Chapter II (7)

The subjects which Leconte de Lisle prefers are never of a sort to promote sentimentality or even sensibility. He writes of Druids moaning along the edge of hyperborean cliffs, of elephants marching in set column across hot brown stretches of sand, of the black panther crouched among the scarlet cactus-blossoms, of the polar bear lamenting among the rocks, of the Syrian sages whose beards drip with myrrh as they sit in council under the fig-tree of Naboth. He writes of humming-birds and of tigers, of Malay pirates and of the sapphire cup of Bhagavat, of immortal Zeus danced round by the young Oceanides, and of Brahma seeking the origin of things in the cascades of the Sacred River. These are not themes which lend themselves to personal effusion, or on which the poet can be expected to embroider any confessions of his egotism. If Leconte de Lisle chooses to be thus remote from common human interests--that is to say, from the emotions of our vulgar life to-day--his is the responsibility, and it is one which he has fully recognized. But that his genius was not wholly marmoreal, nor of an icy impassibility, the careful study of his works will amply assure us.

It is strange that even very careful critics have been led to overlook the personal note in the poems of Leconte de Lisle: probably because the wail of self-pity is so piercing in most modern verse that it deadens the ear to the discreet murmur of the stoic poet's confession. Hence even Anatole France has been led to declare that the author of _Poemes Barbares_ has determined to be as obstinately absent from his work as God is from creation; and that he has never breathed a word about himself, his secret wishes, or his personal ideals. But what is such a passage as the following if not a revelation of the soul of the poet in its innermost veracity?

_O jeunesse sacree, irreparable joie,
Felicite perdue, ou l'ame en pleurs se noie!
O lumiere, o fratcheur des monts calmes et bleus,
Des coteaux et des bois feuillages onduleux,
Aubes d'un jour divin, chants des mers fortunees,
Florissante vigueur de mes belles annees...
Vous vivez, vous chantez, vous palpitez encor,
Saintes realites, dans vos horizons d'or!
Mais, o nature, o ciel, flois sacres, monts sublimes,
Bois dont les vents amis sont murmurer les cimes,
Formes de l'ideal, magnifiques aux yeux,
Vous avez disparu de mon coeur oublieux!
Et voici que, lasse de voluptes ameres,
Haletant du desir de mes mille chimeres,
Helas! j'ai desappris les hymnes d'autrefois,
Et que mes dieux trahis n'entendent plus ma voix._

This is a note more often heard, perhaps, in English than in French poetry. It is the lament of Wordsworth for the "visionary gleam" that has fled, for "the glory and the dream" that fade into the light of common day.

Leconte de Lisle is unsparing with the results of his erudition, and this probably confirms the popular notion of his remoteness. Here, however, returning for a moment to Landor, we may observe that he is never so close-packed and never so cryptic as the author of _Chrysaor_ and _Gunlaug_. What Leconte de Lisle has to tell us about mysterious Oriental sages and mythical Scandinavian heroes may be unfamiliar to the reader, but is never rendered obscure by his mode of narration. Nothing could be less within our ordinary range of experience than the adventure of _Le Barde de Temrah_, who arrives at dawn from a palace of the Finns, in a chariot drawn by two white buffaloes; but Leconte de Lisle recounts it voluminously, in clear, loud language which leaves no sense of doubt on the listener's mind as to what exactly happened.

His Indian studies became less precise in the _Poemes Barbares_ than they had been in the early _Poemes Antiques_; perhaps under the stress of greater knowledge. But he had been from early youth personally acquainted with the Indian landscapes which he describes. With the ancient Sanscrit literature, I suppose he had mainly an acquaintance through translations, of which those by Burnouf may have inspired him most. Whether, if he had lived to read Professor Jacobi's proof that Valmiki was a historical character, and the author in its original form of the earliest and greatest epic of India, the _Ramayana_, Leconte de Lisle would have been annoyed to remember that he had treated Valmiki as a mythical person, symbolically devoured by white ants, it is impossible to say. Probably not, for he only chose these ancient instances to illustrate from the contemplative serenity of Brahmanism his own calm devotion to the eternal principle of beauty.

_Bhagavat! Bhagavat! Essence des Essences,_
_Source de la beaute, fleuve des Renaissances,_
_Lumiere qui fait vivre et mourir a la fois._

Probably no other European poet has interpreted with so much exactitude, because with so intense a sympathy, the cosmogony and mythology of the Puranas, with their mystic genealogies of gods and kings.

The harmony and sonorous fullness of the verse of Leconte de Lisle were noted from the first, even by those who had least sympathy with the subjects of it. He achieved the extreme--we may almost say the excessive--purity of his language by a tireless study of the Greeks and of the great French poets of the seventeenth century, with whom he had a remarkable sympathy at a time when they were generally in disfavour. His passion for the art of Racine may be compared with the close attention which Keats gave to the versification of Dryden. He greatly venerated the genius of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps the only contemporary poet of France who exercised any influence over the style of Leconte de Lisle. It is difficult to define in what that influence consisted; the two men had essentially as little resemblance as Reims Cathedral has to the Parthenon, Victor Hugo being as extravagantly Gothic as Leconte de Lisle was Attic. But the younger poet was undoubtedly fascinated by the tumultuous cadences of his more various, and, we must admit, more prodigious predecessor. They agreed, moreover, in appealing to the ear rather than to the eye. Verlaine has described Leconte de Lisle's insistence on the vocal harmonies of verse, and he adds: "When he recited his own poems, a lofty emotion seemed to vibrate through his whole noble figure, and his auditors were drawn to him by an irresistible sympathy." It must have been a wonderful experience to hear him, for instance, chant the iron _terze rime_ of _Le Jugement de Konor_, or the voluptuous languor of _Nourmahal_.

Much has been said about the sculpturesque character of Leconte de Lisle's poems. But a comparison of them to friezes of figures carved out of white marble scarcely does justice to their colour, though it may indicate the stability of their form. It would be more accurate to compare them to the shapes covered with thin ivory and ornamented with gold and jewels, in which the Greeks, and even Pheidias himself, delighted. The _Poemes Antiques_ are, in fact, chryselephantine. But Leconte de Lisle was a painter also, and perhaps the chief difference to be observed between the early compositions and the _Poemes Barbares_ consists in the pictorial abundance of the latter. His descriptions have the character of broadly-brushed cartoons of scenes which are usually exotic, as of some Puvis de Chavannes who had made a leisurely voyage in Orient seas. Leconte de Lisle floods his canvas with light, and his favourite colours are white and golden yellow; even his fiercest tragedies are luminous. India he sees not as prosaic travellers have seen it, but in a blaze of dazzling splendour:

_Tes fleuves sont pareils aux pythons lumineux_
_Qui sur les palmiers verts enroulent leurs beaux noeuds;_
_Ils glissent au detour de tes belles collines_
_En guirlandes d'argent, d'azur, de perles fines._

It is natural that a nature so eminently in harmony with the visual world, and so pagan in all its instincts, should be indifferent or even hostile to Christianity. His stoic genius, solidly based on the faiths of India and of Hellas, finds the virtues of humility and of tender resignation contemptible. In the very remarkable dialogue, _Hypatie et Cyrille_, Leconte de Lisle defines, with the voice of the Neoplatonist, his own conception of religious truth. It is one in which _Le vil Galileen_ has neither part nor lot. We have to recognize in his temper a complete disdain of all the consolations of the Christian faith, or rather an inability to conceive in what they consist, and no phenomenon in literature is more curious than that, after a single generation, French poetry should have returned to the aggressive piety which strikes an English reader as so incomprehensible in M. Francis Jammes and in M. Paul Claudel. But poetry has many mansions.

The person of Leconte de Lisle is described to us as characteristic of his work. He was very handsome, with a haughty carriage of the head on a neck "as pure and as solid as a column of marble." A monocle, which never left his right eye, gave a modern touch to an aspect which might else have been too rigorously antique. A droll little pseudo-anecdote, set by Theodore de Banville in his inimitable amalgam of wit and fancy, illuminates the effect which Leconte de Lisle produced upon his contemporaries. I take it from that delicious volume, too little remembered to-day, the _Camees Parisiens_, of 1873:

Leconte de Lisle was walking with AEschylus one day, in the ideal
fatherland of tragedy, when, while he was conversing with the old
hero of Salamis and of Platea, he suddenly observed that his
companion was so bald that a tortoise might easily mistake his
skull for a polished rock. Not wishing, therefore, to humiliate the
titanic genius, and yet not able without regret to give up an
ornament the indispensable beauty of which was obvious, he made up
his mind to be totally bald in front, while retaining on the back
of his head the silken and curly wealth of an Apollonian
_chevelure_.

It was perhaps in the course of these walks with AEschylus that Leconte de Lisle formed the habit of spelling Clytemnestre "Klytaimnestra." The austerities of his orthography attracted a great deal of attention, and cannot be said to have succeeded in remoulding French or spelling. People continue to write "Cain," although the poet insisted on "Kain," and even, in his sternest moments, on "Qain." He believed that his text gained picturesqueness, and even exactitude of impression, by those curious archaisms. They are, at least, characteristic of the movement of his mind, and the reader who is offended by them must have come to the reading with a determination to be displeased. His vocabulary is more difficult; and sometimes, it must be confessed, more questionable. He uses, without explanation or introduction, the most extraordinary terms. Ancient Roman emperors are said to have shown their largess by putting real pearls into the dishes which they set before their guests. This was generous; but the guest who broke his tooth upon a gift must have wished that the pearl had been more conventionally bestowed upon him. So the reader of Leconte de Lisle may be excused if he resents the sudden apparition of such strange words as "bobres," "bigaylles," and "pennbaz" in the text of this charming poet.

In spite of these eccentricities, which are in fact quite superficial, and in spite of a suspicion of pedantry which occasionally holds the reader's attention at arm's length, there is no French poet of our day more worthy of the attention of a serious English student. Leconte de Lisle cultivated the art of poetry with the most strenuous dignity and impersonality. He had a great reverence for the French language, and not a little of the zeal of the classic writers of the seventeenth century who aimed at the technical perfection of literature. He is lucid and direct almost beyond parallel. In England, among those who approach French literature with more enthusiasm than judgment, there is a tendency to plunge at once into what is fashionable for the moment on the Boulevard Saint Michel. We have seen British girls and boys affecting to appreciate Verlaine, and even Mallarme, without having the smallest acquaintance with Racine or Alfred de Vigny. It is pure snobisme to pretend to admire Prose pour Des Esseintes when you are unable to construe Montaigne. For all such foreign folly, the rigorous versification, the pure and lucid language, and the luminous fancy of Leconte de Lisle may be recommended as a medicine.

TWO FRENCH CRITICS

EMILE FAGUET--REMY DE GOURMONT

The importance of literary criticism in the higher education of a race has been recognized in no country in the world except France. Elsewhere there have arisen critics of less, or more, or even of extreme merit, but nowhere else has there been a systematic training in literature which has embraced a whole generation, and has been intimately combined with ethics. The line of action which Matthew Arnold vainly and pathetically urged on the Anglo-Saxon world has been unobtrusively but most effectively taken by France for now more than half a century. When the acrid and ridiculous controversy between the Classical and the Romantic schools died down, criticism in France became at once more reasonable and more exact. The fatuous formula which has infected all races, and is not yet extirpated in this country--the "I do not like you, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell"--passed into desuetude. It was implicitly recognized that it is your duty, if you express a view, to be able to "tell" on what principles it is founded. In fact, if we concentrate our attention on the progress of French professional criticism, we see it becoming steadily more philosophical and less empirical.

But about 1875, after the period of Taine and Renan, and, in a quite other field, after that of Gautier and Paul de Saint Victor, we find criticism in Paris rapidly tending in two important directions, becoming on the one hand more and more exact, almost scientific, on the other daringly personal and impressionist. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who was a man of extraordinary force of character, gave a colour to the whole scheme of literary instruction throughout France. He resisted the idea that literature was merely an entertainment or a pastime. He asserted that it was the crown and apex of a virile education, and he declared its aim to be the maintenance and progress of morality. With Brunetiere everything was a question of morals. He was a strong man, and a fighting man; he enjoyed disputation and snuffed the breath of battle. He advanced the impersonality of literature and stamped on the pride of authors. In the year 1900, an observer glancing round professorial circles had to admit that the influence of Brunetiere had become paramount. His arbitrary theory of the _evolution des genres_, founded on Herbert Spencer and Darwin, and applied to the study of literature, pervaded the schools.

But the vehement tradition of Brunetiere was undermined from the first by his two greatest rivals, Anatole France and Jules Lemaitre, whose character was the exact opposite of his. They were "impressionist" critics, occupied with their own personal adventures among books, and not actively concerned with ethics. Their influence, especially that of Lemaitre, since Anatole France retired from criticism before the close of the century, tempered what was rigid and insensitive in the too-vehement dogmatism of Brunetiere, but they did not form a camp distinct from his. The sodality of the French Academy kept them together in a certain happy harmony, in spite of their contrast of character. Brunetiere died in 1906, Lemaitre in 1914; the effect of the one upon education, of the other upon social culture, had been immense, but it had not advanced since 1900. With the new century, new forces had come into prominence, and of the two most important of these we speak to-day.

It was the fate of France to lose, within a few months, the two most prominent critics of the period succeeding that of which I have just spoken. The death of Emile Faguet and of Remy de Gourmont marks another stage in the progress of criticism, and closes another chapter in its history. That their methods and modes of life were excessively different; that their efforts, if not hostile, were persistently opposed; that one was the most professorial of professors, the other the freest of free lances; that each, in a word, desired to be what the other was not; adds a piquancy to the task of considering them side by side. The first thing we perceive, in such a parallel, is the superficial contrast; the second is the innate similitude, so developed that these spirits in opposition are found in reality to represent, in a sort of inimical unison, the whole attitude towards literature of the generation in which they flourished. Their almost simultaneous disappearance leaves the field clear for other procedures under their guidance. In the extremely copious published writings of these two eminent men the name of each of them will scarcely be found. They worked, in their intense and fervid spheres, out of sight of one another. But, now both are dead, it is interesting to see how close to each other they were in their essential attitude, and how typical their activity is of the period between 1895 and 1915.

If anyone should rashly engage to write the life of Emile Faguet, he would find himself limited to the task of composing what the critic himself, in speaking of Montaigne, calls "the memoirs of a man who never had any occupation but thinking." Through the whole of a life which approached the term of threescore years and ten, Faguet was absorbed, more perhaps than any other man of his time, in the contemplation of the printed page. He said of himself, "I have never stopped reading, except to write, nor writing, except to read." In any other country but France, this preoccupation would have led to dreariness and pedantry, if not to a permanent and sterile isolation. But in France purely literary criticism, the examination and constant re-examination of the classics of the nation, takes an honoured and a vivid place in the education of the young. The literary teaching of the schools is one of the moral and intellectual forces of the France of to-day, and Faguet, who was the very type, and almost the exaggeration, of that tendency in teaching, was preserved from pedantry by the immense sympathy which surrounded him. His capacity for comprehending books, and for making others comprehend them, found response from a grateful and thirsty multitude of students.

Emile Faguet was born, on the 17th of December, 1847, at La Roche-sur-Yon, in Vendee, where his father was professor at the local lycee. M. Victor Faguet, who had received a prize for a translation of Sophocles into verse, nourished high academic ambitions for his son. From the noiseless annals of the future critic's childhood a single anecdote has been preserved, namely that, when he was a schoolboy, he solemnly promised his father that he would become a member of the French Academy. All his energy was centred towards that aim. He passed through the regular course which attends young men who study for the professoriate in France, and at last he became a professor himself at Bordeaux, and then in Paris. But in that career, as Dr. Johnson sententiously observed, "Unnumber'd suppliants croud Preferment's Gate," and at thirty-five Emile Faguet was still quite undistinguished. He saw his juniors, and in particular Lemaitre and Brunetiere, speed far in front of him, but he showed neither impatience nor ill-temper. Gradually he became a writer, but it was not until 1885 that his _Les Grands Maitres du XVIe Siecle_ attracted the attention of the public. He began to be famous at the age of forty, when his _Etudes Litteraires sur le XIXe Siecle_, clear, well arranged, amusing and informing, proved to French readers that here was a provider of substantial literature, always intelligent, never tiresome, who was exactly to their taste. From that time forth the remaining thirty years of Faguet's life extended themselves in a ceaseless cheerful industry of lecturing, writing, and interpreting, which bore fruit in a whole library of published books, perhaps surpassing in bulk what is known as the "output" of any other mortal man.

Though ever more concerned with ideas than with persons, Faguet did not disdain, in happy, brief, and salient lines, to sketch the authors who had written the books he analysed. Let us attempt a portrait of himself as he appeared in the later years of his life. No one ever less achieved the conventional type of academician. His person was little known in society, for he scarcely ever dined out. He had so long been a provincial professor that he never threw off a country look. In sober fact, Emile Faguet, with his brusque, stiff movements, his rough brush of a black moustache, and his conscientious walk, looked more like a non-commissioned officer in mufti than an ornament of the Institut. He was active in the streets, stumping along with an umbrella always pressed under his arm; on his round head there posed for ever a kind of ancient billycock hat. He had a supreme disdain for dress, and for the newspapers which made jokes about his clothing. He lived in a little stuffy apartment in the Rue Monge--on the fifth storey, if I remember right. He was an old bachelor, and the visitor, cordially welcomed to his rooms, was struck by the chaos of books--chairs, tables, the floor itself being covered with volumes, drowned in printed matter. Just space enough swept out to hold the author's paper and ink was the only oasis in the desert of books. I remember that, at the height of his fame and prosperity, there was no artificial light in his rooms. That army of his publications was marshalled by the sole aid of a couple of candles. Everything about him, but especially the frank dark eyes lifted in his ingenuous face, breathed an air of unaffected probity and simplicity, and of a kind of softly hurrying sense that life was so short, and there were so many books to read and to write, that there could be no time left for nonsense.

His image will long recur to the inner vision of his friends, as he went marching to his lecture or to his newspaper-office, nonchalant and easy, with his hands in his pockets, his elbow squeezing that enormous umbrella to his side. In the evening he would go, inelegantly dressed, in the same loosely martial way, to the theatre, for which he had an inordinate affection. He was not a "first-nighter," but dropped in to see a new piece whenever he wanted copy for his _feuilleton_. His lectures, it is reported, were familiar and conversational, with frequent repetition and copious quotation, the whole poured out as a man tells a story which he intimately knows, with an inexhaustible flow of thoughts and facts. Sometimes he was so vivacious as to be a little paradoxical, and led a laugh against himself. He stood before his students, formidable only in his erudition, easy of approach, austere and gay. His congested rooms in the Rue Monge were open to any young inquirer, but it was observed that Faguet never asked what the name of his visitor was, but how old he was. The younger the student, the less dogmatic was the professor, but the more familiar, abundant, sympathetic. It was noticeable in all his relations, with young and old alike, that Faguet's one aim invariably seemed to be honestly to make his interlocutor comprehend the matter in hand.

Some recollections of the outer presence of Emile Faguet should not be without value to us in fixing the character of his inner life, the spirit which pervaded his profuse and honest labour. No one in the history of literature has been more distinguished for intellectual probity; and no one has cared less for appearances, or for the glorification of his own character and cleverness. His value as a critic consists primarily in his capacity for thoroughly understanding what each author under consideration meant by this or that expression of his art. Faguet does not allow himself to be stung into eloquence by the touch of a master-mind, as Lemaitre does, nor does he fly off from his subject on the wings of an imperative suggestion, like Anatole France, but he sticks close to the matter in hand, so close that he reaches comprehension by becoming absorbed in it. There is no writer on literature who has ever crept so completely into the skin of each old author as Faguet has done. He makes the dry bones live; he resuscitates the dead, and revives in them all that was essential in their original life, all that was really vital in them, even if it be ultimately to condemn the taste or the tendency exhibited. The first object with him is to vivify; to analyse and dissect come next.

He was open to all impressions, and he was particularly admirable in his periodical surveys of the four great centuries of French verse and prose, because of his unflagging open-mindedness. He saw the living thread of literary history, running, a pulsating stream, from Rabelais to Flaubert. He had followed it so often, up and down, this way and that, that no curve of it, no backwater was unfamiliar to him. Lassitude is as unknown to Faguet as it was to Shelley's "Skylark." His curiosity is always awake; no shadow of satiety ever comes near him. He was a Titan in his way, but never a "weary Titan"; he never felt "the orb of his fate," though it embraced so much, to be "too vast." The more elaborate or complex an author was, the more actively and ingeniously Faguet penetrated his work, smoothing out the complexities, throwing light into every dark corner. But it is very proper to notice that even where he devotes himself with what seems the most absorbing care to the investigation of a particular mind, he is always essentially detached from it, always ready to quit one tenement of genius and adapt himself with alacrity to another, like a soldier-crab, whose tender extremity will fit itself to any shell-habitation.

In one of his criticisms of Montesquieu--and on no French classic has he been more constantly felicitous--Faguet speaks of the faculty possessed by that prince of intelligence of wandering among souls, and of studying their spiritual experience "comme un anatomiste etudie le jeu des organes." The author of the _Esprit des Lois_ took wide views and surveyed a vast expanse of society, but he was equally apt to map out a square inch of mossy rock at his feet. "Il a du reste beaucoup ecrit, _comme en marge de ses grands livres_." These words remind us of a section of Emile Faguet's writings which is peculiarly stimulating and useful. It is illustrated to great perfection in what is perhaps the most fascinating specimen of his vast and various production, the volume called _En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres_, which he published so lately as 1911. This was followed by _En lisant Corneille_ in 1913 and _En lisant Moliere_ in 1914. If the war had not intervened and if his own health had not failed him, it is probable that Faguet would have extended and developed this section of his work, which exhibited the ripest fruit of his subtle and vigorous criticism.

The method which he adopted in these treatises was to take a portion of a well-known book or a short poem, and read it with his imaginary audience exactly as though they, and he, had never met with it before. In _En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres_ he takes a score of such passages, and analyses them without pedantry, eagerly, curiously, cordially. He explains what the author meant, shows how he has succeeded in expressing his meaning, points out the ingenuities of thought and the felicities of language, and in short exhibits the piece of hackneyed prose or verse as though it had just been discovered. The process may sound perfunctory and pedagogic, but, conducted as Faguet conducts them, these little excursions are not less delightful than original. He takes things that everybody knows--such as Montaigne on Friendship, or Bossuet on the Romans, or a couple of La Bruyere's portraits; he takes a long poem, like Alfred de Vigny's _La Maison du Berger_, or a short lyric, like Victor Hugo's _Le Semeur_; he takes the character of Severe in _Polyeucte_ or a landscape out of the memoirs of Chateaubriand, and he illuminates these familiar things until the reader not merely sees in them what he never saw before, but has gained a method of reading by which he will in future extract infinite new pleasures from re-reading old familiar books.

In this system of analysis by conversation consists the chief originality of Faguet's criticism. The idea of it was not entirely new; so long ago as the seventeenth century Descartes said that "la lecture est une conversation continue avec les plus honnetes gens des siecles passes." But it had not been planned on a practical basis until Faguet sketched out these enchanting books of his, in which we seem to see him seated, smiling, at a table, the volume open before him, expounding it to an eager circle of intelligent young people. In these conversations, Faguet had not the weight of Brunetiere or the sparkle of Lemaitre; he was simpler than the one and soberer than the other. He achieved the dream of the teacher when he discovered how to write books which please and are useful at the same time. He avoided, by a whole continent, the vapid dreariness of the usual English manual, which looks upon the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley as fit only to be pressed between sheets of blotting-paper in a _hortus siccus_. Faguet is always in earnest, although he sometimes indulges in immense humour and vivacity, not of the Parisian variety, but highly exhilarating. When he suddenly confesses to us that Balzac had "the temperament of an artist and the soul of a commercial traveller," or when he sums up an entirely grave summary of Pindare-Le Brun by telling us that "c'etait un homme de beaucoup d'esprit, d'un caractere tres meprisable, et excellent ouvrier de vers," it is no schoolmaster that speaks to pupils, but a friend who takes his intimates into his confidence.

It has been the habit to depreciate the style of Faguet, which indeed does not set out to be exquisite, and cannot compare with those of several of his great predecessors. He has been charged, in his zeal for the matter of literature, with a neglect of its form. It is true that his phrases are apt to be curt; he gives little attention to the conduct of a sentence, further than to define in it his precise intention. But his criticism has a great purity of design, which is in itself an element of style. It sets forth to accomplish a certain purpose and it carries out this aim with the utmost economy of means. No writer less than Faguet, to use a vulgar expression, "slops about all over the shop." He has at least this negative beauty of writing, and he adds to it another, the gift of discussing great authors in a tone that is in sympathy with their peculiarities. An instance of this, among a hundred, may be cited from his _Dix-huitieme Siecle_; summing up what he has to impress upon us about Marivaux, he defines that author in these terms; "C'est un precieux qui est assez rare et qu'on s'interdit de condamner au moment meme qu'on le desapprouve, parce qu'on n'est pas sans en jouir dans le moment meme qu'on en souffre." It would hardly be possible to put more of critical value into so few words, but moreover it is said as Marivaux himself might say it.

Faguet had his prejudices, as every honest man may have. He adored the seventeenth and he loved the nineteenth centuries, but he had almost an aversion from the eighteenth. He put Buffon first among the writers of that age, and Montesquieu next; so loyal a spirit as Faguet's could not but be cordially attracted by Vauvenargues. But the lack of poetry, and, as he asserted, the lack of philosophy of the Encyclopaedists annoyed him, and for their greatest name, for Voltaire, he had a positive hatred. Faguet found it difficult to be just to Diderot, and difficult to tolerate Rousseau, but to love Voltaire he made no effort whatever; he acknowledged that feat to be impossible. He did not fear to contradict himself, and about Rousseau his opinion grew steadily more favourable, until, in 1913, he positively published five independent volumes on this one writer alone. But Faguet could never persuade himself to approach Voltaire with any face but a wry one. Yet, even here, his antipathy is scarcely to be perceived on the surface. Faguet always leaves the judgment of his reader independent. He puts the facts before him; his own irony marks the line of thought which he suggests; but he is careful never to attempt to bully the reader into acceptance. Brunetiere is apt to be vociferous in persuasion; Faguet never raises his voice.

In 1899, being called upon to sum up the qualities of the leading French critics from 1850 onwards, Faguet found himself confronted with his own name and work. It was characteristic of his candour and simplicity that he did not shrink from the task of describing himself, and that he undertook it without false modesty or affectation. When he comes to describe Emile Faguet he is as detached, as calmly analytic, as he is when he speaks of Theophile Gautier or M. Rene Doumic. He defines the qualities, acknowledges the limitations, and hints at the faults of his subject. I do not know a case in all literary history where a writer has spoken of himself in terms more severely judicial. He closes this remarkable little study with words which we may quote here for their curious personal interest no less than as an example of Faguet's style:

Laborieux, du reste, assez methodique, consciencieux, en poussant
la conscience jusqu'a etre peu bienveillant, ou en ne sachant pas
pousser le scrupule consciencieux jusqu'a la bienveillance, il a pu
rendre et il a rendu des services appreciables aux etudiants en
litterature, qui etaient le public qu'il a toujours vise. Sans
abandonner la critique, qu'il est a croire qu'il aimera toujours,
il s'est un peu tourne depuis quelques annees du cote des etudes
sociologiques, ou c'est a d'autres qu'a nous qu'il appartient
d'apprecier ses efforts.

In this connexion a phrase of the great critic may be recalled. When the war broke out in 1914, someone who knew Faguet's absorbing love of books sympathized with him on the blow to literature. He responded, in a tone of reproof, "L'avenir national est une chose autrement importante que l'avenir litteraire."

Those sociological interests were steadily emphasized. Faguet became, not less in love with great books, but more inclined to turn from their technical to their ethical value. He became himself a moralist, after having in so many eloquent volumes analysed the works and the characters of the politicians and teachers of the nineteenth century. He possessed a finished faculty for amusing and pleasing while he instructed, and it was remarkable that in these treatises of his late middle life he addressed a much wider public than he had ever reached before. His _Commentaire du Discours sur les Passions_ was a link between the earlier purely literary treatises and the later analyses of psychological phenomena, but it was highly successful. Even more universally popular were the little books on _Friendship_ and _Old Age_, which enjoyed a larger circulation than any other contemporary works of their class. Faguet was pleased at his popularity, and felt that he was recognized as belonging to that "vieille race de moralistes exacts et fins" of whom La Rochefoucauld had been the precursor. Of these moral studies, the most abundantly discussed was that which dealt with _Le Culte de l'Incompetence_ (1910), a book which bears a very remarkable relation to the state of France when war broke out.

Towards the end of his life, Faguet became a great power in France. He exercised, from that book-bewildered room in the Rue Monge, a patriotic, amiable, fraternal influence which permeated every corner of the French-speaking world. But his health, which had long been failing, gave way under the strain of the war. He had never given himself any rest from perpetual literary labour, and he had always said that he knew that before he was seventy years of age he should be "buried and forgotten." A third stroke of paralysis carried away the greatest living friend of literature in France on the 7th of June, 1916, in his sixty-ninth year. Buried he is at last, to their sorrow, but his compatriots will not readily forget him.

It is not easy to find common terms in which to describe Faguet and his remarkable contemporary, Remy de Gourmont. Their two circles of influence were far-reaching, but did not touch. In the very extensive literature of each the other is perhaps never mentioned. We may suppose that it would be almost impossible for a French observer to review them together without allowing the scale to descend in favour of this name or of that. But here may come in the use of foreign criticism, which regards the whole field from a great distance, and without passion. The contrast between these two writers, both honest, laborious and fruitful, both absorbed in and submerged by literature, both eager to discover truth in all directions, was yet greater than their similarity. We have briefly observed in Faguet the university professor, the great public interpreter of masterpieces. In Remy de Gourmont, on the other hand, we meet the man who, scornful of mediocrity and tolerant of nothing but what is exquisite, stands apart from the crowd, and will scarcely share his dream with a disciple. Faguet, like a Lord Chancellor of Letters, is versed in all the legislation of the mind, and lives in a perpetual elucidation of it. Gourmont, standing in the outer court, attracts the young and the audacious around him by protesting that no laws exist save those which are founded on an artist's own eclecticism. Together, or rather back to back, they addressed almost everyone who was intelligent in France between 1895 and 1914.

We have seen in Emile Faguet a typical member of the middle class. Remy de Gourmont was an aristocrat both by descent and by temperament. He was born on the 4th of April, 1858, in the chateau of La Motte, near Bazoches-en-Houlme, in the Orne; during his childhood his parents moved to a still more romantic little manor-house at Mesnil-Villement. These Norman landscapes are constantly introduced into Gourmont's stories. His race was of considerable antiquity and distinction; his mother traced her descent from the great poet, Malherbe; a paternal ancestor was that Gilles de Gourmont who printed in France the earliest books in Greek and in Hebrew character. A passion for the Muses, like a fragrant atmosphere, surrounded the boy from his cradle. He arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-five, provincially instructed, but already of a marvellous erudition. He was appointed assistant librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, where for eight years he browsed at will on all the secret and forgotten wonders of the past, indulging to the full an insatiable literary curiosity. In 1890 he published a novel, _Sixtine_, a sort of diary of a very complicated mind which believes itself to be in love, but cannot be quite sure. It was "cerebral," without action of any kind, an absurd book, but ingeniously--too ingeniously--written. The historic interest of _Sixtine_ rests in the fact that it led the reaction against the naturalism of Zola and the psychology of M. Paul Bourget. Gourmont now achieved a single English reader, for _Sixtine_ was read by Henry James, but with more curiosity than approval.

Although hardly a book of permanent value, _Sixtine_ had a lasting effect on the career of its author. It expressed with remarkable exactitude the sentiments of the group of young men who were now coming to the front in France. Gourmont became the champion of the "vaporeux, nuance et sublimise" literature which started about 1890. He accepted "symbolism," and he became the leader of the symbolist movement, of which his stern mental training and curious erudition permitted him to be the brain. He was the prophet of Mallarme, of Verlaine, of Maeterlinck, of Huysmans, and at the same time he welcomed each younger revolutionary. All this, of course, was not done in a day, but reconciliation with the intellectual conventions was made impossible by a fact which must not be ignored in any sketch of Remy de Gourmont, and indeed ought to be faced with resolution. In 1891 he was dismissed from the public service and from the Library, for an article which he published entitled _Le Joujou Patriotisme_, in which he poured contempt upon the Army, and openly advocated the abandonment of any idea of the "Revanche." The chastisement was a severe one, and had an effect on the whole remainder of Gourmont's life. About the same time his health gave way, and excluded him from all society, for he was invaded by an unsightly growth in the face. His hermitage was high up in an old house in the Rue des Saints Peres, near the quay, and there he sat, day in, day out, surrounded by his books, in solitude, a monk of literature.

For the next eight or nine years, Gourmont, abandoning politics, in which he had made so luckless an adventure, devoted himself exclusively to art and letters. He joined the staff of the _Mercure de France_; and under its director, and his life-long friend, M. Vallette, he took part in all the symbolist polemics of the hour. He defended each new man of merit with his active partisanship; he wrote ceaselessly; verse, art criticism, humanism, novels, every species of fantastic and esoteric literature flowed from his abundant pen. These books, many of them preposterous in their shape, "limited editions" produced in conditions of archiepiscopal splendour of binding and type, possess, it must be admitted, little positive value. They are blossoms in the flower-garden of that heyday of sensuous "symbolism," of which we had a pale reflection in our London _Yellow Books_ and _Savoy Reviews_. The most interesting of the publications of Remy de Gourmont during these feverish years is the little volume called _L'Idealisme_ (1893), in which he sought to restore to the word "ideal" what he called its "aristocratic value." A passage may be quoted from an essay in this elegant and ridiculous treatise, on the beauty of words, irrespective of their meaning:

Quelles realites me donneront les saveurs que je reve a ce fruit de
l'Inde et des songes, le myrobolan,--ou les couleurs royales dont
je pare l'omphax, ou ses lointaines gloires?

Quelle musique est comparable a la sonorite pure des mots obscurs,
o cyclamor? Et quelle odeur a tes emanations vierges, o
sanguisorbe?

Stevenson--the R.L.S. of "Penny plain and Twopence coloured"--would have delighted in this.

Gourmont became tired of symbolism rather suddenly, and he buried it in two volumes which were the best he had yet published: the _Livres des Masques_ of 1896 and 1898. These have a lasting value as documents, and they mark the beginning of the author's permanent work as a critic of letters. In them he insisted on the warning not to let new genius pass ungreeted because it was eccentrically draped or unfamiliarly featured. These two volumes are a precious indication of what French independent literature was at the very close of the nineteenth century, and it is interesting after twenty years of development and change to note how few mistakes Remy de Gourmont made in his characterization of types. He took a central place among these symbolists, grouping around him the men of genuine talent, repulsing pretenders who were charlatans and discouraging mere imitators; marshalling, in short, a ferocious little army of genius in its attack upon the conventions and the traditions of the age. Time rolls its wheel, and it is amusing to notice that several of these fierce young revolutionaries are now members of the French Academy.

At the close of the century Remy de Gourmont abandoned symbolism, and the world of ideas took possession of him. He plunged deeper into the study of philosophy, grammar, and history, and he explored new provinces of knowledge, particularly in the direction of ethnography and biology. In the midst of this acquisitive labour he was stirred to the composition of one remarkable work after another, and to this period belong the four successive publications, which, in the whole of Gourmont's vast production, stand out as the most interesting and important which he has written. His reputation stands four-square on _L'Esthetique de la Langue Francaise_ (1899), _La Culture des Idees_ (1900), _Le Chemin de Velours_ (1902), and _Le Probleme du Style_ (1902). During the thirteen years which followed he wrote incessantly, and the widening circle of his admirers always found much to praise in what he produced. But now that we see his life-work as a whole it seems more and more plain that he revealed his genius freshly and fully in these four books of his prime, and in a world so crowded as ours the reader who has much to attract him may be recommended to these as broad and perhaps sufficient exponents of the character of Gourmont's teaching.

It has been said by one of his earliest associates, M. Louis Dumur, that Gourmont was always "le bon chasseur du mensonge humain." This is a friendly way of describing his intellectual dogmatism and his restless habit of analysis. He took nothing for granted, and, whether he desired to be so or not, he was a destructive force. He describes himself, in one of his rather rare paragraphs of self-portraiture, as "un esprit desinteresse de tout, et interesse a tout," and this very accurately defines his attitude. He strikes us as ceaselessly hovering over hitherto uncontested facts in the passionate desire of proving them to be fallacies. The epithet "paradoxical," which is often misapplied, appears to be exactly appropriate to the method of Remy de Gourmont, which starts by denying the truth of something which everybody has taken for granted, and then supporting the reversed position by rapid and ingenious argument. He is unable to accept any convention until he has resolutely turned it inside out, examined it in every hostile light, and so dusted and furbished it that it has ceased to be conventional. He was indefatigable in these researches, and so ingenious as to be often bewildering and occasionally tiresome.

He has left no book more characteristic than _Le Chemin de Velours_, which he called a study in the dissociation of ideas. He chose a very illuminating tag from Pascal as his motto: "ni la contradiction n'est marque de faussete, ni l'incontradiction n'est marque de verite." The whole treatise is a comparison between the Jansenist and the Jesuit system of morals, as revealed in the _Provincial Letters_. Like many Frenchmen of recent years, Remy de Gourmont liked religion to be championed, but never by a believer. Neither Port Royal nor the Society of Jesus would thank him for his disinterested support, but he defends them, alternately and destructively, with an immense fund of vivacity. No one has defined more luminously the evangelical doctrine of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, and for a while the reader thinks that the balance will descend on the Jansenist side. But Gourmont is scandalized to see Calvinism banging the door of salvation in people's faces, while he applauds the humanity of the Jesuits in holding it wide open, and in spreading between birth and death a velvet carpet for delicate souls. He analyses the works of Sarrasa, a Flemish Jesuit, who in 1618 produced an _Ars semper gaudendi_ which was, according to Gourmont, neither more nor less than a treatise on the way to make the best of both worlds. Gourmont was endlessly amused by the indiscreet admissions of Father Sarrasa.

Nevertheless, the Jesuit type shocked him more than the Jansenist. He admired the logical penetration of Pascal, his rigidity of thought, his unalterable ideal of duty, more than the easy-going casuistry of his opponents. He thought that Protestantism, which rests on abstraction, was a purer type of religion than the mitigated and humanized Christianity of Catholicism. But he was irritated by the way in which Port Royal pushed their spiritual logic to extremes, and he dared to suggest that Pascal would have been a better and a more useful man if he had consented to be less holy. Gourmont speculated ingeniously what would have been the future of philosophical literature if Pascal, instead of retiring to Port Royal, had joined Descartes in Holland. On the whole he decides against the Jansenists, because although he sees that they were noble he suspects them of being inhuman, and of laying intolerable and needless burdens upon the spirit of man. Remy de Gourmont considered evangelical Christianity an Oriental religion, not well fitted for Latin Europe. In all the schisms and heresies of the churches he thought he saw the Western mind revolting against a dogmatism which came from Jerusalem. The Jansenist is a pessimist; the Jesuit, on the other hand, cultivates optimism; he pretends, at all events, that the soul should be free and joyous, to which end he rolls out his velvet road towards salvation. Remy de Gourmont concludes that the final effect of _Les Provinciales_ is to make the reader love the Jesuits, and when he comes to sum up the matter he is on the side of the Society, because nothing wounds a civilized man so deeply as the negation of his free will. It will be seen that neither party gains much from his sardonic and fugitive approbation.

After 1902 a further transformation began to be visible in the genius of Remy de Gourmont. An improvement in his health permitted him to mingle a little with other human beings, and to become less exclusively an anchorite of the intellect. Having pushed his individualist theories to their extreme, he withdrew from his violent expression of them, and he took a new and pleasing interest in public life. He continued to seek consolation for the disappointments of art in philosophy and science, and he developed a positive passion for ideas. He founded the _Revue des Idees_, which had a considerable vogue in the intellectual world. But his chief activity henceforward was as a publicist. His incessant short essays, mainly published in the _Mercure de France_, became an element in the life of thousands of cultivated readers. They dealt briefly with questions of the day, concerning all that can arrest the attention of an educated man or woman. The author collected them in volumes which present the quintessence of his later manner, four of _Epilogues_, three of _Promenades Litteraires_, three of _Promenades Philosophiques_, and so forth. These dogmatic expressions of his conception of life were written in a style more fluid, more buoyant, and less obscure than he had previously used, and they achieved a great popularity, especially among women. Meantime, as a critic, he showed less and less interest in the exceptional and the unwholesome, of which he had been the fantastic defender, and more in the great standard authors of France. In 1905 he opened with an anthology from Gerard de Nerval a series of _Les Plus Belles Pages_, which he continued until the war with admirable judgment.

The war found Remy de Gourmont not totally unprepared. He had always unflinchingly avowed himself an aristocrat and an anarchist; it was his way of expressing his horror at vulgarity and tyranny. He had chosen to be disconcerting in his vindictive pursuit of sentimentality and folly. He had thought it fitting to be a determined enemy to militarism. It was difficult for a critic with so fine an ear as his to tolerate patriotic verses which did not scan. But the ripening years had sobered him, and he made after 1911 a much more careful examination of the destiny of his country. He saw that with all his scepticism he had been the dupe of Teutonic culture, and he repudiated the Nietzsche whom he had done so much to introduce to Parisian readers. From August, 1914, Remy de Gourmont put aside all his literary and scientific work, and devoted himself wholly to a patriotic comment on the war. His short articles in _La France_ form an admirable volume, _Pendant l'Orage_, by which all his petulance in times of peace is more than redeemed. The anguish of the struggle killed him, as it had killed so many others. Remy de Gourmont was seated at his writing-table, with a protest against the outrage upon Reims half-completed before him, when a stroke of apoplexy put an instant period to his life. This was on the 29th of September, 1915.