There is no doubt that Schlegel’s best-known work is, as sometimes,

though not always, happens, his best, and by a very long way. The

_Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature_, which he delivered at Vienna

in 1808, printed next year, and issued finally in book form three years

later, undoubtedly deserve a place, not merely in any library of

critical literature, but on any shelf devoted to criticism which will

hold, say, a score of volumes. They have indeed faults, and grave ones.

The attitude towards French Drama, and especially towards Corneille and

Molière, does not sin merely by an excess of party spirit. There would

be some excuse for that, especially in face of the absolutely ridiculous

over-valuation of themselves by the French, who had held the critical

ear of Europe for a hundred and fifty years. Moreover, as has been, I

think, hinted more than once here, there are worse things than

thorough-going advocacy, prosecuting as well as defending, in criticism,

provided only that it observes literary manners and literary morals,

that it is well informed, and that it is intelligent. Schlegel is not

exactly guilty under the first count, but he is under the two last. He

ought to have seen that Corneille is really a Romantic Samson in the

mill of the classical Gaza. And as to Molière the case is even worse.

Further, to confine ourselves to really large and important matters, the

complete omission of the mediæval drama in the earlier part of the book,

where we stride straight from Seneca to the Renaissance, and the very

inadequate treatment of it later, form a really serious draw-back. I

have myself little doubt that the almost incomprehensible blunder of

those who deny the influence of this mediæval drama on our Elizabethans,

is in some cases due to the blunderers having taken their notions on the

subject from Schlegel. And it would be extremely easy to pick out a

small number of great errors, and a great number of small ones, to

supplement these two.

[Sidenote: _Their initial and other merit._]

Yet they are but little to be considered—they are certainly not to be

considered as at all fatal—in face of the merits of the book. To me the

greatest of all these is contained in its very first page, where the

whole question of the kinds, or parts, or phases of criticism, and of

their relation to each other, is treated with a completeness and

sureness which I do not know where to find before, and which I wish I

had found oftener since. On the one hand, says Schlegel, there is the

general _History_ of Art—indispensable, but not always easy to

understand. On the other, there is the _Theory_ of Art in general, and

the arts in particular—extremely important to the philosopher, necessary

to some extent for the artist himself, but inadequate by itself. Between

these two, connecting them, completing them, making them fruitful, is

actual criticism—the comparison and judging of existing productions.

There is really little or nothing to add to this: and if no other line

of the book had ever been written, it would give Schlegel an abiding and

important place in our history. But the book itself, though necessarily

in other parts somewhat antiquated, though of the kind which has to be

done afresh for itself, if not by every generation yet by every century

or so, remains excellent and masterly—one of the best individual

summaries of the critical struggle for independence of the eighteenth

century, and by no means merely dead or exhausted after the end of the

nineteenth.

[Sidenote: _The Schlegelian position._]

We should draw from this book the idea that though Goethe’s contemptuous

dismissal of August von Schlegel (almost in his presence) as _kein

Mann_[785] is not borne out by it in the critical respect,—though the

accompanying compensation-prize of “learning and service” to literature

certainly _is_—there remains to be added, if in the favourable sense an

acknowledgment of the completeness, and value of his playing of his

part, and of the part itself, yet also a further limitation. We have

seen and acknowledged the truth throughout, though we have protested

against the common exaggeration of it, that “old critics are like old

moons.” Perhaps the Schlegels are the most eminent examples of this.

They did yeoman’s service in their own time and to their own country—

perhaps even at that time they did service to other countries, too, in

preaching and spreading the Romantic gospel. But they were diffusers and

popularisers, not origins: and they did not give to their diffusion and

popularisation quite that touch of pure literary genius which will save

anything and anybody. They thus rank rather with Addison among ourselves

than with Dryden or Johnson, though in thoroughness and width of

critical knowledge and practice they are ahead of all three. If I were

writing this History of Criticism in German, and for Germans, I should

give them much more space than I give them here, of course. But even if

I were a German, “writing on this German matter in the German tongue for

German men,” I should never put them on a level with Coleridge, any more

than I should with Aristotle or Longinus in one class of critics, with

Novalis or with Joubert in another.

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorlesungen über Schöne Literatur und Kunst.]

The long unpublished Berlin _Lectures on Art and Belles Lettres_, in the

three first years of the nineteenth century, supply a document of A. W.

Schlegel’s criticism which is of the very greatest value. It is true

that they are “half-done work”—in some cases bare notes for lectures, in

others detached pieces of them, in only a very few (which were

separately published) finished even as parts. But it would be very

unwise of a writer to put his readers, and very unbenevolent of readers

to put their author, in either of the two classes to whom “half-done

work” is taboo. In fact, the book is as much finished as not a few of

the contemporary documents for Coleridge: and its great bulk and very

extensive range promise well enough. Nor is the performance to be evil

spoken of. Ambitious as is his scope, Schlegel nowhere shows that

shyness of detail which we shall have to notice in his brother: and his

width of knowledge, which would be unusual even at the present day, is

quite astounding when we remember that it was shown by a man of not much

over thirty a hundred years ago. The first volume, or course, deals with

Æsthetics generally, though from a peculiar point of view: and only a

few things in it need be noted, the most remarkable of which is

Schlegel’s scorn for Longinus on the one hand,[786] and on the other his

very ample acknowledgment of the dangers of Æsthetics themselves.[787]

The second deals with Ancient Literature (not without ample reference to

modern classics), and the third, which is in the least complete state,

with Modern Literature itself.

The Longinus passage just referred to is partly a corrupt following out

of the critic’s usual and very healthy distrust of such generalities as

“_The_ Sublime,” “_The_ Tender,” and the like; but it has a worse side

to it. As we have already seen, Schlegel is guilty of excess of party

spirit: and I have little doubt that, if Boileau and others of the

objects of eighteenth-century-worship had not expressed admiration for

the Περὶ Ὕψους, he would have judged it more wisely. In fact, his

judgments, which, either in the straight way of his courses or as

_obiter dicta_, are extremely numerous, are, though always interesting,

a curious mishmash of hit and miss, and the misses may be too generally

accounted for as the effects of that “trying to be different” which so

often besets young men of talent. The severity with which he treats

Burke[788] has some justification. But his handling of, for instance,

Opitz[789] is quite out of the right tone, and has all the faults that

beset the “company of warm young men.” Some of his English judgments—for

instance, those on Milton’s verse and on Thomson[790]—suggest, besides

this, an uncomfortable suspicion that his actual knowledge of our

language was not very perfect. In Greek he fails to respond quite

satisfactorily to the test of Æschylus. And in regard to a person very

different from Milton and from Æschylus, Ariosto, it is remarkable that,

where he praises him, he is doing it to disparage Wieland, and that in

the preserved heads of an intended fuller treatment he is most

unsatisfactory. No doubt much of this mere will-worship and

“will-blasphemy” (to invent a counter-word) would have disappeared in a

final redaction for press; but unfortunately it is there.

Fortunately there are also many better things, and on the whole the book

bears out, with evidence of a class peculiarly cogent, the praise which

has been given to Schlegel of being freer than any German critic from a

temptation to “speak off book,” to shirk and jilt the Book itself, for

expatiatory flirtations with so-called Ideas. He is in the main faithful

to Literature, and there is no higher praise.

[Sidenote: _Illustrated still more by Friedrich._]

Friedrich, though a very important person for us in general, has a good

deal less for us here, and has to a certain extent been already touched

and dealt with in the remarks on his brother. He seems very early to

have launched out into the expanse—I shall not here by any means say the

_inane_—of general literary outline and survey; and when he arranged his

collected works not so very long before his death,[791] he showed the

way in which he would himself have wished to have them regarded by

putting the _Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur_[792] first,

though it was nothing like the first written; and by arranging after it,

in the position of fillings-up or developments, the studies on

Greek[793] and on Romantic[794] poetry, the book on Indian

Literature,[795] and the smaller critical pieces.[796] Of these smaller

pieces he reproduced but few, and the actual reviews or definite

criticisms which they contain are of slight importance.

In fact, “judging of books”, and even “judging of authors,” was not

Friedrich’s forte at all. The _Ancient and Modern Literature_ is from

some points of view a book more curious than entirely edifying. When we

find Greek literature dashed off in some sixty pages, which include a

great deal of preliminary and general matter; Roman in another sixty,

which have likewise to provide for Hebrew and Persian; five-and-thirty

doing duty for the rise of the Novel, all English _belles lettres_ from

Spenser to Milton, _and_ the Spanish and French dramas, it is surely not

carping to say “this is either too little or too much.”

Nor, when we turn to what we have called the “fillings,” do we find much

more satisfaction in some directions. Here Greek has something like

three volumes and seven or eight hundred pages to itself—and not a

volume or a page too much—as no one can add more heartily and

whole-souledly than the present writer. But even in this ample room or

verge we find that Schlegel blenches at the book—still more at the

passage and the phrase. What he likes to talk about is matter such as

the Pelasgians; as epic (specially Homeric) and lyric poetry in general;

as this and that “school”; as “The Artistic Worth of the Old Comedy” and

“The Presentation of Female Character in Greek”; as “The Connection and

Contrast of the Interesting and the Beautiful.” In presence of the

actual literary integer he seems like a shy person at a _tête-à-tête_,

though he is perfectly at home when he is addressing himself, _ex

cathedrâ_, on generals to a large audience. People of his kind are, in

their place and at their time, most useful: the Schlegels were really

born to burst up the old narrowness, to encourage catholic (Friedrich

does not seem to me to have been quite fairly charged with turning this

into _Roman_ Catholic) views: to cheer the student on to the discovery

and appropriation of the enormous and far-flung wealth which had been so

long neglected. Their doctrines were so widely diffused in the middle of

the nineteenth century that at the end thereof they came to be regarded

as truisms and almost “falsisms.” But their place is still honourable,

though it is a place rather in the museum of Criticism than in her

living-room of study.

We may conclude this chapter—since an exhaustive examination of the

German work of this period is here impossible, and, if it were possible,

would be of very little service—by noticing one or two authors and books

of different kinds, specimen-fashion.

[Sidenote: _Uhland._]

The best known in England of German lyric poets next to Bürger and

Goethe, and (in time) before Heine, Uhland, was a man forty years

younger than the author of _Lenore_, and did not die till Heine himself

was dead. But his most important work[797] in verse was done quite in

this period,[798] and one of his most important works in connection

with, if not strictly within, our subject, the excellent Essay on

“Walther von der Vogelweide,” appeared as early as 1822. Uhland’s

critical dealings with northern poetic literature are of no

inconsiderable bulk,[799] and they are very important for the history of

literary taste. Not merely in time, but in character, they stand between

the earlier, most creditable and stimulating, but often insufficiently

informed, and still more often too discursive and popular handlings, of

Herder and even the Schlegels, and the modern method of pure philology,

from which all literary appreciation is too often deliberately left out.

Uhland combines real scholarship, for his time and means, with poetical

and critical appreciation in almost the exactly desirable blend. Would

there were more such!

[Sidenote: _Schubarth._]

The work of Schubarth, _Zur Beurtheilung Goethe’s_,[800] may be worth a

short notice as an early and by no means contemptible example of a kind

of book which has been very largely written during the nineteenth

century, but which we can only here take by sample. A contemporary

cannot often have been handled earlier on so great a scale: for there

are some nine hundred pages in the second edition, and the author makes

the widest possible casts round his subject. He is not in the least

satisfied with the consideration of particular works (which he gives

mainly in two batches, on the earlier and the later respectively), or on

his author’s general literary characteristics. He has long excursus on

the personages, especially Mephistopheles. He can never refuse himself

what he modestly calls a “glance” (_Hinblick_), but what is generally a

very durable and substantial stare, at things that occur in passing,—

some criticisms of A. W. Schlegel’s, the literary contrasts of

Christianity and Heathenism, Lessing and the Education of the World, the

great succession of German philosophers from Kant to Schelling, the

Historical Method, Shakespeare, Poetry and Criticism in our day, the

Nibelungen Lied, the Devil in the Middle Ages, the Moral and the Immoral

in Art and Poetry. In short, the book is a sort of _Quodlibeta_—a

treatise upon “Goethe and Things in General.” We have seen many like it

since: let them appear here by it their foreman.

[Sidenote: _Solger._]

Solger’s _Vorlesungen_[801] are an early and good example of the defect

of Æsthetic from the standpoint of this book. He often says true things;

but they are generally not the whole or final truth, and they are almost

always too abstract. Thus, for instance: “Oft verwechselt man das

Interessante mit dem Schönen.”[802] The truth of this is constantly

exemplified both in life and in criticism; but, laid down too

isolatedly, it blinks the question whether, in certain degree, matter,

and circumstance, the Interesting _is_ not the Beautiful: and it has an

obvious and possibly dangerous connection with the very important

critical question of the “Unity of Interest.” So, too, distinctions of

Heavenly and Earthly Beauty are full of snares: and the danger of

generalisation perhaps reaches its highest in the dictum, “In Epic and

Lyric, matter is the important thing: in the Drama, form and the pure

activity of fancy.” One might almost make out “twenty-nine distinct

damnations” involved in this, with hardly more than a thirtieth and

single way of salvation and escape!

[Sidenote: _Periodicals, Histories, &c._]

To complete the notice of this remarkable division, which has, by

authorities respectable and more than respectable, been pronounced to be

the greatest of all, and which is certainly most important, something

should be said of the critical publications which, in Germany as

elsewhere, but almost earlier there than anywhere, played so important a

part, and of the immense industry in literary history which came to

supply perhaps the greatest of critical needs. Of the Translations,

which some would rank with these, I shall say nothing more than that

they seem to me to have been a great misfortune for Germany—encouraging

the tendency of the nation to keep aloof from the pure literary integer

of the book-as-it-is; assimilating the literature of other nations

insensibly but unduly to German ideals; and so making even the general

judgment of authors untrustworthy and unsound.

The Periodicals of this time are gradually shaking off the disguises and

mannerisms which the _Spectator_ had imposed upon those of our last

period. The most important of them, after Lessing’s _Dramaturgie_, are

the _Frankfurter Gelehrten-Anzeigen_ of Merck, Herder, and Goethe

(1772); the _Teutsche Merkur_ of Wieland, next year; the Berlin

_Monatschrift_ (1783); the _Jena Allgemeine Literatur-zeitung_ (1785);

Schiller’s _Horen_ (1795), and _Musenalmanach_, next year; the

Schlegels’ _Athenæum_ (1798). Of literary historians from Bouterwek to

Menzel, Schlosser,[803] and others, the list is almost too long to

attempt.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CHANGE IN THE OTHER NATIONS.

The present chapter could hardly be omitted; but it must be almost

necessarily rather an apology for what does not appear than a

substantive presentation. Something has been said already[804] of the

state of Italian and of Spanish criticism during the eighteenth century.

Its lethargy was only quickened after (and even some time after) the

beginning of the nineteenth, by the spread of those very waves of

influence which have been described, and their origin and progress

traced, partly in the last Book, and partly in the three preceding

chapters of the present. Neither country contributed anything original

to the critical change—to the establishment of Romanticism—though both

had much to do with that establishment as furnishing those texts of past

creation which were, as we have seen, almost the most powerful, and

certainly the most beneficent, of all agencies in the revolution. None,

perhaps, did so much by furnishing further scenery and apparatus to the

new movement: though Byron, by adopting these, enhanced their influence

in this way, yet it had been exercised long before he wrote—before he

even existed—in England, from the time of the _Castle of Otranto_, in

Germany, from one somewhat, but not so very much, later. But all this

belongs to the far-off fringes of our subject, if even to them; and we

have only too little room for its central and substantive portions.

The critical awakening of more backward and outlying nations and

languages, such as Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, was in much the same

case; that of the Scandinavian countries was a little more advanced. The

closer relations in which Denmark at all times stood with Germany, and

those which Sweden maintained, not merely with Germany but with France,

must have kept them more to the front in these matters, while the double

influence was of course still more constantly, though not quite so

effectually, at work in Holland. Holberg and Tullin and Ewald, with

Baggesen a little later in Denmark, rather accompanied than followed the

reconstructive reformation of German literature; Kellgren, Leopold, and

Thorn conducted the attack and defence in Sweden a little later still;

and the literary decadence of Dutch was at last relieved, towards the

end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, by

Southey’s friend, Bilderdijk. In regard to all the languages referred to

in this paragraph, though not in regard to Italian and Spanish, I am in

the disability formerly acknowledged, as to one of them—Dutch. But I

cannot learn from any good authority that this disability is likely here

to be fatal, or even injurious. In the history of the individual

literatures their criticism is of course of great importance: but in the

history of the general subject it can have very little.[805]

INTERCHAPTER VIII.

(WITH AN EXCURSUS ON PERIODICAL CRITICISM.)

We here come to the point antipolar to that of the last volume, at

which[806] we ventured to give a sketch of the Classic or Neo-classic

creed. The challenge to array definitions of Classicism and Romanticism

in a tabular form has already[807] been respectfully declined: but that

this “declinature” comes neither from pusillanimity, nor from

complacency in purblindness, may be best proved by undertaking the much

more perilous adventure of an anti-creed to that formerly laid down.

Even there we had to interpose the caution that absolute subscription,

on the part of all the critics concerned, ought not to be thought of:

but here the very essence and quiddity of the situation is that no such

agreement is in any way possible. In fact, no single and tolerably

homogeneous document could possibly here be drawn up, for there would be

minority (and sometimes majority) counter-reports on every article. Even

those who resist the extremer developments take large licenses upon the

old classical position. You have your Jeffrey expressing admiration of a

_Pharonnida_ which would have seemed to Dennis a monstrous

stumbling-block, and to Johnson mere foolishness: while among the

extremists themselves, each man is a law unto himself. Still, it is

perhaps possible to draw up some articles of the Modern or Romantic

Criticism which was reached during this period, and we have already, in

the last two books, described at some length the process by which they

were reached. These articles will be best separated into two batches,

the first representing the creed of centre and extremes at once, the

second that of extremes (left or right) only: and it will be well to

mark the difference from the former statement by giving the articles

separately, and not arranging them in paragraphs.

The more catholic creed is very mainly of a negative and protesting

character, and its articles might run somewhat thus:—

All periods of literature are to be studied, and all have lessons for

the critic. “Gothic ignorance” is an ignorant absurdity.

One period of literature cannot prescribe to another. Each has its own

laws; and if any general laws are to be put above these, they must be

such as will embrace them.

Rules are not to be multiplied without necessity: and such as may be

admitted must rather be extracted from the practice of good poets and

prose-writers than imposed upon it.

“Unity” is not itself uniform, but will vary according to the kind, and

sometimes within the kind, itself.

The Kind itself is not to be too rigidly constituted: and subvarieties

in it may constantly arise.

Literature is to be judged “by the event”: the presence of the fig will

disprove the presence of the thistle.

The object of literature is Delight; its soul is Imagination; its body

is Style.

A man should like what he does like:[808] and his likings are facts in

criticism for him.

To which the extremer men would add these, or some of them, or something

like them:—

Nothing depends upon the subject; all upon the treatment of the subject.

It is not necessary that a good poet or prose writer should be a good

man: though it is a pity that he should not be. And Literature is not

subject to the laws of Morality, though it is to those of Manners.[809]

Good Sense is a good thing, but may be too much regarded: and Nonsense

is not necessarily a bad one.

The appeals of the arts are interchangeable: Poetry can do as much with

sound as Music, as much with colour as Painting, and perhaps more than

either with both.

The first requisite of the critic is that he should be capable of

receiving Impressions: the second that he should be able to express and

impart them.

There cannot be Monstrous Beauty: the Beauty itself justifies and

regularises.

Once more it has to be stipulated that these articles are not to be

regarded as definitely proposed ends and aims, which the critical

practice of the period set before itself, and by which it worked. They

are, for the most part, piece-meal results and up-shots of a long and

desultory campaign, often reached as it were incidentally, “windfalls of

the Muses,” kingdoms found while the finder is seeking his father’s (or

anybody’s) asses. If anything general is to be detected before and

beneath them, it is a sort of general feeling of irksomeness at the

restraints of Neo-classicism—a revolt against its perpetual restrictions

and taboos.

To recur once more to those egregious _juvenilia_ of Addison’s, which,

though not to be too much pressed as stigmata on his own memory, are a

useful caricature of Neo-classicism in regard to English, some English

lover of literature feels that there is much more in Chaucer than vulgar

jests, now not even fashionably vulgar, and in Spenser than tiresome

preaching. He looks about to support his feeling with reasons, and he

“finds salvation” in the Romantic sense, more or less fully, more or

less systematically, more or less universally. The ways and manners of

the finding are very much the same in all countries, and have been dealt

with in the first Book of this volume; the results of it, in critical

form, have been set forth in that just finished, but may deserve some

summary and _rationale_ here.

In the remarkable group of English critics whom we have called “the

companions” of Coleridge, and in Coleridge himself, the contemporary

quality, and in some cases the direct suggestion, of that great critic

appear unmistakably, while in at least most cases they are free from the

chaotic or paralytic incompleteness which he hardly ever, save in the

_Biographia_, shook off. They all show, as he does, though in varying

degrees, the revolt or reaction from the hidebound failure of the baser

kind of Neo-classic to _appreciate_—the effort really to taste, to

enjoy, and so to deliver that judgment which without enjoyment is always

inadequate. And it would be unjust to regard them as merely the sports

and waifs of an irresistibly advancing tide. There _is_ something of

this in them,—the worst of the something being the uncritical scorn with

which they sometimes regarded even the greatest of the departed or

departing school—the astonishing injustice of Coleridge himself to

Gibbon, and Johnson, and the Queen Anne men; of many of them to Pope; of

Hazlitt even to Dryden. But they were not only carried, they swam,—swam

strongly and steadily and skilfully for the land that was ahead. Their

appreciation is not mere matter of fashion; it is genuine. They are

honestly appetent of the milk and honey of the newly opened land of

English literature for themselves, and generously eager to impart of it,

and of the taste for it, to others.

But we must not—for these merits, or even for what some may think the

still greater one of providing, for almost the first time in any

literature, a great bulk of matter which is at once valuable criticism

and delightful literature itself—make a refusal of our own critical duty

as to their shortcomings, which were neither few nor inconsiderable, and

which led directly to the sad and singular decadence of English

criticism in the middle third of the century. The first and the greatest

of these—let us fling it frankly and fairly to any partisan of the older

critical dispensation who “expects his evening prey” as our history

draws towards its close—was, or at any rate was a result of, the very

lawlessness and rulelessness by which they had effected their and our

emancipation. True, many of the rules that they threw off were bad and

irrational, most perhaps were inadequate, irrelevant, requiring to be

applied with all sorts of provisos and easements. But they had at any

rate kept criticism methodical, and tolerably certain in its utterances.

There had been a Creed; there had been not the slightest difficulty in

giving reasons, though they might be doubtful ones, for a faith which,

if incomplete and not really catholic, was at any rate formally

constituted. With the new men it was different. Coleridge indeed boasted

mediate and even higher rules and principles behind his individual

judgments. But with the rest it was rather a case of sheer private

judgment, of “meeting by yourself in your own house.”

Another drawback, dangerous always but intensified in danger by its

connection with the former, is that, while most of them were much less

intimately acquainted with the classics than the critics of former

generations had been, this deficiency was not generally compensated by

any of that extensive knowledge of _modern_ literature which the

ruleless or scantily ruled system of criticism imperatively requires.

Nay, they were all, including even Coleridge himself and De Quincey (the

two most learned, not only of these but of all English critics), very

imperfectly acquainted with _French_ literature—which, as a whole, is

the best suited to qualify the study of our own, correct it, and

preserve it from flaws and corruptions. Leigh Hunt knew little but

Italian; and in Italian knew best the things that are of least real

importance for the English student. As for Lamb, he was more than a fair

Latin scholar; but he seems to have known very little Greek, and not to

have had wide reading in the classics, either Greek or Latin, while he

betrays hardly the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, any foreign

modern literature whatever. Hazlitt’s case is worse still, for he

evidently knew very little indeed, either of the classics or of foreign

modern literature, except a few philosophic writers, here of next to no

use. In fact, one cannot help wondering how, knowing so little, he came

to judge so well—till the wonder nearly disappears, as we see how much

better he would have judged if he had known more. Wilson (to look

forward a little as we have done with De Quincey) had some classics: and

Lockhart had not only classics, but German and Spanish. But one suspects

the former to have known next to nothing of modern literature: and the

latter did not use critically that which he knew. Even as regards

English itself the knowledge of all these critics was very gappy and

scrappy. They did not, with all their advantages of time, know anything

like so much of early English literature (even putting Anglo-Saxon out

of the question) as Gray had known nearly a hundred years earlier, and

Mitford in their own early days.

Thus, while they had deliberately, and in the main wisely, discarded the

rules which at least were supposed deductively to govern _all_

literature, they had not furnished themselves with that comparative

knowledge of _different_ literatures, or at the very least of all the

different periods of one literature, which assists literary induction,

and to some extent supplies the place of the older Rules themselves.

They were therefore driven to judge by the inner light alone; and as,

fortunately, that inner light, in at least some of them, burnt with the

clearest and brightest flame, they judged very well by it. But their

system was a dangerous one when it came to be applied, as it inevitably

had to be applied, in the majority of cases, when their own torches went

out, by the aid of smoky farthing rush-lights in blurred horn lanterns.

Yet, allowing for these drawbacks of commission and of example in the

most illiberally liberal manner, there will yet remain to their credit

such a sum as hardly any other group[810] in any country—as none in ours

certainly—can claim. Here at last, and here almost for the first time,

appears that body of pure critical appreciation of the actual work of

literature for which we have been waiting so long, which we have missed

so sorely in ancient times, and which, in the earlier modern, has been

given to us stinted and, what is worse, adulterated, by arbitrary

restrictions and preoccupations. In Coleridge, in Hazlitt, in Lamb, in

Leigh Hunt even, to name no others, we have real “judging of authors,”

not—or at any rate not mainly—discussion of kinds, and attempts to lay

down principles. They are judges, not jurists, “lawmen,” not lawmongers

and potterers with codes. Appreciation and enjoyment, with their, in

this case necessary, consequences, the communication of enjoyment and

appreciation—these are the chief and principal things with them, and

these they never fail to provide.

The same merits and drawbacks, differently adjusted and conditioned,

appear in the French division of the subject. Perhaps there is nothing,

even in Sainte-Beuve, of the same consummate merit, from the point of

view of appreciation, as the best things of Hazlitt and Lamb: and I do

not think there are any critical generalities, either in Sainte-Beuve or

in any other, that quite approach the best things of Coleridge. The

length and the bitterness of the Classic-Romantic quarrel threw some

French critics into a mood of partisanship too extreme to be quite

judicial: but on the other hand it gave us that admirably trenchant

profession and confession of the faith that “nothing depends on the

subject” which we have dealt with from Victor Hugo, and other things

from other men. And, moreover, the interest excited by this quarrel,

coming to reinforce the general French spirit of system, order, and

artistic adequacy, brought about that high general level in the new

appreciative criticism which attracted the admiration of Mr Arnold and

others, and which certainly for a time (_cir._ 1830-1860) was much above

the level of English. Numerous as are the writers whom I have discussed

in the chapter on this subject, I feel half ashamed of not having

included more, and could easily do so. But it is almost enough to say

that, in accordance with that gregarious or scholastic spirit which has

always characterised Frenchmen, the merits which have been so fully

displayed in Sainte-Beuve are visible more or less in almost all his

fellows.

There is no doubt that these merits were to some extent (as Sainte-Beuve

himself allowed with equal judgment and generosity) transmitted or

inherited from the Empire critics, especially Chateaubriand and, in a

different way and lower sense, Villemain: while the whole secret of the

method had been revealed, or concealed, in and by the “fuliginous

flashes” of Diderot long before. But this sudden and enormous

development of it is still rather wonderful. It cannot be put down

merely to Sainte-Beuve, though Sainte-Beuve was its most eminent

representative; for, as we have seen, he did not himself reach his

perfection at once, or for a very long time, and critical results as

good as, or better than, his own _at the time_ had been produced by

others earlier. It was a case of a plenteous and great vintage, with one

growth improving beyond the rest. To this day it is impossible to read

over again, well as one may have known it, any of the better critical

work of France in this period without astonishment at its varied and yet

even excellence. But, as has just been said, it is not always, even in

its highest examples, of the _very_ highest: and perhaps at no time is

what we have so often called “grasp” a characteristic of it. It would be

absurd to call it superficial: yet, if it has a tendency towards

something not of the best, that tendency is towards superficiality.

Further, the French, though largely influenced by foreign nations and

literatures at this period, hardly shine so much as some others do in

criticism of those literatures. But, in reference to their own, they

exemplify the new process of “judging by the result,” and setting forth

that result, with attractiveness rivalled by hardly any, and with

facility and craftsmanship rivalled perhaps by none. From the elaborate

process of Sainte-Beuve to the impressionism of Gautier, and from the

strong meat and drink of Nisard to the froth of Janin, whatever is

provided is provided so as to give the user and consumer the least

fatigue and the most delectation. The severer critics are not pedantic,

and the lighter ones are seldom merely frivolous or horse-playful.

Occasionally, as in Nisard’s case again, there is a solidly constructed,

if not quite a solidly based, system: occasionally, as with Planche,

there are serious, if disputable, philosophical starting-points. In

Sainte-Beuve himself there is perhaps the greatest and most orderly

accumulation of positive knowledge, never of the “marine store” kind,

that any critic has brought together. But these dignified things never

take leave of the Graces: and even the lightest armed of the army—even

Janin and those about Janin—seldom write with the appalling absence of

knowledge and of method to which we are only too well accustomed in the

critics of some other countries.

The part played by Germany in this process was, of course, of the utmost

importance, and it is by no means out of a pusillanimous desire to

disarm the indignation or the contempt invited by some things already

written that I repeat and emphasise this acknowledgment. Germans (taking

their Swiss brethren with them) were among the very first to move the

stagnant waters. They were among the most—they _were_ the most—

industrious engineers in continuing the process—in clearing out the

water-courses and turning the new streams into them. It is impossible to

exaggerate their merits in putting at the service of criticism the

massive and acute intellect of Lessing, to substitute a new Preceptism

for the old: the wide range and towering literary faculty of Goethe, to

extend and popularise the new methods: the attractive and contagious

alacrity of the Schlegels in overrunning the provinces and the empires

of literature. But in the highest and purest work of criticism, as we

here define it, even these their greatest are sometimes strangely

wanting: and others are wanting less strangely but more disastrously. As

a rule, the German is far _too_ scientific (the epithet of praise

usually selected for him and by him) in his criticism. He has curiosity,

but not passionate or intimate enjoyment; intelligence, but not

enthusiasm; industry, but little (and hardly at all subtle) intuition.

He only gets out of the pupillary state—if he ever does so—to get into

the pedagogic. And it is difficult to say which of these is the more

unfavourable to true critical accomplishment.

We may, however, be justly asked, in this place or in that, to face that

view of German criticism which Carlyle was the first to put in England

by a famous (and indeed very admirable) “State of German

Literature,”[811] and which, with some modifications, was maintained and

enforced later by Mr Arnold, who did not like Carlyle. The eulogium is

well known, and it is a magnificent one. The Germans are [1827]

distinctly and considerably in advance of other nations in Criticism.

They have “raised it to a higher power,” in fact: though he does not, I

think, use the phrase. They neither, in the old way, discuss diction,

figures, logical value, &c., nor, as is usual with the best of our own

critics at present, discover and debate the particular nature of the

poet from his poetry: but, subordinating these two, attack the essence

and peculiar life of the poetry itself. “How did Shakespeare organise

his dramas?” they ask. “What unmixed reality is bodied forth in them?”

&c. Then, too, how do they proceed? Not by gorgeous mystic

phraseology[812] and vague declamation? No: by “rigorous scientific

inquiry,” of which much is said, the illustration and the enforcement at

once being drawn from Schiller on “Æsthetic Education,” and Fichte on

the “Nature of the Scholar.”[813]

This abstract is designedly cut short, not out of unfairness, but

because the original is known to many and accessible easily to all. It

is a high encomium: and even the contents of this book will show that it

is, beyond controversy, in part at least a deserved one. From Lessing

onwards there can be no question of the intent of the Germans to bring

about a complete critical Reformation: nor can it be denied that, after

a time, and to no small extent in consequence of their efforts,

something like a complete critical Reformation was brought about. But

whether there is not an indispensable nexus wanting somewhere—whether

the general improvement of actual criticism in Germany and elsewhere,

though not perhaps more in Germany than elsewhere, is a consequence of

the endeavour to consider the essence of Poetry and frame theories of

it—that is the question. It would be fatuous to say that I have shown,

but I have at least endeavoured to show, some cause against the

affirmative answer. In particular, I should like to re-invite the

reader’s attention to that _aporia_ which has been stated earlier—

whether the famous criticism of _Hamlet_ in _Wilhelm Meister_ (to which

Carlyle, of course, appeals here) might not have been written without

any knowledge of the original, of its language, and of its form—in

short, on a German prose translation of Shakespeare? If anybody is bold

enough to say “Yes: and so much the better,” well and good. But in that

case his idea of the essence of poetry and mine are so different that I

must necessarily seem a Completed Bungler to him, and that he must

necessarily seem to me (let us say) a Person to be Sincerely

Commiserated.

In actual “judging of authors” I have endeavoured to collect some facts

showing that the Germans did not attain to any remarkable

proficiency[814] by the application of their new systems of Æsthetic—in

regard to which, by the way, no two authorities agreed among them, and

of which, as a whole, some great authorities among them used language

not much more respectful than my own. And so, far from this “scientific”

criticism having any effect in the _production_ of great poetry or of

great literature, it is a notorious fact that since Heine—who was a

hopeless rebel to the whole system—Germany has produced no great poet,

and very few great men of pure letters. While other countries, besides

producing in their unscientific way critics at least not less great (I

should of course myself say, much greater) than Germany’s own, have

maintained the production of creative literature for the best part of a

century—for all but the whole of it.

And I have also endeavoured—if only by such hints and glances and

instances as are allowable on the plan of this book—to show _why_ the

Germans seem to me to have failed, if not exactly where they seemed to

Carlyle to have succeeded, yet in the same neighbourhood—how they have

generally either flown too high or grubbed too low, and so have failed

to gather the flowers and garner the fruit of the field of literature.

Very likely these opinions are quite unjust, but at any rate they are

not founded on ignorance; and he who holds them is perfectly ready to

fight for them at any time with the due arms and in the proper lists.

If, more shortly and in slightly altered form, I may once more put

my objection to German criticism, I can, as it happens, do so by

simply inserting a “not” in a German boast on this very subject.

Professor Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the

_Alumni-Register_[815] of that Institution, quotes these remarkable

words from Professor Lemcke of Marburg: “Let us for once lay aside

our proverbial modesty and openly declare that it is not the

affinity of race, nor the indications in his poetry of a German

spirit, which have brought us so close to Shakespeare, but it is

that God-given power, vouchsafed to us Germans before all other

nations, by the grace of which we are enabled to recognise true

genius, of whatever nation, better than other nations, ofttimes

better than its own, and better to enjoy and appreciate its gifts.”

Far be it from me to anticipate the obvious comments of different

kinds upon this utterance of Germanism _in cuerpo_, and with the

encumbrances of modesty laid aside. I shall only observe that it is

precisely this “God-given power” of recognition or appreciation

which German criticism seems to me to lack. It has the best

intentions; it takes the most enormous trouble; it accumulates the

most extensive and sometimes not the least valuable material and

plant for appreciation. But, except in the case of its very greatest

exponents, it does not seem to me often to _appreciate_.

But—French, or German, or English, with whatever diversity of immediate

aim, exact starting-point, felicity of method, and perfection of result—

all the dominant and representative criticism of this time tends in the

direction and obeys the impulse of some form or other of that general

creed which we have endeavoured to sketch earlier in this Interchapter,

and so contributes to the general progress (straight or circular, who

shall say?) of which this Book is the history. And when, rather, as

usual, by the influence of creative than of critical literature, and by

that of Scott and Byron above all, the same purpose was inspired in yet

other countries, the results were again the same. The dislike of Rule;

the almost instinctive falling back upon mediæval literature as an

alterative from classical and (recent) modern; the blending of the Arts;

the cultivation of colour- and sound-variety in poetry; the variegation

and rhythmical elaboration of prose,—in all these ways, by all these

agencies, literary Criticism as well as literary practice was

reconstructed. And the end is not even yet.

Some more general remarks on the sub-period must be postponed to the

several parts of the Conclusion. But there is one phenomenon which,

first appearing towards the end of the last volume, and much more

noticeable in the last Book, now becomes what the Germans call

_hervorragend_, persistently and almost aggressively prominent. And on

this we must say something.

[816]To enter into all the questions connected with the Periodical here,

would be obviously impossible. That it has multiplied criticism itself

is a truism; that it has necessarily multiplied bad criticism is

maintainable; the question is whether it has actually multiplied good. I

think it has. It is very difficult to conceive of any other system under

which a man like Sainte-Beuve—not of means, and not well adapted to any

profession—could have given his life practically to the service of our

Muse as he actually did. It is difficult to imagine any other which

would have equally well suited a man like Mr Arnold, with abundant, and

fairly harassing, avocations on the one hand, and with apparently no

great inclination to write elaborate books on the other. Many officials,

professional men, persons “avocated” (in the real sense) from criticism

by this or that vocation, have been enabled by the system to give us

things sometimes precious, and probably in most times not likely to have

been given at all under the book-and-pamphlet dispensation. Above all,

perhaps, the excuse of the surplusage which beset the regular treatise

has disappeared, while the blind (or too well-seeing) editor, with his

abhorred shears, is apt to lop excrescences off if they attempt to

appear.[817] Although there certainly has been more bad criticism

written in the nineteenth century than in any previous one,—probably

more than in all previous centuries put together,—it is quite certain

that no other period can show so much that is good. And the change which

has resulted in it was needed. The early _Bibliothecæ_ of the late

seventeenth century wanted pliancy, variety, combination of industrial

power: the later _Reviews_ were far too apt to be mere booksellers’

instruments, while their wretched pay kept many of the best hands from

them, and kept those who were driven to them in undue dependence. And

further, the increasing supply of actual literature _required_ more

criticism than could easily be had under the old system of few

periodicals, eked out by independent treatises and pamphlets.

These are not unimportant considerations, but they lie a little outside

of—or only touch—the question of the altered quality and increased or

decreased goodness of criticism as a whole and in itself. And when we

come to discuss this, the question assumes rather a different aspect.

The better pay, the increased repute, the greater independence, might be

thought likely to attract, and did attract, a better class of writers to

the work: but whether this better class was always better fitted for the

particular task itself one may sometimes doubt. And there can be no

doubt at all that the same attractions must necessarily tempt, and that

the increased demand must almost force, a very much larger supply of

inferior talent to the said task. Again, this increased demand, if not

for critics, for somebody who would undertake to criticise (which is not

quite the same thing), coincided with a gradual removal of the not very

severe requisitions of competence which had up to this time been imposed

upon the aspirant. The Mr Bludyer of the eighteenth century was at least

supposed to know his Aristotle and his Longinus, his Horace and his

Quintilian, his Boileau and his Le Bossu, his Dryden and his Addison. In

the majority of cases he did know them—after a fashion—though he

constantly misinterpreted the best of them and put his faith chiefly in

the worst. But the Mr Bludyer of the nineteenth has not been supposed to

know anything at all of the history and theory of his art. Now, when you

at once set up a Liberty Hall, and dispense good things therein freely

to all comers, your Liberty Hall is too likely before long to become a

Temple of Misrule.

As the older arrangements went to make the critic’s trade not merely

homely and slighted, but cramped by too many, too strict, and too little

comprehended rules and formulas, so the new tended rather to make it a

paradise of the ignoramus with a touch of impudence. It has never

perhaps been quite sufficiently comprehended, by what may be called the

laity, that though, in a sense, Blake was perfectly right in saying that

every man is a judge of art who is not connoisseured out of his senses,

yet it does not quite follow that every man, without training and

without reading, is qualified to _deliver judgment_, from the actual

bench, on so complicated and treacherous a work of art as a book. You

can take in at least great part of the beauty of a picture at the first

glance; and, no matter what the subject may be, many of the details,

with all the colour and some of the drawing and composition, require

neither previous education nor prolonged and attentive study, though

study and attention will no doubt greatly improve the comprehension and

enjoyment of them. In the case of a book it is very different. The most

rapid and industrious reader[818] will require some minutes—it may even

be some hours—to put himself in a position to deliver any trustworthy

judgment on it at all: and he must be an exceedingly well-informed one

who is at home with every subject treated in every volume that he has to

review. You have to find out what it is that the author has endeavoured

to do, and then—the most impossible of tasks to some critics, it would

seem—to consider whether he has done it, and not whether he has or has

not done something else which you wanted him to do. You have to guard

against prejudices innumerable, subtle, Hydra-headed,—prejudices

personal and political, prejudices social and religious, prejudices of

style and of temperament, prejudices arising from school, university,

country, almost every conceivable predicament of man. You must be able

first to grasp, then to take off a total impression, then to produce

that impression in a form suitable to the conveyance of it to the

public. One would not perhaps be quite prepared to assert that every one

of the hundreds and thousands who have, under the new dispensation,

undertaken the office of a critic, has been divinely endowed with these

gifts before undertaking that office, or that all of them, even if they

took the trouble to acquire what may be acquired, were likely to

succeed. There remains, of course, the comfortable doctrine that

“practice makes perfect”: or, as one of the most agreeable and acute of

modern political satirists, himself an admirable critic, has ironically

put it—

“That by much engine-driving at intricate junctions

One learns to drive engines along with the best.”

And if this seem small comfort to the suffering author, who thinks that

he has had too great a share of the bad criticism and too little of the

good—if it make him think of that inspiriting substitute in the

Secularist hymn for our old-fashioned Glorias—

“The social system keep in view!

Good night! dear friends, good night!”—

there are two other consolations which may suit him according to his

temperament. The one is that under any other system his book would very

probably have received no notice at all, which would in some cases (not

in all) annoy him worse than blame. If he be of another sort, he may

perhaps anticipate the all-healing question to any _alma_ passably

_sdegnosa_, “Would you rather _not_ have written so, and be praised?”

One very necessary branch of the new criticism, as regarded poetry, the

average critic, whether in or out of periodicals, was sadly slow to

learn—indeed for the most part he recalcitrated furiously against

learning it. This was the proper appreciation of the new effects in

verbal painting and verbal music. There had always, of course, been much

of this in the great old masters: but there had not been _so_ much of

it, and the critic had been wont to treat it alternately in a peddling

and in a high-sniffing fashion.[819] On the musical side especially,

theory had chiefly confined itself to the remarks on “suiting the sound

to the sense,” in a comparatively infantine fashion—putting plenty of

_ss_'s into a line about a snake or a goose, and plenty of _r_'s into a

line about a dog; giving trisyllabic feet in a line that meant swift

movement, and clogging it with consonants when effort or tardiness came

in. The new poets—Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson,—in increasing degree,

changed this simple and rudimentary proceeding into a complicated

science of word-illumination and sound-accompaniment, which the new

critics perhaps could not see or hear, and at which they were by turns

loftily contemptuous and furiously angry. That there was some genuine

inability in the matter may appear from looking back to Johnson’s

well-known and very interesting surprise at Pope’s fondness for his

couplet—

“Lo! where Mœotis sleeps, and hardly flows

The freezing Tanais, through a waste of snows.”

This couplet _is_ beautiful, though the _homœoteleuton_ of “Mœot_is_”

and “Tana_is_” is a slight blemish on it. But its beauty arises from

such subtle things as the contrast of the metrical rapidity of “Tănăĭs”

and the sluggish progression of its waters, and from the extremely

artful disposition and variation of the vowel notes _o_, _a_, _ee_.

Even this is not _very_ complicated: and it occurs with Pope and his

clan once in a thousand or ten thousand lines. _The Ancient Mariner_ and

_Kubla Khan_ are simply compact of the colouring symphonies of sound:

and the palette becomes always more intricate, the tone-schemes more

various and more artful, as you journey from the _Eve of St Agnes_ to

the _Palace of Art_, and from the _Dream of Fair Women_ to _Rose Mary_.

In the _Palace_ especially[820] the series of descriptions of the

pictures pushes both these applications of the two sister arts towards—

almost to—the limits of the possible. Rossetti alone has since surpassed

them. Take, for instance, the cunning manipulation of the quatrain

stanza[821] itself to begin with; the figures and colour of the actual

designs; and the sound-accompaniment, to suit these figures and colours,

in such a stanza as—

“One seemed all dark and red: a tract of sand,

And some one pacing there alone,

Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,

Lit with a low large moon.”[822]

Now the “values” of this are not really difficult to make out: they

can be thoroughly mastered for himself, without book or teacher, by an

intelligent boy of sixteen or seventeen, who, having a taste for

poetry, has read some—and who happens to have been born within the

nineteenth century. But they do need intelligent, sympathetic, and to

a certain extent submissive, co-operation on the part of the person

who is to enjoy them. The adjustment of the stanza, with its

successive lines of varying capacity and cadence; the fitness of those

lines themselves to receive and express more or less detailed images,

and add, as it were, not merely stroke after stroke, but plan after

plan, to the picture; the monosyllables; the alliteration of the last

line, and the crowning effect whereby the picture is lightened after

being displayed in shadow; the trisyllabic foot thrown in by

“glimmering,” whether you take it in the last or the last but one of

the third verse; the atmosphere-accompaniment,—all these things might

well be almost invisible and inaudible to a critic brought up on

eighteenth-century principles. And if he saw or heard them at all,

they might affect him with that singular impatience and disgust at

refinement and exquisiteness in pleasure which was affected by ancient

philosophers, and which seems to be really genuine in many excellent

Englishmen whom the Gods have not made in the very least

philosophical. I have never myself understood why it is godliness to

gulp and sin to savour; why, if a pleasure be harmless in itself, it

becomes harmful in being whetted, and varied, and enhanced by every

possible innocent agency. But there are doubtless some people who

think it a “poisoning of the dart too apt before to kill.” And there

are, I strongly suspect, a good many more whose senses are too blunt

to taste or feel the refinements, and who receive the attentions of

the poetic fairies with as little appreciation, though usually with by

no means as much good-humour, as Bottom showed to those of Titania and

her meyny.

This, however, is undoubtedly something of a digression, perhaps

something too much of it. But it illustrates the perils to which the new

reviewers were exposed, and at the same time (which is the excuse for

the divagation) the constant opportunity of salvation which reviewing

provides.

[Sidenote: _Saws and instances._]

Nor need much be said of the general quality of the articles in these

famous collections. Persons of enterprise have sometimes gone

“exploring,” like Mrs Elton (on or off their donkeys, and with or

without their little baskets), in this direction, and have come back

saying, more or less wisely, that the land is barren. Some of the more

practical of them have brought back specimens of its flora and fauna,

its soil and its rocks.[823] It is perhaps more profitable to digest

some of the general considerations which have already been stated or

indicated than to dwell on particulars. Not that these particulars are

useless or always uninteresting. It is good to know that _The Monthly

Review_, in an article which could not be called unfriendly, thought

_The Ancient Mariner_ “a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and

incoherence” [the whole thing is as clear to _us_ as a proposition in

Euclid], with “poetic touches of an exquisite kind.” It is very

interesting, and not at all surprising (especially when we remember

Voltaire) to find the _Edinburgh_, the oracle of political Whiggery,

enunciating the doctrine of Poetical Divine Right in its article on

_Thalaba_.[824] It is interesting, again, and almost more instructive,

to find the _Quarterly_, in the article which did _not_ kill John Keats,

finding fault with that poet and his master Leigh Hunt, not (as might

have been done plausibly enough) for a flaccid _mollities_, for the

_delumbe_ and the _in labris natantia_,[825] but, of all things, for

“ruggedness.” If we have pursued our critical studies aright, we know

the symptoms, we know the diseases. They are all varieties of

_Kainophobia_,—the horror and the misunderstanding of the unaccustomed.

[Sidenote: _Their justification, such as it is._]

But though it is not original, it is very far from superfluous to point

out that these poor old unjust judges, these Doubters and Bloodmen of

the poetic Mansoul at this crisis of its history, were by no means

without their excuses. The original form of _The Ancient Mariner_ is

only less inferior to the later form which most people know now than

Tennyson’s Poems[826] as they appear in the editions since 1842 are

superior to themselves as they appeared to risk the knout of Wilson and

the thumbikins of Lockhart. Southey’s unrhymed _vers libres_ in

_Thalaba_ are, when all is said and done, a mistake: and their

arrangement is sometimes as unmusical as the least successful parts of

Mr Arnold’s followings of them. Exquisite as are the beauties,

intoxicating as is the atmosphere, of _Endymion_, no one nowadays could

pronounce it free from faults of taste of more kinds than one, or deny

that as, after all, it holds itself out to be a story, the demand for

some sort of intelligible narrative procession is not so irrelevant as

when it is put to a lyric, in even the widest sense of that word. And

the critics were, in every one of these cases, justified of their

victims. Coleridge and Tennyson altered into perfection the poems which

had been so imperfect. Southey added rhyme and better rhythm in

_Kehama_; Keats grew from the incoherence of _Endymion_, and its

uncertain taste, to the perfection of _Lamia_ and the great _Odes_ and

the _Eves_ of St Agnes and St Mark. “They also serve, who only stand

and—_whip_.” But it is better to have a soul above mere whipping.

BOOK IX

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

“_En critique littéraire, les œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur

beauté et leur perfection._”—ÉMILE MONTÉGUT.

“_Der Teufel hole alle Theorien!_”—GRILLPARZER.

CHAPTER I.

THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.

“ORDONNANCE” OF THIS CHAPTER—PHILARÈTE CHASLES—BARBEY D’AURÉVILLY—ON

HUGO—ON OTHERS—STRONG REDEEMING POINTS IN HIM—DOUDAN—INTEREST OF HIS

GENERAL ATTITUDE, AND PARTICULAR UTTERANCES—RENAN—TAINE—HIS “CULPA”—

HIS MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WORK—HIS ‘HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE

ANGLAISE’—ITS SHORTCOMINGS—INSTANCES OF THEM—MONTÉGUT: HIS

PECULIARITIES—DELICACY AND RANGE OF HIS WORK—SCHERER: PECULIAR

“MORAL” CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—ITS CONSEQUENT LIMITATIONS—THE

SOLID MERITS ACCOMPANYING THEM—SAINTE-BEUVE + GAUTIER—BANVILLE—

SAINT-VICTOR—BAUDELAIRE—CRÉPET’S ‘LES POÈTES FRANÇAIS’—FLAUBERT: THE

“SINGLE WORD”—“NATURALISM”—ZOLA—‘LE ROMAN EXPÉRIMENTAL’—EXAMPLES OF

HIS CRITICISM—THE REASONS OF HIS CRITICAL INCOMPETENCY—“LES DEUX

GONCOURT”—“SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM”: HENNEQUIN—“COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE”: TEXTE—ACADEMIC CRITICISM: GASTON PARIS—CARO,

TAILLANDIER, ETC.—THE “LIGHT HORSEMEN”: JANIN—PONTMARTIN—VEUILLOT—

NOT SO BLACK AS, ETC.—THE PRESENT.

[Sidenote: Ordonnance _of this chapter_.]

It may be barely worth while to repeat the caution given above—that

“successors” in the title of this chapter is not to be taken too

literally; though, in fact, “Beware of the _Letter_” would be the best

possible continuous heading for every page of every History of

Literature or of Criticism. Construed, however, with some elasticity,

the term has more than enough truth in it. Some of Sainte-Beuve’s

elders, most of his contemporaries, practically all his juniors, felt

the influence of the flood of criticism that welled, gently but

irresistibly, from the fountainheads of the _Causeries_ and their

companion- or forerunner-volumes. Indeed, Taine—the most influential

critic purely of the second half of the century in France—is only

Sainte-Beuve methodised and formulated. Before him, we shall deal with

three interesting individualities belonging to each of the groups just

indicated. Then a sufficiently natural grouping will give us a notable

quartette in Renan, Taine himself, Montégut, and Scherer. We may then

diverge to another group, who represent the influence of Sainte-Beuve

very strongly blended with that of Gautier, the most distinguished of

these being Saint-Victor, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. Then we may take the

“Naturalists”; then two notable theorists who pushed Taine’s own theory

further, one in a less, the other in a more fruitful direction; then a

fresh batch of critics of the generally academic or specially erudite

kind. After which we may cast back to a kind of “Cossack” division—

écheloned over the century,—and finish with at least a salute to certain

famous living representatives of French criticism, of whom it is not,

according to our plan, lawful to speak further.

The trio first referred to were more or less contemporaries, and present

various tendencies of literature and criticism in the nineteenth century

strikingly enough. Two of them, Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly and Victor

Euphémion Philarète Chasles, were men of letters by profession, and in

constant practice and publicity, for the greater part of the period: the

third, Ximénès Doudan, published hardly anything in his lifetime, and

was suddenly revealed, after his death and within the last quarter of

the century, as one of those observers of the λάθε βίωσας who tend to

become rarer and rarer in modern life.

[Sidenote: _Philarète Chasles._]

The eldest of the three, Philarète Chasles,[827] was at an early period

of his life a refugee in England for political reasons, and acquired

there a knowledge of our literature and institutions which stood him in

good stead for literary purposes ever afterwards. He was, however, at

least as well acquainted with the literature of his own country, and in

the summer of 1828 he divided the Academy’s prize, for a study of French

literature in the sixteenth century, with an Essay[828] which is still

worth studying, not merely as a foil to Sainte-Beuve’s famous and

epoch-making book, but in itself. Some hold that, in one piece or

another of a man’s early work, his whole literary development is, so to

say, _acorned_; there is certainly something of the phenomenon in this

tractate of Chasles. It has plenty of knowledge; it is well written; it

abounds in intelligent _aperçus_; and it inclines (if with a limitation

to be stated immediately) in the Romantic direction not obscurely, in

the catholic, comparative, historical direction beyond all question. But

there is a certain deficiency in grasp; the style, though often

brilliant and forcible in a way, too seldom concentrates itself to light

up, or to blast home, an important proposition; and in the principles

there is a certain transaction and trimming to catch the favour of the

judges. These merits and these defects alike continued to mark Chasles'

work for the fifty years during which he unweariedly performed it: but

the defects, if they did not exactly get the upper hand, made him more

of a journalist than of a representative of literature. He was useful

and important to his contemporaries, especially as a populariser of that

English literature which was needed as an alterative by French, at least

as much as French was by English. But even some special interest[829]

cannot make me rank him very high as a critic.

[Sidenote: _Barbey d’Aurévilly._]

If Chasles gave some occasion to those who charged him with being a

“Swiss of Letters,” a journalist ready to do any journey-work—this was

certainly not the case with Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the most

considerable eccentrics of recent literature. A dandy and an apostle of

Dandyism, a practitioner of the most “precious” style, a transgressor as

to forbidden subjects, and at the same time one of the most formidable

of those free lances of Catholicism of whom Ourliac, Pontmartin, and

Veuillot are the chief others in his time and country, Barbey

d’Aurévilly did a good deal to invite the title of charlatan, which was

freely bestowed on him by his numerous and recklessly provoked enemies.

But I do not think he quite deserved it at any time: and in a very large

part of his extensive work[830] he did not deserve it at all. Nor are

many people likely to follow me in reading this without acknowledging

him as a chief example of that steady improvement in critical power with

age, which has been so often noted. He never, indeed, became a good

critic _sans phrase_—that is to say, a trustworthy one. In his country

the danger-flag is constantly flying; or, rather, there are all sorts of

danger-flags, some of which even the tolerably wary may not always

recognise as such.

[Sidenote: _On Hugo._]

Not the most difficult case is that of the attacks on Hugo, which

provoked the poet to some of his most undignified Billingsgate in reply.

It may seem indeed odd that a person who, though with a difference, was

himself a _romantique enragé_—a man who calls Villemain _un eunuque

littéraire opéré par le goût_—should dislike Hugo. But, first of all,

there is the religious and political grudge against Hugo as a deserter:

and Barbey never forgets his grudges, though he deplores the effect of

other grudges on Chasles. And, secondly, one begins to wonder whether,

in the soul of his soul, he cared much for poetry. One of his epigrams

on Hugo himself,[831] clever as it is, gives more than a hint of this.

The poet is _un puits artésien de poésie—intarissable, mais de la même

eau_. This is to a very great extent true; but who ever quarrelled with

a fountain of living water because it is a fountain of living water, and

does not, like an artificial one on a holiday, alternately play milk,

and milk-punch, and raspberry vinegar? Certainly no one who had ever

thoroughly realised what the Water of Poetry—the Water of Life for the

soul—is. So, too, no one, whatever his political and religious views,

who can taste this Water of Life, could possibly dismiss the

_Contemplations_ as _un livre accablant, un livre qui doit descendre

vite dans l’oubli des hommes_. And his distaste leads him into

puerilities and almost stupidities of verbal criticism, such as the

question, when Hugo has written, “O chiens! qu’avez vous donc dans les

dents? C’est son nom.” “Comment s’y est on pris pour l’y faire entrer?”

[Sidenote: _On others._]

But his dislike for Hugo does not, in the least, conciliate him to, for

instance, Mérimée—the same prejudices working in a different way, and

summoning others to their aid. This exquisite master of style and irony,

this ice-covered volcano, is at one time[832] _un morceau de bois_ (I

wish some one would show me the Broceliande where such wood grows!), at

another a “wading bird” (_échassier_) who occasionally fishes up a

_Carmen_! (“O lead us to those ponds where _Carmens_ swarm!”) A writer

who is at least as different from Mérimée as from Hugo, George Sand, is

_le plus grand préjugé contemporain_ (another example of Barbey’s

successes, at least in epigram) _la grande routine dans l’admiration de

ce siècle_, nay, actually _commune_—which even those who have no mania

for the lady or her work may think extravagant.[833] One stares as one

reads that Southey’s _Nelson_ is _bêtement raconté_, till one remembers

Barbey’s intense, flaming, roaring Byronism, or, perhaps, till one reads

the rather tell-tale statement that “stern” [Sterne] _veut dire sérieux

en Anglais_, which certainly does not argue a nice acquaintance with the

_nuances_ of the English language. As for the other statement, that

“Johnson, l’affreux docteur Johnson, l’hippopotame de la lourde critique

Anglaise, fut un de ceux qui se moquèrent le plus de Sterne,” it is

sufficient to answer, “Why, no, sir!”

[Sidenote: _Strong redeeming points in him._]

It may seem strange, after my citing these instances of wrong-going,

which might be very largely multiplied, that I should have given even

partial praise to Barbey d’Aurévilly as a critic. Yet I cannot withdraw

it. In the first place, as examples already given will have shown, he

was really a great master of the critical epigram—a thing capable of

much abuse, and of late specially abused and vulgarised and brought into

discredit, but (when well-bred, and well-trained, and well-ridden) a

great battle-horse in the critical stable for all that. His own critical

axioms, though generally requiring correction and completion, are often

most valuable, as when he says[834] that the two great critical

qualities are Penetration and Weight. Only he should have added (but the

addition would have hit himself hard) “Directing Judgment,” without

which diamond-point and battering-ram momentum can but waste themselves

or do mischief. Indeed, in his own most misguided criticisms,

penetration and weight themselves are seldom wanting. His ninth volume,

_Les Critiques ou les Juges jugés_, is often quite admirable, almost

always noteworthy, on the most different people—on Joubert as on

Villemain, on Nisard as on Sainte-Beuve. And almost everywhere the

writing is _alive_; the liking, if it be only crotchet, the dislike, if

it be only prejudice, is, _pro tanto_ and for the moment, real, felt,

_vécu_. He is rather a bad example; he has, I think, like Veuillot,

already done harm, not merely in France but in England. But I should be

loath to lose him: for he is not as the scribes.

[Sidenote: _Doudan._]

It is impossible to imagine a more curious contrast to the often by no

means ignoble hack-work of Chasles, and the restless and somewhat

“posing” activity of Barbey, than the fireside and library arm-chair

quiet which pervades the writings of Doudan.[835] Critically, indeed,

that work is chiefly valuable as a placid and agreeable reflection of

the workings of such a life on an intellect above the average, but of no

gigantic force or “genial” individuality, and a taste for literature

which never raised itself to very active or deliberate discharges of the

critical function. His two most regular critical exercises, the early

article “De la nouvelle école poétique”[836] occasioned by

Sainte-Beuve’s _Tableau_, and the later but (unless I mistake) not

precisely dated “Les Révolutions du Goût,”[837] are more curious than

exactly important. They exhibit, as the work of these half-recluses

often does, an odd mixture of reflection of the time-movements and

reaction against them. His style of opposition (for he does oppose it)

to the Romantic movement is double, and in each case rather unexpected.

[Sidenote: _Interest of his general attitude,_] One horn is pure

Chauvinism. “Who are these Germans and English, that we Frenchmen should

imitate them?” This he shed later. But he always lifted up the other—a

curious form of belief in progress and development, which once more

almost persuades us to believe that no believer in Progress _can_ be a

critic as such and for the time. In the “De la Nouvelle École” this

takes the cruder form, common in the early nineteenth century, of asking

why we, with all our glorious gains, should go back to, if not exactly

barbarous ages, yet less favoured ones? In the _Révolutions_ it becomes

a subtler, but perhaps more dangerous, heresy, which draws to its aid

the fashionable fancies about time and climate and the like. According

to Doudan, it would seem, a real historical criticism is impossible,—

“Les nuances délicates s'évanouissent quand les mœurs, etc., ont

changé.” You cannot keep on the tracks of poesy, _cette science émue et

populaire_ (note the Montaignesque perfection of the phrase, whatever we

may think of the argument), you cannot sound _ces magnifiques abîmes_.

Each generation sees only one side of the Beautiful—and apparently you

cannot extract and combine the visions of each from their records. Which

is, I think, blasphemy against Criticism and Literature; but some fight

might, no doubt, be made for it, and it is admirably and suggestively

put.

[Sidenote: _and particular utterances._]

It would require a separate and elaborate handling to show how far these

half-progressist half-nihilist views are reflected in the literary

utterances which stud Doudan’s _Letters_: but some of these must be

given. He never achieves the supremacy of his very close analogue

Joubert: but he is certainly “to be made a note of.” For instance,[838]

in a certain _Chartreuse_ (not otherwise identified, but which must be

Beyle’s from what follows) he says (as he should not) that it is

“stupid,” and accounts for, at the same time as he disables, his own

judgment by adding that he has not read it. But he knows other books of

the author, who is “un mauvais sujet au courant de tous les procédés

d’imagination.” Unjust of course: but with how much justice and with how

much more felicity in it! In 1843 he must have somewhat modified his

fifteen years’ earlier disapproval of Old French, for in the _Roman de

la Rose_ he sees[839] “mille idées passer dans ces ombres du Moyen Âge”—

ideas, we may retort, which, if you see, you may surely cry Halt! to,

and register. Twenty years later again, in 1865,[840] he not merely

condemns, in the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_, “le langage torturé, comme

dans M. Victor Hugo, pour produire des effets,” which might be thought

to show a certain obsolescence of judgment, but clears himself from this

charge, and from his old fault of Chauvinist criticism, not merely by

defending Eugénie de Guérin but by approving Charlotte Bronté, a

combination of literary lady-loves which is not commonplace. He even

consents, later still, to read Miss Braddon: and expresses warm and

intelligent approval of _The Small House at Allington_. Only fanatical

_Goetheaner_ will find much fault with his characterisation,[841] in one

of his interesting letters to A. W. Schlegel, of _Meister_ as

“excessively desultory and chimerical” in matter: and all but fanatical

Hugonians will at least understand his unhappiness[842] at _William

Shakespeare_, though the expressions of it have a touch of the comic.

When you have read the book for ten minutes you feel as if you were

standing on your head. Polyphemus must have written like it when he had

eaten a Greek and drunk a skinful of wine. And the younger generation

finds it admirable! These are the tricks that await all of us as we grow

older, unless we keep our feet (and our heads) very carefully when we go

into the House of Literature. But Doudan is not excessively affected by

them, though, on the other hand, he does not shake himself vigorously

and critically free. He is a good specimen of the purely contemplative

and “occasional” critic—a sort of hermit of the desert, who does not

object to decide on cases that present themselves, but who will not go

to seek them.[843]

[Sidenote: _Renan._]

We may turn from Doudan to a very different figure, introducing a new

and important group. It is not uncommon to see M. Renan spoken of as a

considerable critic; on the other hand, I think some one (and no mean

authority, if my memory serves me) is reported to have said of him,

“Renan n’a pas le sens littéraire.” Both statements are excessive: but

at the risk of shocking some readers, I am bound to say that the second

is a great deal nearer the truth than the first. A _biblical_ critic he

was, no doubt: but, as has been pointed out at the beginning of this

history, the operations of the biblical critic are always conducted on

principles different from, and usually on principles diametrically

opposed to, the principles of the criticism of literature. Yet it may be

urged, Did he not help to produce one volume, and that on a very

interesting period, of the great _Histoire Littéraire de la France_? Did

he not almost precede Mr Arnold himself in arguing for the necessity of

Criticism, and the excellent influence not merely of Science but of

Literature? and quite precede him in exalting the literary uses and

virtues of Celtic? Has he not left us, from the _Averroès_ and the

_Avenir de la Science_ downwards, constant literary allusions and

handlings, frequent literary papers, on subjects ranging from Spinoza to

Béranger?

This is all quite true: and if it were reasonable, as some people seem

to think it is, to expect that an author should use as great length in

showing why he does not deal with a subject as in dealing with what he

thinks it right to handle, I could, as in the case of others from

Voltaire downwards, produce chapter and verse to any extent in negative

justification. But M. Renan seemed to me, on a careful perusal of all

his then published work, twenty years ago[844] and more—he seemed to me,

on a repetition and extension of that reading a dozen years later[845]—

and he seems to me now, after recurring to his work for the present

purpose—seldom or never to have regarded literature as literature. He

said, in so many words, at the beginning of his career, and he published

the saying towards the close,[846] that literary work is _only_ valuable

as the work of its time, that “the _Pensées_ of Pascal and the _Sermons_

of Bossuet, if they appeared to-day, would be hardly worth notice.” This

exaggeration of the historic view is interesting, of course; but it is

as fatal to criticism as the absolute refusal to take that view.

[Sidenote: _Taine._]

Not thus is to be dismissed one who thought Renan a critic and a great

one. Hippolyte Taine _was_ a critic, though too often (not always) a

“black horseman” of criticism. He was a great æsthetician, he was a

brilliant literary historian—that is to say, what should be a critic on

the greatest scale. He could do splendid justice[847] to another critic

of tendencies and predilections so different from his own as those of

Paul de Saint-Victor. To question his competence in pure criticism may

seem more than presumption, it may seem pure fatuity. But, though a poet

is dispensed from having a conscience, a critic and a historian of

criticism is not.

[Sidenote: _His_ culpa.]

The fault of Taine as a critic was put once for all from two different

points of view and by two widely different, though each in his different

way supremely competent, persons, in that conversation at one of the

Magny dinners which is referred to elsewhere,[848] and the reporting of

which,[849] whether justifiable in itself or not, should bribe

Rhadamanthus in his condemnation of the Goncourtian _reportage_. He did

not understand the sublime—the “magnificent”—in literature, as no less a

person than Sainte-Beuve told him on that occasion: and he did not

understand it, because, as no less a person than Gautier (consciously or

unconsciously repeating Longinus) told him, he did not see that the

secret of literature lies in the “mots rayonnants,” the “mots de

lumière.” Or, rather, he _would_ not understand: for as two of his

selected quotations,[850] from such an apostle of the _mot rayonnant_ as

Saint-Victor, show, he had the root of the matter in him, but would not

let it grow.

[Sidenote: _His miscellaneous critical work._]

Taine is, therefore, the capital example of the harm which may be done

by what is called “philosophy” in criticism. If he had resisted this

tendency, and had allowed himself simply to receive and assimilate the

facts, he might have been one of the great critics of the world. That he

_could_ have done so is shown, I think, completely by the greatest work

of his life, the _Origines de la France Contemporaine_—in which, with a

good grace, if not explicitly, swallowing all he had said in his earlier

remarks on Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, he allowed himself to yield to

the other facts, and established the truth for ever, on and in an

impregnable foundation and circumvallation of document. But he had no

time to do everything: and in his literary perversity he had gone too

far. He began as quite a young man, but not young enough to be immature,

in the famous studies on La Fontaine and Livy, by a philosophical

crystallisation of the process which Sainte-Beuve had almost invented,

but had always kept in a fluid and flexible condition—the process of

inquiring into the “circumstances,” the ancestry, country, surroundings,

religion, tastes, friends, career, of the man of letters. As

crystallised under the influence of a philosophical determinism, this

process became one of inquiring into the racial origin, chronological

period, and general environment (_milieu_) of the individual, the

school, the literature, as a result of which these “had to be”—what they

seemed to M. Taine. The man of letters, be he Shakespeare or Voltaire,

Dante or Cervantes, was simply a made-up prescription.

[Sidenote: _His_ Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise.]

It might not have been so disastrous as it was, if M. Taine had had the

audacity—or from a different point of view the pusillanimity—to choose

the literature of his own country as his sphere of principal operation.

His theory would not have been so cramping as Nisard’s, and he was

better furnished with facilities of direct appreciation. That there

would have been faults, gaps, oddities, in the survey is certain: but it

would have been a great and an invaluable history of French Literature.

Now his famous _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_—one of the most

brilliantly written of its class, one of the most interesting, perhaps

_the_ history of literature, which has most of literature itself—is only

valuable for qualities which are not of its own essence, and in the

qualities which are of its essence is very nearly valueless. To any one

who knows “those who are there and those who are not”—the authors whom

M. Taine discusses and the authors whom he skips—it is a stimulating and

piquant, if not exactly an informing, book to read. Those who do not

know them will be led hopelessly astray. To begin with, M. Taine himself

did not know enough, though he knew creditably much. He had many

distractions and avocations at the time, and did not plunge on the

document with anything like the “brazen-bowelled” energy which he

afterwards showed in the _Origines_. Whole periods—especially where

language or dialect present difficulties—are jumped with the most

perfect nonchalance, but unfortunately not always in silence. Those

minor writers who give the key of a literature much more surely than the

greater ones (for these are akin to all the world) receive very little

attention. The native, automatic, irrational, sympathies and

preferences, which keep a man right much oftener than they lead him

wrong, are necessarily wanting. Nothing interferes to save the critic

from the influence of his theory. He has constructed for himself, on

that theory, an ideal Englishman with big feet (because the soil of our

country is marshy and soft), with respect for authority (as is shown by

English boys calling their father “Governor”), Protestant, melancholy,

with several other attributes. This ideal Englishman is further moulded,

tooled, typed, by race, time, _milieu_: and he becomes Chaucer,

Shakespeare, Pope, Byron. And the literature of Byron, Pope,

Shakespeare, Chaucer has to deliver itself in a concatenation

accordingly.

[Sidenote: _Its shortcomings._]

It is unnecessary to add much to what Sainte-Beuve and Scherer,[851]

both his personal friends, both practically Frenchmen, both acquainted

as few Frenchmen have been with English literature itself, one of

supreme and the other of high critical competency, said in deprecation

of this proceeding. But an Englishman, especially if he knows something

of other literatures as well as his own, enjoys a _parrhesia_ which they

did not enjoy. And the only adequate verdict that can be pronounced on

Taine’s History of English Literature is that, great as a book and as a

creation, it is as criticism not faulty, not unequal, but positively and

utterly worthless. It does not even supply the native with useful

independent checks and views “as others see,” for the views are the

views of a theory, not a man. It supplies the foreigner with a false and

dangerous travesty.

[Sidenote: _Instances of them._]

But in reference to so famous, and in a way so engaging, a book, it

might seem impertinent not to descend a little more to particulars. Let

anybody contrast the handlings of Dryden and of Swift. The former is

one, I do not hesitate to say, of the worst criticisms ever written by a

great writer, the latter one of the best. And why? Because Swift—great,

arch-great as he is—is very much of a piece: and Taine can adjust him to

his theory. Dryden is not of a piece at all, except in regard to that

purely literary craftsmanship which a foreigner can judge least well. He

is scattered, eclectic, contradictory: and if you make any general

theory about him, or even bring any general theory in contact with him,

you get into difficulties at once. About Keats—a great person surely,

and in casting shadows before him immense—Taine is null; about Shelley,

ludicrous; I am not sure that he so much as mentions Browning, most of

the best of whose work was done when he wrote. To take examples all over

the history, on _Piers Plowman_, on the Caroline Poets, on Gray and

Collins, he is at the mercy of any cub in criticism, and a thing to look

at and pass for the more gracious and benign animals therein. Sometimes,

as we have said above, he tempts the horrid reflection, “Had he really

_read_ the authors of whom he speaks?” And always his neglect (which may

have endeared him to Mérimée)[852] of the minor figures throws his

sketches of the major out of drawing, out of composition, out of

proportion. That he started from Sainte-Beuve is certain; but he comes

round to a point absolutely opposed to Sainte-Beuve’s serene

observatory. He speaks of what he has _not_ seen.

[Sidenote: _Montégut: his peculiarities._]

It is strange, though perhaps not inexplicable, that the critical renown

of Émile Montégut is not greater with us than it is. He was one of the

best and most popular writers of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ at a time

when it still held the position of the chief critical periodical in

Europe. He dealt largely with subjects of special interest to

Englishmen. Yet, with us, he has nothing like the reputation, not merely

of Sainte-Beuve, but of Scherer and Taine. The reasons for this lie

partly in the fact that Montégut was, I believe, at all times a man who

wrote for his bread, and so not only had to do translation,[853]

biography on commission, and other hack-work, but even in his proper

sphere could not pick and choose his tasks. Another cause may probably

be found in his fondness—I will not say for prolixity, but for handling

on the very great scale. I have said elsewhere that I believe part of

the success of Sainte-Beuve to be due to the fact that in his very best

days he very rarely dealt, at any one time, with any one subject at more

than single (or at most double) _causerie_ length. Montégut’s treatment

of George Eliot runs to 160 pages, that of Charlotte Bronté to very

little less, those of Musset and (more remarkably still) of Nodier to

120 each. Now, though people will sometimes read critical estimates of

great length, they will rarely re-read them. And they do not show the

qualities of the critic, especially to the running reader, with as much

clearness, crispness, and variety of effect as do shorter, but not too

short, pieces.

Yet these qualities in Montégut were rare and admirable.

I do not know that I have found any work, short of the

Aristotelian-Longinian-Coleridgian level, stand the process of

re-reading, among the thousand applications of it which this book has

necessitated, better than his. His critical appeal is not _tapageur_ and

peremptory like that of Taine; nor has it quite the clear, vigorous,

masculine, common-sense judgment, when prejudice does not interfere, of

Scherer; but it is extraordinarily enveloping, penetrating, intimate.

With Taine you get soon tired, if not of his _opes_, which are indeed

considerable, yet of his _fumum strepitumque_: with Scherer you think

that he has said what he ought to have said, but you are not very

anxious to hear him say it again,[854] and there is rarely any “second

intention,” any suggested but not obvious thought, for you to hear.

Montégut’s delicate, intricate reflection and sympathy, especially at

the length at which they are given, can hardly, by the most attentive

and sensitive of readers, be taken in all at once; there are always

gleanings of the grapes, always second mowings of the grass to be made.

Further, Montégut was, in this group, the only one who did not commit

himself to the absolute and inseparable identification of critical

inquiry with the construction and application of a general theory of

national character and history. He was not, indeed, always free from

this besetting delusion of nineteenth-century criticism, a delusion

which has done nearly as much harm as all the idols of Neo-classicism

put together.[855] On the contrary, he has whole essays tending in this

direction.[856] But his best work is done in quite a different one, and,

in a late and remarkable study of Saint-René Taillandier,[857] he

expressly draws a contrast between _critique littéraire_ and _critique

qui se propose un but social_, and lays down that in the former “les

œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur beauté et leur perfection.” And so,

unenslaved by non-literary theory, and only “servant,” in the good old

sense of lover, to the Muses, he is able to discern the interest of work

in both directions, while the pure national-character critics are

hampered in one by the theory they take to help them along in the other,

and not much helped by it even there.

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

Among the best examples of Montégut’s critical genius that I can think

of is the short essay on Boccaccio[858] (where he shows conclusively

that great length was not, in the least, an indispensable condition with

him), almost all his English papers,[859] and the exceedingly agreeable

study of Théophile Gautier,[860] which remains the best thing ever

written on that author—difficult, though himself delightful. If I were

an admirer of the Guérins (I _am_, though no more than reason, an

admirer of Eugénie), I think I should prefer his papers on these two

extraordinarily overpraised young persons to either Sainte-Beuve’s or Mr

Arnold’s. The above-mentioned piece on Saint-René Taillandier is a real

triumph of friendly advocacy. On Béranger—a subject, though for

different reasons, almost as much a touchstone as Gautier—he is again

wonderfully happy.

Indeed it is rather difficult—except when he is _Tainising_—to discover

where Montégut is not happy. To his natural genius for delicate

appreciation he united very wide reading, not merely in French, but in

English, German, and Italian. In these foreign tongues he has the

unconventional _main heureuse_, which sometimes, though not very often,

attends foreigners who are not ignorant and who follow their own

judgment. The average superficial critic in England to-day may think

that he took _Guy Livingstone_[861] much too seriously; the future

Sainte-Beuve of England may not. He could appreciate—as, again, not all

our own critics could or can—the unequal, and for a foreigner one might

think hopelessly baffling, qualities of Charles Kingsley. I am not sure

that this “horizontality”—this faculty of bringing himself in line with

German, Italian, English, French subjects and interpreting them, has not

done him some harm. It is something so much out of the way, if not out

of the reach, of most people that they suspect it. But in the court of

International Critical Law—which, had it power as it has authority,

would govern the literary world—his case is pretty safe.

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

It has been recognised from the first that the obituary epigram of M.

Edouard Rod on M. Edmond Scherer, “Il ne jugeait pas les écrits avec son

intelligence; il les jugeait avec son caractère”—especially if it be

remembered that _caractère_ in French combines the meaning of the two

English words “character” and “temper”—is an exposition, as happy as it

was meant to be friendly, of the _defects_ of the subject’s criticism.

But, like all epigrams, it is scarcely adequate even to the portion of

the subject to which it applies: and this subject was by no means

one-sided. Fully to understand the dozen or so volumes[862] of trenchant

and well-informed censorship which Scherer left, it is necessary, for

all but persons of unusual powers of intellectual divination, to know

much more of the circumstances than is always needful. He was, though

French by birth, Swiss by extraction on the father’s side, and English

on the mother’s: and he was brought up, in the straitest school of

French Protestantism and English dissent, to become a Protestant-pastor.

Continental Protestantism has always tended towards freethought, and

after many years of progressive “advance” in his opinions, M. Scherer

reached something like positive Nihilism in religion, or at least

Agnosticism of the extremest kind. He had, though he must have read very

widely in French Literature,[863] written little or nothing on it during

this period: and he did not become a literary critic till he was

forty-five. Moreover, in the process of unsettlement of his belief, his

temper, which had always been very serious, seems to have acquired, as

in the case of Mark Pattison and others, though not all, something like

a definite roughening or souring. Further, he had paid much attention to

philosophical study, and was peremptory in his requirement of “a

philosophy” in all works of art and letters.[864] Yet further, his

relinquishment of religion had made him only the more strenuous on the

score of morality: and against any book or writer showing loose morals,

or tolerance of them, he waged truceless war. [Sidenote: _Its consequent

limitations._] And to conclude, while he had a somewhat limited

sense[865] of the comic, and was slow to appreciate irony, _litotes_,

and other things like unto them, his very intelligence, though

remarkably strong and in certain senses acute, was distinctly wanting in

flexibility, accommodation, and “play.” It was a chisel rather than a

watchspring-file, and when it encountered resistance or stoppage of any

sort, it was apt rather to try to batter and break than to insinuate

itself and so to open a way.

[Sidenote: _The solid merits accompanying them._]

Add to these influences, not always tending for good, others tending

powerfully the right way—great learning, the freedom from national

prejudice derived from mixed blood, an inflexible honesty of intention,

a perfect fearlessness, and a clear and forcible if not exactly

attractive style—and the qualities of the resultant are easily

anticipated. Such a critic will be weakest in the expression of

dislikes. On Molière, Diderot, Carlyle, Baudelaire, especially on the

three Frenchmen, M. Scherer is scarcely even interesting or edifying.

His imperfect sympathy with the comic in the first case; his porcupine

morality, perhaps again in the first, and certainly in the second and

fourth; his dislike of the eccentric, the abnormal, the bizarre, in the

third and fourth,—make real appreciation impossible for him. “What he

says may be used against _him_,” to play on the famous police caution:

but in regard to his subjects it is not so much ineffectual as almost

irrelevant.

On the other hand, when he speaks of writers with whom he is more or

less _in_ sympathy,—on Milton, Wordsworth, Lamartine, George Eliot,—very

few critics are better worth reading. His temperament saves him from the

usual danger of exaggeration, except very rarely, when the indulgence is

quite pleasant; his general approval confines his exposition of

particular defects within the limits of an acute liberality; and his

setting forth of merits has all the sufficiency which can be conferred

by full knowledge, untiring industry, a strong intelligence, and a

practised and logical method.

When, on the other hand, cases of attraction and repulsion are about

equally present, at least when the _caractère_ allows the intelligence

full play, he is almost, if not quite, as good.[866] And as these two

classes of Essays are, after all, in the majority, the criticism of M.

Scherer is a most valuable exercise both for his craftsfellows and for

the general student of literature. When his vision is not distorted by

prejudice, he is the inferior of hardly any critic in argumentative

power: there is a directness, solidity, simplicity about his methods and

his conclusions which, without being in itself better or worse than the

accumulative but not always decisive method of Sainte-Beuve and the

suggestive approaches of Montégut, forms a very useful alternative and

complement to both. He was never popular either in France or elsewhere:

and he has hardly charm enough to recover, or rather attain, popularity

at any future time. But on no subject on which he has written favourably

or impartially—and not on all of those where the _caractère_ has had too

much the upper hand—will it be safe for the real student to neglect him.

And if that counsel of perfection which I have more than once adumbrated

here—the compilation of a critical _corpus_ of the best work of all

times and literatures—were ever undertaken, it would be possible to

select from his work a volume, and perhaps more than one, of the

strongest and soundest criticism to be found in the French language.

[Sidenote: _Saint-Beuve_ + _Gautier_.]

These four notable writers represent, as has been said, the principles

and practice of Sainte-Beuve, more or less hardened and methodised by

an attempt to make a philosophy of them in Taine’s case, coloured by

personal and “professional” tendencies in those of Renan and Scherer,

least altered in Montégut. But the specially Romantic tone, which,

though it never quite disappeared, had become less and less noticeable

in Sainte-Beuve himself, shows little in any of them, unless it be in

the last. On the contrary, in another group, where Sainte-Beuve’s

general influence was strongly qualified by that of Gautier, the

Romantic side, both formal and “tonal,” appears very strongly, and

leads on to a development rather more noteworthy (except in the

attacks upon it) for creative than for critical results in the

Realist-Naturalist-Impressionist-Symbolist movement. The chief members

of this group[867] were, the famous master of _flamboyant_ style

Saint-Victor, the poets Baudelaire and Banville, and the novelist

Flaubert, with whom we may join the band (among which some of them

figured with Sainte-Beuve and Gautier himself) of contributors to the

very remarkable _Poètes Français_, issued by Crépet forty years ago.

[Sidenote: _Banville._] Banville needs but little separate notice, for

though a delightful prose-writer, as well as a charming poet, he did

not write very much criticism besides his contributions to Crépet. But

his Tractate of Versification[868] is most important in the history of

French prosody.

[Sidenote: _Saint-Victor._]

One very famous writer just mentioned, Paul de Saint-Victor, is perhaps

hardly here entitled to the place which he must occupy in a History of

Literature, though, as a fact, all his production came more or less

under the head of criticism in its vaguer and wider sense. The

distinction is due partly at least to the fact that his professional

criticism was in the main either purely theatrical or else artistic,

with neither of which branches, as such, do we meddle. But there is more

to say. Saint-Victor published little of this; and the chief books on

which his reputation depends—the rather famous _Hommes et Dieux_[869]

earlier, and _Les Deux Masques_,[870] an elaborate study of literary

drama from classical times, the publication of which he undertook just

before his death—put forward at least some claim to be strictly of our

material; and invite attention because of the elaborate perfection of

their style. Saint-Victor, after his death, was made the subject of that

“nimious and indiscreet” biography which has played the ghoul to almost

all men of letters, especially in France, for many years past: and a

story, already referred to, has obtained currency that he built up his

paragraphs by dotting over the sheet nouns or epithets of striking

qualities which he wished to introduce, and then filling in the contexts

to suit. This, which is half a caricature and half an antithesis of the

Flaubertian theory and practice, is by no means incredible, and though

the practice lends itself to criticism, it is capable enough of defence,

but not as criticism itself. The more serious point is that

Saint-Victor’s interests are obviously not in pure literary

appreciation. He rarely attempts it, and when he does (as in his article

on Swift) the result is sometimes disastrous. Where he succeeds he is

rather historic, and historic-pictorial, than literary. Deriving partly

from Hugo (whom he worshipped) and partly from Gautier, he has more

proportion, less immensity in grandeur and in absurdity than the first,

and a somewhat greater sense of humanity generally than the second,

while his phrase (as in the sentence admired by Taine and quoted above)

is sometimes of enchanting beauty. He is interesting to compare with Mr

Pater: but the Englishman has very greatly the advantage of him as a

pure critic.

[Sidenote: _Baudelaire._]

If Baudelaire had given less attention to the criticism of art[871] and

more to that of literature, and if he had been permitted more health and

longer life,[872] it is more than probable—it is nearly certain—that he

would have been a very considerable literary critic. As it is, there is

hardly a page of the two hundred or so which concern the subject in the

volume of his posthumously published or republished works, entitled

_L’Art Romantique_, that does not contain most remarkable things. He had

paid beforehand for Gautier’s admirable Preface by the most elaborate of

his own individual appreciations: and the shorter notices of Hugo and

others, with the few reviews of individual books (including _Les

Misérables_ and _Madame Bovary_), make a worthy company for it. But

Baudelaire’s special aptitude is for criticism of a slightly more

abstract kind, such as his _Conseils aux Jeunes Littérateurs_, _Les

Drames et Les Romans Honnêtes_, _&c._; while the actual appreciations of

particulars just noticed are apt to drift off in this direction. And it

was not to be regretted: for these _axiomata media_ are often extremely

true and subtle. If people would only study them, the popular idea—as

far as there is any popular idea at all—of Baudelaire as a passionate

and paradoxical champion of immorality and abnormality of all kinds

would be strangely altered.[873] Irony is indeed almost always present:

but it is yoked with a feeling for art which is extraordinary, and with

a sound good sense which, especially in its ironic leaven, often makes

one think of Thackeray.

[Sidenote: _Crépet’s_ Les Poètes Français]

As a combined anthology of poetry and criticism, Crépet’s _Poètes

Français_[874] has no superior—it may be doubted whether it has an

equal. After its general Introduction by Sainte-Beuve, the mediæval and

fifteenth-century poets were committed to the admirably competent hands

of Louis Moland, a member of the second Romantic generation mainly

represented in this Book, who gave up the bar to devote himself to

editing and studying older French literature; Anatole de Montaiglon, a

still more learned scholar and palæographer; Charles d’Héricault, the

remarkable excellence of whose fifteenth and early sixteenth century

studies has been referred to before, and who has hardly a critical fault

except a slight over-valuation of his pet subjects. With the sixteenth

century—or rather with the Pléiade—recourse was naturally had to writers

who were less of specialists and more of men of letters generally.

Gautier, Baudelaire, and Banville are contributors; Janin’s article on

Lamartine is one of the best specimens of his more serious criticism:

while the great mass of minor poets were divided among divers others, of

whom the most fully presented and the best known were Charles

Asselineau, the bibliographer of Romanticism and a diligent student with

a pleasant pen; Hippolyte Babou, the accredited inventor of Baudelaire’s

title _Fleurs du Mal_, and a man of remarkable though (except here)

rather wasted talent; Philoxène Boyer (“Dans les salons de Philoxène,

Nous étions quatre-vingt _rimeurs_”); and Edouard Fournier, an

inestimable editor, in the _Bibliothèque Elzévirienne_ and elsewhere,

and the author, among innumerable other things, of the famous

collection, _L’Esprit des Autres_ (Paris, 1855).

The whole collection is a real literary and critical monument—

independently of the merit of many of the articles—because it is

practically the first attempt to deal with the entire poetry of a

literature in a catholic and impartial manner, uninfluenced by any

prevailing theory exalting or depressing particular periods, or

particular writers, at the expense of others. The nineteenth century had

its faults, and many of them: but this book could hardly have been

written before the nineteenth century.

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

If Rousseau, who wrote no criticism at all, ought, according to some, to

have a large place in a History thereof, how much more Flaubert? For the

author of _Madame Bovary_, though he wrote, or at least published,

hardly any, has filled his _Letters_[875] with critical remarks, and is

the acknowledged godfather, though by no means the inventor (for we have

seen it as far back as La Bruyère, nay, as Longolius, if not as far back

as Virgil), of the Doctrine of the Single Word—the notion that there is

only _one_ phrase, sometimes only one single and integral combination of

letters, which will really express an author’s meaning, and that he must

wrestle with Time and the dictionary and his own invention till he finds

this. This, we say, will be found _passim_ in Flaubert’s _Letters_; it

will be found, by those who do not wish to read all these (they make a

mistake), admirably and forcibly put by his disciple Maupassant in the

Introduction thereto. The doctrine,[876] though an obvious exaggeration

of the _true_ doctrine of the importance of “the word,” is an

interesting one, and has been—perhaps still is—an influential, but, on

our general principles, I do not think it necessary to give Flaubert

much space here on the strength of it. He never chose to embody his

opinions on this matter in any regular form; probably, with his very

peculiar temperament, it would have been quite impossible for him to do

so, while his headlong ways of thought and speech, so oddly contrasted

with the enormous patience of his writing, made his critical utterances

in relation to others mainly genial and Gargantuan splutters—things

_gigantesque_, to use his own favourite word, but not critical.

[Sidenote: “_Naturalism._”]

As in the case of Flaubert and “Realism,” so in the case of “Naturalism”

and M. Zola, the more general considerations will be for the Conclusion,

the selection of facts and documents, on which they are based, for this

place. To obtain these facts and documents we must a little break the

rule of not noticing persons who have lived very recently, in the case

of M. Zola himself and his friend M. de Goncourt. Their _numerus_ must

undergo the law of representation by chiefs which presses ever and ever

more upon us. Of the host opposed to them, the chief and principal, M.

Ferdinand Brunetière, is still living.

[Sidenote: _Zola._]

The author of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ (for out of those good manners which

do not determine by death, I shall not call him by the periphrasis

against which he specially protested, “the author of _L’Assommoir_”)

wrote a good deal of criticism; his combative temperament supplying the

impulse, and his journalist experience the means.[877]

But of the nearly half-score volumes[878] in which this criticism has

been collected, perhaps only one, _Le Roman Expérimental_,[879] is much

worth re-reading; at any rate, it will give us quite sufficient

“document” here. Issued at the very culminating-point of its author’s

talent and popularity, in 1880, long after he had come through the

struggles of his youth, and long before he had fallen into that

condition of a naturalist and anti-theistic _voyant_ which we find in

_Travail_ and _Vérité_, it is thoroughly characteristic, thoroughly

equipped. There is no reason, if the author had had the same talent for

criticism that he had (after making all allowances) for creation, why it

should not display as much power in the one direction as the nearly

contemporary _Attaque du Moulin_ does in the other.

[Sidenote: Le Roman Expérimental.]

Not to mince matters (and waste time in the mincing), it does nothing of

the sort: but, on the contrary, proves that he had next to no critical

aptitude. The contention of the title-paper—that the exploits of M. Zola

and his friends in fiction correspond to those of Claude Bernard in

physics, supported as it is by extensive quotation and adaptation of the

famous vivisector’s own words—can, I fear, receive no other epithet than

puerile. The physiologist can, of course, experiment very abundantly.

But how, in the name of transcendentalism and common-sense alike, can

the artist in fiction _experiment_? One artist in fiction did do so

certainly: to wit, the unlucky author of _Sandford and Merton_, who

trained up a little girl that she might become his wife, with the

natural result that she became somebody else’s. _That_ was a _roman

expérimental_, on all-fours with physiological and other experiments, if

you like. Many persons who are entertained at His Majesty’s expense, or

who have stretched His Majesty’s hemp, might also be described as

_romanciers expérimentaux_, and the company could be strengthened from

less sinister sources.

But how can the _writer_ experiment? He can observe, he can experience,

he can (the ambiguous sense of the word is probably the source of M.

Zola’s blunder) analyse, as we call it. But he can never experiment, he

can only imagine. The check of nature and of the actual, the blow of the

quintain if you charge at it and fail, can never be his except in the

metaphorical and transformed sense of “literary” success or failure,

which brings us back to another region altogether. Now “imagination,”

“idealism,” and the like are M. Zola’s abomination, the constant targets

of his ineffectual arrows. He does not see that he is himself using them

all the time to form his subjects, just as he is using the “rhetoric,”

which he abominates equally, to convey his expression.

[Sidenote: _Examples of his criticism._]

Consult other places to fill out M. Zola’s ideas of literature, and they

will be found all of a piece. Read[880] his “Lettre à La Jeunesse,” with

its almost frenzied cry for a literature of _formula_, excluding genius,

excluding individuality, though only to smuggle them in again afterwards

by a backdoor. Read his account (very well done and producing quite the

opposite effect to that which he intends) of the old man of letters, the

man of letters _à la_ Sainte-Beuve, in “L’Argent dans la Littérature,”

and the funny details about royalties and centimes which follow. Read

him on “L’expression personnelle” in the novel—where he is specially

interesting, because with all his talent this is exactly what he himself

had not got. Read him on the famous “Human Document,” where he misses—

misses blindly and obstinately, almost ferociously, with the ferocity of

the man who _will_ not see—the hopeless, the insuperable rejoinder,

“Study your documents as much as you like, but _transform_ the results

of the study before you give them as art.” Read the astonishing

paralogism entitled “La Moralité,” where he excuses the product of

_tacenda_ in literature because _tacenda_ are constantly recurring in

life, and even being inserted in the newspapers which object to them in

fiction. Read his queer reversal of a truth (certainly not too generally

recognised) that Naturalism is only Romanticism “drawn to the dregs”—“le

Romantisme est la période initiale et troublé du Naturalisme.” And read

above all, in another of the papers, generally headed “De la Critique,”

the monumental, fatal sentence, “Balzac, qui avait pour Walter Scott une

admiration _difficile à concevoir aujourd’hui_.”[881]

He has said it. _Not_—let it be also said and underlined with all the

emphasis possible, that M. Zola—that anybody—is to be put out of court

because he does not admire Scott. We may be extremely sorry for him; we

may think him _quoad hoc_ utterly wrong; but he can plead the old

privilege. He likes what he can—what he does like: and there is no more

to be said. But if he cannot understand why Balzac (whom he himself

admires for certain, not for all, of his qualities) should have admired

an author whom he himself does not admire, because his qualities are

different—_then_ he shows himself at once to be destitute of the primal

and necessary organ of criticism—the organ which appreciates, which at

any rate comprehends and admits the appreciation of, things that are

different. He is even as those Neo-classics, who could not understand

how anybody could admire what was not like Virgil, or like something

else, as the case might be. He has cut the ground from under his own

feet, thrown up his own charter and passport. He cannot object if he be

bound hand and foot and carried into the outer darkness, where La Harpe

is Minos and M. Nisard Rhadamanthus, with the third place on the

infernal bench left vacant for the reader to fill at his pleasure.

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

The truth, I think, of it all is, that M. Zola, though in his way a

rather great man of not the best kind of letters, knew nothing

critically about literature, and did not even take any real interest in

it. I do not know that it has been generally remarked, but I am sure

that if any one who is familiar with the enormous stretch of the novels

will exert his memory, he will find an almost unexampled absence of

literary reference, literary allusion, literary flavour in them. Even

Dickens is not to be named in this respect beside Zola. Nay, his very

critical works themselves, though they deal with books, have nothing of

the book-atmosphere about them. When a man is really saturated with

literature, he carries the aroma of it with him like a violet or a piece

of Russian leather (less complimentary comparisons can be added at the

taste and pleasure of the reader). He cannot dissociate himself from it

if he would: just as another cannot attain it, however hard he pretends.

When M. Zola read books it seems generally to have been to coach up his

documents and his details: indeed, why should a person who despised

poetry and rhetoric read them for anything else? Given this ignorance or

this want of appetite, given a consuming desire to philosophise,

combined with a very weak logical faculty, an intense belief in one

formula or set of formulas, and a highly combative temperament, and you

get a set of conditions which even M. Hennequin might admit as

sufficient to turn out or account for a personage nothing if not

_un_critical.

[Sidenote: “_Les Deux Goncourt._”]

The state of his friends, the MM. de Goncourt, was not much more

gracious; but though they were even more influential, as holding up the

general critical doctrine and practice of naturalist-impressionism, they

have left very little direct criticism, and what they have is of art

rather than of letters. They too seem to have read not much _belles

lettres_. The elder brother, towards the very end of his days (when, by

the way, he thought that Shakespeare _manque d’imagination_), discovered

with much interest that there had been a man named Defoe who was a

considerable Realist or Naturalist, and that _M. Maspero_ had hit upon a

remarkably interesting story about one Rhampsinitus. Their general

principle—that all literature (they, like so many moderns who cannot

write poetry, thought that prose had quite superseded it) should consist

of direct personal observation clothed in deliberately and jealously

“personal” expression—may be dealt with later. Of individual

applications of it, the most attractive is Edmond’s quarrel with

Flaubert because _he_, with all his labour, hit only on “the epithets of

all the world _in excelsis_,”[882] while “we” achieved the “personal”

epithets. From which it will appear that our old friend, Miss

Edgeworth’s Frederick, when he called his hat by the extremely personal

epithet of “cadwallader,” had finished the art of literature, had

sounded the depths and scaled the heights of possible writing.

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

One of the objections—and not the least forcible—to philosophising too

much, in æsthetic matters as in others, is at the “too much” always

begets a too much more; it is like the Hybris of Greek dramatics. Some

might have thought that Nisard, with his ideal French genius, and still

more Taine, with his all-pervading law of place and time and

circumstance, would have satisfied every normal craving for “scientific”

criticism: some even that the results of their practice were sufficient

to warn any reasonable person off such things. But to think this would

have been to ignore humanity and history. Towards the end of the

penultimate decade of the century a young and energetic critic, M. Émile

Hennequin, fluttered the dove-cotes (or hawk’s eyries) of criticism with

a still further straitening of the method, by the promulgation of what

he was pleased to term _esthopsychology_. His career was cut prematurely

short:[883] and, as the experienced had foreseen, “esthopsychology” soon

followed—if it did not even accompany—him to the grave. But it made some

noise for a time: and the three volumes,[884] which he issued in three

successive years, will always remain a curiosity of criticism if not

much more; while his attempt, foredoomed as it was, is, will be, to

failure, is sure to be renewed. It was duly pointed out at the time that

when “esthopsychological” criticism proceeded most closely on its own

lines it was usually bad criticism, and that when it was good criticism

its methods were not distinguishable from those of other kinds. This is

true; but there is something more to be said.

Let us do M. Hennequin the justice to admit at once that he separated

his new science from strictly literary criticism, and adjusted

literature itself in an entirely peculiar and novel attitude and garb,

before he subjected it to his own processes of pathological experiment.

“Literary work,” according to him,[885] is “a collection of written

signs intended to produce non-active emotions”: and of course in the

country where, and for the people to whom, it is this, all sorts of

peculiar phenomena may arise. In that country we can quite understand

that they regard individuality as an _influence perturbatrice_,—a nasty,

impudent, interfering baggage that upsets formulas, and brings your sum

all wrong just when you have got it symmetrically arranged in the

ciphering book. But those who consider individuality as the source and

soul of genius, the only begetter of poetry, the incomparable companion,

patron, voucher of great Art—what part or lot can _they_ have with the

esthopsychologists? A sort of slender snow-bridge across the crevasse

may show itself when we come to the doctrine that, in order to

understand a book, you must analyse its effect on the reader as well as

the evidences it gives of its own originating causes and purposes in the

author; but then, as was pointed out in the antithesis above cited,

there is nothing new in this:—we are back again with Longinus, nay, with

Aristotle. And we speedily discover that the other side of this bridge

is a place to which we do not even wish to get, though the proceedings

of the inhabitants are sometimes rather funny at a distance.

An enormous tabular scheme of conditioning and distinguishing

circumstances, characteristics, means, effects, &c., has first to be

arranged. The sea as a place is _b_: something more complicated is

“_daxxx_,” and so on. You compose your formula for Hugo by the help of

thus symbolising his Mystery, his Grandiosity, and a good many other

things, including the fact (not a fact by any means) that he had in 1888

only one disciple in England—to wit, Mr Swinburne. You study Dickens,

Heine, Tourguénieff, and Poe in this way as _Écrivains Francisés_,

others as _Écrivains Français_. And what is the result? Dickens has much

“sensibility”; Hugo is “antithetic”; the Goncourts rather draw than

write; M. Huysmans affects sensational colour; Panurge is an incarnation

of the ancient French character. “Après avoir fait l’analyse du

vocabulaire, de la syntaxe, de la métrique, de la composition de

Flaubert, nous avons examiné ses procédés de description et de

psychologie qui se reduisent à ceux—[the reader doubtless expects

something new and startling]—du réalisme”! These “secrets of Punch,”

these “truths of M. de La Palisse,” simply pullulate in M. Hennequin’s

pages. We travel painfully from Dan to Beersheba, and from Beersheba

through all the wildernesses to the uttermost parts of the sea; we

accumulate the most elaborate implements, provisions, documents of

travel that the shops can furnish or our ingenuity invent: we spend

months and years in painful prospecting. And we bring home exactly the

same conclusions which have been written on the walls of every house in

the intellectual Israel for Heaven knows how many years. Much μόχθος

περισσὸς has been seen in this story: some (though I should demur) would

have it to be a history—and an example—of nothing else. But labour more

utterly lost than “esthopsychology” I think we have not found, and shall

not find, even here.

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

About ten years later Fate again cut short the life of an industrious

and promising critic in M. Joseph Texte. I received, from personal

friends of M. Texte, such golden accounts of his character and

abilities, and the purpose to which he devoted his too short life-work—

that of the study of “Comparative Literature”—is so much that to which I

have devoted my own much more extended if not quite unhampered

opportunities,— that I should like to say nothing of him but good. His

last title, _La Littérature Comparée_, sums up the drift of critical and

literary-historical thought for the last hundred and fifty years, and

especially for the last hundred. As we have seen, from the time of

Bodmer and Breitinger in Germany, from that of Gray in England, from

that of Diderot, if not even earlier, in France, it has always been this

extended and comparative study which has corrected criticism. But it was

not till the nineteenth century was pretty far advanced that the

practice of Sainte-Beuve, and a little later the formal doctrine of Mr

Arnold, recognised and, as it were, canonised the idea; while it is only

within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years that it has been largely

carried out, and only within the last decade or less that it has

received regular academic and other sanction. I have never myself, since

I began to study literature seriously almost forty years ago, had the

slightest doubt about its being not only the _via prima_, but the _via

sola_ of literary safety.

But literary roads are never quite “royal” in the sense of the proverb:

there are always obstacles and breaches in the way, as well as

possibilities of mistaking it. Especially, as it seems to me, is the

student of Comparative Literature exposed to the old temptation of

generalising and abstracting too much. I think that M. Texte’s first,

and perhaps best known book, _Rousseau et les Origines du

Cosmopolitanisme Littéraire_,[886] is rather an example of this. It will

be observed that the very title hurries us a long way to sea—that we are

almost out of sight of the firm land of individual example-study. If you

have been brought up solely on the drama of Racine and are introduced to

that of Shakespeare—nay, even _vice versa_, though not to the same

extent—it is almost impossible that the contrast should not do you good,

if only by forcing you to distinguish—to give your reasons, not to “like

grossly.” But “Literary Cosmopolitanism”[887]? is not this a very

distant and very vague City of God? is it not even something of a

Nephelococcygia? It has never existed except to some extent during the

Middle Ages: there is no present sign of its ever being likely to exist.

And the coupling of it with Rousseau excites other apprehensions.

Rousseau was a Swiss; he lived in France, Italy, England: his works were

popular all over Europe. There _is_ an air—but an almost obviously false

air—of cosmopolitanism about this. When we examine the actual book we

find that, practically, it consists of a summary of the chief literary

_rapports_ between France and England before Rousseau; of an ingenious

attempt[888] to make Rousseau himself out as a kind of unconscious

apostle of universal principles of literary criticism: and then of some

remarks on the further _rapports_ of English and French after him.

“Rousseau and the Relations of English and French Literature” would be

the real title of the book: and a useful enough monograph it is. The

_Études de Littérature Européenne_ are better (the studies of Keats and

Browne are very good), and the _Littérature Comparée_ interesting. But

M. Texte was always too heedless of the guile that lurks in generals—

literary more than of any other kind. The “Descendants of the Lakists in

France” really means little more than that Wordsworth exercised a

considerable influence on Sainte-Beuve: and “The German Influence in

France” is either a quite unmanageably large subject, or a mere

disproportion of nut and kernel. It is very dangerous to take, as an

example of “contemporary” English literature, at the end of the

nineteenth century, _Aurora Leigh_, which merely represents a brief and

passing phase between the first Reform Bill and the first Exhibition.

But nothing is further from my wishes than to carp and cavil at M.

Texte, who in an average lifetime must have made vast and valuable

progress, and who, as it is, was a valiant pioneer in a great and

effectual way.

[Sidenote: _Academic Criticism: Gaston Paris._]

To pass or recur to criticism of a strictly academic character, it is

much easier to be impartial in judgment of an enemy than of a friend.

And, but for one thing, I fear I might be bribed in favour of M. Gaston

Paris by the extraordinary liberality and indulgence which, without any

private introduction or intercession, he showed, some twenty years ago,

towards an attempt on the subject in which he was the unquestioned

authority and master—an attempt which did not follow his own or any

other leading, which to his expert eyes must have been full of blunders

and shortcomings, and which could have had in those eyes no merit but

that of being honest, and based on first-hand study. Even this would not

have conciliated everybody. But M. Paris had nothing of the dog who

growls when any one approaches _his_ bone, and it was most interesting

to watch in _Romania_, the periodical which he helped to direct for more

than thirty years, the difference of his method and that of some of his

coadjutors. One could only marvel at his perfect freedom from this

_lues_ of the mere scholar.

This equity or urbanity, however, though the most pleasing to persons

who experienced it, was not the only nor perhaps the chief, it was

certainly not the most purely literary, excellence of M. Paris as a

critic. He had another, still rarer in the philologist—the faculty of

appreciating literature. His philological and other conscientiousness,

indeed, prevented him from reprinting—during long years in which all

students of Old French coveted it—the delightful _Histoire Poétique de

Charlemagne_, with which (in 1865-66) he began his literary career: and

most of his time was spent on lectures, editions, and miscellaneous work

in the periodical just mentioned and others. But many of his _Romania_

Essays (which we may hope will be collected) display the rare union just

mentioned, as the work of few other philologists in the older modern

tongues has done throughout Europe, though the late Professor Kölbing

came an honourable second in Germany. And in 1885 he actually collected,

under the title of _Poésie du Moyen Age_, some of his more popular

lectures on the title-subject, on the origins of French Literature, on

“La Chanson de Roland et La Nationalité Française” (a fine piece,

delivered _crânement_, as his students might have said, in beleaguered

Paris, during the central December of the Année Terrible), on the quaint

semi-comic epic of Charlemagne’s Pilgrimage, on the story of Parnell’s

_Hermit_, on his father. Some years later he gave an excellent but too

brief _Manual of Mediæval French Literature_: and in 1896 he published a

very noteworthy collection of articles, obituary and other, on modern

men of letters, entitled _Penseurs et Poètes_. The longest and most

remarkable of these is on the poet, M. Sully Prudhomme—a lifelong

friend—and it shows better than anything else M. Paris’s power of pure

literary criticism in subjects far distant in character as in time from

those in which his hand usually dealt. I do not agree with him here; I

cannot rank his subject’s estimable and faultless, but rather cold and

limited, poetic gift so highly as he did. But for careful investigation

and grouping of results, for delicate arrangement of merits so that they

may produce the best effect, for good taste in enthusiasm, and

ingenuity, never unfair, in advocacy, the article will stand comparison

with one of Sainte-Beuve’s at his most interested and good-natured, or

one of Montégut’s at his least discursive and protracted.

[Sidenote: _Caro_, _Taillandier_, &c.]

The number of learned or academic critics—some older, some younger—who

might be grouped round or arranged after M. Paris is of course very

large: but I do not know any who combined his special accomplishment

with his general literary quality. Long ago, in another place, I was

guilty of introducing two of the class as “M. Saint-René Taillandier, a

dull man of industry, and M. Caro, a man of industry who is not dull.”

Neither, alas! “is” anything now: but a renewed and special study of

their work for the purposes of this book does not induce me to tone down

the flippancy. Still, it is fair to say that neither seems to have

intended what we call here “pure literary criticism.” Caro[889] was (and

was satirised rather unjustly as such, in a comedy famous in its day) a

sort of ladies’ philosopher, a moralist in kid gloves and dress clothes.

Taillandier (the “Saint-René” appears to be one of the usual

self-embellishments) was in the same way a historian and political

student, who, in his capacity as regular contributor to the _Deux

Mondes_, attempted a great deal of literary work, and collected a good

deal of it.[890] He had little grasp or suppleness: and retained a great

deal of the old academic horror of the bizarre. A review by him of

Flaubert’s _Éducation Sentimentale_ was, I think, the particular _locus_

which convinced me of his dulness: and I have never read anything which

removed the impression.[891]

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

Of what may be called the light horsemen of French criticism, almost any

one, with even the slightest knowledge of the subject, would at once

name Jules Janin as the hetman. He was very early singled out by Nisard

in his attack on la _littérature facile_;[892] and though he replied

with all the wit, style, and facility itself for which he was justly

renowned, he probably—or rather certainly—knew as well as anybody else

that it was easier to counter-raid the enemy’s country than to defend

his own. A “prince of criticism,” as he was called (and is said to have

liked to call himself, with the mixture of self-deceit and self-satire

which all men of some brains know), he hardly was: a prince of

journalism he was most certainly. Of his purely literary exercises in

the art practically nothing survives; his early romantic extravagances

in novel kind, _L’Âne Mort_ and _Barnave_, have outlasted them, while

themselves possessing no very solid fame. His purely theatrical

criticisms are said to be of some value as _points de repère_. But, on

the whole, if the most brilliant of journalists, he was also the most of

a journalist among brilliant men of letters. His appreciations were

written with all that appetising _à peu près_—that dash and sparkle and

apparent mastery—which, more than any solid qualities, have given French

criticism its reputation with those who do not know. But they represent

little real knowledge on the writer’s own part: and while destitute of

any theory of criticism of the more abstract kind (which they might lack

and be no worse for it), they display no standard of personal taste, no

test of goodness drawn from comparative experience, to supply the place

of such a theory. They had their day; but they have ceased to be.

[Sidenote: _Pontmartin._]

It might have been scarcely safe to class M. Armand de Pontmartin with

the light horse during his lifetime; he would at any rate, in all

probability, have taken care to show that light horsemen not only do not

belong to the non-combatant divisions of an army, but are one of its

most formidable arms of offence and defence. The extreme voluminousness

(he reprinted some fifty or sixty volumes of his _Samedis_ and other

work) of this Royalist critic; the sharpness of his tongue, especially

in a book entitled _Les Jeudis de Madame Charbonneau_, which fluttered

literary critics in the middle years of the Second Empire; and the fact

that Sainte-Beuve took the field against him on more than one occasion,

have created, I believe, rather an unfavourable impression. This is not

quite fair. M. de Pontmartin wrote, or at least republished, too much;

he was too generally under the influence of splenetic partisanship in

more than one kind, and there was in his criticism a certain

superficiality and tendency to gossip round a subject, whether in attack

or in caress, rather than to grasp and penetrate it. But he had great

acuteness, wrote an admirable French style of the older and purer kind,

and certainly had no reason to be ashamed of the way in which he

harassed the “Naturalists” in his later years of contribution to the

_Gazette de France_. The other publications of these years[893] show a

mellowing of temper and no loss of ability: while even in the earlier

_Samedis_ a great number of true things, well put, may be found.

[Sidenote: _Veuillot._]

But the most formidable of French critical Pandours—a man of genius in

his own way, and the inspirer in that way of no small or inconspicuous

divisions of journalism in other countries and since his own time—was

Louis Veuillot. Most of his “swashbuckler” writing—to do him justice he

did not merely swash the buckler, but had a right swashing blow with the

sword at his enemy’s face and body—was directed to religious and

political matters. But he had a real interest in literature: and though

his principles, as Extreme Right and Extreme Left principles generally

do, allowed and indeed encouraged him to regard no blow as foul in their

service, he is perhaps less unscrupulous in administering literary

sensations[894] than in dealing out others.

The twelve solid volumes of his _Mélanges_,[895] despite the apparently

ephemeral character of many of their subjects, are still excellent

reading, especially for the judicious student who knows how to skip, and

does not disdain to do so now and then. Even when Veuillot raises false

issues he is seldom quite negligible; and when he is in sympathy with

his subject he is sometimes extraordinarily happy; while one seldom or

never detects in him the note of personal spite, or the mere pedantic

snarling, which, as has been said, are the unpardonable sins of

criticism.