Volume 3 / Book 7 — CHAPTER IV. DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION.

THE POSITION OF DIDEROT—DIFFICULT TO AUTHENTICATE—BUT HARDLY TO BE EXAGGERATED. HIS IMPRESSIONISM—THE RICHARDSON ÉLOGE—THE ‘REFLECTIONS ON TERENCE’—THE REVIEW OF THE ‘LETTRES D’AMABED’—THE EXAMINATION OF SENECA—THE QUALITY AND EMINENCE OF HIS CRITICAL POSITION— ROUSSEAU REVISITED—MADAME DE STAEL— HER CRITICAL POSITION—AND WORK— THE ‘LETTRES SUR ROUSSEAU’—THE ‘ESSAI SUR LES FICTIONS’— THE ‘DE LA LITTÉRATURE’—THE ‘DE L’ALLEMAGNE’— HER CRITICAL ACHIEVEMENT: IMPUTED—AND ACTUAL— CHATEAUBRIAND: HIS DIFFICULTIES—HIS CRITICISM— INDIRECT—AND DIRECT—THE ‘GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME’— ITS SATURATION WITH LITERARY CRITICISM—SURVEY AND EXAMPLES— SINGLE POINTS OF EXCELLENCE—AND GENERAL IMPORTANCE— JOUBERT: HIS REPUTATION—HIS LITERARY αὐτάρκεια— THE LAW OF POETRY—MORE ON THAT SUJECT— ON STYLE—MISCELLANEOUS CRITICISMS— HIS INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENTS MORE DUBIOUS— THE REASON FOR THIS—ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS— GENERAL REMARKS—THE OTHER ‘EMPIRE CRITICS’— FONTANES—GEOFFROY—DUSSAULT—HOFFMAN, GARAT, ETC.— GINGUENÉ—M.J. CHÉNIER—LEMERCIER—FELETZ— COUSIN—VILLEMAIN—HIS CLAIMS— DEDUCTIONS TO BE MADE FROM THEM—BEYLE— RACINE ET SHAKESPEARE—HIS ATTITUDE HERE— AND ELSEWHERE—NODIER.

The position of Diderot.

One of those judgments of the Common Sense which, while sometimes finding it necessary to contest or correct them, we have also found in the main not untrustworthy, has long ago decided that for good or for ill, the weakening of the neo-classic tradition in its great stronghold, France, is due originally to Denis Diderot more than to any one else—nay, that the Germans themselves owe him a heavy quit-rent. With this decision we shall have no quarrel here; 90on the contrary, a long familiarity with the writings^[161] of this voluminous and disorderly genius, has made the present writer one of its very strongest supporters. There is not the slightest need to engage either in controversy or in compromise with others, or to hark back upon our own demonstrations that in Fontenelle, in La Motte, and elsewhere, there are seeds and germs of a critical calculus very different from Boileau’s. We may at this stage take these things for granted. Far be it from us to say that “there’s nothing new or true, and it doesn’t matter.” But we may very modestly, but very unflinchingly say that there is nothing wholly new or old; that there are at least very few things wholly true or false; and that it matters very much that it should be so.

Difficult to authenticate.

Therefore, or however (for either link of the argument would be defensible) it is reasonable or convenient to start this chapter with Diderot. Yet he can hardly have, in mere space, a treatment proportionate—as proportion has been in other cases observed—to his importance. It is an importance rather of attitude and suggestion than of explicit pronouncement; and the explicit pronouncements are so many, and so various, that to summarise and discuss them would require far more than the utmost room that we have given to our very greatest authorities. Moreover, that inadequate universality, that flawed all-round-ness, which every competent critic has noticed in Diderot, would make wildernesses of proviso and commentary necessary. It is not quite safe to leave unread a single page of the twenty big octavos of his works, in arriving at an independent estimate of his critical, as of his general quality: and those who do not care to undertake so considerable an investigation, must take the word of those who have undertaken it, to some extent on trust. Further, though Diderot is by no means a mere general aesthetician—though his very 91critical value consists largely in the fact that he flies upon the corporal work of art like a vulture—yet his utterances in different arts concern and condition one another after a fashion, of which, before his time, there was hardly any example. We cannot possibly here bestow space on the Paradoxe sur le Comédien and the vast and tempting assemblage of the Salons. Yet the person who attempts to examine Diderot’s purely literary pronouncements without examining these, will do so at his peril certainly, and almost certainly to his damage. Le Neveu de Rameau is imperative: nay, the much-abused Jacques le Fataliste itself must not be neglected.^[162]

But hardly to be exaggerated. His Impressionism.

Diderot is the first considerable critic—it would hardly be too much to say the first critic—known to history who submits himself to any, to every work of art which attracts his attention, as if he were a “sensitised” plate, animated, conscious, possessing powers of development and variation, but absolutely faithful to the impression produced. To say that he has no theories may seem to those who know him a little, but only a little, the very reverse of the truth: for from some points of view he is certainly a machine à théories as much as Piron was a machine à saillies. But then the theory is never a theory precedent; it never (or so seldom as to require no correction of these general statements) governs, still less originates, his impression; it follows the impression itself and is based thereon. Not seldom the substructure, if not even the foundation, of the impression itself may seem to us quite disproportionate to the originating work of art—be it book, or play, or picture; but that is not the point. Constantly, the enthusiasm which had made Diderot give himself up to the fascination of his new subject may seem to lead him into all sorts of extravagances. The best known and perhaps the best example of these extravagances, the almost famous éloge of Richardson, has been drawn

92upon by nearly everybody who has written on Diderot, and by most who have written on Richardson, for examples.

The Richardson éloge.

This marvellous dithyramb^[163] really exceeds, in the superlatives of its commendation of a work of originality and genius, the most “azure feats” of a modern reviewer on a tenth-rate novelist or minor poet. Richardson puts in action all the maxims of all the moralists: and yet all these maxims would not enable one to write a single page of him. Diderot was constantly going to cry out [He does constantly cry out “O Richardson!”] “Don’t believe him! Don’t go there!” to the characters, and especially to Clarissa. This author sows in the mind whole crops of virtues, which are sure to come up sooner or later. He knows every kind of life, and scrutinises its secrets infallibly. He preaches resignation, sympathy, justice. He has made Diderot so melancholy that his friends ask him tenderly “What is the matter?” But Diderot would not be cured for anything. To think that there should be pedantic, frivolous, insensible wretches who reproach Richardson with being long-winded! He must be read in the original. He should be discussed in society. Richardson is a new gospel: he will always be popular, though thoroughly appreciated only by the elect. He is truer than history; his intense interest hides his art; a friend of Diderot, who had only read the French translation, omitting the burial and will of Clarissa, wept, sobbed, abused the Harlowe family, walked up and down without knowing what he was doing, on perusing the original. Richardson simply haunts Diderot, stifles his genius, delays him from work and effort. Ye Ages! begone and hasten the full harvest of the honours due to Richardson!

Very extravagant, no doubt; rather absurd, if anybody likes. But fair and softly; let us, as usual, examine the nature and the circumstances of this extravagant, this absurd, critical fact.

In the first place, we have to remember that it was a work of genius—whatever its faults—that was brought under Diderot’s notice; in the second, that as at least a majority, if not a consensus, of competent critics has long ago decided, it was an example or collection of examples of genius applied in a new way—that without going to the pedantic extremes to 93which some have gone in their definition of the novel, it has been found impossible to discover before Richardson the necessary mixture of incident and character-interest, the unity (not necessarily a dramatic or even an epic unity) of plot, the mingled appeal to, and play upon, passions and manners. Then let us ask ourselves whether the systems of criticism and the critics, with which and with whom we are up to this point familiar, have as a rule proved themselves equal to cope with new geniuses and new kinds of composition—whether their tendency has not rather been distinctly to frown upon such things; at any rate, to give them the coldest and most distrustful welcome. Let us remember that Hurd, about the same time as Diderot,^[164] and in the very act of defending the older and more poetical romance, was throwing cold water on prose fiction as a clumsy upstart. And finally, let us ask ourselves whether all Diderot’s exaggerations are not, after all, exaggerations of the truth—owing their weak points to an excitable nature and a prevalent fashion of expression, their strong ones to a genius, and a perception of truth itself, not unfairly comparable in their way to Richardson’s own in his.

The Reflections on Terence.

Side by side in the Works with this effusion there are some Reflections on Terence^[165] written within a year of the other. In the famous Roman dramatist there is neither novelty, nor intense sentiment, nor multiplicity of individual character, nor volume of story. He was the darling of those critics from whom Diderot differed most. His faults—at least his shortcomings—are obvious to infinitely less acute, restless, and rapid judgments than that of the great Encyclopædist. His excellences are of the kind which might seem least likely to appeal to Diderot. Yet Diderot is not merely just to him, not merely bountiful, but not in the least clumsy or haphazard in his bounty. He will not have the time-honoured (or dishonoured) putting off of the praise of Terence on Scipio and Lælius. Admitting his “lack of verve,” he gives him full credit for its compensation of even humanity, for his “statuesque” and quiet perfection. 94He adds remarks on translation which are excellent; and if he may have taken the idea of holding up Terence and Molière together for admiration from La Bruyère,^[166] he escapes La Bruyère’s mistake of suggesting the mixture of the immiscible.

The Review of the Lettres d’Amabed.

Take a third example of a very different kind. We have a short review^[167] by Diderot (first extracted by M. Assézat from MS.) of Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed. This book, it is hardly necessary to say, is anti-religious: and Diderot was violently anti-religious himself. It is saturated with Voltaire’s sniggering indecency: and Diderot was the author of Les Bijoux Indiscrets.^[168] Lastly, it was by Voltaire, of whom Diderot, though an independent, was an eager and faithful champion. But it is “without taste, without finesse, without invention; a botching up of stale blackguardisms about Moses and Christ and the rest; it has no interest, no fire, no verisimilitude, but plenty of dirt and of clumsy fun.” This is the plain critical truth about the Letters of Amabed, and it is Diderot who says it in so many words, and says it moreover in MS.—which could curry no favour with, and obtain none from, public hypocrisy and cant.

The Examination of Seneca.

Turn the examining instrument from these short pieces to the long critical examination of Seneca,^[169] which forms the second part of the Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron. It is open to any one to agree or disagree with Diderot’s uncompromising, though by no means indiscriminate, championship of the usurious philosopher-statesman; as a matter of fact, though it is a matter of only argumentative importance, I am, except on the head of style, one of those who disagree with it. But agree or disagree as he may with the conclusion, no competent critic, I should suppose, can fail to admire the thoroughness with which Diderot has taken in and digested his complicated literary subject, the range and extent of literary knowledge with which he illustrates it, the readiness of his argumentation and exposition, 95and, above all, the craftsmanlike and attractive fashion in which he combines analysis and criticism. Again, I doubt whether there is an earlier example of what we may call “freehand” criticism—the criticism which is not tethered to the necessity of applying or expounding rules in reference to its subject, but can take that subject in, can deal with it on its own plan and specification—can, in fact, appreciate, without being bound to refer to and obey some official book of prices. There are some two hundred pages of this appreciation, and one’s only reason (itself rather uncritical) for qualified satisfaction with it is that it does not handle some writer of greater intrinsic value and wider artistic appeal.

The quality and eminence of his critical position.

I should be prepared to multiply the citation and discussion of the critical “places” in Diderot to almost any extent, if such multiplication were reconcilable with my plan; but, as has been said, to do so would be as superfluous logically as it is methodically impossible.^[170] Diderot’s commanding position, in criticism as well as in aesthetics, is due not more to the number and variety of his individual utterances than to the fact that he certainly obtrudes, and in all probability conceals, no general æsthetic “preventions” (as the French would say, and as Dryden very wisely does say) whatsoever. One of the great resources and one of the great charms of his criticism is the way in which he draws it from, and returns it to, all the arts without letting any of them interfere with the other. The pedants of art-criticism have of course said that his is too literary; but the pedant is always pedantic, and always negligible, whether he draws his principles from French classrooms in the seventeenth century or from French studios in the nineteenth and twentieth. No matter whether he is talking of writing or of acting, of painting or of sculpture, the work of art is for Diderot something which ought to give the human sense and the human soul pleasure, which, if it does so, is to be welcomed and extolled, not without (if anybody feels thereto disposed) inquiry into the manner and the causes, 96rather mediate and immediate than ultimate, of that pleasure. He can everywhere display a really encyclopædic “curiosity,” in the good sense. He can be extremely inventive and subtle, as in the famous Paradoxe;^[171] he can enter into infinite detail and yet never lose grasp of principle, as in the essay De la Poésie Dramatique;^[172] he can glance and digress in lightning fashion as he does everywhere, but especially in the Salons. As good an instance of this as any is the admirable excursus on Mannerism in the Salon of 1767,^[173] which is applicable to literature quite as much as to painting.

Certainly, if any devout Arnoldian says that Diderot’s greatness is due to his “fertility in ideas,” no contradiction will be thought of here. But then we have the old difficulty as to what “ideas” mean. I do not remember that Mr Arnold himself makes much reference to our Denis; and, indeed, Diderot must have been, from some points of view, nearly as horrible—let us lay cards on table and say as incomprehensible—to him as to his friend M. Scherer. But it may be that the critical “idea” is neither more nor less than the result of that contact of subject and critic which has been glanced at before—a contact intimate, physical, uninterrupted, and resulting in conception and birth. This, if anything, is the “idea” of modern criticism; and while few have been more prolific of such results than Diderot, none before him and hardly any since have so invariably and consciously guided themselves by its law. I do not know that he has ever positively stated this law; I really do not know that it ever has been explicitly laid down by any of the constituted, or even the non-constituted, critical authorities. But his whole work is an exemplification of it.

And the result is, that this whole work, wherever it approaches criticism, is alive; and that he cannot help its becoming alive, even if he has apparently given hostages to 97Death by attempting set dissertations on cut-and-dried subjects, or by dallying with science, or atheism, or what not. It is a further reason why even such contemporaries as Lessing, and later, Goethe, found in him such an extraordinary stimulus. The dead, mechanical deductions of too many critics under the older system could produce nothing but copies, even more dead and more mechanical than themselves, though, as we have seen in many a figure of our gallery, the principle of life in human nature made the greater critics of the older dispensation sometimes quicken under it. But Diderot’s fecundity was contagious: his “cultures” have propagated themselves from generation to generation directly, have set the example of a similar creation of critical entities to fit subjects ever since. From a formula you will never get anything but formulas: from the living contact of critic and subject you will get live criticism.

Rousseau revisited.

I was so severely rebuked by an excellent and friendly critic for dismissing Rousseau, with but a reference, from the last volume, that I thought it my duty to reconsider the matter, though the principal plea of the rebuker, that M. Texte had devoted some hundred pages to Jean-Jacques, appeared to me nihil ad rem. But I might have committed an error as to the res itself, and so I took down the four quartos, and went through them to see if my memory had played me false, as that faculty sometimes does when one is walking in the browner shades. I need not have alarmed myself; but it is perhaps worth while to spare a page to put the pièces actually before the reader. There is in Rousseau practically no literary criticism at all from the first line of the “Confessions” to the last of the “Correspondence.”^[174] No writer known to me abstains with such an inevitable and tell-tale deflection from “judging of authors.” His attitude is that of his favourite Plutarch heightened to a Jean-Jacquian intensity. 98It is always of the moral, never of the literary, character and effect of a book that he is thinking. His fervid sensibility to the fascination of women, of scenery, of mere food and wine (for he admits this), does not seem to have extended to literature at all. By an extremely humorous coincidence (I do not know whether any one has noticed it before me, but probably some one has) he writes from Venice—the very place where he had just received, or was just to receive, the withering advice, “Zanetto! studia la matematica!”—to order books from Paris; and they are nearly all mathematics. The famous Discours about arts and sciences blinks the literary point of view altogether. The famous Letter to D’Alembert on Plays would almost adjust itself to plays in dumb show, except that spoken words have an additional moral or immoral effect. When Saint-Preux writes to Julie about her studies, he never so much as glances at the literary value of books: nor is this touched in all the talk about Education in Emile. The everlasting moral has dinned the Muses out. So it is in the two only less famous letters to Voltaire; so everywhere. I replace my four quartos, having found just one really critical sentence, in allocation and application only, for Jean-Jacques, probably, was not thinking of literature at all. But when he asked himself, “Serais-je damné?” and replied, “Selon mes Jansénistes la chose était indubitable, mais selon ma conscience il me paraissait que non,” he does mutatis mutandis suggest the revolt of the Romantic conscience against the Neoclassic.

“Ah, but,” they say, “Rousseau’s influence on the mind of Europe counted for so much in its changes of critical and creative taste.” A la bonne heure! and I have recognised this, and shall recognise it in the proper places. But the agencies that bring about changes of critical and creative taste, proper to be mentioned, are not also as proper to be worked out here. Of such influences the capture of Constantinople is a famous and undoubted one. Was I bound to tell the story of Byzantine decadence, and the story of Mussulman progress? It has in innumerable instances, if not universally, influenced a man’s criticism, a man’s creation—whether he is in love at the time; whether he has arrived at that right and happy point, which Mr Thackeray would not call “a pint” in the drinking of good 99wine; whether he has been under the soothing influence of the Indian weed. Am I therefore bound to insert in this History a treatise on “Feminine Attraction,” a book on “The Wines of the World,” and an “Anti-Counterblast” to King James? In all seriousness, it may, I think, be requested once more of readers and of critics that they will “look at the bill of fare.” If the meat and the wine suit them, well and good; if not, are there not, in this particular instance, M. Texte and his hundred pages to make quaere aliud diversorium no merely churlish or vindictive dismissal? While, as to such remarks as are proper to be made here on the general critical temper and tendency of the Romantic movement, they were deliberately postponed in the last volume, and will find their proper place, not here, but in the Interchapters of the present.

This indirect influence of Rousseau, with the direct influence of Diderot, no doubt cast a mighty leaven into the mind of France during the later decades of the eighteenth century; and it is noteworthy that, of the three remarkable writers with whom we shall next deal, while Madame de Staël directly and Chateaubriand indirectly express the first, Joubert was much in contact with Diderot during his youth. But the dominant criticism of the last twenty or five-and-twenty years of the century remained neo-classic; and we have accordingly dealt with it^[175] in the last volume. Nay, the dominant criticism of the first twenty or so of the next abode in no very different state. Here we shall deal with what has not yet been handled of this half century, or nearly so, in France, isolating more or less the three great figures above mentioned, and dealing more in group with these “Empire Critics,” who in different ways reflect the transition to Romanticism.

Madame de Staël.

Of the interest, the influence, the significance, and, in so far as these important things go, the importance, of the work of 100Madame de Staël^[176] in criticism, there can, as to their mere existence, be no two well-formed opinions. I wish that I could think this statement—made frankly in intention, and with deliberate consideration of the weight of every word—likely to obtain for the examination which follows the credit of impartiality which I think it deserves. Unfortunately, we are now approaching closely matters which are distinctly cinis dolosus. At every step the apparently irreconcilable difference between those who mean by criticism the judging and judicial enjoyment of literature, and those who mean by it theorising about the ultimate causes of such judgment and such enjoyment, is likely—is sure—to interfere. Nor does it seem possible for the philosophers to agree to keep these points of law for the appropriate tribunal, and to let the rest of the case be stated on its own merits.^[177]

Her critical position.

Now “Corinne” is about the first person in whose case this difficulty and this difference become acute and annoying. She is not quite so popular with the critics of “ideas” as she used to be; they have, belike, discovered at last her rather awkward sciolism of fact; her very theories are not theirs; the “hideous hum” of “Madame de Staël : ideas; Chateaubriand : images,” ceases to tire the weary ear quite to the same extent as it used to do in histories of literature and critical discussions thereof. But historically she is not to be denied; there is no doubt that no one has ever done the popularising of “metacritic” throughout Europe as she did.

And work.

But if the painful historian were only left to his own hod-and-trowel work instead of having to draw the sword and don the helmet against metacritical raiders, his task would not be a difficult one. Madame de 101Staël, unlike her countryman and in some sort master, Rousseau, is a critic, not merely indirectly, conjecturally, and by dint of the “must have,” but frankly, plainly, in honest straightforward deliverances ad hoc. The documents of her criticism are mainly four: the early Letters on Rousseau himself, the later but still early Essay on Fiction, the famous De La Littérature, and the more famous De l’Allemagne. In all, but in increasing measure as they come, we see the curious and interesting development and production of a temperament originally no doubt possessing some masculine gifts of thought, as well as many feminine ones of feeling, excited and almost irritated to the highest activity by the word-fencing of the philosophe salons, and presented with all the current doctrines or fancies in regard to literature and its precincts, by contact with the most active minds of Geneva, Paris, and Germany. With her half-masculine vigour and her wholly feminine receptivity, she absorbs and reproduces, tant bien que mal, all or a large part of the ideas which had been fermenting in all countries more or less, but especially in Germany, for the great part of a century,—French-Godwinian perfectibility, the æsthetic of Lessing and Winckelmann, the historical theories of Herder, as much as she could of the applied criticism of Goethe and Schiller and the Schlegels. Her different works show her of course at different stages of this influence. They show also—with equal necessity and undisguised by a system of explanatory and supplementary notes in the later editions—what actual knowledge of literature she had, what stock of material to expose and submit to all this complicated apparatus, all this varied range of reagency.

The Lettres sur Rousseau.

The very early work on Rousseau is of course the most immature, and it meddles the least with purely literary criticism, but it is, for reasons obvious à priori, not the least interesting, and it is perhaps not the least satisfactory on acquaintance. The contrast between the modest (but not fairly to be called mock-modest) brevity of the original Preface, and the pomp and cant and claptrap of the second, twenty-six years later, may raise a sigh in amiable breasts. But the text, whether one agree or disagree with its sentiments and estimates, by no means lacks merit. The 102writer is well acquainted with the actual matter of discussion (which was by no means always the case with her later): she is in intelligent as well as emotional sympathy with it. She does not indeed take the purely literary side very strongly; she had her master’s own practice as warrant for not doing so. But her remarks (some of which are perhaps innocently borrowed from Longinus) on Rousseau’s style, and the inapplicability of the word “perfection” to it are not despicable: and the characterisations of the various works, though always tending to the moral and material side, are very far from negligible. It may be worth noting that while objecting, not without reason, to “les plaisanteries de Claire,”^[178] she does not seem to know that they are only a corrupt following of Richardson. But the whole is a very fair début in criticism, inclined as we should expect to the moral side, but not illegitimately so.

The Essai sur les Fictions.

The Essai sur les Fictions, a sort of after-thought introduction to the three little stories, Mirza, Adelaide et Théodore, and Pauline, is a slight and rather curious defence of the novel of actual life moralised, as the most useful of fictitious or imitative writings, by means of a survey of such writings under three heads: “Marvellous and allegorical fictions,” “historical fictions,” and “natural fictions,” i.e. novels proper, where nothing is true, but everything true-like. The first two are very insufficiently treated, and her condemnation of the historical novel is deprived of all weight by the fact that she wrote too early to know any really good example of it. Perhaps the same may be said of the third.

The De La Littérature.

The Rousseau, however, is but the work of a novice, and the Sur Les Fictions is still something of an essay-piece: yet in both one may observe a nisus towards large generalising, which was the natural result of the author’s time, temperament, and education. This nisus turns into a full spread of wing in De La Littérature, published 103as the centuries met, and when the author was four and thirty. Its avowed central principle is a transformed “Modernism,”—the application of the favourite philosophe doctrine of perfectibility to literature, with an inflexible determination that though Greek literature may be better than anything before it, Roman shall be better than Greek, and (though there is hiatus valde lacrimabilis about mediæval), that modern literature shall be greater than either. To those who are not pure “ideologists,” and who do not think that an ounce of generalisation, however silly, however demonstrably false, is better than a ton of sober consideration and array of fact, this theory condemns itself at once. Here, at any rate, we may legitimately echo Mr Burchell and his “Fudge!” Yet Corinne’s attempts to prove it are interesting, and would be more so, if she had had skill enough to hide her ignorance of the facts themselves, or knowledge enough of them to gild her paradox. Her actual method is not merely characteristic of time and person, but has a certain ingenuity: indeed, it no doubt deceived herself. She will not take literature per se, but she takes it in its relations with “virtue,” “glory,” “liberty,” “happiness,” first in the abstract, and then under these categories as illustrated by Greek, Roman, “Northern,” “Southern,” and individual national literatures, paying special attention to English, and defending it from the objections of French eighteenth-century critics. It is, of course, easy to see how, by showing, or trying to show, that virtue, &c., is, according to her, better displayed in literature as it goes on, she proves, or attempts to prove, her general point.

Unfortunately, in the course of the argument, the most enormous errors of fact, the most startling assertions, which cannot take the benefit of de gustibus, simply pullulate. The book nearly drops from one’s hands when one reads “Eschyle ne présente aucun résultat moral”: and the reference to the Prometheus by which this statement is supported, suggests very forcibly that the writer knew nothing else, and did not understand this. More allowance must be made, no doubt, for the point of view, when we read further that “les héros (of Greek tragedy) n’avaient pas cette grandeur soutenue que leur a donnée Racine”; but what a point of view it is!^[179] We are in 104full topsyturvydom with the statement^[180] that “la philosophie des Grecs me paraît fort au-dessous de celle de leurs imitateurs les Romains,” and we do not get out of the country as long as the contrast of Greek and Roman continues. But here, it may be said, we are in the region of opinion. The plea cannot be urged for the astounding statements which diversify the defence of our own barbarous poetry. In believing Ossian genuine, as in admiration for it, she, of course, had respectable companions: but the person who could say^[181] “les poètes Anglais qui ont succédés aux bardes écossais ont ajouté à leurs tableaux,” &c., could have possessed neither the faintest knowledge of literary, or even political, history, nor the least extensive acquaintance with actual examples. The note,^[182] “le docteur Blair n’aurait pu juger en Angleterre Shakespere avec l’impartialité d’un étranger,” betrays the most obvious and complete ignorance of what le docteur Blair had actually said. The description in the text^[183] of Falstaff as a charge, a “caricature populaire,” a “plaisanterie grossière,” speaks the lady’s critical competence with a voice of doom. But the most utterly damning page is that^[184] which denies inventive imagination to English poetry; airily dismisses Waller and Cowley as unsuccessful imitators of the Italians; adds je pourrais y joindre Downe (sic), Chaucer, &c.; and a moment later despatches at a blow, as showing this want of inventive imagination, The Rape of the Lock (full of faults of taste), The Faërie Queene (the most tiresome thing in the world), Hudibras (witty, but dwelling too long on its jokes). Admit (it is a good deal to admit) that there may be faults of taste in the Rape; admit that more than one Englishman has been unfortunate enough to find Spenser tedious; admit that there is even some justice in the charge against Hudibras. How (except by the easy method of having never read them) can you leash these three books together? and, most of all, by what prank of her own elves does “that Elfish Queen” find herself between Trulla and Belinda? I have myself not the slightest doubt that though Madame de Staël may have glanced at the Rape, and disliked the sylph machinery, she had never so much as opened 105“Downe” or Chaucer, Butler or Spenser, and I should not be surprised if she knew nothing, save at second-hand, of Waller or Cowley.

I could multiply examples ad lib., from the German chapters especially, but the “matter of Germany” had better be dealt with under the book exclusively devoted to it. As for general strictures on the Littérature, they also will best be postponed till the De l’Allemagne has been dealt with.

The De l’Allemagne.

That this book is, as far as criticism goes, her masterpiece, there can be no doubt, and it would be surprising if it were not so. She was older; she had read more; and she had enjoyed very distinguished “coaching.” This kept her fairly straight in matters of fact within the comparatively limited range which she here allowed herself as far as literature is concerned. German literature had taken itself by this time pretty seriously for a couple of generations: and the German men of letters whom she interrogated or “led about,” were perfectly competent and apparently not unwilling^[185] to keep her from such absurdities as we have just been noticing. Very much of the book is plain, straightforward compte rendu, and generally très bien rendu, whatever minor faults one may find here and there. Above all, the expressed and very fairly carried out purpose of comparative study which made Napoleon so angry, and with such good reason,^[186] gives the book an honourable place as a precursor, if not, indeed, an absolute origin, in a new way which had to be trodden. If Napoleon’s innate and colossal vulgarity had not been constantly tripping up his immense cleverness, he might have perceived that here was a new feather of some consequence to stick in his sham crown-imperial. The analyses and précis of such short things as Lenore and the Braut von Korinth are rather excessive for a book: but neither piece is easily translatable into French, and Madame de Staël probably knew very well that few of 106her dear quasi-countrymen were likely to learn German, in order to read them.

The old leaven of French and philosophe taste and culture shows itself at intervals interestingly. She cites^[187] (a little generously perhaps in any case) the line in Raynouard’s Les Templiers, when the reprieve arrives too late to save the knights who have been chanting hymns on the pyre

“Mais il n'était plus temps; les chants avaient cessés,”

in connection with the yoke of the unities. But, strangely enough, she does not seem to notice the weakening and watering down of what she calls l’un des mots les plus sublimes qu’on puisse entendre au théâtre, by its being made part of the speech of a messenger. The voices of the warrior-priests ceasing one by one in agony, and the reprieve coming on the silence of the last, would be, though a rather melo-dramatic, a really dramatic moment. The recital of the situation is a little less ordinary than talk “of the rain and the fine time,” and that is all.

This, however, is succeeded by some really acute, and in French quite novel, criticism of Shakespeare as too subtle, too impartial, &c., for the stage—criticism which she had probably learnt from Schlegel,—and the whole chapter^[188] is important; as is that on “Comedy,” though the definition^[189] from Schlegel himself, with which it starts, is very nearly galimatias.

There is much good sense in the criticism of German romance, though the old leaven once more appears in the statement that “verse is required for the marvellous; prose will not do.”^[190] Always on Goethe she is good, and, “philosophess” as she is, she has some very sensible remarks on the over-dose of metaphysic in Schiller’s criticism. On most of her subjects, indeed, from Wieland to Jean Paul, she is still worth reading.

Her critical achievement—Imputed.

Her admirers, however,—or the partisans of the school of 107criticism, which, as has been said, she did so much to “vulgarise”—would no doubt regard this matter as merely, in Luther’s famous epithet of contempt, “stramineous.” It is on her attempt to grasp the principles not merely of kinds but of literatures, to identify or at least connect these with national characteristics, and to extend the definition and comparison beyond even the bounds of nations to national groups—that they would base her claims. Here, perhaps, we may find ourselves in a distressing inability to follow. Certainly, no one will deny that there are some apparent national characteristics in literature; certainly no one will say that it is useless or idle to attempt to separate the national and the generic from the individual. But, in the first place, there was nothing absolutely new in this, though it might be for almost the first time used as a frequent implement, and as a fertile store-cupboard, in literary research. Even the despised Middle Ages had had national tickets for the different states of the European republic—had discovered that the Englishman had a proud look and a high stomach, that he took his pleasure sadly, and so forth. And had it been newer than it was, it might still have been distrusted. After all, the literature of a nation, though we talk of it as if it were something existent per se, is merely the aggregate of the work of individuals. It is the work of those individuals that you have to judge; and it is open to the very gravest doubt whether, in trying the several cases, the general inductive-deductive ready-to-hand estimate of the national quality is not more of a snare than of a help. At any rate, experience proves that those who have been readiest to use it, from Madame de Staël to M. Taine and M. Texte—to name no living examples—have been more snared than helped by it. Your preoccupation with the idea that the Englishman will be insular and rebel to ideas, the German unpractical and “inner-conscious,” the Frenchman logical, witty, tasteful, may very likely, according to the weaknesses of the poor but constant creature Human Nature, rather lead you to dispense with inquiry into the fact whether he, the individual Briton, Teuton, or Gaul, does really exhibit these characteristics. It will tempt you in the same way to exaggerate what tendencies he may have to them—to force them on him if he has them 108not—or even to leave him out of consideration if he is so impudent as too incontestably not to have them.

And there is also the gravest possibility of doubt whether, even in themselves, they have sufficient truth to make them of more than the slightest value. After all, a man is a man before he is an Englishman or a Frenchman; it is scarcely too paradoxical to say that he is himself before he is even a man. The very greatest men of course carry this disconcerting triumph of individuality furthest; all but the very smallest help to flaunt its banner now and then. And when the hasty generaliser generalises still more hastily, and talks about Literature of the North and Literature of the South, the Rebellion of Fact is more inconvenient still. You lay it down that the literature of the North does not busy itself with frank youthful passion, and you have to settle matters with Romeo and Juliet; that the Italian is a light-hearted being whose only wants are sunshine, an olive or two, a flask of red wine with a wisp of tow in it, and a donna leggiadra, and there rises before you the Divina Commedia.

And actual.

But this argument would tempt ourselves out of the way; and, even in so far as it is legitimate here at all, is rather for the Interchapters. Let it suffice that Madame de Staël is undoubtedly a notable figure in the mere History of Criticism, and that, like nearly all such figures, she has by no means lost her actual critical value; that she is no “shadow”; that she is still, dead as she is, a speaking voice of some of the perpetual forms and phases of criticism itself. That her intellectual ability, if only of the receptive and transmissive kind, was somewhat extraordinary, there can be little question. She frequently claims for herself the invention of the word “vulgarity”: and though she lived to be so unfortunate as to apply it^[191] to Miss Austen—though it has perhaps been more misused than any other single word of criticism—it was needed. Nor was she herself much the dupe of words, though she often was of supposed ideas. She has somewhere quoted from Rousseau, and expanded, a wise protest against the requirement of a pedantic adherence to definition in terminology. 109It was unlucky for her, no doubt, that to some extent she came at, and could not but represent, one of those rather unsatisfactory transition periods which are neither quite one thing nor quite another. She has touches of classic “dignity” and of philosophic cant, harlequinned with others of Romantic sehnsucht and “naturalistic” passion. Or rather she is like one of the picture-cleaners’ sign-portraits—half in eighteenth century shadow, half in nineteenth century light—or the other way about, if anybody chooses.

Yet the ill-luck is not total, and may perhaps even seem to be but apparent. For it is precisely this bariolage, this partition, this intermixture, which gives her not merely her historical position, but even, I think, her intrinsic attraction as a critic. She helps us by giving a fresh “triangulation,” a fresh aspect, a midway stage. Her perfectibilism keys on as interestingly from the literary side to the old Ancient-and-Modern dispute as on the political side to the Republican manias of the time. Her struggles to retain some conviction of the supremacy of Racine make more interesting, and are made more interesting by, her admiration for Shakespeare and the Germans. Her assimilations, or her attempts to assimilate, the new aesthetic, the new historical theories, the new wine generally, would have far less interest if she had put away all fancy for the old bottles. And so she figures worthily and interestingly in what we have called the French Transition, with a quaint enough contrast to Diderot, who opens it, and who taught her German teachers. She is a figure of far less originality, strangeness, and charm, but she has a more definite gospel, she is much less diffused and dissipated over the orbis scientiarum, she points more clearly to a clearly marked out path, and so she is much more likely to be followed by the multitude, if not by the elect.

Chateaubriand: his difficulties.

But she does not figure in her place alone: for side by side with her, and with a face looking still more forward, is another figure, not less curious, not less blended in its composition, but to some at least far more interesting and far greater. Chateaubriand is one of those literary personages to whom it is peculiarly difficult to do justice, and to whom accordingly justice has very seldom 110been done. I admit that it was long before I could myself regard him through glasses sufficiently achromatic, or divest him of his accidents with a satisfactory thoroughness. His personality—that troublesome and disturbing factor from which we are so fortunately free in the case of most ancient writers, and with which we are so teasingly confronted in the case of most modern—is a little enigmatic and more than a little unsympathetic. He trails with him the trumpery of two different times—Classical emphasis, arbitrariness, even to some extent prejudice, Romantic tawdriness, inconsequence, gush. He has curious adulteries of pedantry and foppishness—strange and indecent communions of ignorance and knowledge. And yet he is, in literature, so great a man that one sometimes hardly knows how to construct any definition of greatness which shall keep him out of the highest class. He has, and has by anticipation, all the gifts of Byron except the gift of writing verse: he can write prose which is hardly inferior to Byron’s verse in the qualities where verse and prose touch nearest, and not much below all but Byron’s best in some where they are farther apart. And he has other gifts to which Byron can lay no claim.

His Criticism,

The chief of these gifts is criticism—a department in which Byron, for all his shrewdness, simply does not count, because of the waywardness, egotism, and personal prejudice which tinge every one of his critical utterances, eulogistic or depreciatory. Now Chateaubriand counts in criticism for a very great deal. By those who allow indirect critical influence to rank Rousseau as a great critic, Chateaubriand ought to be ranked as a critic infinitely greater; by those who observe a more rigid and legitimate calculus, he can, as we shall shortly show, be ranked almost, if not quite, in the first class. When a French critic or historian^[192] pronounces him the father of modern criticism, the first to start the comparative method, and so forth, he is, as we are all inclined, and as French critics used to be extravagantly, and are still rather excessively inclined to do, speaking as if what is true of his own nation and literature were true universally. We must, of course, go a long way back in time, and some way afield in place—to the 111middle of the eighteenth century in the one case, to England and Germany in the other—for the real first appearances (“origins” is always a misleading word) of these things, and even if we cling to France we must deal with the vaguer but far older claims of Diderot. But Chateaubriand represents them powerfully. He represents them practically before Madame de Staël, in a much more literary fashion, and with much more literary power, and he represents them with a magic, with a contagious influence, to which she cannot pretend. Further, he possesses that claim which is the first, if not the sole claim for us, though it seems to be regarded by some with jealousy, and almost with resentment, the claim of having actually written criticism, and a great deal of it.

Indirect

The champions of the Indirect have, it must be confessed, not a little to rely upon in Chateaubriand. He was so much more intensely literary than Rousseau, and even than Madame de Staël, that Atala, René, Les Natchez, Le Dernier Abencérage still more, Les Martyrs most of all, and even not a few things in the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, may without violence be twisted into a literary bearing. All, in their different degrees and ways, exhibit the author’s insatiable curiosity as to the literature of different times, countries, religions, languages, and his indefatigable industry in staining and twining his own literature with the colours and the threads of these others. But it is quite unnecessary to twist and infer, to force the “this must have” and the “we can see,” when we have two such documents before us as the Essai sur La Littérature Anglaise, and, above all, the Génie du Christianisme.

and Direct.

As a matter of fact, by far the larger part of this latter famous book, the revanche for Voltairianism, the manifesto of the whole earlier, and not a little of the later nineteenth century, the main pillar of its author’s fame,^[193] is literary criticism pure and simple. It is so odd a place to look for this that it sometimes escapes. Accounts of Chateaubriand have been written (I am, I fear, guilty of one myself) in 112which it has had no adequate recognition. But when we have once sighted our panther,^[194] she cannot escape us; and we may try here to do justice to the real sweetness of her breath.^[195]

The Génie du Christianisme.

So odd a place: and that, too, in more ways than one. At first sight—and perhaps tootoo hasty or not thoroughly informed readers permanently—the Génie^[196] may appear an inextricable tangle, or a frank flinging together of fragments without even the connection of being tangled. It would be improved (and perhaps such a thing has been done) by a table like that which Burton wisely prefixed to the Anatomy. One has to realise the utter terrassement in France of Christian doctrine and practice—the all but total triumph of that purely secular education and atmosphere for which a hundred years later some of our Nonconformists pant—to appreciate the real art and the practical necessity of the fashion in which Chateaubriand “lets everything go in” against Philosophism. It seems temerity, but was probably wisdom, to begin, as he begins, with the altitudes of faith and dogma. And he glides off from them, cunningly but most naturally, to those ceremonies, sacramental and other, for which the Republic had substituted unmeaning and unaffecting civil functions. Then he once more attacks the philosophes on their own ground—on the subject of morals and that “virtue” which they had so tediously dinned into the

113public ear, but of which they had made so little private exhibition,—and grapples courageously, though perhaps not rashly, considering the extreme sciolism of most of his adversaries, with cosmology and teleology, with physic and metaphysic, with Hell and Heaven themselves. In all, his rhetoric serves him admirably, if nothing else does; but we have as yet little or nothing to do with literature or with criticism. It is quite different when we come to the “Second Part,” Poétique du Christianisme, and here Chateaubriand begins to present his credentials as a critic. Nor, with some digressions, does he again drop the character throughout the book.

Its saturation with literary criticism.

The proceeding^[197] was probably more logical than it seems. On the one hand the attack on religion had been overwhelmingly, and the attack on civil order very largely, literary in its own character and weapons. In the second, the everlasting philosophe-republican chatter about the Greeks and the Romans had more than reconstituted the old classical and “ancient” prejudice. Madame de Staël had not shared this latter; but she had failed to share it principally because of her perfectibilism, which had put down the merits of the ancients chiefly to their republican constitutions. Here were a whole host of things for Chateaubriand to deal with; and in every case the literary way was an obvious line of attack, as well as one intensely congenial to the new champion. He is no perfectibilist, of course; in fact, one of the appendices of the Génie is a Letter to Fontanes^[198] on the second edition of the De la Littérature, combating its views. But his championship of “modern” literature is based upon its Christianisation, and he compares famous ancient with famous modern poets on purpose to show first, how Christianity has enabled the latter to rise to nobler heights; secondly, how some at least of the best points of the ancients themselves are to be found in contact with Christian ethics. Like his feminine opponent, he has some not quite cleanly rags of classicism and Gallicism about him. A too sanguine hope may be dashed when it finds him talking about the “bad 114taste” of Dante, and the “defects” of his age. But Romanticism, no more than its far-off godmother Rome, was to be built in a day.

Survey and examples.

And we very soon see that for all these remains of “the old man,” and for all a certain necessary ignorance (he thinks there is nothing mediæval before Dante but “a few poems in barbarous Latin),” despite also such antiquated arbitrarinesses as the admission as a fault in the Milton whom he so much admires, and in the Dante whom he admires rather less, that “the marvellous is the subject and not the machine of the poem”—we very soon see on what side Chateaubriand is fighting. He hazards at the very opening the doctrine—shocking to the whole French eighteenth century, and contrary to Aristotle—that the Epic is not only larger in bulk, but higher, greater, more varied, more universal indeed, in kind and range, than the drama. And perhaps this is as much a dividing principle of criticism as anything else. I hold myself, as has been made obvious, with those who think that the drama is only accidentally literary, though it has been so now and again, for long periods, in the very highest degree; while the epic is literary or nothing—it is, with lyric, the beginning of all literature. But, however this may be, the whole drift of his criticism is anti-neoclassic. Again and again he contrasts passages and long scenes from Homer and Milton,—not to show how superior Homer is, as the French neoclassics would have done, as Addison had done—not even to show how superior Milton himself is—not to defend Milton by Homer’s example,—but to show how they are differently excellent. A most interesting and novel critical suggestion is that of trying to realise how a modern poet would have done what an ancient poet has done, the whole lesson of the comparative method being here in little.

I shall hardly be expected, though I should much like, to analyse and represent the whole of these twelve books, to which something has even to be added from the six last. The turning of the tables on the Henriade^[199] (which is treated most politely), with a sincere lament that, while the finest places of its author’s poems are inspired by religion, he has not more 115fully inspired himself therewith in this particular poem (the subject of which so obviously requires it!) is ingeniously malicious. We may take mediocre interest in the contrasts of Lusignan and Andromaque, Guzman and Iphigénie,^[200] but they are full of delicate and acute critical observation, which shows itself again in the comparison of Virgil and Racine.^[201] So too we may dispute the epigram that “la barbarie et le polythéisme ont produit les héros d’Hómère; la barbarie et le Christianisme ont enfanté les chevaliers du Tasse”;^[202] but the whole passage where this occurs is connected with the all-important devotion to Chivalry. When he comes to passion we may again desiderate something different from the comparison of Dido and Phèdre.^[203] But this was what was wanted “for them”; and there is no fault to find with the treatment of Pope’s handling of Héloise.^[204] With the author’s ecstacies over Paul et Virginie,^[205] few people now living can sympathise; but once more Paul et Virginie was good “for them.” Virginie is only a victim of nasty prudishness when you compare her to Nausicaa, but she might easily be taken for a mirror of purity in the age of Madame de Warens and Madame de Puisieux. The fine passage on “Le Vague des Passions” which serves to introduce René is of great critical importance, though it may have been partly suggested by Bossuet.

The paradox of the beginning of the book on the Marvellous^[206]—that mythology belittled nature and made description abortive—is at least exceedingly ingenious, as is what follows on Allegory; but Chateaubriand’s account of the history of modern descriptive poetry itself suffers from want of knowledge.^[207] Still, in attacking the position that pagan mythology was a more poetic subject than Christian, it must be admitted that he is excellent on Angels,^[208] and that his comparison of Venus in the Carthaginian woods and Raphael in Eden, is one 116of the best of those companion-pieces in which he so delights, and which are such engaging criticism. We cannot follow him through dreams and through “machines,” through Hell and through Tartarus; nor even give much space to the bold, elaborate, and often admirably critical comparison of Homer and the Bible.^[209] But these things, like the others mentioned before, all illustrate the range, the height, the Pisgah quality—or rather that still higher quality of the mountain view in Paradise Regained—to which Chateaubriand’s criticism can justly pretend. These thirty pages are perhaps his most elaborate and ambitious critical attempt, and they deserve to be thoroughly studied.

Hardly less remarkable is the Third Part, which deals with a sort of clash of influences—that of Christianity on the Fine Arts, and that of the Fine Arts, Christianity, and Literature on each other. The wonderfully prophetic instinct of the writer is shown in what he says of the Gregorian chant, as well as of Gothic architecture, and he brings them very close to letters; but of course he comes closer still in dealing with History, Oratory, and the like. And he manages, in a surprising fashion, not to keep very far from it, even in his last part, that of “Worship.”

Single points of excellence,

These exercitations are diversified and illustrated by constant expressions and aperçus of real critical power, showing, if, as we have said, necessarily not complete, yet very considerable, and for the time remarkable knowledge. Chateaubriand knows all about Ossian; and he corrects Madame de Staël’s amiable and ignorant enthusiasms with a politeness which must have been insufferable to the good lady. He has the right phrase exactly^[210] for that singular failure of a genius the Père Lemoyne—a phrase which may not improbably have suggested Flaubert’s gorgeous Tentation, and which is, as it were, a keynote or remarque-index in relation to the critical imagination of modern times. He has not merely this altered tone in excelsis, but also in details:—as 117witness the very remarkable note at i. 260, on the effects of a particular vowel (whether “first discovered” or not does not matter). On the very same part his open-mindedness is shown in the warm and just praise given to André Chénier—dead and unpublished—and a little later in a delicate protest against the inconsistency of Rivarol’s translation of Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante. The characters of the ancient historians are sketched with a masterly brevity in III. iii. 3, and there is an astonishing moderation and justice, as well as a sort of chivalry, in his frequent encounters with Voltaire.

and general importance.

But the greatest glory of Chateaubriand is that he is, if not the creator, the first brilliant exponent of what we have called above the Critical Imagination—the first great practitioner of imaginative criticism since Longinus himself. Lessing and Diderot had no doubt shown the way to this, but the first was not quite enthusiastic enough, and the second was enthusiastic to and over the verge of dithyramb. The Schlegels and Goethe had practised in it; but the two former were not great enough men of letters, and the most ambitious attempts of Goethe, such as that in Wilhelm Meister, are spoilt by deplorable longwindednesses and pedantries. Chateaubriand is one of the very first to take the new stream, remis atque velis, plying the oars of the intellect, and catching the wind of the spirit. His occasional delinquencies in the use of the phrase mauvais goût; his deference to the old opinion that the hero of tragedy must necessarily be what we called then in English “a high fellow”; other things of the same kind; do not matter in the very least. Every one of them could be set off against a corresponding expression of freedom from neo-classic prejudice; and there would remain a mighty balance of such utterances on the credit side.^[211]

Joubert—his reputation.

The critical position of Joubert, acclaimed soon after the posthumous publication of his work^[212] by the greatest critical 118authorities, has sometimes been questioned in later days, but quite idly. Readers of these pages must have seen, if indeed they did not know it long before, that a large body of critical, as of other opinion, is merely negligible. It does not rest upon any solid knowledge or argument; it is in many cases not even the expression of a genuine personal preference, illusion, or impression of any kind. Sometimes the critic does not like the other critics who have expressed approval of the author; sometimes he does not like some individual utterance or group of utterances of the author’s own; more often he simply wishes “to be different”—to blame where his predecessors have praised, and to extol to the skies what they have disapproved or left unnoticed. In all such cases the verdict need not even be seriously fought before any court of cassation; it is self-quashed.

The remarkable body of judgment by French critics^[213] from Sainte-Beuve downwards, which is prefixed to the usual editions of the Correspondance, especially if it be supplemented by Mr Arnold’s famous essay, is almost “document” enough of Joubert’s worth; but we cannot here avoid full examination of him, especially as hardly one of these critics has taken our exact point of view. We can neglect the great body of Joubert’s miscellaneous Pensées and concentrate ourselves on those affecting literature, which practically begin^[214] under the heading De l’Antiquité, appear both here and in the subsequent headings with general titles, and of course constitute the substance of “On Poetry,” “On Style,” “On the Qualities of the Writer,” and “Literary Judgments.”

His literary αὐτάρκεια.

In literature, with an exception to be noticed presently, his time exerts remarkably little influence on Joubert. This is not the case elsewhere; in his religious, political, moral, social judgments we feel—and it could not be but that we should feel—the pressure, and the shadow, and the sting, of the Revolution everywhere. 119But the literature is—as literature is but too seldom and ought always to be—presented (except in one way) with a sort of autarkeia. Joubert was born in mid-eighteenth century, and he died just as the Romantic movement was in full bud and had begun to burst, with the Odes et Ballades. But he is neither a hard and fast classic, nor a revolter of the extreme kind against classicism, nor, like those not uninteresting contemporaries of his whom we shall group after him, blown hither and thither by the wind of this or that doctrine. He betrays, indeed, the enfranchising and widening influence of Diderot; but he has worked this out quite independently, and with a “horizontality” and comparative range of view in which the early Romantics themselves (except Sainte-Beuve) were conspicuously lacking, and which even Sainte-Beuve never fully attained. The Law of Poetry. The famous, the immortal, ninth “Pensée” of the Poetry section,^[215] “Rien de qui ne transporte pas n’est poésie: La lyre est en quelque manière un instrument ailé,” is positively startling. It is, of course, only Longinus, dashed a little with Plato, and transferred from the abstract Sublime to the sublimest part of literature Poetry. But generations had read and quoted Longinus without making the transfer; and when made it is en quelque manière (to use the author’s judicious limitation, which some people dislike so much), final. Like other winged things, and more than any of them, poetry is itself hard to catch; it is difficult to avoid crushing and maiming it when you think to catch it. But this is as nearly perfect a definition by resultant, by form, as can be got at.

More on that subject.

Of course all the utterances are not at this level. The fault of the “Pensée” itself in general, is that, in human necessity, it will miss, or only go near ten times (perhaps a hundred) for once that it hits; and it is easy enough for a hostile critic in turn to hit the misses. But it is the hits that count; and, as for them, how astonishing is it to come across at this date (No. xxv.), “Les beaux vers sont ceux qui s’exhalent comme des sons ou des parfums,” where you have, put perfectly, all the truth that exists in the “symbolist” theory of some seventy 120years later! Again (xxxviii.) “Dans le style poétique chaque mot retentit comme le son d’une lyre bien montée, et laisse toujours après lui un grand nombre d’ondulations”—where the great quality of the best nineteenth-century poetry, of that poetry of which hardly anything had been written in France and Germany, and of which Joubert could hardly know what had already been written in England—the contingent, additional music superadded to meaning,—is hit off perfectly once more. Then there is the second best known and most famous passage (xli.), forbidding the “lieu trop réel,” the “population trop historique,” and enjoining the “espèce de lieu fantastique,” in which the poet can move at pleasure; and that other fatal saying (xlvi.), “On ne peut trouver de poésie nulle part quand on n’en porte pas en soi,” and the reiteration (xlix.) of the capital doctrine as to the beauty of words—of words even detached from context. Taking them together, these ten pages of Joubert contain more truth—more stimulating, suggestive, germinal truth—about poetry, than any other single treatise from Aristotle down to the present day. This is the way a man must think of poetry if he is to be saved; though not every clause of the Joubertian creed is thus Athanasian.

On Style.

The Style section is equally astonishing. I think I first read Joubert about thirty years ago; I know his ancestors and his successors much better now; but he astonishes me just as much as ever. In another rather longer^[216] stretch you have the best things in Aristotle, Longinus, and others—some at least of which he pretty certainly had neither read nor heard of—revised and applied; you have the principles and the practice of Hugo, Gautier, Saint-Victor, Flaubert, of Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, put plumply or by suggestion beforehand in eighteen pages.

Here is everything: the necessity of choice which is the condition of good style, and which works so differently in ancient and modern times; the powers of “the word” in all their varied bearings; the excellence of archaism rightly understood, and the occasional charms of the kuria as a rest and interval for refreshment; the right to reinvest an old word with new meaning; the “science of names”; the placing 121of words; the freedom which the reader possesses of improving on his author by keeping his word and adding to his sense; the difference between musical and pictorial style; the impossibility of literature when words are used with an absolutely fixed value; the unpardonable sin of mere purism; the natural and justifiable idiosyncrasy of dictionary and even grammar in good writers, with the due guards against its excess; the variety of degree in which ancient authors are to be followed; the value and the danger of idioms. These and a hundred other things will all be found, sometimes of course (the fault of the form again) put too absolutely; sometimes, though very rarely, intermixed with things more dubious—but always present at short, at all but the shortest notice. Never, I think, did any critical writer enter so much into the marrow of things in so limited a space: the section is a sort of Tinctura Fortior, as the pharmacopœias say, or even like those older “drop-cordials” of story, where a vial the size of the little finger contained the virtue of a whole pharmacy.

Miscellaneous Criticisms.

These two sections form the aureus libellus of Joubert—if I knew a wealthy and sensible, intelligent and obliging bibliophile, they should be printed on vellum and adorned by the greatest decorative artists of the age, and bound in the simplest but the most perfect coat obtainable. We decline slightly with the two remaining chapters—though there is still plenty of gold to be found—and the decline is continuous. In the section “Des Qualités de L’écrivain et des Compositions Littéraires” we once more approach the merely philosophic side, and it is Joubert himself who has left us, apropos of Corinne, the memorable proposition that sometimes “un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”^[217] A fine distinction (not so expressed) between realist and idealist literature^[218] is an instance of the consolation which is constantly occurring; but we must look for relapses. What do we learn by being told^[219] that “Homer, Euripides, and Menander” (O groves of Blarney!) had more facilité pour le beau than Hesiod and Sophocles; Æschylus, Dante, and La Bruyère less than Fénelon and J. J. Rousseau? The context indeed shows (not by any means in so many words) what gloss is to be put on 122facilité and what on beau to get out Joubert’s meaning; but the result is not worth the trouble. And when we find afterwards that la facilité est opposée au sublime we agree, but, recurring, ask whether Homer is less sublime than Hesiod? The sub-sections on criticism (§ cxl. sq.) are excellent, and a fairly severe winnowing would leave a residue not much less valuable than in the other two: but the winnowing is necessary.

His individual judgments more dubious.

The fact may prepare the wary reader for some further inequality in the last section of “Jugements Littéraires,” with which should be taken certain letters to Molé in the Correspondance. To prevent disappointment and even puzzlement it is here necessary to remember Joubert’s “time, country, and circumstance.” He was a man, let it be repeated, of the mid-eighteenth century by birth; a Frenchman, and not, it would seem, by any means widely acquainted with foreign languages and literatures, except classics. He always speaks as if he could only read Milton in translations; his knowledge of Shakespeare, though he admired him, is derived from the same untrustworthy source; of any large part of English literature he necessarily knows nothing at all. Accordingly—in a fashion which is nearly unique in this history, but which is priceless in its unicity—the disadvantages which have been powerless to affect his general conceptions recover their hold upon him, to some extent, in particulars. He is still sound on what the general merits of poetry and of literature should be; but he sees those merits in the wrong place. At first sight, to an English reader who is not thoroughly broken to the ways of our difficult art, it may seem impossible, inconceivable, a bad joke, that the author of the aphorisms above quoted as to the necessity of “transport,” the power of words, and all the rest of it, should admire Delille and not admire Milton. But remember, he understood the words of Delille—they had, feeble as they were, the power to excite, according to his own true and profound theory, that poetry which was ready to answer and magnify them in his own soul. He did not understand the words of Milton, and they could not touch him; while he is certainly not to blame for not being touched by the words of Louis Racine.

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The reason for this.

This is the most striking instance, the most astounding at first, the most illuminative afterwards; and it will give us a key to all the rest. It must for instance be a fresh stumbling-block, and no small one, to find Joubert, who could prefer Delille to Milton, quite cool, almost harsh, to Racine, saying that Racine is “the Virgil of the ignorant,” that those whom he suffices are “poor souls and poor wits.” But the way round the obstacle is perfectly clear to the practised traveller in our country. Racine’s was not the poetry of Joubert’s own time and generation; Delille’s was. His language, his words, his imagery could convey whatsoever of poetry was in them—though it might not be very much—to Joubert’s ears and wit and soul better than Racine’s could. And once more, as those ears and wit and soul were exquisitely sensitive to even a trace of poetry that did reach them, the difficulty becomes no difficulty at all, but, on the contrary, a real paradox of the most illuminating and helpful kind, constantly to be remembered, and especially good against those estimable doctrinaires who will have a hard and fast hierarchy in poetry, a “best, better, good, not so good, bad,” arranged in rigid classes. That is poetry to a man which produces on him such poetical effects as he is capable of receiving. The reader takes it, as the writer makes it, poeticamente. You may possibly—it is not certain, but it is possible—educate his poetic sense; say to it, “Friend, come up higher.” You may certainly remove merely mechanical obstacles, such as Joubert’s ignorance of English. But until something of this kind is done, it is better that the man should even excessively admire Burns or Béranger, Macaulay or Moore, than that he should simulate admiration of Shelley, or Hugo, or Heine. It would be pleasant to dwell on this, which has never, I think, been dwelt upon, or expounded fully before; but words to the wise must be here, as always, our motto: the hints given can easily here, as elsewhere, be expanded by those who have the wits and the inclination.

Additional illustrations.

Some further instances, however, may and must be given of the working of this curious state of things, which makes a critic equal to the very greatest we have met in abstract appreciation of poetry and literature, the inferior of many we have met—if not of most who were good 124critics at all—in his appreciation of individuals. There is the germ of a most important general censure on “Naturalism” (a thing once more far ahead) in his remark on Boccaccio, that he “adds nothing to the story,” that he “respects the tale as he would respect a truth,” a position interesting to compare with the constant protests of the Goncourts and their fellows against what has been called “disrealising.”^[220] “Boileau est un grand poète, mais dans la demi-poésie,” though a little epigrammatic, is true enough. His few remarks on Molière argue, as we should expect, a rather lukewarm admiration; but he is among the highest praisers of La Fontaine, ranking him as (of course this is before the nineteenth century) fuller of poetry than any other French author. (Note again that this means, “fuller of poetry which can bring itself into contact with Joubert’s mind.”) He admits that his beloved Delille has only “sounds and colours” in his head, but then they are the sounds and colours that Joubert can see and hear, and he knows rightly that sounds and colours make more than half of poetry. As for the ancients, he remarks with great truth, that Cicero, whom nevertheless he admired much, has “more taste and discernment than real criticism.” And then we find the moralist in the remark, that Catullus unites the “two things which make the worst mixture in the world, mignardise and coarseness,” and that “ses airs sont jolis, mais son instrument est baroque,” another curious instance of the inability of the Latin race to value the second greatest poet of Latin. Joubert, you see, did not like the indecency of Catullus, and he did not like his “bitterness,” as Quintilian calls it; and the dislike barred the poetic contact. On the other hand, he could see and feel Tacitus. That Pascal is “exempt from all passion” seems an odd judgment, though I could, I think, explain it. He is excellent on Bossuet and Fénelon: less so, I think, on Malebranche.

On his own eighteenth century one turns to him with much interest, but the utterances are too detailed for us to linger on them. They have the perspicacity (if sometimes a little of the injustice) of an escaped pupil of the philosophes. He is very valuable on Rousseau, but that “a Voltaire is good for nothing 125at any time,” though he had acknowledged many literary gifts and graces in this Voltaire, is not merely unjust, but saugrenu. Still it certainly raises the point of law, whether “good for nothing” literature, which is good literature, is not good for something.

General remarks.

A few more general remarks may perhaps be made on this critic, who contrasts so remarkably with all the rest of the critics of the Empire, and not least remarkably with his friend Chateaubriand and with Madame de Staël, beside whom alone of this numerous group he can be placed. It will be seen that while he is free from “Corinne’s” hasty generalisations and indigestible “philosophy of literature,” while he has a less extended knowledge of literatures (though probably a much more accurate one) than hers, he actually far transcends her in real philosophy of view, that he takes a sight of all poetry, all literature, and their qualities, which is aquiline alike in sweep and searchingness. Further, that though his knowledge is again more accurate than Chateaubriand’s, it is more circumscribed, and that he cannot relish some particular things which Chateaubriand could, yet that once more he excels his friend in clearness, ideality, comprehension, and depth. That finally (though the matter of this is to come), in comparison with all the other Empire critics, from Fontanes and Geoffroy downwards, a similar distinguendum has to be observed. One Joubert—the Joubert of the general views and of the sections on style and poetry—is far over their heads, out of their sight and reach. The other Joubert—the Joubert of the particular judgments—is very much nearer them, though he is sometimes, not always, their superior.

What is certain, however, is, that this particular kind of doubleness (we have seen others more common) is extraordinarily rare—that though faint touches of it may appear here and there, they are not more than faint. Joubert’s descriptions of poetry and his admiration of Delille are no parallel to Longinus’ definitions of the Sublime and his failure fully to admire the Odyssey. There is no conflict of the higher and the lower rule, but only an unexampled—yet when we come to think of it, perfectly natural—inability to get the higher rule into play. If one could have had not merely the gift of 126tongues, but the gift of conferring it, it would have been perhaps the most interesting experiment possible in the critical sphere to have made Joubert a thorough proficient in English, and then to have seen whether he failed to see the beauties of Milton. Meanwhile he remains isolated. I do not think Mr Arnold’s comparison of him to Coleridge a very happy one, though there are no doubt certain resemblances—the Coleridgean depreciation of French poetry in relation to the Joubertian of English is the most striking of these, and might seem sufficient. I do not think Coleridge depreciated French poetry because he could not hear it: Mr Arnold himself practically admitted that he did, and he is therefore himself a better parallel. And Coleridge had the excuse, which Mr Arnold had not, that French had, in literature accessible to him, hardly tried the whole compass of its lyre at all. But this is a digression, only excused by its helping to point the assertion that there is no one like Joubert—for Mr Arnold himself knew French very well indeed.

The other “Empire Critics.”

To all these three remarkable writers the term “Empire Critics,” which has obtained a certain solid position in critical history from the use made of it by Sainte-Beuve,^[221] might, as far as chronology goes, be applied. But they are not the writers who are generally denoted by the term, these being rather a group extending from Fontanes through Ginguené, Garat, Geoffroy, Dussault, Feletz, Lemercier, Marie-Joseph Chenier, Hoffman, and others, down to Villemain and Cousin, who belong in part even to the Second Empire, but still represent an older tradition than the men strictly of 1830. They have been of late somewhat forgotten and neglected, despite Sainte-Beuve’s weighty pleas for them;^[222] and perhaps in hardly a single case (I am not forgetting the once mighty name of Villemain himself) do they supply us with a critic of the highest class. But they are extremely 127important to history; we cannot really understand the criticism of the last seventy years itself without them. And I do not regret the time that I have myself spent on them, though I do not propose, as Agamemnon would say, to equal my treatment of them to that time itself.

Fontanes.

The novice in these matters who goes from Sainte-Beuve’s repeated and respectful notices of Fontanes to the latter’s Œuvres^[223] may be a little puzzled, even if he take due heed to the fact that these Works are, as far as the criticism goes at any rate, only “selected.” There is not very much in bulk; and what there is may not seem, according to the severe Arnoldian standard, “chief and principal.” An introduction and some notes to his translation of the Essay on Man, articles on Chateaubriand, on Madame de Staël, on the “emphatic” Thomas, &c.:—“we can do all these for ourselves if we want them, which we mostly do not,” is likely to be the verdict of the impatient.

But it should not be allowed to stand. Fontanes shows us, in a manner made more historically important by the fact that for a long time he was a sort of Minister of Literature to Napoleon, that turning, that transition, which is the subject of this whole chapter. He still, and naturally, has a great deal of the eighteenth century in him; but he can see the vacuity and the frigidity of eighteenth-century “emphasis.” He is responsible^[224] for teaching Victor Hugo that Voltaire taught us to admire Shakespeare, one of the most remarkable mare’s-nests in critical history. But, his eyes perhaps sharpened a little by personal friendship, he perceived to a very large extent, if not fully, the importance of the Génie du Christianisme. So there may have been mixed motives in his different reception of Madame de Staël’s theories; but there is a singular and satisfactory compound of eighteenth-century good sense and nineteenth-century catholicity in his dealing with her fantasticalities about North and South. He is himself rather rhetorical at times, but seldom to the loss of sobriety; and he is altogether a good sample, a good tell-tale, of the attitude of the inhabitants of a landslip—as we may call it—who see their old marks changing relation and bearing, who do not wholly 128like it, but who are capable of adapting themselves, at any rate to some extent, to the change.

Geoffroy.

Another interesting and representative person is Geoffroy,^[225] who incurred the strictures of Joubert, and has had them “passed on” by Mr Arnold. Geoffroy—the pillar for many years of the Année Littéraire and of the Débats, the “Folliculus” of Luce de Lancival—has received from Gosse (M. Etienne, not Mr Edmund) the praise of having “toujours marché dans la même route et à la lueur du flambeau qu’il avait choisi dès le commencement.” In other words immutatus et immutabilis—an attribution magnificent in some relations of life; not, perhaps, as we have before noted, in criticism. Geoffroy’s road and torch might have been better chosen.

He, too, feels his time—if he is by no means a Romantic before or at the birth of Romanticism, he is hardly more of a Voltairian. But he is first of all “against” everything and everybody—a child of Momus.^[226] He is doubtful about Corneille and Molière; even Racine is not “perfect” for him. But his most characteristic passage is perhaps one which occurs at page 137, vol. ii., of his work cited below. It is a real point de repère, because it is one of the last authoritative expressions of a sentiment—no doubt not yet extinct, but for a long time kept to some extent in check—the French belief in the absolute superiority of French literature and the impossibility of a foreigner being a judge of it—the impertinence even of his attempting to judge it. Geoffroy rates Blair in the most approved pedagogic fashion for expressing the opinion—now probably entertained by the majority of Frenchmen themselves—that Phèdre is a greater play than Iphigénie, and for assigning the reason that Iphigénie is too French. He blames the Edinburgh professor roundly for “meddling with our authors”; the opinions are not disputable opinions merely—they are “errors”; Blair and Edinburgh “ought to be ashamed” 129of them; they show that the critic “knows nothing about the matter.” Similar things are, of course, said to-day in England as well as in France; but they only show the temper of the particular critic, not the theory of prevailing criticism. Yet Geoffroy, if only from cross-grainedness, helped in the unsettling of the merely traditional view of literature: and so did service.

Dussault.

His contemporary and fellow-worker on the Débats, Dussault, is of a different type.^[227] He is much more amiable in his judgments—has, indeed, the credit of being a sort of maker of things pleasant all round; but he is in principle much more reactionary—he is perhaps the most so of this group of critics, till they were exacerbated by the Revolters, to whom he himself refers as anarchistes littéraires. He is a staunch Bolæan; and if he has to admit (as with the growth of literary history it was by his time almost impossible for any one not to admit) that the Art Poétique is not complete, c’est du moins bien écrit. But he goes far beyond this elsewhere; and on the 26th of April, 1817—the very year when a certain enfant sublime presented himself as a competitor for an Academic prize—he asks, undoubting of the fact, “Pourquoi la constitution du Parnasse est elle si solide et si durable?” That the disciples of the Greek and Latin Muses should have anything to learn by going to “Runes” and such like things is nullement possible. Fairy tales are “absurd.” Even the avant-courriers of the French classic age meet with no mercy; and Balzac himself is credited merely with “bad taste.”

Hoffman, Garat, &c.

Of another member of the staff of the Débats in its early days, Hoffman, I know less than of these.^[228] He was, like most of the group, a dramatist, and as might be expected, and as was the case with all of them, the double employments reacted not quite beneficially on each other. Like Geoffroy (with whom, however, he was at variance, and who told him in effect, with characteristic sweetness, to go back to his dramatic gallipots and leave criticism alone) he frowned on the youth of Romanticism, and seems generally to 130have been of the race and lineage of Rymer. Garat, not very weighty as a politician, possesses little more worth, if any, as a critic, though he had vogue as an éloge-writer. Daunou, who wrote noticeable notices on Ginguené and others, began his career by a critical essay, two years before the Revolution, on the influence of Boileau, and was during all his life more or less concerned with criticism. But he was more of a historian and student of the political sciences than of a literary critic of the pure breed. Etienne, Fiévée, Legouvé the elder, the two Lacretelles, Andrieux,^[229] and others, we must also pass by, though I have matter for speaking of all of them: but Ginguené, M. J. Chénier, Népomucène Lemercier, and Feletz are not to be thus dismissed.

Ginguené.

The first was an older man than most of the group—in fact, he was over forty at the date of the Revolution, from the tender mercies of which he was only saved by Thermidor. But he ranks in literature, and especially in critical literature, chiefly by his Histoire Littéraire d’Italie,^[230] which did not begin to appear till the second decade of the nineteenth century had opened, and was one of the earliest of these comprehensive surveys of literature—other than the writer’s own or than that of antiquity—which have had almost more to do than anything else with the formation of modern criticism. He has been accused of relying too much on Tiraboschi for his material; but the vice of looking rather at the commentators than at the texts was an old one, inherited from classical scholarship, and is by no means extinct a hundred years after Ginguené's time; and he is rather less tinged with it than we might expect. His judgments on such—to a Frenchman of the eighteenth century—dangerous writers as Dante and La Casa have considerable merit.

M. J. Chénier.

Marie-Joseph Chénier, in other respects besides his relations 131to his ill-fated and illustrious brother, appears to have been an unpopular and disputable person: nor, putting his considerable satiric power aside, can he be called a great man of letters. But, I think, his Tableau de la Littérature Française depuis 1789,^[231] has been rather undervalued. It is not, of course, free from the common defects of these surveys, especially when taken à bout portant; it notices much that we do not want noticed at all, belittles important things, takes refuge in stock phrases and clichés so as to get the business over. But it is often acute and very much less one-sided and hide-bound than La Harpe or Geoffroy—recognising, for instance, in opposition to the latter, that Blair is “always just” to French writers. And it supplies us, written as it was just before the dawn of Romanticism (for Chénier died in 1811), with some interesting and necessarily unbiassed views. People, he says,^[232] do not read Le Bossu at all, and they read Bouhours very little. He greatly prefers Diderot and Marmontel (though he thinks them “paradoxical”) to Batteux; and if he is complimentary to Voltaire and even to Thomas, rejoices in Fénelon and Corneille. He cannot, or will not, understand Chateaubriand;^[233] but he takes frequent opportunity, under the guise of noticing translations, to refer to and estimate English and German literature. In short, he is open to the reproach of “not knowing where he is,” but the very evidences of this are useful to us.

Lemercier.

Still more relatively, and very much more intrinsically interesting, is Népomucène Lemercier—that singular first sketch of a Victor Hugo, who, naturally enough, would have none of Victor Hugo himself when he appeared, and who, in a cruel trick of Fate and Death, was actually supplanted by Hugo in his Academic Chair. It is unfortunate that Lemercier’s Cours de Littérature Générale^[234] is 132not a very common book. It has something of the excessive generalisation of the eighteenth-century—men were struck by the effect of measured sounds and wrote poetry, &c.; and he still sticks to Kinds a good deal. But his independence is unmistakable. He slights the unities superbly; has what is, I think, the finest passage on Shakespeare written by a Frenchman up to his day, on “The English Aeschylus;” condemns la pernicieuse manie de critiquer opiniâtrement; qualifies and redeems his tendency to begin “in the air” with “the chimerical,” “the marvellous,” “the allegoric,” &c., by invariably condescending upon particulars in the true critical way; and, as became the author of the Panhypocrisiade and Pinto, defends Aristophanes against La Harpe. Unfortunately he followed (intentionally or not) Aristotle in confining himself to Drama and Epic. But he is a really stimulating and germinal writer, and represents the morrow among his own contemporaries.

Feletz.

Our last critic, before we come to those who in a way stand for both Empires, is a curious contrast both to the critic of the type of Geoffroy and to the critic of the type of Lemercier. Charles Marie Dorimont, Abbé de Feletz,^[235] who died in the very middle of the nineteenth century at the age of eighty-three, was with Geoffroy himself, Dussault, and Hoffman, one of the Débats Four, and like them was something of an anti-Romantic. But he was a man of amiable temper, of many friends and of much addiction to society, so that he rather flicked than lashed. His information as to the foreign subjects which he often affected was not exhaustive, and the praise, as well as the blame, of his not quite novel remark that in the pièces difformes et barbares of Shakespeare there are beautés veritables, are both weakened by the fact that he thinks Falstaff is hanged on the Stage in the Merry Wives. But he reviews novels obviously by preference, can like Joseph Andrews, and can enjoy Miss Edgeworth. In which things a door, great and effectual, is opened, though Feletz doubtless knew it not.^[236]

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Cousin.

Of the remarkable pair^[237]—united in their lives, their careers and their reputation—who, being first known under the first Empire, died in the same year a little before the close of the second, Cousin concerns us less than may be generally thought. He touched not a few literary subjects,^[238] but always preferably, and for the most part exclusively, from the philosophical, social, or some other non-literary side. Villemain: With Villemain it is different. He, too, was a politician, a historian, and what not, but he was a man of letters, and a man of critical letters, first of all. His second Academic prize, as a very young man, was gained by a paper on “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Criticism;” of the fifteen volumes of his collected works^[239] the greater part consists of literary history or estimate; he was Professor of “Eloquence Française,” that is to say French Literature; he was for a long period of years almost autocratic in the distribution of prizes and promotions at the Academy, of which he was “Secrétaire Perpetuel;” and it has long been, and to some extent still is, the correct and orthodox thing to speak of him as having initiated the modern critical movement in France, and shared with the Schlegels the credit of initiating that of Europe generally.

his claims:

From all this men must come to the fifteen volumes with high expectations—a little chequered perhaps in the case of the wary by some cautions of Sainte-Beuve’s.^[240] To describe the result as unmixed disappointment would be unfair. The mere dates and contents of the books taken together establish the fact that the debt owed by literary and 134critical history to Villemain is great, and one of those which will never be written off the grand livre of the subject. That between 1816, the year of his appointment as Professor, and 1828, that of the first publication of his Cours de la Littérature Française, French students first, and then French readers, had presented to them for the first time a survey of their literature, which included a historical view of its own origins and earlier achievements, and something like a comparative view of the achievements of other nations, is a thing the greatness of which is not likely to be denied or minimised here. Villemain’s style is always correct and agreeable, and he did much to establish, for French criticism in the nineteenth-century, that repute for “honeying the cup,” which has become something of a superstition. Sainte-Beuve, in the passage just referred to, may give him a little too much credit for acuteness and wit in his individual observations, but he has both.

Deductions to be made from them.

Unluckily, however, the entries on the other side of the sheet are numerous and grave. There is not merely the fault, which his great successor justly brings against him—a fault from which, by the way, Sainte-Beuve himself was by no means free—that Villemain is afraid of concluding, that he seldom or never gives you a clear, “grasped,” summed-up view of his whole subject or man. Very few critics do. But in details also his work is too often unsatisfactory. His numerous “Reports” on academic competitions, which give opportunity for excellent criticism, are elegant, but hollow and rhetorical, as is his rather famous Tableau de l’Eloquence Chrétienne au IVème Siècle. His notices of various ancient and modern writers are much boiled down from others, with the result, not usual in physical boiling-down, of being not thick but thin—those of Lucretius, and of the tempting and almost virgin subject of the Greek Romances, especially so. Comparative and liberal as he is, his judgment of Shakespeare will not stand beside Lemercier’s (he says definitely that Shakespeare does not provide, in the same proportion as the Greeks, “universal beauties”), and his estimate of Milton is beggarly beside Chateaubriand’s. With all his reputation for rehabilitating mediæval literature, he seems to have known it little: he is not merely very superficial on Chaucer, which 135might be pardonable in a Frenchman, but actually sweeps the mighty volume of the Chansons de geste away at one stroke by the words “we had no poetry at once rude and vigorous.” He is sound upon Ossian—that craze was dying and could survive even rudimentary comparative study of literature in no one of talent; and his thirty-ninth and fortieth lectures in the Cours on Criticism itself deserve to be very well spoken of. But on the whole he is disappointing. We must, of course, make allowance—very large allowance—for a pioneer who begins early, who finds others, during the course of his long life, extending his own explorations far beyond his own limits, and who, from other engagements, from routine, or from sheer disenchantment or worse, declines to follow them; we must increase it for his industry in other matters; we must give him his just part and royalty in the accomplishment of those who followed, and not a few of whom he actually taught, while all owed him something indirectly. But intrinsically and absolutely I do not find him a very great or even a very good critic. He is deficient in enthusiasm, in originality, in grasp: nor does he quite make up the deficiency by erudition and method.