II. MIL-HUIT-CENT-TRENTE…

II. MIL-HUIT-CENT-TRENTE

THE ‘GLOBE’—CHARLES DE RÉMUSAT, VITET, J. J. AMPÈRE—SAINTE-BEUVE: HIS TOPOGRAPHY— THE EARLIER ARTICLES—3‘PORTRAITS LITTÉRAIRES’ AND ‘PORTRAITS DE FEMMES’— THE ‘PORTRAITS CONTEMPORAINS’—HE “ARRIVES”— PORT-ROYAL, ITS LITERARY EPISODES—ON RACINE— ‘CHATEAUBRIAND ET SON GROUPE LITTÉRAIRE’— FAULTS FOUND WITH IT—ITS EXTRAORDINARY MERITS, AND FINAL “DICTA”— THE ‘CAUSERIES’ AT LAST—THEIR LENGTH, ETC.— BRICKS OF THE HOUSE—HIS OCCASIONAL POLEMIC— THE ‘NOUVEAUX LUNDIS’— THE CONCLUSION OF THIS MATTER— MICHELET AND QUINET—HUGO—‘WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE‘— ‘LITTÉRATURE ET PHILOSOPHIE’—THE ‘CROMWELL’ PREFACE, AND THAT TO THE ‘ORIENTALES’— CAPITAL POSITION OF THIS LATTER—THE “WORK”— NISARD: HIS ‘ÆGRI SOMNIA’—HIS ‘ESSAIS SUR LE ROMANTISME’— THEIR “CULPA MAXIMA”—GAUTIER—HIS THEORY: “ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC.— HIS PRACTICE: ‘LES GROTESQUES’—‘HISTOIRE DU ROMANTISME,’ ETC.— UBIQUITY OF FELICITY IN HIS CRITICISM—SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN— PLANCHE— WEIGHT OF HIS CRITICISM—MAGNIN—MÉRIMÉE.

[Sidenote: The Globe.]

It is well known, even to not very careful students of French literature, that the famous term which has been taken as the title of this chapter is something of a misnomer,—that the still more famous “representation of Hernani” was in effect the shouting after the battle, not the battle itself. The pains which have been spent above on the Empire Critics, greater and smaller, must have been most ill-bestowed if they have not shown that the working of the world-spirit had done already much of what had to be done—that the i's only had to be dotted and the t's crossed, by the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century. The crossing and dotting was done, as usual, with some violence, and it attracted corresponding attention; but the letters had been shaped long before. Dubois and Pierre Leroux had founded the famous Globe—object of the admiration of Goethe and cradle of the talent of Sainte-Beuve and others—in 1824. It furnishes comfort and support to those who believe that criticism is nothing if not philosophical, by the very strong philosophical colour which it took on. Jouffroy was one of its chief pillars; and attention has often been drawn to his tractate in it, Comment les dogmes finissent (as to which it can only be remarked that no dogma has ever died yet, and that every dogma, as a natural product of something in human nature, is immortal till human nature perishes), as a symptom and symbol of its literary as of its other doctrines. [Sidenote: Charles de Rémusat, Vitet, J. J. Ampère.] We are here, however, only concerned with its strictly (if not merely) literary contributors, Sainte-Beuve himself, Charles de Rémusat, J. J. Ampère, Vitet, and the rest. Of Sainte-Beuve we shall have plenty to say presently; the rest need not delay us long. The extraordinarily brilliant talents of Charles de Rémusat[565] were always touching literature: but philosophy and politics constantly drew him away from the Muses proper, though whether he talks of Abelard or of Anselm, of Bacon or of Channing, he is never negligible. Vitet became a politician and an antiquary chiefly, but has left at least one remarkable literary document in his well-known essay on the Chanson de Roland.[566] As for J. J. Ampère, he supplemented and furthered the study of foreign literatures, which Villemain had made almost obligatory, by an unusual frequentation of foreign countries; and besides some excellent work on the literary history (especially in mediæval times) of his own language, wrote many books of literary travel.

On the whole, however (for Sainte-Beuve grew out of and far above his Globe stage), the general interest of the reviewing in this paper is superior to that of its component parts as criticisms and its individual authors as critics. Those who now read Goethe’s remarks on it to Eckermann[567] may, if they neglect the historic estimate, be a little puzzled at the great German’s enthusiasm. He was right, however, as, in a general way, he usually was. These young men took literature with a wider knowledge and purview of it than the old critics had brought to bear, and with very much less subservience to particular theory as to what the book ought to be, and a more obliging though quite independent attention to what it was. Their “eclecticism” (which was philosophically the tone or ticket of their paper) adapted itself especially well to these literary exercitations: indeed Eclecticism is never so well justified of any of her necessarily mixed family as in literature. But their greatest is their greatest by so far, that we may well turn to him.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve: his topography.]

Sainte-Beuve was not infrequently seized with an amiable and very convenient fancy for constructing small retrospective guides and clues to the mighty maze of his fifty or sixty volumes of critical essays. The most definite and important, written in September 1861, just at the beginning of the Nouveaux Lundis, and appended to the second volume of the Garnier edition of Portraits Littéraires, distributes his whole career under heads. First comes his novitiate in the Globe up to 1827; then the Romantic campaign of the Ronsard, the Tableau du Seizième Siècle, and the articles of 1828-29; then the nearly twenty years’ stretch of his contributions (preserved in the Portraits Littéraires themselves and the Portraits Contemporains) to the Revue des Deux Mondes, with Port-Royal as a solid cut-and-come-again accompaniment; then Chateaubriand et son Groupe; then the Causeries du Lundi properly so called, and, lastly, the series which he was beginning as he wrote. The work of the first period of which he speaks with some disdain—ce ne sont que des essais sans importance—he never actually republished; but towards the end of his life he repented and intended to do so, and such part of it as could be recovered appeared posthumously, with a good many waifs and strays of other kinds, as Premiers Lundis. If to these we add the Étude sur Virgile[568] and perhaps the P. J. Proudhon,[569] we shall nearly have exhausted his available stores, and quite, I think, those of critical interest.[570]

[Sidenote: The earlier articles.]

The earliest detachment of this great army, as presented in that régiment de marche the Premiers Lundis (made up of all sort of things from these raw recruits to the poor old veterans of Senate-speech more than forty years later), might deserve their author’s modest or merciless sentence from the severe point of view of his greatest pupil. They are certainly not “chief and principal things” in themselves. Sainte-Beuve was very young (barely twenty) when he began to write them, and, as we have said, it is nearly impossible for a very young critic to be a very good critic, though it is deplorably possible for a rather old one to be more than rather bad. Some of them are so short as to give no room for much display of individual and original talent. Sometimes they deal with things ephemeral, and now forgotten, in a merely journalist fashion. Sometimes, as in the dealing with Scott’s Napoleon, inevitable and insuperable prejudices and preoccupations come in. One may even admit frankly that, nonnunquam, there are symptoms which lead one to understand, after a fashion, the charges of dulness[571] and of galimatias which were brought against Sainte-Beuve by persons from Balzac[572] downwards, and which have sometimes seemed mere spiteful lunacy to readers of the Causeries at their most brilliant period only. But to the expert there is unmistakable and not merely fancied quality even here. There is already the indefinable, but in previous critics so unfortunately rare, desire to appreciate, to understand. There is almost always a sober judgment; not seldom a delicate if rather tentative subtlety. Above all, there are signs of something very different from the sham omniscience which is such a temptation to the young reviewer,—of a range and width of reading, classical, modern, foreign, most surprising and most unusual at the time.

The Tableau,[573] with its associated selection of Ronsard, and some other matter appended to its later editions, is quite a landmark in French literary history. It turned (or rather marked the turning of) the tide in regard to sixteenth-century literature, interested the youth of the day in the Pléiade, stimulated the new prosodical movements, did much else. But its author’s powers were immature: and there is not a great deal of the highest critical importance in its individual utterances and judgments. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the statement in the Preface that “L’Art consacre et purifie tout ce qu’il touche”—a companion axiom to the Preface of the Orientales, which neither critic nor poet would have fully indorsed in their later days, though many of their followers would.

[Sidenote: Portraits Littéraires and Portraits de Femmes.]

The Portraits Littéraires, with its satellite or tow-boat the Portraits de Femmes, appears to have been a sort of favourite with Sainte-Beuve. He rearranged it early from the original Critiques et Portraits Littéraires;[574] he sifted out the Portraits de Femmes, as if to concentrate special attention on them; he added from time to time appetising and really important bonuses and primes of appendices, Pensées, personal confidences, and the like. A good deal of his best-known work is in the four volumes (including the Femmes) as they are now[575] current: and probably the collection meets the taste, of the general reader at least, as well as any other of his numerous collections, if not better. This, I venture to think,—using a phrase of an author who would probably not have agreed with me in this particular instance,—is because the general reader “does not want criticism,” or does not want it first of all. Sainte-Beuve, who knew everything, and cared not to conceal it, knew, as the general reader does not know, that the causerie, whether in volume- or essay-form, of mingled biography and criticism, was of English, not French invention: and he confesses that he longed to imitate it. He did so, and carried it even beyond Johnson: but he was frequently tempted to let the biography and the personality rather swamp the criticism, and I think he has done so here. In the Portraits de Femmes especially, be it gallantry, gossip-loving, or God knows what, though there may be much interest, there is uncommonly little criticism, even on La Rochefoucauld, who presents himself in the middle of the galaxy with a singular and sultanesque intrusion. On some of the subjects, such as Mme. de Longueville, there could be none: even on Mme. de Sévigné and Mme. de Staël, where the opportunities were infinite, there is little; and where there is most, as in the case of Pauline de Meulan (Mme. Guizot), it is where we care least about it. Of history and life plenty, and therefore of amusement much; of criticism very little.

Life and its farrago—of which I desire not to speak disrespectfully more than of any other equator, but which are not my subject—have rather less exclusive hold in the Portraits Littéraires proper and segregated, but still a greater hold than literature. In those days Sainte-Beuve, as he himself more than once confesses, was even more of a philosopher than of a littérateur. There are of course exceptions, where the past greatness of the author takes the future greatness of the critic by storm beforehand, and forces acquaintance and recognition from its destined brother. Even in these cases one often feels that the critic “is not ready”—that the hour has not fully come. The early and strongly “Romantic” articles on the great classics of the seventeenth century, which open the first volume, are not merely wrong with the crudity of early partisanship, as he himself represents them. Indeed in this respect they are hardly wrong at all. But they are not right in the right way. Except the very remarkable piece, “Du Génie Critique et de Bayle,” where the vocation asserted itself, there is hardly one of them (if even this is) worthy of Sainte-Beuve. The “Diderot,” to make a move forward, is capital on the man, a little short of capital on the writer. The best critical thing in the volume is the “Nodier”—much later in date (1840) than the rest of its contents. The second volume, which has something of this advantage, in point of time, contains much better things:—the well-known “Molière,” the long (some would say the disproportionately long) “Fontanes,” the “Joseph de Maistre,”[576] the “Naudé,” and a delightful paper on Aloysius Bertrand of Gaspard de la Nuit,[577] which combines the old Romantic enthusiasm with the acquired craftsmanship. The third, better still in this latter respect, has less interesting subjects, except in the case of the “Theocritus” and the “Mlle. Aissé,” which is again a “Portrait de Femme,” hardly at all literary. A sacred shame invades me at even appearing to speak disrespectfully of this book. Compared with anything not of its author’s, and not of that author’s at a future time, it would be very great: but its greater younger brothers are its enemies.

[Sidenote: The Portraits Contemporains.]

Still not of these is the Portraits Contemporains. One feels inclined to say at the beginning, and perhaps not disinclined to repeat the saying at the end, that the title announces an attempt foredoomed to failure.[578] It is almost inevitable that a contemporary portrait in literature should fail to be a likeness, should be at best a charge, from one point of view or another. Sainte-Beuve himself in one place (with a naïveté more characteristic of him than those who have not read him very long and very carefully may think, but seldom so openly expressed) admits that his sitters had an awkward trick of falsifying his presentations. He had traced out for them, more or less early in their career, that career as they ought to pursue it; but lo! they would follow their own stars, and not his tracings and indications. This is one danger, and a common, if not universal one, with its result,—not often realised in Sainte-Beuve’s own case, but constantly in that of smaller critics,—that the prophet loses his temper with these disobedient ducklings, and rates them, not because they behave badly, but because they behave in a way different from that which he expected and wished. But more dangerous still, and less to be avoided even by the staunchest and most vigilant censors, are those insidious, innumerable, ineluctable personal or partisan differences and prejudices which dazzle and trouble the contemporary’s eyes: and, worst perhaps of all, that incurable “too-nearness,” that hopeless lack of the firm perspective of the past, which clings to him, and will not let him attain to clearness and the Whole. Accordingly the Portraits Contemporains are, with the Portraits Littéraires, the most unequal of Sainte-Beuve’s work, and all the more often disappointing because of the contemporaneity.

That reserve, indeed, which was made at the end of the notice of the Portraits Littéraires is even more imperatively called for here, and it is most important that while recognising that the real Sainte-Beuve— the plenilune—is as yet but crescent, we should recognise his brightness and his crescency. It is, for instance, not merely hasty, but fundamentally uncritical, to exclaim at the length, the fulness, the cordiality, with which figures like Fontanes, Fauriel, Daunou are treated; and to contrast, with abomination, the hesitancy, the grudging, the reserves, in the case not merely of Hugo,[579] but of Vigny, Lamartine, even Musset, the roughness on Balzac, the comparative respect paid to Sue, and the comparatively cavalier treatment long accorded to Gautier. Even in regard to the great stone of stumbling, it is necessary, for us who were born later, to remember that however ardent in the chevelu and gilet rouge and hierro! manner we may think we should have been if we had been born earlier, the Hugo of the time before the Châtiments, and the Contemplations, and the Legénde, great as he is, is not the Hugo of that glorious trinity. As for the Empire Critics, no impatience at their disproportionate allowance ought to prevent acknowledgment of Sainte-Beuve’s rare equity and true critical spirit towards the immediate predecessors with whom he did not agree—a thing, as we have seen, deplorably rare in criticism.

Indeed, save in that Supreme Court of Critical History where the dignity of the place excuses the personal insignificance of the judge, and puts the greatest author on his defence, apology for these five volumes would be needless, and almost impertinent. They certainly need not fear assay either of pieces or of passages. In the First, where most of the dubious places occur, where the judgment is most immature, and the

style most inclined to the jargonish,[580] the “Senancour,” and in part the “Lamennais,” demand special notice, while the opening of the “Béranger,” with its sketch of the causerie method, is of extreme interest, and the frequent references to English writers[581] show us already the largeness of the critic’s equipment. The Second is perhaps to be more cordially welcomed for the miscellanies at its end (including the striking critical imaginations put into the mouths of Diderot and Hazlitt) than for any of its more imposing constituents. The “Balzac” article, though it is in the main just, has a harshness and a touch of personal rudeness about it which are very unusual in Sainte-Beuve, and not quite explicable. The novelist might certainly be excused for thinking it wantonly uncivil. It is a little distressing, too, to read the hostile appendix which Sainte-Beuve ill-advisedly put to his “Montalembert” paper. But “Misères que tout cela!” The “Ballenche” and the “Villemain,” the “Mme. Desbordes-Valmore” and the “Ulric Guttinguer,”[582] nearly, if not quite, take the taste out. In vol. iii., an extremely interesting opening on Vinet, and a good close on Mérimée, hold between them things even better and sometimes well known— the “Töpffer,” the “Xavier de Mestre,” the “Jasmin,” the “J. J. Ampère”— and show, in the “Magnin” and elsewhere, that admirably horizontal view of all periods of French literature which Sainte-Beuve was almost the first to take, and in which he has had far too few followers, whether in regard to French literature or others.

This reappears in the “Fauriel,”[583] which takes up nearly a third of vol. iv., and is there accompanied by an excellent paper on Barante, a longer but much less capital one on Thiers, two of Sainte-Beuve’s best known pieces on Leopardi and Parny, and one—for us—of peculiar interest on Daunou, containing perhaps the most vivid, and at the same time delicate, sketch in existence of the latest type of Neo-classic critic in France, before M. Brunetière’s revival sixty years later,—a type without La Harpe’s exaggeration and caricature, with a certain mildness and toleration towards the newer things, but secretly and saturatedly convinced that Reason is the Goddess of Literature, that fine verse is “almost as good as fine prose,” and that fineness in both consists of absolute good sense, logical connection, grammatical impeccability, and a horror of the verbum inusitatum. In this, too, the later and more perfect manner is increasingly present throughout; and, naturally, still more so in the Fifth, where the dates bring us to the very eve of the great period itself, and the essays are sometimes hardly distinguishable from the work thereof. The very best of these, perhaps, are the three classical pieces (for Sainte-Beuve was never prudish about titles, and not more than half of the Portraits in this volume deal with contemporaries in any sense) on Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Meleager, in which, not for the first time, but for the first time in nearly or quite his full force, he once more makes a new departure in criticism by handling antiquity in true causerie style. But the “Desaugiers,” the “Louise Labé,” and the “Casimir Delavigne” are also noteworthy, while the paper on Gautier’s Les Grotesques, a little meticulous and pedagogic in parts, and written in avowed protest of a mild kind, is still more so.[584]

[Sidenote: He “arrives.”]

In fact, by about 1845[585] he had very nearly developed his full powers, and he was shaking off the awkward transition state when he had ceased to be romantique à plusieurs (he never was à tous) crins, and not yet become himself, and himself only. He had almost accomplished the causerie, the mixture of biography, and criticism, and “talk about it,” which Dryden, I maintain, is the first to have actually hit upon, which Johnson had strengthened but a little stiffened in the Lives, and which he himself re-fashioned by taking hints of depth and insight from Coleridge and the English Companions, touches of grace and engouement out of a score of French eighteenth-century critics, from Fontenelle and Diderot down to Fontanes and Daunou, adding knowledge of literary history, and a not too peremptory theory of time and milieu, from the Germans and the ambient air, enthusiasm from the still smouldering hearth of the deserted cénacle, and that magic and indefinable dose, that “little of my own sauce,” as Mrs Tibbs has it, which genius provides, and of which it keeps the secret. His ability to concoct this mixture, or rather to produce this new organism, had been by this time almost fully shown; but the final proof was given, and the new kind was definitely named and sent abroad, only after the composition of the most substantive work (except Port-Royal) which he had yet attempted, and the best—itself displaying the gifts he had now acquired in the fullest measure. Probably the critical moment was hastened, as so often happens, by an external catastrophe, the upset of the July Monarchy, and by that transplantation into Belgium for a time which, though he has put the best face on it, was certainly an exile, and by no means wholly a voluntary one.

[Sidenote: Port-Royal,]

We must, however, first take some notice of Port-Royal, which, either by cause or coincidence, was also the product of a journey, if not an exile, being originally delivered in the form of lectures at Lausanne. It[586] is, of course, the most important and substantive single work of its author—the only one, in fact, to which the older and more exacting definition of a book would have shown itself complaisant. It occupied, with completions and revisions, twenty years of his life; it contains perhaps the most elaborate and masterly exposition of that system of combined literary, historical, and social inquiry into the life of a period which he did so much to introduce, and so much more to establish as a literary Kind; and it expresses and registers notably those changes of opinion which made him, in the last two decades of his life, an exponent of an almost entirely irreligious view of life itself. With this aspect of it we do not here concern ourselves; but the book has far too much which does directly concern us, in the strictest construction of our own plan, not to receive detailed attention.

[Sidenote: its literary episodes.]

I do not know that those “older and more exacting definitions,” which have been just referred to, would pass, without demur, the features which make it of this importance to us. It is true that many, if not most, of the more distinguished men of letters of that century which, in the general judgment, has been regarded as the greatest century of letters in France, had more or less connection with Port Royal: nay, more, that not a few of the Port Royalists of the outer and even inner circles were great men of letters themselves. But whether this entirely justifies (to take examples from the first two volumes only) the inclusion in the book of analyses of Polyeucte and Saint-Genest, which would be ample for extensive monographs on Corneille and Rotrou respectively,—of an elaborate study of the elder Balzac of which the same may be said,—is a very arguable point. Still, the inclusion gives us the book; and, even if it did not, I am not inclined to be strait-laced on these points, or to chicane about the relation of the episodes to the epic.

Let us then be as kind to Sainte-Beuve as he was to himself, and admit what (feeling, I suppose, uneasy) he pleads at vol. ii. p. 107, “Nous voici, ce semble, bien loin de Port Royal; pas si loin que l’on croit”— that the spirit of the two plays is quite Port-Royalist, that Balzac wrote letters to M. de Saint-Cyran (so he did to most people, but no matter), that Pascal, Nicole, Racine come in of course; that even the Mémoires de Grammont are not quite extraneous, for was not la belle Hamilton herself (despite her nez retroussé and her Cupid’s-bow mouth) educated there? We are, in short, to take our literary goods as we find them, and as fate and the author provide: and they certainly provide them in plenty. No detailed examinations of Sainte-Beuve’s are more careful than those of the two plays. If he is a little hard, in the text, on that Christian (and semi-Gascon) Socrates, and writer of most handsome letters, who dwelt on the banks of the Charente, he repairs it in an appendix. The references to minor Louis XIII. literature (though injured by Sainte-Beuve’s dislike to quaintness) are never to be missed: and it is needless to say the same of the whole dealing with Pascal, and of the chapters devoted to the famous labours of the Port-Royalists themselves, in literary and philosophical education. Tillemont, if not exactly a lion in literature, is one of the greatest of lion’s providers therein, and Nicole cannot be denied the title of man of letters. Malebranche comes in as an opponent, Racine as a pupil, though as an ungrateful pupil: and on all these and others Sainte-Beuve indulges in literary excursus of all but his best kind.

[Sidenote: On Racine.]

The Racine passage is the best worth dwelling on of these, because what Frenchmen say on Racine is always interesting. We know, of course, beforehand that Sainte-Beuve will be, to a certain extent, juste-milieu,—that he will neither be of those who denounce with rage, nor deplore with pity or contempt, the poor foreigners who cannot hear the celestial music of the great doucereux, nor of those who approach more or less nearly to the view of the poor foreigners themselves. But the piece is specially interesting because it is perhaps the most distinct general retractation of the critic’s ultra-Romantic creed, and because it expresses much the same views as those (very probably derived from it) of Mr Arnold. You must not, says Sainte-Beuve, attempt to judge Racine by passages; there Hugo, Lamartine, even much lesser moderns will beat him. You must judge the whole, and take into consideration the support which each part gives to, and in turn derives from, the others. Nay, more, Racine is “moins imprévu, moins éclatant, moins héroïque, moins transportant” than Corneille, but more “equal,” &c. “L’unité, l’ensemble chez Racine se subordonne tout.” Sainte-Beuve even thinks that he could have done the many poetic things that he did not do as well as those which he did, and that in them (here we may all agree) “on aurait le même Racine.” But did he not lose something under the desperate hook of Boileau? Perhaps. “Il n’avait pas un démon déterminé.” You can understand him at once as you cannot Shakespeare or Molière. He presents the perfection of poetic style, même pour ceux qui n’aiment pas essentiellement la poésie. And the critic, with what some, I suppose, would call a touch of his “perfidy,” adds, “Là, c’est le point faible, s’il en est un.” Let us rather say that, while all reasonable praise of Racine may be read in the lines of this criticism, all reasonable dispraise of him may be read between those lines.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire.]

The great critical truth, that not merely is the tongue of the critic loosed but his eyes are opened by the death of his subject, has seldom been better illustrated than by the volumes entitled Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire, originally delivered as lectures at Liége when Sainte-Beuve had left France to the March-haredom of the Second Republic. Of course we must remember that he had had more than twenty years of critical practice wherein to grow in critical wisdom and stature; that in the last sixteen or seventeen, especially, since he had shed his Saint-Simonian and Lamennaisian crotchets, he had (losing some fancy and enthusiasm with them) acquired immensely greater knowledge, critical delicacy, critical insight in most ways; and that, accordingly, the Portraits and other pieces of the ’Forties are, in almost every respect except romantic and poetic furia, superior to those of the ’Thirties. But this will not entirely account for the excellence of the Chateaubriand, which is a sort of central “broad” in the stream of Sainte-Beuve’s criticism, from which it flows thereafter ever deeper, wider, and clearer. The book indeed is not—what book, and especially what critical book, is?—to be praised unreservedly or with very slight reserves. The common accusations of “envy,” “treachery,” “malignity,” “intolerance of greatness,” and the like, brought against Sainte-Beuve, are exaggerated at the best, and at the worst simply silly. They come partly from the general dislike and suspicion of the critic, who is a critic wholly or mainly, partly from unintelligent, if not quite ungenerous partisanship, partly from the most polluted of all sources, personal and spiteful gossip. But, as nearly always happens, there is some shred of justification for them, and the matter is important enough to be dealt with once for all here.

[Sidenote: Faults found with it.]

Rarely—so rarely that it is an almost unknown event—shall a man practise, as Sainte-Beuve had for years and decades been practising, criticism of his contemporaries and in many cases friends, without exciting ill-feeling. But that ill-feeling becomes still more certain, and its complexion is likely to be darker, when the criticism is of the peculiar character which it is Sainte-Beuve’s greatest claim in the general view (not quite in mine) to have perfected, if not actually invented. It is true that, in the case of his living subjects, he moves about, among the extra-literary personal traits, which it is his delight to assemble and to group beside the literary details in heightening or contrasting light, with a cat-like dexterity. But even cats sometimes upset things: and the things among which Sainte-Beuve moved were much more ticklish and unstable than the objects of the cat’s legerde_pied_. Moreover, he actually had, as some, though by no means all other great critics have had, a certain predilection for the secondary. He never quite attains to the Longinian soundness of view on the faults-and-beauties question; and it is particularly unfortunate that the two greatest men of letters of his own time and country, Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, were men who specially require a Longinian judgment. Nor am I disposed to deny that his attitude towards the great Beltenebroso of French Literature “doth something smack; doth a little grow to.” Sainte-Beuve’s strange Bonapartism—the strangest instance[587] of that most incomprehensible of political faiths—may have had a little to do with this: but one suspects, putting gossip aside, something more. There was, no doubt, much injustice in the too famous “Mérimée était gentilhomme: Sainte-Beuve ne l'était pas,” but there was an infinitesimal something in it.[588]

Again, to pass to a less “scabrous” subject, the scheme of the book leaves a very little to desire: it may be argued, with some justice, that Sainte-Beuve might better have proceeded entirely by the planet-and-satellite method which he has partly adopted, instead of sometimes mixing planet and satellite up, and sometimes keeping them separate.

[Sidenote: Its extraordinary merits,]

But the critical merits of the book are quite extraordinary. I know nothing earlier even approaching it as a comprehensive review of a great writer; and the details are even more admirable than the admirable ensemble. As for the latter, whatever may be Sainte-Beuve’s insinuations, whatever his want of cordiality for Chateaubriand the man and the politician,[589] it is impossible to charge him with the least inadequacy as regards Chateaubriand the writer. Like others, he dwells a little too much on the obligatory “images”; but unlike others, he does not limit Chateaubriand’s powers to them; and he is more likely to be thought by foreign critics excessive than grudging in his assignment and recognition of those powers. He does the amplest justice to the immense advance, in intensity and range, of “René” over Bernardin and Jean Jacques. He sees perfectly well that the best and most characteristic part of Byron is only Chateaubriand in English, in verse, with a few more yataghans, and with no crucifixes. He has here gone nearer, I think, to a real “grasp” of the writer, and the whole writer (alas! not of nothing but the writer) than in any other instance.

As for the details, one simply punctuates the book with bravo!s, if reading merely for enjoyment, and the note-book is never out of one’s hand if one is reading for reference. It “enfists” you, as the French say, at once, and it never lets the grasp go, but tightens it ever again and again. Take the admirable conclusion of the second Lecture,[590] with its indication of the way in which Chateaubriand combines the appeal of ancient poetry, of mediæval romance, and of the new fancy for nature, and turn, or rather come (for there should be no turning or skipping in this book) to the justification of the last point in the Fourth.[591]

[Sidenote: and final dicta.]

But it is at the end of the Seventh lecture, in the special critique of Atala, that Sainte-Beuve first, I think, shows the wonderful critical mastery which was to distinguish him for the remaining twenty years of his life; and the proofs multiply as we turn the pages. In whom elsewhere—even in Coleridge—shall we find two such sentences, on the verso and recto of the same leaf,[592] showing such different kinds not merely of mastery but of supremacy as those that follow—the last of the Eighth lecture, and, save for a mere bow to the audience, the first of the Ninth? He has, in the first, been contrasting Paul et Virginie (for which he, like almost all Frenchmen, has an affection incomprehensible to us), and he has to admit the transcendence of its successor. “Elle [Atala] gardait,” he says, “son ascendant troublant: au milieu de toutes les reserves qu’une saine critique oppose, la flamme divine y a passé.... On y sent le philtre—le poison qui, une fois connu, ne se guérit pas; on emporte avec soi la flèche empoisonnée du désert.” Dixit! There are critics who feel the philtre and who carry the arrow with them, and there are those who do not.

The other passage is, “Savoir bien lire un livre en le jugeant chemin faisant, et sans cesser de le goûter, c’est presque tout l’art du critique. Cet art consiste encore à comparer.... Faites cela, et laissez-vous faire.” How different this cool prescription from the enthusiasm of the last, and yet how equal in its finality!

I could bestow much more of my tediousness on the reader in regard to this wonderful book: but its allotted space is nearly filled. Once only do I find a pettiness, in fact a falsity, where[593] he carps at the phrase, “A combien de rivages n’ai-je pas vu depuis se briser les mêmes flots que je contemple ici,” in the truly Rymerian note, “Tout les flots se ressemblent: mais ce ne sont pas les mêmes flots, les mêmes vagues qu’il voyait se briser en des lieux si divers.” The poète mort jeune in Sainte-Beuve (to use his own famous words) was bien mort when he wrote this: and the critic had not “felt the philtre.” Does not the greater part of the power of the Angel of the Sea arise from this very mysterious sense of the unity of wave from Pole to Equator, and from coral to iceberg? The lands are broken, separated, isolated: the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea” is one and indivisible, an unbroken link between the live self that sees it here and the dead self that saw it far away and long ago.

But he seldom slips or nods thus. For happier things, note his sketch[594] of the three manners in Chateaubriand, where he compares Fontenelle’s notice of Corneille’s,[595] and might have compared Milton’s; the confession that French is not “une langue qui aurait eu l’accent et qui se souvenait d’avoir étée scandée”; the profound remarks on the Kinds of Criticism;[596] the almost profounder remarks on the different kinds of description.[597] I could multiply these instances almost endlessly, but it is enough to say, or repeat, that if we had nothing else of Sainte-Beuve’s it would place him in the first rank of the critics of the world, and that it is perhaps the earliest book that definitely does so.

[Sidenote: The Causeries at last.]

Although the rest of Sainte-Beuve’s life certainly did not fail to justify the immortal and invariable law that the gods never yet gave all things to man at once, yet in the main it was exceptionally fortunate, and the fortune was of the kind most important to our purpose. For once, a man who could do a thing supremely was allowed to do it, under conditions, if not absolutely ideal, yet exceptionally favourable. Had he resisted the temptations of professorships and senatorships, he would have been able, without any interruption, to devote himself entirely to literary work of his own choosing, in his own house, without let or hindrance, publicity or disturbance, without even the pressure (so galling to some temperaments) of any fixed time and place of duty, except the easily adjustable necessities of having his “copy” and his proofs duly ready. Even of the avocations which he permitted himself, the actual interference with his vocation was trifling. The reward in mere money, though of course ludicrous in comparison with the rewards of other professions or even arts, was a competence; and it freed him completely from one of the most disagreeable penances of the working man of letters, the necessity of stepping out of his proper sphere in order to keep himself within it.

With this amiability of the Destinies, and with the man himself so perfectly prepared as we have seen him to be, it is scarcely surprising that the work should be altogether exceptional. It would require a really “encyclopædic head” either to affirm or deny, with competence, the proposition that it is the most complete and four-square batch of work ever done by any craftsman: but I do not know where to look for its rival, in any branch at least of literature. Criticism may or may not be the lowest of such branches; it may or may not be unworthy even to be called a branch. But of it, and barring the previous question, we shall certainly look in vain anywhere for such an example, in quality and quantity combined, as is presented by the Causeries du Lundi and the Nouveaux Lundis.

[Sidenote: Their length, &c.]

I do not know whether the length of the average causerie was directly conditioned by the fact of its appearance in a daily newspaper[598] instead of a Review, or whether Sainte-Beuve’s experience and instinct combined, induced him to make it rather shorter, but much more uniform in length, than his Deux Mondes articles. This length is pretty exactly twenty pages—a few articles being a little longer and a few a little shorter, but the greater number coming very close to the score of, say, 350 words each. It may be a superstition based on this great practitioner’s practice, but I think the majority of his successors have found that this length—say, from six to eight thousand words—is singularly normal for the treatment of an average subject of the larger literary kind. It ought not to weary the reader; it does not cramp the writer; and it does not tempt him to undue expatiation. Occasionally Sainte-Beuve, of course, doubled or trebled or even further multiplied causeries where the subject demanded it; but at first he did this very seldom, and he never made it the rule. In selecting his subjects he naturally preferred a new book when he could get it, if only as a “peg”: and he had plenty of choice. His rejections, however, were sometimes disappointing, particularly so in the case of M. Egger’s History of Greek Criticism, which he had intended to take. He neither specially chose nor specially rejected themes that he had already treated: and sometimes, though not often, he reproduced parts of his old work. As to the treatment, enough has been said of that above, or will be said below. It was almost unique: it is still almost unmatched. As far as any general scheme is extricable, it is the obvious one of a few general remarks—not very seldom expanding into precious tractatules—of more or less abstract criticism; a biographical sketch, anecdoted with special view to literary influences; remarks, with more or less quotation, on books and passages; and sometimes a sketch, usually rather shy and suggestive than peremptory, of comparative “placing”—the comparison, however, having been subtly presented throughout. But the method is never stereotyped: and the variations are of the essence.

[Sidenote: Bricks of the house.]

The hundreds of articles and the thousands of passages which these eight-and-twenty volumes present are naturally difficult to deal with after the method which has been here adopted; but a few pages may be fairly devoted to a selection from the notabilia with which “the sweet compulsion” of reading them through again for the purpose has provided me freshly. At the very beginning, and in the first volume, though it is one of the most brilliant of all, Sainte-Beuve is rather militant: he never became quite Olympian. The opening article on Saint-Marc Girardin[599] (between whom and our critic there was always a little friction) has a good deal of “malice” in the French, if not exactly in the English, sense: and that which follows on Lamartine’s Confidences, with a later one on Raphael, though just enough, is distinctly cruel, and savours of political vengeance on the fallen dictator. But these ticklish and disgustful contemporaneities give way to those perfect studies of the Sévignés (if it be not profane to speak of that person in the plural), the Hamiltons, the Jouberts, the Comines, the Firdousis, which we associate most happily and most characteristically with Sainte-Beuve. There is less, though there is some, of the wholly welcome dealing with technically “ancient” literature: but there are two consummate articles of “criticism in the second intention”—the papers on “Villemain and Cousin as Men of Letters,” and on “Feletz, and Empire Criticism.”

The second volume or semester of this Annus Mirabilis—for the two cover the whole twelvemonth from October 1 to September 30, 1849-1850, with exactly fifty-two articles told down for the fifty-two weeks[600]— contains the famous and generous “Mlle. de Lespinasse”; the “Huet,” which is perhaps as good an example as one can find of the whole in some ways; the admirable “Chesterfield”; a wonderfully just “Mazarin”; the “Gil Blas,” which will be reprinted with Gil Blas for centuries; and that magnanimous and yet not uncritical adjustment of coals of fire which Sainte-Beuve set alight in honour of the death of Balzac,—all of them varied, picked out, and set off by a profusion of studies of the eighteenth century, less literary in substance but literary enough in connection, and prefaced in one case, that of the “Madame du Châtelet,” with a most ingenious link, conduit, or what shall we call it? of explanatory connection between the purely literary and the merely gossiping. If there is to be found, also, an extremely bitter-sweet appendix on M. de Pontmartin, and an article on Chateaubriand, which is a superfluity and a blunder after the great book, we can pardon them. No other man has ever done such another year’s darg in criticism.

We must not follow the rest of the twenty years or thereabouts with equal precision, though few of them were less substantially filled. An indication to those who do not know, a reminder to those who do, of certain sommités among the articles; and a small sheaf of specially important passages, may lead us to the final summary of Sainte-Beuve’s critical position and achievement.

A whole cluster of remarkable things opens the Third volume. The “Rabelais” is practically the first piece of absolutely sane and appreciative criticism on the subject, the starting-point and foundation of what is now the accepted opinion of the competent. The “Qu’est ce qu’un classique?” is one of those more general pieces of criticism in which Sainte-Beuve does not go out of his way to indulge, but which he does, when he does them, in a manner showing the superiority which practice in actual “judging of authors” confers on its practitioners when they “go up higher.” The “Rousseau” is almost equal to the “Rabelais,” and it is not the first comer in criticism who can be just to both. His social-historic studies of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century serve as foils, and as intrinsically delightful reading, though they are often on the fringes of literature itself. The article on Latouche is a little ungenerous, and that on Fontenelle more than a little inadequate; while I wish that Sainte-Beuve had not indulged in a singularly vain and violent contrast between Camille Desmoulins and Vauvenargues. But the “Pasquier,” the “Saint-Simon,” the new “Diderot,” make amends.

[Sidenote: His occasional polemic.]

And it is always so. There were squalls occasionally, as there were especially certain to be, at the ticklish time, when the Second Consulate or Presidency was passing, not quite ideally, into the Second Empire. He need not have poured broadsides into popgunners like the Staël-Hetzels and the Laurent-Pichats.[601] The first was a very useful publisher and a respectable author of children’s books; I think I remember some tolerable critical work of the second, apart from his politics. But what is either to-day? what, much more, will either be a hundred years hence, beside Sainte-Beuve? He knew Wordsworth: surely he might have remembered that “our noisy curs are” not even “moments in the being of the Eternal Silence.” “They yap; what yap they? let them yap.” For in some cases they can do nothing else: and in all the Silence itself catches them very soon, if we do not lend them an echo.

In the Fourth volume, though the “Mirabeau” articles and the “Chamfort,” the “Saint-Evremond et Ninon” and the “Marmontel” are charming in the mixed kind, I think, for literature, the palm is due to that sentence—so autobiographical and so much more than merely autobiographical—which opens the “Moreau and Dupont” piece, “Je cause rarement ici de poésie, precisément parceque je l’ai beaucoup aimée et que je l’aime encore plus que toute chose.” Quia multum amavi! And he does not derogate from this attitude in the Fifth, where he welcomes Victor de Laprade and Leconte de Lisle, while this also contains delightful things on Raynouard, Rivarol, Retz, Patru, Gourville, and even the remarkable person once called Le-Brun-Pindare. In the Sixth we go from Rollin to La Reine Margot, from Bernardin and Courier to Saint Anselm backwards and the Abbé Gerbet forwards, with, at the close, one article of special interest here, Sainte-Beuve’s revised and in some ways palinodic opinions on Boileau. The Seventh is mainly eighteenth century— Montesquieu and the Président de Brosses, Franklin and Barthélemy, Grimm (for whom, here as elsewhere, Sainte-Beuve makes strong fight against the general, and, I am bound to say, in my judgment, the well-grounded, distrust of him), Necker and Volney, with, to give us change from a better time, Regnard and La Fontaine at front and close, Richelieu and Saint François de Sales, Mérimée and Arnault, and the elder Marguerite. On the last he is a little disappointing: and perhaps we might have expected that he would be.

The Eighth, with many excellent examples of the usual seventeenth-eighteenth century causeries, and with a most welcome batch of mediæval studies on Joinville, on the Roman de Renart, on the Histoire Littéraire—good to read even now, and priceless then—contains an article, written with great care, to which an Englishman naturally turns, and with which most Englishmen will be disappointed, that on Gibbon. None of the usual causes could have blunted Sainte-Beuve’s judgment here: yet it is blunted. Missing, in the one sense, what he calls the javelot, the coup de foudre, the cri haletant—in other words, the somewhat theatrical and rhetorical[602] touch of French, he misses also, in the other, Gibbon’s magnificence, that sense of the vast procession of events and that power of reproducing it, which gives an almost poetic self-transcendence to an otherwise prosaic and philosophe nature. We all miss things, of course: but such a man as Sainte-Beuve should not have missed such a thing as this. The “Joinville,” however, which immediately follows, makes once more those familiar amends; and the next volume (the Ninth) contains admirable companions to it in the “Froissart” and the “Villehardouin,” this last one of the author’s best. He had now started (to some though not to all extents with advantage) dealing with one subject in several essays: and most of this volume is so occupied. “Stendhal,” “Marivaux,” “Madame Dacier,” with others, show his admirable flexibility. The Tenth is perhaps less attractive, for except Agrippa d’Aubigné and one or two others, its subjects are not as a rule of the first interest, and in one Sainte-Beuve returns to Chateaubriand—not happily. But the Eleventh, with a certain amount of “filling,”—the first collection stopped here, and Sainte-Beuve had to plug the gap made by the removal of the index when it was extended,—has at least two articles, or batches of articles, of the first interest—those on Montluc and Cowper. Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut—to appreciate equally, and almost at the same moment, the greater d’Artagnan of Sienna and the patron of Puss.

As a matter of fact, the original enterprise of the weekly Causerie did in a manner finish with this first issue. For five years Sainte-Beuve had kept neck and neck with the enemy. His work afterwards was more intermittent, and even underwent a cessation of some years when he was lecturer at the École Normale, between 1857 and 1861. The last four volumes of the actual Causeries are made up from different sources: though the bulk of the constituents are of the true breed. Among them are some of Sainte-Beuve’s most interesting studies of the past—“Ronsard” (revisited), “Saint Amant,” “Voiture,” “Vauvenargues,” “Villon”—and some of his most famous papers on contemporaries, such as those on Musset and the Guérins. The last volume of all contains two of the most valuable of those invaluable papers on criticism in general, to which we have drawn attention already, that on Nisard’s History and that on La Tradition en Littérature. But perhaps the special appeal of these appendix-volumes is the appearance of articles on books and authors that are still in a manner modern—on Madame Bovary, on Fanny,[603] on M. de Banville, on M. Scherer.

[Sidenote: The Nouveaux Lundis.]

And when the series began again regularly, after this interruption, with the Nouveaux Lundis in 1861, he formally promised or threatened a recrudescence into criticism “truer” and “franker” and more regardless of contemporary protest.

One may be sorry for this, even though the particular ashes are long cooled. Although Sainte-Beuve’s “malignity” was, as has been said, absurdly, and is still sometimes inexcusably, exaggerated, he was far from free from those iræ from which the something less than celestial spirit of the critic so seldom escapes.[604] There is a sort of “rankle,” a kind of distant growl of “That’s my thunder,” in his review at the time of M. Rigault’s Querelle, in his later obituary of the author, and even elsewhere: the first paper of the Nouveaux Lundis on Laprade is openly and almost rudely hostile: while the critic proceeds later to exchange fresh broadsides with M. de Pontmartin.

Still, where the element of hostility or personality does not put flies in the ointment, it is of course of the first interest to have such a paper as, say, the “Madame Bovary” article, or the later one on “Salammbô,” introductions to such rising “imps of fame” as Taine, Renan, the Goncourts, Saint-Victor, Fromentin, Feuillet,—even such fair and well-weighed, though antagonistic, examinations as that of Veuillot. In regard to Taine and others, especially, Sainte-Beuve is particularly interesting, because they present a crop of his seed, a development of his own method, with the substitution, for that rather ondoyant et divers conclusion or no-conclusion of his to which we shall return, of hard-and-fast theories of ruling ideas, and milieux, and the rest. All this, however, would not make up to those of us who love the modern quâ modern little and the contemporary quâ contemporary not at all, if it had induced Sainte-Beuve to give up those inestimable studies of the past, or those well-reasoned considerations of criticism in general, which are his main titles to fame. But it did not. One of the very best of the latter kind is the famous review of M. Taine’s own Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. And in the former, the “La Bruyère,” the “Sévigné,” the “Perrault” in the first volume, the “Bossuet” in the second, the article (independent of his “Introduction,” which is itself a masterpiece) to Crepet’s Poètes Français, and the batch on the Mystère d’Orleans (that is to say, the Early French Drama) in the third are more than reassuring. Soon, moreover, Daphnis and Chloe promises a renewal[605] of those articles on the classics which are perhaps the only ones ever written, since our regrettable specialisations in the nineteenth century, by a literary critic of the very first order in the modern sphere.[606]

Towards the last he turned a little too much to the political, and though at the very end the long batch on Talleyrand is succeeded by one equally long on his old favourite, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, the amiable Marceline is not quite a poetess of importance enough, nor is the part actually devoted to her poetry large enough, to make the swan-song quite literary. But there is plenty of genuine matter everywhere, and even the contemporary articles afford room for justice at last to Gautier, and for a long and attractive review of La Poesie en 1865, where M. Sully Prudhomme, and others not even yet quite out of fashion, appear. It may be that something of the irrational and superstitious guignon of continuations attaches to these Nouveaux Lundis: but surely very little.[607]

[Sidenote: The conclusion of this matter.]

Why more? Indeed, save to observe the proportion and method of the book (which are of the first importance), and to pay proper respect to a prince in the critical Israel (which is hardly of less), why so much? Except for the vast bulk of his work, and for the fact that it is not collected into definite “Works,” but exists under a large number of separate headings, some of which may be overlooked, Sainte-Beuve’s criticism offers itself with almost every advantage and facility to the reader. It has to the full those superficial attractions of “readableness” which have given to French criticism its popular position; and it lacks those superficialities in the other sense, which detract from the value of French criticism so often. The immense variety not merely provides something specially interesting for almost everybody who has any literary, historical, or, one might almost say, intellectual interests at all, but prevents tedium or satiety in those whose interests are wider. The style, though neither coruscating, nor treacly, nor enigmatic, is—in its perfection and when it has outgrown some early defects—“the model of the middle style” in criticism, suitable for the purpose and the writer’s temperament. It can say anything that the author wishes to say, and does not try to say what he cannot.

But we must examine the results which he gives a little more closely before concluding, and, according to the good old plan, take the deficiencies, or the want of supremacies, first. As has been put, with examples, above, Sainte-Beuve is not entirely to be trusted with the out-of-the-way, the eccentric, even the abnormally great. The very ethos of the critic exposes him to this, and the opposite fault—the engouement for everything that is out of the way, that is eccentric, that is abnormal, whether great or not—is not merely an excess of a critical virtue, but a serious, an almost disqualifying critical defect. Still, to be able to admire and recognise the “earth-born and absolute fire”[608] is, if not a critical sine qua non—for without it the critic may do good work—yet his rarest and noblest gift. Sainte-Beuve had it not quite.

There is room for more difference of competent opinion as to his abstinence from the most definite posing and placing—from the final arrangement of his portraits exactly as he wished to have them seen by his readers, and to stand in relation to each other. There is, of course, its own merit in that abstinence, which is (as it was in the earlier case of Villemain) something of a reaction from the fondness of his “Empire” predecessors for the trenchant, the peremptory, the official distinction and ticket. There had been very much too much of this during the Neo-classic period; and there has been, to put it mildly, quite enough and to spare of it since. Nevertheless, one may think that Sainte-Beuve, though he never, as his countrymen too often do, leaves you uninformed, does too often leave you floating—undecided even as to what his own definite view of the man’s or work’s value, relation, position, may be. Now this surely is a slight defect. When one wants a picture, one does not want merely a sheet of drawing-paper, with the most accurate and “genial” studies of eye, nose, chin, mouth, hair, scattered anyhow about it, but the complete, or at any rate the outlined, face made up from these studies.

I can think of no general fault save these two, and we are not now to hark back to particulars. The tale of general and particular excellences is more agreeable to construct, but more difficult to put in little. The head and front of Sainte-Beuve’s critical welldoing he has himself put excellently and more than once. To read; to understand; to love:—and then to facilitate reading, understanding, and loving on the part of others—these are the first and second great commandments of the critic. And few, surely, have obeyed them better. He may be a little cumbered about much serving—we do not (that is those of us who want criticism) always want such Persic apparatus of biography and history and gossip. But the Persic apparatus is very agreeable in itself, and sometimes even not useless. And there is plenty of the plain leg of critical mutton— well fed, well killed, well kept, and well dressed. Only perhaps a certain degree of expertness can fully appreciate, but ordinary sense and taste must surely not fail to perceive, the range of reading which is—be it again and again repeated—in all but the most extraordinary cases the necessarium, if not the unum necessarium, of the critic. Common-sense and taste are perhaps at least equally well prepared with the expertest expertise to recognise, if they are given their way, the sanity and the equity, the patience and the thoroughness, the freedom from crotchet and caprice, from the merely parochial and the merely particularist, which distinguish Sainte-Beuve from almost all other critics. He was, as we have seen, very lucky; few have had at once his gifts, and his opportunities of exercising them, and that rarest and happiest gift of “the Hour,” without which Gift, and even in some sense Opportunity, will fail to estate a man in his proper place. But the Hour has seldom found the Man so ready: and the Man has in no single instance in our department, and in few throughout all, requited the Hour by leaving such fruits of it for all time to come.

The general discussion of the Classic-Romantic quarrel—so far as we can deal with it—will be for the Interchapters; and it is not even very easy here to make a methodic distinction between the names who will best appear in this chronicle side by side with Sainte-Beuve, and those who should figure in the corresponding chapter of the next Book as his successors. But applying something of the same method which has helped us before, we may perhaps most conveniently group beside him Victor Hugo as a matter of course, with, of the rest, five representative figures— Gautier for the Romantic farthest, the out-and-out partisans of “art-for-art”; Nisard for the Classical reaction; Saint-Marc Girardin as an example of that Academic criticism which has always been so important in France, and which with and after Villemain took a new colour; Planche, as the most noteworthy champion of the other school (yet not so “other” but that the two interpenetrate and overlap) of the critics who are purely men of letters, and almost purely journalists; and Magnin for the pure scholars. The rest, with one or two exceptions, but not excepting so famous a man as Janin, will bear postponement, can even be postponed with advantage. The chief exception is Mérimée; here, as always, by the joint efforts of Fate and himself, alone. But the great twin names of Michelet and Quinet may require a little mention here, and before proceeding even to Hugo.

[Sidenote: Michelet and Quinet.]

These two inseparables—more inseparable even than the other pair, Cousin and Villemain—must, I fear, be also among those whom I shall seem to some readers to slight. Both, but especially Quinet,[609] were of course saturated with literature. From his first translation of Herder to his posthumous work on the Greek genius, Quinet was always dealing with the subject, often nominatim, seldom in very remote fashion. Michelet no doubt directed himself more to the purely historical side of that historical study of humanity which he learnt from Vico, and Quinet probably from Herder himself. Literary citations, literary parallels, literary suggestions swarm in Michelet; even the ’45 seems to him (the origin of the notion is obvious enough, but thinking it out will be found uncommonly difficult) “a Canto of Ossian.” But for our purposes the pair are almost disqualified—Michelet more than Quinet, but Quinet very mainly—by two things. The first is that confusion—whither derived from Vico or from the Germans does not matter—of literature with history, sociology, politics, psychology, and the like, which has seemed orthodox to the two last generations, but which to me appears a dangerous delusion and confusion. The other is the peculiar voyant thought and style of both, which precludes them from taking anything like a clear and achromatic view of any literary matter, even if they had endeavoured to do so. Not that the prophet cannot be a critic, for we have been able to disentangle some extremely clear, trenchant, and (however disputable) orderly and logical dicta of criticism from Blake: and Carlyle’s deficiencies, where he is deficient as a critic, do not at all come from this cause. But maresnesting, and night-maresnesting in special, is the very worst possible—perhaps one might say the very most impossible—occupation for a critic; and while Quinet was often, Michelet was almost always, in quest of the variety and the sub-variety of nest.

[Sidenote: Hugo.]

The temperament of Victor Hugo[610] was perhaps as uncritical a one as any man ever possessed, or as ever possessed any man: but the strength of his genius was such that it could hardly fail to confer mastery, at any rate for a time, on its various literary applications. When the sins of temperament had become besetting and habitual, and the genius was—in this respect, not others—a little failed, his criticism became scarcely more than a curiosity; when the genius was still in its prime, and the temperament had not broken through all control, it is sometimes of a very notable character. William Shakespeare[611] is the best text-book of the later and worse state; the Prefaces to the Cromwell,[612] to the Orientales,[613] and the Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées[614] of the earlier and better. To take the worst first, though there are fine things in the Shakespeare book,—there could not fail to be, seeing that it was written, en regardant l’océan, by Victor Hugo,—and though a sort of aura of the right Romantic fury still breathes through it, it has nothing of criticism except a splendid concionatory harangue to admiration of the best things, and a great deal of Hugonism nearly at its worst. The colossal confidence in ignorance, which made the poet a laughing-stock to his enemies, permits him to observe (in arguing that England never knew her Shakespeare till Voltaire taught her better) that Dryden parla de S. une fois pour le déclarer hors d’usage. [Sidenote: William Shakespeare.] It would be a good examination question, “Translate into the French of Hugo ‘the largest and most universal soul,’ &c.,” and the dictionary resulting would be quite a useful cipher-code. Elsewhere you have the usual page-long strings of names, the usual staccato sentences, punctuated with nons and ouis, and stripped of articles and particles, the usual abuse of England (whose life for one thing that she did, in giving Victor Hugo refuge, he will yet not wholly take), and also the usual bursts of verbal and imaginative inspiration which give us the petite fièvre cérébrale, and make us excuse, forget, welcome any nonsense, any bad taste, even any bad blood.

[Sidenote: Littérature et Philosophie.]

Nothing that I have said, or shall say, is to be construed as implying contempt of the remaining critical works of Hugo. On the contrary, “Read all the Prefaces of Dryden,” which Swift said in scorn, may be adapted here in utter seriousness. And the student who wishes to know must read the whole of Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées—that curious collection of the poet’s critical and other work from the age of seventeen to the age of thirty-two. The gods do not grant to any man to be a good critic at seventeen; but they do grant to a Victor Hugo not to be a negligible writer at any time. In the “Journal of a Young Jacobite” of 1819; in the “Opinions of a Revolutionary” of 1830; in the Idées au Hasard; above all, when the poet-critic was a little over age, in the articles on Scott and Voltaire, on Lamennais and Byron, on Mirabeau and Dovalle, there is matter which might have made twenty critics; though it did not please the Fates that it should actually make one. These things are a very open allegory; there should not be any need, and there is certainly here no space, to interpret them.[615]

[Sidenote: The Cromwell Preface,]

If Victor Hugo had written no criticism but William Shakespeare, I think I should have put him, as I have put Balzac, in a note, and left him otherwise alone, out of respect, not of persons, but of the divinity of poetry. The two Prefaces that I have selected—there are others, but these will suffice us—would have given him a substantive place here, if he had written no poetry at all. That to Cromwell is the longer, the more elaborate, and much the more famous: but I do not think that it is really quite so important as the later and shorter to the Orientales. In the first, with a proud humility which retains a little more of the noun, if it has not much less of the adjective, than the undisguised arrogance of the later work, Hugo, while professing not to defend himself at all, and to regard the Classic v. Romantic debate as practically fought out and over, as a fact fights the whole battle once more. It is observable that the word “art,” without being made exactly the battle-cry, recurs again and again throughout the piece, and is, in fact, its dominant. But he has a theory of poetry, not so very different in outline from that of the “Goliaths classiques,” of whom he affects not so much as to take notice. Man and poetry woke in primitive times; when man is singing he is close to God; and the rest of it. The voice is unmistakably Hugo’s, but the forms of thought which it chooses might almost be eighteenth, or even seventeenth, century. They work out the conclusion that Epic + Lyric = Drama—the latter being largely dealt with to show the rise of Comedy and the dignity of the Grotesque. Already we get Hugo’s name-triads flung at us (to use one of his beloved Spanish comparisons) like bolas. There is a great deal about Shakespeare. The “Two” Unities—Hugo has extended his grace to the original one—of Time and Place are too absurd to be spoken of: but they are spoken of and shown to be absurd. A passage on rules, models, and imitations is perhaps the most effective of the whole, though it comes the best part of a century after Lessing. There is an excommunication of Delille (very interesting to compare with the glorification by Joubert, whose own theory of poetry fits Hugo as well, as it fits Delille, to us, strangely), leading to some remarks on Cromwell itself, which have but minor interest, and a notable conclusion on Criticism. There is here more dignity than in those remarks in which he was wont to indulge later, when he drew upon himself the dignified reproof of M. Nisard: and they contain some really good observation on False Taste, old and new, a well-founded denunciation of critique by rule and kind, by faults and beauties, and a final protest against mere Authority.

The piece is of great interest even now: and one can readily understand the immense influence it must have had as a manifesto. But it is injured by its length, by its want of method, and by the constant presence of the two dissonances above indicated. That the poet should fight pro domo sua is natural, desirable, laudable: but why are we to be disturbed by the constant assertion of a lofty indifference? It is again natural, desirable, laudable, that he should fight the general Romantic prize—there was every possible justification for it. But why, again, the pretence of not troubling himself about any such business, and of the business being really over?

[Sidenote: and that to the Orientales.]

The Preface to the Orientales escapes all these objections and, short as it is, is undoubtedly the most remarkable piece of criticism that Hugo has left, while it is also the boldest, the clearest, the least hampered with tricks and mannerisms, the most serious, the most really dignified. In it he “goes straight for the jugular.”[616] He questions, and denies point-blank, the right of the critic to interrogate the poet on his choice of subject or of treatment at all. “L’ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais: voilà tout le domaine de la critique.” Here we come again to one of the epoch-making sentences, one of the great jalons of critical history. No ancient had ever dared to say it. Patrizzi had said it, hardly knowing what he had said. The German and English Romantics had cast about it, implied it, made themselves responsible for it, or something like it; but never posed it plumply as the Charter of Literature. And Hugo does not leave it as if he were afraid of it, or half-ignorant what it means. He turns it over and over, so as at each turn to give a fresh blow to the Neo-classics. Never mind the means employed: ask how they are employed. There are no good or bad subjects in poetry: there are only good or bad poets. Everything is a subject. Poetry is a country of universal suffrage: examine how the artist has worked, not why. Art has nothing to do with gags, leading-strings, handcuffs: he may go where he list, believe as he list, do what he lists. Kind, story, space, time, fashion, all are at his choice.

And then, amplifying more particularly the phrase about the limits of art, Hugo has one of his most characteristic and finest passages of exuberant prose, expressing the wish to make his poetry like a Spanish city—half oriental, half mediæval—and finishes very briefly with some words on his actual book.

[Sidenote: Capital position of this latter.]

This is the real clou, the central decisive point of Hugonic, and indeed of all Romantic, criticism. “Never mind the subject, the kind, anything of that sort: is the treatment good?” is practically the gospel of modern as opposed to ancient, of Romantic as opposed to Classical, criticism. Of course, like all hard-and-fast propositions and prescriptions as to things that are not hard-and-fast, and especially like all controversial propositions and aggressive prescriptions of all kinds, it does not contain the whole truth, and it does not even contain nothing but the truth. If it be construed in the sense that one subject is as good as another, it may, and probably will, lead wrong. If it be taken to mean that even the experience of our two thousand five hundred years (or whatever it is) of literature does not show that some subjects are so much more difficult and thankless than others that they are practically impossible, it will entice the poet to useless and probably dangerous experiment. But then, with reasonable people, it does not mean either of these things. It is in reality a defensive much more than an offensive proposition,—a protest which must be allowed in any Court of Historical Criticism against the Classic and especially the Neo-classic notion of a priori classification of Subject and Kind, and of referring to this instead of considering the work first. [Sidenote: The “work”.]I have known objection taken to the use—at least the frequent use—of this word “work” in literature, and as to literature. It is, in fact, something of a shibboleth: but, I think, a valuable one. No one who uses it intelligently is likely to forget that it is the work, the work_ing_, the art, not the material, that he is to look to first. And Victor Hugo, in the document before us, was practically the first to enjoin this duty with authority and conviction.

We may pass appropriately to his most distinguished opponent and his most enthusiastic disciple in regard to this gospel.

[Sidenote: Nisard: his Ægri Somnia.]

The memories of a reviewer, however hard he may have tried to do his duty, are apt to lodge in a tomb from which there grow more briers than roses. It is not the most unpleasant of the thoughts of the present writer on his own reviewing period that the Ægri Somnia[617] of M. Désiré Nisard enabled him, not quite too late, to revise, in the right direction, his opinion of their author. There needed, and there needs, no grovelling palinode—Nisard still seemed, and still seems to me, to have taken on the whole the wrong side in criticism. And I am not quite certain that the reproach (which was brought against him and which he endeavoured to refute, almost as late as the publication of Ægri Somnia itself, by boldly and wisely reprinting his early articles) of having “burnt what he had adored” was quite unjust. But in these last utterances there was a singular dignity, justice, and good taste, contrasting rather fortunately or unfortunately, according to the side on which one looked, with the insolences which Hugo had permitted himself during the senile apotheosis of his fifteen years’ restoration after the Année Terrible. And one saw—as indeed one always had seen more or less—that whatever had been faulty in M. Nisard’s earlier, but not earliest judgments, had been the result of an undue, an exclusive, a not quite intelligently catholic devotion to justice, dignity, good taste. There have been greater men who had worse gods.

[Sidenote: His Essais sur le Romantisme.]

If one did not know how very differently personal matters strike the person and the not-person, it might be surprising to a reader of the reprinted Essais sur le Romantisme[618] that M. Nisard should have in any way complained of the charge of burning what he had adored. The first half of the book is occupied with articles dating from 1829 to 1831—on Hugo, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and even Musset. They are very good articles; they are, I think, better criticism than Sainte-Beuve’s own was at this time: but, though they are not wildly ultra-Romantic, they in each and every case—even in that of Musset himself—take the side and the defence of the innovators. It is true that there is, towards the last, a momentous and germinal doubt whether there is not something excessive in Hugo—whether there is not de trop.

And in the Preface to the second part, written in 1838, the critic announces his conversion in terms which admit of no dispute. He speaks of his retour aux doctrines classiques, he says that he has “ranged himself,” that he “climbs back, with discouraged and dragging step, the road that he had run down in his intoxication.” Metaphor for metaphor, has this much change to give or to receive from that of “burning the adored”? And the substance of the remainder bears this out. Much in the manifesto Contre la Littérature Facile is quite true—not merely of 1830: and the subsequent controversy with Jules Janin is not idle or one-sided. But as for the articles on Hugo himself which follow, an innocent person might suppose them to have been written by quite another M. Nisard than the author of those above referred to. The Chants du Crépuscule, we are told, “ont achevé de désespérer les amis de M. V. H.” (They contain, let it be remembered, Napoleon II.) There is a caractère de décadence in them. His prose has a better chance than his verse. His mort littéraire is prochaine (so near, in fact, that he wrote the Légende des Siècles twenty, and published the Quatre Vents de l’Esprit more than forty years later).

Yes! M. Nisard was burning what he had adored; but it is fair to admit that for the rest of his long life he adored what he had certainly never burned. His most famous work, the Histoire de la Littérature Française,[619] is written in rigid confinement to the Classical house, with fresh windows opened, indeed, so that the critic could see the glory of Shakespeare and others outside, but with a strict regulation that nothing shall be changed in the furniture and regulations within. The capital studies of Latin Poets, the miscellaneous literary work— professorial and other—are all the consistent utterances of a man who has pulled himself up on the edge (or a little over the edge) of a precipice, and has resolved, for the rest of his life, to walk steadily in the other direction. No article of Sainte-Beuve’s is at once juster and more acute than that on M. Nisard’s History, with its exposition of the way in which the critic-historian has constructed an a priori theory of the French literary genius, and has written his history accordingly—accepting and eulogising those writers who illustrate his conception, neglecting or denouncing those who run counter to it. And the conception itself is formed altogether according to the second manner of viewing—the view according to which Les Chants du Crépuscule is, in another sense, a song of approaching night. M. Nisard tells us that his conversion was effected during a visit to England, and under the influence of Homer and La Fontaine. Surely never was there such a singular instance of similia similibus in literature; nor has the country of Shakespeare—where, by the way, Tennyson and Browning had just brought out their first books—ever exercised a more remarkable influence upon a studious visitor.

By whatever process, M. Nisard had become a confirmed anti-Romantic, and such he remained to the end. He is one of the best of the breed: learned, consistent, courageous, courteous withal, as the critic who is or wishes to be considered “scholarly” too seldom is. But he has given himself up to an idol: he will not take the Work as the Work presents itself, and judge whether it is good or bad. And the result is inevitable.

[Sidenote: Their culpa maxima.]

The conclusion of the reprinted Essais, with great temper and in excellent taste, practically confesses M. Nisard’s weakness as a critic. It is the weakness of the old “faults-and-beauties” method, joined to the moral heresy. Victor Hugo, he says, was a man with very grave moral faults. He was: and what is more, these moral faults were of a singularly disenchanting kind. Further, Victor Hugo’s works are full of faults not merely moral. They are: and sometimes these faults are almost inconceivable. But what M. Nisard forgot is that the critic, like the miner, is finally concerned with the quantity and quality of poetic gold which a poet—or, for the matter of that, with the quantity and quality of literary gold which any man of letters—will yield. No matter that it lies in a pestilential neighbourhood; no matter that you have to smelt out quartz, and far worse and uglier things than quartz, to get it. Is the gold there? That, and nothing else, is the question. Now, in Hugo the gold is there; it is there not by pennyweights, not by ounces, not by pounds, but by hundredweights to the ton. And the critical process, if only it be perfected, is after all not so laborious as the process of stamps and cyanide; the critic himself is not susceptible to wild beasts and malaria. Gold or no gold? much gold or little? these are his true questions. M. Nisard could not see them. The gold must be ready smelted to a certain orthodox French standard; it must be even brought in ingots, or ready worked into jewellery, according to pattern. Otherwise he would not have it. And of the many critics that have been, are, will be, like unto him, he was after all one of the best.

[Sidenote: Gautier.]

France—I have been told frequently of late, and even not so very late, years—has forgotten her Théophile Gautier. And some of the voices have generally said that she has been quite right in doing so, whether urged to the forgetfulness by serious arguments such as those of M. Émile Faguet (whom, though I differ with him not seldom, I desire to take the opportunity here of saluting with all possible respect as an admirable critic, and to whom I could almost pay the doubtful compliment of wishing that he were dead in order that I might discuss him fully), or by the mere impertinences of quite trivial folk. I have never seen the least reason to change my own opinion to the contrary, that “Théo” was not only one of the most amiable and (with some peccadillos) estimable men of letters of the whole French century, but one of the greatest of its men of letters in verse and in prose, in romance and in travel-writing, in miscellanies and in criticism. He was not greatest in the function which here concerns us, but he was great. The common complaint that he was too good-natured, though it may have some faint colour, is mainly a blunder and the son of a blunder—that is to say, of the notion, far too often encouraged by critics themselves, that the critic is a schoolmaster, whose business is to say nothing but “Blockhead!” and “Sit down!” and “Come to me after school!” But the comparative ill-luck which pursued him, and forced him always to write for bread, partly turned him away from pure literary criticism,[620] and sometimes made him write smooth but not very significant things to please, though never at the cost of friendship and principle. Much that he wrote is not reprinted; he could not afford, like M. de Pontmartin, for instance, to “embook” all his feuilletons. Yet certain volumes of his printed works, the Grotesques, the Histoire du Romantisme, and its companion the Portraits Contemporains, with some separate articles, prefaces, &c., will give us good matter to indite of.[621]

[Sidenote: His theory: “Art for Art’s sake,” &c.]

“Théo” has not been a favourite with the grave and precise sort among our fellowship as a rule: yet, if they could be consistent, they should at least admire him for his own consistency, and for the fact that, from the very first to the very last, his criticism, apparently so impressionist and occasional, was conducted on an almost rigid—on a quite logical and well co-ordinated—theory. This theory was the famous one of “L’Art pour l’Art,” with, for inseparable companion, the doctrine that the instrument, the medium, the vehicle, almost the constituent of literary art, is the Word, the beautiful word, furnished with its beauty by light and colour, by sound and form, and developing it by skilful and laborious arrangement, selection, and rejection. As for the major theory (the formulation of which is sometimes attributed to Hugo himself, and was admitted by him as late as William Shakespeare, but with an important qualification, and even, to a certain extent, disclaimer, as to its range and meaning) I have already said,[622] though I see that some critics have not observed the observation, that, especially with the addition “Art for Art’s sake only,” it is at best but a half truth, and may be a full half “error and curse.” And we all know to what sort of whole a half truth constantly turns. Art, after all, is a means: and “means for means’ sake only,” if not nonsense, is at any rate sense very incomplete. But it was necessary, and it was almost desirable, that the exaggeration should be formulated, because of the incessant intrusion of the opposite theories, which are scarcely even quarter-truths, that all depends on the subject, that art must serve morality, and the like. As for the second doctrine above formulated, I need not say that, with Longinus and with Dante, I accept it absolutely and sans phrase. To both doctrines, however, to the more disputable as to the less, Gautier flew at first, and clung at last, not more in the provocative youthfulness of the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin than in the famous and exquisite

“Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle”

of Émaux et Camées, many years afterwards, or in conversation and writing, more than as many years later still. The first is an eager and passionate sermon on the doctrine by a fervent neophyte; the second, its mature embodiment in imperishable verse by a master. Both together leave very little to be said on the matter save the single word “Read!”

[Sidenote: His practice: Les Grotesques.]

At any rate, what has to be said on them by way of comment belongs rather to Interchapter and Conclusion than to this place, where we are busy with Gautier’s application of his doctrines. The next considerable document to the Preface just noticed is the Grotesques of 1844, a delightful book. After all that has been written since on Villon, one comes back to it about him. Scalion de Virbluneau and some others are mere hors-d'œuvre, agreeable enough, but no more. The pièce de résistance of the book is the long, ardent, but at the same time humorous (Théo was one of the few indubitable humourists that France can boast) vindication of the critic’s namesake, Théophile de Viaud, one of the most luckless of the many luckless poets of genius. But Saint-Amant, Chapelain, Scudéry, Scarron, supply him with occasions for work scarcely inferior to the “Théophile.” The criticism is of course, on the whole, avowedly criticism of the lighter kind, gossip-criticism, criticism intended not to disgust those who do not take literature very seriously. But it is also intended to please those who do: and it does.

[Sidenote: Histoire du Romantisme, &c.]

The various documents included under the general head of Histoire du Romantisme and Portraits Contemporains are of very different dates, covering nearly the whole of Gautier’s forty years of literary life. Being ranged rather by subject than by date,[623] they enable us to judge the singular evenness and continuity of his critical spirit, which (as Maxime Du Camp, I think, has urged, and as I myself have always held) was systematic by tendency and nature, though haphazard on the surface. The Histoire itself was actually interrupted by the critic-poet’s death: and the masterly Essay on the French Poetry of the middle of the Century (which should be compared with Sainte-Beuve’s) is only five years before it: but some of its companions go back twenty years, and many of the Portraits Contemporains recede to the legendary decade of the ’Thirties themselves.

[Sidenote: Ubiquity of felicity in his criticism.]

In all, the same critical qualities are apparent—a central motive and directing power of belief in the two doctrines stated above, but at the same time a system of gearing, flexible enough to accommodate itself to the most widely different subjects, an unwearied and rejoicing faculty of appreciation proper, an unrivalled science of verse and of descriptive and decorative prose, an ever-present charm, and, over all and through all, the atmosphere of the sweet and sunny temper which it is so specially delightful and so rare to find in a competent critic. But for those who want sufficient yet not too copious examples, three long pieces—the article on French Poetry above mentioned, the “Balzac” of 1858 (which M. Montégut, I think, has justly called magnifique), and the Introduction to the posthumous edition of Baudelaire in 1867— will do excellently. Between them they would fill a not so very small volume, and there would be hardly a page in that volume destitute of the merits just enumerated, and others to boot. The first is perhaps the greatest example extant of reviewing, brought sub specie æternitatis, and made really higher criticism. From the Légende des Siècles (and remember what Gautier writing on Hugo meant under the Second Empire!) to the Odes Funambulesques, from Poèmes Evangéliques to Fleurs du Mal, on scores of poets and books of poetry besides, he finds always the suitable, and, at the same time, always the admirable word to say. On Balzac and Baudelaire alike—great as is the alteration of palette, and viewing-glass, and style of handling that the two require—he shows alike that “impeccability,” that “perfect magic in letters,” which the younger of his subjects had ascribed to him. I do not know any critic who deserves the older and now strangely altered epithet of “candid” (i.e., “amiably just”) better than Gautier: but his amiability is never indulged at the expense of his justice. And perhaps it needs nothing more than the statement of this fact to express, συνετοῖσι, the infinite resources of his skill in thought and phrase.

[Sidenote: Saint-Marc Giradin.]

Saint-Marc Girardin[624] (who was three or four years older than Sainte-Beuve, and outlived him by four or five) has, in a reference above, been coupled with Villemain, and the resemblance both of career and of critical quality is rather strong. Both were politicians, both professors, and both played their double part after a fashion to which there are few parallels in English history, and those few not very encouraging. But Saint-Marc Girardin was a really considerable person in politics—not least in the very last days of his life, when, in the National Assembly, charged with the reconstitution of France after the Prussian War, he was a strong monarchical and Orleanist partisan. Of his numerous works, our chief texts are his Cours de Littérature Dramatique and his Essais de Littérature et de Morale which appeared in succession[625] about the middle of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. It may be well to say frankly and plumply that he is one of our (or perhaps it were better not to avoid the moi haïssable, and say “my”) disappointments. I did not read him very early, and had a very fair conceit of him when I began: but I find little to recommend in him.[626] He is emphatically “clever”; must have been a stimulating and effectual professor; writes very well; has a real (and not, as is rather common, a painfully simulated) combination of the man of letters and the man of the world. But he does not give me the idea of having had any spontaneous, individual, love for literature, or any original personal views about it. He has everywhere the juste milieu, the opportunism of his time, and his party, and his profession. He is neither a perruque nor an échevelé: he is, in fact, an accomplished Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. And Time is terribly of the Divine mind as to Laodicea and its angels.

Moreover, his method of dealing with Literature, and especially with that dramatic literature which chiefly interested him, is of the kind from which, as it seems to me, there come few good things—“De l’Amour Conjugal chez Shakespeare,” “Le Mariage au Théâtre dans Molière,” “La Jalousie” in this, that, and the other. It may be because of that “barrenness in the philosophic” with which I have been charged; but these things seem to me to be learning’s labour lost. Study Othello, study Leontes, study Posthumus as much as you like; but to see the life, the poetry, the passion in these live, poetic, passionate men and plays, not to extract a dead essence in a bottle and label it “Jealousy in Shakespeare”—or rather in vacuo. Still, there are others who have other tastes, and Saint-Marc Girardin’s half score of editions prove it, and perhaps justify them.

[Sidenote: Planche.]

Gustave Planche, on the other hand—a critic probably much less known now, except vaguely and anecdotically, than Girardin—appears to me to have been a real critic, and to have missed, so narrowly that I do not quite know how he missed it, being a very great critic. Probably it was quia non multum amabat: because he succumbed to that fatalest temptation of our kind to scratch and scoff and snarl instead of embracing. Anecdotically, as I have said, he is probably well enough known—his passion for George Sand, and his odd ways, and especially that most unlucky indifference to clean linen, and cleanliness generally, which he shared with the authors of the Song to David and the Rambler, turn up in all the books. He appears in the Comédie Humaine,[627] and the more extreme Hugolaters shudder or storm at him as a blasphemer of Hugo. But I rather doubt whether many people read his criticism now.[628]

[Sidenote: Weight of his criticism.]

Yet it deserves reading thoroughly: and it is only a pity that there is not more of it easily accessible. That Planche entirely avoids the quest of the mare’s-nest cannot be said; but some varieties of that curious structure are very tempting even to good critics. He may be thought to have found or built a famous one in the discovery that the three egregious books of the excellent Henry Mackenzie, instead of being Sterne plus Rousseau, watered down with quant. suff. of artificial tears, are “a sorrowful and unique hymn on the insufficiency and obscurity of actual life,” the “confession of an immaculate soul.” One thinks of the entire pressgang lifting up its voice and weeping at the noble conduct of old Edwards, and the like, and one marvels—but not, in my case at least, contemptuously. It is perhaps not wonderful, after this, that Planche, though he admires Fielding, cannot tolerate Jonathan Wild. Yet in close context he gives us taste of his quality by a really admirable inquiry—one of the best I know—into the difference of Drama and Novel, and the light which is thrown by and on this difference, in regard to the inferiority of Fielding as a dramatist, and his greatness in prose fiction. No one who has been so kind as to interest himself in my views will think that I agree with Planche when he holds that “literary quality does not matter,” when he bids us seek “the will before the inspiration, the fatal irresistible idea.” He would certainly have anathematised, and does, I think, somewhere very nearly anathematise in terms, my favourite doctrine of the Poetic Moment. But what do such differences of opinion matter? You blaze away at the enemy, but, if he and you be of the right stamp, you salute the soldier.

And Planche (for all his most unfortunate objection to soap and water) is, I think, a “gentleman of the French Guard,” a Black Mousquetaire of the doughtiest. His objection to Hugo[629] is not in the least fossil or stupid. He has a right to it: it is a legitimate and inevitable deduction from his general poetic creed and likings. No poet gives more “poetic moments” than Hugo: and Planche, as we have seen, does not hold with them. No poet has more of poésie visible than Hugo: and Planche objects to this poetry nominatim, directly, again and again, and wants to go back to that poésie intelligible, in which, it must be admitted, Victor would not be quite so victorious. He argues—and I do not know that one can so easily deny it off-hand as point out that it is a dangerous suggestion of false issues—that beauty of form does sometimes “appeal to the very lowest passions”: while, on the other hand, a poet doit toujours avoir une idée philosophique, which (again we must confess) Hugo very seldom, if ever, had. Yet for all this he can say plumply, pour le maniement de la langue, M. Hugo n’a pas de rival, and he admires, little as he can have agreed with much of it, that remarkable Preface to Littérature et Philosophie Mélées on which we have commented above.

He is nothing if not a daring critic. Some of us, who have studied French Literature very long, would hesitate to tell a Frenchman, as Planche unhesitatingly tells Bulwer,[630] not merely that he ought to be plus serré, plus précis, et moins vague, which is true and within any one’s competence, but moins incorrect, which from a foreigner seems going far. This verbality of Planche’s is in fact one of his main notes. Lamartine,[631] one might think, was made for him as a poet: and he does indeed think that Lamartine’s position is magnifique et incontesté. But he does not scruple to say that la grammaire est souvent offensée by the poet of the Méditations; that l’indicatif se croise avec l’imparfait (think of the horror of this crime!) à trois lignes de distance; that the ambitious Jocelyn is un beau poème sans composition et sans style. It may be more surprising that he is not cordial to Alfred de Vigny, and cannot in the least grasp Dolorida: but it must be remembered that Vigny’s earlier work (the posthumous Poems might have pleased Planche better, had he lived to see them) is distinctly inclined to that poésie visible, which the critic did not like because, I think, he could not himself “see” it. It must be admitted that he “gets home” on Leconte de Lisle’s Wardour Street Greek— though I do not know that his sharp correction is more fatal than “Théo’s” mild one.[632]

Lastly, we may mention the extremely remarkable paper[633] on Les Royautés Littéraires, with its notable classification of critics into those who gauge works of literature (1) by comparing them with the past, (2) as present things merely, (3) by looking to the future and the end that the author proposes to himself. Here it is enough to point out to the intelligent the curious difference between this classification and some others. For Planche, near as his terms may seem to come to it, does not mean, by the criticism of his first class, what we mean by the Historic-Comparative method.

These specimens will, I hope, for all their scrappiness and want of context, give some idea of the force, weight, acuteness, and intellectual moment of Planche’s criticism. It is not in merely accidental and catalogue fashion that I have put him next to Saint-Marc Girardin. There is a real and a vital contrast. Planche may be right or he may be wrong, but what he says is coherent; it comes from a direct and real examination, intensely interested, of the subject under discussion; it is guided by and supplemented from a body of definite and, to some extent at any rate, reasoned literary preferences and principles. In short, once more, the live contact, the true, fruitful, critical embrace. It is a pity he did not wash!

[Sidenote: Magnin.]

Of Magnin we need not say so much, but all that is said must be good. A librarian for many, and a professor for a few, years, he was, as we have called him, a pure scholar, but with his erudition mellowed and sweetened by literature. His Origines du Théâtre en Europe,[634] written in the early days of historical comparative study of mediæval literature, is a classic still: and his Causeries et Méditations[635] contain many things worth reading. He was much interested, as were so many Frenchmen, by the visit of the English company of actors, in which Miss Smithson was leading lady, to Paris: and he was led to study the older English theatre, though he misjudges A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and rather staggers one’s notion of the necessary acquaintance with the language of the literature you are criticising, by talking about an English poem entitled “The Greece” (not “La Grèce,” understand). But probably we all do things as bad or worse. And at any rate, Magnin, with this work, his Origines, the re-introduction of modern readers to Hroswitha,[636] and other things, is a protagonist of the historical and the comparative in the study of literature.

[Sidenote: Mérimée.]

As we separated Beyle in a former chapter, so we may separate Beyle’s “most remarkable production,” Mérimée,[637] in this. His temperament, the very opposite in all ways to Hugo’s, was as critical as Hugo’s was uncritical, and his exquisite style—in some respects the most exquisite of the French nineteenth century—should have lent itself to criticism with a sort of pre-established harmony that could never have belonged to the merely plain, or to the mainly “fulgurous.” But, as in other ways, there was something suicidal, or at least self-silencing, in this same temperament, and Mérimée has not left us very much to deal with here. There are numerous strokes of it in the Letters to Panizzi and the Inconnues, some of them not unprecious. We knew that Mérimée (ii. 205, to the Inconnue) would think Hugo “words without ideas,” and recommend a dose of Madame de Sévigné as a remedy (why not enjoy both and turn them to profit?). But it is really interesting to find that he cannot like Baudelaire, and most of all to find his first (though even then rather lukewarm) approval of Renan as a brother in freethought lessening, till we have the famous description—worthy of a Veuillot who should cease to be a swashbuckler and become a gentleman of the sword—of the style of the Vie de Jésus as “the delight of all the servant-girls of France.” But Mérimée, like some others whom we have noticed, was drawn away by his studies, no less than by those contradictions of cynical-sentimental temperament of which we have spoken, from pure literary criticism to things like History and Antiquities, where he had not to “distrust himself.” There may even have been some of the Congrevian affectation, which Voltaire not unjustly rebuked, in the caprice which made him, as M. Blaze de Bury[638] says, “causeur, érudit, archéologue, académicien, sénateur, tout ce qu’on voulait, mais homme de lettres! jamais!” which brought it about that “avec lui la littérature ne venait que par surcroît.” In his published things of the kind, Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires,[639] Portraits Historiques et Littéraires,[640] and the like, the literary side is studiously kept down and away from, though, as we see from the Letters, it was always really present. He imputes to Beyle[641] his own assumed detachment from it; the review[642] of Ticknor’s Spanish Literature, which he was so admirably qualified to write, is full of traits going in the same direction. One is rather sorry to find Mérimée siding with those who would have mediocre authors kept out of literary histories, pretending that a man may read too much (he was himself almost omnilegent), that you can understand French seventeenth-century theatre (you cannot) “without having read Campistron.” But this is the fanfaronade of a modern Signor Pococurante, with a difference; and in the piece Mérimée cannot help showing his own critical sense (whether consistently or not) in his demand for more on the early literature, in his contempt of symbolic and Germanising explanations of Don Quixote. Of the two papers[643] which, with the “Beyle,” are the longest of his literary essays, the “Cervantes” and the “Brantôme,” the latter has a mere coda, the briefest possible, of true literary criticism, and the former not very much of it. Even on his beloved Russians, Gogol,[644] Pouchkine, Tourguénieff—though there was bound to be more here in the case of an actual Introduction, so to say, at last by a Grand Master of the Ceremonies of a new language and literature—there is hardly so much, except perhaps on Pouchkine, as we should expect. Like Lockhart, to whom he had a great resemblance, Mérimée hated “your d—d literary man” so much, and feared so much to be mistaken for such a person, that he would not, perhaps at last could not, be what he might have been as a critic. But we could not do without the stories from Charles IX. to Lokis, and we can very well do without criticism from him. So all, once more, is for the best—a reflection which, when made in connection with Mérimée, has unwonted piquancy.

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III. GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

HAMANN—LICHTENBERG—HERDER—HIS DRAWBACKS OF TEDIOUSNESS, PEDAGOGY, AND “METEOROSOPHIA,” BUT GREAT MERITS—THE ‘FRAGMENTE’—THE ‘KRITISCHE WALDER’—THE ‘URSACHEN DES GESUNKNEN GESCHMACK,’ THE ‘IDEEN,’ ETC.— ‘AGE-, COUNTRY-, AND RACE-, CRITICISM’—SPECIMENS AND REMARKS— WIELAND—GOETHE—THE ‘HAMLET’ CRITICISM, ETC.—THE ‘SPRÜCHE IN PROSA’— THE STERNE PASSAGES—REVIEWS AND NOTICES—THE CONVERSATIONS—SOME MORE GENERAL THINGS: GOETHE ON SCOTT AND BYRON—ON THE HISTORIC AND COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE OF LITERATURE—SUMMING UP: THE MERITS OF GOETHE’S CRITICISM—ITS DRAWBACKS: TOO MUCH OF HIS AGE—TOO MUCH A UTILITARIAN OF CULTURE—UNDULY NEGLECTFUL OF LITERATURE AS LITERATURE—SCHILLER—HIS ÆSTHETIC DISCOURSES—THE BÜRGER REVIEW—THE ‘XENIEN’—THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH GOETHE—THE ‘NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY’—OTHERS: BÜRGER—RICHTER—THE ‘VORSCHULE DER ÆSTHETIK’—THE SO-CALLED “ROMANTIC SCHOOL”—NOVALIS—THE ‘HEINRICH’—THE EARLIER ‘FRAGMENTS’—THE LATER—HIS CRITICAL MAGNIFICENCE—TIECK—THE SCHLEGELS— THEIR GENERAL POSITION AND DRIFT—THE ‘CHARACTERISTIKEN’—A. W.: THE ‘KRITISCHE SCHRIFTEN’ OF 1828—ON VOSS—ON BÜRGER—THE ‘URTHEILE,’ ETC.—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DRAMATISCHE KUNST UND LITERATUR’—THEIR INITIAL AND OTHER MERIT—THE SCHLEGELIAN POSITION—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN ÜBER SCHÖNE LITERATUR UND KUNST’—ILLUSTRATED STILL MORE BY FRIEDRICH—UHLAND—SCHUBARTH—SOLGER—PERIODICALS, HISTORIES, ETC.

There is a difficulty in writing about German criticism, especially in the great period of Goethe’s productiveness, which hardly occurs in any other department of our subject. Not only is there much positive critical writing from all the writers, great and small, of the time, but almost all the writings of the great ones are criticism of an indirect and applied kind. The whole of German Literature from 1750 to 1830 is a sort of Seminar—a kind of enormous and multifarious Higher Education movement, pursued, with much more than half consciousness, by persons often of great talent and sometimes of great genius. To give an account of all this is impossible: if it were possible it would be really improper, because much of what the Germans found out with infinite labour was only what nations more fortunately situated in regard to literary position had inherited, if they sometimes neglected their inheritance. But they also found out certain things which other nations had not: nor is it easy to combine an indication of these with an account, full, but not too full, of the entire movement; and hardly any two persons are likely to agree on the point where fulness is reached but running over has not begun.

[Sidenote: Hamann.]

An early and remarkable instance of this critical permeation is Hamann,[645] the “Magus of the North.” If Hamann had been anything but a German, superficial readers might take him for a quack; indeed, as it is, they have done so, and possibly may still do so. After an early visit to England—which was anything but fortunate, save that it imbued him with English literature—and after trying various occupations, he passed the greater part of his life in a very poor public employment. He wrote large numbers of letters to Lindner, Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and other persons, and published many short treatises, of the most miscellaneous in kind, and the most eccentric and occasionally apocalyptic in style and title. But he was in reality as deadly a foe of affectation and sham as Carlyle himself, who, no doubt, took not a little from him. His polemic with his friend, and townsman, and “high-honoured Herr-magister” Kant (whom, however, one shudders to find elsewhere described as “ein guter homunculus”) does not concern us. But it is almost impossible to read a few pages in his works without coming across some literary reference, more or less remarkable when its date is considered. As early as 1759 he writes[646] to Kant himself, “Wir schreiben für ein Volk das Maler und Dichter fordert”; three years later[647] he entitles two of his quaint little pieces “Author and Critic,” “Reader and Critic,” and fills them with ironic wisdom. Earlier than these last, in May 1761,[648] he has read Diderot, and, like Lessing,[649] has discovered in and with him that rules are all very well, but that there is something “more immediate, more intimate, obscurer, but more certain” than the Rule.

He is harsh, but by no means wholly unjust (as indeed we have seen), when he finds, in The Elements of Criticism, “Mehr Worte und Wendungen als Sachen”; he knows Burke; and he leaves his “Magus”-tower to discuss Baretti and Goldoni. Mystic as he is, he detects the emptiness of the new Æsthetic:[650] and consistently champions direct perception of literary and other beauty in individual cases. It is admitted that his Shakespeare study[651] transmitted itself to Herder, upon whom he had great influence: and, generally speaking, he may be said to have exercised at least as much power in the germinal and stimulating way upon the younger writers, who were to form the great generation, as Lessing did in the way of dogma and method. Against the mere Aufklärung and against Sturm und Drang, Hamann was alike a conservative and preservative agency: and he is one of the authors, now getting terribly numerous, on whom I should like to spend much more time and space than can be afforded here.

[Sidenote: Lichtenberg.]

There are rather strong points of resemblance between Hamann and the somewhat younger Lichtenberg. Both were very much influenced by visits to England, and both show the inspiration or English humourists— especially Swift—in their not exactly forced, but very decidedly purposed, eccentricity. Lichtenberg, however, was more a man of this world than the “Magus”: and he shows very much more of the passion of the time for physics. Never did any one’s writings better deserve the title of Vermischte Schriften[652] than his, consisting as they do, for the most part, of a bewildering assemblage of mote-articles, ranging from the question “Why Germany has no seaside watering-place,”[653] and from an account of a “Sausage-Procession”[654] (which gives a foretaste not merely of Jean Paul but of Sartor Resartus itself) to serious mathematical and physical discussions. Lichtenberg is perhaps best known to English readers by his dealings with Garrick and other English theatrical persons: but there is not a little pure literature in him, outside as well as inside his two sets of titularly literary Bemerkungen.[655] He has actual animadversions on Pope, on Swift, on the early German drama even: but his most noteworthy critical achievements are to be found in more general maxims and judgments, many of them showing that creditable anxiety for the literary improvement of his country which the best men of his generation all felt, and which was rewarded in and by the next. He stigmatises that excessive imitation which even here we have had to notice: he says plumply,[656] Die Deutschen lesen zu viel; he is prophetically, as well as actually, notable on the process of commenting and translating Shakespeare.[657] But perhaps his best judgment-epigram is on that critical vice which is the other extreme from general denigration. “Men call,” says he, “others by the name of genius, as wood-lice [Kelleresel] are called Millepedes. Not that they have a thousand legs, but that people won’t take the trouble to count!”

[Sidenote: Herder.]

With Herder himself a different form of difficulty besets the historian. Here there is no question of scattered literary obiter dicta occurring in a range of obstinately miscellaneous thinking. Twenty volumes[658] of ostensibly and really literary work, of which something like a full half is actual criticism, present themselves to the inquirer; he knows, and everybody knows, that his author counts, as hardly anybody else, save Lessing and Goethe, has counted, in the literary development of one of the great “completely equipped”[659] literary nations of Europe; he can see, if he has any eyes at all, that Herder is, with Lessing, Diderot, and the shy and mainly apocryphal Gray, one of the very few leaders in the conversion of Europe at large to a catholic study of literature. And yet the arguments against any very full treatment of him in such a book as this are twenty-legion strong.[Sidenote: His drawbacks of tediousness,] In the first place, there is what I can only call a certain fearful woolliness about Herder’s literary work. It scarcely ever compresses and crystallises itself into a solid and fiery thunderbolt of literary expression. He himself, in the very forefront of it,[660] speaks of “Die liebe Göttin Langeweile,” “the dear Goddess Ennui,” as having “hunted many, if not most people, into the arms of the Muses.” I am afraid it must be said that in his own case the dear Goddess did not understand where her mission as matchmaker ended, and is too frequently present at the interviews of man and Muse.

[Sidenote: pedagogy,]

In the second place, that pedagogic instinct which has been noted, which is so excusable and so praiseworthy in him and in his contemporaries, when we consider their circumstances and milieu, interferes somewhat disastrously with the freedom and the lasting interest of his writing. The Latin nations, by their inheritance of real or supposed prerogative from Latin itself, we English by our alleged national self-sufficiency, escape this in greater or less degree. All the four, Italians, French, Spaniards, English, take themselves in their different degrees and manners for granted; they are “men,” if only in the University sense. The Germans of the mid-eighteenth century are, and take themselves for, schoolboys: it is greatly to their credit, but it does not precisely make them good reading without a great deal of good will. [Sidenote: and meteorosophia,] Lastly Herder, as it seems to me (though, no doubt, not to others), in consequence of this sense of dissatisfaction with his own literature, climbs too rapidly to generalisations about the relation of literature itself to national character, and to the connection of literature generally with the whole idea of humanity. All this is noble; but we are in a bad position for doing it. It will be a capital occupation for persons of a critical temperament when humanity has come to an end—which it has not even yet, and which it certainly had still less in Herder’s time.[661]

[Sidenote: but great merits.]

These general disadvantages are indeed compensated by general merits of a very eminent kind. Stimulated by Hamann, by Lessing, and by his own soul, Herder betook himself, as nobody had done before him, to the comparative study of literature, to the appreciation of folksong (perhaps his best desert), to the examination of Ancient, Eastern, Foreign literature in comparison with German. This is his great claim to consideration in the history of literature and of criticism: and it is so great a one that in general one is loath to cavil even at the most extravagant expressions of admiration that have been lavished upon him.

[Sidenote: The Fragmente.]

But individual examination of his works revives the objections taken above. For instance, the early Fragmente zur Deutschen Litteratur[662] has an almost unique relative interest. I do not know where to look for anything like it as a survey (or rather a collection of studies) of a literature at a given period of its development. On the language; on the prosody;[663] on the “rhetoric” in the narrow-wide sense, of German after the close of the Seven Years’ War; on the chief authors and kinds of its literature; on a vast number of minor points, positive and comparative, in relation to it, Herder lavishes an amount of filial devotion, of learning, of ability, which is quite admirable. Taken absolutely, the value and the interest, and therefore the admiration, shrink a little.

[Sidenote: The Kritische Walder.]

The Kritische Wälder, which followed the Fragmente in a couple of years,[664] are occupied, first, with a sort of continuation of the work of Winckelmann and of Lessing in the Laocoön (a continuation which, like its forerunners, busied itself chiefly with the arts other than literature), and then with some work of Lessing’s enemy, Klotz,[665] somewhat more directly literary in kind. Klotz, however, had busied himself, and Herder necessarily busies himself in turn, with general questions of the moral-literary type, especially in reference to Homer and Virgil. The book is full of those curious Rettungen or “white-washings,” of which we have previously referred to an example in speaking of Lessing on Horace. But it has not very much for us.

[Sidenote: The Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmack,]

There is some more, though the quality may be differently appreciated by different persons, in the Prize Essay of 1773 on the Causes of the Decline of Taste in different Nations:[666] and a great deal more in the twenty years later Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und bildenden Künste.[667] In the first, Herder develops (not of course for the first time, for Montesquieu had given the line long before, if he had not applied it much to literature, and Du Bos had started it before him, and Vico had in a manner anticipated both; but for the first time in a wide, and at the same time not loose, application to literature itself) the idea of Age- and Race-criticism—the close conjunction of a general conception of the characteristics of a time and a country with the phenomena observed or supposed to be observed in groups of literary production. In theg second, at once generalising further, and descending to further particulars, we have an attempt to connect literature with general characteristics of humanity, and almost innumerable critical experiments of this process, on different authors and schools and kinds.

[Sidenote: the Ideen, &c.]

Anything that has to be said in general on these processes is for the Interchapters; but we may here repeat that no one can well exaggerate their historical importance or the influence that they have exercised since. Further, the merit of their combined precept and example, in directing study at once to those features which are common in all literature, and to the individual bodies by comparison of which the general features are discernible, is quite beyond question. The Prize Essay has perhaps the main defects of its kind, that of “figuring away” in plausible gyration, without bringing home any very solid sheaves, or even leaving any definite path. But the immense Miscellany of the Ideen more than makes up for this. Herder’s general scheme, here, in the Adrastea,[668] in that Aurora (suggested by the dawn of the nineteenth century) which he only planned, and which was but a small part of the huge adventures for which he died lamenting his lack of time, may be described as that of a mediæval collection of Quæstiones Quodlibetales, methodised by the presence throughout of his leading practical and theoretic ideas. [Sidenote: Age-, Country-, and Race-, Criticism] These were, as has been said, the necessity of enriching German literature with material, and furnishing it with patterns, “plant,” and processes, by the study of all literature, ancient and modern, as a practical and immediate aim; and the working out of the notions of literature, as connected with the country, and literature, as connected with the general race, for ultimate goal.

[Sidenote: Specimens and Remarks.]

But, owing to the enormous dissipation,—the constant flitting from flower to flower which his task imposed on him,—Herder was not and could not be a very important critic on particular points. He was bound to share the over-valuation of Ossian[669]—for was not Ossian exactly what was wanted to dissolve and lubricate the sècheresse of French-German enlightenment, and did it not appear to give a brilliant new example of “national” literature? So we must not overblame him for this, any more than we must overpraise him—while praising him heartily— for having been undoubtedly the main agent in inoculating the Germans with Shakespeare.[670] Elias Schlegel had begun the process, and Hamann had continued it; but the first was cut off too early for him to do more than make a beginning, and Hamann’s mission was rather to send others, including Herder himself, than to work directly upon the general. It is also fair to say that, with all his soaring ideals and world-wide aspirations of mental travel, there was little Schwärmerei about Herder, except in a few semi-poetical passages, which can easily be skipped. His judgment is a pretty sound and sensible one, if his taste is not infallible—see for instance his remarks on political poetry (xvi. 169, op. cit.), and the equally modest and intelligent observations which follow on the impossibility of emulating or surpassing the special qualities of foreign literatures, however useful these literatures may be for study.[671] To any nation Herder must have been a useful and stimulating teacher; to the Germans at this time he was simply invaluable. But the definition of his general scope, and these few particulars of his procedure, must suffice us here.[672]

[Sidenote: Wieland.]

Wieland, the other chief of German belles lettres between Lessing and Goethe, is also one of those writers—necessarily thickening upon us as we proceed—who were very important to their own times and countries, but whose importance historically is here less a matter for detailed investigation than for general summary. His extensive work[673] is full of criticism; indeed his position as editor of the Teutsche Merkur was one of the most responsible and not of the least influential in the great German period. The curious modernised-classical or classicalised-modern novels and miscellanies of which he was so fond— especially the Abderiten—abound in it, in a more or less dissolved and diffused state; the seven or eight volumes of his miscellaneous works[674] contain more in a precipitated and concentrated condition. Now he will ask—but perhaps not answer—the question, “Was ist eine schöne Seele?”[675] then discourse (after the fashion of Burke and Barnwell and Bulwer) on “the Relation of the Agreeable and Beautiful to the Useful”;[676] then come closer still to real practical criticism in the interesting “Sendschriften an einen Jungen Dichter” of 1784.[677] The alphabetically arranged reviews and notices which fill, or help to fill, the three last volumes deal with all manner of authors and books, from Aristophanes to the Amadis, and from Louise Labé to Luis Vivès. In all, modified to some extent by the influence which his greater juniors exercised latterly on him, there appears that somewhat rococo, but interesting, attractive, and very largely beneficent blend or coupling of wit and imagination (or at least fancy) which is Wieland’s characteristic, and which undoubtedly did much—very much—to raise the Germans out of another and much less attractive mixture of pedantry and horse-play and bombast. But his individual critical utterances are of less importance to us. And so to Goethe himself.

[Sidenote: Goethe.]

In a certain sense the whole six-and-thirty volumes[678] of Goethe’s work, with all the Letters and Conversations added, may be said to be a record of his criticism: in this sense he certainly deserved the hackneyed “nothing if not—--” But for our purposes, though we may step beyond them now and then, the famous passages in Wilhelm Meister and elsewhere (especially “Shakespeare und Keine Ende”) on Shakespeare, the Sprüche in Prosa, the collected papers on German and other literature, and the Conversations with Eckermann, will give a sufficient collection of texts. The Xenien will be more conveniently postponed till we deal with their other author.

[Sidenote: The Hamlet criticism, &c.]

One thing must or should have struck every reader (at all accustomed to draw conclusions from what he reads) about the Hamlet passages in Meister.[679] These passages might have been written by a man who was only acquainted with a prose translation of the piece into a language other than its own. This may seem a little staggering: but it is true. Goethe handles—with extraordinary and for the most part unerring insight—the characters, the situations, the conduct of the play. But there he stops dead. Of its magnificent and ineffable poetical expression—of those phrases and passages which, read hundreds of times through scores of years, produce as much effect on the fit reader as at first, and more—he says nothing. “Shakespeare und Keine Ende” tells the same story: nearly all, if not all, the scattered references from the Frankfort speech of 1771, when he was just of age, to the last remark to Eckermann sixty years later, tell the same. It is at least a curious one. One begins to wonder whether the person who wrote Shakespeare was, not Bacon, but, say, Wieland.

[Sidenote: The Sprüche in Prosa.]

Many things, however, might, and some perhaps shall, be said about this. Let us turn to the more miscellaneous and general utterances of the Sprüche in Prosa, which, with the parallel verse jottings, especially some of the Zahme Xenien, are recognised as supplying a sort of running accompaniment of Goethe’s thought, for all periods of his life. No one (again with the same slight goodwill to think) can read far in either of these divisions, much less in both of them, without perceiving the very strong, we might almost call it the overbearing, practical and ethical tendency, even of those passages which apparently bear most closely on literature. All the best things are generalised as much as possible, with perhaps some forgetfulness of the writer’s own caution about Allgemeine Begriffe.[680] In these generalities there is much that is admirable, such as the famous “Superstition is the poetry of life,”[681] and the much less known but very striking “Rhythmical movement has something magical about it: it makes us believe that the Sublime is our own property.”[682] The danger appears in his often-quoted comparison of Classicism to Health and Romanticism to disease[683]—if he had said “Classicism is precaution against disease: Romanticism is making the best of that which must come,” there would have been something to say for him. But it is far off in the admirable, “There are pedants who are also scoundrels; and they are the worst of all.”[684]

But when we pass from these generalities—disputable sometimes, indisputable not seldom, almost always stimulating—to individual judgments, the case is a little altered. If he had oftener written such notes as “Vis superba formæ. Ein schönes Wort von Johannes Secundus,”[685] it had been better. What is the good of saying of Henry IV.[686] that “If everything else extant of the kind were lost, we could restore poetry and rhetoric completely out of this alone”? Nobody shall outgo me in rational admiration of Henry IV. I will not give up a hair of Doll Tearsheet’s head, nor a blush of the page’s cheek. Everything in it is good: but to say that everything that is good is in it would deepen the inscrutable smile on Shakespeare’s face a little less inscrutably. The saying, however, may perhaps be allowed the credit, as well as the discredit, due to enthusiastic exaggerations. This is not the case with the passages on Sterne,[687] which are numerous, which form a tolerably complete context, and which are yet separated from each other, and returned upon, in a fashion which shows what a strong impression the subject had made on the writer’s mind.

[Sidenote: The Sterne passages.]

We begin with the sufficiently round statement, “Yorick Sterne was the finest[688] spirit that ever worked. Whosoever reads him has at once the feeling of freedom and beauty; his humour is inimitable, and not every kind of Humour frees the soul.” Now, as a thing said once, this would be surprising enough, however well we may think of Sterne: but Goethe does not leave it alone. After the widest casts round to the general aspects of Poetry and Science, Art and Humour, he circles back to “Tristram.” “Even at this moment” (the context shows that this must have been pretty late in his life), “every man of culture should take his works once more in hand, that the nineteenth century may learn what we owe him already, and look out for what we may still owe him.” Another page and more of generalities, and he harks back again. “Sterne was born in 1713 and died in 1768. To comprehend him one must not leave out of consideration the moral and ecclesiastical state of his time: we should remember that he was Warburton’s contemporary.” And then a context of notes remarks on his “free spirit,” “his power of developing things from within,” of “distinguishing truth from falsehood,” his “hatred for the didactic-dogmatic, the pedantic tendencies of the serious”; his wide reading and discoveries of “the inadequate and the ridiculous”; his “boundless sagacity and penetration,” and a great many other things. Admitting that Sterne is “never a model,” he thinks him “always suggestive and stimulating,” and makes the charitable remark that “the element of coarseness in him, in which he moves so carefully and elegantly, might have spoilt many others.”

Now this is at first odder than the hyperbole about Henry IV., and takes one’s breath away more completely for the moment. One may have a very strong liking for “Atalanta’s better part,” for the lightness, grace, good sense, refreshing qualities of Shandyism, and a very great admiration for Sterne’s genius, especially for the uniqueness, if not exactly the impeccability, of its literary expression. But to make of him, even to the extent to which it is possible to make of his master Rabelais, an author to be turned over by day and night, a vade mecum, a great teacher, a literary discoverer and deliverer, the “finest spirit that ever worked”—this is really going rather too far. Yet the point of view is perfectly obvious, and it is equally obvious that it is not a literary point of view at all. Goethe felt severely the Philistinism of his own country, and he had—as most Continentals always have had, and as some dear good Englishmen think it proper still to have—the idea that England was specially dominated by the weaver’s beam. Sterne to him is a David: his jests and pranks are the small stones of the brook, and he thinks of nothing more than of the discomfiture of Goliath.

Yet he could be Philistine enough himself, as where, in Shakespeare und Keine Ende, having talked of the universality of Shakespeare[689] more mysteriously and pretentiously, but far less intelligently and forcibly, than Dryden a century and more earlier, he tells us that “Coriolanus is pervaded throughout by the chagrin experienced at the refusal of the mob to recognise the choice of its betters.” In Julius Cæsar “everything rests on the idea that the leaders are averse to seeing the highest place filled, because they wrongly imagine that they can work successfully in co-operation.” Antony and Cleopatra “declares with a thousand tongues [plus a thousand copybook headings?] that idle enjoyment is incompatible with a life of activity.” We have all heard of Goethe as a great and true Apollo, a Philistine-slayer from youth to age. Was there ever more platitudinous and trivial chatter of Ashdod than in these three sentences? And how, again, when we find him, like a seventeenth-century Preceptist, dividing literary motives into Progressive, Retrogressive, Retardative, Retrospective, and Anticipatory, a list which yet once again sets one thinking, with a shameful joy, on possible Rabelaisian developments and parodies of it? Is our own poor Alison, with his Bandit unequally yoked to a Grecian nose[690]—are the poor Le Bossus and Rapins themselves—to be scoffed at, when we find this Jove of Weimar and Germany laying it down that “Christians contending with Christians will not, especially in later times, form a good picture,” but that “Christians conquering Turks” are admissible?

[Sidenote: Reviews and Notices.]

The very numerous literary reviews and notices which fill nearly two volumes[691] of the Works in the edition we are using must, of course, be read by every one who desires to acquaint himself thoroughly with Goethe’s criticism: but they have not quite the importance which they might be expected to have, and very often, when they are at their best, that best comes to little or nothing more than we find condensed and quintessenced in a maxim of the Sprüche or a sentence of the Conversations. This indeed could not be otherwise: for the most “panoramic intellect” (a phrase which Goethe acknowledged with rather sardonic politeness when it was applied to him by some English critic[692]) cannot see, and the most facund tongue cannot say, the same thing differently every time. Even in the earliest there are very neat things, as where[693] poor Sulzer’s Die Schönen Künste is described in the opening sentence of the review as “Very suitable for translation into French: indeed it might very well have been translated from French.” The very latest, such as that on Mérimée’s La Guzla,[694] display that combination of fresh interest, impartial judgment, and experienced knowledge which ought to be the reviewer’s equipment, but which unluckily few attain.

[Sidenote: The Conversations.]

On the whole, however, the Conversations with Eckermann are the richest placer of Goethe’s criticism, and the most convenient for the general reader. There appears to be no reason for any exaggerated scruples about admitting them as genuine and trustworthy. Eckermann, no doubt, has some of the irritating qualities which are almost inseparable from the Boswellian temperament: one need not be ashamed of enjoying that characteristic Heinesquery, the regret

“Dass Goethe sei todt, Und Eckermann sei zu Leben.”

But this need not prevent our being thankful that Eckermann remained zu Leben long enough to put these things on record. There is nothing in the least disloyal or disgusting about them: the sternest hater of eavesdropping need not be afraid or ashamed to take up the book. And Eckermann seems to have been very fairly in possession of the two positive and the one negative qualities required by his difficult and rather thankless art—exactness, intelligence up to a certain point, and the absence of the superfluous cleverness which might have tempted him to refine, and touch up, and overlay. Therefore some analysis of the chief critical utterances of the book should find a place here. It must, moreover, always be remembered that Goethe was a man soaked in literature, and that those who read him without having at least dipped in it are apt to make mistakes.[695] Pretty early we have one of those striking generalities which catch mankind, and which—in a sense not unjustly—have earned their author his immense reputation. “Fact must give the motive, the points that require expression the particular kernel; but to make a beautiful enlivened whole, that is the business of the poet.”[696] The practical advice about a certain job of verse[697] is as good as it can be, and as we should expect it to be; to find a better and more conscious craftsman of letters than Goethe, you may take the wings of the morning and put a girdle round the earth in vain. Nor perhaps is much more needed than mere quotation for the three words on the opposite page, Ach, das Publikum! There is a very noteworthy passage[698] on Schiller and his philosophy, and a still more noteworthy one,[699] indeed one of the cardinal places of the whole, on the character of writers, with a context—accidental as far as dates go (for there is a full fortnight between them), but real in thought—on Style.

The classification of his enemies[700] is very interesting and curious, as are, both from the critical and the personal standpoint, the observations[701] on Klopstock and Herder. But what follows[702] immediately, on the contemporarily intimate relations between France and Germany in literature, is more noteworthy still, and so is, especially when we take account of the dates and of other places, Goethe’s dissuasion[703] of Eckermann from undertaking a compte-rendu of German Literature for an English Review. At this very time[704] the Globe was being founded in Paris: and Goethe’s admiration for the Globe was unbounded. J. J. Ampère he knew personally: but the praise which so constantly recurs applies to Sainte-Beuve, Rémusat, and others almost more than to Ampère. In one place later, he expresses his surprise that these young French reviewers did not think it necessary, as the Germans did, to “hate one another” if they differed in opinion.[705] Alas! the disease was not, and is not, confined to Germany: and it certainly did not spare these same contributors to the Globe. But their width of range, their comparative spirit, their judicial and yet not pedagogic manner, justly enchanted Goethe. And it was doubtless because he did not, in 1824, think it possible for a reviewer to show them, that he bade Eckermann not “eat the beans” of reviewing.

The passage[706] which naturally and immediately follows on the connection of German and English literature, and the frank avowal of the enormous indebtedness of the former to the latter, is deservedly famous, and certainly shows Goethe most favourably in the light of that combined lamp of intelligence, learning, and character which he himself always liked to turn on his subject. But one does not read with so much satisfaction what follows at a little distance on the sufficiency of translation,[707] a passage at which, I feel sure, all the Muses wept. Scientifically, morally, practically, translation can do much: from the point of view of pure literature, all it can do is to supply something different from the original—good perhaps, bad perhaps, between the two most probably, but never the original. Once more he refers valuably[708] to the great older contemporaries of his youth—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, as well as to Schiller. Always we may apply to Goethe when he speaks of Schiller what Thackeray says so well of Pope[709] when he speaks of Swift. His remarks on Menander in more places than one supply a very curious document, or item of a document, as to his criticism generally, when we reflect in what a fragmentary state the great New Comic has come down to us. Many notable passages on Shakespeare and Molière follow: indeed, the various contexts on Molière should be as carefully looked at and compared as those on Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. They will form, with these, the chief bases of our general estimate of Goethe’s criticism.

The judgment[710] of January 1827 on Hugo is famous and interesting. More favourable than later ones, it shows the critic’s eclecticism, if not quite his catholicity. He saw, and saw rightly, the connection with Chateaubriand: and we must not now be too severe on him for thinking then that Hugo “may be as important as Lamartine and Delavigne.” A less agreeable side of his criticism—one to which we have had, and shall have, to turn and return—is the remark on Flemming,[711] er kann jetz nicht mehr helfen. Now Flemming certainly was not a very great poet; he has only “a very pretty talent, rather prosaic and bourgeois.” But the “er kann jetz nicht mehr helfen” is hard to forgive. It is a point of view which has done harm to many, notably to Mr. Arnold: but that is between the Muses and themselves. What concerns us, is that it is bad in itself. The idea that such and such a writer “won’t pay,” that you can’t “get culture” out of him, is the pure Philistinism of culture itself. It is the exact analogue to the theory and practice of “saving your own dirty soul” in religion. What does it matter whether he “helps” or not, if he is good and, in his own little or large measure, delights? This calculus of profit is mighty disgusting and, we may add, mighty dangerous: for it is at the root of much of the bad criticism in the world.

He is in his better mind, and in his own sphere, with the remark[712] that now, fifty years ago, and fifty years hence, it is, was, will be so that what men wrote when they were young will be best enjoyed by young men. And we may note in passing wise and witty things on destructive criticism,[713] on Smollett,[714] on Lazaret-poesie,[715] before leaving with a good taste in our mouth, the first and, for literary utterances I think the weightiest, volume of the Conversations.

A good example of that common-sense judgment which is perhaps Goethe’s chief claim as a critic is to be found early in vol. ii.,[716] where he speaks of Aristotle as “rash in his opinions.” At first sight this may seem not merely impertinent, but contradictory of the facts: and yet there is much in it. Undoubtedly Aristotle, great as he is, was rash, with the peculiar Greek rashness of imagining that Greek facts were all facts: and this was nowhere more the case than in his literary criticism. We may be less happy—on the same page and the next—with a repetition of Philistinisms against Fouqué and the Middle Ages, about there being “nothing worth our fetching from these dim old German times,” or with an additional mistake (which again has done much harm) about the “miseries” of these said times and the uselessness of adding them to our own. How much better is a fresh application of “the apples of gold and pictures [frames] of silver,” a metaphor of which he was fond, a little later! “Die Frauen,” says he,[717] “sind silberne Schalen in die wir goldene Aepfel legen.” In other words, their worth and their fairness are their fairness and their worth to our imagination, which indeed is the conclusion of the whole matter, not merely in gynæcology. His statement as to Voltaire[718] that “everything which so great a talent writes is good,” is interesting to compare with the direct negative of Joubert. And it may repay anybody if he thinks a little about its connection with a more general and very important statement of Goethe’s, that “in Art and Poetry Personality is everything,”[719] wherewith also it were well to combine his frequent references[720] to his favourite idea of the “dæmonic.” His extreme and repeated[721] admiration of Daphnis and Chloe (undoubtedly a charming thing) is to be noted.

The third volume, giving us[722] Eckermann’s second skimmings of his notes and memories, is, perhaps naturally, less fruitful, but it is far from barren. Another of the audacious and felicitous phrases which have done so much to establish Goethe’s fame is that[723] about Shakespeare’s “unflustered, innocent, sleepwalkerish manner of production”: and the passage on Schlegel[724] is a good combination of magnanimity and veracity. One of the strangest blunders of interpretation ever made by such a man is that by which he makes[725] Macduff’s “He has no children” apply to Macbeth instead of to Malcolm, thereby not only making necessary a clumsy explaining-away of Lady Macbeth’s own words, but spoiling the poetry of the actual passage. In the same context comes the contradiction of himself, that Shakespeare thought mainly of the stage when he wrote.[726] On the other hand, the passage[727] on Burns, Béranger, and the effect on literary talent of an exciting atmosphere of various kinds, from the clash of sentiment and thought in a city like Paris to the inspiration of traditional ballad-literature, is all but consummate in a certain way.

Then read him on the incommensurableness of poetry,[728] and (in a happier vein about Classic and Romantic than that which has been noticed) pronouncing[729] that, for all the fuss (Lärme) about the two, “a work that is good all through will be a classic sure enough,” and you may leave him in a state of reconciliation which, in wise persons, will not be disturbed by later utterances on French authors, Guizot, Villemain, Mérimée, Victor Hugo even, though on the latter you may think that he has got at a wrong angle. After all, one may say that Hugo and not Goethe was in that position: for few persons with a critical head now think of the author of Marion de l’Orme as they think of the author of the Contemplations and the Légende.

[Sidenote: Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and Byron.]

To proceed from particulars to mediate generalities, a very instructive light on Goethe’s general critical attitude may be obtained by comparing his expressions in regard to Scott and to Byron.[730] He admires both. But in regard to Scott he justifies his admiration. His analysis to Eckermann[731] of The Fair Maid of Perth is really critical: he points out how good this passage is, how cunningly that episode is worked in, how powerful is that other picture. He praises Rob Roy in the same manner,[732] “going at the jugular,” selecting the truth of detail, the unendliche Fleiss in den Vorstudien (the very thing which shallow critics deny to Scott), and so forth. Now, his eulogies of Byron are quite different. They are nearly all in generals; the most definite passage that I remember, about the wigshops and lamplighters in Don Juan, comes from Eckermann’s mouth, not Goethe’s. The great man himself is struck by Byron’s social and political position; he is lost in wonder at Byron’s real or supposed revolt against what he, like others, supposes to have been English Philistinism (the Philistinism of Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding!), and the like. It is never a phrase, a passage, a situation, hardly ever a book[733] that he praises. And I do not know a closer approach to the merely and purely bête in a writer of the greatest literary, and of great critical, genius than the remark[734] that a few lines of Don Juan “poison the whole Gerusalemme.” It would be as sensible to say that one stanza of Tasso is an antidote to the whole of Don Juan. The two things are “incommensurable,” and severed by a gulf.

[Sidenote: On the historic and comparative estimate of literature.]

Another remarkable thing about Goethe’s criticism, which might be illustrated from the Sprüche, from Eckermann, and from other sources, may again surprise those who have simply adopted the common opinion of him as an apostle of universal culture. Curiously enough, he, the “Doctor Universalis” of nineteenth-century literature, as some would make him, distinctly discourages and disparages that historic study of Comparative Letters which is the distinguishing nineteenth-century principle. His warning to the Germans, that they have most to lose by the introduction of a “world-literature,” is no doubt true enough ad hoc or ad hos: and when, close by, he emits the wish, “May the study of Greek and Roman literature remain the basis of the higher Culture,” we can only say “Amen, and Amen” ever-lastingly. But his stigmatisation of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian literatures as Curiositäten—useless for moral and æsthetic culture—is very tell-tale: and even the most experienced person may be slightly shocked when he finds Goethe extending this taboo to European-mediæval letters as well.[735]

[Sidenote: Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism.]

I hope that it is not extravagant to think that this selection of the actual facts of the case, individual and grouped, may serve to base, with some solidity, a judgment of Goethe’s actual position as a critic. For a considerable time, let us say roundly the middle forty years of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870, this position, very mainly owing to the efforts of a large number of great men from Carlyle downwards, was exalted to the very skies: and even more recently it has been rather left alone than seriously attacked. The causes of this— causes which to some extent are true causes and must always operate—may be put shortly as follows. Goethe possessed, to an extraordinary degree, and later perhaps than any one else, that singular wisdom which has been more than once animadverted upon as the property, in the strict sense, of the eighteenth century. He was, for half its length and for nearly two-thirds of his own life, a man of its own: and he never escaped, or wished to escape, entirely from its influence. He was always “in touch” with life and fact: there was “no nonsense about him,” to use an excellent vernacular phrase which, if somewhat double-edged, has a keen and heavily backed edge on the favourable side. There are no “Samothracian mysteries of bottled moonshine” in him; the most apparently dreamy parts of his loftiest and greatest things, such as the second part of Faust, are always, like natural and healthy dreams, merely sublimations of actual facts—experienced or capable of being experienced.

But further, and on the other hand, he had, from very early youth, and by the favour of those of “the Mothers” who allow men of great genius to anticipate and combine the gifts which most have only later and separately, a very strong infusion indeed of Romance and of Science— the two apparently opposite characteristics of the century to which his last thirty years belonged. He had hardly a touch of the special stupidity which accompanied the special cleverness of his earlier century—the degeneration of “common-sense.” In him the fashionable and epidemic diseases of the Neo-classic period were neutralised by the appropriate agencies, without any of these turning to the morbid. The comparison of Goetz with The Robbers is an education in pathological criticism. Nobody ever served under two flags with such honour and credit as Goethe; he may even be said to have effected, if not alone, yet mainly, a reconciliation and junction of arms between his two masters. Yet again his almost unique mastery (just glanced at) of the tendencies of the morrow; his sympathy, in his age, and when he was in a way the greatest man of letters in Europe, with the ideas, tastes, aspirations of quite young men—not merely secured, but to no very small extent deserved, the enthusiastic adhesion of these latter. And when we add to these powerful general things his extraordinary literary gifts, the still more extraordinary range of his interests, the Olympian good-nature of his character, and his singular, and almost supra- or infra-human, avoidance of extremes, it ceases to be at all surprising that the position above noted should have seemed to good wits to be his: it may even seem ungracious, pedantic, absurd to take any exceptions to it.

[Sidenote: Its drawbacks: too much of his age.]

Yet the exceptions must be taken, and, if possible, made good. The greatest of them—at least, according to those general lines which he himself loved and followed—is connected with that peculiarity of his which has been noticed a few lines previously. He is just a little too much of the day and the morrow combined—not enough of yesterdays and to-morrows far behind and far ahead. The least local and temporary of those who are for an age—possessor of the widest “age” perhaps of them all—he is still of that age, and, except in criticisms that are of life rather than of literature, not sufficiently of all time. As we have seen and shown, he cannot duly appreciate the Middle Ages; and the fact that others were over-appreciating them does not excuse him a whit. In his formative precepts he looks too much to what he thought the requirements of actual nineteenth-century literature—a modified Romanticism, not excluding Science. In other words, he keeps time without winding for a longer period than any other clock on record, but he is perhaps rather impossible to wind afresh. On that calculus of his own which we have disallowed and protested against, which we shall shortly disallow and protest against afresh, one might too often say that he cannot “help us any more.” He is not as “rash in his opinions” as he thought Aristotle was, but he is more inadequate; we can nowadays allow for and discard Aristotle’s rashness, and find abundance of the eternal left in him, and we cannot quite do this with Goethe. We must sometimes, with Aristotle, have, and mark, the side-note, “This was a man of the fourth century B.C.”; we must always with Goethe have the other, “This was the cleverest man of 1770-1830.” Take him again with Longinus, and we find that Longinus needs hardly any side-note at all—only here and there in utterances such as that about the Odyssey. And I at least think that Coleridge, though he certainly needs it here and there, needs it seldomer, far seldomer, than Goethe.

[Sidenote: Too much a utilitarian of Culture.]

But there is another count. Goethe, as everybody knows, had a private chapel (which has bred chantries and churches and cathedrals all over the world), with an ephod and teraphim and everything complete, dedicated to the great god, Cham-Chi-Thaungu, otherwise called Culture. It is ill to be joined to any idols: and this was well seen of him. “This cannot help us,” he says constantly; “we cannot fetch any good out of this.” “Such times, such books, such men have nothing to say for us.” Now, such sentences, from the point of view of the really higher criticism, are anathema, because they are negative. The corresponding positives are not condemnable at all. If a thing does help any one, if any can fetch good, or delight, out of it, it passes at once—in a low class perhaps, perhaps in a high—but it passes. That it does not help any particular person proves nothing at all. If the work is good, on its own scale and specification, it can afford to wait for the persons whom it will help, to whom it will “give culture.” Its beauty is its sole duty. Indeed “What is culture?” is a question to be asked not at all jestingly, and it will be hard to find the answer.

[Sidenote: Unduly neglectful of literature as literature.]

Yet once more the specimens given (I believe quite fairly) above entitle us—and all but the most blindly fanatical Goetheaner will find it hard to _dis_entitle us from the observation—to observe in them a constant deflection from strictly literary consideration of things. He likes to consider “poetry” rather than “poesy,” poets rather than poetry; and in poets he is always considering the not strictly poetical qualities. He extols, for instance, in a well-known passage, Byron’s “Keckheit, Kühnheit, Grandiosität.” Now the last, though a somewhat questionable, may be a real, poetical quality: but what is there essentially poetical in Keckheit and Kühnheit? The occasion requiring them, it is good that a poet—as that a fox-hunter, a sub-lieutenant left in command of the regiment, a householder facing a fire or a burglar at two o’clock in the morning—should have them: but what is there specially poetical about them? On the contrary, may not a man have them and be, in virtue of having them, a bad, and the worse, poet? Character, conduct, personality (the second construed in a liberal way), these things are what Goethe is always harping on. Now, ten generations of foes and friends have (with the good leave of some friends as well as foes of mine) been able to make out next to nothing at all about Shakespeare’s character, conduct, and personality. Yet most people think that Shakespeare was, let us say, one of the great poets of the world. Shelley’s character was rather weak; his conduct was sometimes disgusting; his personality, though generally amiable, is very vague; and some of us think him the “next poet,” not merely the next English poet, to Shakespeare. We may be wrong: but our case is a case.

Therefore, insolent absurdity as it may seem, I venture to doubt whether Goethe’s criticism is of the absolutely greatest value. We have met with many marks or notes of the true critic in our “journey across Chaos,” and some of them Goethe has. But there are most important ones which he lacks. That he is a great dramatic critic I can very well admit: but his very greatness here, on the principle more than once referred to, makes him a dubious critic of literature. For the Goethe of Faust (not least of the Second Part of it), of the best lyrics, and of some other things, I have, and for a great number of years have had, almost unlimited admiration: for the critical Goethe I feel very much less. That, assisted by natural xenomania, he was a great revelation to Englishmen seventy, eighty, even a hundred years ago, I can very well allow and believe: that he was a valuable populariser of a critical attitude, useful as an alterative to that of Neo-classicism, I know. But I am less sure that there is much in him, as he would himself say, for us now. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, are creeds: though the first and second are too succinct and the last too discursive and full of lacunæ. I can admit even Scaliger, even Boileau, to be of the calibre of a will-worship. But Goethe, the critical Goethe, has too much the character of a superstition, now rather stale.

[Sidenote: Schiller.]

Schiller’s critical position, which some have estimated very highly, depends first upon the collection of small æsthetic treatises, and of a few actual reviews, which is included in his prose works;[736] secondly, in his share of the Xenien; and thirdly, in the critical utterances of his Letters, especially those in the correspondence with Goethe, though by no means neglecting those to others, especially Körner. With regard to the first part of the first division, extraordinary importance has been attached to it by some—importance which a wary person would be slow to accept on trust, when he remembers, not merely the remarks of A. W. Schlegel, a declared unfriend, but those of Goethe, Schiller’s unflinching defender, and those of Novalis, a very competent and apparently quite dispassionate observer.[737] Much, however, will of course depend on the estimation in which “æsthetic salt for putting on the tail of the Ideal”[738] is itself held.

[Sidenote: His Æsthetic Discourses.]

The very strong inclination of the poet towards the abstract discussion is shown in his “Dissertation on the Connection of the Animal Nature of man with the Spiritual,” written and printed in his twenty-first year: as well as in others nearly as early. And few things of the kind can be more curious than the comparison of the “Briefe über Don Carlos” with such other defences of a man’s own work as Dryden’s or Corneille’s.[739] The Discourses on Tragedy,[740] which appeared in the Thalia for 1792, of course have their interest. But Schiller’s most noteworthy exercises in this direction have, I believe, been generally thought to be the æsthetic discourses of the Fourteenth volume[741] and those on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,”[742] and on “The Sublime” in the Fifteenth.

[Sidenote: The Bürger review.]

This also contains the few reviews preserved. Of these, the most remarkable is the unlucky one on Bürger, as to which I can only say that, having first read it when I had not read A. W. Schlegel’s reply,[743] and did not know the tenor of this, I had anticipated Schlegel’s verdict, that it is “an offence against literary morality.” In one case, therefore, however humble, Schiller’s later plea,[744] that posterity would do justice to the uprightness of his intentions, has not itself been justified: and I cannot think that it can have been so in many others. For, though the ill side of human nature will always rejoice in its own likeness, and though, even putting this aside, there is still a singular notion abroad that an abusive review must be an honest and well-intentioned one, this review is one of the worst ever written, and in one of its own latter sentences it writes itself down so. Bürger, we are told, has “wealth of poetical painting, the glowing and energetic language of the heart, a streamer of poetry, now waving gorgeously, now caressingly floating, and [finally] an honest heart that speaks from every line.” If it were possible to imagine a reader who did not know Lenore or anything of the rest, and who had worked patiently through the pages on pages of carping and sneering which lead up to this astonishing confession, we can only suppose that he would gasp for breath, and wonder whether he had turned over half a dozen sheets at once and come upon the end of a quite different paper.

The truth appears to be that Schiller, with all his talent, all his genius, was something of a prig: and a prig is capable of almost any discreditable act. It has often been pointed out that for the author of Die Räuber to find fault with Bürger as not being strictly proper is “rather too rich”: but it must be remembered that when Schiller wrote Die Räuber he was a prig too, though a prig in a fit of unconventional, Bohemian, and Sturm-und-Drang priggishness. Here the cold fit had followed the hot. The poet of the Moors is now busied with “the man of culture,” with “Idealising art which collects and mirrors all the morality, all the character, all the wisdom of the time,” and which of course rejects equally raptures about “Molly,” and childish things about the dead riding fast. He informs us, with the true superior air, that Bürger “not seldom mingles with the People, to whom he should only let himself condescend.” And he has succeeded, marvellous to say, in reducing ad absurdum the argument against popularity as a test of poetry, in his very endeavour to reduce thereto the argument for it. “’Tis as much as to say,” cries he with lofty scorn, “‘What pleases excellent judges is good: what pleases all without distinction is better.’” “Why, so it is, oh well-born Court-Counsellor and Professor at Jena,” one may reply.[745]

[Sidenote: The Xenien.]

As for the Xenien, I am afraid I am still more out of accord with Schiller’s admirers here. The ill-nature of them is very suspicious when we find that, in this collaboration, it communicated itself to Goethe, who was certainly not ill-natured as a rule, though he was rather selfish. But the ill-nature is not the worst part. This kind of thing, whether it is done by a Pope, or by a Firm of Goethe, Schiller, & Company, has some of the disgustfulness of pigeon-shooting or even rabbit-coursing. There is hardly any real sport in it; the victims are nearly always rather defenceless, and generally quite harmless: their destruction does little, if any, good to anybody; and the spectacle is demoralising.[746]

These Xenien, I confess, appear to me to be one of those superstitions of literature which it is certainly the business of the critic, and the historian of Criticism, to protest against and demolish if he can. I never thought very much of them: and I think still less of them after a very careful study for the purposes of this book.[747] They corresponded, of course, in a certain sense, to the nearly contemporary, but much less famous and, as far as their authors are concerned, much less remarkable battues of Rivarol and Gifford in France and England. Goethe and Schiller were not only much more formidable sportsmen, but had much better game—or worse vermin if anybody likes—for quarry. The imperfections of German literature were, as they always have been, much greater than those of French, and much more easily got at than those of English. It is rather ridiculous, and more than rather disgusting, to find even such men treating such others as Wieland and Jean Paul (Herder himself seems only to have escaped because of his personal connection with Weimar) as if they were “Tom Sternhold or Tom Shadwell.” But this is not the worst of it. The Xenien are not, as a rule or in any large proportion, particularly good: and if they did not appeal to the ill-nature of mankind, and had not great names attached to them, few people would think them so. Schiller’s are often very lumbering verse and phrase, regarded merely as phrase and verse: Goethe’s are less often so, but seldom very brilliant as either.[748] If more people would read them in comparison with Martial himself, their lameness and awkwardness could hardly fail to be made clear. It would need a rather wider reading (though I at least have as little doubt of the result) to show not merely their pervading ill-nature and arrogance but their frequent miss-fires.

[Sidenote: The Correspondence with Goethe.]

Most fortunately, however, we are not left either in the cold with the Æsthetic treatises, or in hot water with the Bürger review and the Xenien. The Letters of Schiller and Goethe[749] are a twice-blest book. Nowhere does one like Goethe so much as in them: nowhere is it possible to understand, and therefore to like, Schiller better than in parts of them. It is true that the sense of his being fundamentally a prig of genius remains—that even the sense of his having something of that “bad blood,” of which Milton, Racine, and perhaps Wordsworth, are the chief other examples among persons of genius of the Upper House, remains likewise. But Goethe meets him with such an amiable camaraderie, he softens his asperities with such a never offensive but always effective blend of cordiality and irony, that, after the first few letters, Schiller begins to talk almost like a man of this world, and yet neither loses his predominant interest in literature. It is true that when we come to the Xenien the offence returns. It is not pleasant to find two men of genius calmly plotting how to put, into the smallest space and the neatest form, most envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness towards the greatest number of persons obnoxious to them. And Schiller’s remarks on the necessity of “giving it hot” to a certain unlucky Reichardt, who had had the impudence not merely to praise the Horen lukewarmly, but to praise the wrong things in them, can only be matched with Macaulay in reference to Croker, while there is much more deliberate malice in them. It is no excuse to say that severe criticisms are sometimes necessary. The reviewer is a policeman who may sometimes have to use his staff: the Xenien-writer is a bravo who chooses the stiletto. But enough of that matter.

And, as has been said, the book as a whole is very interesting to us. Schiller’s criticisms on Meister never reach the concentrated justice of Novalis (v. inf.) But they are by no means without parrhesia: and the picture they give us of the successive results of the instalments, on an eagerly receptive and extraordinarily sensitive literary wit-gauge, is not readily to be paralleled, except by the companion remarks of Goethe on Wallenstein later. And Goethe’s practised Weltweisheit deprives his observations of the naïve character which Schiller always, for good or for bad, retains. The latter, however, always retains likewise his porcupine attitude towards contemporary men of letters who are not quite of “ours.” From Richter to Bouterwek he cannot away with them in one sense, and would like to away with them very much in the other. Where this disturbing element does not come in, he is better; but seldom quite satisfactory. He was right not to think much of Darwin, and not wrong to think something of Restif’s Monsieur Nicolas: but this last, at least, has little to do with literature. His Shakespeare criticisms are always informing from the ethical-æsthetic side; they hardly even attempt the literary. But the elaborate character of the Index to these letters, which exhibits all the literary judgments of both the poets under separate reasoned catalogues, makes it almost unnecessary to pursue our usual process of sampling, the task being done to hand.

[Sidenote: The Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.]

Of the definite critical treatises, by far the most important for our purpose (the “Æsthetic Education” being omitted, on the showing of its chief admirers, as of a more general bearing) is the tract on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” It has even been claimed for this, that here, for the first time, is a distinction made out between ancient and modern poets, on the score of their objective and subjective character respectively. The distinction is not quite real, and it is not critically made out. In support of the first demurrer (which is something too wide for us here), let me request anybody who really knows the Greek choruses, and especially those of Æschylus, to say whether, on his soul and conscience, he can deny them “sentimentality” in the good sense, subjectivity in any. Goethe and Browning will be hard put to it to fight this prize against the choruses of the Agamemnon alone. The other point is more relevant. At the time[750] when Schiller wrote this essay we know, from a subsequent letter of his[751] to Goethe, that he had not read the Poetics; this is dangerous, but it is not fatal. What is, as it seems to me, fatal is that nearly all his literary citations are of a general and second-hand character. I can see nowhere any direct evidence of “contact” with the texts. He knows Kant at first hand certainly; he probably knows Lessing and Herder; he of course knows Kleist and Wieland. But did he know, at first hand and in the originals, besides the ancients, Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Ariosto, Rabelais and Molière? I cannot see much evidence of it.

In fact, though I know well to what danger I am, once more, exposing myself, I must once more say that Schiller does not seem to me a great critic, or even a good one. He was a man of letters who, as such, possessed genius, and a philosopher who at least had a very great talent for philosophy; and so much of a critic as can be made by these two qualifications he was. To put it in other ways, and perhaps to go even a little further, he was, as a merely a priori critic, or a critic furnished with such a posteriori knowledge as can be supplied at second-hand, very clever indeed. He could spin out of his interior more criticism, and of a better quality, than most men could. But he was excessively deficient in Love—that first and greatest fulfilling of the law of the true critic: and, partly without his own fault (for, as is well known, his life was short and not altogether favoured by fortune), partly by it, he did not give himself, or was not given, sufficient opportunity to warm his hands before that immortal fire of literature which each generation keeps burning, to soften what is harsh, feed what is starved, anoint and cheer and clean what is stiffened and saddened and soiled in the nature of man. The best of life might yet have been for him in criticism, as in other things: the Versöhnung, the time of the “calmed and calming mens adepta,” might have come. But it did not so please the Gods; and the most illogical form of playing Providence perhaps, though not the most mischievous and impertinent, is to refuse to accept the fact of what the Gods did not choose to do.

[Sidenote: Others: Bürger.]

Others of the greatest men of this Augustan period of German literature were more or less given to criticism, while not deriving their chief titles from it. Bürger himself was not at all contemptible in this respect. His answer to Schiller[752] is not undignified, and a little more of that wisdom of the serpent, which Molly’s adorer never possessed, would have made it very damaging. As we have said, it was Schiller’s ridicule of his theory of popularity that was ridiculous, not the theory in itself: and several things worth attention will be found in the two Prefaces to his Poems, in his “Thoughts on translating Homer,” and in his Prose Fragments. In these last, indeed, there are some critical utterances of real weight on the extreme sensuous and individualist side of theoretical Poetic. Bürger says boldly that “among people to whom asafœtida gives a more charming scent than roses the poet ought to celebrate asafœtida”; and I am bound to say I think he is right.[753]

[Sidenote: Richter.]

There is a note to the Preface of the second edition of Jean Paul’s[754] Vorschule der Æsthetik which expresses my own opinions on its subject so completely that I must give it in full. “A collection of Wieland’s reviews in the Teutsche Merkur, or, in short, any honest selection of the best æsthetic reviews from newspapers and periodicals, would be a better bargain for the artist than any newest Æsthetic. In every good review there is, hidden or revealed, a good 'Æsthetic,' and, more than that, an applied one, and a free, and the shortest of all, and (by dint of the examples) the best.”

No one, of course, who has the slightest knowledge of Richter will suppose that the whole book is written in such a straight-forward and common-sense style as this. But it is very far indeed from being one of his thorniest or most acrobatical: and Carlyle[755] need scarcely have feared that it might “astonish many an honest brother of our craft were he to read it, and altogether perplex and dash his maturest counsels if he chanced to understand it.” Nobody who can understand the Biographia Litteraria could have the faintest difficulty with the Vorschule.

[Sidenote: The Vorschule der Æsthetik.]

Such Richterisms as do appear are chiefly in the appendix lectures, the “Miserikordia-Lecture for Stylists,” the “Jubilate-Lecture for Poetical Persons,” and the “Kantate-Lecture on Poetical Poetry,” which, nevertheless, do contain excellent things. In the main body of the book there are only occasional flings (such as, “according to Kant, the formation of the heavenly bodies is easier to deduce than the formation of a caterpillar”), while the famous and very just description of a certain thing as “like a lighthouse, high, shining, empty,” is mere justice lighted up itself by wit. The fact is, that the book is one of the best of its kind, and deserves to be reserved from that exclusion of titular Æsthetics which prevails in this part of our History, not more by the large intermixture of actual criticism in it than by the sanity, combined with inspiration, of the rest. From its separation at the beginning of the “Nihilists” of Poetry (those who generalise everything) and the Materialists (who abide wholly in the sensuous) to the fragments on Style and Language at the end, it is a really excellent book, and if it has not been translated into English it ought to have been, and to be.

[Sidenote: The so-called “Romantic School.”]

The German “Romantic School”[756] has been the occasion of divers solid books[757] (and famous booklets) all to itself, and I do not consider it necessary to say much about it generally here. In a certain justifiable sense it may be said to have begun with Klopstock and only died, if it died even then, with Heine, who, on a calculus to me, I own, incomprehensible in any other sense than this, is thought by some to have killed it. But its usual connotation in literary histories, a connotation responsible, I think, for this and other errors, is that of a period extending from the latest years of the eighteenth century over about the first quarter (or the first thirty or forty years) of the nineteenth, and dominated by a remarkable quartette of friends—the two younger Schlegels, “Novalis,” and Tieck. The work of all the four is saturated with literary criticism of the polemic and propagandist kind, but it is rendered more troublesome to handle than it need be by the pestilent habit (which the Germans took from Rousseau, and from Goethe downwards indulged after the most intemperate fashion) of throwing polemic and propagandist thought into the forms of prose romance.

[Sidenote: Novalis.]

Of these four the greatest critic is, in my humble judgment, Novalis— though he wrote the least criticism. Indeed, there is a sense in which one might, without absurdity, call Novalis the greatest critic of Germany. He is, in fact, the Shelley of criticism; and it may be left to the Devil’s Advocates to suggest that, like Shelley, he had time to indicate, at least, all that was of truth in him, and had no time to turn it into, or muddle it with, error. He, very much more than Jean Paul, is der Einzige: though his uniqueness is such that, while it does not adjust itself to all times or temperaments, it will, when once apprehended, always re-present itself at some time or other with some slight assistance of fortune.

It would hardly have assisted his critical position if he had carried out the intention, which we are told[758] he entertained (under the influence of the above-noted delusion, as to the suitableness of the Romance for such purposes), of writing seven documents of the kind, on Poetry, Physics, the Civic Life, Commerce, History, Politics, and Love! Wilhelm Meister, which (see below) he judged so well, would have had much to answer for if this had been done. As it is, the existing but unfinished Heinrich von Ofterdingen represents the first of these, and the not much more than begun Lehrlinge zu Sais is believed to represent the second: but the rest remained bodiless and in the gloom. It was much better so: for neither the partly completed nor the hardly begun book approaches in value the Fragmente which follow. In fact, even if the scheme were really practicable (which, despite certain imposing instances, may be very much doubted), it is pretty clear that Friedrich von Hardenberg was not the man for it.

[Sidenote: The Heinrich.]

It can hardly, on the other hand, rejoice any reader of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, whether he be philosopher, critic, or simple reader for reading’s sake, when the Quest of the Blue Flower, and all the other agreeable Fouqué-like “swarmeries,” are interrupted by a discourse of three pages from the poet Klingsohr on the Überschwenglichkeit of certain subjects for poetry. Even if you are a poet, and a Middle-High-German, and the father of Matilda, you must not talk like that in a novel. And your poetry, and your Middle-High-Germanship, and your fatherhood of Matilda are very distinctly überschwenglich for you in your character as a critic. From Heinrich, therefore, we shall chiefly get (though there are tempting aperçus in it here and there) a somewhat vague notion of the clair-de-lune Poetic of the central Romantic school. [Sidenote: The earlier Fragments.] The Disciples at Sais hardly concern us. But the Fragments that remain give much less unsubstantial food. Here is that witty and appallingly accurate judgment of Klopstock, which applies to a whole class of poets as well, that “His works appear to be, for the most part, free translations and workings up of an unknown Poet by a very talented but unpoetical philologist.” Here, too, is that remarkable judgment of Goethe’s work in general, and of Wilhelm Meister in particular, of which Carlyle bravely gave the gist,[759] though it certainly did not coincide with his own opinion, and which remains almost a pattern of independent and solid judgment, unspoilt by any petulance or jealousy of youth, from a young man of letters on the living leader of his country’s literature. Here also are some almost equally remarkable things on Shakespeare, not quite showing the adequacy[760] of those on Goethe, but very acute and especially valuable because they enter a protest against the exaggeration—a reaction, of course, from the opposite exaggeration of Voltaire & Co.—of Shakespeare’s deliberate artistry. And these individual judgments occur side by side, in the æsthetic and literary division of these Fragments, with more general dicta of astonishing profundity and beauty.

The most pregnant of all the sayings, as it seems to me, though the æstheticians may not like it, is this,[761] “Æsthetic is absolutely independent of Poetry”; and I should pair with it the other,[762] “May not poetry be nothing but inner painting and music, freely modified by the nature of [the individual’s?] feeling (Gemüth)?” The further Shakespearian remarks[763] on the blending of contradictories in our poet, with the remarkable approximation of his style to Boccaccio’s and Cervantes’ prose, as “gründlich, elegant, nett, pedantisch und vollständig,” may puzzle some people, but they do not puzzle me. What a critical genius must a German have had who, about 1800 and before he himself was thirty, combined[764] with the above-cited judgments of Klopstock and Goethe, recognition of the facts that Wieland and Richter sin from formlessness, and from having “not æsthetic or comic spirit, but only æsthetic or comic moods,” and that Schiller “starts from too definite a point, and draws in too sharp and hard an outline.” “Man ist allein mit allem was man liebt”[765] may be said, by any one who likes, to be mere “dropping into poetry” in feeling as in form. Again: it is not so to me. And the postil[766] on a highly aggressive text, “Die Welt muss romanticisirt werden,” is not so aggressive as it looks.

[Sidenote: The later.]

I am, however, inclined to think that there is still further improvement in the fragments and thoughts of the third volume. This was not published till nearly twenty years after Carlyle wrote the Essay by which, in all probability, most Englishmen know Novalis. But I should venture to recommend, to any one who wishes to understand him, the reading of it both first and last. The biographical article, written many years before by his old friend and chief, Just, gives, I think, a fuller and truer notion of the man than Tieck’s Vorrede in the first collection. The Diaries, Letters, and oddments of various kinds help to fill out this portrait, and the Fragmente, themselves, from p. 160 onward, contain most admirable things. This third volume, in fact, forms a much earlier pendant to Amiel’s Journal, with, as some people may be excused for thinking, much less Katzenjammer, a much manlier tone, and far more positive genius.

How much more critical and more informing is the confession[767] that “Shakespeare is darker to him than Greece”—that he is more at home with Aristophanes’ jokes than with Shakespeare’s—not merely than the old abuse, but than certain kinds of laudation! What a combination (on a par with the sentence on Klopstock, elsewhere cited) of giustizia, potestate, sapienzia, e amore (not a bad definition, by the way, if I may dare to borrow it, of the qualifications of the critic) is there in the saying[768] that Goethe is “der wahre Statthalter des Poetischen Geistes auf Erden”! The words—idle paradox as they may seem to some—“Moments may occur when A B C books and Compendia seem to us poetical,”[769] are a better text for a whole æsthetic—or, at least, for a whole theory of real criticism—than oratio sensitiva perfecta or any of its clan. So is this:[770] “By industrious and intelligent study of the classics of the Ancients, there arises for us a classical literature which the Ancients themselves had not.” How just the observation[771] that “Lessing saw too clearly: and so missed the feeling of the undefined Whole”!

[Sidenote: His critical magic.]

These are but specimens. But I shall venture to say of them that for awaking the critical power, and qualifying the critical taste where it exists—as examples of that critical unity of subject and object which has been so often spoken of—they are specimens of some significance. There is only one other person who can, I think, be yoked with Friedrich von Hardenberg. If you want critical system, range of actual critical examination, and the like, you must go elsewhere. But for critical magic—for the critical “Open sesame!”—go to the two contemporaries, Novalis and Joubert.

[Sidenote: Tieck.]

Tieck, at one time very famous as a critic, and not undeservedly so, need occupy us less than his friends: for he has less intensity than Novalis, and less extension than the Schlegels. Survey of his critical work may, therefore, with advantage be confined to the actual collection of his Kritische Schriften,[772] which he issued in his last years: for the Nachgelassene Schriften,[773] the two thin volumes of which appeared after his death, contain only an eristic or apologetic piece, “Über Parteilichkeit, Dummheit, und Bosheit”—an “_un_hübsches Lied” which we all feel inclined to sing now and then—and some fragments and sketches for his great projected Shakespeare-book. It need hardly be said that Tieck occupies a very important position in the succession of German Shakespeare critics, or that some of the most interesting of his criticisms belong to the subject. Three out of the four earliest articles of the Kritische Schriften, all dated before 1800, concern the Master—the first being a perhaps excusably ill-tempered one on the engravings of the too famous Shakespeare Gallery; the second, the really valuable discussion of his “Handling of the Marvellous”; and the third, “Letters” on him. Tieck, as is again matter of common knowledge, was an early student of the Pre-Shakespearian drama, dealing with it at intervals in 1811, 1823, and 1828. His criticism is generally appreciative: but his textual suggestions are not always fortunate.[774]

As an example of what may be called the Romantic potpourri, Tieck’s work is very interesting and symptomatic. It ranges from Early German drama through Kleist to Goethe at home, and from Espinel to the history of the Novella abroad. It is all sensitive, appreciative, catholic; and there is a remarkably sound sense of Literary History (which it must be remembered was still in its infancy) in an article on “Criticism and German Bookishness” (Buchwesen). On the whole, however, that subordinate position, from the historical point of view, which I have assigned to him, in comparison with the other members of the quartette, seems to me not unjustifiable.

[Sidenote: The Schlegels.]

There are not many better known names in the History of Criticism than those of the (younger) Schlegels. They may even be said to be, in a vague and general manner, more associated with the idea of “Romantic” criticism than any other persons: and the question of the exact relationship of both to Coleridge, or of Coleridge to them, is one of those which seem to have more power than anything else to conciliate the attention to critical persons, though, as has been confessed repeatedly, the attraction is rather repulsive to the present writer. Of their influence on Madame de Staël—who at least served as a most influential vulgariser of the new critical ideas in Europe—there is no question at all: the later critical Corinne is mainly, if not merely, as much Schlegel as could go clothed in French petticoats, and remember itself there. Those who adopt the common, but to my thinking quite erroneous, idea that Romanticism began to wane towards the middle of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, probably mean Schlegelian Romanticism, and are so, perhaps, not quite wrong. In any case, the name, if shadowy and in a sense antiquated, is still imposing, if only as having once imposed.[775]

[Sidenote: Their general position and drift.]

The work of the Schlegels generally—for not a little of it was done in common, and almost all expresses a common tendency—may be described as a continuation of that of Herder, with a still more definitely literary intent, and with what may be called a complexion to that intent which was most definite of all. Criticism in Germany had been a long time focussing itself, and it may perhaps even be questioned whether the period of actual focus which it had now reached lasted very long; but for a time it did last. The somewhat wool-gathering and tentative efforts of Bodmer and his school had started the movement: and those of Gottsched, with, in a less utterly perverse direction, those of the half-French school—of whom Wieland is the representative, “too good for such a breed”—had wholly failed to divert it; the keen-edged strength of Lessing had given it movement and penetration; the immense literary excursions of Herder and others had opened up the widest fields to it. Nay, the Æsthetics, from Baumgarten to Schiller, with the imminent or accomplished transcendence of their transcendentalism in the minds, if not yet on the pens, of such men as Fichte and Hegel, had in a dangerous balloon-like fashion given new motive and vehicle; and the amiable if excessive Chauvinism of those about Klopstock had its good side likewise. If the extraordinary critical insight and sureness of hand which we have seen in the fragments of Novalis could have been allowed to preside over the concentration of all these, and had taken into partnership the practical wisdom of Goethe, and the exact scholarship of the great German school of philologists from Reiske downwards, there is no knowing how great the things done in consequence might have been. As it was, these two friends of Novalis were not quite equal to so mighty a task: but they did what they could, and it was a good deal.

[Sidenote: The Characteristiken.]

On the whole, Carlyle, I think, showed a right flair, due not merely to the fact that he had probably made his own first acquaintance with them in it, by selecting the Characteristiken[776] as more than titularly characteristic. No matter what article we take, or which brother, the eulogies of Lessing and of Meister, or the apology for Bürger, the “Romeo and Juliet,” an admirable thing in all but its title,[777] or the capital “Letters on Poetry” (in which A. W., unhampered by the connection with a heretic on the subject which afterwards hampered Coleridge, puts the indissolubility of the marriage between metre and poetry with the greatest force), the “Bluebeard and Puss in Boots,” or the “Don Quixote,” there is noticeable, in all, the peculiar modern blend of criticism—moral, æsthetic, verbal, and purely literary—compounded and applied with the utmost freshness, vigour, and skill. I do not know that they ever did better work, though, no doubt, there is observable, here as elsewhere, the great fault of Romantic criticism generally—that the critic is, so to say, too much at the mercy of the last speaker. The actual goose, on pool or grass, is always not only a swan, but the swan. Shakespeare and Calderon, Indian Literature and Chamfort, rule the roost so absolutely and exclusively for the time that one has twinges and qualms of doubt as to the legitimacy of the kinghood of any one of them.

[Sidenote: A. W.: the Kritische Schriften of 1828.]

But henceforward we may separate the brothers for a moment and take the elder first. His Kritische Schriften, mentioned in the note above, have the advantage, which it is nearly impossible to exaggerate, of containing not merely reviews and critical writings of different periods, but also later annotations on the earlier ones.[778] There can be no better test of a man’s critical quality than this: and Schlegel comes out of it very well, though the result no doubt does not place him quite as high as his friend Corinne and some others would do. The two best examples are the long and early review of Voss’s Homer,[779] and that (later but still early) of Bürger’s Poems. There is perhaps a slightly excessive patriotism in the author’s contention that German is better suited than any other language for the purpose of translating Homer; one is almost tempted to echo Garrick to Goldsmith: “Come, come! you are perhaps the worst ... eh, eh?” in certain respects, though no doubt not in all. Yet even here there is force as well as ingenuity in the contention that the very fact of Germany possessing no large amount of great literature at the time prevented German phrase from being hackneyed in, and, as it were, ascript to, certain contexts and associations, as was the case with Italian, French, and even English, while the enormous and unquestioned xenomania with which the Germans had for generations been refreshing and stocking their speech and their culture was another advantage.[Sidenote: On Voss.] There is, moreover, too much distinct animus against Pope as a coryphæus of the English Neo-classics; but this itself marks Schlegel’s attitude, which, let it be remembered, was fresh and novel. Nor is it surprising that, as the author tells us with pride, both Goethe and Schiller, personages not always well disposed to him, warmly approved the metrical part of the essay. It is now pretty generally admitted, both that Schlegel was a very sound critic on this all-important subject, and that the importance of it was almost greater in Germany than elsewhere owing to the extreme laxity and cacophony, descending at times nearly to the level of the horse-fiddle, in which men not merely like Klopstock but like Bürger had indulged. And the whole is one of the first examples I know of a full modern review of the best kind, neither “puff” nor “slate” (though there is a good deal of severe criticism in it), neither mere compte-rendu nor mere divagation from the subject into some general discussion which happens to interest the reviewer.

[Sidenote: On Bürger.]

The Bürger article[780] has the additional interest of being an answer, and a crushing one, to a precedent criticism. I have said[781] something earlier of Schiller’s unlucky production, and need not return to it: but it may fairly be observed that this is as good an instance of obedience to literary morality as that was of offence against it. Bürger had been a friend of Schlegel’s, and he was one of the poetical protagonists of the cause for which Schlegel himself was fighting. Yet there is no unfair praise here: and, what is more, there is no abstinence from just censure. Indeed Schlegel may be thought to be even a little too hard on the unlucky Lenardo und Blandine, though this piece has nearly all the faults of “Monk” Lewis and other imitators.

If, however, these and other pieces of themselves place Schlegel in a high position as a critic, the volumes do not fail to show his shortcomings. The system of self-annotation, though possessing some advantages, is dangerous, as giving opportunity for those egotistical displays of which Schlegel has been commonly accused: but this does not matter so very much. [Sidenote: The Urtheile, &c.] The batch of Urtheile, Gedanken, &c., which closes the first volume, and which originally appeared in the Athenæum (the periodical which the two brothers had founded in 1798, the very year of the Lyrical Ballads[782]), do not raise our opinion of Schlegel’s talent, and they certainly do not, as do the corresponding Fragments of Novalis, give us any idea of critical genius. The one exception[783] is not at all like the others, and is very like Novalis himself. But even this is rather an amusing and well-aimed “fling” than a real critical plummet suddenly let down to the bottom of the well of critical Truth. The rest are quite ordinary and commonplace things, by no means unrespectable but nothing more. Now, no one is bound to isolate his critical judgments and set them up in specimen-cases for examination after this fashion. But if he does so, they should be something more than commonplace, and ordinary, and respectable.[784]

[Sidenote: The Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur.]

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.

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