impossible,— “Les nuances délicates s'évanouissent quand les mœurs, etc., ont changé.” You cannot keep on the tracks of poesy, _cette science émue et populaire_ (note the Montaignesque perfection of the phrase, whatever we may think of the argument), you cannot sound _ces magnifiques abîmes_. Each generation sees only one side of the Beautiful—and apparently you cannot extract and combine the visions of each from their records. Which is, I think, blasphemy against Criticism and Literature; but some fight might, no doubt, be made for it, and it is admirably and suggestively put.

[Sidenote: _and particular utterances._]

It would require a separate and elaborate handling to show how far these half-progressist half-nihilist views are reflected in the literary utterances which stud Doudan’s _Letters_: but some of these must be given. He never achieves the supremacy of his very close analogue Joubert: but he is certainly “to be made a note of.” For instance,[838] in a certain _Chartreuse_ (not otherwise identified, but which must be Beyle’s from what follows) he says (as he should not) that it is “stupid,” and accounts for, at the same time as he disables, his own judgment by adding that he has not read it. But he knows other books of the author, who is “un mauvais sujet au courant de tous les procédés d’imagination.” Unjust of course: but with how much justice and with how much more felicity in it! In 1843 he must have somewhat modified his fifteen years’ earlier disapproval of Old French, for in the _Roman de la Rose_ he sees[839] “mille idées passer dans ces ombres du Moyen Âge”— ideas, we may retort, which, if you see, you may surely cry Halt! to, and register. Twenty years later again, in 1865,[840] he not merely condemns, in the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_, “le langage torturé, comme dans M. Victor Hugo, pour produire des effets,” which might be thought to show a certain obsolescence of judgment, but clears himself from this charge, and from his old fault of Chauvinist criticism, not merely by defending Eugénie de Guérin but by approving Charlotte Bronté, a combination of literary lady-loves which is not commonplace. He even consents, later still, to read Miss Braddon: and expresses warm and intelligent approval of _The Small House at Allington_. Only fanatical _Goetheaner_ will find much fault with his characterisation,[841] in one of his interesting letters to A. W. Schlegel, of _Meister_ as “excessively desultory and chimerical” in matter: and all but fanatical Hugonians will at least understand his unhappiness[842] at _William Shakespeare_, though the expressions of it have a touch of the comic. When you have read the book for ten minutes you feel as if you were standing on your head. Polyphemus must have written like it when he had eaten a Greek and drunk a skinful of wine. And the younger generation finds it admirable! These are the tricks that await all of us as we grow older, unless we keep our feet (and our heads) very carefully when we go into the House of Literature. But Doudan is not excessively affected by them, though, on the other hand, he does not shake himself vigorously and critically free. He is a good specimen of the purely contemplative and “occasional” critic—a sort of hermit of the desert, who does not object to decide on cases that present themselves, but who will not go to seek them.[843]

[Sidenote: _Renan._]

We may turn from Doudan to a very different figure, introducing a new and important group. It is not uncommon to see M. Renan spoken of as a considerable critic; on the other hand, I think some one (and no mean authority, if my memory serves me) is reported to have said of him, “Renan n’a pas le sens littéraire.” Both statements are excessive: but at the risk of shocking some readers, I am bound to say that the second is a great deal nearer the truth than the first. A _biblical_ critic he was, no doubt: but, as has been pointed out at the beginning of this history, the operations of the biblical critic are always conducted on principles different from, and usually on principles diametrically opposed to, the principles of the criticism of literature. Yet it may be urged, Did he not help to produce one volume, and that on a very interesting period, of the great _Histoire Littéraire de la France_? Did he not almost precede Mr Arnold himself in arguing for the necessity of Criticism, and the excellent influence not merely of Science but of Literature? and quite precede him in exalting the literary uses and virtues of Celtic? Has he not left us, from the _Averroès_ and the _Avenir de la Science_ downwards, constant literary allusions and handlings, frequent literary papers, on subjects ranging from Spinoza to Béranger?

This is all quite true: and if it were reasonable, as some people seem to think it is, to expect that an author should use as great length in showing why he does not deal with a subject as in dealing with what he thinks it right to handle, I could, as in the case of others from Voltaire downwards, produce chapter and verse to any extent in negative justification. But M. Renan seemed to me, on a careful perusal of all his then published work, twenty years ago[844] and more—he seemed to me, on a repetition and extension of that reading a dozen years later[845]— and he seems to me now, after recurring to his work for the present purpose—seldom or never to have regarded literature as literature. He said, in so many words, at the beginning of his career, and he published the saying towards the close,[846] that literary work is _only_ valuable as the work of its time, that “the _Pensées_ of Pascal and the _Sermons_ of Bossuet, if they appeared to-day, would be hardly worth notice.” This exaggeration of the historic view is interesting, of course; but it is as fatal to criticism as the absolute refusal to take that view.

[Sidenote: _Taine._]

Not thus is to be dismissed one who thought Renan a critic and a great one. Hippolyte Taine _was_ a critic, though too often (not always) a “black horseman” of criticism. He was a great æsthetician, he was a brilliant literary historian—that is to say, what should be a critic on the greatest scale. He could do splendid justice[847] to another critic of tendencies and predilections so different from his own as those of Paul de Saint-Victor. To question his competence in pure criticism may seem more than presumption, it may seem pure fatuity. But, though a poet is dispensed from having a conscience, a critic and a historian of criticism is not.

[Sidenote: _His_ culpa.]

The fault of Taine as a critic was put once for all from two different points of view and by two widely different, though each in his different way supremely competent, persons, in that conversation at one of the Magny dinners which is referred to elsewhere,[848] and the reporting of which,[849] whether justifiable in itself or not, should bribe Rhadamanthus in his condemnation of the Goncourtian _reportage_. He did not understand the sublime—the “magnificent”—in literature, as no less a person than Sainte-Beuve told him on that occasion: and he did not understand it, because, as no less a person than Gautier (consciously or unconsciously repeating Longinus) told him, he did not see that the secret of literature lies in the “mots rayonnants,” the “mots de lumière.” Or, rather, he _would_ not understand: for as two of his selected quotations,[850] from such an apostle of the _mot rayonnant_ as Saint-Victor, show, he had the root of the matter in him, but would not let it grow.

[Sidenote: _His miscellaneous critical work._]

Taine is, therefore, the capital example of the harm which may be done by what is called “philosophy” in criticism. If he had resisted this tendency, and had allowed himself simply to receive and assimilate the facts, he might have been one of the great critics of the world. That he _could_ have done so is shown, I think, completely by the greatest work of his life, the _Origines de la France Contemporaine_—in which, with a good grace, if not explicitly, swallowing all he had said in his earlier remarks on Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, he allowed himself to yield to the other facts, and established the truth for ever, on and in an impregnable foundation and circumvallation of document. But he had no time to do everything: and in his literary perversity he had gone too far. He began as quite a young man, but not young enough to be immature, in the famous studies on La Fontaine and Livy, by a philosophical crystallisation of the process which Sainte-Beuve had almost invented, but had always kept in a fluid and flexible condition—the process of inquiring into the “circumstances,” the ancestry, country, surroundings, religion, tastes, friends, career, of the man of letters. As crystallised under the influence of a philosophical determinism, this process became one of inquiring into the racial origin, chronological period, and general environment (_milieu_) of the individual, the school, the literature, as a result of which these “had to be”—what they seemed to M. Taine. The man of letters, be he Shakespeare or Voltaire, Dante or Cervantes, was simply a made-up prescription.

[Sidenote: _His_ Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise.]

It might not have been so disastrous as it was, if M. Taine had had the audacity—or from a different point of view the pusillanimity—to choose the literature of his own country as his sphere of principal operation. His theory would not have been so cramping as Nisard’s, and he was better furnished with facilities of direct appreciation. That there would have been faults, gaps, oddities, in the survey is certain: but it would have been a great and an invaluable history of French Literature. Now his famous _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_—one of the most brilliantly written of its class, one of the most interesting, perhaps _the_ history of literature, which has most of literature itself—is only valuable for qualities which are not of its own essence, and in the qualities which are of its essence is very nearly valueless. To any one who knows “those who are there and those who are not”—the authors whom M. Taine discusses and the authors whom he skips—it is a stimulating and piquant, if not exactly an informing, book to read. Those who do not know them will be led hopelessly astray. To begin with, M. Taine himself did not know enough, though he knew creditably much. He had many distractions and avocations at the time, and did not plunge on the document with anything like the “brazen-bowelled” energy which he afterwards showed in the _Origines_. Whole periods—especially where language or dialect present difficulties—are jumped with the most perfect nonchalance, but unfortunately not always in silence. Those minor writers who give the key of a literature much more surely than the greater ones (for these are akin to all the world) receive very little attention. The native, automatic, irrational, sympathies and preferences, which keep a man right much oftener than they lead him wrong, are necessarily wanting. Nothing interferes to save the critic from the influence of his theory. He has constructed for himself, on that theory, an ideal Englishman with big feet (because the soil of our country is marshy and soft), with respect for authority (as is shown by English boys calling their father “Governor”), Protestant, melancholy, with several other attributes. This ideal Englishman is further moulded, tooled, typed, by race, time, _milieu_: and he becomes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Byron. And the literature of Byron, Pope, Shakespeare, Chaucer has to deliver itself in a concatenation accordingly.

[Sidenote: _Its shortcomings._]

It is unnecessary to add much to what Sainte-Beuve and Scherer,[851] both his personal friends, both practically Frenchmen, both acquainted as few Frenchmen have been with English literature itself, one of supreme and the other of high critical competency, said in deprecation of this proceeding. But an Englishman, especially if he knows something of other literatures as well as his own, enjoys a _parrhesia_ which they did not enjoy. And the only adequate verdict that can be pronounced on Taine’s History of English Literature is that, great as a book and as a creation, it is as criticism not faulty, not unequal, but positively and utterly worthless. It does not even supply the native with useful independent checks and views “as others see,” for the views are the views of a theory, not a man. It supplies the foreigner with a false and dangerous travesty.

[Sidenote: _Instances of them._]

But in reference to so famous, and in a way so engaging, a book, it might seem impertinent not to descend a little more to particulars. Let anybody contrast the handlings of Dryden and of Swift. The former is one, I do not hesitate to say, of the worst criticisms ever written by a great writer, the latter one of the best. And why? Because Swift—great, arch-great as he is—is very much of a piece: and Taine can adjust him to his theory. Dryden is not of a piece at all, except in regard to that purely literary craftsmanship which a foreigner can judge least well. He is scattered, eclectic, contradictory: and if you make any general theory about him, or even bring any general theory in contact with him, you get into difficulties at once. About Keats—a great person surely, and in casting shadows before him immense—Taine is null; about Shelley, ludicrous; I am not sure that he so much as mentions Browning, most of the best of whose work was done when he wrote. To take examples all over the history, on _Piers Plowman_, on the Caroline Poets, on Gray and Collins, he is at the mercy of any cub in criticism, and a thing to look at and pass for the more gracious and benign animals therein. Sometimes, as we have said above, he tempts the horrid reflection, “Had he really _read_ the authors of whom he speaks?” And always his neglect (which may have endeared him to Mérimée)[852] of the minor figures throws his sketches of the major out of drawing, out of composition, out of proportion. That he started from Sainte-Beuve is certain; but he comes round to a point absolutely opposed to Sainte-Beuve’s serene observatory. He speaks of what he has _not_ seen.

[Sidenote: _Montégut: his peculiarities._]

It is strange, though perhaps not inexplicable, that the critical renown of Émile Montégut is not greater with us than it is. He was one of the best and most popular writers of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ at a time when it still held the position of the chief critical periodical in Europe. He dealt largely with subjects of special interest to Englishmen. Yet, with us, he has nothing like the reputation, not merely of Sainte-Beuve, but of Scherer and Taine. The reasons for this lie partly in the fact that Montégut was, I believe, at all times a man who wrote for his bread, and so not only had to do translation,[853] biography on commission, and other hack-work, but even in his proper sphere could not pick and choose his tasks. Another cause may probably be found in his fondness—I will not say for prolixity, but for handling on the very great scale. I have said elsewhere that I believe part of the success of Sainte-Beuve to be due to the fact that in his very best days he very rarely dealt, at any one time, with any one subject at more than single (or at most double) _causerie_ length. Montégut’s treatment of George Eliot runs to 160 pages, that of Charlotte Bronté to very little less, those of Musset and (more remarkably still) of Nodier to 120 each. Now, though people will sometimes read critical estimates of great length, they will rarely re-read them. And they do not show the qualities of the critic, especially to the running reader, with as much clearness, crispness, and variety of effect as do shorter, but not too short, pieces.

Yet these qualities in Montégut were rare and admirable. I do not know that I have found any work, short of the Aristotelian-Longinian-Coleridgian level, stand the process of re-reading, among the thousand applications of it which this book has necessitated, better than his. His critical appeal is not _tapageur_ and peremptory like that of Taine; nor has it quite the clear, vigorous, masculine, common-sense judgment, when prejudice does not interfere, of Scherer; but it is extraordinarily enveloping, penetrating, intimate. With Taine you get soon tired, if not of his _opes_, which are indeed considerable, yet of his _fumum strepitumque_: with Scherer you think that he has said what he ought to have said, but you are not very anxious to hear him say it again,[854] and there is rarely any “second intention,” any suggested but not obvious thought, for you to hear. Montégut’s delicate, intricate reflection and sympathy, especially at the length at which they are given, can hardly, by the most attentive and sensitive of readers, be taken in all at once; there are always gleanings of the grapes, always second mowings of the grass to be made.

Further, Montégut was, in this group, the only one who did not commit himself to the absolute and inseparable identification of critical inquiry with the construction and application of a general theory of national character and history. He was not, indeed, always free from this besetting delusion of nineteenth-century criticism, a delusion which has done nearly as much harm as all the idols of Neo-classicism put together.[855] On the contrary, he has whole essays tending in this direction.[856] But his best work is done in quite a different one, and, in a late and remarkable study of Saint-René Taillandier,[857] he expressly draws a contrast between _critique littéraire_ and _critique qui se propose un but social_, and lays down that in the former “les œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur beauté et leur perfection.” And so, unenslaved by non-literary theory, and only “servant,” in the good old sense of lover, to the Muses, he is able to discern the interest of work in both directions, while the pure national-character critics are hampered in one by the theory they take to help them along in the other, and not much helped by it even there.

[Sidenote: _Delicacy and range of his work._]

Among the best examples of Montégut’s critical genius that I can think of is the short essay on Boccaccio[858] (where he shows conclusively that great length was not, in the least, an indispensable condition with him), almost all his English papers,[859] and the exceedingly agreeable study of Théophile Gautier,[860] which remains the best thing ever written on that author—difficult, though himself delightful. If I were an admirer of the Guérins (I _am_, though no more than reason, an admirer of Eugénie), I think I should prefer his papers on these two extraordinarily overpraised young persons to either Sainte-Beuve’s or Mr Arnold’s. The above-mentioned piece on Saint-René Taillandier is a real triumph of friendly advocacy. On Béranger—a subject, though for different reasons, almost as much a touchstone as Gautier—he is again wonderfully happy.

Indeed it is rather difficult—except when he is _Tainising_—to discover where Montégut is not happy. To his natural genius for delicate appreciation he united very wide reading, not merely in French, but in English, German, and Italian. In these foreign tongues he has the unconventional _main heureuse_, which sometimes, though not very often, attends foreigners who are not ignorant and who follow their own judgment. The average superficial critic in England to-day may think that he took _Guy Livingstone_[861] much too seriously; the future Sainte-Beuve of England may not. He could appreciate—as, again, not all our own critics could or can—the unequal, and for a foreigner one might think hopelessly baffling, qualities of Charles Kingsley. I am not sure that this “horizontality”—this faculty of bringing himself in line with German, Italian, English, French subjects and interpreting them, has not done him some harm. It is something so much out of the way, if not out of the reach, of most people that they suspect it. But in the court of International Critical Law—which, had it power as it has authority, would govern the literary world—his case is pretty safe.

[Sidenote: _Scherer: peculiar_ moral _character of his criticism_.]

It has been recognised from the first that the obituary epigram of M. Edouard Rod on M. Edmond Scherer, “Il ne jugeait pas les écrits avec son intelligence; il les jugeait avec son caractère”—especially if it be remembered that _caractère_ in French combines the meaning of the two English words “character” and “temper”—is an exposition, as happy as it was meant to be friendly, of the _defects_ of the subject’s criticism. But, like all epigrams, it is scarcely adequate even to the portion of the subject to which it applies: and this subject was by no means one-sided. Fully to understand the dozen or so volumes[862] of trenchant and well-informed censorship which Scherer left, it is necessary, for all but persons of unusual powers of intellectual divination, to know much more of the circumstances than is always needful. He was, though French by birth, Swiss by extraction on the father’s side, and English on the mother’s: and he was brought up, in the straitest school of French Protestantism and English dissent, to become a Protestant-pastor. Continental Protestantism has always tended towards freethought, and after many years of progressive “advance” in his opinions, M. Scherer reached something like positive Nihilism in religion, or at least Agnosticism of the extremest kind. He had, though he must have read very widely in French Literature,[863] written little or nothing on it during this period: and he did not become a literary critic till he was forty-five. Moreover, in the process of unsettlement of his belief, his temper, which had always been very serious, seems to have acquired, as in the case of Mark Pattison and others, though not all, something like a definite roughening or souring. Further, he had paid much attention to philosophical study, and was peremptory in his requirement of “a philosophy” in all works of art and letters.[864] Yet further, his relinquishment of religion had made him only the more strenuous on the score of morality: and against any book or writer showing loose morals, or tolerance of them, he waged truceless war. [Sidenote: _Its consequent limitations._] And to conclude, while he had a somewhat limited sense[865] of the comic, and was slow to appreciate irony, _litotes_, and other things like unto them, his very intelligence, though remarkably strong and in certain senses acute, was distinctly wanting in flexibility, accommodation, and “play.” It was a chisel rather than a watchspring-file, and when it encountered resistance or stoppage of any sort, it was apt rather to try to batter and break than to insinuate itself and so to open a way.

[Sidenote: _The solid merits accompanying them._]

Add to these influences, not always tending for good, others tending powerfully the right way—great learning, the freedom from national prejudice derived from mixed blood, an inflexible honesty of intention, a perfect fearlessness, and a clear and forcible if not exactly attractive style—and the qualities of the resultant are easily anticipated. Such a critic will be weakest in the expression of dislikes. On Molière, Diderot, Carlyle, Baudelaire, especially on the three Frenchmen, M. Scherer is scarcely even interesting or edifying. His imperfect sympathy with the comic in the first case; his porcupine morality, perhaps again in the first, and certainly in the second and fourth; his dislike of the eccentric, the abnormal, the bizarre, in the third and fourth,—make real appreciation impossible for him. “What he says may be used against _him_,” to play on the famous police caution: but in regard to his subjects it is not so much ineffectual as almost irrelevant.

On the other hand, when he speaks of writers with whom he is more or less _in_ sympathy,—on Milton, Wordsworth, Lamartine, George Eliot,—very few critics are better worth reading. His temperament saves him from the usual danger of exaggeration, except very rarely, when the indulgence is quite pleasant; his general approval confines his exposition of particular defects within the limits of an acute liberality; and his setting forth of merits has all the sufficiency which can be conferred by full knowledge, untiring industry, a strong intelligence, and a practised and logical method.

When, on the other hand, cases of attraction and repulsion are about equally present, at least when the _caractère_ allows the intelligence full play, he is almost, if not quite, as good.[866] And as these two classes of Essays are, after all, in the majority, the criticism of M. Scherer is a most valuable exercise both for his craftsfellows and for the general student of literature. When his vision is not distorted by prejudice, he is the inferior of hardly any critic in argumentative power: there is a directness, solidity, simplicity about his methods and his conclusions which, without being in itself better or worse than the accumulative but not always decisive method of Sainte-Beuve and the suggestive approaches of Montégut, forms a very useful alternative and complement to both. He was never popular either in France or elsewhere: and he has hardly charm enough to recover, or rather attain, popularity at any future time. But on no subject on which he has written favourably or impartially—and not on all of those where the _caractère_ has had too much the upper hand—will it be safe for the real student to neglect him. And if that counsel of perfection which I have more than once adumbrated here—the compilation of a critical _corpus_ of the best work of all times and literatures—were ever undertaken, it would be possible to select from his work a volume, and perhaps more than one, of the strongest and soundest criticism to be found in the French language.

[Sidenote: _Saint-Beuve_ + _Gautier_.]

These four notable writers represent, as has been said, the principles and practice of Sainte-Beuve, more or less hardened and methodised by an attempt to make a philosophy of them in Taine’s case, coloured by personal and “professional” tendencies in those of Renan and Scherer, least altered in Montégut. But the specially Romantic tone, which, though it never quite disappeared, had become less and less noticeable in Sainte-Beuve himself, shows little in any of them, unless it be in the last. On the contrary, in another group, where Sainte-Beuve’s general influence was strongly qualified by that of Gautier, the Romantic side, both formal and “tonal,” appears very strongly, and leads on to a development rather more noteworthy (except in the attacks upon it) for creative than for critical results in the Realist-Naturalist-Impressionist-Symbolist movement. The chief members of this group[867] were, the famous master of _flamboyant_ style Saint-Victor, the poets Baudelaire and Banville, and the novelist Flaubert, with whom we may join the band (among which some of them figured with Sainte-Beuve and Gautier himself) of contributors to the very remarkable _Poètes Français_, issued by Crépet forty years ago. [Sidenote: _Banville._] Banville needs but little separate notice, for though a delightful prose-writer, as well as a charming poet, he did not write very much criticism besides his contributions to Crépet. But his Tractate of Versification[868] is most important in the history of French prosody.

[Sidenote: _Saint-Victor._]

One very famous writer just mentioned, Paul de Saint-Victor, is perhaps hardly here entitled to the place which he must occupy in a History of Literature, though, as a fact, all his production came more or less under the head of criticism in its vaguer and wider sense. The distinction is due partly at least to the fact that his professional criticism was in the main either purely theatrical or else artistic, with neither of which branches, as such, do we meddle. But there is more to say. Saint-Victor published little of this; and the chief books on which his reputation depends—the rather famous _Hommes et Dieux_[869] earlier, and _Les Deux Masques_,[870] an elaborate study of literary drama from classical times, the publication of which he undertook just before his death—put forward at least some claim to be strictly of our material; and invite attention because of the elaborate perfection of their style. Saint-Victor, after his death, was made the subject of that “nimious and indiscreet” biography which has played the ghoul to almost all men of letters, especially in France, for many years past: and a story, already referred to, has obtained currency that he built up his paragraphs by dotting over the sheet nouns or epithets of striking qualities which he wished to introduce, and then filling in the contexts to suit. This, which is half a caricature and half an antithesis of the Flaubertian theory and practice, is by no means incredible, and though the practice lends itself to criticism, it is capable enough of defence, but not as criticism itself. The more serious point is that Saint-Victor’s interests are obviously not in pure literary appreciation. He rarely attempts it, and when he does (as in his article on Swift) the result is sometimes disastrous. Where he succeeds he is rather historic, and historic-pictorial, than literary. Deriving partly from Hugo (whom he worshipped) and partly from Gautier, he has more proportion, less immensity in grandeur and in absurdity than the first, and a somewhat greater sense of humanity generally than the second, while his phrase (as in the sentence admired by Taine and quoted above) is sometimes of enchanting beauty. He is interesting to compare with Mr Pater: but the Englishman has very greatly the advantage of him as a pure critic.

[Sidenote: _Baudelaire._]

If Baudelaire had given less attention to the criticism of art[871] and more to that of literature, and if he had been permitted more health and longer life,[872] it is more than probable—it is nearly certain—that he would have been a very considerable literary critic. As it is, there is hardly a page of the two hundred or so which concern the subject in the volume of his posthumously published or republished works, entitled _L’Art Romantique_, that does not contain most remarkable things. He had paid beforehand for Gautier’s admirable Preface by the most elaborate of his own individual appreciations: and the shorter notices of Hugo and others, with the few reviews of individual books (including _Les Misérables_ and _Madame Bovary_), make a worthy company for it. But Baudelaire’s special aptitude is for criticism of a slightly more abstract kind, such as his _Conseils aux Jeunes Littérateurs_, _Les Drames et Les Romans Honnêtes_, _&c._; while the actual appreciations of particulars just noticed are apt to drift off in this direction. And it was not to be regretted: for these _axiomata media_ are often extremely true and subtle. If people would only study them, the popular idea—as far as there is any popular idea at all—of Baudelaire as a passionate and paradoxical champion of immorality and abnormality of all kinds would be strangely altered.[873] Irony is indeed almost always present: but it is yoked with a feeling for art which is extraordinary, and with a sound good sense which, especially in its ironic leaven, often makes one think of Thackeray.

[Sidenote: _Crépet’s_ Les Poètes Français]

As a combined anthology of poetry and criticism, Crépet’s _Poètes Français_[874] has no superior—it may be doubted whether it has an equal. After its general Introduction by Sainte-Beuve, the mediæval and fifteenth-century poets were committed to the admirably competent hands of Louis Moland, a member of the second Romantic generation mainly represented in this Book, who gave up the bar to devote himself to editing and studying older French literature; Anatole de Montaiglon, a still more learned scholar and palæographer; Charles d’Héricault, the remarkable excellence of whose fifteenth and early sixteenth century studies has been referred to before, and who has hardly a critical fault except a slight over-valuation of his pet subjects. With the sixteenth century—or rather with the Pléiade—recourse was naturally had to writers who were less of specialists and more of men of letters generally. Gautier, Baudelaire, and Banville are contributors; Janin’s article on Lamartine is one of the best specimens of his more serious criticism: while the great mass of minor poets were divided among divers others, of whom the most fully presented and the best known were Charles Asselineau, the bibliographer of Romanticism and a diligent student with a pleasant pen; Hippolyte Babou, the accredited inventor of Baudelaire’s title _Fleurs du Mal_, and a man of remarkable though (except here) rather wasted talent; Philoxène Boyer (“Dans les salons de Philoxène, Nous étions quatre-vingt _rimeurs_”); and Edouard Fournier, an inestimable editor, in the _Bibliothèque Elzévirienne_ and elsewhere, and the author, among innumerable other things, of the famous collection, _L’Esprit des Autres_ (Paris, 1855).

The whole collection is a real literary and critical monument— independently of the merit of many of the articles—because it is practically the first attempt to deal with the entire poetry of a literature in a catholic and impartial manner, uninfluenced by any prevailing theory exalting or depressing particular periods, or particular writers, at the expense of others. The nineteenth century had its faults, and many of them: but this book could hardly have been written before the nineteenth century.

[Sidenote: _Flaubert: the “Single Word.”_]

If Rousseau, who wrote no criticism at all, ought, according to some, to have a large place in a History thereof, how much more Flaubert? For the author of _Madame Bovary_, though he wrote, or at least published, hardly any, has filled his _Letters_[875] with critical remarks, and is the acknowledged godfather, though by no means the inventor (for we have seen it as far back as La Bruyère, nay, as Longolius, if not as far back as Virgil), of the Doctrine of the Single Word—the notion that there is only _one_ phrase, sometimes only one single and integral combination of letters, which will really express an author’s meaning, and that he must wrestle with Time and the dictionary and his own invention till he finds this. This, we say, will be found _passim_ in Flaubert’s _Letters_; it will be found, by those who do not wish to read all these (they make a mistake), admirably and forcibly put by his disciple Maupassant in the Introduction thereto. The doctrine,[876] though an obvious exaggeration of the _true_ doctrine of the importance of “the word,” is an interesting one, and has been—perhaps still is—an influential, but, on our general principles, I do not think it necessary to give Flaubert much space here on the strength of it. He never chose to embody his opinions on this matter in any regular form; probably, with his very peculiar temperament, it would have been quite impossible for him to do so, while his headlong ways of thought and speech, so oddly contrasted with the enormous patience of his writing, made his critical utterances in relation to others mainly genial and Gargantuan splutters—things _gigantesque_, to use his own favourite word, but not critical.

[Sidenote: “_Naturalism._”]

As in the case of Flaubert and “Realism,” so in the case of “Naturalism” and M. Zola, the more general considerations will be for the Conclusion, the selection of facts and documents, on which they are based, for this place. To obtain these facts and documents we must a little break the rule of not noticing persons who have lived very recently, in the case of M. Zola himself and his friend M. de Goncourt. Their _numerus_ must undergo the law of representation by chiefs which presses ever and ever more upon us. Of the host opposed to them, the chief and principal, M. Ferdinand Brunetière, is still living.

[Sidenote: _Zola._]

The author of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ (for out of those good manners which do not determine by death, I shall not call him by the periphrasis against which he specially protested, “the author of _L’Assommoir_”) wrote a good deal of criticism; his combative temperament supplying the impulse, and his journalist experience the means.[877]

But of the nearly half-score volumes[878] in which this criticism has been collected, perhaps only one, _Le Roman Expérimental_,[879] is much worth re-reading; at any rate, it will give us quite sufficient “document” here. Issued at the very culminating-point of its author’s talent and popularity, in 1880, long after he had come through the struggles of his youth, and long before he had fallen into that condition of a naturalist and anti-theistic _voyant_ which we find in _Travail_ and _Vérité_, it is thoroughly characteristic, thoroughly equipped. There is no reason, if the author had had the same talent for criticism that he had (after making all allowances) for creation, why it should not display as much power in the one direction as the nearly contemporary _Attaque du Moulin_ does in the other.

[Sidenote: Le Roman Expérimental.]

Not to mince matters (and waste time in the mincing), it does nothing of the sort: but, on the contrary, proves that he had next to no critical aptitude. The contention of the title-paper—that the exploits of M. Zola and his friends in fiction correspond to those of Claude Bernard in physics, supported as it is by extensive quotation and adaptation of the famous vivisector’s own words—can, I fear, receive no other epithet than puerile. The physiologist can, of course, experiment very abundantly. But how, in the name of transcendentalism and common-sense alike, can the artist in fiction _experiment_? One artist in fiction did do so certainly: to wit, the unlucky author of _Sandford and Merton_, who trained up a little girl that she might become his wife, with the natural result that she became somebody else’s. _That_ was a _roman expérimental_, on all-fours with physiological and other experiments, if you like. Many persons who are entertained at His Majesty’s expense, or who have stretched His Majesty’s hemp, might also be described as _romanciers expérimentaux_, and the company could be strengthened from less sinister sources.

But how can the _writer_ experiment? He can observe, he can experience, he can (the ambiguous sense of the word is probably the source of M. Zola’s blunder) analyse, as we call it. But he can never experiment, he can only imagine. The check of nature and of the actual, the blow of the quintain if you charge at it and fail, can never be his except in the metaphorical and transformed sense of “literary” success or failure, which brings us back to another region altogether. Now “imagination,” “idealism,” and the like are M. Zola’s abomination, the constant targets of his ineffectual arrows. He does not see that he is himself using them all the time to form his subjects, just as he is using the “rhetoric,” which he abominates equally, to convey his expression.

[Sidenote: _Examples of his criticism._]

Consult other places to fill out M. Zola’s ideas of literature, and they will be found all of a piece. Read[880] his “Lettre à La Jeunesse,” with its almost frenzied cry for a literature of _formula_, excluding genius, excluding individuality, though only to smuggle them in again afterwards by a backdoor. Read his account (very well done and producing quite the opposite effect to that which he intends) of the old man of letters, the man of letters _à la_ Sainte-Beuve, in “L’Argent dans la Littérature,” and the funny details about royalties and centimes which follow. Read him on “L’expression personnelle” in the novel—where he is specially interesting, because with all his talent this is exactly what he himself had not got. Read him on the famous “Human Document,” where he misses— misses blindly and obstinately, almost ferociously, with the ferocity of the man who _will_ not see—the hopeless, the insuperable rejoinder, “Study your documents as much as you like, but _transform_ the results of the study before you give them as art.” Read the astonishing paralogism entitled “La Moralité,” where he excuses the product of _tacenda_ in literature because _tacenda_ are constantly recurring in life, and even being inserted in the newspapers which object to them in fiction. Read his queer reversal of a truth (certainly not too generally recognised) that Naturalism is only Romanticism “drawn to the dregs”—“le Romantisme est la période initiale et troublé du Naturalisme.” And read above all, in another of the papers, generally headed “De la Critique,” the monumental, fatal sentence, “Balzac, qui avait pour Walter Scott une admiration _difficile à concevoir aujourd’hui_.”[881]