Chapter I: The Successors of Sainte-Beuve (2)

He has said it. _Not_—let it be also said and underlined with all the emphasis possible, that M. Zola—that anybody—is to be put out of court because he does not admire Scott. We may be extremely sorry for him; we may think him _quoad hoc_ utterly wrong; but he can plead the old privilege. He likes what he can—what he does like: and there is no more to be said. But if he cannot understand why Balzac (whom he himself admires for certain, not for all, of his qualities) should have admired an author whom he himself does not admire, because his qualities are different—_then_ he shows himself at once to be destitute of the primal and necessary organ of criticism—the organ which appreciates, which at any rate comprehends and admits the appreciation of, things that are different. He is even as those Neo-classics, who could not understand how anybody could admire what was not like Virgil, or like something else, as the case might be. He has cut the ground from under his own feet, thrown up his own charter and passport. He cannot object if he be bound hand and foot and carried into the outer darkness, where La Harpe is Minos and M. Nisard Rhadamanthus, with the third place on the infernal bench left vacant for the reader to fill at his pleasure.

[Sidenote: _The reasons of his critical incompetency._]

The truth, I think, of it all is, that M. Zola, though in his way a rather great man of not the best kind of letters, knew nothing critically about literature, and did not even take any real interest in it. I do not know that it has been generally remarked, but I am sure that if any one who is familiar with the enormous stretch of the novels will exert his memory, he will find an almost unexampled absence of literary reference, literary allusion, literary flavour in them. Even Dickens is not to be named in this respect beside Zola. Nay, his very critical works themselves, though they deal with books, have nothing of the book-atmosphere about them. When a man is really saturated with literature, he carries the aroma of it with him like a violet or a piece of Russian leather (less complimentary comparisons can be added at the taste and pleasure of the reader). He cannot dissociate himself from it if he would: just as another cannot attain it, however hard he pretends. When M. Zola read books it seems generally to have been to coach up his documents and his details: indeed, why should a person who despised poetry and rhetoric read them for anything else? Given this ignorance or this want of appetite, given a consuming desire to philosophise, combined with a very weak logical faculty, an intense belief in one formula or set of formulas, and a highly combative temperament, and you get a set of conditions which even M. Hennequin might admit as sufficient to turn out or account for a personage nothing if not _un_critical.

[Sidenote: “_Les Deux Goncourt._”]

The state of his friends, the MM. de Goncourt, was not much more gracious; but though they were even more influential, as holding up the general critical doctrine and practice of naturalist-impressionism, they have left very little direct criticism, and what they have is of art rather than of letters. They too seem to have read not much _belles lettres_. The elder brother, towards the very end of his days (when, by the way, he thought that Shakespeare _manque d’imagination_), discovered with much interest that there had been a man named Defoe who was a considerable Realist or Naturalist, and that _M. Maspero_ had hit upon a remarkably interesting story about one Rhampsinitus. Their general principle—that all literature (they, like so many moderns who cannot write poetry, thought that prose had quite superseded it) should consist of direct personal observation clothed in deliberately and jealously “personal” expression—may be dealt with later. Of individual applications of it, the most attractive is Edmond’s quarrel with Flaubert because _he_, with all his labour, hit only on “the epithets of all the world _in excelsis_,”[882] while “we” achieved the “personal” epithets. From which it will appear that our old friend, Miss Edgeworth’s Frederick, when he called his hat by the extremely personal epithet of “cadwallader,” had finished the art of literature, had sounded the depths and scaled the heights of possible writing.

[Sidenote: _“Scientific criticism”: Hennequin._]

One of the objections—and not the least forcible—to philosophising too much, in æsthetic matters as in others, is at the “too much” always begets a too much more; it is like the Hybris of Greek dramatics. Some might have thought that Nisard, with his ideal French genius, and still more Taine, with his all-pervading law of place and time and circumstance, would have satisfied every normal craving for “scientific” criticism: some even that the results of their practice were sufficient to warn any reasonable person off such things. But to think this would have been to ignore humanity and history. Towards the end of the penultimate decade of the century a young and energetic critic, M. Émile Hennequin, fluttered the dove-cotes (or hawk’s eyries) of criticism with a still further straitening of the method, by the promulgation of what he was pleased to term _esthopsychology_. His career was cut prematurely short:[883] and, as the experienced had foreseen, “esthopsychology” soon followed—if it did not even accompany—him to the grave. But it made some noise for a time: and the three volumes,[884] which he issued in three successive years, will always remain a curiosity of criticism if not much more; while his attempt, foredoomed as it was, is, will be, to failure, is sure to be renewed. It was duly pointed out at the time that when “esthopsychological” criticism proceeded most closely on its own lines it was usually bad criticism, and that when it was good criticism its methods were not distinguishable from those of other kinds. This is true; but there is something more to be said.

Let us do M. Hennequin the justice to admit at once that he separated his new science from strictly literary criticism, and adjusted literature itself in an entirely peculiar and novel attitude and garb, before he subjected it to his own processes of pathological experiment. “Literary work,” according to him,[885] is “a collection of written signs intended to produce non-active emotions”: and of course in the country where, and for the people to whom, it is this, all sorts of peculiar phenomena may arise. In that country we can quite understand that they regard individuality as an _influence perturbatrice_,—a nasty, impudent, interfering baggage that upsets formulas, and brings your sum all wrong just when you have got it symmetrically arranged in the ciphering book. But those who consider individuality as the source and soul of genius, the only begetter of poetry, the incomparable companion, patron, voucher of great Art—what part or lot can _they_ have with the esthopsychologists? A sort of slender snow-bridge across the crevasse may show itself when we come to the doctrine that, in order to understand a book, you must analyse its effect on the reader as well as the evidences it gives of its own originating causes and purposes in the author; but then, as was pointed out in the antithesis above cited, there is nothing new in this:—we are back again with Longinus, nay, with Aristotle. And we speedily discover that the other side of this bridge is a place to which we do not even wish to get, though the proceedings of the inhabitants are sometimes rather funny at a distance.

An enormous tabular scheme of conditioning and distinguishing circumstances, characteristics, means, effects, &c., has first to be arranged. The sea as a place is _b_: something more complicated is “_daxxx_,” and so on. You compose your formula for Hugo by the help of thus symbolising his Mystery, his Grandiosity, and a good many other things, including the fact (not a fact by any means) that he had in 1888 only one disciple in England—to wit, Mr Swinburne. You study Dickens, Heine, Tourguénieff, and Poe in this way as _Écrivains Francisés_, others as _Écrivains Français_. And what is the result? Dickens has much “sensibility”; Hugo is “antithetic”; the Goncourts rather draw than write; M. Huysmans affects sensational colour; Panurge is an incarnation of the ancient French character. “Après avoir fait l’analyse du vocabulaire, de la syntaxe, de la métrique, de la composition de Flaubert, nous avons examiné ses procédés de description et de psychologie qui se reduisent à ceux—[the reader doubtless expects something new and startling]—du réalisme”! These “secrets of Punch,” these “truths of M. de La Palisse,” simply pullulate in M. Hennequin’s pages. We travel painfully from Dan to Beersheba, and from Beersheba through all the wildernesses to the uttermost parts of the sea; we accumulate the most elaborate implements, provisions, documents of travel that the shops can furnish or our ingenuity invent: we spend months and years in painful prospecting. And we bring home exactly the same conclusions which have been written on the walls of every house in the intellectual Israel for Heaven knows how many years. Much μόχθος περισσὸς has been seen in this story: some (though I should demur) would have it to be a history—and an example—of nothing else. But labour more utterly lost than “esthopsychology” I think we have not found, and shall not find, even here.

[Sidenote: _“Comparative Literature”: Texte._]

About ten years later Fate again cut short the life of an industrious and promising critic in M. Joseph Texte. I received, from personal friends of M. Texte, such golden accounts of his character and abilities, and the purpose to which he devoted his too short life-work— that of the study of “Comparative Literature”—is so much that to which I have devoted my own much more extended if not quite unhampered opportunities,— that I should like to say nothing of him but good. His last title, _La Littérature Comparée_, sums up the drift of critical and literary-historical thought for the last hundred and fifty years, and especially for the last hundred. As we have seen, from the time of Bodmer and Breitinger in Germany, from that of Gray in England, from that of Diderot, if not even earlier, in France, it has always been this extended and comparative study which has corrected criticism. But it was not till the nineteenth century was pretty far advanced that the practice of Sainte-Beuve, and a little later the formal doctrine of Mr Arnold, recognised and, as it were, canonised the idea; while it is only within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years that it has been largely carried out, and only within the last decade or less that it has received regular academic and other sanction. I have never myself, since I began to study literature seriously almost forty years ago, had the slightest doubt about its being not only the _via prima_, but the _via sola_ of literary safety.

But literary roads are never quite “royal” in the sense of the proverb: there are always obstacles and breaches in the way, as well as possibilities of mistaking it. Especially, as it seems to me, is the student of Comparative Literature exposed to the old temptation of generalising and abstracting too much. I think that M. Texte’s first, and perhaps best known book, _Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitanisme Littéraire_,[886] is rather an example of this. It will be observed that the very title hurries us a long way to sea—that we are almost out of sight of the firm land of individual example-study. If you have been brought up solely on the drama of Racine and are introduced to that of Shakespeare—nay, even _vice versa_, though not to the same extent—it is almost impossible that the contrast should not do you good, if only by forcing you to distinguish—to give your reasons, not to “like grossly.” But “Literary Cosmopolitanism”[887]? is not this a very distant and very vague City of God? is it not even something of a Nephelococcygia? It has never existed except to some extent during the Middle Ages: there is no present sign of its ever being likely to exist. And the coupling of it with Rousseau excites other apprehensions. Rousseau was a Swiss; he lived in France, Italy, England: his works were popular all over Europe. There _is_ an air—but an almost obviously false air—of cosmopolitanism about this. When we examine the actual book we find that, practically, it consists of a summary of the chief literary _rapports_ between France and England before Rousseau; of an ingenious attempt[888] to make Rousseau himself out as a kind of unconscious apostle of universal principles of literary criticism: and then of some remarks on the further _rapports_ of English and French after him. “Rousseau and the Relations of English and French Literature” would be the real title of the book: and a useful enough monograph it is. The _Études de Littérature Européenne_ are better (the studies of Keats and Browne are very good), and the _Littérature Comparée_ interesting. But M. Texte was always too heedless of the guile that lurks in generals— literary more than of any other kind. The “Descendants of the Lakists in France” really means little more than that Wordsworth exercised a considerable influence on Sainte-Beuve: and “The German Influence in France” is either a quite unmanageably large subject, or a mere disproportion of nut and kernel. It is very dangerous to take, as an example of “contemporary” English literature, at the end of the nineteenth century, _Aurora Leigh_, which merely represents a brief and passing phase between the first Reform Bill and the first Exhibition. But nothing is further from my wishes than to carp and cavil at M. Texte, who in an average lifetime must have made vast and valuable progress, and who, as it is, was a valiant pioneer in a great and effectual way.

[Sidenote: _Academic Criticism: Gaston Paris._]

To pass or recur to criticism of a strictly academic character, it is much easier to be impartial in judgment of an enemy than of a friend. And, but for one thing, I fear I might be bribed in favour of M. Gaston Paris by the extraordinary liberality and indulgence which, without any private introduction or intercession, he showed, some twenty years ago, towards an attempt on the subject in which he was the unquestioned authority and master—an attempt which did not follow his own or any other leading, which to his expert eyes must have been full of blunders and shortcomings, and which could have had in those eyes no merit but that of being honest, and based on first-hand study. Even this would not have conciliated everybody. But M. Paris had nothing of the dog who growls when any one approaches _his_ bone, and it was most interesting to watch in _Romania_, the periodical which he helped to direct for more than thirty years, the difference of his method and that of some of his coadjutors. One could only marvel at his perfect freedom from this _lues_ of the mere scholar.

This equity or urbanity, however, though the most pleasing to persons who experienced it, was not the only nor perhaps the chief, it was certainly not the most purely literary, excellence of M. Paris as a critic. He had another, still rarer in the philologist—the faculty of appreciating literature. His philological and other conscientiousness, indeed, prevented him from reprinting—during long years in which all students of Old French coveted it—the delightful _Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne_, with which (in 1865-66) he began his literary career: and most of his time was spent on lectures, editions, and miscellaneous work in the periodical just mentioned and others. But many of his _Romania_ Essays (which we may hope will be collected) display the rare union just mentioned, as the work of few other philologists in the older modern tongues has done throughout Europe, though the late Professor Kölbing came an honourable second in Germany. And in 1885 he actually collected, under the title of _Poésie du Moyen Age_, some of his more popular lectures on the title-subject, on the origins of French Literature, on “La Chanson de Roland et La Nationalité Française” (a fine piece, delivered _crânement_, as his students might have said, in beleaguered Paris, during the central December of the Année Terrible), on the quaint semi-comic epic of Charlemagne’s Pilgrimage, on the story of Parnell’s _Hermit_, on his father. Some years later he gave an excellent but too brief _Manual of Mediæval French Literature_: and in 1896 he published a very noteworthy collection of articles, obituary and other, on modern men of letters, entitled _Penseurs et Poètes_. The longest and most remarkable of these is on the poet, M. Sully Prudhomme—a lifelong friend—and it shows better than anything else M. Paris’s power of pure literary criticism in subjects far distant in character as in time from those in which his hand usually dealt. I do not agree with him here; I cannot rank his subject’s estimable and faultless, but rather cold and limited, poetic gift so highly as he did. But for careful investigation and grouping of results, for delicate arrangement of merits so that they may produce the best effect, for good taste in enthusiasm, and ingenuity, never unfair, in advocacy, the article will stand comparison with one of Sainte-Beuve’s at his most interested and good-natured, or one of Montégut’s at his least discursive and protracted.

[Sidenote: _Caro_, _Taillandier_, &c.]

The number of learned or academic critics—some older, some younger—who might be grouped round or arranged after M. Paris is of course very large: but I do not know any who combined his special accomplishment with his general literary quality. Long ago, in another place, I was guilty of introducing two of the class as “M. Saint-René Taillandier, a dull man of industry, and M. Caro, a man of industry who is not dull.” Neither, alas! “is” anything now: but a renewed and special study of their work for the purposes of this book does not induce me to tone down the flippancy. Still, it is fair to say that neither seems to have intended what we call here “pure literary criticism.” Caro[889] was (and was satirised rather unjustly as such, in a comedy famous in its day) a sort of ladies’ philosopher, a moralist in kid gloves and dress clothes. Taillandier (the “Saint-René” appears to be one of the usual self-embellishments) was in the same way a historian and political student, who, in his capacity as regular contributor to the _Deux Mondes_, attempted a great deal of literary work, and collected a good deal of it.[890] He had little grasp or suppleness: and retained a great deal of the old academic horror of the bizarre. A review by him of Flaubert’s _Éducation Sentimentale_ was, I think, the particular _locus_ which convinced me of his dulness: and I have never read anything which removed the impression.[891]

[Sidenote: _The “Light Horsemen”: Janin._]

Of what may be called the light horsemen of French criticism, almost any one, with even the slightest knowledge of the subject, would at once name Jules Janin as the hetman. He was very early singled out by Nisard in his attack on la _littérature facile_;[892] and though he replied with all the wit, style, and facility itself for which he was justly renowned, he probably—or rather certainly—knew as well as anybody else that it was easier to counter-raid the enemy’s country than to defend his own. A “prince of criticism,” as he was called (and is said to have liked to call himself, with the mixture of self-deceit and self-satire which all men of some brains know), he hardly was: a prince of journalism he was most certainly. Of his purely literary exercises in the art practically nothing survives; his early romantic extravagances in novel kind, _L’Âne Mort_ and _Barnave_, have outlasted them, while themselves possessing no very solid fame. His purely theatrical criticisms are said to be of some value as _points de repère_. But, on the whole, if the most brilliant of journalists, he was also the most of a journalist among brilliant men of letters. His appreciations were written with all that appetising _à peu près_—that dash and sparkle and apparent mastery—which, more than any solid qualities, have given French criticism its reputation with those who do not know. But they represent little real knowledge on the writer’s own part: and while destitute of any theory of criticism of the more abstract kind (which they might lack and be no worse for it), they display no standard of personal taste, no test of goodness drawn from comparative experience, to supply the place of such a theory. They had their day; but they have ceased to be.

[Sidenote: _Pontmartin._]

It might have been scarcely safe to class M. Armand de Pontmartin with the light horse during his lifetime; he would at any rate, in all probability, have taken care to show that light horsemen not only do not belong to the non-combatant divisions of an army, but are one of its most formidable arms of offence and defence. The extreme voluminousness (he reprinted some fifty or sixty volumes of his _Samedis_ and other work) of this Royalist critic; the sharpness of his tongue, especially in a book entitled _Les Jeudis de Madame Charbonneau_, which fluttered literary critics in the middle years of the Second Empire; and the fact that Sainte-Beuve took the field against him on more than one occasion, have created, I believe, rather an unfavourable impression. This is not quite fair. M. de Pontmartin wrote, or at least republished, too much; he was too generally under the influence of splenetic partisanship in more than one kind, and there was in his criticism a certain superficiality and tendency to gossip round a subject, whether in attack or in caress, rather than to grasp and penetrate it. But he had great acuteness, wrote an admirable French style of the older and purer kind, and certainly had no reason to be ashamed of the way in which he harassed the “Naturalists” in his later years of contribution to the _Gazette de France_. The other publications of these years[893] show a mellowing of temper and no loss of ability: while even in the earlier _Samedis_ a great number of true things, well put, may be found.

[Sidenote: _Veuillot._]

But the most formidable of French critical Pandours—a man of genius in his own way, and the inspirer in that way of no small or inconspicuous divisions of journalism in other countries and since his own time—was Louis Veuillot. Most of his “swashbuckler” writing—to do him justice he did not merely swash the buckler, but had a right swashing blow with the sword at his enemy’s face and body—was directed to religious and political matters. But he had a real interest in literature: and though his principles, as Extreme Right and Extreme Left principles generally do, allowed and indeed encouraged him to regard no blow as foul in their service, he is perhaps less unscrupulous in administering literary sensations[894] than in dealing out others.

The twelve solid volumes of his _Mélanges_,[895] despite the apparently ephemeral character of many of their subjects, are still excellent reading, especially for the judicious student who knows how to skip, and does not disdain to do so now and then. Even when Veuillot raises false issues he is seldom quite negligible; and when he is in sympathy with his subject he is sometimes extraordinarily happy; while one seldom or never detects in him the note of personal spite, or the mere pedantic snarling, which, as has been said, are the unpardonable sins of criticism.

It might surprise some people who have heard of Veuillot only as a tomahawk-and-black-flag critic to read the affectionate and admirably executed eulogy of Edouard Ourliac, at iv. 580 of the second series; until Sainte-Beuve went out of his way to offend the Clericals, Veuillot appreciated him; and even in regard to Hugo, his handling (at ii. 542 of the second series) is astonishingly clever. Further, Veuillot is very seldom silly: one of the few instances I can think of, is his attack on Sainte-Beuve and Rabelais. It is never quite easy to understand what there is in Master Francis which upsets and disorganises even the most intelligent Roman Catholic critics, and the fact is one of the heaviest charges against the Roman form of Catholicism, from the literary point of view. Of poetry, Veuillot had not much sense; one would hardly expect it in him, and it is certain that his doctrine, that a great poet must sing _ni sa dame, ni la dame d’autrui, ni les dames de tout le monde_, would, if it were carried out universally, make poetry extremely uninteresting. He could be vulgar, as in his attack on Edmond About (at v. 372 of the second series), but then it has to be remembered that About could be and was extremely vulgar himself, and that the greatest danger of this sort of rough-and-tumble journalism is that you are too apt to accept the weapons and the methods of the adversary.

[Sidenote: _Not so black as, &c._]

We have little space for “Mr Bludyer” in this book, and therefore it is that I have given some to his greatest and most gifted representative in the flesh during our time. One may think indeed—I do—that Mr Bludyer is a very unnecessary evil,—that it is perfectly possible to fight as keenly and as stanchly as you like with the pen, and yet never write otherwise than fairly, honestly, and like a gentleman. But whether Mr Bludyer must come or not, he generally does; and when he does, it would be well if he always had the wits, and the raciness, and, on the whole, the freedom from mere dirty selfish vanities and jealousies and greeds, which characterised the redoubtable and notorious author of the _Odeurs de Paris_.

[Sidenote: _The present._]

It is half pleasant and half unpleasant to conclude this notice of French criticism with only a reference to those distinguished living representatives of it who hold up its banner and spread its sails to all the winds of the spirit. To name no juniors, I have already had more than one occasion to refer to the great erudition, the remarkable acuteness, and the practised critical method of M. Ferdinand Brunetière. These qualities, with an agreeable and sufficient difference, appear also in M. Émile Faguet: while M. Anatole France illustrates a more strictly impressionist, and a lighter kind of our office with one of the most charming styles that any living European writer uses for the pleasure of the human race; and there are many who greatly admire the wit, the alertness, and the truly Gallic nonchalance of M. Jules Lemaître. They have all written for some considerable time: may they put on none but Academic immortality for at least as much longer!