The masters of modern French criticism

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Preface

What I have tried to do in this volume is not to criticise criticism, at best a somewhat languid business, but to criticise critics, which may be a far more legitimate task, especially if the critics happen to be, as in the present case, among the most vital and significant personalities of their time. Matthew Arnold speaks in one of his sonnets of "France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme." Yet elsewhere he accords to Sainte- Beuve a supremacy in the art of criticism of the same order as that of Homer in poetry. That Arnold was the last man to underestimate a supremacy of this kind we may infer from the familiar sentence in his essay on translating Homer: "Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort."

To study Sainte-Beuve and the other leading French critics of the nineteenth century is therefore to get very close to the intellectual centre of the century. We may thus follow the main movement of thought through this period and at the same time build up the necessary background for the proper understanding of the ideas of our own day, whether they continue this earlier thought or react from it.

The so-called anti-intellect ualist movement of the present time especially can only be understood with viii PREFACE

reference to such a background; it is a reaction from the dogmatic naturalism that reached its height in the second half of the nineteenth century, a sign that the world is growing weary of scientific positivism and its attempt to lock up reality in its formulae. The walls of that particular prison house of the spirit are plainly crumbling. Parts of the edifice have been collapsing of late with almost dramatic suddenness. We must rid ourselves of all forms of the metaphysical illusion (including the scientific form), says M. Bergson, perhaps the chief spokesman of the new tendency, and so make philosophy vital. This attempt of philosophy to escape from mere intellectualism is in itself highly laudable. With the older type of metaphysician ordinary mortals felt that they had very little in common. They could at most address to him the Virgilian query : —

But the philosophers have of late been coming out of their chilling clouds of abstraction. They have been growing literary, so literary, in fact, that the time would seem to have arrived for the men of letters to return the compliment and become to the best of their ability philosophical.

The literary critic especially should be willing to meet the philosopher halfway, if it be true, as I have tried to show in this volume, that they are both confronted at present by the same central problem. For, to inquire whether the critic can judge, and if so by what standards, is only a form of the more general inquiry

PREFACE ix

whether the philosopher can discover any unifying principle to oppose to mere flux and relativity. We are told by the new school that any attempt on the part of the intellect to unify life and impose upon it a scale of values is artificial, and that we must oppose to this artificial unity our vivid intuitions of change, of the infinite otherwiseness of things. Now, however little we may accept the whole of this thesis, we must grant that M. Bergson — and James, as it seems to me, even more than M. Bergson — has rendered a substantial service to philosophy in thus turning its attention to what Plato would have called the problem of the One and the Many. Most people, James admits, do not lose much sleep over this problem, yet he is right in thinking that all other philosophical problems are insignificant in comparison. If philosophy once gets firmly planted on this ground, it may recover a reality that it has scarcely possessed since the debates of Socrates and the sophists. Instead of the intricate fence with blunted foils to which the intellectualists have too often reduced it, we may once more see the flash of the naked blade.

In their dealings with the problem of the One and the Many, both M. Bergson and James have adopted, it would seem sufficiently plain, not the Socratic but the sophistical side of the argument. I have expressed my own conviction in the following pages that what is needed just now is not merely a reaction from scientific positivism (that we are getting already), but a reaction from naturalism itself. By this I mean that we should x PREFACE

effect our escape from intellectualism not by sinking below it, after the fashion of the Bergsonians and pragniatists, but by rising above it, and this would involve in turn a use of the Socratic and Platonic method of definition. Instead of reducing the intellect to a purely utilitarian role, as M. Bergson does, we should employ it in multiplying sharp distinctions, and should then put these distinctions into the service of the character and will. If we are told that in order to get at reality we must abandon intellect for intuition, the obvious reply is that only by means of the intellect can we lay the proper foundations for a philosophy of intuition. In short, the word intuition itself is very much in need of being treated Somatically. If I have contributed even in a small degree to dissipate the dangerous sophistries that are accumulating so rapidly around this word in contemporary thought, I shall be satisfied. I have tried to show, especially in the essays on Joubert and Taine, that the term intuition is not simple but complex, that there are different orders of intuitions. Good sense itself, according to Dr. Johnson, is intuitive, and this is a kind of intuitiveness of which we stand in special need at the present crisis ; for this word is not too strong to apply to a time when the philosophy of the flux is proclaimed so confidently and received with so much applause. This same naturalistic vertigo, we may remember, seized upon ancient Greek society at the very height of its achievement and marked the first downward step towards the abyss. "Too many of our modern philosophers in their search after the nature of things," says Plato in words

PREFACE xi

that might have been written yesterday, "are always getting dizzy from constantly going round and round; and then . . . they think that there is nothing stable or permanent, but only flux and motion, and that the world is full of every sort of motion and change."

I have just said that to study the chief French critics of the nineteenth century is to get very close to the intellectual centre of the age. I am of the belief, however little I may have justified it by my practice, that this question of the One and the Many, on which all the other main aspects of our modern thought finally converge, may be studied to special advantage in connection with these critics. I have aimed, however, to estimate the work of each critic in itself and not to study it simply as part of an intellectual development. To this end I have made a very liberal use of quotation, on the principle laid down by Sainte-Beuve : Avec des citations bien prises on trouverait dans chaque auteur son propre jugement. In such a way one may stand aside and let the authors speak for themselves.

Cambridge, Mass., November 1, 1912.

Contents

Preface vii

I. Madame de Stael ...... 1

II. Joubert 34

II

If Madame de Stael is the best type of the Rousseauistic enthusiast at the beginning of the nineteenth century we have in Joubert the representative of a very different kind of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm that may be associated with Plato rather than with Rousseau. The sharpness of the contrast between the Platonist and the Rousseauist may be inferred from Joubert' s very severe judgment on Madame de Stael which I have already quoted (p. 8 ). He writes in one of his letters that he had " avoided seeing her a thousand times and looked on her as a fatal and pernicious being." 1 Yet when she died and the news of her death had been received with general silence and indifference, in strange contrast to the tumult in which she had lived, one of those most sincerely moved was Joubert. " The clouding over of such a reputation," he writes, " really afflicted me, and when I saw that no one was willing to think of this poor woman, I began to think of her all by myself and to regret with inconsolable bitterness the misuse she had made of so much intellect, energy and goodness." 2

1 Cor., 237. My references are to Paul de Raynal's edition in two volumes (4 e £d., 1866). In the volume containing the Pensees, no numbers are used in the opening chapter ("L'auteur peint par lui-in erne "). The thoughts are arranged by subjects in the following numbered chapters, which are therefore called " Titres."

2 Ibid.

So far as the general public was concerned Joubert himself lived in entire obscurity, more " enamored/' in his own phrase, "of perfection than of glory. " Yet he was singularly fortunate both in the friendships he enjoyed during his lifetime and the kind of reputation he has had since his death. His " Pensees " were presented to French readers by Chateaubriand and Sainte-Beuve, and to English readers by Matthew Arnold in one of the best critical essays ever written in English. 1 The literary " Pensees " show such a fine quality of critical insight that Joubert has come to be regarded as the critics' critic much as Spenser has been called the poets' poet. He has that gift of ornate conciseness which he himself declared to be the supreme beauty of style. It is not, however, his phrase that he polishes, he says, but his idea; "I wait until the drop of light that I need is formed and falls from my pen." 2 His ambition was so to express the exquisite as to give it general currency. Now it is not easy to imagine a continuous discourse made up entirely of the exquisite and we are not surprised when Joubert says he is unfitted for continuous discourse. " I lack intermediary ideas." 3 His saying that sages do not compose reminds one of Emerson's description of the sentences in his own essays as infinitely repellent particles.

The danger for a critic who aims solely at the exquisite or in his own phrase at " expressing the inexpress-

1 I am assuming a familiarity with this essay on the part of the reader and have as a rule avoided translating the same Pensees.

ible " * and who lacks intermediary ideas, is that he may become affected and obscure, and Joubert does not altogether avoid these penalties of oversubtlety. "To reach the regions of light," he says, "one must pass through the clouds." 2 Unfortunately Joubert does not always disengage himself from the clouds. But personally, I should not agree with those critics who prefer his "Letters" to the "Thoughts" because of their greater simplicity and naturalness. The "Letters," however, do reveal one essential side of Joubert far more completely than the " Thoughts." They are pervaded by a fine vein of whimsical humor, an habitual sportiveness, that suggests to Sainte-Beuve a comparison with Charles Lamb. It seemed to Joubert an important part of wisdom to distinguish the very few things that are to be taken seriously and then to take all other things playfully. En tout il me faut quelque jeu. 3 He is at the opposite pole from those " serious and gloomy spirits who have very futile doctrines"; a sentence that inevitably calls to mind many modern reformers.

Possibly the danger of a sort of transcendental preciosite in Joubert appears most clearly in some of his thoughts on religion. He recognizes the existence of matter only by courtesy. If the Creator withdrew his breath from the world, he says, it would " become what it was before time, a grain of flattened metal, an atom in the void, even less than this; a mere nothing." 4 Another sage of whom Joubert frequently reminds one, does not feel that he can dispose of matter quite so lightly. "I can reason down or deny everything/' says Emerson, " except this perpetual Belly : feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable." One is tempted to say that in both the literal and figurative sense, Joubert lacked body. He himself admitted the justness of Madame de Chatenay's remark that he seemed a pure spirit who had stumbled on a body by chance and made the best he could of it.

Though we can detect in Joubert something of the shrinking of the valetudinarian from the rough and tumble of life, we cannot insist too strongly that his spirituality is true spirituality and not the Rousseauistic imitation. The words that he traced almost with his dying hand really sum up the effort of his whole life : " 22 March, 1824. The true, the beautiful, the just, the holy! " He is far removed from a man like Coleridge who retired from his actual obligations into a cloud of opium and German metaphysics. The contrast between Coleridge's speculations and his daily practice recalls Joubert's thought, " Religion is neither a theology nor a theosophy ; it is more than all that : a discipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement." 1 Though one of the frailest of invalids, Joubert never failed to meet the demands of life. He was justified in saying of himself, " Behind the strength of many men there is weakness, whereas behind my weakness there is strength; the weakness is in the instrument." 2 His fellow-citizens in the little town of Montignac where he

1 Tit. I, lxii. 2 Pensees, p. 8.

was born elected him justice of the peace and long preserved, we are told, the memory of his efficiency.

Sainte-Beuve does not seem to me to strike quite the right note of praise when he says that " once to have known one of these divine spirits (like Joubert) who seem the living definition of the phrase of the poet : divinae particulam aurae, is to be forever disgusted with all that is not fine, delicate, delectable ; with all that is not perfume and pure essence ; it is to prepare for oneself assuredly many annoyances and misfortunes." 1 This passage suggests too strongly that Joubert was too good for human nature's daily food, whereas he was one of the shrewdest and most practical of men. He even pushed too far his horror of the merely speculative when he said you can learn more of the art of government from a single page of Machiavelli's " Prince " than from the whole of Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws." 2

The danger of Joubert's avowed dislike for mere reality, Vaffreuse realite, as he calls it, is not so much a romantic retreat into the tower of ivory as an undue sympathy for certain conceptions of the noble style and the grand manner. He says in defending Corneille that we should rise above the trivialities of earth even if we have to mount on stilts. 3 His attitude towards the opposite school of art appears in his remark that the novels

1 Chateaubriand, n, 138.

2 As an example of his courage and good sense see his letter to Fontaues, then Grand Master of the University, in which he protests against the poor pay of teachers and professors {Cor. 217).

8 Tit. xxiv, v, vn.

of Lesage " seem to have been written in a coffee-house by a player of dominoes just after leaving the

theatre." 1

Joubert's shrinking from Vaffreuse realite is also to be connected with the fact that he had lived through the Reign of Terror. " The Revolution," he says, " drove my spirit from the real world by making it too horrible for me." 2 "Revolutions are times when the poor man is not sure of his probity, the rich man of his fortune and the innocent man of his life." 3

Joubert as a young man had come into contact with Diderot and had got the initiation into the new critical spirit that such a contact implies. But even without the Revolution Joubert would never have been a thoroughgoing modern. The ancients, he says, were appealed to by the magic of the past and not like the moderns by the magic of the future, 4 and he was in this respect a true ancient. The French are wont, rightly for the most part, to call their reactionaries "haters of things new" (misoneistes) ; but the epithet that should be applied to Joubert is the more gracious Greek, — " lover of things old " (<^t\a/)^aios). " The great drawback of the new books," he says, "is that they keep us from reading the old ones." 5

What the eighteenth century wanted, according to Joubert, was not religious liberty, but irreligious liberty. 6 It was for discarding as mere prejudice everything that did not make itself immediately intelligible either to

1 Tit. xxxn. 2 Pensees, p. 4. 8 Tit. xvi, lex.

4 Ibid., xvh, i. 6 Tit. xvni, lvii. 8 Ibid., xvm, xm.

40 MODEEN FRENCH CRITICISM

reason or feeling. " My discoveries, and every one has his own," he says, "have brought me back to prejudices." x " Our reformers have said to experience : thou art a dotard, and to the past : thou art a child." 2 The other extreme towards which Joubert himself inclines is to impose the past too despotically on the present. Though he vivifies tradition with insight, more perhaps than any other French reactionary, he is nevertheless too resolutely traditional. 3 Such has been the revolutionary stress of the past hundred years that it has rarely failed to disturb the poise even of the most finely tempered spirits. Joubert tends to see only the benefits of order just as Emerson tends to see only the benefits of emancipation.

In the name of what he conceives to be order, he would be too ready to deliver society over to the Jesuits and fix it in a sort of hieratic immobility. He sees our main modern misfortune in what Emerson regards as our main modern gain. " Unhappy epochs," he exclaims, " when every man weighs everything by his own weight, and walks, as the Bible says, by the light of his own lamp " ; 4 when the broad communications that formerly existed with heaven are broken and every one has to build his private ladder. 5 Indeed the more leading-strings the better, if it be true, as he asserts, that "few are worthy of experience, most allow themselves to be corrupted by it." 6

1 Pensees, p. 4. 2 Tit. xvm, xx.

8 " Aux Grecs, et surtout aux Atheniens, le beau litte'raire et civil; aux Romains, le beau moral et politique; aux Juifs, le beau religieux et domestique; aux autres peuples, Pimitation de ces trois-la " (Tit. xvn, xiii).

4 Tit. xvm, v. * Ibid., xiv. 6 Ibid., xvi, xm.

Joubert is of course consistent in his severe handling of the two great leaders of eighteenth century thought, Voltaire and Rousseau. He can, to be sure, imagine good coming from a reformed Rousseau, but can conceive of no circumstances in which a Voltaire would be of any profit. 1 " Voltaire," he says, " would have read patiently thirty or forty folio volumes to find in them one little irreligious jest. That was his passion, his ambition, his mania." 2 Yet in the final analysis the irreligion of Voltaire is a less insidious danger than the pseudo-religion of Rousseau. " I speak to tender, to ardent, to lofty spirits, to spirits born with one of these distinctive characteristics of religion, and I say to them : Only J. J. Rousseau can detach you from religion and nothing but religion can cure you of J. J. Rousseau. 3

If Joubert leans too much to the side of reaction in his politics and religion he preserves in the main a remarkable poise in his literary opinions. He was placed between an age that had been rational in a way to discredit the reason and an age that was going to be imaginative in a way to discredit the imagination. He protests against the excess of the past and utters a warning against the excess that was to come. Yet nothing would give a falser notion of Joubert's work than to look on it primarily as a warning or a protest, or upon his role as only negative and restrictive. For the French he is not merely the author of the " Pensees " but, along with Fontanes, the literary mentor of Chateaubriand.

1 Tit. xxiv, xxxviii. 2 lhid., xxv. 8 Ibid., l.

Now of these two " guardian angels " of Chateaubriand, as Sainte-Beuve calls them, Joubert was the one who inspired and encouraged, whereas Fontanes was rather inclined to caution and hold back. In his attacks on formalism, in his plea for hospitality of mind and feeling, Joubert had his face turned towards the future. Ayons le cceur et V esprit hospitallers — this one phrase sums up about all that is legitimate in the new criticism. The eighteenth century had wrought harm to poetry, partly by imposing a mechanical imitation, partly by the abuse of rationalism. Joubert is constantly vindicating the claims of the imagination against both the formalists and the rationalists. "Nothing that does not enrapture is poetry; the lyre is so to speak a winged instrument." l No view of life is sound that lacks imaginative wholeness. "Whatever we think, we must think with our whole selves, soul and body," 2 and above all avoid one-sidedness. " Man is an immense being in some sort, who may exist partially but whose existence is delectable in proportion as it becomes full and complete." 3 It would not be easy to find an utterance more satisfying than this from the point of view of the humanist. Above all Joubert is severe upon the one-sided intellectualists (and here again his animus against the eighteenth century appears). Philosophers fall into unreality from " confounding what is spiritual with what is abstract." 4 He warns us to distrust words in philosophical books that " have not become generally current and are fit

1 Tit. xxi, ix. 2 Ibid., ix, vol.

3 Ibid., V, lvh. 4 Ibid., xn, vi.

only to form a special dialect." J " How many people become abstract in order to appear profound ! Most abstract terms are shadows concealing voids." 2 Philosophy should " have a Muse and not be a mere reasoning shop." 3

Joubert, it should be added, was himself a man of wide philosophical reading. He was one of the first Frenchmen to make a thorough study of Kant, whom he read in the Latin translation — "a German Latin," he writes Madame de Beaumont, " as hard as pebbles." Getting at Kant's ideas is like cracking ostrich eggs with one's head and then most often finding nothing in them. 4 " A man," Joubert remarks, " may sprain his mind as well as his body," and he seems to have suffered a sort of intellectual sprain from reading this Latin translation of Kant. His final judgment on Kant is that he was intellectual where he should have been intuitive and so " missed the true measure of all things." 5

Joubert, according to Chateaubriand, wanted his philosophy to be at the same time painting and poetry. A philosophical thought, as Joubert believed, when it got thoroughly matured lost its abstract rawness, as it were, and took on atmosphere, form, sound, light, color. Possibly his unwillingness to speak abstractly, even when abstraction is plainly indicated, is responsible for the somewhat over-luxuriant metaphor, the effect of pre-

1 Tit. xii, xxv. 2 Ibid., xn, xxxn. 8 Ibid., vi. 4 Cor., 62.

6 He goes on to say that " la mesure de toutes choses est Vimmobile pour le mobile, Vinfini pour le limite, le rneme pour le changeant, Veternel pour le passager," etc. (Cor., p. 61). For his views of Kant see also Pensees, Tit. xxiv, xvn-xix.

ciosite, that I have already noted in some of the " Thoughts." He seems very modern in his insistence that words should not be treated as mere algebraic signs after the fashion of the eighteenth century, that they should not be robbed, so to speak, of their aura of suggestiveness. He felt and encouraged the subtle emotional interplay and blending of the different arts that was to figure so largely in the romantic movement. " Beautiful verses," to quote one of his many utterances on this subject, " are exhaled like sounds and perfumes," 1 and this should seem good doctrine to a follower of Verlaine. " We should not portray objects," to cite another advanced saying, " but our feelings about objects"; 2 and this should satisfy even a post-impressionist.

But Joubert was careful to follow his own rule and never utter a truth without at the same time putting forth its complementary truth. 3 He did not, like so many moderns, go mad over the powers of suggestiveness. After speaking of nous qui chantons avec des pensees etpeignons avec des paroles,* after saying that when " you understand a word perfectly, it becomes, as it were, transparent, you see its color and form, you feel its weight," etc., he admits that the main thing in a word is not its color or its music, but its meaning ; and that when words are so chosen and arranged as to express the meaning most clearly, they are likely also to seem the most harmonious. 5 " What is wanted," he says, " is not merely the poetry of images but the poetry

1 Tit. xxi, xxv. 2 Ibid., xxni, lxxvh. 8 Ibid., xi, xvm.

4 Ibid., xxii, lxxiv. 6 Ibid., xxh, xxtx.

of ideas." * " When the image masks the object, and you make of the shadow a body, when expression gives such pleasure that you no longer tend to pass beyond, to penetrate to the meaning, when the figure in fine absorbs the whole of your attention, you are held up on the way and the road is taken for the goal, because a bad guide is conducting you." 2 This hits severely many of the French romanticists, Gautier certainly, and I should not hesitate to add, Hugo.

Unfortunately the French romanticists could scarcely have agreed with Joubert about the goal of poetry, for their enthusiasm was not like his, Platonic, but Rousseauistic, that is, they sought to escape from abstraction, not by rising above the ordinary intellectual level, but by sinking beneath it; and so the romantic movement turned in the main not to the legitimate revival of the imagination that Joubert desired, but to the glorification of an unchecked spontaneity. Joubert' s actual use of the word enthusiasm might be made the subject of an interesting study. To what often goes by that name he applies some other word — passion, verve, entrailles, or the like. True enthusiasm in his sense is not associated with heat and movement as in Madame de Stael, but with light and serenity, 3 and might best be defined, says Sainte-Beuve, as "exalted peace." And so Joubert reserves the word for the great poets, the saints and the sages. He speaks, for example, of the enthusiasm of Virgil.

Perhaps the difference between the two types of en-

1 Tit. xxi, xxm. 2 Ibid.y xxn, ex. 8 Ibid., xxra, evin.

thusiasts, the Platonist and the Rousseauist, comes out most clearly in the use they would make of imaginative illusion. Joubert is nowhere more original than in his ideas about the role of illusion in life and art. Here if anywhere he justifies his boast that he is more Platonic than Plato (Platone platonior). He defends art and literature against Plato by arguments that are themselves highly Platonic. The artist should not be satisfied with copying the objects of sense, for in that case his works would fall under Plato's censure of being at two removes from reality, mere " shadows of a shadow world.". He should, on the contrary, so use the objects of sense as to adumbrate a higher reality ; so as to produce a cast, a hollow cast as it were, of a heavenly archetype. 1 Now this adumbration of a higher reality can only be achieved by the medium of imaginative illusion. By imaginative illusion communication may be established between the reality of sense and the reality of spirit. We may be made to "imagine souls by the means of bodies." 2 " Heaven, seeing that there were many truths which by our nature we could not know, and which it was to our interest, nevertheless, not to be ignorant of, took pity on us and granted us the faculty of imagining them." 3 We can perceive the truth in this sense

1 Tit. xxi, ii.

2 Tit. xx, xlv. Joubert distinguishes sharply between V imagination, an active and creative faculty, the sole intermediary between intellect and spirit, and possessed in a high degree only by the gifted individual; and Vimaginative, a sub-rational and passive faculty, that may manifest itself Very strongly in children, timid people, etc. See Tit. ni, xlvi-lii.

only through a veil of illusion, and it is the grace of the truth to be thus veiled. 1 This intimate blending of illusion and wisdom is the charm of life and of art. 2 " God deceives us perpetually and wishes us to be deceived ; and when I say that he deceives us/' Joubert adds, " I mean by illusions and not by frauds." 3 Illusion thus conceived becomes an integral part of reality, 4 and we must not strive to see anything in its nakedness ; — il nefaut rien voir tout nu. 5