Ferdinand Brunetière, the celebrated French literary critic, was born in
Toulon, the great military Mediterranean sea-port of France, in the year
1849. His studies were begun in the college of his native city and
continued in Paris, in the Lycée Louis le Grand, where in the class of
philosophy he came under Professor Émile Charles, by whose original and
profound though decidedly sad way of thinking he was powerfully
influenced. His own ambition then was to become a teacher in the
University of France, an ambition which seemed unlikely to be ever
realized, as he failed to secure admission to the celebrated École
Normale Supérieure, in the competitive examination which leads up to
that school. Strangely enough, about fifteen years later he was, though
not in possession of any very high University degree, appointed to the
Professorship of French Literature in the school which he had been
unable to enter as a scholar, and his appointment received the hearty
indorsement of all the leading educational authorities in France.
[Illustration: Ferdiand Brunetière]
For several years after leaving the Lycée Louis le Grand, while
completing his literary outfit by wonderfully extensive reading,
Ferdinand Brunetière lived on stray orders for work for publishers. He
seldom succeeded in getting these, and when he got any they were seldom
filled. Thus he happened to be commissioned by the firm of Germer,
Baillière and Company to write a history of Russia, which never was and
to all appearances never will be written. The event which determined the
direction of his career was the acceptance by the Revue des Deux Mondes,
in 1875, of an article upon contemporary French novelists. François
Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder and editor of the world-famed
French bi-monthly, felt that he had found in the young critic the man
whom French literary circles had been waiting for, and who was to be
Sainte-Beuve's successor; and François Buloz was a man who seldom
made mistakes.
French literary criticism was just then at a very low ebb. Sainte-Beuve
had been dead about five years; his own contemporaries, Edmond Schérer
for instance, were getting old and discouraged; the new generation
seemed to be turning unanimously, in consequence of the disasters of the
Franco-German war and of the Revolution of September, 1870, to military
or political activity. The only form of literature which had power to
attract young writers was the novel, which they could fill with the
description of all the passions then agitating the public mind. That a
man of real intellectual strength should then give his undivided
attention to pure literature seemed a most unlikely phenomenon; but all
had to acknowledge that the unlikely had happened, soon after Ferdinand
Brunetière had become the regular literary critic of the Revue des
Deux Mondes.
Fortunately the new critic did not undertake to walk in the footsteps of
Sainte-Beuve. In the art of presenting to the reader the marrow of a
writer's work, of making the writer himself known by the description of
his surroundings, the narrative of his life, the study of the forces by
which he was influenced, the illustrious author of the 'Causeries du
Lundi' remains to this day without a rival or a continuator. Ferdinand
Brunetière had a different conception of the duties of a literary
critic. The one fault with which thoughtful readers were apt to charge
Sainte-Beuve was, that he failed to pass judgment upon the works and
writers; and this failure was often, and not altogether unjustly,
ascribed to a certain weakness in his grasp of principles, a certain
faint-heartedness whenever it became necessary to take sides. Any one
who studies Brunetière can easily see that from the start his chief
concern was to make it impossible for any one to charge him with the
same fault. He came in with a set of principles which he has since
upheld with remarkable steadfastness and courage. In an age when nearly
every one was turning to the future and advocating the doctrine and the
necessity of progress, when the chief fear of most men was that they
should appear too much afraid of change, Brunetière proclaimed time and
again that there was no safety for any nation or set of men except in a
staunch adherence to tradition. He bade his readers turn their minds
away from the current literature of the day, and take hold of the
exemplars of excellence handed down to us by the great men of the past.
Together with tradition he upheld authority, and therefore preferred to
all others the period in which French literature and society had most
willingly submitted to authority, that is, the seventeenth century and
the reign of Louis XIV. When compelled to speak of the literature of the
day, he did it in no uncertain tones. His book 'The Naturalistic Novel'
consists of a series of articles in which he studies Zola and his
school, upholding the old doctrine that there are things in life which
must be kept out of the domain of art and cannot be therein introduced
without lowering the ideal of man. Between the naturalistic and the
idealistic novel he unhesitatingly declares for the latter, and places
George Sand far above the author of 'L'Assommoir.'
But the great success of his labors cannot be said to have been due
solely or even mainly to the principles he advocated. Other critics have
appeared since--Messrs. Jules Lemaître and Anatole France, for
instance,--who antagonize almost everything that he defends and defend
almost everything that he antagonizes, and whose success has hardly been
inferior to his. Neither is it due to any charm in his style.
Brunetière's sentences are compact,--indeed, strongly knit
together,--but decidedly heavy and at times even clumsy. What he has to
say he always says strongly, but not gracefully. He has a remarkable
appreciation of the value of the words of the French language, but his
arrangement of them is seldom free from mannerisms. What, then, has made
him the foremost literary critic of the present day? The answer is,
knowledge and sincerity. No writer of the present day, save perhaps
Anatole France, is so accurately informed of every fact that bears upon
literary history. Every argument he brings forward is supported by an
array of incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling. No one can
argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind
of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with
dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk handles
the figures of a check list. And all this comes forward in Brunetière's
articles in the most natural, we had almost said casual way. The fact
takes its place unheralded in the reasoning. It is there because it has
to be there, not because the writer wishes to make a display of his
wonderful knowledge; and thus it happens that Ferdinand Brunetière's
literary articles are perhaps the most instructive ones ever written in
the French language. They are moreover admirably trustworthy. It would
never come to this author's mind to hide a fact that goes against any of
his theories. He feels so sure of being in the right that he is always
willing to give his opponents all that they can possibly claim.
Of late years, moreover, it must be acknowledged that Brunetière's mind
has given signs of remarkable broadening. Under the influence of the
doctrine of evolution, he has undertaken to class all literary facts as
the great naturalists of the day have classed the facts of physiology,
and to show that literary forms spring from each other by way of
transformation in the same way as do the forms of animal or vegetable
life. Already three works have been produced by him since he entered
upon this new line of development: a history of literary criticism in
France, which forms the first and hitherto only published volume of a
large work, (The Evolution of Literary Forms); a work on the French
drama, (The Periods of the French Theatre); and a treatise on modern
French poetry, (The Evolution of French Lyric Poetry during the
Nineteenth Century.) The second and last of these were first delivered
by their author from the professor's chair or the lecturer's platform,
where he has managed to display some of the greatest gifts of the public
speaker. Most of M. Brunetière's literary articles have been collected
in book form under the following titles:--(Questions of Criticism) (2
vols.), (History and Criticism) (3 vols.), (Critical Studies on the
History of French Literature) (6 vols.), (The Naturalistic Novel)
(1 vol.).
At various times remarkable addresses have been delivered by him on
public occasions, in which he has often represented the French Academy
since his election to that illustrious body. Unfortunately his
productive literary activity has slackened of late. In 1895 he was
called to the editorship of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and since his
assumption of this responsible editorial position he has published only
two or three articles, bearing upon moral and educational questions.
To pass final judgment upon a man whose development is far from
completed is an almost impossible task. Still it may be said that with
the exception of Sainte-Beuve's (Causeries du Lundi) and (Nouveaux
Lundis,) nothing exists that can teach the reader so much about the
history of French literature as Brunetière's works. The doctrinal side,
to which the author himself undoubtedly attaches the greatest
importance, will strike the reader as often very questionable. Too often
Brunetière seems in his judgments to be quite unconsciously actuated by
a dislike of the accepted opinion of the present day. His love of the
past bears a look of defiance of the present, not calculated to win the
reader's assent. But even this does not go without its good side. It
gives to Brunetière's judgments a unity which is seldom if ever found in
the works of those whose chief labors have been spent in the often
ungrateful task of making a hurried public acquainted with the
uninterrupted stream of literary production.