been more constantly felicitous--Faguet speaks of the faculty possessed
by that prince of intelligence of wandering among souls, and of studying
their spiritual experience "comme un anatomiste etudie le jeu des
organes." The author of the _Esprit des Lois_ took wide views and
surveyed a vast expanse of society, but he was equally apt to map out a
square inch of mossy rock at his feet. "Il a du reste beaucoup ecrit,
_comme en marge de ses grands livres_." These words remind us of a
section of Emile Faguet's writings which is peculiarly stimulating and
useful. It is illustrated to great perfection in what is perhaps the
most fascinating specimen of his vast and various production, the volume
called _En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres_, which he published so lately
as 1911. This was followed by _En lisant Corneille_ in 1913 and _En
lisant Moliere_ in 1914. If the war had not intervened and if his own
health had not failed him, it is probable that Faguet would have
extended and developed this section of his work, which exhibited the
ripest fruit of his subtle and vigorous criticism.
The method which he adopted in these treatises was to take a portion of
a well-known book or a short poem, and read it with his imaginary
audience exactly as though they, and he, had never met with it before.
In _En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres_ he takes a score of such passages,
and analyses them without pedantry, eagerly, curiously, cordially. He
explains what the author meant, shows how he has succeeded in expressing
his meaning, points out the ingenuities of thought and the felicities of
language, and in short exhibits the piece of hackneyed prose or verse as
though it had just been discovered. The process may sound perfunctory
and pedagogic, but, conducted as Faguet conducts them, these little
excursions are not less delightful than original. He takes things that
everybody knows--such as Montaigne on Friendship, or Bossuet on the
Romans, or a couple of La Bruyere's portraits; he takes a long poem,
like Alfred de Vigny's _La Maison du Berger_, or a short lyric, like
Victor Hugo's _Le Semeur_; he takes the character of Severe in
_Polyeucte_ or a landscape out of the memoirs of Chateaubriand, and he
illuminates these familiar things until the reader not merely sees in
them what he never saw before, but has gained a method of reading by
which he will in future extract infinite new pleasures from re-reading
old familiar books.
In this system of analysis by conversation consists the chief
originality of Faguet's criticism. The idea of it was not entirely new;
so long ago as the seventeenth century Descartes said that "la lecture
est une conversation continue avec les plus honnetes gens des siecles
passes." But it had not been planned on a practical basis until Faguet
sketched out these enchanting books of his, in which we seem to see him
seated, smiling, at a table, the volume open before him, expounding it
to an eager circle of intelligent young people. In these conversations,
Faguet had not the weight of Brunetiere or the sparkle of Lemaitre; he
was simpler than the one and soberer than the other. He achieved the
dream of the teacher when he discovered how to write books which please
and are useful at the same time. He avoided, by a whole continent, the
vapid dreariness of the usual English manual, which looks upon the rose
of Sharon and the lily of the valley as fit only to be pressed between
sheets of blotting-paper in a _hortus siccus_. Faguet is always in
earnest, although he sometimes indulges in immense humour and vivacity,
not of the Parisian variety, but highly exhilarating. When he suddenly
confesses to us that Balzac had "the temperament of an artist and the
soul of a commercial traveller," or when he sums up an entirely grave
summary of Pindare-Le Brun by telling us that "c'etait un homme de
beaucoup d'esprit, d'un caractere tres meprisable, et excellent ouvrier
de vers," it is no schoolmaster that speaks to pupils, but a friend who
takes his intimates into his confidence.
It has been the habit to depreciate the style of Faguet, which indeed
does not set out to be exquisite, and cannot compare with those of
several of his great predecessors. He has been charged, in his zeal for
the matter of literature, with a neglect of its form. It is true that
his phrases are apt to be curt; he gives little attention to the conduct
of a sentence, further than to define in it his precise intention. But
his criticism has a great purity of design, which is in itself an
element of style. It sets forth to accomplish a certain purpose and it
carries out this aim with the utmost economy of means. No writer less
than Faguet, to use a vulgar expression, "slops about all over the
shop." He has at least this negative beauty of writing, and he adds to
it another, the gift of discussing great authors in a tone that is in
sympathy with their peculiarities. An instance of this, among a hundred,
may be cited from his _Dix-huitieme Siecle_; summing up what he has to
impress upon us about Marivaux, he defines that author in these terms;
"C'est un precieux qui est assez rare et qu'on s'interdit de condamner
au moment meme qu'on le desapprouve, parce qu'on n'est pas sans en jouir
dans le moment meme qu'on en souffre." It would hardly be possible to
put more of critical value into so few words, but moreover it is said as
Marivaux himself might say it.
Faguet had his prejudices, as every honest man may have. He adored the
seventeenth and he loved the nineteenth centuries, but he had almost an
aversion from the eighteenth. He put Buffon first among the writers of
that age, and Montesquieu next; so loyal a spirit as Faguet's could not
but be cordially attracted by Vauvenargues. But the lack of poetry, and,
as he asserted, the lack of philosophy of the Encyclopaedists annoyed
him, and for their greatest name, for Voltaire, he had a positive
hatred. Faguet found it difficult to be just to Diderot, and difficult
to tolerate Rousseau, but to love Voltaire he made no effort whatever;
he acknowledged that feat to be impossible. He did not fear to
contradict himself, and about Rousseau his opinion grew steadily more
favourable, until, in 1913, he positively published five independent
volumes on this one writer alone. But Faguet could never persuade
himself to approach Voltaire with any face but a wry one. Yet, even
here, his antipathy is scarcely to be perceived on the surface. Faguet
always leaves the judgment of his reader independent. He puts the facts
before him; his own irony marks the line of thought which he suggests;
but he is careful never to attempt to bully the reader into acceptance.
Brunetiere is apt to be vociferous in persuasion; Faguet never raises
his voice.
In 1899, being called upon to sum up the qualities of the leading French
critics from 1850 onwards, Faguet found himself confronted with his own
name and work. It was characteristic of his candour and simplicity that
he did not shrink from the task of describing himself, and that he
undertook it without false modesty or affectation. When he comes to
describe Emile Faguet he is as detached, as calmly analytic, as he is
when he speaks of Theophile Gautier or M. Rene Doumic. He defines the
qualities, acknowledges the limitations, and hints at the faults of his
subject. I do not know a case in all literary history where a writer has
spoken of himself in terms more severely judicial. He closes this
remarkable little study with words which we may quote here for their
curious personal interest no less than as an example of Faguet's style:
Laborieux, du reste, assez methodique, consciencieux, en poussant
la conscience jusqu'a etre peu bienveillant, ou en ne sachant pas
pousser le scrupule consciencieux jusqu'a la bienveillance, il a pu
rendre et il a rendu des services appreciables aux etudiants en
litterature, qui etaient le public qu'il a toujours vise. Sans
abandonner la critique, qu'il est a croire qu'il aimera toujours,
il s'est un peu tourne depuis quelques annees du cote des etudes
sociologiques, ou c'est a d'autres qu'a nous qu'il appartient
d'apprecier ses efforts.
In this connexion a phrase of the great critic may be recalled. When the
war broke out in 1914, someone who knew Faguet's absorbing love of books
sympathized with him on the blow to literature. He responded, in a tone
of reproof, "L'avenir national est une chose autrement importante que
l'avenir litteraire."
Those sociological interests were steadily emphasized. Faguet became,
not less in love with great books, but more inclined to turn from their
technical to their ethical value. He became himself a moralist, after
having in so many eloquent volumes analysed the works and the characters
of the politicians and teachers of the nineteenth century. He possessed
a finished faculty for amusing and pleasing while he instructed, and it
was remarkable that in these treatises of his late middle life he
addressed a much wider public than he had ever reached before. His
_Commentaire du Discours sur les Passions_ was a link between the
earlier purely literary treatises and the later analyses of
psychological phenomena, but it was highly successful. Even more
universally popular were the little books on _Friendship_ and _Old Age_,
which enjoyed a larger circulation than any other contemporary works of
their class. Faguet was pleased at his popularity, and felt that he was
recognized as belonging to that "vieille race de moralistes exacts et
fins" of whom La Rochefoucauld had been the precursor. Of these moral
studies, the most abundantly discussed was that which dealt with _Le
Culte de l'Incompetence_ (1910), a book which bears a very remarkable
relation to the state of France when war broke out.
Towards the end of his life, Faguet became a great power in France. He
exercised, from that book-bewildered room in the Rue Monge, a patriotic,
amiable, fraternal influence which permeated every corner of the
French-speaking world. But his health, which had long been failing, gave
way under the strain of the war. He had never given himself any rest
from perpetual literary labour, and he had always said that he knew that
before he was seventy years of age he should be "buried and forgotten."
A third stroke of paralysis carried away the greatest living friend of
literature in France on the 7th of June, 1916, in his sixty-ninth year.
Buried he is at last, to their sorrow, but his compatriots will not
readily forget him.
It is not easy to find common terms in which to describe Faguet and his
remarkable contemporary, Remy de Gourmont. Their two circles of
influence were far-reaching, but did not touch. In the very extensive
literature of each the other is perhaps never mentioned. We may suppose
that it would be almost impossible for a French observer to review them
together without allowing the scale to descend in favour of this name or
of that. But here may come in the use of foreign criticism, which
regards the whole field from a great distance, and without passion. The
contrast between these two writers, both honest, laborious and fruitful,
both absorbed in and submerged by literature, both eager to discover
truth in all directions, was yet greater than their similarity. We have
briefly observed in Faguet the university professor, the great public
interpreter of masterpieces. In Remy de Gourmont, on the other hand, we
meet the man who, scornful of mediocrity and tolerant of nothing but
what is exquisite, stands apart from the crowd, and will scarcely share
his dream with a disciple. Faguet, like a Lord Chancellor of Letters, is
versed in all the legislation of the mind, and lives in a perpetual
elucidation of it. Gourmont, standing in the outer court, attracts the
young and the audacious around him by protesting that no laws exist save
those which are founded on an artist's own eclecticism. Together, or
rather back to back, they addressed almost everyone who was intelligent
in France between 1895 and 1914.
We have seen in Emile Faguet a typical member of the middle class. Remy
de Gourmont was an aristocrat both by descent and by temperament. He was
born on the 4th of April, 1858, in the chateau of La Motte, near
Bazoches-en-Houlme, in the Orne; during his childhood his parents moved
to a still more romantic little manor-house at Mesnil-Villement. These
Norman landscapes are constantly introduced into Gourmont's stories. His
race was of considerable antiquity and distinction; his mother traced
her descent from the great poet, Malherbe; a paternal ancestor was that
Gilles de Gourmont who printed in France the earliest books in Greek and
in Hebrew character. A passion for the Muses, like a fragrant
atmosphere, surrounded the boy from his cradle. He arrived in Paris at
the age of twenty-five, provincially instructed, but already of a
marvellous erudition. He was appointed assistant librarian at the
Bibliotheque Nationale, where for eight years he browsed at will on all
the secret and forgotten wonders of the past, indulging to the full an
insatiable literary curiosity. In 1890 he published a novel, _Sixtine_,
a sort of diary of a very complicated mind which believes itself to be
in love, but cannot be quite sure. It was "cerebral," without action of
any kind, an absurd book, but ingeniously--too ingeniously--written. The
historic interest of _Sixtine_ rests in the fact that it led the
reaction against the naturalism of Zola and the psychology of M. Paul
Bourget. Gourmont now achieved a single English reader, for _Sixtine_
was read by Henry James, but with more curiosity than approval.
Although hardly a book of permanent value, _Sixtine_ had a lasting
effect on the career of its author. It expressed with remarkable
exactitude the sentiments of the group of young men who were now coming
to the front in France. Gourmont became the champion of the "vaporeux,
nuance et sublimise" literature which started about 1890. He accepted
"symbolism," and he became the leader of the symbolist movement, of
which his stern mental training and curious erudition permitted him to
be the brain. He was the prophet of Mallarme, of Verlaine, of
Maeterlinck, of Huysmans, and at the same time he welcomed each younger
revolutionary. All this, of course, was not done in a day, but
reconciliation with the intellectual conventions was made impossible by
a fact which must not be ignored in any sketch of Remy de Gourmont, and
indeed ought to be faced with resolution. In 1891 he was dismissed from
the public service and from the Library, for an article which he
published entitled _Le Joujou Patriotisme_, in which he poured contempt
upon the Army, and openly advocated the abandonment of any idea of the
"Revanche." The chastisement was a severe one, and had an effect on the
whole remainder of Gourmont's life. About the same time his health gave
way, and excluded him from all society, for he was invaded by an
unsightly growth in the face. His hermitage was high up in an old house
in the Rue des Saints Peres, near the quay, and there he sat, day in,
day out, surrounded by his books, in solitude, a monk of literature.
For the next eight or nine years, Gourmont, abandoning politics, in
which he had made so luckless an adventure, devoted himself exclusively
to art and letters. He joined the staff of the _Mercure de France_; and
under its director, and his life-long friend, M. Vallette, he took part
in all the symbolist polemics of the hour. He defended each new man of
merit with his active partisanship; he wrote ceaselessly; verse, art
criticism, humanism, novels, every species of fantastic and esoteric
literature flowed from his abundant pen. These books, many of them
preposterous in their shape, "limited editions" produced in conditions
of archiepiscopal splendour of binding and type, possess, it must be
admitted, little positive value. They are blossoms in the flower-garden
of that heyday of sensuous "symbolism," of which we had a pale
reflection in our London _Yellow Books_ and _Savoy Reviews_. The most
interesting of the publications of Remy de Gourmont during these
feverish years is the little volume called _L'Idealisme_ (1893), in
which he sought to restore to the word "ideal" what he called its
"aristocratic value." A passage may be quoted from an essay in this
elegant and ridiculous treatise, on the beauty of words, irrespective of
their meaning:
Quelles realites me donneront les saveurs que je reve a ce fruit de
l'Inde et des songes, le myrobolan,--ou les couleurs royales dont
je pare l'omphax, ou ses lointaines gloires?
Quelle musique est comparable a la sonorite pure des mots obscurs,
o cyclamor? Et quelle odeur a tes emanations vierges, o
sanguisorbe?
Stevenson--the R.L.S. of "Penny plain and Twopence coloured"--would have
delighted in this.
Gourmont became tired of symbolism rather suddenly, and he buried it in
two volumes which were the best he had yet published: the _Livres des
Masques_ of 1896 and 1898. These have a lasting value as documents, and
they mark the beginning of the author's permanent work as a critic of
letters. In them he insisted on the warning not to let new genius pass
ungreeted because it was eccentrically draped or unfamiliarly featured.
These two volumes are a precious indication of what French independent
literature was at the very close of the nineteenth century, and it is
interesting after twenty years of development and change to note how few
mistakes Remy de Gourmont made in his characterization of types. He took
a central place among these symbolists, grouping around him the men of
genuine talent, repulsing pretenders who were charlatans and
discouraging mere imitators; marshalling, in short, a ferocious little
army of genius in its attack upon the conventions and the traditions of
the age. Time rolls its wheel, and it is amusing to notice that several
of these fierce young revolutionaries are now members of the French
Academy.
At the close of the century Remy de Gourmont abandoned symbolism, and
the world of ideas took possession of him. He plunged deeper into the
study of philosophy, grammar, and history, and he explored new provinces
of knowledge, particularly in the direction of ethnography and biology.
In the midst of this acquisitive labour he was stirred to the
composition of one remarkable work after another, and to this period
belong the four successive publications, which, in the whole of
Gourmont's vast production, stand out as the most interesting and
important which he has written. His reputation stands four-square on
_L'Esthetique de la Langue Francaise_ (1899), _La Culture des Idees_
(1900), _Le Chemin de Velours_ (1902), and _Le Probleme du Style_
(1902). During the thirteen years which followed he wrote incessantly,
and the widening circle of his admirers always found much to praise in
what he produced. But now that we see his life-work as a whole it seems
more and more plain that he revealed his genius freshly and fully in
these four books of his prime, and in a world so crowded as ours the
reader who has much to attract him may be recommended to these as broad
and perhaps sufficient exponents of the character of Gourmont's
teaching.
It has been said by one of his earliest associates, M. Louis Dumur, that
Gourmont was always "le bon chasseur du mensonge humain." This is a
friendly way of describing his intellectual dogmatism and his restless
habit of analysis. He took nothing for granted, and, whether he desired
to be so or not, he was a destructive force. He describes himself, in
one of his rather rare paragraphs of self-portraiture, as "un esprit
desinteresse de tout, et interesse a tout," and this very accurately
defines his attitude. He strikes us as ceaselessly hovering over
hitherto uncontested facts in the passionate desire of proving them to
be fallacies. The epithet "paradoxical," which is often misapplied,
appears to be exactly appropriate to the method of Remy de Gourmont,
which starts by denying the truth of something which everybody has taken
for granted, and then supporting the reversed position by rapid and
ingenious argument. He is unable to accept any convention until he has
resolutely turned it inside out, examined it in every hostile light, and
so dusted and furbished it that it has ceased to be conventional. He was
indefatigable in these researches, and so ingenious as to be often
bewildering and occasionally tiresome.
He has left no book more characteristic than _Le Chemin de Velours_,
which he called a study in the dissociation of ideas. He chose a very
illuminating tag from Pascal as his motto: "ni la contradiction n'est
marque de faussete, ni l'incontradiction n'est marque de verite." The
whole treatise is a comparison between the Jansenist and the Jesuit
system of morals, as revealed in the _Provincial Letters_. Like many
Frenchmen of recent years, Remy de Gourmont liked religion to be
championed, but never by a believer. Neither Port Royal nor the Society
of Jesus would thank him for his disinterested support, but he defends
them, alternately and destructively, with an immense fund of vivacity.
No one has defined more luminously the evangelical doctrine of
Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, and for a while the reader thinks that the
balance will descend on the Jansenist side. But Gourmont is scandalized
to see Calvinism banging the door of salvation in people's faces, while
he applauds the humanity of the Jesuits in holding it wide open, and in
spreading between birth and death a velvet carpet for delicate souls. He
analyses the works of Sarrasa, a Flemish Jesuit, who in 1618 produced an
_Ars semper gaudendi_ which was, according to Gourmont, neither more nor
less than a treatise on the way to make the best of both worlds.
Gourmont was endlessly amused by the indiscreet admissions of Father
Sarrasa.
Nevertheless, the Jesuit type shocked him more than the Jansenist. He
admired the logical penetration of Pascal, his rigidity of thought, his
unalterable ideal of duty, more than the easy-going casuistry of his
opponents. He thought that Protestantism, which rests on abstraction,
was a purer type of religion than the mitigated and humanized
Christianity of Catholicism. But he was irritated by the way in which
Port Royal pushed their spiritual logic to extremes, and he dared to
suggest that Pascal would have been a better and a more useful man if he
had consented to be less holy. Gourmont speculated ingeniously what
would have been the future of philosophical literature if Pascal,
instead of retiring to Port Royal, had joined Descartes in Holland. On
the whole he decides against the Jansenists, because although he sees
that they were noble he suspects them of being inhuman, and of laying
intolerable and needless burdens upon the spirit of man. Remy de
Gourmont considered evangelical Christianity an Oriental religion, not
well fitted for Latin Europe. In all the schisms and heresies of the
churches he thought he saw the Western mind revolting against a
dogmatism which came from Jerusalem. The Jansenist is a pessimist; the
Jesuit, on the other hand, cultivates optimism; he pretends, at all
events, that the soul should be free and joyous, to which end he rolls
out his velvet road towards salvation. Remy de Gourmont concludes that
the final effect of _Les Provinciales_ is to make the reader love the
Jesuits, and when he comes to sum up the matter he is on the side of the
Society, because nothing wounds a civilized man so deeply as the
negation of his free will. It will be seen that neither party gains much
from his sardonic and fugitive approbation.