Olive Percival 
 
 HER BOOK 
 
 THE DOWN-HYL CLAIM 
 
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 A.
 
 A GROUP OF FRENCH CRITICS
 
 A GROUP 
 
 OF 
 
 FRENCH CRITICS 
 
 BY 
 
 MARY FISHER 
 
 AUTHOR OF "TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS ON ENGLISH 
 AUTHORS," ETC. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 
 1897
 
 COPYRIGHT, 
 EY A. C. McCLURG Co. 
 
 A. U. 1897.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 " A /TANY names, many things," says Ville- 
 IV J. main, " are destined to be effaced in 
 the progress of the world, and what is dis- 
 covered or reinstated through the taste for 
 historical research must often be lost again 
 in the continual increase of our intellectual 
 stores. Let us honor, however, all scrupu- 
 lous, free research that restores a character 
 worthy of memory, brings into new light a 
 truth long misunderstood, or points out to 
 us, in whatever epoch it may be, the noble- 
 ness of works of genius and the unalterable 
 value of devotion to knowledge." 
 
 The wish to introduce to the English read- 
 ing public a group of French critics who merit 
 of the world the honor that Villemain ascribes 
 to scrupulous, free research, has led me to 
 publish this volume. But I have been im- 
 pelled to this work by more than a mere 
 wish. I feel that we owe to those who have 
 
 , 
 
 FRENCH
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 instructed and charmed us and developed 
 our taste, at least the recognition of grati- 
 tude, and that if it be possible to extend 
 their influence, we owe it to the public to 
 do so. In a close study of these acute crit- 
 ics, whose broad, impartial criticism is based 
 on deep, indulgent knowledge of humanity, 
 I have found a teaching that it seems to me 
 good for us to listen to, and good not only 
 for us but good for posterity; a teaching 
 which I, for one, am thankful to have heard. 
 Summed up briefly, the teaching of these 
 critics is, that agitation is neither action nor 
 force ; that the revolutionary spirit is, for 
 the most part, the spirit of youth and dis- 
 content, and not necessarily the kindling of 
 patriotism or of righteous anger at the sight 
 of injustice; that true literary criticism is 
 founded on scientific psychology; that the 
 morbid nature-worship of certain minds is 
 the result of irritated egotism ; that the proper 
 subjects of art and of science are not neces- 
 sarily identical ; that what is true in the latter 
 may be neither true, beautiful, nor acceptable 
 in the former, because true art has to do 
 with the normal not with the abnormal, with 
 beauty and health not with deformity and 
 disease; and, lastly, that we are in sore need
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 of the substitution of healthy, rational ideas 
 in life and literature for morbid and false 
 ones. 
 
 I have had yet another wish in mind in 
 the publication of this work, and that is a 
 desire to do justice to a side of French char- 
 acter and French literature that appears to 
 be unrecognized by the general world out- 
 side of France. The French are grown used 
 to having the best in them ignored ; they 
 are accustomed to hearing themselves called 
 wholly frivolous and pleasure-loving, and 
 their literature characterized as a literature 
 of the sewers and gutters. In the conscious- 
 ness that these are not correct statements of 
 the facts, they can quietly ignore them, but 
 we need to know better. In a severe article 
 on Mr. George Saintsbury's " Short History 
 of French Literature," Edmond Scherer 
 says : " Mr. Saintsbury shares a caprice com- 
 mon to many of his fellow-citizens, but which 
 is unpardonable in him. He knows all our 
 blustering writers, those who acquire noto- 
 riety by affectations, by coteries, sometimes 
 by scandal. He is familiar with the opinions 
 of second-rate journals and adopts them with 
 confidence. But, on the contrary, wherever 
 there is any originality, any native manner of
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 writing that is pleasing to cultivated minds, 
 it escapes him. He ignores Maurice de 
 Guerin and the two most valuable acquisitions 
 of modern times to our epistolary literature, 
 Mme. de Remusat and Doudan. Fromentin, 
 the rarest, take it all in all, of our contempora- 
 neous writers, the most interesting, the most 
 enigmatic, the most personal, Fromentin 
 is not even mentioned in Mr. Saintsbury's 
 pages." 
 
 Like Mr. Saintsbury, most of us know 
 French literature through the blusterers. It 
 is a tardy justice, but it is some justice, to 
 contemporaneous French literature and char- 
 acter to introduce to English readers, in these 
 critics, calm, widely-read, mature, and wise, 
 the representatives of the France that sur- 
 vives her revolutions. I feel, however, that 
 the necessities of my task have not always 
 permitted me to do justice to the critics 
 themselves. In selecting passages for trans- 
 lation, I have had to bear in mind the fact 
 that I am writing for English readers only, 
 and must choose subjects of criticism with 
 which they are familiar. But a critic can 
 never so far divest himself of his nationality 
 that he can do his best work on foreign 
 ground, lie is strongest ahvays where he is
 
 Preface. ix 
 
 at home. Therefore in order to do as much 
 justice as possible to the critic and at the same 
 time to interest the English reader, I have 
 for the most part selected such criticisms as 
 bear upon French authors who have an inter- 
 national reputation, and on such subjects as 
 are of universal and permanent interest M. 
 Scherer is known to English readers through 
 Mr. Saintsbury's translation of his criticisms 
 on English authors ; but in these criticisms 
 Scherer is by no means at his best, is even 
 feeble at times. S. M. Girardin's " Lectures 
 on Dramatic Literature " have, I think, been 
 translated. The remaining critics, Bersot, 
 Doudan, and Gustave Planche, so far as I 
 know, have been little more than mere names 
 to English readers, and I trust that I may 
 have been fortunate enough to make them 
 much more than that to future readers. 
 
 M. F.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 II. EDMOND SCHERER ....... 40 
 
 III. ERXEST BERSOT 114 
 
 IV. SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN 155 
 
 V. XlMENES DOUDAN 195 
 
 VI. GUSTAVE PLANCHE 228 
 
 VII. CONCLUSION 293
 
 A GROUP 
 
 OF 
 
 FRENCH CRITICS 
 
 I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE French mind loves light and warmth. 
 It is content to look only in daylight 
 for what it wishes to see, and it troubles itself 
 little about what the darkness conceals. In 
 this respect it differs notably from the Teu- 
 tonic or the Anglo-Saxon mind, that loves to 
 pierce the shadows of the unknown and peo- 
 ple them with the chimeras of the imagina- 
 tion. The Frenchman likes to feel the solid 
 ground under his feet ; the German is reputed 
 to love the kingdoms of the air; and the 
 Anglo-Saxon is wholly content neither with 
 the one nor the other. From these national 
 characteristics proceed what we call mysticism
 
 14 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 in German literature, the idealizing tendency 
 in English literature, and materialism in the 
 literature of France. Thence proceed, too, 
 the natural antipathy between France and 
 Germany and the sympathy of the English 
 mind with German rather than with French 
 literature. 
 
 But the quiet and steady progress of science, 
 the slow assimilation of its facts, its spirit, so 
 wholly opposed to that of pure speculation, are 
 gradually bringing about a better understand- 
 ing of the attitude of the French mind and a 
 larger sympathy with its positivism. But in all 
 revolutions, there is an embarrassing transition 
 stage, in which, in our efforts to adapt ourselves 
 to new conditions, we are the victims of many 
 fruitless and unhappy experiments. We do 
 not learn at once that that which appeals to 
 our senses and inclinations in the strongest 
 manner is not always that which appeals to 
 what is highest in us. Like children who 
 snatch at gaudy, rattling toys, we lay hold of 
 the startling and ear-splitting, only to grow 
 tired of glare and noise and disgusted with 
 emptiness and insufficiency. We ought never 
 to forget that it is not the thoughtful, the 
 solid writers of a nation, that first find a hear- 
 ing and favor in forciern countries. The
 
 Introduction. 15 
 
 shriek is carried quicker and farther than 
 the simple, low voice whose message must 
 pass from mouth to mouth in order to be 
 heard. And so it happens that in our efforts 
 to transmit something of the French spirit, 
 we have caught, first, at what Scherer calls 
 the " blusterers," and ignored the strength of 
 the nation's literature. It is time that we 
 were learning where that strength lies in con- 
 temporaneous literature. It lies not in the 
 ephemeral productions of the modern Parisian 
 school of fiction and poetry, but in the writ- 
 ings of a body of critics, the coolest, wisest, 
 and most discriminating that have appeared 
 in any literature. This critical roll is a long 
 one, and among other names includes such 
 as Sainte-Beuve, Villemain, Alexander Vinet, 
 Eugene Geruzez, Ferdinand Brunetiere, Emile 
 Montegut, Gustave Planche, Silvestre de Sacy, 
 Saint-Marc Girardin, Ernest Bersot, and Ed- 
 mond Scherer. 
 
 With the exception of Sainte-Beuve, Saint- 
 Marc Girardin, and Edmond Scherer, who 
 have been partially translated into English, 
 these critics for the most part are either 
 mere names or are wholly unknown to the 
 great majority of English readers. Selecting 
 from among them, Scherer, Bersot, Girardin,
 
 1 6 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Planche, and adding Doudan, whose critical 
 work was chiefly conversational and episto- 
 lary, I have tried by careful study of these 
 critics, to produce a volume for those who 
 regard literature as something more than 
 recreation ; who believe that it has its stan- 
 dards, its recognizable principles of good and 
 evil, as well as anything else that concerns 
 humanity, and who wish to know them in so 
 far as they can be known by familiarity with 
 the opinions of acute and large-minded critics 
 who have made it their life-work to see clearly 
 into men and things. 
 
 The great task of modern literature is to 
 preserve the ideals of civilization and at the 
 same time to keep them in harmony with the 
 revelations of science. Rationalism has in- 
 vaded literature as well as theology. We are 
 no longer satisfied with a divorce of heart 
 and head. We wish to think and believe as 
 well as to feel. The poetry that satisfies a 
 scientific age must know how to invest a fact 
 with a charm ; the fiction that satisfies it 
 must be founded on a knowledge of life and 
 humanity as real and as exact as the engineer's 
 knowledge of the principles he puts into play 
 in his management of the locomotive he 
 guides. But this knowledge requires long
 
 Introduction. 17 
 
 and searching study and wide and varied ex- 
 periences. It does not come by inspiration 
 alone. Without the severe and exact train- 
 ing that belongs to scientific knowledge, we 
 shall have pseudo-scientific superstitions and 
 pseudo-scientific chimeras substituted for the 
 old-fashioned superstitions and chimeras of 
 fairyland and mythology. This is what has 
 really happened in fiction. The great popu- 
 larity of the so-called realistic school is partly 
 to be accounted for by the fact of its apparent 
 revelations of scientific laws with regard to 
 human nature. "Virtue," says Zola, "is a 
 product like vitriol and sugar ;" or " Inheri- 
 tance has its laws like gravity." That may be 
 true : but as Georg Brandes remarks : " We 
 know the laws of gravity, but as good as 
 nothing of the laws of inheritance." So, too, 
 we may know the conditions necessary to the 
 production of vitriol and sugar, but there is 
 no science of human chemistry to give us the 
 molecular changes necessary to the produc- 
 tion of virtue and vice. But the realistic 
 school pretends to know the principles of 
 such a chemistry. It has its system. It has 
 badly digested Darwinism and the theories of 
 the new school of criminal anthropology as 
 set forth by Lombroso, and it uses a scientific
 
 1 8 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 jargon that appeals to the modem demand 
 for explanation. The great public, like chil- 
 dren who are satisfied with any answer to 
 their questions, so long as it pretends to be 
 an answer at all, greedily swallows the pre- 
 sumptions of the realistic school in order to 
 satisfy its curiosity, and adopts the mistakes 
 of its charlatan guides in supposing that be- 
 cause science reveals the social origin and 
 evolution of some of our noblest sentiments, 
 therefore these sentiments being purely arti- 
 ficial in their character deserve neither rec- 
 ognition nor respect, and the baser natural 
 inclinations are to be preferred and fol- 
 lowed instead. In no direction has this 
 error made greater headway than in the 
 recent frequent attacks upon the institution of 
 marriage, and the degradation of the ideal 
 of love into a purely physical attraction. 
 Granting that love taken in the ideal accepta- 
 tion of the term is the product of a higher 
 civilization and was unknown among the 
 ancients, it is none the less a reality because 
 all are not capable of it, and none the less of 
 a noble and lofty character. Evolution of 
 sentiment is certainly as noble and real a 
 thing as evolution of matter. Civilization has 
 worked out monogamy as her highest ideal
 
 Introduction. 19 
 
 and a departure from it would be a step 
 backward into barbarism. It is impossible that 
 in so close a union as that of marriage, there 
 should not arise at some time that mutual ir- 
 ritation which comes from imperfect sympa- 
 thies and a clash of interests and wills. It is 
 impossible, too, that a union often contracted 
 in a moment of youthful folly and illusion 
 should not sometimes bind together those 
 who should never have met, and for whom a 
 divorce is the only legitimate reparation of a 
 terrible mistake. But it is nevertheless true 
 that a very great deal of the irritation and 
 restiveness felt under the marriage yoke, by 
 women in particular, is caused by that 
 morbidly sensitive nervousness and hysterical 
 egotism that are induced by unwise education 
 and an idle, luxurious life. Our less refined 
 ancestors were like children in their domestic 
 relations ; they quarrelled and kissed, forgave 
 and forgot, and hand in hand went " down 
 the hill thegither." Our modern married 
 people nurse their wrath to keep it warm ; 
 they ruminate over their disagreements, ex- 
 aggerate their importance, read exciting 
 literature spiced with similar experiences, 
 imagine themselves doomed to life-long 
 wretchedness, and immediately begin to
 
 2O A Group of French Critics. 
 
 realize their anticipations. By far the greater 
 part of the tragic-marriage fiction that has 
 been flooding Europe during the past decade 
 has come from the pens of women. It is the 
 shriek of a petulant child, spoiled by over- 
 indulgence and wholly engrossed in its own 
 wilful desires; it is not literature. 
 
 Modern fiction, in attempting to be sci- 
 entific, errs in another direction : it con- 
 founds psychology with pathology, which 
 are two very different things ; it gives us 
 details that belong to medicine and the sick 
 room, and not to literature and art. It uses 
 its powers as would the botanist who should 
 neglect the flowers and trees around him and 
 devote all his study to nut-galls and hideous 
 excrescences on bark and leaves. The de- 
 scription may be faithful, the language cap- 
 tivating, the interest well sustained, but after 
 all, we have only got a nut-gall when we 
 might have had an oak. " All that is true 
 in psychiatry," says Lombroso, " is not ac- 
 ceptable in art. There is no doubt that 
 exaggeration of truths is harmful to litera- 
 ture. The true is not always the beautiful, 
 and there are moral abysses which literature 
 in the name of art has no right to explore." 
 
 But it is these moral abysses which much
 
 Introduction. 21 
 
 of modern fiction seems bent on exploring. 
 It seeks its heroes among criminals and its 
 heroism in vice. It pretends to follow scien- 
 tific teaching, and it leaves out what does not 
 suit its purpose and retains what it likes. In 
 order to understand just what the new school 
 of criminal anthropology teaches and in what 
 essential features the realistic school of fic- 
 tion departs from its teachings, let us briefly 
 examine the conclusions arrived at by Lorn- 
 broso. However disagreeable the reading 
 may be, it is necessary to know all that this 
 new school teaches in order to judge rightly, 
 and in order to perceive the full force of the 
 criticism directed against ultra-realism by the 
 critics we have chosen for study. We may 
 believe Lombroso's conclusions or not as we 
 choose, but in view of the fact that he is at 
 the head of the department of medical juris- 
 prudence in the University of Turin and 
 physician to the insane and to criminals in 
 the asylums and prisons of that city, and has 
 examined thousands and thousands of crimi- 
 nals, his opinion is at least worth the atten- 
 tion of those who know the criminal only 
 through newspaper reports of his crime. 
 
 In " L' Uomo delinquente," Lombroso, in 
 virtue of the frequent relapses and well-known
 
 22 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 incorrigibility of criminals, proposes to study 
 the criminal in order to ascertain whether 
 there is anything abnormal in his organic 
 constitution and whether there is a true, 
 natural necessity in crime. He finds that all 
 criminals are not born criminals, but he also 
 finds that there does exist a class of per- 
 verted men who are vicious in obedience to 
 their nature; who commit crime for the sake 
 of crime. These men are morally insane, 
 wholly incapable of assimilating the fruits of 
 moral culture, and in the unbridled fierceness 
 of their passions, in the absence of moral 
 feelings and judgments, stand on the same 
 plane that savages do. 
 
 Pursuing the methods of physiological 
 psychology, Lombroso begins his investiga- 
 tions by a study of abnormal conditions in 
 plants and animals. The old jurists, he says, 
 spoke of a divine, eternal justice almost in- 
 herent in nature. On the contrary, if we 
 glance at natural phenomena, we sec acts 
 regarded by us in the highest degree crimi- 
 nal, most widely spread and frequent among 
 the lower animals, offering us, as Renan says, 
 " an example of the most implacable insen- 
 sibility and the greatest immorality." The 
 fly-catching sun-dews and the Venus' fly-trap
 
 Introduction. 23 
 
 offer examples of the first dawn of criminal- 
 ity. These examples become clearer when 
 we pass to the animal kingdom. Jealousy, 
 hatred, strife, and murder follow in the train 
 of natural selection among animals. Ants 
 and termites make a veritable war upon one 
 another. A community of bees will suffer 
 but one queen, and if several appear among 
 them, all but one are killed. Cannibalism, 
 infanticide, parricide, and other revolting 
 crimes find their counterpart among the 
 lower animals. The female crocodile often 
 eats her little ones ; cats, rats, and other 
 animals are known to do the same thing, but 
 never in obedience to normal instincts. Vet- 
 erinary surgeons and persons who have much 
 to do with horses, notice that depraved 
 instincts and vicious habits are associated 
 with cerebral mal-organization. Veterinary 
 surgeons among the French soldiers have 
 given the name of chevaitx a nez busqu/ to 
 those horses with a curvature in the forehead 
 near the nose, and these depraved instincts 
 are so far believed hereditary that the Arab 
 takes note of them and will not allow such 
 horses among his selections for breeding. 
 Certain elephants separate from the herd and 
 are morose, solitary, vicious, and dangerous.
 
 24 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 They are known as " rogues " among the 
 native Indians, and special hunts are organ- 
 ized for their extermination. After numerous 
 illustrations of further abnormal peculiarities 
 among animals, Lombroso proceeds with a 
 consideration of the crimes and brutalities 
 of savages and then passes on to a discussion 
 of the absence of moral sense in children 
 even of the highest civilization. 
 
 It is a fact, he declares, that the germs of 
 moral idiocy and of crime are to be found 
 not by exception but normally in the early 
 age of man's life, just as in the fcetus are 
 constantly appearing certain forms that are 
 monstrosities in the adult. The young child, 
 like the savage, is given to fits of irrational 
 anger, to lying, cruelty, idleness, vanity, jeal- 
 ousy, excessive imitation. In common with 
 savages and criminals, the child is absolutely 
 without foresight. To-morrow does not 
 exist for him. He lives in the present hour, 
 and no event that is not immediate or does 
 not appear so, has the slightest influence 
 over his imagination. To be promised a cer- 
 tain pleasure at the expiration of eight days 
 or at the end of a year is all one to him. 
 The moral sense, however, is one of the fac- 
 ulties most susceptible of being modified
 
 Introduction. 25 
 
 by moral surroundings. The child's sense of 
 justice and property and of the rights of 
 others is gradually developed by experience, 
 admonition, and example, and his growing 
 intelligence gives precision to the distinction 
 between good and evil. 
 
 The born criminal, on the contrary, never 
 arrives at this distinction. For him, there is 
 no good outside of the satisfaction of his 
 depraved instincts. His very appearance 
 betrays his depravity. The general charac- 
 teristics of the born criminal are : unusually 
 prominent ears; abundant hair and scarcity 
 of beard ; enormous upper jaw; facial asym- 
 metry ; square chin, and broad projecting 
 cheek-bones ; type, in short, approaching 
 the Mongolian or Negroid. Criminals are 
 also characterized by a marked insensibility 
 to pain. They love to tattoo themselves, 
 and submit to the most painful surgical oper- 
 ations without a groan. This insensibility to 
 pain explains their utter want of sympathy 
 with the suffering of others, for sympathy 
 exists in proportion to physical sensibility. 
 Their sense of taste is dull. They are fre- 
 quently color-blind. They rarely blush. 
 They are not, however, without affection, but 
 their affections, morbid in character, are in-
 
 26 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 termittent and unstable. In place of family 
 and social affections, dominate with a con- 
 stant tenacity a few other passions, such as 
 pride and vanity. They are proud of their 
 strength and skill, audacity and cunning. 
 They have an insane desire to be talked 
 about, which explains the fact that they often 
 convict themselves in pride of their crimes, 
 instead of concealing them. To satisfy van- 
 ity, to shine, to make a figure in the world, 
 and to be talked of, are the commonest 
 causes of crime. A natural consequence of 
 such restless, unlimited vanity is their incli- 
 nation to revenge themselves for the slightest 
 
 o o 
 
 affront. They are lovers of play and drink, 
 and practise the most revolting forms of 
 bestial sensuality. 
 
 It is a common opinion that criminals are 
 without religion, but the truth is, that by far 
 the greater number of them have a sensual 
 and accommodating religion which makes of 
 the God of truth and justice a benevolent 
 tutor of criminals. They rarely believe them- 
 selves lost, and die on the scaffold in the firm 
 conviction that they will open their eyes in 
 heaven. 
 
 Intellectually, criminals arc characterized 
 by their incapacity for continued, assiduous
 
 Introduction. 27 
 
 mental labor; by their singular lightness and 
 mobility of mind. It is impossible to fix their 
 attention for any length of time. They are 
 generally of a cynical, joking humor, laugh 
 easily and loud, love to rival one another in 
 slang and in punning, debasing the dearest 
 and most sacred things by burlesque and 
 obscenity. They are great liars, and even 
 when it is their interest to speak the truth, 
 they are inexact in statement because of 
 defective precision in perception and mem- 
 ory. Many of them are unable to count to a 
 thousand. They are great visionaries, are 
 always going to do the impossible, are 
 thoughtless, credulous, believers in dreams, 
 presages, and fatal days. Their ideal is a life 
 without labor and the unrestrained opportu- 
 nity to indulge their vicious instincts. 
 
 In admitting that there is a class of born 
 criminals, Lombroso acknowledges the neces- 
 sity of admitting their irresponsibility. But 
 in admitting their irresponsibility, he strenu- 
 ously opposes the weak sentimentality that 
 excuses them and allows them the liberty of 
 doing as they please. We do not deny irre- 
 sponsibility to the mad dog or the venomous 
 serpent, but we do not the less exterminate 
 them. The safety of society demands the
 
 28 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 incarceration for life, or the death, in certain 
 cases, of the criminally insane. 
 
 In his latest contributions to criminal an- 
 thropology, Lombroso strengthens his posi- 
 tion by taking note of the manner in which 
 the genius of artists has divined and made 
 use of a criminal type before criminal anthro- 
 pology had studied it scientifically. Michael 
 Angelo gave to his demons animal forms with 
 human faces, characterized by retreating fore- 
 heads, prominent ears, and a brutal look of 
 stupidity or idiocy. Raphael Sanzio in his 
 " Last Supper" gave Judas a broad head, 
 contracted eyebrows, and a short, thick upper 
 lip. Delacroix in a series of drawings has 
 treated the different scenes from Goethe's 
 " Faust " and Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and 
 has given to his Mephistopheles the malig- 
 nancy of feature that belongs to a well-known 
 class of criminals. In short, there was never a 
 great artist that did not adopt for criminals 
 the characteristics that the new school has 
 permanently fixed. 
 
 Lombroso then passes on to a considera- 
 tion of the criminal as depicted in literature. 
 He says that Dostojewski's descriptions in 
 " Casa dei Morti " are so exact that they are 
 really valuable as confirmations of the dis-
 
 Introduction. 29 
 
 coveries in criminal anthropology. He has 
 described in a family of criminals the cold- 
 blooded apathy, insensibility to pain, impos- 
 sibility of feeling remorse, the exaggerated 
 vanity, idleness, susceptibility to meteoric 
 influences, the childish love of dress and or- 
 nament, the impossibility of repressing a 
 desire ; all well noted characteristics of 
 criminals. In one case, he even ventures to 
 say that underlying this criminality there 
 " might be some organic defect, a physical 
 and moral monstrosity unknown to science." 
 In the above summary, we have the plain, 
 unvarnished truth, the revolting and depress- 
 ing facts of scientific observation. What 
 place have these facts in art? Do they 
 belong to art at all? Zola and his followers 
 think they do, and that they have a leading 
 place in art. But does he give us the facts 
 as they are? Does he carry out his theory 
 of realism? Let us listen to Lombroso 
 again. Lombroso says that the leading idea 
 of the "Bete humaine" is the born criminal. 
 " But," he adds, " Zola has fallen into singular 
 errors and violates the laws of truth and pro- 
 bability by an atavistic return to the old trick 
 of romancers, who always conceive of fated 
 events as committed in fated places by pre-
 
 30 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 destined men and predestined weapons. For 
 example, in the ' Fortune des Rougons,' 
 there is mention of a gun with which a 
 contraband kills a gendarme and which is 
 used by a rebel nephew against another gen- 
 darme and later, in its turn, it kills the assas- 
 sin, as if destiny were not in the hereditary 
 instinct, but had been bequeathed to that 
 unconscious instrument. But Zola's great- 
 est error is not here : it lies in the portrayal 
 of character. He has depicted drunkards 
 wonderfully, and even well enough the low 
 bourgeois of villages and cities, but has not 
 in my opinion studied the criminal from life. 
 His portrayals produce on me the effect of 
 those pale, blurred, photographic reproduc- 
 tions from oil paintings, instead of from the 
 living subject. Therefore, I, who have stud- 
 ied thousands and thousands of criminals, am 
 unable to classify Roubeaud ; and a degener- 
 ate epileptic like Jacques ought to have 
 many other defects : a singular violence of 
 character and unreasonable irascibility, a pro- 
 found immorality, while, on the contrary, he 
 appears to be a good man, except in the 
 ferocious moments that assail him." 
 
 There lies the vicious character and the 
 consequent immorality of Zolaism. It pre-
 
 Introduction. 31 
 
 tends to give the truth, and it suppresses 
 the greater part of it, and in that suppression 
 falsifies what it borrows of reality. It calls 
 itself scientific, and it knows nothing whatever 
 of the broad, calm, impartial spirit of science 
 that tells the whole truth and ignores noth- 
 ing. It enlists our sympathies for what 
 ought to excite our disgust. It subverts the 
 principles of art by substituting the abnor- 
 mal for what is normal, and in doing so cor- 
 rupts the taste and the morals of its readers. 
 
 Another favorite subject for pseudo-scien- 
 tific treatment in fiction, is hypnotism. The 
 vast majority of readers who get their science 
 from novels are under the impression that 
 there exists in certain favored individuals a 
 mysterious power by which they can in- 
 fluence others to do as it pleases them. In 
 an age in which a novel whose plot is based 
 on such a belief can attain unexampled pop- 
 ularity and become for a time the chief 
 theme of pulpits and lecture-rooms, it is 
 not out of place to attempt an explanation 
 of this phase of hypnotism, in a work that 
 wishes to familiarize the public with the prin- 
 ciples of true criticism. 
 
 We sought in Lombroso, a student of crim- 
 inals, for what he knew of them, and now we
 
 32 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 shall seek in Wilhelm Wundt, of the Uni- 
 versity of Leipsic, an authority in the domain 
 of scientific psychology, for what he can 
 teach us about hypnotism. " At present," 
 he writes, " there exist two forms of scientific 
 superstition : animal magnetism and spiritual- 
 ism. The first is over a hundred years old, 
 and dates back to Mesmer, who began his 
 career by publishing a belief in the influence 
 of planets on the human body. Then he 
 taught that a magnet had power over dis- 
 eases ; that patients could detect its pres- 
 ence in a room, and that they could be healed 
 by the strokes of a magnet. Later he pre- 
 tended to discover that this magnetic force 
 existed in certain human bodies, that he him- 
 self was endowed with the power in an ex- 
 traordinary degree, and that by rubbing 
 others, he could impart a healing influence. 
 His theory passed to the stage of magic ; he 
 declared that he could not only influence 
 persons but that he could magnetize objects, 
 such as iron bars, water in flasks, etc. . . . 
 
 " If any one should broach the question how 
 a mythology could be accepted that did not 
 originate in a gray, prehistoric past and in 
 the childhood of national development, but in 
 the light of history under modern conditions of
 
 Introduction. 33 
 
 culture and uninfluenced by historic tradition, 
 everybody would shake his head at such a 
 question. Well, the American nation has 
 solved the problem, and its solution is spirit- 
 ualism. Its development is within the re- 
 membrance of every one. About thirty years 
 ago, the first excitement of spiritualism spread 
 like an epidemic over all Europe. The phe- 
 nomenon of table-turning first appeared ; 
 then, spirit-rapping. Then originated the idea 
 that certain persons called ' mediums ' could 
 enter into intimate relations with spirits and 
 could communicate to others the thoughts of 
 dead men. Finally it was asserted that the 
 dead could appear visibly in their former bod- 
 ies. A literature sprang up that claimed to 
 be scientific. Clairvoyants, magnetic healers, 
 sprang up and reaped a harvest from the 
 deluded public. The characteristic form of 
 the superstitions of the present, is that they 
 are spread among the so-called educated 
 classes, while formerly superstitions belonged 
 to the lower class. The peasant is conser- 
 vative in his superstitions, but on the con- 
 trary the ' educated ' laugh at the old fash- 
 ions and riot in the new fantasies just as 
 soon as they believe them to be clothed in 
 scientific garments.
 
 34 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 " Investigations have proved that excitable 
 persons, who are usually chosen for magnetic 
 experiments, show all the so-called influences 
 of magnetism if only they believe that they 
 are magnetized, and remain completely unin- 
 fluenced when subjected to real magnetic 
 treatment if they do not know that they are 
 so subjected. The investigation proving this 
 was conducted by a committee of the French 
 Academy to which Benjamin Franklin and 
 Lavoisier belonged. These investigations 
 prove to us that the old magnetic cures were 
 allied to modern hypnotism ; that is, they de- 
 pended on the suggestibility of the subject." 
 
 " A noble world governed by grand, unal- 
 terable laws, or a little unreasonable world of 
 hysterical mediums, which?" this is the 
 alternative which Wundt poses for our belief, 
 and no thoughtful mind asks for a moment 
 in which to deliberate over its choice. It is 
 a noble world, and its laws are grand and 
 unalterable. According to Wundt, hypno- 
 tism has no more right to claim to be the 
 true key to psychological laws than dreams, 
 manias, or idiocy. It is an abnormal state 
 into which persons of feeble will-power and 
 morbid, nervous excitability throw themselves 
 under the impression that they are being
 
 Introduction. 35 
 
 subjected to the mysterious and unavoidable 
 power of another. " I consider it estab- 
 lished," says Wundt, "that the so-called 
 suggestion that practised by words or by 
 acts to suggest representations is the prin- 
 cipal if not the only cause of hypnotism. 
 The action of other influences, such as fixing 
 the attention upon a determined object, ap- 
 pears to be reduced to this fact, that they 
 facilitate suggestion in provoking a state of 
 consciousness fitted to receive it, or that they 
 themselves constitute a suggestive practice 
 in the sense that they engender the idea of 
 an hypnotic sleep. . . . 
 
 " Undoubtedly hypnotism has its value in 
 medicine by aiding physicians to act upon 
 the nutritive functions by suggestion when 
 the malady is a purely nervous one ; but 
 hypnotic enthusiasts believe they have found 
 in suggestion a remedy for all the moral mal- 
 adies from which we suffer. In the future, 
 pedagogues will suggest to a child to be good 
 and obedient until the desired qualities are 
 fixed in the character. Under suggestion, it 
 is said, all artistic works will be produced, 
 from the feats of the acrobat to the less mate- 
 rial productions of art. Legends and tales 
 that rational criticism had expelled from his-
 
 36 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tory are restored to the dignity of facts 
 worthy of belief. Sleeping Beauty is a cata- 
 leptic. Religions are based on hypnotism; 
 their revelations are due to hypnotic sugges- 
 tion ; the tongues of the Apostles are ex- 
 plained in this way. Such are the phantoms 
 of a science gone mad. Of all the relations 
 of man to man that is the most immoral that 
 makes of one the machine of the other, It is 
 the most intolerable of slaveries. . . . Besides, 
 it is a dangerous practice for the health. A 
 constant diminution of the force of resistance 
 of the nervous system ensues, and the subject 
 becomes a victim to hallucinations through 
 his extreme susceptibility to suggestion." 
 
 Here again we have the plain, scientific 
 fact. There is no mysterious all-powerful 
 influence emanating from some favored in- 
 dividual, no inevitable submission on the part 
 of another accompanied by inevitable loss of 
 individuality. There is simply a suspension 
 of will-power on the part of a credulous per- 
 son with an excitable and degenerate nervous 
 system. The influence is not external but 
 internal. The subject is simply the victim 
 of self-delusion. 
 
 There arc many other scientific truths of a 
 revolting character of which it ought to be
 
 Introduction. 37 
 
 noted that the sexless spirit in which they 
 are written and read by scientists is very dif- 
 ferent from the morbid spirit which in the 
 name of art throws a brilliantly colored, 
 finely-woven mantle of rhetoric over moral 
 ulcers and moral weakness, and persuades un- 
 thinking readers that it conceals beauty and 
 health. 
 
 The great giants in literature have always 
 recognized this fact. . They have chosen the 
 strong, the beautiful, the graceful, and the 
 enduring elements of human character as 
 their chief themes. They have treated with 
 a fine irony or an indulgently contemptuous 
 humor the frailties, the eccentricities, and 
 weaknesses of human nature. Shakespeare 
 does not make the animalism that draws 
 Touchstone to Audrey the theme of his bril- 
 liant comedy, but a modern novelist would 
 have suppressed or subordinated Rosalind 
 and Orlando, and in the name of realism and 
 art for art's sake would have made the clown 
 and his doxy the chief subject of treatment. 
 
 Everywhere and at all times it is the work 
 of true criticism to expose the rhetorical de- 
 basement of the ideal, and this apotheosis of 
 disorder and corruption. True criticism is 
 not the mere expression of an opinion. It
 
 38 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 is the search for the faithful reflection of true 
 life in literature. It is the careful discrimina- 
 tion between the false and the true. It is the 
 insistence upon law and order in opposition 
 to anarchy and disorder. 
 
 " There are serious problems in human 
 life," says that acute German critic, Julian 
 Schmidt, "that no writer can justly avoid. 
 Has art anything to do with morality? Who- 
 ever judged a landscape by a moral standard 
 would make himself ridiculous; but where 
 human actions, principles, and feelings are 
 concerned, it is natural to judge them by the 
 standards of morality that belong to men. 
 The overthrow of an ideal is more danger- 
 ous than uncertainty in maxims." But by 
 morality, Julian Schmidt does not mean the 
 " narrow-minded, pietistic, resigned moral- 
 ity," the outgrowth of limitation and fear, but 
 that morality which makes life richer and 
 fuller, which is the outcome of the widest, 
 most fearless culture, and which recognizes 
 that obedience to law or morality is nature's 
 fundamental principle of self-preservation. 
 
 The criticism of the men whom we are 
 about to study is of this true kind. It is 
 fearless, uncompromising, unrelenting on the 
 side of morality, yet with no taint of cant or
 
 Introduction. 39 
 
 narrowness. It is touched with the truly 
 scientific spirit of the age; that is, it is 
 founded on a profound and intimate knowl- 
 edge of the human heart, on wide experience, 
 and a comparative study of national literatures. 
 It is touched, too, with that indescribable 
 tang or personal flavor which genius alone 
 can impart. We feel that there is a man 
 behind each of these telling, limpid sen- 
 tences. These clear, solid thoughts are not 
 mere mouthings ; they are growths rooted 
 and nourished in the inner life of manly 
 struggle in the darkness towards the light 
 I know nothing more helpful than an ac- 
 quaintance with such men ; and in each case, 
 I have tried to sketch, in rapid yet firm out- 
 lines, the personality of the critic, trusting 
 to the translated extracts from his works to 
 complete the outlined sketch and give a clear 
 idea of the quality of his contributions to 
 literary criticism.
 
 II. 
 
 EDMOND SCHERER. 
 
 EDMOND SCHERER was born at Paris, 
 April 8th, 1815, and died in 1889. In 
 1890, a life of Scherer was published by 
 Octave Greard, to whom we are indebted for 
 the main facts of his biography. 
 
 On the side of his father, a Parisian banker, 
 Scherer belonged to a Swiss family; on his 
 mother's side, he had English and Dutch 
 blood in his veins. His father put him into 
 the Bourbon College, and later, in 1831, sent 
 him for two years to England to study the 
 language and literature of that country. 
 
 Before going to England, young Scherer 
 had not been regarded a particularly promis- 
 ing student; but if he were apathetic with 
 respect to his school-books, he was already 
 a hungry and omnivorous reader, conducting 
 his education in his own fashion by consult- 
 ing the taste and inspiration of the moment, 
 which is perhaps the best fashion of all
 
 Edmond Scherer. 41 
 
 for those who have a native bent towards 
 literature. 
 
 In the list of books he was reading at fif- 
 teen, are to be found " Manon Lescaut," 
 " Rob Roy," " Cinq Mars," Silvio Pellico's 
 " My Prisons," Courier's " Correspondence," 
 Mme. de StaeTs " Considerations sur la Re- 
 volution," " Notre Dame de Paris," Sainte- 
 Beuve's " Consolations," " Childe Harold," 
 and Lord Byron's " Memoirs." Even at this 
 early period that which was in later years a 
 marked feature of his criticism, his interest 
 in personality and his appreciation of the 
 refinements of expression, was decidedly 
 strong in him. " The description of man- 
 ners," says his biographer, "charmed him; 
 poetry intoxicated him, and he tried himself 
 to write verses." The attitude of his mind 
 at this time was sceptical and irreligious. 
 There was nothing in the atmosphere of his 
 daily life nor in the general character of the 
 books he was reading to develop a religious 
 sentiment in him ; but his mind was at the 
 same time an impressionable, idealizing mind 
 especially open to all healthful influences, or 
 such as appealed to its love of beauty and 
 order. A daring mind, too, capable of fol- 
 lowing truth, or what seemed to it truth,
 
 42 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 through the gloomiest abysses and over the 
 ruggedest pathways in order to reach the 
 serene and sun-bathed heights of intellectual 
 freedom. 
 
 The story of the development of such a 
 mind is not an ordinary one; it will be the 
 story of those fierce, silent conflicts of which 
 a rumor only now and then reaches us from 
 some John Bunyan or Thomas Carlyle ; a con- 
 flict in which few minds are strong enough 
 to engage, and out of which no man comes 
 just what he was when he entered it. He will 
 be either wounded irrecoverably, or he will 
 bear about with him the conscious strength 
 of the victor who knows that henceforth life 
 can offer him no trial that he will be unable 
 to meet. " Edmond Scherer's intellectual 
 evolution," says Edouard Rod, " is one of the 
 richest and most instructive of this century." 
 The whole story of Scherer's life is a story 
 of that evolution, and it properly begins 
 when, as a lad of sixteen, he was sent to 
 England to be placed under the tutorship 
 of the Rev. Thomas Loader of Monmouth. 
 
 Monmouth is a beautiful old town in a 
 southwestern county of England bordering 
 on Wales. It lies in a hill-encircled valley 
 just at the point where the rivers Wye and
 
 Edmond Scherer. 43 
 
 Monnow unite to flow into the Severn. 
 Monmouthshire is famous not only for its 
 picturesque beauty, but for its interesting 
 ruins, among which Chepstow, Raglan Castle, 
 and Tintern Abbey on the Wye are the most 
 celebrated. The name of Tintern Abbey will 
 recall to every English reader those immor- 
 tal lines in which Wordsworth has given to 
 us his joys in Wye's " steep woods and lofty 
 cliffs," its " waters rolling from their moun- 
 tain-springs." 
 
 Fancy the sensations of an eager-minded 
 boy, a lover of poetry, with the poet's eye 
 for beauty in his head, who is suddenly trans- 
 ported from a great city like Paris to a 
 charming old town like Monmouth, where 
 in a few minutes he can have fresh, springing 
 turf under his feet and the murmur of waters 
 and winds in his ears. The boy has ex- 
 changed, too, the careless freedom and count- 
 less distractions of Parisian life for the placid, 
 uniform, and methodical home-life of an Eng- 
 lish parsonage. " The Rev. Loader," says M. 
 Greard, " was a rigorist. The first Sunday 
 that Scherer passed in Monmouth, he had 
 taken a book, as was his custom, and had gone 
 for a ramble in the country. On his return, 
 Mrs. Loader asked him, with tears in her eyes,
 
 44 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 never again to distress her husband by such 
 a profanation of the holy Sabbath, and 
 Scherer strictly conformed to that prayer." 
 In winter, he rose between seven and eight, 
 breakfasted at half-past eight, and began his 
 English reading with Mr. Loader at nine. 
 He dined at two, renewed his lessons, which 
 were interrupted by tea at six, after which 
 he continued his reading and extracts until 
 supper at nine, and went to bed between 
 eleven and twelve. In summer, he often 
 rose at four to meet the new tasks he had 
 imposed upon himself. He took up Greek 
 again, and read Blackstone and Burke. With 
 these studies were mingled frequent theo- 
 logical discussions with the Rev. Loader, 
 who often allowed his pupil to accompany 
 him in his pastoral visits to the sick. 
 
 This life, so simple and studious, the ever 
 present consciousness of its seriousness, the 
 sad reminder of its brevity by the bedside of 
 the dying, the poetic beauty of his surround- 
 ings, the sweetness and charm of the seclu- 
 sion and intimacy of English home-life, 
 all these new influences quickly wrought 
 a profound change in this impressionable 
 young mind, and in his diary of that year, 
 1832, appears this significant record: "25
 
 Edmond Scherer. 45 
 
 Dfcembre, Noel, conversion." He had 
 sloughed off the sceptical, indifferent, boy- 
 ish Scherer; he had taken a great stride 
 forward ; he had become a man in the con- 
 sciousness of a responsibility upon him, and 
 in the ardent wish to fit himself to discharge 
 it well. Up to this time, his educational 
 training had been designed to prepare him 
 for the law, and on his return to Paris, after 
 a two years' stay in England, he continued 
 his legal studies at the University. But 
 these studies no longer satisfied either his 
 head or his heart. There was a message 
 within him shaping itself for delivery, and 
 he eagerly sought whatever could nourish it. 
 He found time to attend the lectures in the 
 literary course. He listened to Saint-Marc 
 Girardin, Jouffroy, and Victor Cousin. He 
 read unweariedly. At last, he broached the 
 subject of his dissatisfaction with the law, 
 and in '36, he was allowed to 'go to Stras- 
 burg to take a theological course. 
 
 Three years in Strasburg gave him a mas- 
 tery of German. He deepened, too, his 
 knowledge in Latin, persevering in it until 
 he could write in it, and then to keep up 
 his hand, he wrote letters in Latin to his 
 brother, his professor, and his friends.
 
 46 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Slowly, perhaps unconsciously to himself, 
 the old religious ardor was giving place to 
 a new fire that consumed him, the insa- 
 tiable knowledge-hunger. "I suffer," he 
 writes, "from a singular preoccupation, that 
 of the rapidity and value of time. Doubt- 
 less it comes from having lost several years, 
 and wishing to make them up. The aim 
 that I fix for myself disappears as I approach 
 it. It is a horizon which I fancy I can reach, 
 but which enlarges and recedes at every step. 
 I have proposed to make certain studies; to 
 acquire certain kinds of knowledge, but it is 
 like another voyage. You do not think of 
 the ground gone over, it is the space yet to 
 be travelled that absorbs your attention. We 
 are never content with what we have, but 
 always wishing for what we have not. That 
 is especially true of knowledge, where the 
 gaps seem to multiply in proportion as they 
 are filled. Ars longa, -vita brevis. Life is 
 nothing more to me than a number of hours 
 of which each one unemployed in a certain 
 manner seems lost. And what a mournful 
 echo this word 'lost' has in my mind. In 
 this way, I always hear behind me the voice 
 that says, ' Go on ! go on ! ' : 
 
 In 1839, he took his degree of Bachelor of
 
 Edmond Scherer. 47 
 
 Theology. He married. Public life might 
 have begun for him, as an associate pastorate 
 was offered him, but he refused it. He took 
 a little country-house at Wangen, and there, 
 in the perfect seclusion of a foreign country, 
 gave himself up to further study. Some of 
 his friends remonstrated with him on this 
 course, declaring so much study unnecessary 
 for the discharge of ministerial duties ; but he 
 protested that he could not conscientiously 
 enter the pulpit with less, and that the truths 
 he came into possession of must be the 
 fruit of reflection and labor. His library be- 
 came his world. During his attendance at 
 the university, he had associated little with 
 his professors and fellow-students, and now 
 that he was wholly master of his time, he 
 was not more inclined to squander it in the 
 sterile intercourse of social gossip. 
 
 Indeed, something of the close student's 
 reticence and coldness of manner clung to 
 him all his life. Strangers found him ex- 
 ceedingly difficult to meet. He gave him- 
 self reluctantly, and even then not to 
 everybody. His purity and refinement, his 
 sincerity that refused to cloak its indiffer- 
 ence, his preoccupation in the world of 
 ideas, unfitted him for that free and easy
 
 48 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 yet conciliatory intercourse that we call 
 neighborliness. But those who were for- 
 tunate enough to awaken his interest and 
 regard, found in his friendship a life-long 
 possession and an exhaustless well of refresh- 
 ing and delight. He liked to meet his 
 friends alone, and never visited those whom 
 he particularly loved, but at such times as 
 he knew that he would meet no other visitor. 
 
 He is described to us as of slender build, 
 with a mobile, intellectual face well framed 
 by soft, abundant blonde hair; the forehead 
 high, the mouth delicate and expressive; 
 the eye cold, but capable of warming in the 
 fire of passion; and in his movements, ges- 
 tures, looks, that indescribable air of author- 
 ity and charm that belongs to superior 
 natures. 
 
 In 1844, the Neo-Calvinistic school, 
 founded at Geneva under the title of Free 
 School of Theology, offered Scherer a chair, 
 which he gladly accepted, thinking that he 
 had touched the aim of his life, little know- 
 ing that many and many a weary league still 
 lay between him and the real work that he 
 was destined to do. The untiring research 
 did not end with the assumption of profes- 
 sorial duties. Had it ended then, Edmond
 
 Edmond Scherer. 49 
 
 Scherer might have quietly lived and died a 
 college professor, honored in the narrow cir- 
 cle in which he moved, but wholly unknown 
 to the literature of Europe. But the voice 
 that had cried in his early youth, " Go on ! 
 Go on ! " still urged him forward, and in 
 1851 began the revolution in him which he 
 so vividly describes in the following pas- 
 sage : 
 
 "The 'most profound revolution that can 
 take place in the human mind is when the 
 absolute escapes it, and with 'the absolute, 
 the arrested outlines, the privileged sanctu- 
 ary, and the oracles of truth. It is difficult 
 to describe all the agitation of the heart, 
 when we begin to recognize that our church 
 and our system have not a monopoly of the 
 good and the true; when we meet sincere 
 and eminent men who profess the most op- 
 posed beliefs; when sin and justice become 
 in our eyes the degrees of an infinite ladder 
 that rises to the clouds and sinks into hell ; 
 when we discover that there is no error but 
 has its mixture of truth, and no truth that is 
 not partial, incomplete, and error-stained; 
 when the relative appears to us like the ab- 
 solute, and the absolute like an aim eter- 
 nally pursued yet eternally inaccessible, and
 
 50 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 truth like a mirror broken into a thousand 
 fragments, all of which reflect the sky while 
 no one reflects it wholly. Until then, sub- 
 mission was all that was necessary; now, 
 examination becomes a duty. Authority 
 and the absolute have disappeared at the 
 same time, and since truth is nowhere con- 
 centrated within the hands of a single de- 
 pository, it is a question, in future, of 
 searching, proving, and selecting." 
 
 These profound revolutions in human life 
 do not take place without some evidence of 
 their existence, and Scherer's college-lec- 
 tures began to betray the conflict in which 
 he was engaged. When his friends reproved 
 him for the boldness and newness of the 
 ideas that crept into his lectures, he excused 
 himself by saying that man does not learn 
 what he wishes to learn, but learns without 
 ceasing and in spite of himself what he must 
 through the teachings of suffering and the 
 course of events ; that every new acquisition 
 of knowledge necessarily modifies the whole 
 mass of knowledge previously acquired, and 
 that in this way take place the greatest spir- 
 itual revolutions, and that Christianity it- 
 self has acted on souls in no other way. He 
 said that he had crown accustomed to dis-
 
 Edmond Scherer. 51 
 
 tingtrish between his tastes and reality, and 
 that he felt the need of seeing things as they 
 are, even when they were repugnant to his 
 feelings or to his conscience. He said : 
 " Logic knows no more characteristic ex- 
 ample of fallacious argument than the fol- 
 lowing reasoning: I cannot explain this 
 phenomenon, therefore, it is inexplicable: 
 it is inexplicable, therefore, it ought to be 
 referred to a direct intervention of the su- 
 preme power. The opposite conclusion 
 ought to be drawn; every phenomenon has 
 a cause, and until we know that cause we 
 ought to suppose it natural." 
 
 From 1855 to 1859, he continued his lec- 
 tures at Geneva, but in choosing his sub- 
 jects, he carefully avoided anything of a 
 doctrinal character, selecting from the New 
 Testament such passages as are best suited 
 to the development of the inner life, and 
 sometimes confining himself to a simple 
 study of texts. It was the beginning of the 
 end; "the last effort," says his biographer, 
 "of his theological science, and of a science 
 in which his faith was no longer interested." 
 There was but one course open to an 
 honest man who respects his intellect, and 
 prefers its honor to its prostitution to worldly
 
 52 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 interests, and Scherer was an honest man. 
 He prepared a careful, firm, and manly, yet 
 modest report of his new attitude towards 
 theology, and addressed this published re- 
 port, entitled " La Critique et la Foi, " to Dr. 
 Merle D'Aubigne", president of the theolog- 
 ical seminary of Geneva. 
 
 " I have not come to these views," he con- 
 fesses in the report, "without much hesita- 
 tion and effort. Doubt presented itself to 
 my mind from the first day of my religious 
 life. I have resisted it in every possible 
 way. Many a time, I have voluntarily closed 
 my eyes to the evidence of facts. I imitated 
 that bad conservatism which believes that 
 the edifice is menaced with ruin as soon as 
 repairs are begun upon it." 
 
 Religion had been to Scherer a passion 
 that had absorbed his whole heart, his whole 
 range of feeling, but it had never been able 
 to absorb wholly his large, penetrating, un- 
 tiring intellect. The conflict between this 
 passion and his reason consumed more than 
 half the working years of life. He was forty- 
 five when he freed himself from its bondage. 
 He quitted Geneva never to return except as 
 a traveller. Shortly after leaving Geneva, 
 he gave away to different libraries and to
 
 Edmond Scherer. 53 
 
 his friends his large collection of theological 
 works. He went to Strasburg for a time, 
 and then settled permanently at Versailles. 
 In a note to one of his last articles on 
 sociology, he sums up his intellectual expe- 
 riences in this graphic way: "There are two 
 classes of men among those consecrated by 
 passion and earnestness. The one class have 
 been awakened to the sentiment of duty. 
 They have caught a glimpse of that pure and 
 holy ideal of life which, once seen, takes 
 complete possession of them; in Christian 
 phraseology, they are converted, and then 
 everything in them is conformed to this sub- 
 lime vision. Their intellectual attitude is 
 no longer that of research but that of de- 
 fence of a possession. Their mind has be- 
 come less inquiring and less exacting. They 
 admit with secret complaisance the solutions 
 favorable to their new conception of things. 
 They choose to pass by all objections, and 
 when these objections present themselves, 
 they avoid looking them too closely in the 
 face. They even go so far as to do a certain 
 violence to their critical conscience; preju- 
 diced in favor of a higher order of truths, 
 they have lost their loyalty to the true. The 
 convert has renounced science for faith. 
 Such was my history at twenty.
 
 54 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 "The second class of men have recognized 
 the supreme authority of the true. They 
 have said, in short, that all turns on a ques- 
 tion of faith or of logic, of historic proof or 
 of rational demonstration. They have not 
 been able to convince themselves that truths, 
 even of what is called faith or sentiment, 
 can escape the necessity of being in har- 
 mony with the conditions of thought and 
 fact. Where certainty seems impossible of 
 attainment, they have learned to decline to 
 give an opinion, and to remain in doubt. . . . 
 The holy life and the beliefs upon which it 
 rests, are not by that excluded or profaned. 
 They preserve their beauty; they remain an 
 ideal and a source of strength, but they can 
 no longer claim a miraculous value. The 
 scientific conception refers all things, if we 
 may so express it, to natural history, and 
 religion protests in vain; it has its place, 
 like all the rest, in the science of nature. 
 There is where I stood at forty." 
 
 The soul to which religion has once fur- 
 nished the principles of a holy life cannot 
 altogether escape, even in the quiet gladness 
 of conscious growth and disillusionment, the 
 passionate regret of what was once the light 
 of life. It cannot learn to hate nor even to
 
 Edmond Scherer. 55 
 
 be indifferent to what it has so wholly loved. 
 It cherishes an exquisite tenderness for what 
 it renounces. Such was Scherer's attitude 
 towards religion. There was nothing of the 
 proselyting spirit in it. He could not pro- 
 fane what he had once so deeply loved, and 
 he could be loyal, at least, to the memory of 
 what it had once been to him. All light 
 mockery of infidels was odious to him ; even 
 wit on such subjects hurt him as if it were a 
 personal insult, and he would not even allow 
 a smile in the discussion of subjects so sa- 
 cred. "What is certain," says Sainte-Beuve, 
 of Scherer in his criticism of the latter's 
 "Melanges d'histoire religieuse, " "is that 
 he is still and was always a Christian in this 
 sense at least, that the Sermon on the Mount 
 appears to him of divine inspiration, some- 
 thing after which humanity ought not to re- 
 semble humanity before it." Even after 
 his published renunciations of Theology, 
 Scherer's home remained a Christian home, 
 and in it his wife preserved her faith intact. 
 His attitude towards religion is admirably 
 expressed in a comment to be found in his 
 critical article on Sismondi. The comment 
 is appended to his quotation of the following 
 letter from Mine. Sismondi to her son:
 
 56 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 "It is not very surprising that we should 
 incur the hatred of men in needlessly attack- 
 ing the opinions on which their happiness is 
 founded. These opinions may be erroneous, 
 but long accepted errors are more respecta- 
 ble than those which we would like to sub- 
 stitute for them ; for it is not the truth we 
 find when we overthrow the system of reli- 
 gion that is generally adopted ; because the 
 truth, if it is not revealed, is hidden from 
 the human mind in impenetrable shadows. 
 Then, leave in peace the Trinity, the Virgin, 
 and the Saints. To the majority of those 
 who are attached to this doctrine, they are 
 the columns that sustain the whole edifice; 
 it will crumble to pieces if you shake them. 
 And what would become of the souls whom 
 you will have deprived of all consolation and 
 hope? Piety is one of the sweetest affec- 
 tions of the soul, and that which is most 
 necessary to its repose. We must have it in 
 all religions except those in which, by force 
 of pruning away the branches to which our 
 senses cling, by force of spiritualizing, we 
 fall into abstract ideas and a desolate vague- 
 ness. " Scherer comments on this letter in 
 the following manner: "That is beautiful! 
 That is true! That is what we sometimes
 
 Edmond Scherer. 57 
 
 need to repeat to ourselves, all we who are 
 apt to confound so easily error with evil, 
 and to attack in souls that which makes their 
 strength, and more than that, their beauty. 
 Alas ! blind pioneers working at the over- 
 throw of the past, we know not what we do. 
 We yield to a power of which it seems some- 
 times as if we were the victims as well as 
 the instruments. The terrible dialectics 
 whose formulas we cipher, crushes us at the 
 same time that we crush others with it. It 
 is the future, undoubtedly, that we must 
 trust. Woe be to us, if we doubt it. And 
 yet, when the struggle ceases for a moment, 
 when the thinker becomes a man again, 
 when he sees the ruins that he has made, 
 and hears the groans he has extorted, O, 
 how wild and rugged he finds his pathway 
 then; and how willingly he would give all 
 the pleasures of conquest for one of those 
 sweet flowers of piety and poetry that still 
 make fragrant the pathway of the humble." 
 Scherer was deeply convinced that the im- 
 prisonment of a spiritual idea in a dogma is 
 its death-blow. Change, implying adapta- 
 tion, growth, development, was for him the 
 law of the intellectual and moral life as well 
 as of physical life. He accuses his country-
 
 58 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 men of a particular love of dogma manifested 
 in their inclination towards what is external. 
 "In everything," he writes, "we go from the 
 outside to the inside. We regulate all the 
 manifestations of human activity. We have 
 no confidence in the plastic force of life. 
 We think we can hold it in formulas, fix it 
 in our papers, produce it in our decrees. 
 Our institutions are not the expression of a 
 moral fact; they are a mould which we ap- 
 ply to society. They do not proceed from 
 our customs. They are an abstract product 
 of reason. Neither have we the taste nor 
 the understanding for liberty. In fact, lib- 
 erty has no value, no meaning but to men 
 who have an inner law of action. We pre- 
 fer the regular forms of mechanical move- 
 ment to the free gait of spontaneity. The 
 inclination of which I speak, is betrayed in 
 religion as well as in public life. . . . We do 
 not understand religion unless it be reduced 
 to articles of faith. ... It is high time \ve 
 were done with the superstition of dogma. 
 Dogma is not substance, it is shadow; it is 
 not living truth, it is dead truth. Humanity 
 does not live by abstract principles but by 
 great thoughts, and great thoughts come from 
 the soul. All thoughts that have ever borne
 
 Edmond Scherer. 59 
 
 fruit among men have had their birth in the 
 mystic depths of our being, in the spon- 
 taneous intuitions of our nature, in aspira- 
 tions towards the infinite, in a thirst for the 
 beautiful and true, in sentiments of love and 
 justice. Great men are not those who rule 
 but those who inspire. They are not the 
 legislators, but the prophets. The words 
 that change the world are words of passion. 
 Later they cool; the lava stiffens. Then 
 comes formula. Recordings, creeds, char- 
 ters succeed to the free manifestations of the 
 Eternal Spirit. We wish to retain life by 
 fixing it and we end by stifling it. 
 
 " I know very well that it is impossible to 
 prevent the arrival of this hour of reflection, 
 that gives birth to dogma; but in the name 
 of heaven, let us not take shadow for sub- 
 stance ; let us not extinguish the fire in order 
 to warm ourselves by its chilled cinders. . . . 
 It is impossible to imagine anything less dog- 
 matic than Christianity in its origin. Christ 
 wrote nothing, decreed nothing, founded 
 nothing. He cast his word into the air as 
 the sower his seed, with the most sublime 
 confidence in the virtue of spiritual germs. 
 He teaches, but his teachings are not the 
 articles of a code or the propositions of a
 
 60 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 catechism. They are the cry of the soul to 
 God, and the cry of God to the soul. He 
 brings a revelation, and this revelation 
 teaches us quite simply to say : ' Our Father 
 which art in heaven. ' He changed the rela- 
 tions of men to one another, but he changed 
 them in exhorting us to do unto others what 
 we would that they should do unto us. He 
 regenerated society. He gave a new idea to 
 humanity. He was the leader of an histori- 
 cal development; he transformed civiliza- 
 tion, created a world, and all that by the 
 simple power of a soul that descended into 
 itself, into those luminous depths where it 
 found the pure image of man together with 
 the pure image of God. 
 
 " Catholicism is a development of Evangel- 
 ical Christianity, but a development which 
 is a decadence, and this decadence is pre- 
 cisely that which every idea suffers when it 
 passes from life to formula. One must have 
 very little intuition of great things not to 
 feel to what degree the speculations of coun- 
 cils and the distinctions of scholasticism 
 detract from the majesty of the religion of 
 Christ. ... It is the same with Protestant- 
 ism as with Catholicism. In the beginning 
 with Luther, especially with the Luther of
 
 Edmond Scherer. 61 
 
 the early years, him whom anabaptism had 
 not yet intimidated, the Reformation is 
 wholly a joyous soaring, a celestial confi- 
 dence, enthusiastic deliverance, prophetic 
 speech. Then come the confessions of 
 faith, and after that, the dogmatic and the 
 scholastic, until the theologians of the seven- 
 teenth century made of Protestant orthodoxy 
 a skeleton as dry, as grimacing as ever was 
 Catholic orthodoxy in the slumbers of the 
 Middle Ages." 
 
 To Scherer, then, religion did not live in 
 dogma, but in the passionate longing of the 
 human heart for rest in faith, in something 
 eternal, something infinitely purer and 
 higher than itself, and in passionate effort 
 to realize in its temporal life something of 
 the beauty of the holiness it adores. It is 
 in this sense that he writes : " It is com- 
 plained that there is no longer any religion 
 in the world; that the world of religion has 
 disappeared ; that the things of religion are 
 dead. For my part, I do not believe it. 
 Religion is like poetry; it always finds a 
 place in which to strike its roots; it rises 
 from its ashes; it will live as long as the 
 human soul." 
 
 It is in tliis sense, too, that in renouncing
 
 62 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 the claims of dogmatic theology, in rising to 
 the supreme heights of intellectual freedom, 
 Scherer still remained the most profoundly 
 religious man of his day. It was this well 
 of Puritan feeling in him that set him at 
 variance with his young contemporaries, and 
 made them complain of him that he judged 
 with his character and not with his intelli- 
 gence. His ideal man was in no wise the 
 modern ideal. "His ideal," says Edouard 
 Rod, " is the honest man, in the old sense 
 of the expression ; he, who according to La 
 Rochefoucauld piques himself on nothing, 
 and can be amorous as a madman but not as 
 a fool; he who according to La Bruyere 
 holds a medium between the clever man and 
 the good man ; who acts simply, naturally, 
 without artifice, without a thousand singu- 
 larities, without pomp and without affecta- 
 tion; he of whom Chevalier de Mere said 
 that intelligence and honesty are above every- 
 thing. If we try to complete these quali- 
 ties by others that Scherer himself furnishes, 
 we shall find that the man has freed himself 
 from some of the laws that the moralists of 
 the old regime imposed upon him. He has 
 ceased to be satisfied with words; the philo- 
 sophical seductions to which he has yielded,
 
 Edmond Scherer. 63 
 
 have taught him certain things of which the 
 La Bruyeres and La Rochefoucaulds were 
 ignorant ; among other things, that there are 
 but 'facts and series of facts,' and that 'fact 
 is but the consciousness we have of it. ' . . . 
 But the liberty, acquired in this high sphere 
 in which one rarely moves, does not prevent 
 him from remaining a gentleman in the prac- 
 tice of current life; a man of taste, re-read- 
 ing more willingly than reading; loving 
 delicate and finished things; sensible to 
 force but more sensible still to perfection; 
 jealous of his liberty and too much alive to 
 distinctions to give way to violence, crudi- 
 ties, and brutalities; mindful of certain laws 
 of decorum which probably have no better 
 foundation than others, but which beautify 
 life; knowing that the absolute has no 
 authentic existence, but complying with its 
 laws as if he believed in it, the honest 
 man of the eighteenth century completed 
 by what he is pleased to admit of the 
 nineteenth." 
 
 This ideal of which Rod says he would 
 despair of humanity if it were the definitive 
 and unchangeable type, seems to us infin- 
 itely preferable to that which he himself 
 sketches as the ideal man of the nineteenth
 
 64 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 century. In learning just what that ideal is, 
 according to Rod, we are better able to un- 
 derstand the intellectual and moral gap that 
 separates Scherer from the majority of his 
 young contemporaries. Rod begins by say- 
 ing that the nineteenth century's ideal re- 
 sembles Scherer's very little, but that he is 
 not a blockhead for all that. "Without 
 doubt he has lost definitively the faiths 
 which serve as a law to the other; he knows 
 it, and he has taken his stand; but in losing 
 them, he has gained by freeing himself from 
 all prejudice. The idea of the absolutely 
 imperative escapes him, but he does not the 
 less continue to do good from tradition, 
 habit, and education. He no more believes 
 in the absolute in aesthetics than in morals; 
 but that does not prevent him from distin- 
 guishing enduring works from the temporary 
 ones which he disdains. While knowing 
 that the ideas which he has of the good and 
 the beautiful are but relative, he holds none 
 the less tenaciously to them, only he does not 
 try to impose them on others; and applies 
 himself to understanding even those mani- 
 festations of art that are the most remote 
 from them. A philosopher having taught 
 him that all error contains a portion of truth,
 
 Edmond Scherer. 65 
 
 he has profited by this aphorism, whose con- 
 sequences are numerous and of a character 
 that renders him very indulgent. Moreover, 
 truth and error are words that have no very 
 precise meaning to him, and he employs them 
 only with a mental reservation. His intellect 
 is developed at the expense of his character, 
 but it will soon teach him that character is 
 as indispensable as intelligence, and he will 
 make himself one of which he, only, will 
 know its artificial nature. One feature in 
 which he will differ greatly from his prede- 
 cessor is, that in art he will very likely pre- 
 fer strength to delicacy, precisely because 
 strength is the quality most difficult for him 
 to obtain, and he will distrust perfection, 
 knowing too well how many faults it con- 
 ceals, and that true masterpieces are never 
 perfect. Very eclectic in his tastes, he will 
 be able to like the corruption of Beaudelaire 
 without being corrupted, and will esteem M. 
 Zola in spite of his crudities. Do not think 
 that the reading of ' Fleurs clu Mai' will 
 prevent him from enjoying the choruses of 
 ' Athalie, ' and be assured that even if Moli- 
 ere versifies badly, as Scherer has demon- 
 strated, he will always take pleasure in 
 hearing the 'Misanthrope;' as he is clispas- 
 5
 
 66 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 sionate, he will be of easy commerce, and if 
 he holds the critic's pen, he will not use it 
 as a club against those who displease him 
 most; for he will always have sympathies 
 and antipathies, the intellect being able 
 to excuse everything, but not to make every- 
 thing lovable. This honest man whose com- 
 plete portrait might fill many pages, is very 
 likely worth as much as the other. He 
 would have irritated Eclmond Scherer, who 
 has all his clear-sightedness, and has never 
 been able to console himself for having it." 
 We are greatly indebted to Rod for sum- 
 ming up in so unmistakable a manner, the 
 qualities that the modern Parisian school 
 think so admirable that they make them the 
 typical characteristics of the culture of the 
 nineteenth century. It helps us to know 
 exactly what are the dangers that threaten 
 morality and real culture, for to adopt Rod's 
 own phraseology, we should despair of man- 
 kind were these qualities definitive and un- 
 changeable ; and we turn to Scherer's ideal 
 with a sense of love and respect that is 
 mingled with the deepest gratitude. It is 
 good to feel in this man a character worthy 
 of all confidence because there is nothing 
 artificial in it. It is not based on mere
 
 Edmond Scherer. 67 
 
 "tradition, habit, or education;" it does not 
 rest on something external. That which is 
 its strength is part of itself; it proceeds 
 from an instinctive love of purity and right 
 as healthy and natural as the instinct that 
 sets the cellar-plant to groping towards the 
 light. Among the countless thousands who 
 find it easier to adopt their opinions ready- 
 made, here is a man whose opinions are a 
 growth proceeding from his experiences, his 
 broader contact with life. Here is a man 
 who finds it more respectable to think even 
 at the risk of thinking wrongly than not to 
 think at all. There is a vast difference be- 
 tween living in your opinions and having 
 your opinions live in you. In the first case 
 you use your opinions as you do your house, 
 for mere shelter and convenience. They 
 are no more a part of you than your house 
 and furnishings, and yet, like the latter, they 
 may give you a certain prestige, a certain 
 social status, but they are nothing that you 
 can impart in living contact with your fellow 
 men. They are not in you but on you. In 
 the next case your opinions are a living part 
 of your character. They give shape and 
 consistency to it. They are felt in you as 
 vitally active and reactive. You cannot sac-
 
 68 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 rifice them without injury to yourself any 
 more than you can lose an eye or an arm. 
 If they change, it is by the slow, vital pro- 
 cess of waste and assimilation. On the con- 
 trary, in the former case, you can change 
 them as often as you can change your house, 
 and with as little inconvenience or harm. 
 This is the whole secret of that artificiality 
 of which Rod boasts that the maker of his 
 character alone knows how factitious it is. 
 
 It is good, too, to feel that Scherer recog- 
 nizes that there is a distinction between 
 right and wrong; that he does not blend 
 black and white into a soft, acceptable gray, 
 nor fall into sentimental pity or apotheosis 
 of guilt. We are grateful to him for feeling 
 the need to keep alive the old taste for the 
 masterpieces of sound literature; the joy in 
 a noble sentiment nobly expressed. We are 
 grateful for his love of truth so faithful and 
 austere that no fad, no fashion, no clamor of 
 the hour can turn him from her, grateful 
 that he could love her so well that when 
 in ignorance or blindness he had worshipped 
 her under some mistaken form, he could quit 
 the false, and champion the true with no 
 cowardly fear of being ridiculed for vacilla- 
 tion or of being passed by on the other side
 
 Edmond Scherer. 69 
 
 and left to faint and perish by the wayside. 
 This man can take no joy in corruption that 
 he knows corrupt. He cannot find the per- 
 fumes of Arabia in the stenches of gutters 
 and cloacas, and when he holds the pen of 
 the critic, he will use it in the interests of 
 moral cleanliness and moral health. 
 
 This is the work that Edmond Scherer 
 has found to do, and it is a work to which 
 he comes in the maturity of his powers after 
 much travail of spirit and deep, wide, ardent, 
 unremitting study. During the latter years 
 of his stay in Geneva, when his interest in 
 theological questions began to decline, he 
 had taken up the study of Italian. English 
 he had learned at Monmouth, and German 
 at Strasburg. Therefore he had free access 
 to the leading literatures of Europe in their 
 own language, and no critic since Sainte- 
 Beuve has been so well informed. He be- 
 gan his critical work on his removal to 
 Versailles. A study of Hegel in the Octo- 
 ber number of the " Revue des deux Mondes, " 
 1860, was his debut in journalism. "No 
 labor frightened him," says his biographer; 
 "he was capable of shutting himself up for 
 months in the meditation of a subject. . . . 
 He was hardly ever seen on the railroad be-
 
 70 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tween Paris and Versailles without a book 
 and a pencil in his hand, and it was not for 
 everybody that he would make the sacrifice 
 of putting his book into his pocket." 
 
 In the late Franco-Prussian war, while 
 the Prussians occupied Versailles, Scherer 
 addressed a correspondence in English to the 
 "Boston Review." He preferred English 
 literature to that of any other foreign nation, 
 and has left a volume of articles on the lead- 
 ing English writers. These criticisms, how- 
 ever, are not in his best vein. In spite of 
 all his cosmopolitan experiences and learn- 
 ing, the classical French taste for clearness, 
 chastity of style, and directness of state- 
 ment, was particularly strong in him, and 
 faults of expression, eccentricities, or affec- 
 tations sometimes rendered him insensible 
 to vigor of thought. He himself writes to 
 be intelligible; he has, he says, no taste for 
 clouds. In his notice of Guizot's "Me"- 
 moires, " he writes: " I have a horror of 
 Carlyle's books. I prefer a hundred times 
 the dull manner of our compatriot to the 
 brazen affectations of the Scotch humorist." 
 Ruskin, too, he accuses of affectation of 
 depth, and a laborious search for expression. 
 Matthew Arnold's clearness attracts him
 
 Edmond Scherer. 71 
 
 strongly. He calls Arnold the apostle of 
 intellectual civilization; the liveliest, most 
 delicate, most elegant of critics; the critic 
 who has been most fertile in ideas to which 
 he has given the most piquant expression; 
 and declares it a rest to open one of Arnold's 
 books after reading those great mannerists, 
 Ruskin and Carlyle, " of whom our neigh- 
 bors are so wrongly proud." 
 
 All displays of rhetoric offended him. 
 He says that Taine makes him think of a 
 wooden doll with steel springs. Of the 
 rhetoric of Comte de Lisle, he writes : " I 
 do not know why, but I never meet these 
 studied efforts in style without feeling a lit- 
 tle ashamed for the author. He took so 
 much trouble to write finely, and he has so 
 rarely succeeded." He thought that the 
 best proof that the sermon is a false species 
 of literature, " is the rhetoric to which it is 
 condemned. Manner that goes beyond mat- 
 ter; expression destined not to render, but 
 to simulate emotion; the need of convincing 
 one's self by straining the voice, heating 
 one's self, gesticulating violently; emotion 
 by emphasis, this is what we mean by 
 rhetoric. There is a well-known saying, 
 ' You are angry, therefore you are in the
 
 72 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 wrong,' which with a slight modification I 
 should like to apply to preachers : ' You de- 
 claim, therefore you are in a false position. ' ' 
 
 He touches finely the note of falsity in 
 Chateaubriand, whom he calls the man of 
 phrase and effect. "Chateaubriand's man- 
 ner has the seal of literature in decadence, 
 disproportion between depth and form. 
 There is a letter from him to Joubert in 
 which he recounts a voyage. It was night. 
 'A tiny end of a crescent moon,' he says, 
 'was in the sky just on purpose to prevent 
 me from lying, for I feel sure that if the 
 moon had not been there, I should have put 
 it into my letter, and it would have been 
 just like you to convince me of falsehood, 
 with your almanac in your hand. ' ' 
 
 It would have been like Scherer, too. He 
 had a fine, manly directness of statement, 
 a clear, unwavering consciousness of the 
 value of the fact behind the expression, and 
 he would not alter his fact an iota for the 
 sake of making the expression more brilliant 
 or more captivating. "Taste," he writes, 
 "conceals the labor it costs, and to-day, we 
 want the proceeding to show itself. Taste 
 is delicacy, and we appreciate nothing but 
 force. It is moderation, and we applaud
 
 Edmond Scherer. 73 
 
 precisely what is immoderate. Formerly, 
 the pencil was never light enough ; now, it 
 must pierce the paper. Tints ought to be 
 harmonious; now, they must be striking. 
 Expression no longer addresses itself to the 
 mind but to the senses. . . . Formerly, a 
 writer did not speak till he had something 
 to say. Romanticism, which has taught us 
 to prefer force to moderation, has also taught 
 us to subordinate matter to manner. The 
 famous principle 'art for art's sake' is 
 understood in the sense that sounds and 
 images have a value in themselves. . . . The 
 writer is no longer a thinker but a virtuoso. 
 He no longer needs sense, knowledge, in- 
 tellect, passion, humor; only one thing is 
 demanded of him, cliic." 
 
 Scherer declares that the "great intellec- 
 tual virtues are the curiosity that states prob- 
 lems, the sincerity that studies them, and 
 the courage that does not recoil from the 
 solutions," and he himself has these virtues. 
 His strength as a critic lies in his absorbing 
 interest in human individuality and his con- 
 sequent search for the writer behind his 
 works. " However real the pleasure that I 
 have always felt in the commerce of let- 
 ters," he writes, "I think that even in works
 
 74 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 of imagination and in poetry, my principal 
 interest has been awakened by the person of 
 the author." With this end in view of un- 
 derstanding and enjoying the author, he 
 makes a virtue of curiosity. Nothing is 
 indifferent to him that can illustrate charac- 
 ter, nothing too trivial for suppression, and 
 he confesses that he would give all the phil- 
 osophies of art and history for some simple 
 literary chats or anecdotes, a volume of Bos- 
 well or of Saint-Simon. He has a wonder- 
 ful selective power, the power that he 
 praises in another of putting his finger on 
 the characteristic trait of men and things. 
 He does not go round and round a subject; 
 he goes straight to its centre. Hence his 
 power to draw admirably a literary portrait. 
 He has exquisite delicacy, the refinement 
 that can appreciate refinement; and some of 
 these portraits not only elucidate the charac- 
 ters of certain authors, but enrich criticism 
 by furnishing valuable psychological analy- 
 ses of those mental peculiarities that result 
 in certain forms of morbid literature. Among 
 the finest of these portraits is that of Mau- 
 rice de Gucrin. In the course of his article 
 on the unfortunate young poet and journal- 
 ist, Schercr says : " Melancholy is the prod-
 
 Edmond Scherer. 75 
 
 uct of an advanced civilization. The forces 
 of nature are at last subdued; the struggle 
 of man with man is finished or arrested; toil 
 and war are replaced by abundance, luxury, 
 and peace. The satiety that follows pos- 
 session ; literature, art, and science giving 
 a more energetic development to mental 
 forces; the mind pushing forward to the 
 ultimate limits of all things, such are the 
 causes of those solitary griefs with which 
 epochs of combat and victory are unac- 
 quainted. When man gives himself wholly 
 up to the interests of external life, his 
 thought is simple. It grows richer, more 
 complex, and more troublesome when he be- 
 gins to descend into himself. A thousand 
 new questions arise; another world to be 
 conquered opens before him. In its modern 
 form, melancholy finds its first expression in 
 Rousseau. Rousseau is its ancestor, I was 
 about to say its founder; and what a singular 
 role, when we come to think of it, this ex- 
 traordinary genius plays in universal initia- 
 tives ! His influence separates into two 
 parts the history of the eighteenth century. 
 The ' Contrat social ' dominates the French 
 Revolution : ' HeloTse ' inaugurated the reign 
 of paradox. Rousseau is the father of vir-
 
 76 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tuous and super-sensitive souls : he taught 
 humanity a new sentiment, that of the 
 beauty of nature. In short, he was the first 
 man to give to the world the spectacle of a 
 soul looking inward to observe how it lives, 
 nourishing itself on its sorrows, feeding it- 
 self on its own substance. 
 
 " The influence of Rousseau as the father 
 of modern melancholy did not at once make 
 itself completely felt. The struggles of the 
 Revolution and the wars of the Empire were 
 not favorable to reveries. ' Rene", ' it is 
 true, appeared in 1802, and ' Obermann ' did 
 not spring up and bear fruit until twenty 
 years later in the full Restoration. The 
 great shocks and frightful crises were suc- 
 ceeded by moral exhaustion. Men's souls 
 were wearied of everything, even of hope. 
 M. de Lamartine gave the tone to our litera- 
 ture. Poetry, dramas, and novels became 
 subjective. 'Consolations,' 'Impressions,' 
 ' Inner Voices,' these titles mark the pre- 
 vailing key. Such was the medium in which 
 Maurice de Guerin was born and lived. 
 
 " Melancholy, moreover, invests itself with 
 various forms. Ren6 is not like Obermann; 
 Rene is dominated by passion. Life for him 
 is concentrated in love. ' O God, ' he cries,
 
 Edmond Scherer. 77 
 
 in the midst of his profoundest grief, ' if 
 you had but given me a woman after the de- 
 sires of my heart ! ' Add to that the artist 
 who seeks an effect, the poet who poses be- 
 fore himself, a vanity that puts a sting into 
 every feeling, even tenderness, and you will 
 have Chateaubriand, and in him you will 
 have Ren6. 
 
 "Obermann, on the other hand, is sad- 
 dened by reflection. He has suffered an 
 irreparable loss, that of desires. 
 
 " Maurice de Gue"rin has also his peculiar 
 sorrow. In reading him, we sometimes 
 fancy that we are listening to Obermann, 
 but to a more eloquent Obermann, one with 
 a finer mastery of the art of expression. 
 And yet the root of sadness is not quite the 
 same in these two melancholy men. Mau- 
 rice is especially haunted by the idea of his 
 powerlessness; he is paralyzed by what he 
 calls his inner wretchedness. He does not 
 feel himself fitted for the struggle of life; 
 he is worn out with alternate soaring and 
 sinking; his melancholy is that of discour- 
 agement. Besides, Maurice is an invalid; 
 he is frail, consumptive; he will die at 
 twenty-nine. Perhaps, if we could get to 
 the bottom of melancholy we should always
 
 78 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 find some such want of equilibrium of facul- 
 ties and, as a final cause, some organic de- 
 cay. The melancholy man is an incomplete 
 being, attacked in the sources of life, a 
 man who will breathe out eloquent com- 
 plaints, but who will scarcely reach finished 
 art. 
 
 "The true artist, he who dominates nature 
 and man, who reproduces them in an imper- 
 sonal conception, a Shakespeare, a Goethe, 
 a Walter Scott, these are sound men. 
 They do not know what it is to feel their 
 pulse. Their peace of mind is not at the 
 mercy of the weather. They look at life 
 with serenity. If there is one thing that 
 they do not understand in the infinite vari- 
 ety of human nature which it is their busi- 
 ness to depict, it is, very likely, just this 
 solitary, subjective wretchedness of weaker 
 beings. Melancholy is the product of an 
 organization nervous, impressionable, acute, 
 exquisite, but incompatible with the har- 
 mony of forces and the elasticity of a robust 
 temperament. 
 
 " The want of equilibrium among the facul- 
 ties is betrayed in Maurice, by a dispropor- 
 tion between his intelligence and his will. 
 He is all thought. Action and moral life
 
 Edmond Scherer. 79 
 
 are wanting. He has only desires, nay, less 
 than that, only feeble wishes. Seated at the 
 crossing of a thousand roads, he does not 
 know which to take. His strength is con- 
 sumed in irresolution. He is the prey of a 
 secret contradiction in his nature. He con- 
 ceives grand things and he loves them. He 
 catches a glimpse of fame and he is enam- 
 oured of it. He is touched at the name of 
 heroism and virtue. No one has a higher 
 ideal, and it is from this height that he 
 falls back upon himself, upon the weakness 
 of his character and the timidity of his will. 
 His nature contracts and dilates in turn. His 
 life is a continual alternation of buoyancy 
 and exhaustion, of ambitious dreams and 
 heart-breaking deceptions. He would like 
 to be guided; he would like to yield to 
 others the decisions that he cannot make, 
 and he cannot even do that. On whatever 
 side he looks, he sees but attempts without 
 results, abortive creations, convulsive efforts 
 which resemble, he himself says, the inco- 
 herent words of a madman. 
 
 " More thought than will, but that is not 
 all ; more thought than reason. Maurice 
 has no taste for the mechanical operations 
 of the intellect. He cares neither for lotric
 
 8o A Group of French Critics. 
 
 nor systems. By so much as he excels in 
 the analysis of sensations, by just so much 
 is he a stranger to that of ideas. His world 
 is the subjective one. He descends therein 
 as a miner into the bowels of the earth. He 
 applies a microscope to it, like a naturalist 
 in the pursuit of the ultimate phenomena of 
 life. He watches himself suffer; he ob- 
 serves himself watch. Yet this subtle and 
 unlimited analysis in which M. de Guerin 
 takes pleasure, is united in him with great 
 activity of the imagination, and we see two 
 faculties that apparently ought to exclude 
 each other, on the contrary, mutually aid 
 and excite each other. This apparent con- 
 tradiction existing between minute sor- 
 rowful observation and an active ardent 
 imagination is another feature of the mel- 
 ancholy temperament. 
 
 " Look at these suffering geniuses : they 
 live absorbed in themselves, and yet they 
 love to plunge into the contemplation of 
 nature. Association with men wounds and 
 depresses them. The going and coming of 
 so many busy people irritates them. They 
 feel themselves inferior to these people, so 
 far as the conduct of life is concerned, and 
 at the same time superior with all the supe-
 
 Edmond Scherer. 81 
 
 riority of a human being who thinks of an- 
 other who has never known self-reflection. 
 Hence a mute, concentrated rancor which 
 is appeased in solitude, especially in the 
 presence of the grand scenes of nature. Not 
 that melancholy is forgotten there. If the 
 melancholy man abandons himself to Nature, 
 if he identifies himself with her, it is only 
 to lend her his own preoccupations. The 
 ceaseless change of all things, the life of 
 beings, the succession of generations, the 
 law of suffering, the responsibility of the 
 universal order, all that is still we our- 
 selves; it is the very mystery of our des- 
 tiny, and in contemplating this vast current 
 of life in which individual existence seems 
 but a shallow ripple on the surface of the 
 water, in plunging by thought into the in- 
 finite in presence of which the finite is but 
 a transitory form, we lose ourselves only to 
 find ourselves again. We are conscious of 
 our infinite littleness ; and is not the sover- 
 eign act of personality to know ourselves in 
 the plenitude of our vanity? Hence the 
 double effect of contemplation on the reflec- 
 tive mind. It calms it and troubles it: it 
 is its joy, because it wrests man from the 
 cares of life, the miseries of society, the dis- 
 6
 
 82 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tractions of activity, to lead him back to the 
 fundamental unity; but at the same time 
 it feeds his melancholy, because it brings 
 vividly before his eyes again the mirage 
 of universal illusion. It must be acknowl- 
 edged, however, that this development of 
 the contemplative faculties of the mind is 
 not accomplished except to the detriment 
 of intellectual vigor and even of energy of 
 feeling. . . . 
 
 " Maurice de Guerin has given us some 
 beautiful pages, but he has very especially 
 left us an example. There are two ways of 
 consoling ourselves in life: one is by that 
 wisdom which, in admitting the sovereign 
 right of whatever is, takes away the sting of 
 evil; the other is by that art which, in 
 transforming subjective emotion, in reducing 
 it to measure and harmony, in freeing from 
 it the poetical and ideal element, obliges 
 the soul to withdraw from the circle of sen- 
 sations to live a broader and healthier life. 
 It is into this road that Maurice de Guerin 
 was about to enter when premature death 
 carried him away." 
 
 In this analysis, Schcrer recognizes a fact 
 that is only beginning to be generally ad- 
 mitted in literary criticism, but which as
 
 Edmond Scherer. 83 
 
 surely has its proper place there as the law 
 of gravitation has its place in physics. This 
 fact is that temperament, organic well-being 
 or ill-being, in a great measure determine the 
 form and character of thought, and hence the 
 form and character of literature. Scherer 
 notes this fact again in his review of the 
 French critic Alexandre Vinet. 
 
 "Vinet, " he says, "like all writers, has 
 the style of his temperament He was in 
 feeble health. An infirmity contracted at 
 the age of twenty made a martyr of him for 
 the rest of his life. He was frail, delicate, 
 nervous, without sap or gayety. He knew 
 nothing of the body but its burden and 
 suffering. Nothing could be more sensi- 
 tive and less sensual than his nature. His 
 only pleasures were those of the intellect. 
 Driven back upon himself by timidity and 
 ill-health, he had learned to live in an inner 
 world. . . . He was the most profound and in- 
 genious writer we know, but his thought had 
 not substance enough, nor his style enough 
 of color. Pie had gone out of the tradi- 
 tional school of French literature which he 
 admired, however, more than anybody, and 
 which demands, before all else, clearness, 
 and loves simple lines and large masses. In
 
 84 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 this respect Vinet was like Joubert; he also, 
 ill, fastidious, saying exquisite things with 
 a thread of a voice, understanding every- 
 thing, and creating nothing. Both of dis- 
 tinguished nature, but whose distinction 
 depends upon temperament and the very ab- 
 sence of vigor, nature I should say of the 
 critic. The true artist has health. Shake- 
 speare, Bossuet, Walter Scott, are men who 
 were well; as for Joubert and Vinet, they 
 wrote in bed, supported by a pillow, cover- 
 ing little sheets of paper with fine handwrit- 
 ing. Now, the public, in general, is in good 
 health. It does not understand invalids and 
 does not like them." 
 
 It may be added, here, that if the public 
 is not in good health, or weak enough to be 
 influenced by those who are not, it is apt to 
 turn to what is morbid in literature and to 
 ignore or underrate what is sound. In such 
 crises it is more than ever the duty of the 
 faithful critic to brave the caprices and the 
 hysterical anger of the weak or invalid pub- 
 lic, in the interests not only of art and litera- 
 ture, but of moral health. It was Scherer's 
 lot to wield the critic's pen during one of 
 these crises in France, the period of Zola, 
 Baudelaire, and the ultra-realists, and he 
 wielded it faithfully.
 
 Edmond Scherer. 85 
 
 "I am inclined to believe," he says, "that 
 a poet, in the highest sense of the word, 
 cannot be a corrupt or frivolous man. The 
 very cultivation of art, this direction of the 
 mind, this ideal turn of thought implies a 
 sort of moral life. The conception of, the 
 beautiful is something pure, and all impur- 
 ity is an attack upon the aesthetic perfection 
 of a work. The great poet is healthy." 
 
 Scherer recognizes clearly that it is easy 
 to excite curiosity, especially by the treat- 
 ment of unusual subjects in unbridled lan- 
 guage. Therefore Zola's thousands of readers 
 and dozens of editions do not disconcert him 
 in the least. He says: "An author's merit 
 is not a question of the number of his read- 
 ers, but of who the readers are, whether they 
 will re-read him, and how long he will re- 
 main in favor. To excite curiosity is one 
 thing; to excite interest is another. The 
 difficulty is not in finding a public, but in 
 satisfying the true public whose opinion 
 counts and whose judgment lasts. The fate 
 of literary works depends upon a few per- 
 sons who do not read from idleness, curios- 
 ity, love of novelty, or love of scandal, but 
 who read as thinkers and artists, with atten- 
 tion and reflection, applying to the book they
 
 86 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 hold before them an understanding exercised 
 by habitual association with the masterpieces 
 of the human mind. These are the readers 
 whom Zola does not interest because he con- 
 ducts them to a society to which they will- 
 ingly remain strangers. Whatever talent a 
 novelist may have, he will never give me 
 pleasure by introducing me in his books to 
 men who may be my fellow-creatures, but 
 with whom I have nothing in common, either 
 in manner of life, tastes, or language. One 
 may be democratic by principle or by resig- 
 nation, a great partisan of the equal rights 
 of citizens; he may even work for his part, 
 in breaking down more and more the dis- 
 tinctions of class and rank, but that does not 
 prevent him from preferring to live among 
 his own. I may be a philanthropist, and feel 
 a sincere sympathy for suffering creatures, a 
 true pity even for the vicious and the crim- 
 inal ; but these honorable sentiments do not 
 make me find pleasure in the description of 
 a beggar's hole or of a mason's drunkenness. 
 ... It is not enough that an object be de- 
 picted with fidelity to please us; it is not 
 enough that a description be exact in order 
 to interest. What matters acuteness of ob- 
 servation, or even the power with which an
 
 Edmond Scherer. 87 
 
 object is reproduced, if the object itself has 
 no attraction ? Whom does Zola think to 
 please when he employs twenty or thirty 
 pages in describing the cabbages, lettuce, 
 and carrots heaped on a market-pavement, 
 and the various preparations from pork in a 
 butcher's shop? M. Zola thinks we ought 
 to learn to tell whether or not the blood- 
 pudding will be good. 'Look! this is the 
 best sign. The blood is dripping and I catch 
 it, beating it with my hand in the bucket. 
 It must be good and hot, creamy, without 
 being too thick. ... I beat, beat, see ? ' con- 
 tinued the boy, making gestures in the air as 
 if he were whipping cream. 'Well, when I 
 take out my hand and look at it, it must look 
 as if it were greased with blood in such a 
 way that the red glove will be of the same 
 red in every part. Then you can't make 
 a mistake in saying, the pudding will be 
 good. ' 
 
 "There is a lesson that evidently does the 
 greatest honor to M. Zola's knowledge as a 
 specialist; only I should like to know who 
 the readers are that such a description can 
 charm, if they are not the workmen them- 
 selves whose labors are so knowingly de- 
 scribed. But in the name of what principle
 
 88 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 of art do you inflict upon me, who am not a 
 pork-butcher, so vulgar, not to say so revolt- 
 ing, a reality? I do not want to see this 
 bucket into which you plunge your arm with 
 such delight ; and this page of which you are 
 so proud only inspires me with disgust. . . . 
 It is said that Louis XIV. liked the odor of a 
 water-closet. Zola, too, likes a stench. No- 
 body thinks of disputing his pleasures with 
 him, only we should like a little toleration 
 for those who have noses that are made dif- 
 ferently from his. . . . Some subjects charm 
 him that are disagreeable or repugnant to 
 other people. Baudelaire was of this school 
 of aesthetics a rebours. 
 
 " ' Les charmes de 1'horreur n'enivrent 
 que les forts.' Zola has adopted this maxim, 
 save that he substitutes the dirty for the 
 horrible. His ideal in literature is the 
 ' human beast ' set entirely free. Now, we 
 know how agreeable this beast is when set 
 at liberty. Let M. Zola take pleasure, if he 
 likes, in the discoveries to which his predi- 
 lection conducts him, the lowest depths 
 of bestiality, that is his business. Let 
 him create, and at the same time satisfy his 
 morbid appetite in cultivating this kind of 
 literature. The friends of good sense, good
 
 Edmond Scherer. 89 
 
 taste, and good morals may pity him and com- 
 plain of him, but, after all, he has his per- 
 sonal rights. The only thing we ask of him 
 is not to overwhelm with his ferocious con- 
 tempt the man who happens to have the prej- 
 udices of reason and decency. 
 
 " I do not think that there is anything of 
 the prude in me. One of my favorite read- 
 ings is that very Shakespeare of whom Zola 
 says, sillily enough, that his drama is the tri- 
 umph of the ' human beast. ' The fact is, I 
 could overlook much of Zola's shamelessness 
 if he had a little of the depth of poetry or 
 even of the humor and verve of the master 
 whom he invokes. Is it my fault that he 
 produces on me the effect of those impres- 
 sionists, as they are called, who think that, 
 in order to become artists, they must leave 
 drawing and perspective out of painting? 
 In literature, Zola has suppressed substance 
 and form, thought and talent. I see in him 
 no observation except of things material and 
 external; and as for his style, it seems to me 
 to be absolutely lacking in charm and pi- 
 quancy. He seems to write with the point of 
 a horn on leaves of lead. There is no style 
 but where there is somebody holding the 
 pen, and something worth the saying. The
 
 90 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 reader must find himself in the presence of 
 an intelligence, a soul, a temperament, if 
 you like, at any rate, of real human nature. 
 He must come in contact with a true indi- 
 viduality; he must come under the charm or 
 feel the grip. Zola has neither drawing, 
 color, relief nor movement. It goes without 
 saying that we do not ask distinction and 
 poetry of him, because he professes con- 
 tempt for these things. But we never find 
 in him what can do no harm to any prose, 
 the happy expression, vivacity, wit, imagi- 
 nation. In him everything is dull without 
 being either just or appropriate. . . . 
 
 " The attractions which the ' human beast ' 
 has for Zola are so pronounced that a pre- 
 dilection for the turpitudes of society be- 
 comes in his eyes the standard of value in a 
 writer. Appearing to have a wide knowl- 
 edge of foreign languages and literatures, 
 he informs us that the drama and the novel 
 are no longer to be found in England or 
 Germany. And why? Because in these 
 countries public opinion does not allow a 
 description of the 'ulcers that consume hu- 
 manity.' According to Zola, literature will 
 be pathological, or it will not exist at all. 
 Dickens finds cruel eMncr favor with our critic.
 
 Edmond Scherer. 91 
 
 He grants him penetrating emotion, intense 
 life; but it is plain to see for what he re- 
 proaches him; women can read Dickens, 
 and confess that they have read him." 
 
 Scherer is no less severe on Baudelaire 
 and his school. He says : " There are writ- 
 ers who possess certain gifts without being 
 artists, who have a certain talent without 
 being able to compose a work. But Baude- 
 laire has nothing; neither heart, intelli- 
 gence, language, reason, fancy, enthusiasm, 
 not even the art of composition. He is 
 grotesque from impotence. His only title 
 to glory is in having contributed to create 
 an aesthetics of debauchery, the poem of the 
 brothel. He has rotted, body and soul, and 
 in a state of complete exhaustion, he puts 
 into verse this refuse of himself. He feels 
 dirty and he is proud of it. He affects an 
 attitude, exposes his ulcers as a warrior his 
 honorable wounds. 
 
 ' Nous avons, nations corrompues, 
 Aux peuples anciens des beautes inconnues, 
 Des visages rongcs par les chancres du coeur.' 
 
 Or he plays the misanthrope, then pities 
 himself for his abject state, or tries to dig- 
 nify the platitudes of venal love with a savor
 
 92 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 of pessimistic bitterness: 'O Satan, prends 
 pitie de ma longue misere. ' 
 
 " Fortunate for him were there some trace 
 of real feeling beneath .these affectations, a 
 remnant of sincere humanity beneath these 
 attitudes, the blossoming of some flower on 
 this dunghill ! But, no, nothing but the 
 Bohemian who imagines himself a noble- 
 man; nothing but license and shamelessness 
 fancying itself strength. And this silliness 
 and affectation, this barefaced licentious- 
 ness are as wearisome as they are impure. 
 
 " Baudelaire, who has become the head of a 
 school of writers, has his ancestors. A man 
 is always the son and grandson of somebody, 
 only in this case, instead of weakening, the 
 racial characteristics have gone on accentu- 
 ating with every generation. Byron's pose 
 is that of misanthropical dandyism. He 
 only attains to disorder and libertinism. In 
 Alfred de Musset the pose becomes display, 
 the libertinism vice. Debauchery begins to 
 call itself by its own name, to consider itself 
 genteel, and to take the place formerly oc- 
 cupied by sentiment or passion. The line 
 bends with Theophile Gautier. Gautier 
 poses, but in another way, as 'the child of 
 the century,' as an Olympian. He is
 
 Edmond -Soberer. 93 
 
 more immoral than Musset, but in another 
 manner, immoral like nature, simply a 
 stranger to the distinction between good 
 and evil. With Baudelaire the line takes 
 another bend ; depravity is regarded as mo- 
 rality, and cynicism turns into boastfulness. 
 This is the dictum of Paul Bourget himself. 
 
 "Are we at the end? No. The end of 
 this road is never reached, and that is its 
 condemnation. ' Les Fleurs du Mai ' ! Why 
 flowers? W T hy not the crude evil itself? 
 Poetry ! Why poetry ? Art ! why not real- 
 ity, and by preference the most repugnant 
 reality ? Enough of sheep-folds ! Give us 
 pigsties ! It is said that M. Zola has made 
 disciples who have in turn relegated him to 
 a place among the Berquins. l Parliament 
 ought to restrict by law the license of ob- 
 scenity. It is true that obscenity has its 
 defenders, but men who have wives and 
 daughters are in the majority. 
 
 " I have always said that literature once 
 stung by the horsefly of lechery is con- 
 demned to go to the very end, that is to say, 
 to the point where the last remnants of mod- 
 esty in the most debauched civilization finish 
 by revolting. 
 
 1 Berquin, a writer of the eighteenth century, the first 
 creator of child's literature as it exists to-day.
 
 94 A Group of- French Critics. 
 
 "The Baudelaireists invoke precedents, 
 quote authorities, Regnier, Rabelais. Let 
 us come to an understanding, once for all, 
 on this subject of Rabelais. Do you like 
 him equally well in every part? Do you 
 like him in spite of or because of? Do you 
 walk on tiptoe through the sewers, or do 
 you wallow there in delight? If such are 
 your tastes, well and good; there is nothing 
 to be said. As for Regnier, I am like Boi- 
 leau. I cannot admire his bedraggling the 
 muses with Macette. J But what a singular 
 effect all this passage from Boileau to which 
 I allude, produces on the reader of the pres- 
 ent day! He speaks there of the 'chaste 
 reader' and of 'modest ears.' He seems to 
 think that the French reader wishes to be 
 respected. To judge from the authors of 
 our time, we might be tempted to believe 
 that French readers wish to be treated like 
 old blackguards. 
 
 "The Baudelaireists declare that genius 
 and talent have their privilege, their magic 
 that excuses everything. I deny with the 
 most perfect conviction that a poem can be 
 made out of debauchery. There are books 
 
 1 Macette, a hypocritically devout old courtesan in 
 Regnier's poem of the same name.
 
 Edmond Scherer. 95 
 
 and brilliant poems that have the worm of 
 rottenness at bottom, but how can any one 
 be blind to the fact that they belong to liter- 
 ature but in proportion to what there is of 
 soundness in them ? A man may have dirty 
 hands and do beautiful work, but the beauti- 
 ful work is not made with the dirt. At any 
 *rate, it is by no means Baudelaire who can 
 prove that it is so made. No reputation is 
 so utterly unwarranted as that of ' Fleurs 
 du Mai. ' In the absence of sentiment and 
 ideas, of inspiration and verve, not even the 
 technical skill of a Theophile Gautier is to 
 be found. It is a painful and fatiguing ham- 
 mering ; a crowd of metaphors whose falsity 
 makes them appear burlesques ; a confusion 
 of expressions whose impropriety resembles 
 a parody. His images are never either true 
 or beautiful; night is a 'partition,' the sky 
 a 'lid.' There are some passages so laugh- 
 ably absurd that they seem to have been pro- 
 duced in a wager. Baudelaire's only merit 
 and only strength is that he has had the 
 courage of his vice. But it seems that that 
 is exactly what makes his attraction. Es- 
 quimaux, too, we are told, like only rotten 
 fish. 
 
 " Do not be surprised at the heat with which
 
 96 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 I attack certain tendencies in contemporane- 
 ous literature. It would be too cruel to be- 
 lieve that their degradation represents the 
 actual state of society in France. Good 
 God ! how far we are from the * honest 
 man ' of the eighteenth century, alas ! and 
 even from the ' gentleman ' of fifty years ago. 
 I can conceive of a democratic literature, , 
 strong and incorrect, without taste but not 
 without sap, but I refuse to admit that art 
 cannot become democratic without becoming 
 bestial. And at the same time I can con- 
 ceive of a literature refined, aristocratic, if 
 you like to term it such, searching new 
 paths according to a constant law of litera- 
 ture, but I can never bring myself to regard 
 Baudelaire and Baudelaireism as a legitimate 
 form of this research. Baudelaireism is not 
 the literature of a society destined to live. 
 It is a literature of I dare not write the 
 word, you will find it in the prologue to ' Gar- 
 gantua. ' I shall content myself with saying 
 that it is the literature of a generation with 
 vitiated blood and ruined constitution." 
 
 At the death of Sainte-Beuve in 1869, 
 Schcrcr succeeded to his critical authority. 
 Two men were probably never more unlike 
 in certain respects than these two great rep-
 
 Edmond Scherer. 97 
 
 resentatives of French criticism. The one 
 with a truly Protean power of transforma- 
 tion, enabling him to understand all forms 
 of thought and modes of expression, no mat- 
 ter how widely divergent; the other never 
 being quite able to divest himself of a cer- 
 tain austerity of sentiment and exquisite per- 
 fection of taste that resulted in limitations 
 in one direction, but rendered him espe- 
 cially sensitive to the most delicate charms 
 of literature. The one erring in judgment 
 sometimes through over-sympathy with the 
 coarser experiences of life, a man of the 
 world, skilled in the use of circumlocutions 
 in calling the false and the puerile by their 
 proper names; the other a man whom soci- 
 ety cannot intimidate nor make indulgent, 
 and who will say what he means in incisive 
 and unmistakable language. But both men 
 have this in common : both are intensely in- 
 terested in human individuality. To both, 
 the author is as much, if not more, than his 
 writings. Each, therefore, finds enjoyment 
 in the critical work of the other, and has 
 paid his tribute to the ability that produced 
 him that enjoyment. Writing of Sainte- 
 Beuve, Scherer says : 
 
 " The world is the subject of our creations 
 
 7
 
 98 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 and our judgments. To live, to see, to feel, 
 to open one's mind to all things, one's soul 
 to all impressions, that is the secret of art 
 and knowledge. Not, however, that the art- 
 ist and the critic study the world in the 
 same way. The first acts as a master. He 
 commands the world he observes ; he sees it 
 as he makes it; he impresses the stamp of 
 his genius upon it. The true critic is more 
 impersonal ; he knows how to withdraw from 
 himself and some of his mental peculiarities. 
 He tries to see every object in its own char- 
 acter. He identifies himself in turn with 
 all that is offered to him. In order better 
 to penetrate the essence of things, he aban- 
 dons himself to them and is transformed 
 into their semblance. To understand is to 
 go out of one's self in order to be trans- 
 ported as far as possible into the bosom of 
 realities. It is to receive their impression; 
 it is to participate their life. Now, does 
 not criticism consist especially in under- 
 standing everything? 
 
 " M. Sainte-Beuve understands everything, 
 because he has tried everything, felt every- 
 thing; he has not only tried everything and 
 felt everything, but he has been completely 
 transformed every time. He has passed sue-
 
 Edmond Scherer. 
 
 99 
 
 cessively through several existences. M. 
 Sainte-Beuve has been philosopher, Saint- 
 Simonian and Catholic; he has been ascetic 
 and man of the world. He has had his polit- 
 ical fever and recovered from it. He has 
 written to the 'Globe,' the 'National,' the 
 ' Constitutionnel. ' He has written poetry; 
 he has composed a novel, a history, portraits. 
 He has been one of the frequenters of a ro- 
 mantic cenacle, and has gone farther than 
 any one in adoration of the gods to whom 
 incense was burned there, and he has broken 
 the idols that he adored. . . . 
 
 " We have recognized in M. Sainte-Beuve 
 one of the princes of criticism. What does 
 that mean, and what must we think of the 
 line of work in which he excelled? The 
 importance of criticism may appear exagger- 
 ated, at present. Its role, however, repre- 
 sents a need of our age. Besides, criticism 
 has changed very much. We wish it now 
 to explain things, facts, man himself. Criti- 
 cism is no longer a simple reflection on 
 works of the mind. It has become one of 
 the instruments, or, if you like, one of the 
 applications, of modern science. Thus it 
 tends daily to enlarge its sphere. We have 
 seen how it has been transformed under the
 
 ioo A Group of French Critics. 
 
 hands of M. Villemain and M. Sainte-Beuve. 
 It will not stop there. Nothing strikes the 
 attentive man more than the continual en- 
 largement of the scientific horizon, the up- 
 lifting, if I may so speak, of the intellectual 
 soil, and as a consequence, the incessant dis- 
 placement of the point of view. It is a rev- 
 olution of which a new phase is daily passing 
 under our eyes. Yet we do not discern it 
 except on the condition of isolating ourselves 
 for the moment, and taking a standpoint in 
 the past. We can already foresee the mo- 
 ment in which present criticism with all its 
 marvellous aptitudes will in its turn become 
 insufficient; in which we shall demand from 
 the critic more positive knowledge, more 
 familiarity with natural science, with his- 
 tory, religion, criticism, and the great phil- 
 osophical speculations. 
 
 " It is nevertheless true that the interest of 
 all researches remains concentrated on man 
 and society, that is to say, on ourselves. 
 This is the point to which our thoughts in- 
 cessantly return, and this is what assures a 
 permanent attraction to the works of Sainte- 
 Beuve. He has represented to us under 
 many diverse aspects this object of our per- 
 petual study. He has added to our knowl-
 
 Edmond Scherer. 101 
 
 edge of human nature. He has shown 
 himself to be a faithful and sincere painter. 
 He has not been, to use his own expression, 
 the advocate of a single cause, but the inex- 
 orable observer. His conception of things 
 might be more elevated, but would it be so 
 true? His manner of considering life might 
 be more heroic, but at the same time would 
 it not risk being narrower? I am not in- 
 sensible, by any means, to the nobleness of 
 grand resolutions, to the dramatic interest 
 of the moral struggle, to the spectacle of the 
 man who, alone on his rock, opposes to na- 
 ture and destiny the inflexible energy of a 
 principle. . . . Who is not touched by the 
 grandeur of Pascal, by his abnegation, his 
 poverty, his hair-cloth, the disease so wholly 
 accepted, so complete a detachment from the 
 most legitimate feelings; but who does not 
 tremble even while admiring? Who does 
 not see that if all this is beautiful, it is at 
 the same time forced and excessive? Who 
 does not stifle in so cramped a place? Who 
 does not recognize that the world seen thus 1 
 from the garret-windows of a cloister, is not, 
 after all, the real world such as God has 
 made it? Pascal solves the problem by sim- 
 plifying the terms and eliminating some of 
 the factors.
 
 IO2 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 "There is an age, I know, in which we love 
 to take questions in this way, by their abso- 
 lute side, to retrench them by some sub- 
 lime act of the will. Later, we learn to 
 dread this simplicity as a snare. We have 
 felt the power of the insensible demonstra- 
 tion of a simple contact with reality. We 
 are athirst to know the universe as it is, in 
 all its fulness and complexity, and then we 
 are disposed to pardon a great deal to a 
 writer like Sainte-Beuve, who shows himself 
 simple, sincere, and who reproduces in his 
 pages something of the infinite variety, if 
 also something of the imperturbable equa- 
 nimity, of nature." 
 
 A review of " Endymion " gives Scherer 
 an admirable opportunity to bring into relief 
 two characters so opposite and so individual 
 as those of Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield. 
 
 "Gladstone's," he says, "is essentially a 
 moral nature. The categories to which he 
 refers all things are those of good and evil. 
 Yet this great seriousness that excludes ex- 
 travagance does not exclude enthusiasm. 
 Mr. Gladstone brings the fervor of faith into 
 all the causes that he espouses. He is es- 
 sentially a believer. There are noble sides 
 to his character, sincerity, justice, ardor,
 
 Edmond Scherer. 103 
 
 but there are also some defects in it. His 
 gravity lacks humor; his solidity becomes 
 stiffness. His intellect, endowed with the 
 most varied aptitudes, served by a prodigious 
 power of work and prodigious activity, able 
 to descend from the general direction of an 
 empire to the technical details of a bill or 
 the complicated accounts of a budget, his 
 intellect is more extended than flexible. His 
 reasonings are abstract, because they are more 
 preoccupied with principles than with real- 
 ities. His judgments are absolute, because 
 they elevate every truth to the same stand- 
 ard of value, that of an article of religion. 
 This explains Gladstone's tendency to be- 
 come more and more radical every day; 
 radicalism being nothing else than the ap- 
 plication of the absolute to politics. Un- 
 fortunately, politics is precisely the most 
 relative thing in the world ; so that radical- 
 ism is serviceable only in the production of 
 revolutions, and in ordinary times perpetu- 
 ally risks setting institutions in advance of 
 customs. 
 
 "What Gladstone is in public affairs, so is 
 he in his books. Solidity, sincerity are in- 
 terpreted by conscientious study and exact- 
 ness of erudition; but at the same time the
 
 IO4 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 absence of suppleness and acuteness are be- 
 trayed by the weakness of his criticism. 
 Mr. Gladstone, with his need of ready- 
 made theses, carries his mental submission 
 into the study of the Iliad as into the study 
 of the Bible. He no more doubts Homer and 
 the siege of Troy than Moses and the cross- 
 ing of the Red Sea. He is even pleased to 
 unite the two subjects into a single faith and 
 to make of Homeric mythology an echo of 
 Christian revelation. Mr. Gladstone, in 
 fact, is a survivor of scholasticism. He 
 still belongs to those centuries of human 
 thought in which intellectual force is ap- 
 plied to the ideas furnished by tradition, in 
 which no one dreams of disputing, and in 
 which the acutest subtlety is accompanied by 
 the most superstitious respect for authority. 
 "Take the contrary of Mr. Gladstone in 
 every respect, and you will have Lord Bea- 
 consfield's character. In him the keynote 
 is scepticism. He believes in success and 
 that nothing succeeds like it. In conse- 
 quence, he is not disposed to regard moral- 
 ity too closely in his manner of arriving a t 
 success. He has less worth than his rival, 
 but he has more ingenuity; less austerity, 
 but more geniality; less depth, but more
 
 Edmond Scherer. 105 
 
 worldliness. Very inferior in the study of 
 details, he has not less courage when it is a 
 question of a resolution to be taken, espe- 
 cially if this resolution involves something 
 adventurous. I dare not say that Lord Bea- 
 consfield is the more clever of the two in his 
 management of men, for if Mr. Gladstone 
 errs in believing them all as sincere and 
 ardent as he is, Lord Beaconsfield is de- 
 ceived in believing them all as free from 
 prejudices as himself. His scepticism dis- 
 poses him too much to consult their weak- 
 nesses rather than their virtues. And it is 
 the same with things; instead of going to 
 the bottom of them, he is contented with the 
 surface, with appearances. In fact, what is 
 the use of solving problems and satisfying 
 questions if an end can be reached by some 
 blowing of trumpets and theatrical ma- 
 noeuvres? The sceptic willingly does as lit- 
 tle' as he can, and he does that little in the 
 easiest possible way. There is something of 
 the charlatan in him. Witness Lord Bea- 
 consfield in the history of the Congress of 
 Berlin, and in all the foreign policy of the 
 last Cabinet. He thinks he has done enough 
 if he speaks to the imagination. I may add 
 that he is the same in his books. He is
 
 io6 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 brilliant, amusing, but superficial. He ex- 
 cites public curiosity for a fortnight. But 
 he does not awaken a profound sentiment or 
 a new idea. His latest novel, 'Endymion, ' 
 leaves the impression of a talent which 
 might be promising in a young man, but 
 which in a literary veteran marks, on the 
 contrary, the sorrowful end of a mistaken 
 career." 
 
 Besides his numerous volumes of critical 
 work, Scherer is the author of a valuable his- 
 tory on the Franco-Prussian war. But his 
 chief claim to the gratitude of posterity is 
 the fact that he used his taste, his learning, 
 and his tireless industry in the faithful ser- 
 vice of classical literature. Wherever in the 
 Babel of voices, his quick ear caught a purer, 
 finer note, he did what he could to rescue it 
 from being drowned in the confusion. He 
 forced a hearing for it, and spread the whole- 
 some influence of its melody. He intro- 
 duced his countrymen to the works of their 
 great English contemporaries, and so helped 
 in the further dissemination of fruitful 
 thought. He liberated himself from dogma 
 without hatred or violence, because he did it 
 by slow, steady, unaided growth. After the 
 agitation of doubt and inquiry, he reached
 
 Edmond Scherer. 107 
 
 the calm of resignation by accepting things 
 as they are, and recognizing that there are 
 problems beyond human solution which it is 
 useless and therefore senseless to state. In 
 this calm in which he could work at prob- 
 lems which do admit of solution, he tasted 
 the serenest joy, and as old age came on, 
 with no abatement of mental vigor and no 
 chilling of interest in his work, he could 
 write what few among the old can say: 
 "What a delicious thing is old age, old 
 age approaching or even already come, 
 with health, of course, that first condition, 
 that substratum of all joy, and with faculties 
 intact enough to spare you the proofs of de- 
 cay. The passions are stilled, but the feel- 
 ings may yet be warm. Talent, if there is 
 any, has gained in acquirements and skill 
 what it has lost in enthusiasm ; time, which 
 has dissipated the intoxications of youth, has 
 given in compensation the singular pleasure 
 of being undeceived. We have learned at 
 our own expense, to be sure, but we have 
 learned; and by experience we lay hold 
 again of the life that is escaping us. We 
 possess ourselves, and in this self-posses- 
 sion we control the destiny that still re- 
 mains to be fulfilled."
 
 io8 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 The whole passage so richly colored by 
 the deep experiences of a truly intellectual 
 life is well worth quoting in full as a rtsumt 
 of Scherer's maturest convictions; but we 
 have space, in conclusion, for its salient 
 features only. 
 
 "How many things," he continues, "are 
 only learned with age! . . . Recall to mind 
 the circle of your acquaintances, and ask 
 yourself how many men you know who are 
 in the habit of suspending their judgment, 
 and have the courage, if need be, to confess 
 their ignorance. Impatience with uncer- 
 tainty leads to generalizations. As we wish 
 to know without learning, or at least to 
 have the illusion that we know, we are not 
 fastidious about the manner in which we 
 arrive at knowledge. The book is judged 
 by one page. Countries are described at 
 first sight. You have met one Englishman, 
 and you tell us what they are all like. If 
 you speak of a current event, you deduce an 
 historical law from it. In short, we deduce 
 and induce with equal arbitrariness, without 
 making the least allowance for the surprises 
 of reality and the sovereignty of fact. Rash 
 generalization is cousin-german of another 
 error, the idea that men are all alike,
 
 Edmond Scherer. 109 
 
 either wholly good or wholly bad, wholly 
 superior or without merit of any kind, ca- 
 pable of all or capable of nothing. No me- 
 dium between infatuation and disparagement, 
 because in order to judge we must have time 
 to reflect, and we must take the trouble to 
 analyze. We make shorter work with the 
 absolute; the mediocre mind takes delight 
 in the absolute; it is the natural form of 
 uncultivated thought. 
 
 " It must be acknowledged, however, that 
 distinctions are often difficult to make, even 
 for a well-trained judgment. We admit eas- 
 ily enough that a great man may not excel 
 in everything, that he may have, as we say, 
 the defects of his qualities; but we are loath 
 to recognize eminent qualities accompanied 
 by enormous gaps or startling defects, to 
 admit the union in the same person of a fine 
 intelligence and a despicable character, or 
 the union of vigor and affectation in the 
 same genius. . . . Was ever mind livelier 
 and fuller of charm than that of Voltaire? 
 Was ever enthusiasm more entertaining, 
 good sense more incorruptible ? But can the 
 delight he has given us, and the services he 
 has rendered, prevent us from admitting that 
 Voltaire was, on the whole, a pitiable char-
 
 no A Group of French Critics. 
 
 acter, destitute of all sentiment of personal 
 dignity, the most impudent of liars, the 
 most insipid of courtiers, and as much a 
 stranger to patriotism as to decency? . . . 
 "We confound comfort with happiness, 
 while it is but one of the conditions of happi- 
 ness. Happiness, though it certainly supposes 
 the satisfaction of our wants, is not the conse- 
 quence of it. Before all else, happinessjs_a 
 state of the mind, a matter of disposition, 
 a philosophy of life, and so much so that we 
 can be happy with few enjoyments, and mis- 
 erable with the ability to satisfy all our de- 
 sires. Social progress, then, restored to its 
 true sense, cannot assure the happiness of 
 anybody, and still less can it promise that of 
 the human race. With regard to happiness, 
 it is possible that progress may even defeat 
 its ends; since contentment is a result of 
 wisdom, and wisdom is the fruit of an intel- 
 lectual culture more refined than that which, 
 according to all appearances, is permitted by 
 democratic levelling. We must be resigned 
 to the fact that for the most part men lose 
 in one direction what they gain in another. 
 
 " The aim of art is to please, that is to say, 
 to interest, and all means are good by which
 
 Edmond Scherer. in 
 
 success is attained. Nothing is vainer than 
 the tyranny of rules. I add that art is not 
 only impatient of rules, but that it under- 
 goes revolutions. There is one law in par- 
 ticular to which attention has never been 
 sufficiently paid, and which determines some 
 periodical crises of taste. Let us consider 
 for a moment the effects of familiarity. A 
 poet writes a masterpiece. By this master- 
 piece he creates a genre, founds a school. 
 Everybody begins to imitate him, until the 
 vein is exhausted, and the public sated. 
 This satiety creates the need of something 
 else, and when this need makes itself felt 
 we may be sure that it will be satisfied. 
 Hence, new attempts, new writers, work on 
 new themes, and so on perpetually, because 
 interest lies in the unexpected; it is sur- 
 prise; and surprise, when genius is no longer 
 able to arouse it in the treatment of familiar 
 subjects, can come only from innovation. It 
 must not be concluded, however, that all that 
 piques curiosity is justifiable by that alone, 
 or that the old masterpieces necessarily lose 
 their interest. There are works that aston- 
 ish and make some noise without deeply 
 enough interesting the mind to live, and 
 there are others, on the contrary, that are
 
 ii2 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 rich and deep enough to appear always new. 
 A writer may come into vogue by writing 
 vulgarly for the vulgar of his time; but he 
 can leave his mark in art only by writing 
 for the men of taste and thought of all ages. 
 
 " How can any one fail to be struck by the 
 prominence given to description in contem- 
 poraneous literature? It is no longer an 
 accessory; it has become the very founda- 
 tion of poetry and romance. Those whom 
 we rightly esteem the modern masters in 
 these genres a Balzac, a Hugo are es- 
 sentially descriptive. When a page of a 
 book is praised, or we are told of a new 
 writer that he has talent, we may be sure 
 that the eulogy has reference to this sort of 
 virtuosity. The reason of it is evident. A 
 writer may have nothing in his brain, and 
 yet be gifted with an eye that sees forms, 
 and a hand that can reproduce them. In 
 confounding literature with the other arts, 
 we lose sight of the fact that the substance 
 of the art of composition is language, and 
 the substance of language is the idea. A 
 sentence cannot free itself from the necessity 
 of having a meaning, and the beauty of an 
 image, or the sonorousness of a word, has no
 
 Edmond Scherer. 113 
 
 value but on the condition of remaining in 
 the service of sense. He only has the right 
 to hold a pen who has something in his head 
 or in his heart ; and if he feel truly the need 
 to speak, let him do it with justness, and 
 in such manner that he can be understood. 
 The more charm he puts into his manner, so 
 much the better, assuredly; but the writer is 
 not absolutely obliged to charm, still less to 
 entertain; and I can see only the effect of 
 frivolity avid of amusement in the demands 
 that are made to-day, without distinction, of 
 every man who writes a book or an article. 
 ... In painting, the means of expression 
 have a value in themselves; there are admi- 
 rable pictures whose subject is without in- 
 terest, as there are some whose coloring 
 enchants, although the drawing be defective 
 or the grouping vicious. But intellectual 
 pleasure is of another order than the pleas- 
 ure of the eye and ear, and it is to the in- 
 tellect that we address ourselves when we 
 write."
 
 III. 
 
 ERNEST BERSOT. 
 
 " T)ERSOT, a Moralist," that is the 
 JL/ title by which Ernest Bersot wished 
 to be remembered by posterity, and it is the 
 title of a volume compiled by his friend and 
 biographer, Edmond Scherer, in which is to 
 be found a biographical notice of Bersot, and 
 selections from his volume of Essays en- 
 titled "Essays on Literature and Morality." 
 These essays, and a volume entitled " Edu- 
 cational Questions," are Bersot's most val- 
 uable contributions to literature. But it 
 sometimes happens that a man's life is as 
 eloquent as anything he has written, that it 
 teaches us, in the more touching and power- 
 ful language of example, the beauty of hero- 
 ism and the nobleness of a life governed by 
 the idea of duty. Such a life was Ernest 
 Bersot's. This man, who said that "the rar- 
 est and most charming thing in the world is 
 perfect simplicity," and whose character bore 
 testimony to that rarity and charm, this
 
 Ernest Bersot. 115 
 
 man, full of ardor and full of seriousness, 
 loving the young, loved by them, and devot- 
 ing his life to their instruction, suffered as 
 few men are called to suffer in this life, and 
 yet to the end of it preserved, in the seren- 
 ity of self-abnegation, his benign and radi- 
 ant helpfulness to others. 
 
 Ernest Bersot was born on the 22d of 
 August, 1816, and died on the ist of Febru- 
 ary, 1880. His birthplace was Surgeres, 
 but he was of Swiss Protestant origin, and 
 though he had never been in Switzerland, 
 he had learned to love it from hearing his 
 father speak of it, and was accustomed to say 
 that he probably owed to his Swiss origin 
 his two great passions. the love of nature 
 and the love of independence. His father 
 was a watchmaker, and in 1824 removed with 
 his family to Bordeaux, where young Ernest 
 grew up, took a college course, and taught 
 for a short time. But his apprenticeship for 
 teaching was finished in the Higher Normal 
 School of Paris. 
 
 We have frank, pleasant glimpses of this 
 Parisian student-life in his letters written 
 home. He tells his mother that in Paris he 
 has the reputation of being "gentle as a 
 lamb," from which we might infer that this
 
 n6 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 lamb-like character was something new in 
 him. He adds that in his boarding-house 
 he meets all sorts of people, prejudiced in 
 all sorts of ways, and that he rolls himself 
 into a ball to conceal his asperities. 
 
 Once he was invited to dine with one of 
 the professors, a very wealthy man. " I was 
 afraid to go," he writes; "but once there, I 
 watched how the others behaved, so as to do 
 nothing stupid. I talked, told an anecdote 
 now and then, but I was particularly bent 
 on observing. It was very amusing. When 
 dinner was over, some colored bowls with col- 
 ored glasses were brought in. ' Ah there ! ' 
 I said to myself, 'is it a float-light?' By 
 no means; it was for washing the mouth and 
 fingers. I waited, I looked, and I executed 
 the operation with cool assurance. There 
 was something that smelt very sweet in the 
 glass of warm water, and one of my inexperi- 
 enced neighbors drank a good part of it. " 
 
 After three years in the Normal School, 
 Bersot received his degree of Doctor of Phi- 
 losophy, and the next year, 1840, he became 
 the secretary of Cousin who was minister of 
 public instruction. At the end of his eight 
 months' service under the Thiers regime, 
 Bersot was appointed professor of philoso-
 
 Ernest Bersot. 117 
 
 phy in the College of Bordeaux; but the 
 freedom of his opinions brought him into 
 collision with the directors of the College, 
 and he was forced to resign. His resigna- 
 tion, however, was covered by an appear- 
 ance of promotion; and the young professor 
 who dared to think for himself instead of 
 prudently adopting his opinions, was sent to 
 Dijon. 
 
 Long afterwards, in recollection no doubt 
 of his own youthful experience, he writes : 
 "We ask but one thing, and but what is 
 right, respect for contrary opinions. We 
 do not believe what we like, but what we 
 can; and nobody is responsible but for the 
 pains he has taken to search for the truth. 
 When once the mind begins to reflect, it 
 has no longer the 'power to stop; it goes on, 
 impelled by an irresistible force without 
 knowing what it will find. We cannot ex- 
 press the esteem we have for a man who, 
 having searched sincerely, and chancing to 
 fall upon different ideas from those gener- 
 ally received, dares avow it, and renounces 
 the pleasure so desirable everywhere, but 
 especially in France, of feeling himself in 
 harmony with what surrounds him, and ex- 
 poses himself to the displeasure of those
 
 u8 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 whom he respects and loves. As the reward 
 of his sincerity, we wish for him the belief 
 in a consoling idea, the happiness of carry- 
 ing within him an enchanted world in which 
 he can escape the miseries of the outer one; 
 but if he has the misfortune not to possess 
 so happy a belief, if in face of his admitted 
 ideas he has but denials and doubts, he is 
 certainly worthy of respect, for he must love 
 Truth singularly well to follow her even into 
 the deserts." 
 
 Bersot remained at Dijon a year, and was 
 then removed to the College at Versailles, 
 where for six years he filled the chair of phi- 
 losophy. He was very exact in all the de- 
 tails of his duties. Prompt himself in 
 attendance, he required a like promptness of 
 his pupils. He opened his recitations by 
 asking questions on the preceding lesson, 
 then required a summary of the lesson of the 
 day, employing the Socratic method when 
 he found an active mind. While conducting 
 a class he never sat down, but continued 
 walking up and down with his hands behind 
 him. It was the custom, then, to wear a 
 gown at recitation, and the gown annoyed 
 him. One day, in a moment of impatience, 
 he took it off and threw it on a chair. The
 
 Ernest Bersot. 119 
 
 class smiled. "Excuse me, gentlemen," he 
 explained, " I do it out of respect, I was 
 treading on it." 
 
 In explanation, he was brief, clear, easy to 
 follow. He had no mannerisms, and used 
 the natucal and varied tones of conversation. 
 Reserved in manner, he made no advances 
 unless attracted by an open mind and good 
 feelings; but he was not unsociable: on the 
 contrary, he greatly enjoyed conversation, 
 music, whist, and gratified these tastes in 
 some houses in Versailles where he was 
 much beloved. Neither did he hold himself 
 aloof from the political interests of his coun- 
 try. There are scholars and men of letters 
 in whom a cosmopolitan spirit, a broad sense 
 of racial unity, destroys or weakens the pa- 
 triotic sentiment. Bersot did not belong to 
 this class. He was Frenchman to the core. 
 In the Revolution of the I5th of February, 
 1848, he was one of the volunteers who went 
 to Paris to aid the Assembly. The coup 
 d 1 etat grieved him sorely, and he refused to 
 take the oath required of every functionary 
 to support faithfully the Constitution and 
 the President. 
 
 " I have an inexpressible horror and dis- 
 gust, " he says, "of all that is going on now,
 
 I2O A Group of French Critics. 
 
 and if I should give my oath in support of 
 such a regime, I should die. ... I shall 
 leave the University honorably, to return 
 honorably later, it is to be hoped." 
 
 He left the University, moved into some 
 inexpensive rooms in the fourth story of a 
 house in the Place d'Armes in Versailles, 
 and reduced his expenses to meet his income 
 from private tutorship and the writing of 
 books. His tastes were simple, and his 
 pleasures therefore within easy reach. An 
 evening with his friends or a ramble in the 
 open air sufficed to make him happy. In 
 the following paragraph he gives us a charm- 
 ing revelation of his love of nature : 
 
 " One starts out full of joy at thought of 
 escaping the daily bustle. At first the 
 mind cannot bestir itself, crowded as it is 
 with a thousand incoherent ideas pressed 
 upon it by the details of life. But it throws 
 off one oppression after another along the 
 road, until finally it succeeds in freeing it- 
 self entirely. The exercise of walking sets 
 it in movement, and it goes on in advance 
 of him, lending itself to the chance impres- 
 sions which objects bring to it; the float- 
 ing cloud, the bird flying from a branch, the 
 ant hastening to work, the lizard concealing
 
 Ernest Bersot. 121 
 
 itself in the brambles, the flower whose per- 
 fume betrays it, the murmur of water, the 
 roaring of waves and wind, the torment of 
 the trees in its power, the grand silence of 
 the fields, the mysterious hum that proceeds 
 from nature, all these impressions, that 
 succeed one another and penetrate him with 
 the great life of nature, efface the troubled 
 image of the world he has quitted. The 
 soul grows simpler, and imagines a world in 
 which it could always live as now, happy 
 and free. Yes, the soul has wings in these 
 gracious moments. These walks in the open 
 air, under the open sky, make life more 
 buoyant, and the thoughts that are born in 
 them have a strength and charm to be found 
 nowhere else." 
 
 In 1853 Bersot published his "Essay on 
 Providence," and his volume on "Mesmer 
 and Animal Magnetism." Two years later 
 his " Studies on the Eighteenth Century " 
 appeared, and in 1857 his "Letters on Ed- 
 ucation " were successively published in 
 pamphlet form. During this same year, 
 after a short journey in Italy, he became 
 acquainted with Saint-Marc Girardin, by 
 whom he was subsequently introduced to 
 journalism.
 
 122 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 His contributions to the "Journal des De"- 
 bats " enabled him to give up his private 
 tutorship. The work was congenial, and in- 
 troduced him to congenial men. He en- 
 joyed the praise that came to him on the 
 quality of his work, but he was not intoxi- 
 cated by it. "I have this peculiarity," he 
 writes home : " it seems to me as if the com- 
 pliments paid me were not addressed to me, 
 and I am never elated by thoughts of my 
 merits. I think only of what is wanting in 
 me; of the uncertainty and transitory char- 
 acter of the inspiration that dictated a hap- 
 pier passage than another; of the necessity 
 of working and increasing my reputation ; of 
 human instability. Only I am very glad to 
 be doing a man's work, and I can never ex- 
 haust this pleasure." 
 
 "To do a man's work," not only in literary 
 and educational service, but in kindly offices 
 to one's fellow-men, is not always charac- 
 teristic of scholars, but it was characteris- 
 tic of Bersot. During the Franco-Prussian 
 War he visited the wounded French in the 
 hospitals, going from bed to bed, offering 
 his services to the unfortunate soldiers, writ- 
 ing their letters, or bringing them news of 
 their absent friends. He was assisted in
 
 Ernest Bersot. 123 
 
 this benevolent work by his young friend, 
 Arnold Scherer, son of Edmond Scherer. 
 
 There was nothing lukewarm in Bersot's 
 patriotism. No one could laugh at the foi- 
 bles of Frenchmen more heartily, or write of 
 them with a kindlier irony than he; but for 
 France, the nation, the mother-country, he 
 had an inextinguishable and fervent love, 
 and when the Prussians attacked her, he was 
 thoroughly obstinate in his optimism about 
 the result. "I remember," says Scherer, 
 "that he was angry with me and avoided 
 me several days, because I believed the 
 news that Strasburg was taken, and to 
 him it was a sort of religion to doubt this 
 catastrophe." 
 
 In 1871 Bersot was made director of the 
 Normal High School at Paris, and continued 
 to fulfil the duties of this office until his 
 death. He was then, and had long been, 
 suffering from the terrible disease that was 
 to carry him away, and which made life a 
 punishment. In 1864 the first symptoms 
 of a cancer appeared on his cheek, and the 
 daily progress of this frightful malady ren- 
 dered him an object of fear and pity to all; 
 yet he accepted his agony as an inevitable 
 fact, and employed all his strength and all
 
 124 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 his courage to bear it like a man. Never 
 once did he complain to his friends; never 
 once did he betray to them the slightest 
 anxiety. Scherer tells us that he "dissimu- 
 lated so carefully what he felt, he so evi- 
 dently turned every subject of conversation 
 touching himself, that his friends were 
 obliged to enter into this conspiracy of si- 
 lence. ... It was not stoicism. We find 
 in his language neither exaggeration, effort, 
 nor pride. Neither was it pious resignation 
 with its optimistic tendency. It was some- 
 thing simpler and more natural; man endur- 
 ing misery, agony, trembling in the presence 
 of destruction, yet lifting himself above his 
 sufferings by the faculty he preserves of con- 
 templating them. He did not deny them, 
 which would have been rodomontade; he 
 did not transform them into pledges of fu- 
 ture felicity, which is the rdle of piety; but 
 he felt the singular and bitter satisfaction of 
 rendering clearly to himself an account of 
 his destiny. Such are the 'consolations of 
 philosophy.' I have often observed that this 
 kind of defence against pain and death is the 
 privilege of very cultivated minds. Litera- 
 ture can do much in this. It seems that 
 association with the finest minds communi-
 
 Ernest Bersot. 125 
 
 cates to us an elevation from the heights of 
 which we can judge life more serenely." 
 
 'Bersot had not only strength for himself, 
 but strength and encouragement for the 
 young under his care. "This mutilated 
 face," says one of his pupils, "had a smile 
 for us to the end. . . . 'Why abuse life? 
 Life is good ; ' I still hear the sound and the 
 accent of these words that he liked to repeat, 
 and then he recounted the delights of life, 
 and the simpler pleasures; a beautiful walk, 
 an entertaining book; then the real bless- 
 ings ; the love of those who surround us, the 
 sacredness of those whom we have lost; and, 
 lastly, the great duties; devotion to a noble 
 cause, the accomplishment of some useful 
 and obscure task. We left him, ashamed of 
 ourselves, but more tranquil and stronger." 
 
 Doubtless few can read the report of Ber- 
 sot's physician without feeling, as this pupil 
 did, ashamed in the consciousness of coward- 
 ice in the endurance of afflictions far less 
 severe ; and more tranquil and stronger, in 
 the knowledge that human fortitude, human 
 obedience to duty, can rise to so sublime a 
 height. For that reason we give some ex- 
 tracts from the report, painful as it is : 
 
 "From the first months of 1879 the can-
 
 126 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 cer by which M. Bersot had been attacked 
 for fourteen years perforated the cheek, and 
 had eaten into the gums and nerves of the 
 maxillary bones. From this moment our 
 poor friend had not an hour's rest. He suf- 
 fered without truce. The pain was contin- 
 uous, and increased every day by several 
 crises which he attributed to decayed teeth. 
 We dared not undeceive him, and he did not 
 think of having them extracted, because for 
 seven years, that is, since the first operation, 
 his two jaws were absolutely immovable, and 
 a second operation would have been followed 
 by consequences involving a long time for 
 recovery, and he did not wish to be taken 
 from the care of his school." 
 
 Once, when a new treatment had been pro- 
 posed, and it was necessary for him to cease 
 his school supervision, he would not consent 
 to it until after the classification of the new 
 candidates was over; and then, when that 
 day came, he demanded a respite of his doc- 
 tor because he had to console the disap- 
 pointed candidates. "I cannot shut my door 
 on them," he cried; "counsel and encourage- 
 ment often decide a career. These poor 
 children deserve it. They have worked so 
 hard."
 
 Ernest Bersot. 127 
 
 When the end drew near, he said to his 
 doctor : " I am not afraid of death, and I am 
 preparing for it. At the rate this disease is 
 making, I have probably three more months 
 to live. I shall see the beginning of the 
 new promotions. I shall write an article on 
 Cousin that will be abused, and then my 
 work is done." 
 
 "Oh, no!" replied the doctor, "fortu- 
 nately the end is not so near." 
 
 "So much the worse," was the reply. 
 " My life is painful to me now. In the past 
 three years, since the operation, I have had 
 a great deal of pleasure in taking part in 
 social life again, and in seeing my friends. 
 But the disease has come back. At first I 
 concealed it by putting it under my hand or 
 on the shaded side. But now I dread the 
 houses where there are children. I am 
 afraid of their questions about the wound 
 in my cheek. Of late, I have refused all 
 invitations. I have gone only to the minis- 
 ter of instruction and to the institute. I 
 ought to have given up going there. In the 
 evening I quitted the school secretly; I 
 went round the Pantheon, or even down by 
 the Seine. Well, for five months now, 
 I have not gone out in broad day, I
 
 128 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 who at Versailles passed the day in the 
 woods." 
 
 "This is the only complaint," adds the 
 doctor, "that I ever heard from him." 
 
 "Since the second of December," contin- 
 ued Bersot to his physician, " I pray every 
 night, and the habit of it is such that my 
 prayer, always the same, comes to my lips, 
 though sometimes my thoughts are else- 
 where. ' My God, ' " here he paused, " yes, 
 I address God, and yet this term is very ob- 
 scure to me; I believe firmly in liberty, in 
 duty, in immortality. The effort of thought, 
 the struggle to discipline the soul, all the 
 work of a life cannot be lost; but the idea of 
 God seems to me less and less distinct, but 
 I address him : ' My God, save France and 
 liberty, and let me see those I love again.' " 
 
 "Those who saw M. Bersot during this 
 time could not believe that they were face to 
 face with a man struck by death and con- 
 scious of it. He received you in his hand- 
 some school-office seated before the chimney 
 and near his desk. He had arranged the 
 light so that it illuminated only the sound 
 half of his face. A cordial smile welcomed 
 you. Then rapidly, as if to avoid all ques- 
 tions about himself, he entered into the
 
 Ernest Bersot. 129 
 
 heart of the conversation. How many ef- 
 forts he employed to conceal the pain he 
 felt ! I have seen him continue talking in 
 the midst of a neuralgic paroxysm. That is 
 not all ; his voice, which no longer issued 
 from his mouth but from the gaping wound 
 in his cheek, grew less and less distinct and 
 sometimes hollow, and so, in order not to 
 weary his listeners, he tried to articulate 
 distinctly, and exhausted himself more and 
 more." 
 
 He worked up to the last week of his life, ful- 
 filling his duties, continuing to interest him- 
 self in all that was going on. " I have never 
 felt my thought clearer," he said. "They 
 say my last writings are my best, thanks to 
 my solitude, no doubt. The prettiest flowers 
 grow only in the wildest woods." 
 
 A brave, beautiful soul; a man who did 
 the work of a man and felt his joy in it ; a 
 man stricken in his prime, and bearing 
 mutely the agony of the stroke, lest a cry of 
 pain should mar the beauty and value of the 
 gift to others of what was best and strongest 
 in himself, that was Ernest Bersot. In 
 his essays on "Happiness" and on "Pleas- 
 ure and Pain," he touches, with a fine irony 
 and rare good sense, the various mental atti- 
 9
 
 130 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tudes towards the calamities of human life, 
 and lets us into the secret of his wise cour- 
 age, his philosophy of life. 
 
 "There is a silly optimism," he writes, 
 "which imagines that everything that hap- 
 pens is for the best; and not satisfied with 
 this sanctimonious contentment, it must find 
 in every particular circumstance some spe- 
 cial argument to prove that what has hap- 
 pened is better so than otherwise. There is 
 also a class of pious persons who are pro- 
 vided with so much resignation that in the 
 very heat of their friendship for you they 
 are quite prepared to give you up, and you 
 might die without fear of causing them the 
 slightest pain. I admire these optimists and 
 devotees very much, and I envy them their 
 peace of mind; but if I were choosing my 
 friends, I should very likely choose them of 
 another sort; for by an egotism from which 
 it is difficult to purify the human heart, we 
 suffer a little at the thought that our friends 
 would not take our death very much to 
 heart, but on the contrary find it a natural 
 and proper event. It is well enough to be 
 consoled, but they are too much consoled. 
 
 " Fortunately, the world knows another 
 virtue, the resignation of truly religious
 
 Ernest Bersot. 131 
 
 souls, convinced that God exists, that he is 
 perfectly wise and good even when he sends 
 some great sorrow, bowing under his de- 
 crees, and adoring, while they weep, the 
 hand that smites them. Some, in a trans- 
 port of heroism, go beyond this resignation. 
 As I write I have in mind a thought of Jou- 
 bert's: 'We must love the gifts and the re- 
 fusals of God, love what he wills and 
 what he does not will. ' . . . 
 
 "Let us now consider ancient stoicism, 
 which sees no good but virtue, and no evil 
 but vice. It is a sublime paradox that nature 
 denies. Not even the heights and depths 
 of the joys of virtue can take the place of 
 everything. Virtue may make us happy in 
 one direction, and leave us miserable in 
 other ways. The sages justly said : ' The 
 happiness which virtue procures is the only 
 one which is always in our own hands, the 
 only one that does not corrupt; the fullest 
 happiness that we are permitted to enjoy on 
 earth. ' But reason reasons in vain ; virtue 
 does not relieve those that suffer; it docs not 
 feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, 
 nor the power to love to those who hunger 
 and thirst to love. 
 
 "The truth is, that pain is simply an inev-
 
 132 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 itable fact. Given the laws of organization 
 and life, our faculties, their limits and 
 their infinite aspirations, and pleasure and 
 pain inevitably follow. The truth is, too, 
 that once fronting pain, man ought to act as 
 a man, exert all his energy and all his pride. 
 He suffers because he is an animal ; but 
 since he is something more than that, he 
 suffers in a manner peculiar to himself. 
 That is what seems true to me. I only ask 
 that it shall not be said that pain was made 
 for the use man makes of it ; that it was cre- 
 ated for his advantage. To say that, is to 
 abuse final causes. . . . 
 
 " Man is not born to be happy, but he is 
 born to be a man at his risks and perils. 
 How good it is to feel one's self under 
 this law ! How much virtue there is in 
 the thought; how much tranquillity and 
 strength ! We must go to life, therefore, as 
 we go to a fire, bravely, without asking 
 how we shall come back ; and if we are mor- 
 tally wounded, well, for my part, I believe 
 there is some one who sees our wounds." 
 
 Criticism was rather the accident than the 
 business of Bersot's life. He was essen- 
 tially an educator. The progress of mental 
 development, the springs of human action,
 
 Ernest Bersot. 133 
 
 the influence of the experiences of life, in- 
 terested him profoundly, and in literature 
 he preferred what fed this interest. No man 
 to whom life has bared her real tragedies 
 can find tears for mock pain, or joy in the 
 heartless stripping of the veil of ideality 
 from the nakedness of life. Therefore, in 
 Bersot, solidity of judgment was united 
 with a fine, poetical instinct that made him 
 keenly sensitive to the absence of enduring 
 charm and merit in the so-called realism of 
 his day. He sums up its shallowness and 
 defects in the criticism of a popular author 
 of his time, from which the following ex- 
 tracts are taken: 
 
 "According to M. Champfleury, realism, 
 in short, is the reproduction of quite crude 
 reality, independent of its interest which is 
 a false god. . . . M. Champfleury does not 
 clearly enough distinguish between the real 
 and the dull. In literature, insignificant 
 reality is of no account. In order to merit 
 description, a passing event or a passing face 
 must say something; if they do not, they are 
 nothing. Putting your head out of the win- 
 dow is not all that is necessary in order to 
 see a drama; because a face or a crowd of 
 faces is not worth the trouble of reproduc-
 
 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 ing unless a soul is revealed in it; a soul 
 under the sway of some passion, whether it 
 be joy, sorrow, hope, fear, pity, fury, or 
 heroism. 
 
 "... I must thank the author for a ser- 
 vice he has rendered me. Until now, I had 
 believed that it was a difficult thing to write 
 a novel, and that a realistic novel was espe- 
 cially difficult because it must be supported 
 by observations taken on the scene. But I 
 am reassured. I need not run all over the 
 world to study human nature. I can study 
 it by my fireside in the Police Gazette. 
 After such study I shall be very stupid if, 
 in taking the flower of the crimes, I cannot 
 write my little novel. I must thank M. 
 Champfleury and his disciples for yet an- 
 other obligation, which they do not suspect 
 having rendered. Ordinary life in itself is 
 dull enough, but after reading certain real- 
 istic novels everything seems poetic, by 
 comparison, 'the very furnishings of one's 
 room, the utensils of housekeeping, the 
 passers-by on the street. 
 
 " Where art thou, O poetry, that we may 
 refresh ourselves in thy living waters? Art 
 thou but an illusion that God has given to
 
 Ernest Bersot. 135 
 
 console us in life, or rather, art thou not life 
 itself, since thou art the inspiration towards 
 something better? The day is dark; the 
 clouds gather; the rain falls; at last it 
 ceases. Earth and air drink the water and 
 nothing remains of it but one drop on a leaf. 
 The sun comes out, shines on it, and it 
 bursts into a blaze of color. That drop of 
 water, that fiery ray is poetry, the charm of 
 the world. . . . 
 
 "There is another realism than that of 
 which we have been speaking. Human in- 
 telligence has always been divided into two 
 classes. The one class of mind, curious, 
 observing, rejoicing in seeing what exists, 
 cannot be sated with the infinite variety of 
 nature; wholly absorbed in this research, it 
 is less critical. Every form that exists 
 pleases it, as one more form in the universe. 
 The other class of mind, belonging to men 
 of imagination and sentiment, dreams of a 
 more perfect nature, and criticises what it 
 sees. It has preferences, antipathies; it 
 would suppress certain forms if it could, 
 and it excludes them from art. 
 
 " Men of the first class love what is, that 
 is, reality. They are the realists. Those 
 of the second class love what ought to be,
 
 136 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 the ideal. They are idealists. What I am 
 saying is old as the world. I am ashamed to 
 say it, and only say it to those who have 
 forgotten it. In philosophy, it is the op- 
 position of Aristotle and Plato; in paint- 
 ing, these classes are represented by the 
 Dutch and the Italians; in politics, by Mon- 
 tesquieu and Rousseau; in literature, by 
 Shakespeare and Racine. I confess my 
 weakness for the latter class. But, great 
 God ! what a loss we should sustain in los- 
 ing the former what treasures of science! 
 what marvels of observation! 
 
 "Man does many things that animals do; 
 but whatever he does, he does humanly ; he 
 brings to its performance some one of these 
 things: moderation, intelligence, feeling, 
 delicacy, conscience, devotion. The real- 
 ists suppress these things. There are two 
 realities in man ; they leave the one and take 
 the other which they call reality. By what 
 right ? As if good were not as real as evil ! 
 As if the remorse of Phedre were not as real 
 as her passion! What! the timidity of a 
 heart that fears to confess that it loves, the 
 combat, the scruple about violating an en- 
 gaged faith, the grief at having been found
 
 Ernest Bersot. 137 
 
 wanting in it, the shame of yielding one's 
 self to unworthy creatures, the desire to rise 
 again out of this shame, is n't all that 
 real? Is there anything more real, more 
 human? Isn't it we ourselves? And what 
 a happy inspiration in novelists, who are 
 supposed to search movement and life, to re- 
 trench all that ! There is a story of vir- 
 tue, of its efforts to maintain itself, a story 
 as varied as characters and circumstances; 
 there is a story of passion, of its birth, prog- 
 ress, transports, a story told again and again 
 since the world began, always new and des- 
 tined to be always new, for the same sun 
 does not illuminate the same world twice; 
 but there is also a love which has no story, 
 and this is the love you have chosen to write 
 about. 
 
 " In searching the cause of these moral, ar- 
 tistic, and philosophical eccentricities an idea 
 occurs to me. It seems to me unjust to at- 
 tribute the same value to all the thoughts 
 and feelings of a nation. Some of them are 
 essential, their foundation being human na- 
 ture. Others are transitory; they do not 
 proceed from the true nature of man, but 
 from something accidental. A physical mal-
 
 138 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 ady, for example, gives to our ideas and feel- 
 ings a character that passes away with the 
 disease. In a paroxysm of fever, or a crisis 
 in certain organic affections, we are no 
 longer ourselves. The soul, too, has its 
 crises, in which one writes ' Rene" ' or 
 'L61ie. ' Then the crisis passes, nature's 
 equilibrium is restored; life resumes its nor- 
 mal course; the patient comes to himself, and 
 is astonished at what he has been. Why 
 should not nations suffer from these disor- 
 ders? Why do we not distinguish in them 
 what is their mind, their real soul, from 
 what is simply a fit, a crisis, a transitory 
 state of mind? Nations as well as individ- 
 uals have their periods of sickness and 
 health. In health the aim is fixed; the 
 road lies straight in the sunlight; the sight 
 is clear; the step firm; the whole body in 
 harmony, is disposed for action, feels itself 
 move and live. In sickness, the aim is con- 
 cealed or shifting, the road uncertain, the 
 step faltering; a false light troubles the 
 eyes and changes the color and form of 
 things; the sentiment of reality is lost, and 
 the patient moves as if in a dream. If we 
 are in this condition, at present, it is but a 
 trial, and the solid genius of this nation is
 
 Ernest Bersot. 139 
 
 capable of enduring many such trials. I am 
 no longer alarmed at the perturbation of its 
 feelings and thoughts. It is a languor, a 
 crisis from which it will recover." 
 
 All Bersot's criticism is marked by the 
 qualities of this extract, gentle irony, and 
 clear, rapid, firm, and serious statement of 
 fact interspersed with jets of enthusiasm. 
 He is warm, but not passionate; serious, 
 but neither dull nor sad. There are no dark 
 corners in his mind. A steady light burns 
 there ; he can give account of what he feels 
 and knows, and he values this light. 
 
 " The Greeks, " he writes, " were enamoured 
 of physical light, and in dying bade it touch- 
 ing adieus. We, who have not their limpid 
 ether, are enamoured of intellectual light. 
 Our intelligence recognizes it, moves freely, 
 and rejoices in it. It struggles and suffers 
 in darkness ; it is restless until day dawns. 
 That is the eternal foundation of the French 
 intellect. ... In France we do not will- 
 ingly lose sight of earth. If any one ven- 
 tures into space, we look at him, but we do 
 not follow him. We think more of seeing 
 clearly that our wealth is on a firm basis 
 than of increasing it. We even consent to 
 diminish its bulk for the sake of getting rid
 
 140 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 of the false coin. . . . Clearness is intelli- 
 gence. . . . We are always glad, when, after 
 a mist which obscures and confuses every- 
 thing, objects begin to be distinguished and 
 to take their true form and their true being. 
 We are glad, too, when an idea which was 
 vague in us begins to clear up, when day 
 begins in our thought, and the true nature 
 and the true reason of things appear to us in 
 their natural order." 
 
 Bersot loved simplicity as he loved clear- 
 ness, and no trickery of rhetoric, no tinsel 
 or tirade deceived him into seeing merit 
 where there was none. He praised " simple 
 beauty, the discreet beauty that does not 
 make a display of its charms, and is un- 
 known except to some true souls like itself." 
 He says somewhere: "When all men around 
 you are running after riches, you must be 
 firm to resist their example; when all are 
 running after what glitters, it takes courage 
 to keep alive at the bottom of your heart the 
 unknown and solitary flame. But it warms 
 you, and at this ruddy fireside of those who 
 have scarcely any other here on earth, rest 
 is to be found, and poetry is sometimes a 
 visitor." 
 
 He sees clearly that the less delicate the
 
 Ernest Bersot. 141 
 
 instrument whose sounds we wish to evoke, 
 the harder we must strike. " When we speak 
 to the public," he writes, "we need an af- 
 firmative tone, for it cannot conceive doubt; 
 we need a great appearance of logic, for it 
 sees but one principle at a time; a great deal 
 of sentiment, for it has an honest instinct; a 
 great deal of imagery, for it is taken by the 
 senses. With the public, it is less a ques- 
 tion of striking justly than of striking hard. 
 In objects which are to be exposed to the 
 people, the necessary features are strong pro- 
 portions, salient outlines, and a simple and 
 pronounced character in which are no deli- 
 cacies to be lost. The metaphysical, the 
 gigantic, and the prophetic style were in- 
 vented for the people, and have succeeded." 
 
 Better than any other, he knows all the 
 weakness and peculiarities of his own public, 
 and gives us the following good-humored in- 
 ventory of them with its accompaniment of 
 timely and sensible advice. 
 
 " One of the first characteristics of the 
 French is restlessness. We are impatient. 
 We can suffer no delay between the concep- 
 tion of an idea and its complete application. 
 . . . We put on seven-league boots to take 
 four steps. . . . Another of our weaknesses
 
 142 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 is a love of novelty. When two French- 
 men meet, the first question infallibly is: 
 'What's the news?' With a melancholy 
 air, the other replies : ' Nothing. Nothing 
 new has happened. ' But on the other hand, 
 if there is something to tell, what content- 
 ment, what ardor in asking and affirming! 
 How we run from house to house! How 
 quickly we make the circuit to comment, dis- 
 cuss, and learn the general impression, and 
 what we ought to think of it ! Every morn- 
 ing, on awakening, we feel the need of an 
 occupation of this kind for the whole day. 
 It is on these conditions alone, that we think 
 we truly live. And we are not exclusive. 
 Give us anything you like, a new play, a 
 new novel, a new author, a duel, a political 
 question, a theological quarrel, a riot, a 
 sermon, an assassination, anything. We 
 should be unable to resist for any length of 
 time the exhausting effects of so much ex- 
 citement, if we were in reality profoundly 
 moved by every occurrence, but, fortunately, 
 we take good care of ourselves. In every 
 event, we always keep in reserve a little sen- 
 sibility for to-morrow's use. Very likely 
 we are less interested in affairs than in what 
 is said of them. Be they what they may,
 
 Ernest Bersot. 143 
 
 sad or disastrous, we feel great relief in the 
 discussion of them. Men and affairs are the 
 ceaseless topic of French conversation. Our 
 novels and dramatic literature thrive on ac- 
 cidents, and the press that lives on the pub- 
 lic stimulates its passions to make itself 
 necessary to its readers. It collects and 
 illustrates sensational facts to gratify sharp- 
 ened curiosity. It would prefer to fabricate 
 sensations rather than to do without them; 
 and if it happens that a murder is wanting, 
 it has lost a day. 
 
 "The nation fabricates its politics as it 
 does its novels and dramas. It wants to 
 move. It wants something new and some- 
 thing dramatic, some lightning strokes, some 
 unforeseen blows, perpetual shifting of scen- 
 ery. With this taste, we have a theatrical 
 and romantic politics. We wake to a sur- 
 prise every morning, to a grand combat 
 between the opposition and the government; 
 a combat on the street, in the press, or in 
 the Chamber. At bottom, our nation fears 
 nothing as it fears cnnni. Rather than be 
 bored, she is capable of rushing into all 
 sorts of adventures at the risk of cruel suf- 
 fering, of rushing into a revolution just to 
 see how she will come out of it. How com-
 
 144 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 pletely she has forgiven Napoleon I., be- 
 cause he made her live by her imagination. 
 He bled her, and she adored him. Go thou 
 and preach wisdom to her. Talk to her of a 
 well-ordered life, of domestic happiness. 
 Tell her that in doing a little every day, 
 we shall find at the end of a year or of years 
 that we have done much. . . . 
 
 "If France wishes only to amuse herself 
 and the world, let her indulge herself in 
 these whims; but if she aims at being happy 
 and respected, she must give them up. Let 
 her apply all her intelligence and passion to 
 solving the great modern problem of consti- 
 tuting a free and civilized democracy. . . . 
 
 "What we French have served our appren- 
 ticeship at, or rather, wherein we excel, is 
 in demolishing governments. At the Ver- 
 sailles Museum is to be seen Horace Vernet's 
 fine painting of the assault on Constanti- 
 nople. How those soldiers climb! What 
 ardor and fury they show ! At the rate at 
 which they are going they might scale the 
 heavens. They are our countrymen, these 
 fellows. We French are born for attack. 
 In an assault on the government what pleas- 
 ure we take in the epigrams, the fine 
 speeches, the vigorous and malicious articles,
 
 Ernest Bersot. 145 
 
 the cleverness shown in tripping up an oppo- 
 nent, the lessening of good and increasing of 
 evil ; and so history, poetry, romance, and the 
 drama go to war; it is a terrible outbreak. 
 Nothing can resist it. This is our incontest- 
 able talent. Doubtless that is why we so gen- 
 erally claim to be well versed in politics. But 
 it is a remarkable fact that we have no states- 
 men. There are not many of us who would 
 dare climb on a locomotive and start it going, 
 for it is not solely a question of going; it is 
 also a question of being able to stop without 
 an explosion. On the contrary, in' political 
 matters everybody is ready to climb on the 
 engine. It is true that in the first case a 
 man only risks blowing up himself; while, 
 in the second case, he risks blowing up other 
 people, which is a very different thing. . . . 
 "... Democracy has a lesson to learn; 
 the lesson taught by indefatigable personal 
 activity, by conscientious resistance, uncon- 
 querable resolution ; by that, in short, which 
 makes the character of a man ; and it is char- 
 acter, it is men that we need, if we do not 
 wish the elements of our nation to be but a 
 multitude of atoms brought together by the 
 winds from the four corners of heaven and 
 scattered again at their pleasure.
 
 146 A Group of French Critics 
 
 " For my part, I know of no more pressing 
 problem, warned in some sort by the place 
 where I am writing, one of those sand 
 dunes which the sea deposits on its shores. 
 Blown by the wind, they advance from year 
 to year swallowing up whatever they find be- 
 fore them. A man has stopped the advance 
 of this one. He has planted trees whose 
 deep roots fix the sand and resist the wind. 
 Life has been stronger than the elements. 
 Let us try his plan on this shifting soil of 
 democracy, tormented in every way by its 
 own violence and that of its masters. Let 
 us sow men here ; not ancient sages who fold 
 their arms and resign themselves to being 
 buried alive; but living, breathing, acting 
 men who want to take their place in the 
 sun, hold it fast, and extend it. 
 
 " Make democracy stable by stirring up in 
 every man that composes it, a personal con- 
 science, the sentiment of right and the cour- 
 age to defend it. " 
 
 Wherever the strong and helpful word is 
 needed, Bersot is ready to say it ; but the 
 work in which all the alertness and sagacity 
 of his mind found full play for its action is 
 in the education of the young. He brought 
 to this work not only sagacity and alertness,
 
 Ernest Bersot. 147 
 
 but tact, firmness, kindness. The professor 
 never drowned the man in him. He had a 
 horror of routine. He did not wish the 
 pupil to be a machine, nor the professor "a 
 machine to make machines." He had the 
 genius of a great commander who is not 
 bound by the rules of his tactics, but can 
 fearlessly break them in an emergency, be- 
 cause he is greater than they, and can see 
 over and beyond them into the result he is 
 aiming at. He never forgot that he was not 
 working on paper, or inert, yielding mate- 
 rial, but on living, resistant human souls; 
 and that in such work an ounce of practice 
 is worth a pound of theory. He strongly 
 opposed that requirement in the educational 
 system of France which forced a child at 
 thirteen to choose between a scientific or a 
 literary course of study. He recognizes the 
 excellence of the theory of education in spe- 
 cial directions, but observes that it errs in 
 practice, children of thirteen not being safe 
 judges of their aptitudes or even of their in- 
 clinations. Besides, he does not believe in 
 a divorce in education; both literary and 
 scientific instruction are necessary to a com- 
 plete education. 
 
 "An educated man," he writes, "ought to
 
 148 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 know something of letters and something of 
 science, in order to be interested in all in- 
 tellectual subjects. He ought not to be a 
 stranger to the charms of literature, and 
 with regard to the marvels of industry, 
 steam, light, electricity, he ought to be able 
 to follow an explanation at least to the point 
 where it is lost in formulas. 
 
 " The gymnasium knows the importance of 
 general exercise. A single exercise is not 
 enough. Effort and varied effort is de- 
 manded. Strength and suppleness are not 
 given to any one member of the body in 
 view of any one particular service, but, what 
 is better, vigor and skill are given to every 
 part of it. The same end should be attained 
 in education; therefore we should not sepa- 
 rate literary and scientific instruction, if 
 we aim at the perfection of the human 
 mind." 
 
 Here follows a quotation of the scene from 
 Moliere's "Malade imaginaire," in which 
 the doctor counsels his patient to cut off one 
 arm, because it takes to itself all the nour- 
 ishment, and prevents the other from profit- 
 ing by it; and to take out the right eye 
 because the left one will see the better for
 
 Ernest Bersot. 149 
 
 not being distracted by the interference of 
 the other. 
 
 " I am for the right eye and the left eye," 
 adds Bersot, pithily. " With our two eyes we 
 have not any too much light to see well by, 
 in this world." 
 
 He thinks that if education does anything, 
 it ought especially to give the desire to 
 learn ; it ought to excite an appetite, create 
 tastes. He counsels the study of the clas- 
 sics, if we wish to nourish what is healthiest 
 and give to the young that taste for sim- 
 plicity without which there is no true grace 
 either in life or in literature. 
 
 Reading was for a long time regarded in 
 University life as lost time or a danger. 
 The student was expected to get his mental 
 nutriment either at the hands of his profes- 
 sors or from his text-books. Such an idea 
 aroused Bersot's indignation. " Lost time ? " 
 he cries; "does reading not nourish and 
 awaken the mind ? Does it not make it feel 
 that it lives? A danger? Everything is dan- 
 gerous for an inert soul, but when it is liv- 
 ing, the torreftt of life sweeps away every 
 danger." He especially counsels moderate 
 tasks and wide and varied reading as the 
 chief means of intellectual culture.
 
 150 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 "The understanding of all things, criti- 
 cism which gives to each thing its value, 
 richness and elevation of taste and senti- 
 ment, that is civilization." 
 
 In teaching, Bersot addressed himself to 
 the intelligence and not to the memory of 
 his pupils. He praises the chief educational 
 maxim of Pascal's father, which was always 
 to keep his child above his work. "He 
 whose work taxes all his faculties," he adds, 
 " is an artisan. He who is above his work 
 does that, and is capable of something more. 
 The mind is not a shop, it is an instrument. 
 . . . Children are never so much interested 
 in what others do as in what they do them- 
 selves, and the best professor is he who gets 
 the most work out of them. The best con- 
 ducted class is that which least resembles a 
 lecture-course, but most one of those walks 
 or journeys in which a master full of author- 
 ity, knowledge, discretion, and kindness for 
 youth, awakens his pupil's curiosity, teaches 
 him to see, to search, to find, tries his judg- 
 ment and corrects it in all circumstances, 
 not imposing the stiffness of military drill 
 on this mobile spirit, but yielding to its 
 movements in order to form them. The in- 
 terest given to instruction is the best disci-
 
 Ernest Bersot. 151 
 
 pline; and when a teacher has associated his 
 memory with that of the first work of dawn- 
 ing intelligence, he need not fear that his 
 memory will be effaced." 
 
 He sees clearly that a fact is not neces- 
 sarily educating in itself; that it may lie 
 dead or dormant in the mind, and that it is 
 not until it sets up a ferment, a growth, a 
 living activity, that it becomes truly educat- 
 ing. The fact must be converted into an 
 emotion before it becomes a leaven. This 
 is what he means by the distinction he 
 makes between soul and body in the study 
 of any science. " Facts and truths are the 
 body. The faculty that embraces all these 
 truths, reflects on them to understand them 
 and to find more of them, is the soul. You 
 may know all the facts of history, all the 
 truths of philosophy, all the propositions of 
 geometry, and have neither the soul of phi- 
 losophy nor the soul of mathematics; for 
 with all your facts, your philosophy may be 
 lacking in method, and a true feeling of the 
 nature of the problems you discuss : you may 
 lack penetration in history, and in mathe- 
 matics you may be wanting in the logic that 
 links the last propositions to the first, the 
 scruples about continually demanding the
 
 152 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 reason of what you do, the patience to go on 
 step by step, the power to abstract and gen- 
 eralize, the skill in constructions for render- 
 ing demonstrations easier, and address in 
 solving problems. . . . Without this soul 
 what is science ? What is art ? Or rather, 
 is there a science or an art without it ? " 
 
 Bersot's enthusiasm was not of the perfer- 
 vid, transitory kind whose flame is fed by 
 illusion, and dies out when the illusion is 
 dissipated. His enthusiasm was a mild, 
 steady heat founded on good sense and judg- 
 ment. He had no dream of human perfecti- 
 bility to be realized by universal education. 
 He knew that the clay given him to work 
 with was of various degrees of fineness and 
 coarseness, and that he could not make 
 porcelain vases out of all of it. Moreover, 
 he knew that the finer clay is of extreme 
 rarity, and that it is not always possible to 
 distinguish it at first sight. For this reason 
 he felt that public instruction ought to ad- 
 dress itself to all, but more particularly 
 ought "to occupy itself with ordinary minds 
 that form the immense majority; ought to 
 take by the hand pupils of common capacity 
 and teach them to walk, and lead them as 
 far as possible. Those who have wings will
 
 Ernest Bersot. 153 
 
 fly. The influence of instruction on supe- 
 rior minds is commonly exaggerated. The 
 fact is that they always find their road, even 
 if they do not form themselves quite un- 
 aided. Their original genius develops even 
 under masters who oppose them. They go 
 out like Voltaire from the schools of Jesuits." 
 One of the true problems of education, he 
 felt to be the finding of a medium between 
 the rigid discipline of the regiment and the 
 softness, the enervating laxity of domestic 
 indulgence. There was a cleanness, an un- 
 selfishness in Bersot's love of the young, a 
 wholesome tonic quality in it, exempt from 
 any vanity, any wish to flatter weaknesses in 
 order to create a liking for himself, a wis- 
 dom that looked to the best interests of 
 youth, which made his love what all love 
 should be, but alas! is not, a strength, a 
 safety, and a lasting joy. With this pure, 
 unselfish ideal of parental love, he found it 
 difficult to understand the selfish instinct 
 which goes by the nobler name of love, and 
 is so often the bane of children. " One of 
 the astonishing things of this age," he 
 writes, " is the softness of parents. They 
 wish to be loved, and what is better? But 
 they no longer see that in order to be loved
 
 154 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 lastingly, they must first be respected ; and 
 that no one is respected who surrenders a 
 legitimate part of the authority he has re- 
 ceived; that to be loved lastingly, it is 
 necessary, if need be, to consent not to be 
 loved for a moment. This courage is prop- 
 erly the father's part; but by his absorption 
 in business, the management of the family 
 often falls upon the mother; and to me 
 there are few spectacles more touching than 
 that of a mother who, eager to be loved, 
 eager to please her son and to satisfy his 
 slightest caprices, stops, and, seeing clearly 
 the solid interest of that son some place 
 where he does not see it, takes the author- 
 ity, while her heart bleeds in exercising it. 
 That is heroism. ... In education it is 
 necessary to know how to work, how to ac- 
 cept discipline, and how to sacrifice pleasure 
 to duty." 
 
 Duty, that is a good word with which to 
 close our study of Ernest Bersot. It was 
 the ruling idea of his life; it was followed 
 without asceticism or display, in sunshine 
 and in shadow; and because the world has 
 need of it, the memory of his faithfulness 
 and courage will not die.
 
 IV. 
 
 SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. 
 
 FEW who have been associated for any 
 length of time with persons of a fas- 
 tidious and highly nervous type, intellectual 
 yet destitute of the grasp and strength of the 
 highest intellect, can have missed noting in 
 them a lack of repose and harmony, and a 
 morbid capacity for suffering from trifles. 
 Instead of meeting their vexations with a 
 toss of the hand, as one brushes a fly from 
 the face, they meet them with violence, as if 
 in a hand-to-hand conflict with giants, and 
 suffer more from the exhaustion of the con- 
 flict than from the original evil. There is 
 nothing of the Spartan about them. They 
 make their sensibility their chief title to 
 distinction, and instead of concealing the 
 fox and the wound, they run about showing 
 the marks of his teeth. 
 
 To go out from the influence of this ner- 
 vous irritability that poisons the very springs 
 of human joy, into that of those broad, se-
 
 156 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 rene, outward- looking not inward-looking 
 natures, is like leaving a wine-cellar swarming 
 with gnats and flies and lined with cobwebs, 
 for the open air, placid sunshine, and genial 
 exhilaration of an afternoon in early May. 
 Slowly the flushed cheek loses its heat; the 
 pulse slackens its feverish rapidity. We no 
 longer pant, but breathe deep, slow draughts 
 of wholesome air, and in proportion as vigor 
 returns, joy, calm but deep, returns with it. 
 
 Now, just such a wholesome influence 
 in literature is Saint-Marc Girardin after 
 the Rousseaus, Chateaubriands, and Senan- 
 cours. To him was given the task of free- 
 ing the youth of his time from romantic 
 superstitions; and he did his work without 
 iconoclastic violence, but with such calm 
 appeals to reason and experience that it has 
 permanent value. 
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin, whose real name was 
 simply Marc Girardin, was born in Paris in 
 1801, and died from a stroke of apoplexy at 
 Morsang-sur-Seine in 1873. 
 
 At the age of twenty-seven he became 
 one of the contributors to the " Journal des 
 Debats," and on the accession of Louis Phi- 
 lippe he was appointed to succeed Guizot as 
 professor of history at the Sorbonnc. His
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 157 
 
 predilection for literature induced him to 
 exchange his professorship of history for 
 that of literature. His popularity as a lec- 
 turer crowded his class-room with eager lis- 
 teners, and the literary quality of his work 
 was so high that in 1844 he was elected a 
 member of the French Academy. 
 
 For forty-five years he continued his as- 
 sociation with the University, and his most 
 important publications were the result of his 
 work in the class-room. Hence the domi- 
 nant note in him, the appeal of experience 
 to the errors of judgment and the falsely 
 grounded enthusiasms of immaturity and 
 ignorance. Hence, too, the enduring value 
 of his work, for each generation passes 
 through "the errors of the youth-time of that 
 which preceded it, and the warning voice of 
 experience is therefore always timely. We 
 all begin by loving disorder and lawlessness 
 as elements of growth and liberty. It is a 
 long time before we learn to love law, and to 
 recognize its primal importance, to know 
 that, in fact, it is the very foundation of life, 
 growth, and freedom, that the sun keeps 
 his course in the heavens, the earth her 
 miracle of seed-time and harvest, and the 
 human body its soundness, by obedience to
 
 158 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 law, that a broken law means pain, dis- 
 order, and, if persisted in, ends in ruin. It 
 is a long time before we learn to look out- 
 ward, not inward, before we learn not to 
 mistake our own bitter personal experiences 
 for universal calamity, and before we know 
 that cynicism and pessimism have no place 
 in healthy human existence. It is a long 
 time before we cease wishing to attempt the 
 establishment of a new system of morals in 
 which individual desire shall be the only 
 recognized basis, and to cease to find in ex- 
 isting social institutions the cause of indi- 
 vidual wretchedness. Sometimes we never 
 do outgrow these errors of immaturity, and 
 if to the power of feeling our wretchedness 
 be added the gift of expressing it, we put 
 our wailing into books or pamphlets, and 
 find a like-minded public that will call it 
 literature. 
 
 In this strait it were good for us if a 
 Saint-Marc Girardin could fall in our way. 
 These tumors of self-torturing vanity need 
 puncturing; and in him a good, a kindly 
 physician is at hand. He does not frighten 
 us in the manner of a charlatan, by a violent 
 and exaggerated picture of our condition. 
 He is not so severe that we prefer to die of
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 159 
 
 our malady rather than to be cured in so 
 painful a manner. He is a brother who lays 
 hold of our hand and speaks in firm but good- 
 humored accents. He makes us forget our- 
 selves in the broad outlook on humanity 
 that he opens before us. He sets a faithful 
 mirror in our path, and we catch a perfect 
 image of our pitiful selves, and, disgusted at 
 our weakness and ugliness, we resolve to be 
 something else, if it be yet in our power to 
 change. 
 
 What he is in his books, Saint-Marc 
 Girardin was in his life and character. A 
 scholar, well versed in German and Italian, 
 but no pedant. First of all, a man of activ- 
 ity, full of life and light. 
 
 Bersot, who knew him intimately for more 
 than twenty years, says of him in his intro- 
 duction to one of the editions of Girardin's 
 "Jean Jacques Rousseau": "To be seen at 
 his best, Girardin must be seen in intimacy. 
 He had perfect simplicity; in social inter- 
 course the most congenial, the gentlest of 
 men, with whom endless chats were possible, 
 true chats in that full liberty and full 
 security in which one dares say everything. 
 His conversation was not monologue. . . . 
 He let subjects come and go as they would,
 
 160 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 persisting in nothing, lending himself to 
 everything. He gave wit to all with whom 
 he talked; he had no wish to shine, but a 
 desire to be agreeable which made him 
 so. ... 
 
 " No one was ever less of a dreamer. At 
 Paris, where he lived as little as possible, 
 work, business, society occupied him. In 
 the country he was in his library at an 
 early hour, preparing his lectures, writing 
 his books or his articles. He took his rest 
 in going about his estate, the park, the 
 kitchen-garden, the stable, seeing that every- 
 thing was in order, giving instructions as 
 to what should be done, never tiring of be- 
 ing in the open air where there was some- 
 thing to do, seeing that stones were cleared 
 away, trees planted, protecting them from 
 injury, observing the defences that suc- 
 ceeded best, attentive to those that were 
 languishing, and renewing those that were 
 dead, familiar with the age and history of 
 each one, enchanted with his work. He 
 loved active country life. He had a horror 
 of the vague. . . . 
 
 " He was a born moralist. One always felt 
 in his lectures and in his conversations the 
 man who knew men. He knew them so
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 161 
 
 well that he demanded perfection of no one; 
 and if, along with some essential qualities 
 he discovered some defects, he was indulgent 
 towards the defects, taking the whole, put- 
 ting the good to the account of the individ- 
 ual, and the evil to the account of humanity. 
 If a servant were recommended as faultless 
 to him, he refused to take him, confident 
 that he must have some vice; but, on the 
 contrary, once he knew just what failing he 
 had, he would take him, knowing what to 
 expect and how to defend himself. This 
 knowledge of human nature rendered him 
 exceedingly easy to meet. . . . Then, too, 
 he was exceedingly sensitive to individual 
 worth. He made a distinction between be- 
 ing something and being somebody. To be 
 something is not much ; but to be somebody 
 is worth the trouble of being, and that is a 
 privilege not granted to every one. So when 
 he said that a man was somebody, it was 
 great eulogy; he had set him apart from 
 the others whom he classed in mass as the 
 indistinguishables. 
 
 "His large, clairvoyant experience made 
 him take events very much as he took men ; 
 that is, with a fine indulgence. He be- 
 lieved in what he called the caprices of
 
 1 62 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 events. He thought that matters nearly 
 always turn out differently from what we 
 think they will; that the unforeseen plays a 
 prominent role in the world, and that acci- 
 dent is master of affairs. So when things 
 went well, he did not trust himself to them, 
 and if they went ill, he was not disquieted; 
 he waited. . . . One day, when we were 
 chatting on a subject that was giving us 
 some anxiety, he said to me : ' What saves 
 this country is that there is a great fecun- 
 dity of abortions.' . . . He was a family 
 man, and found in domestic life two forces 
 that he never separated, and without which 
 he could not conceive life, love and duty." 
 The genius of Saint-Marc Girardin can be 
 summed up in a phrase, exceptional good 
 sense. He was the practical man turned 
 man of letters, never willingly losing con- 
 tact with the earth. Therefore his flights 
 are exhilarating runs, and not excursions 
 into the air. He has no quarrel with civ- 
 ilization. He is a friend to law. "He 
 wishes," says Bersot, "in private life, rea- 
 son dominating feeling, and yielding in its 
 turn to faith, which is a less wavering sup- 
 port, chastity, love associated with duty in 
 marriage and in the family; for public life,
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 163 
 
 duty again, intrusted by preference to law, 
 but with no infringement of the right with- 
 out which a man is no longer a man, the 
 liberty of the individual, the liberty of con- 
 science. In politics he believed in the 
 government of the middle classes, which 
 represent reason and moderation. A wholly 
 practical mind that found no enjoyment what- 
 ever in pure fancy, pure poetry, or the specu- 
 lations of philosophy. . . . He is strong on 
 the ground of reality and the practical." 
 
 But Girardin's practical common-sense 
 is not of the blunt and blundering kind 
 that so justly merits ridicule under the name 
 of Philistinism. It is united with the rare 
 tact that is born of perfect understanding. 
 In argument he is a light skirmisher that 
 disarms his antagonist by his skill and im- 
 perturbable self-possession, before they can 
 come to heavy blows. It is impossible to 
 conceive of two minds so wholly antagonis- 
 tic as Girardin's and Rousseau's; and while 
 Girardin is unsparing in his demonstration 
 of Rousseau's weakness, he is just and even 
 tender towards him. You shall smile at 
 Rousseau's vanity, but you shall not mock 
 him; you shall pity his frailty, but you shall 
 not wholly despise him. In spite of all the
 
 164 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 smoke and vapor that obscured the flame, 
 you shall know that there burned in him the 
 immortal light of genius. Only, on the 
 other hand, you shall not take the smoke 
 and vapor for light because they accompany 
 it. You shall know that they are stifling, 
 unwholesome, impure. Rousseau's morbid 
 sensibility, his excessive and irritable van- 
 ity, his seductive sophistries are the occa- 
 sion of some of Girardin's finest criticism. 
 "Jean Jacques Rousseau, " he writes, "is 
 the chief of a school that takes sensibility 
 for the sovereign law of its life. According 
 to this school, whoever allows himself to be 
 guided by his sensibility cannot go astray, 
 or at any rate can err only in a legitimate 
 and honest way. This school believes that 
 the heart of man is good, grave error. It 
 is not good, it is tender, and tender towards 
 evil as towards good. Mdlle. de Scudery, in 
 one of the sentimental conversations with 
 which 'C161ie' is full, defines sensibility as 
 ' tenderness of soul.' The definition is not 
 exact. Sensibility depends very much upon 
 the senses. There is a great deal of youth- 
 fulness and ardor of blood in it, and those 
 who are remarkable for sensibility at thirty 
 are hard and egoistic at sixty. Besides its
 
 Saint- Marc Girardin. 165 
 
 moral weakness, there is another objection 
 to sensibility; it is full of illusions, I was 
 almost about to say, full of lies. It deceives 
 man with regard to himself. It makes him 
 believe that he has the strength of good sen- 
 timents in having their emotions. Thus de- 
 ceived on his own part, he easily deceives 
 others, and from dupe becomes charlatan. 
 
 " How many emotions are born with heat 
 of blood and pass away with it ! And it is 
 this, by the way, which gives to young peo- 
 ple their charm and their happy confidence 
 in themselves. They do honor to their soul 
 for the emotions due to their age. Rous- 
 seau had this kind of sensibility, at the same 
 time, weak and ardent. It served him in 
 his works, and led him astray in his life. 
 Rousseau had read many romances, and this 
 sort of reading developed the sensibility that 
 began with being a charm and ended with 
 being a disease. . . . For a man of feeling, 
 the worst possible thing is to be his own 
 guide, and to be without a calling that rules 
 his conduct and traces his career in advance, 
 and without a family to serve as a support 
 for him and a barrier against his fancy, or, in 
 default of a family, a firm and enlightened 
 guide. The man of feeling in many re-
 
 1 66 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 spects resembles woman. If he does not 
 receive his destiny ready-made from the 
 hands of his family or those of a good direc- 
 tor, he receives it from chance or the sway 
 of his passions. . . . 
 
 " Rousseau left Mme. de Warens ' without 
 leaving or scarcely feeling the least regret 
 for a separation, the very thought of which 
 would formerly have given us the anguish of 
 death. ' There are your heroes and heroines 
 of sensibility! They think themselves born 
 to live and die together. But let the least 
 accident happen, an annoyance, an absence, 
 and there is immediate indifference and ob- 
 livion; inevitable denouement of affections 
 that the soul very inappropriately attributes 
 to herself, but which come from accident 
 and the ardor of youth. This moment of 
 repugnance and separation is a moment that 
 novelists carefully conceal. They make their 
 heroes and heroines die rather than separate 
 them, and they are right. The separations 
 of death are not so sad as those of in- 
 difference." 
 
 With regard to Rousseau's placing his 
 children in a foundling asylum, Girardin 
 continues: "There, again, you have one of 
 the most characteristic traits of sensibility.
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 167 
 
 It is incapable of recognizing duty, when 
 duty appears in the form of an embarrass- 
 ment or a sacrifice, when it is unaccompa- 
 nied with a feeling of pleasure. . . . Put no 
 trust in the morality of a heart that searches 
 its duties in emotions, and does not believe 
 man obliged to do his duty but when he is 
 touched. The idea of duty has this virtue 
 in it that it resists weariness, distraction, 
 forgetfulness, and that we feel guilty when 
 we feel negligent or indifferent. On the 
 other hand, when obligation seeks senti- 
 ments only, it is effaced with the very sen- 
 timent which it has created. . . . 
 
 "The vices of civilization which Rousseau 
 enumerates with the most complacency are 
 the vices and defects of the social world and 
 of the salons. 'Jealousy, coldness, reserve, 
 fear, suspicion, hatred, and betrayal,' he 
 says, 'are continually hidden under this 
 uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, 
 under this much boasted urbanity that we 
 owe to the enlightenment of our century.' 
 It is easy to see in every word, here, the 
 souvenirs that Jean Jacques carried away 
 from the salons in the evening, and the con- 
 solatory reflections that he made upon him- 
 self. He has suffered from the coldness and
 
 1 68 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 reserve that he is astonished at finding asso- 
 ciated with politeness in society. He has 
 suffered from it, because of his inexperience. 
 He has mistaken politeness for affection, 
 and he has wanted to give his soul at first 
 sight to men who gave him their hand, and 
 his heart to every woman who bowed to him. 
 Then, seeing that he was deceived, he has 
 fallen into suspicion and fear, and he will 
 fall deeper and deeper into it every day, and 
 will finish by seeing enemies and traitors 
 everywhere." 
 
 Girardin finds the root of Rousseau's mel- 
 ancholy in vanity deceived. He quotes 
 Mme. d'Epinay's observation: "Rousseau is 
 now nothing in my eyes, but a moral dwarf 
 mounted on stilts." "In all ages," Girardin 
 adds, "the great corruptors are those who 
 change the good into evil, or the evil into 
 good; who say that property is theft, mar- 
 riage is slavery, adultery is liberty." 
 
 Girardin has no patience with the melan- 
 choly assumed by the disciples of Rousseau, 
 and their affected nature-worship that turned 
 nature into the " confidante of their self- 
 love, the echo of their vanity. . . . Sadness 
 seemed originality. They made themselves 
 melancholy in order to be superior, and hast-
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 169 
 
 ened to get rid of their illusions before tak- 
 ing time to become experienced." Then he 
 sums up admirably the characteristic feat- 
 ures of that false melancholy which is but 
 the result of " sharpened and embittered van- 
 ity, the despair which needs to show itself, 
 the melancholy which instead of consuming 
 itself wishes to excite universal pity and ad- 
 miration, the assumption of the role of a 
 martyr instead of that of a simple unfortu- 
 nate ; all of which is so repugnant to the idea 
 of a real and deep grief. 
 
 " Rousseau loves humanity, and he cannot 
 endure individuals. . . . Seen from a dis- 
 tance, and viewed as a whole, humanity can 
 be loved without very much trouble. But 
 those who truly love men are they who pa- 
 tiently endure individuals. Without such 
 patient endurance, the love of humanity is 
 an idea that heats the brain; it is not at 
 all an affection that fills the heart." 
 
 It is this affectation of noble sentiments 
 and reality of ignoble vanity that makes 
 Rousseau so repugnant to Girardin. " Our 
 friends may have many defects," he writes, 
 "but what I demand of them, above all, is 
 to be true. In loving them, I want to love 
 a man and not a manikin. I want their
 
 170 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 language to be real feeling and not mere 
 rhetoric. When I shake hands with them, 
 I want a firm pressure and not a fine gest- 
 ure. Now, in Rousseau, the gesture pre- 
 dominates; the assumed character destroys 
 the individual." 
 
 In the same penetrating way that he un- 
 masks the ulcered vanity of Rousseau, Gi- 
 rardin uncovers the egotism and dryness of 
 heart that lie at the bottom of the mel- 
 ancholy of Chateaubriand's famous Rene: 
 "This mingling of refined sentiments and 
 savage tastes, this soul that demands happi- 
 ness from new scenes and carries about with 
 it its own wretchedness in itself, all this 
 makes of Rene a character apart, that unfor- 
 tunately has become one of the general types 
 of the literature of our day. If I should try 
 to define, in brief, the secret of* Rene's mis- 
 ery, I should say that it is inability to love. 
 The characteristic of souls that are able to 
 love is to give themselves to those they 
 love, and to find their joy and satisfaction 
 in this gift. For, let us not deceive our- 
 selves, it is not the love we inspire that sat- 
 isfies the soul, it is that which we feel. The 
 soul feels empty when it does not love, and 
 it can be filled only by the tenderness which
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 171 
 
 it gives. Hence the anguish of Rene". He 
 is astonished at being loved and being neither 
 calm nor satisfied. He cannot love; that is 
 his torment. . . . He is a brain and a body, 
 he is not a soul. His heart has no flames by 
 which love can be warmed. I grant that he 
 is seductive; he has imagination, ardor, all 
 that creates a belief in love, and even this 
 melancholy and ennui that every woman 
 hopes to dissipate is a charm that attracts 
 pity and vanity. But the seductiveness lasts 
 no longer than it takes to discover this fatal 
 impotence to love which is in his soul. . . . 
 Rene" is melancholy in a disappointed cen- 
 tury; that is why he has so much sadness, for 
 his melancholy is far from being as original 
 as he claims it is. Beneath the poetical 
 melancholy of Ren6 I recognize I know not 
 how many little vexations and petty disap- 
 pointments of the century; on one side the 
 lassitude of a conscience wearied with hav- 
 ing believed and vexed at being able to be- 
 lieve no longer, disgust with principle, faith 
 in chance; on the other side, vanity that 
 loves eclat, the mania for display, the taste 
 for theatrical emotion, and at the bot- 
 tom of all these vain, egotistic puerilities, 
 is to be found ennui, that fatal and inevi-
 
 172 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 table consequence of all man's attempts to 
 live self-centred. How are these errors of 
 vanity and ennui to be rectified? 'There 
 is,' said the old Chactas to Rene, 'there is 
 no happiness except in the common ways. ' 
 Chactas is right, and that is the moral to be 
 drawn from Rene's story. Little minds be- 
 lieve that the extraordinary dispels ennui, 
 and they become disgusted with the ordinary 
 train of life, and search great adventures, 
 and indulge in grave reveries which become 
 small and foolish as soon as they mingle in 
 them. In this way Rene" and his reveries 
 have become a commonplace, thanks to those 
 features of intimate resemblance that Ren6 
 had with our century, but which he concealed 
 under the poetical lustre given to him by his 
 author, thanks to the affectations of vulgar 
 souls that think they cease to be vulgar by 
 imitating the extraordinary, not understand- 
 ing that the worst banality is the banality of 
 the extraordinary." 
 
 Girardin loves health, strength, law, and 
 order, as only a physician can who is ac- 
 quainted with the ravages and ruins of dis- 
 ease and disorder. He never wearies of 
 attacking false sentiments, that "sadness 
 which comes from the disorder and softness
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 173 
 
 of the soul; the morbid excitability of those 
 who think they belong to the elite because 
 they have not the strength of ordinary souls, 
 who cultivate their sensibility till they 
 tremble at the slightest touch, to whom 
 every movement is a shock, every scratch a 
 wound, every contradiction a despair; the 
 soul turned sybarite that cannot bear the 
 crumple of a rose-leaf." 
 
 "Genius is patient and long-lived," he 
 cries; "the strength to live is the essential 
 part of it. Look at Homer, Tasso, Dante, 
 Milton. They did not escape wretchedness, 
 yet they lived because they had within them 
 the strength to support the pains of life. 
 God did not give them genius like a volatile 
 perfume which evaporates when the flask that 
 contains it is shaken, but he gave it as a 
 generous viaticum to sustain the man during 
 a long voyage. What! you have within you 
 a divine and immortal thought and you do 
 not know how to support the vexations of 
 life, the disdain of fools, the wickedness of 
 calumniators, the coldness of the indifferent ? 
 What ! you walk with your head in the skies, 
 and complain because an insect concealed in 
 the grass stings your foot in passing? . . . 
 I distrust the genius that can live only in a
 
 174 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 conservatory, and I expect from this misera- 
 ble plant neither sweet-smelling flowers nor 
 savory fruits. " 
 
 Girardin likes, he says, to demonstrate as 
 much as he is able "the union that exists 
 between good taste and good morals. . . . 
 Who can deny that the elevation and great- 
 ness of character which art demands have a 
 moral advantage? What we must search in 
 good literature that which conforms to the 
 veritable rules of art is this salutary ad- 
 miration inspired by the view of the great 
 and good. The whole question lies in that. 
 Literature is not charged simply with excit- 
 ing us by a description of humanity. This 
 description ought to aim at the beautiful for 
 the purpose of elevating the mind. It ought 
 to avoid grimaces and convulsions, and to 
 shun the ugly to the end that the soul shall 
 not be corrupted or degraded by vicious im- 
 pressions. . . . Art ought to speak to the 
 intelligence alone; it is to the mind only, 
 that it ought to give pleasure. If it tries to 
 move the senses, it degrades itself. . . . The 
 arts are the language of the soul. . . . And 
 do not think that the literary education we 
 receive in modern society always protects 
 the soul from the vulcrar emotions of the
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 175 
 
 body. . . . There are two classes of men 
 who are capable of preferring the brutal 
 emotions of the circus to the noble illusions 
 of the theatre ; those who have not an in- 
 tellect sufficiently cultivated, and those who 
 have it too much cultivated. 
 
 " We begin with low, coarse emotions, but, 
 alas ! we end with them too. Satiety leads 
 us back to brutality. Besides, let us not 
 deceive ourselves ; the human heart, if it be 
 not careful, is easily seduced to this side. 
 . . . Even the Greeks, the chosen people of 
 the arts, finished by adopting the gladiatorial 
 combats ; . . . but from that moment dra- 
 matic art ceased to exist in Greece, and 
 the Roman circus replaced the theatre. . . . 
 When the theatre, in its turn, prefers to 
 depict the sensations of the body instead of 
 the emotions of the soul, it approaches the 
 circus; but it also is punished by a prompt 
 decadence." 
 
 Of the weak, sentimental hero of a then 
 popular novel, Girardin writes: "He is not 
 good, which is the capital point. I say that 
 he is not good, because he has neither reso- 
 lution nor reserve in his affections, and that, 
 however tender and exalted such feelings 
 may be, they do not at all merit the name
 
 176 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 of goodness. Good sense and strength are 
 essential elements of goodness. In my opin- 
 ion, little justice of feeling added to much 
 weakness by no means makes a good heart. 
 It makes a super-sensitive soul, and may God 
 deliver us from super-sensitive souls ! . . . 
 The mistakes of the hero come from soft- 
 ness of heart and character, and for all its 
 titles of sensibility, exaltation, and enthu- 
 siasm, such a character is none the less 
 contemptible. All these souls and hearts 
 expand as foam does, and like foam are empty. 
 . . . Imagine a very young man with a face 
 that says, ' Love me, ' an air of grace, aban- 
 donment, and deathlike languor; eyes filled 
 with vague desires ; thin, delicate lips, as fit 
 for the expression of irony as of tenderness; 
 a supple figure; movements that charm, now 
 by their effeminacy, and now by their ease : 
 give to this young man an imagination that 
 embraces everything; give him curiosity 
 rather than ardor in his passions, the talent 
 of reflecting on his emotions rather than 
 feeling them, a capricious and mobile will, 
 a feverish and palpitating nature capable of 
 trembling rather than of being deeply moved, 
 a soul that vibrates and resounds like a mu- 
 sical instrument that is the more sonorous
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 177 
 
 the hollower it is; given all this and you 
 will have the character of the young man 
 as formed by the customs of society, the 
 leisure, elegances, and all the habits that 
 accompany wealth, as well as by the in- 
 fluences of a purely literary and poetical 
 education. . . . Suicide is the natural and 
 necessary denouement of a life so badly con- 
 ducted as his. 
 
 " Never having known how to content and 
 regulate his emotions, it is quite natural 
 that he should renounce life. Faithfully 
 representing our epoch, floating like it in 
 the wind of all the doctrines, our hero, 
 Henri Farel, also represents by his death 
 this epoch in which so many young people 
 renounce life having scarcely tasted it, 
 wearied by the first step, because, in place of 
 principles and beliefs to sustain them, they 
 have but illusions and the ardor of youth. 
 When this intoxicating gas that comes from 
 youthful blood evaporates with age, the poor 
 balloon falls empty and flat to the ground, 
 never to rise again." 
 
 There is a singular confirmation of the 
 truth of Girardin's statement concerning the 
 enervating effects of a purely literary and 
 poetical education to be found in one of
 
 178 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Lombroso's latest works. The Italian sci- 
 entist says : " No mathematician, no natural- 
 ist that I know of, at least of the very first 
 order, has come under the penalty of a com- 
 mon crime. Nor is there anything strange 
 in this. Men accustomed to breathe the se- 
 rene atmosphere of science which furnishes 
 scope and delight in itself, men trained to a 
 critical appreciation of the true, more easily 
 succeed in restraining brutal passions, and 
 are naturally repelled by the sterile and tor- 
 tuous life of crime. 
 
 "Literature and art present a less favora- 
 ble aspect. In many artists and litterateurs 
 the passions prevailing more largely, because 
 they are more potent factors of genius, are 
 less restrained by criterions of truth and the 
 severe deductions of logic, and hence are 
 to be found among delinquents: Rousseau, 
 Bonfodio, Aretino, Ceresa, Brunette Latini, 
 Franco, Foscolo, and perhaps Byron, not to 
 speak of ancient times and barbarous coun- 
 tries when brigandage and poetry went hand 
 in hand, as witness the poems of Kaleiva 
 Peag and Helmbrecht. 
 
 "This fact is an important one in connec- 
 tion with the education of the young. It 
 warns us to avoid a training too exclusively
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 179 
 
 rhetorical. Let science and mathematics 
 have their due share of attention. Encour- 
 age young men to take up a trade rather 
 than a profession, in order to diminish that 
 great class of idlers who are a perpetual 
 menace to society." 
 
 The same infallible good sense which leads 
 Girardin to put his finger on the cause of the 
 weakness of the young men of his genera- 
 tion, leads him to distinguish clearly be- 
 tween the enthusiasms of temperament and 
 the enthusiasms of experienced judgment, 
 between the apparent strength which an ab- 
 sorbing emotion lends to the soul and the 
 real strength which is founded on the calmer 
 emotions of reason. " Since love animates 
 and heats the soul," he writes, "it is quite 
 natural for the soul to mistake the increase 
 of life which it feels for an increase of force, 
 and to believe itself exalted. But it is an 
 error. Love does not change souls ; it does 
 not make the bad soul good; it simply makes 
 the good better. One is in love what he is 
 in everything else, gentle, if he is gentle, 
 ardent, if he is ardent, only a little more so. 
 lie is not something other than himself, but 
 he is a little more than himself. Love is a 
 state of the mind in which our faculties with-
 
 i So A Group of French Critics. 
 
 out changing their nature change their de- 
 gree, and increase or are excited by a sort of 
 instinctive commotion. . . . Lovers are not 
 generous, devoted, disinterested, virtuous, 
 but towards one another. They are not so 
 towards the rest of the world. Their virtue 
 is a secret between them. Their neighbor 
 knows nothing of it. Now, there are no vir- 
 tues that are not in some degree virtues 
 towards everybody. The virtues which have 
 an object so particular and a circle so lim- 
 ited are feelings, not virtues. Such is love. 
 It inspires devotion, but towards whom? 
 Towards the person we love, that is to say, 
 towards ourselves. A man saves his mis- 
 tress from peril because he loves her, but he 
 does not devote himself to his country or to 
 his religion because he loves his mistress. 
 . . . The raptures of passion pass for quali- 
 ties in the doctrine of romance; the confes- 
 sions and thoughtless effusions of love are 
 the signs of a beautiful soul, and are very 
 nearly regarded as good actions. . . . Shop- 
 clerks and students have elevated the pas- 
 sions or instincts of their age, its generous 
 sentiments, into sacred enthusiasms. They 
 have believed themselves innocent in de- 
 bauchery because they were ardent in it.
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 181 
 
 The grisetteS) in their turn, have believed 
 themselves heroines of tenderness, until 
 some fine day this sentimental dupery or 
 charlatanry yields to the fate of all false 
 sentiments which inevitably end in gross 
 emotions or sordid calculations. The Platos 
 of the counting-house and the mansards are 
 changed without much difficulty into Epi- 
 cures : ' Epicuri de grege porci. ' ' 
 
 "Love," says Girardin elsewhere, "love 
 in modern and even in contemporaneous lit- 
 erature which so often imitates what it crit- 
 icises, love holds the first place. The 
 ancients are fathers, husbands, sons, citi- 
 zens, all, in short, that men can be. The 
 moderns, to believe the poets and novelists, 
 are nothing but lovers; and of the four divi- 
 sions of human life, infancy, youth, matur- 
 ity, and old age, there is but one, youth, 
 which literature chooses to depict. The age 
 that the novelist assigns to his characters, 
 and shall I say it too ? the age at which 
 the majority of novelists begin to write, 
 prevents the affections which make the 
 strength and joy of the family from being 
 represented in a great and strong manner. 
 In fact, respect for these affections is not 
 learned until late. There comes, I know, a
 
 182 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 day in which lovers play the part of hus- 
 bands, or sons the part of fathers; but 
 novels, in general, are arranged to end that 
 day. They lead their heroes to the family, 
 but quit them on the threshold. 
 
 "In Walter Scott's novels love does not 
 hold the first place. It is sometimes the 
 subject of a tale, but even then it does not 
 make the principal theme. The sentiments 
 of father and son, mother and wife, brother 
 and sister, citizen and stranger, victor and 
 vanquished, the peculiar manners of an 
 epoch, this is what Scott represents in- 
 stead of depicting the infinite vicissitudes of 
 a single passion." 
 
 Elsewhere Girardin pays a fine tribute to 
 Scott for his gift of seeing the good side of 
 human nature, and his determination "even 
 in his description of beggars, Bohemians, 
 contrabands, not to pique the curiosity of the 
 idlers in high society by painting this lower 
 world in its grossness, its ugliness, its brutal 
 pleasures, and its ignoble language, but to 
 search behind the rags and in the slang for 
 the elevated sentiment, the noble and touch- 
 ing word, that belongs to all men, whatever 
 their rank, but which is not found except at 
 the moment when the soul rises to the level 
 of action.
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 183 
 
 " Scott has in a supreme degree this be- 
 nevolent clairvoyance, this intuition of the 
 beautiful and good through the shadows of 
 the human soul, through the inequalities of 
 social condition; and this, to my mind, 
 makes the charm and moral merit of his 
 novels. But he is not of the school that 
 lends to crime an insolent grandeur or cor- 
 rupt seduction; he does not make heroes of 
 criminals. . . . Vice is often sentimental 
 and melancholy; it interests and touches the 
 heart under the pretext of guarding still in 
 its abasement something great and good. In 
 short, it seems that we have a taste for ruins 
 in morals as well as in architecture, that we 
 like better what is half fallen than what 
 stands upright. Let us love, I agree to it, 
 what is still pure in perverted souls, as a 
 testimony to human dignity that is never 
 wholly lost; but let us not admire the ruin 
 except in memory of the edifice; let us not 
 esteem the rag more highly than the material 
 in good condition. In short, let us not take 
 in criminals what remains of virtue as an ex- 
 cuse, and let us not push the pity inspired by 
 the excuse so far as respect and admira- 
 tion." 
 
 That which has nothing but its novelty to
 
 184 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 commend it finds no favor with Girardin. 
 He is enamoured of the grand commonplaces, 
 the face of earth and sky in nature, and in 
 literature the old truths of human experience. 
 "The commonplace," he says, "is the im- 
 memorial rendezvous of all minds. Every- 
 body agrees to it; it makes law; it makes 
 proverbs. Turn it into fiction or into story 
 and immediately it takes possession of all 
 minds. It seizes the whole man, his im- 
 agination and his reason. . . . The secret of 
 poetry is but to say better than anybody else 
 what everybody thinks. . . . Great poets 
 and great orators do nothing but give, by 
 the force of their expression, a particular 
 accent to a commonplace." 
 
 In the same vigorous way in which he 
 attacks false sentiment, Girardin attacks the 
 thoughtless revolutionary spirit of youth, 
 and the belief that political institutions 
 are responsible for individual wretchedness, 
 crime, and poverty. 
 
 "Everybody," he says, "is a revolutionist 
 at twenty. Some begin to lose their heat at 
 twenty-five, but the majority push their ar- 
 dor to thirty, and to the time of their mar- 
 riage. The revolutionary spirit, even in the 
 most ardent, hardly continues beyond the
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 185 
 
 nursing of the first child, and ceases with 
 its weaning." 
 
 Marriage with its duties and responsi- 
 bilities, its practical teaching of the in- 
 terdependence of human beings, lessens, 
 according to Girardin, the wish to take risks 
 in foolhardy experiments. It teaches, too, 
 that a man's destiny is not the plaything of 
 social institutions, but the work of his own 
 hands. 
 
 " Take away pride and envy from the heart 
 of man," he continues, "and what remains 
 of the revolutionary spirit? Nothing or al- 
 most nothing, a few hollow maxims, some 
 obscure sentences, and some principles that 
 admit of all sorts of interpretations. For 
 the past four years " [written in 1852] "we 
 have heard a great deal about socialism, and 
 we have been very near seeing its works. 
 As a doctrine, socialism is the most pitiable 
 thing in the world. Nothing is so vague 
 and confused. What is it, then, that makes 
 the strength and the danger of socialism ? 
 The evil sentiments of the human heart. 
 Socialism makes proselytes only after cor- 
 rupting souls. Socialism, with its infinite 
 contradictions, is a veritable tower of Babel, 
 that is to say, an impossibility. But it
 
 1 86 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 is a tower of Babel having for its garrison 
 the seven deadly sins, and that makes its 
 strength." 
 
 Writing of the proneness of incapacity 
 and envious idleness to shift the responsi- 
 bility of their miserable condition from their 
 own shoulders to those of society, Girardin 
 says : 
 
 " In our day there is another mysterious 
 but less guilty being besides destiny, whom 
 we willingly accuse of our misfortunes. Her 
 name is society. How many the complaints 
 against her! how many the maledictions! 
 Archias was born poor. That certainly is 
 the fault of destiny. But as Archias is 
 neither active nor industrious, he stays poor, 
 and then accuses society of his poverty. 
 'This society,' he says, 'is badly organized, 
 no justice, no equity. Everything goes 
 contrary to good sense. ' What is necessary, 
 then, in order that Archias shall find society 
 well organized ? He must be rich and idle 
 in it. It is at this price only that he will 
 declare that a revolution is no longer nec- 
 essary. The revolution that elevates him 
 ought to be the last, because it is the only 
 just and legitimate one. . . . He has a com- 
 plete plan of reform for society, and its fun-
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 187 
 
 damental principle is to set up what is down 
 and pull down what is up, and all that in 
 the name of the rights of man and the prog- 
 ress of civilization. 
 
 "The essential character of the revolu- 
 tionary spirit is the belief that in sup- 
 pressing such and such an institution, in 
 overthrowing such and such a dynasty, we 
 shall suppress evil in society. By no means ! 
 You change the laws and the government, 
 but do you at the same time change your 
 vices into virtues? Do you become wiser, 
 more scrupulous, more honest? Do you 
 renounce your errors and your prejudices? 
 That is the revolution that has never been 
 tried, and which deserves trying, a revo- 
 lution which would be the improvement or 
 conversion of each one of us. I am inclined 
 to believe that in proportion as individuals 
 become of more worth, society will grow 
 better. For the last sixty years we have 
 been trying to solve a very difficult problem, 
 that is, to make a good whole out of bad 
 constituents, to found a city of God on the 
 seven capital sins. There lies the funda- 
 mental error of the revolutionary spirit. It 
 desires to create a perfect government, and 
 it commences by giving a loose rein to the
 
 1 88 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 vices of the human heart. It takes the road 
 to hell to go to Paradise, and it is surprised 
 to find itself still on the way. ... In our 
 day there is no social inequality but differ- 
 ence in education. I am not chimerical 
 enough to believe that this inequality can be 
 abolished, but I am persuaded that it can be 
 diminished, and that it is the duty of every 
 good citizen to work at the lessening of the 
 distance that separates high society from 
 that below. I believe that true Christian 
 charity demands it, and that liberal politics 
 requires it. The day in which there will be 
 some common literary pleasure between the 
 laboring and the lettered classes, the day 
 on which we shall read together some scenes 
 from Corneille and Racine, some of La Fon- 
 taine's fables, some pages of Bossuet, the 
 day on which we shall be penetrated in com- 
 mon, if but for a moment, by the light of 
 beauty and the warmth of goodness, that 
 day political and social prejudices will be 
 effaced, and many rancors of jealousy will 
 disappear. 
 
 "We complain that luxury is spreading 
 among the lower classes, and with reason, 
 because the enjoyments of luxury are to all 
 classes the cause of jealousy and rivalry.
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 189 
 
 Literary enjoyment, which is a luxury also, 
 is, on the contrary, a cause of union. It is 
 shared, as light is shared, without diminu- 
 tion of one part at the expense of another." 
 The same good judgment, clearness, and 
 acuteness that characterize Girardin's liter- 
 ary criticism are to be found in all his ut- 
 terances on educational questions. In his 
 opinion, "the greatest eulogy that can be 
 pronounced on a man is to say that he knows 
 how to get out of a difficulty, not only to 
 get out of a difficulty by a clever speech in 
 an assembly, a witty and amiable conversa- 
 tion in a salon, a good plea in a law-suit, a 
 just appreciation of the chances of loss or 
 gain in a business speculation, not to be 
 able to get out of a difficulty by his wit and 
 intelligence alone, but by the skill of his 
 hands if need be, not only to get out of a 
 difficulty in great things but in little ones, 
 not to be in constant need of having his 
 arms linked in those of other people, not to 
 be embarrassed either by his person or his 
 belongings, to have the wit of expediency 
 and activity, to be neither awkward nor 
 soft, -to know how to live, in short, with- 
 out a bell under his fingers and a servant at 
 the end of the bell."
 
 190 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 The whole man educated, hand, heart, 
 brain, independence, cheerfulness, indom- 
 itable endurance, resolute will developed in 
 him, this is Girardin's ideal; and he knows 
 that it is not to be attained by weak indul- 
 gence, that you can't teach a child to walk 
 by carrying him in your arms, that you must 
 set him on the ground, let him fall and rise 
 again, and not be too fearful about the bumps 
 he gets in consequence To have his pleas- 
 ure only in view, to shield him always from 
 crosses and vexations, is to render him inca- 
 pable of meeting the responsibilities or en- 
 during the trials of life. For this reason 
 Girardin does not believe that study should 
 be converted into play, that kindergarten 
 methods should follow the youth into the 
 grammar school and high school, because the 
 suppression of all difficulty in study is the 
 suppression of its greatest utility. 
 
 "Amused children," he says, "are gener- 
 ally melancholy and discontented young peo- 
 ple. " He thinks that education should give 
 an impulse to unceasing growth, and yet, 
 "how many men," he adds, "stop growing 
 at twenty-five and always remain 'promis- 
 ing youths,' just as many young men have 
 already become and will always remain
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 191 
 
 'children of whom much is hoped.' How 
 many degrees there are in human life, and 
 how few are they who pass through them all ! 
 There are no great men but those who un- 
 ceasingly grow greater, who add the prog- 
 ress of youth to that of infancy ; the progress 
 of maturity to that of youth, and who like 
 vigorous oaks are crowned but in extreme 
 old age. But how few there are among men 
 who have this living sap in them, and to 
 whom each year brings a new leaf and every 
 age a new strength ! " 
 
 The practical training which he finds 
 necessary for a man, Girardin wishes also 
 for woman. " Dancing and music are not 
 for every day, and especially not for every 
 moment." He is not, however, a believer 
 in what is called the enfranchisement of 
 women. In his opinion, "woman was cre- 
 ated to belong to a master whom she pos- 
 sesses," and finds her destiny fulfilled and 
 her happiness assured only in marriage. 
 However ugly this dictum of master and 
 ownership may sound in feminine ears, Gi- 
 rardin is by no means wanting in the great- 
 est respect and honor for woman, and he 
 makes that respect and honor the symbol of 
 civilization. " In whatever country you may
 
 192 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 be," he writes, "wherever you see woman 
 honored and respected, you are in a civilized 
 country. They tell me that in the United 
 States a woman can go from one end of that 
 vast republic to another, passing through 
 half -built towns and half-cleared forests, and 
 everywhere, on the railroads, in the taverns, 
 the steamboats, she meets nothing but honor 
 and respect. By that sign I believe in the 
 future of the United States; and to persuade 
 me of the greatness of her future, don't talk 
 to me of American commerce, her agricul- 
 ture, the rapid increase of her population, 
 nor of her towns that rise like magic, nor of 
 North America traversed in all its breadth 
 from New York to San Francisco, nor of the 
 bravery and boldness of her citizens, nor of 
 their wealth and prosperity, tell me only 
 that a young girl can go from North to 
 South, from East to West, as if she were 
 everywhere under her mother's eye, and I 
 am certain that there is in that country a 
 great and strong civilization." 
 
 The most important of Girardin's works 
 are "Literary and Moral Essays," "Life 
 and Works of Jean Jacques Rousseau," "De- 
 scription of French Literature, followed by 
 a Study of the Literature of the Middle Age
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. 193 
 
 of the Renaissance," "La Fontaine and the 
 Fabulists," "Lectures on Dramatic Litera- 
 ture, or the Employment of the Passions in 
 the Drama." The aim of this last work is 
 to show how the expression of sentiment has 
 changed in the course of time, being at first 
 simple and true, then elegant and refined, 
 and later, exaggerated and becoming gross 
 under pretext of returning to the true. 
 
 As a critic, Girardin does not rank with 
 Sainte-Beuve, Lessing, and De Quincey. 
 Not only the exigencies of his professional 
 duties, but the very character of his intellect 
 gave him an almost absorbing predilection 
 for the real, for what can be vigorously 
 touched and handled in the dry, white light 
 of reason. To the twilight truths, felt by 
 intuition and inexplicable by logic, to the 
 subtle and evanescent charms of poetry, he 
 was almost, if not quite, a stranger. Of 
 every truth and every emotion that concerns 
 human life, he asked, " Can I live best and 
 happiest by it?" and if the answer was no, 
 he was inclined to doubt the necessity of its 
 existence. But all his limitations leaned to 
 virtue's side. They were the limitations 
 that belong to perfect sanity, perfect health 
 of mind and body. To be sure, he had felt
 
 194 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 in his youth all the overflow of animal spir- 
 its that break out in wild pranks or thought- 
 less disorder, but he had outgrown his 
 temperamental ardor at the proper time, and 
 had learned to recognize it for what it was 
 worth. He had put forth leaf after leaf in 
 the manner of the man with living sap in 
 him, whose ceaseless growth he eulogizes. 
 He had attained the poise that comes from 
 the healthy activity of all the faculties; and 
 of the strength that was in him, he not only 
 gave to others, but he gave them the secret 
 of it. That is why he has an assured and 
 honorable, if not the highest, place in criti- 
 cism. His work is not to increase but to 
 decrease sensibility, or to turn it into proper 
 channels. He is the most indefatigable and 
 successful of chimera-hunters. He frees the 
 mind from false sentiments to make room for 
 true ones. His work is akin to that of the 
 farmer on one of our broad prairies ; and if in 
 his ploughing some fragile and beautiful wild 
 flower is uprooted, we shall not account it 
 an unpardonable sin in him, when we gather 
 the rich harvests of autumn.
 
 V. 
 
 XIMENES DOUDAN, 
 
 /"CONCEIVE of a nature in almost every 
 ^-s particular the contrary of that of 
 Saint-Marc Girardin. For the robust phy- 
 sique and sanguine temperament of the latter, 
 substitute the thinness and suppleness that 
 belong to the nervous, intellectual type, and 
 give to this fragile man of middle stature 
 the sufferings of hypochondria and the mor- 
 bid imagination that accompanies it. But 
 at the same time add, as a counterbalance, 
 the most exquisite refinement, the most pen- 
 etrating judgment, lightning flashes of wit, 
 and the lambent play of the kindliest humor, 
 and instead of a dejected invalid and a damp- 
 weather influence you shall have a "man of 
 the most delicate taste, of the brightest mind, 
 and most piquant conversation," the life and 
 soul of a salon, the subtlest of critics, the 
 "oracle of doubtful thoughts" among his 
 friends, you will have, in short, Ximenes 
 Doudan.
 
 196 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 M. Doudan was born in 1800 at Douai, 
 and died at Paris in 1872. An orphan from 
 his earliest childhood, he knew no home- 
 ties, and was singularly reticent regarding 
 himself, never speaking of his past nor of 
 his family. His education was completed at 
 Paris, where he was still living in obscurity 
 in 1826, but already noted among his youth- 
 ful associates as a young man of extraor- 
 dinary promise. Among his friends was 
 Saint-Marc Girardin, who recommended him 
 to the critic Villemain, who in turn intro- 
 duced him to the Due de Broglie, son-in- 
 law of Mme. de Stae'l. 
 
 The Due de Broglie was looking for a 
 tutor for the son of Mme. de Stae'l left from 
 her marriage with M. de Rocca. Entering 
 the family as tutor, Doudan's sterling quali- 
 ties soon made him a trusted and honored 
 member of it. At the death of Monsieur le 
 Due, Doudan continued in the household of 
 the Duchesse, and for nearly forty years was 
 the life of the salon in the Hotel de Broglie. 
 
 He lived a simple, uniform life, remote 
 from public action, but in rapport with po- 
 litical matters. He read incessantly. His 
 taste was early matured by familiarity with 
 the Greek and Roman classics, among whom
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 197 
 
 his favorites were Homer, Plato, Virgil, and 
 Tacitus. But with all his love for the an- 
 cients, he was by no means indifferent to 
 the moderns, and read everything that ap- 
 peared. Beyond a few articles contributed 
 to the "Journal des Debats," and the "Re- 
 vue Frangaise," Doudan published nothing. 
 During his lifetime his reputation was that 
 of a brilliant talker and an incomparable 
 letter-writer, a kind of reputation whose 
 merits are but hearsay to the general public. 
 
 The public learned the secret of this repu- 
 tation when, after Doudan's death, a volume 
 of his selected correspondence appeared, fol- 
 lowed by a thin volume of detached thoughts 
 entitled "Maximes et Pensees." 
 
 French literature is particularly rich in 
 Memoirs, Confessions, and Correspondences, 
 and though other literatures may boast of 
 their biographical and autobiographical mas- 
 terpieces, their Bosvvells and Cellinis arid 
 Jung Stillings, there has been but one 
 Mme. de Sevigne. As letter-writers, the 
 French are incomparably the masters of us 
 all. They have in perfection the art of say- 
 ing nothings in not only the most acceptable 
 but the most exquisite way. Out of a dull 
 little commonplace fact you shall have food
 
 198 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 for mirth or food for fancy, a grotesque 
 face carved in a cherry-stone, or a breath 
 and a drop of water transformed into a filmy, 
 floating sphere that catches the light and 
 throws it back to you in radiant colors. 
 
 The true letter-writer is one of those ami- 
 able egotists, like La Fontaine or Charles 
 Lamb, who delight you the more they speak 
 of their tastes, their temper, and their idio- 
 syncrasies. Their letters are changing por- 
 traits of themselves; you see them, now in 
 this attitude, now in that, and no attitude 
 is a pose, but a careless and natural falling 
 into the positions that varied activity re- 
 quires. The true letter is a conversation of 
 the best kind; that is, it presupposes not 
 only a good listener, but one who is ready 
 to give as well as to take. You can't be 
 witty with a fence-post. You need to know 
 that you speak to an intelligence that an- 
 swers your own, and by its vigorous reaction 
 renders you again the force that you gave. 
 Like a conversation, it admits, too, of the 
 greatest variety of theme and movement. It 
 leaps, it runs, it skims lightly over the sur- 
 face, it pauses here and there for a vigorous 
 thrust and then on again. The one thing it 
 is in duty bound not to do is to set you to
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 199 
 
 yawning, and everything is admissible in it 
 that serves this end, even if it be but the 
 teasing sophistry that wakes you to its vig- 
 orous denial. 
 
 As a letter-writer, Doudan answers all the 
 demands that can be made of him and more. 
 His letters abound in judgments so acute on 
 the literature and politics of his day that 
 they have a value beyond that of mere enter- 
 tainment, and entitle him to a high rank 
 among the critics of his time. " Good sense, 
 good taste, acuteness, and imagination make 
 of him an exquisite critic," says Scherer. 
 " Sometimes this criticism is but a sentence, 
 but it is a sentence that engraves." 
 
 Unfortunately, Doudan belonged to that 
 sensitive and fastidious type of intellectual 
 men whose worship of the ideal results in a 
 partial paralysis of their power. Amiel, 
 Joubert, and the English poet Thomas Gray, 
 are of this type. They are men of contem- 
 plation rather than of action, men enam- 
 oured of perfection and satisfied with nothing 
 less, who, discouraged at the distance be- 
 tween their achievements and their ideals, 
 pass their lives in a painful struggle between 
 the desire to produce and the consciousness 
 of impotence to reach the standard they have
 
 2oo A Group of French Critics. 
 
 raised for themselves. Such men leave us 
 but a scanty testimony to their powers, but 
 it is finished, it is exquisite in its quality. 
 They do their best work in that friendly in- 
 timacy in which the mind, forgetful of the 
 ideal which is almost its bugbear, works 
 freely and easily, following simply the dic- 
 tates of its own individuality. They are 
 inimitable talkers and inimitable letter- 
 writers. There are a few of Joubert's let- 
 ters that are worth all his "Pense"es," and 
 the same may be said of Doudan. His let- 
 ters have an ease, a vivacity, a quaint turn 
 of imagery entirely wanting in the more 
 labored productions of the volume entitled 
 "Maximes et Pense"es." In searching fora 
 soberer expression of his thoughts for the 
 public, he robs them of the color, the nat- 
 ural grace, and force they have when they 
 come warm from his mind and overflow into 
 his letters. 
 
 Therefore it is from Doudan 's letters that 
 we shall make the extracts necessary to illus- 
 trate the peculiar quality of his intellect; 
 and, to begin with, let us note the fine bal- 
 ance of his mind preserved amidst the dis- 
 tractions of a delicate frame, subject to all 
 sorts of nervous disorders. The preserva-
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 201 
 
 tion of a like poise is not common enough 
 to pass without remark. It is the testimony 
 to an intellect finely cultivated and rich in 
 resources, an intellect that can make its 
 own happiness without the aid of exterior 
 helps. Narrow minds fill and overflow with 
 the worries and anxieties of life, and suc- 
 cumb entirely to physical maladies. They 
 can see life fair, only when all is fair with- 
 out them, and their digestion and circula- 
 tion are unimpaired. In the see-saw of their 
 fluctuating emotions, they are optimists or 
 pessimists according as their pulse runs high 
 or low. They never disentangle the real and 
 permanent from the accidental and transi- 
 tory, and the stream of their life is not the 
 full, broad, onward sweep that carries with 
 it pebble and leaf and fallen tree-trunk, and 
 receives its tributaries on every hand ; on 
 the contrary, it is turned aside by every tiny 
 obstruction it meets, and loses itself contin- 
 ually in countless little rills that end at last 
 in stagnant pools. 
 
 Doudan was not vitally attacked, but he 
 suffered all his life from the most irritating 
 of maladies,- -that of sick nerves. "With 
 an imagination a little morbid," he writes, 
 " one has some difficulty in subjecting him-
 
 2O2 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 self to the rule of strict reason. I am in 
 part really sick, and I have restless and mu- 
 tinous nerves. The result is, I do not do 
 half what I want to do, and three-fourths of 
 the time I do not say half what I mean." 
 
 He had the nervous organization of an 
 hysterical woman, and it was only the man's 
 intellect and resolute will in him that kept 
 him from shattering to pieces. He had fre- 
 quent attacks of violent headache that are 
 none the less to be regarded an evil because 
 one does not die of them, as he somewhere 
 remarks. He suffered frequently from that 
 nervous exhaustion in which the mind shares 
 the hopeless weariness of the body, and ex- 
 presses it in the mute misery of an utter 
 extinction of all the interests of life. " Then 
 you know, too," he writes to a friend, "this 
 odious malady of fatigue. It is certainly an 
 invention of the devil, who, knowing that 
 activity is the great remedy for all the ills, 
 has devised a trick which turns out to be 
 this inconvenience from which we suffer. If 
 this kind of chronic weariness were like the 
 fatigue after a long walk, we should have the 
 pleasure of repose, but generally this ex- 
 haustion is mingled with nervous irritation. 
 I am not sure that the souls of Brutus and
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 203 
 
 Cato, wholly stoical as they were, could 
 have resisted this kind of captivity; but 
 very likely the ancients were not acquainted 
 with these nervous disorders, and the devil 
 had not yet made his discovery." Else- 
 where he says : " I am continually in a 
 wretchedly nervous condition. All my phy- 
 sicians say that nothing is the matter with 
 me. My good sense also tells me that, but 
 I am none the less taken captive by my drag- 
 ons whenever I am alone. ... It is clear 
 that I have always had an intensely ner- 
 vous temperament, the temperament which 
 makes the spasmodic, hysterical, and epilep- 
 tic, but I have never yielded to these extrav- 
 agances. I have an obstinate sore throat of 
 which there is no external sign, and which 
 the doctor says is spasmodic." 
 
 " I have never yielded to any of these 
 extravagances." In that assertion lies the 
 secret of the strength of the man. He had 
 a powerful will ; his mind was no party to 
 the weaknesses of his body. It sat in judg- 
 ment on them, pronounced them what they 
 were, and refused their domination. He 
 contented himself with feeling his pulse; he 
 did not record, as Amiel did, the various 
 moods dependent on the swiftness or slow-
 
 204 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 ness of its beats. Beyond the allusions we 
 have quoted, his letters contain no hint of 
 hypochondria. On the contrary, they are 
 uniformly cheerful, and move in a sphere out 
 of the reach of physical ailments. He even 
 gayly transforms the need of repose he feels, 
 and the enforced rests he takes, into a good 
 and not an evil. 
 
 "You complain," he writes to a friend, 
 " of the effects of the great and wise rest you 
 are taking. You think you are not making 
 noise enough. There are moments of intel- 
 lectual drouth similar to tnose felt by pious 
 persons in religious matters. It is the mo- 
 ment when the wings are silently growing 
 again. Continual activity degrades thought 
 more than those grand silences during which 
 it is regaining its strength. Look at the 
 busy people who are always in action. Lit- 
 tle by little they grow dry and superficial. 
 Every morning they sow a poor hastily grow- 
 ing little plant that is mowed in the evening. 
 There are neither great oaks nor deep lakes 
 in these plains. 
 
 " What could the Wandering Jew know of 
 all the sights that had passed under his eye? 
 Where he saw the swallows come, he could 
 not see them leave. The noise of his foot-
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 205 
 
 steps prevented him from hearing the silence 
 of night. If he entered a town that was up 
 in arms, he vainly returned to see which had 
 been victorious, the tyrant or the oppressed. 
 Thus continual activity cuts the thread of 
 thought. The moments in which we think 
 we vegetate in a useless repose are those in 
 which the soul hovers over abysses or over 
 heights to bring back treasures of whose ex- 
 istence she had no suspicion." 
 
 Even when his eyes fail him, and he can 
 neither read nor bear the light of day, he 
 does not break out into querulous complaint. 
 He simply says that there are some maladies 
 that can be conquered by resistance, but that 
 this malady of the eyes is not one of them, 
 that not to be able to read at all is a ter- 
 rible trial, and that nothing less resembles 
 reading than being read to. 
 
 Perhaps this delicate, sensitive frame, 
 more susceptible than most to the jars of 
 life, might have been rendered more robust 
 by a less sedentary life, >a life in which 
 daylight and not gaslight shone on him 
 oftener, but he was social by instinct. He 
 loved good conversation, and he liked to 
 escape from himself. In this he differed 
 from the purely contemplative spirits like
 
 206 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Amiel, as he differed from them also in 
 giving color and wings to his seriousness in- 
 stead of clothing her in sombre hues and 
 clogging her with weights. It was his so- 
 cial experience that taught him how to be 
 arch in his gravity and smilingly ironical 
 even in his indignation, as when he writes 
 of Louis Napoleon: "He seems to be pos- 
 sessed with the fury of being Emperor of 
 something or somebody. He is stubborn as 
 a wild ass. (I speak politely for fear that 
 he may one day be my master.) I believe 
 that he is exceedingly stupid. It is not un- 
 common to be stupid, but it is uncommon to 
 be stubborn in France. Blessed are they 
 who are stubborn, for they shall possess the 
 earth. To him who wishes to enter a house, 
 there comes a moment, if he knock at the 
 door every five minutes, when the half-open 
 door will yield. It remains to be seen what 
 will be done on his entrance. I hope he 
 may be put out by the shoulders, but it 
 won't be done without devastation." 
 
 Doudan had that imaginative vigor which 
 most naturally expresses itself in fresh and 
 lively similes and metaphors. He was an 
 etcher with words, lie could seize the tell- 
 ing points of a character or an incident in a
 
 Ximenes Doudan. ' 207 
 
 few bold strokes, as when he writes of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln : " The democrats will do well 
 to guard his memory preciously, for he is 
 the finest portrait of their race. He is ex- 
 actly the ideal democrat, simple, rugged, 
 mild, patient, courageous when the primitive 
 sentiments of human nature lay hold of him 
 by the throat. Pericles did not speak so well 
 of the young Athenians who died in the Pel- 
 oponnesian war as he did over the American 
 dead brought home to the great desolate 
 cemetery near the city of Washington." 
 
 Doudan liked color in style. " You are a 
 lover of gray tints," he writes to M. Raulin. 
 "According to you, to be a poet is to be 
 sober. If the earth were to be made over 
 again, you would put only swans and geese 
 on it, all white birds, no scarlet flamingos, 
 no colibris, no fireflies, and you would make 
 the sun set in a great white-sheeted bed, 
 with white curtains and a white nightcap. 
 A pretty king of day, by my faith ! Know, 
 sir, that at the bottom of this theory of 
 soberness lies hidden a cold poison that 
 slowly kills the imagination. Soberness is 
 a limit and not a motive. You make it a 
 motive. You abstain from drinking for the 
 mere pleasure of saying, ' I have not drunk.'
 
 2o8 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Well, what of it ? If you did not drink for 
 five hundred years, what would your regime 
 do for the progress of intelligence? The 
 apostle says that we ought to think soberly, 
 sapere ad sobrietatem. It is a rule of aesthet- 
 ics also. . . . You enjoy so vividly the 
 pleasure of not seeing color, of not hearing 
 noises that are too loud, of not encountering 
 a brusque movement, that the foundation of 
 your system is : Je ne vois qtie la nuit, n en- 
 tends que le silence, I see but the night, hear 
 but the silence." 
 
 Yet Doudan's love of color was not with- 
 out limitation. He disliked, as much as 
 those of severer taste, all extravagance in 
 the use of it, and the gaudy rhetoric of 
 Hugo and Taine displeased him excessively. 
 Writing of the latter apropos of an article in 
 the "Revue dcs deux Mondes, " he says: 
 "Taine has written three pretty pages in the 
 last number on Leonardo; but how red, blue, 
 green, ivory-black, mother-of-pearl, opal, 
 iris, and purple they are! His article is a 
 dye-merchant's shop. One might say of it 
 with the elder Mirabeau, ' Oucl tapage cle 
 coulcur! ' "' and of Hugo: "He is a gigantic 
 blusterer who preaches the clemencies of 
 philanthropy with the accent of 1793. . . .
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 209 
 
 He has written some charming verses min- 
 gled with the strangest balderdash. Beside 
 an old slipper and broken pots, you come 
 suddenly upon a beautiful wild rose wet with 
 dew. In my opinion, he mixes everything 
 in this way without premeditated design. 
 He does not distinguish the beautiful from 
 the ugly. He has a powerful enough nature, 
 which produces with vigor and indifference 
 palms, serpents, toads, humming-birds, and 
 spiders. He puts them all into a sack and 
 there is a volume done." 
 
 A score of pages could not convey with 
 more vigor and precision a juster idea of 
 Hugo's defects than these few lines. Yet 
 there was that in the nature of Doudan' s 
 imagination which made him peculiarly sus- 
 ceptible to the charms of romance. Unlike 
 Saint-Marc Girardin, the world of reality 
 was not the only world to him. Without 
 being in any sense a mystic, he knew some- 
 thing of the pleasure of those excursions 
 into the land of shadows and darkness from 
 which, if one brings back no definite idea of 
 particular objects, he brings back at least 
 a general sense of vastness and profundity, 
 and a humbling consciousness that there is 
 a reality beyond the reality that we can see 
 14
 
 2io A Group of French Critics. 
 
 and lay hold of. Speaking of a French 
 treatise on German philosophy, he says with 
 Ampere : " I like better those great troubled 
 marshes deep in places, than these two or 
 three glasses of clear water which the French 
 genius throws into the air with a certain 
 force, flattering himself in the mean time 
 that he is going as high as the nature of 
 things." 
 
 For the same reason, Kenan's rationalism 
 was particularly repulsive to him. "He is 
 a great coquet in the rank of theologians and 
 savants," he writes of Renan. "His co- 
 quetry is mingled with impertinence, but he 
 gives to the men of his generation exactly 
 what they want, bonbons that savor of the 
 infinite. He is like those chemists who 
 have made a very agreeable drink of cod- 
 liver oil; only the active principles have 
 vanished with the cod-liver, and children 
 are as consumptive as ever. He irritates 
 me by obliging me to take what he says for 
 reasoning, and not to drop the subject 
 have you ever asked yourself why women in 
 particular almost always make conversation 
 turn upon music? I fancy it is because 
 music, though superior to all the arts, even 
 literature, in the power of speaking to the
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 211 
 
 soul where words fail us, has the inherent 
 defect of being very vague and of being half 
 sensuous, half moral in an extreme degree. 
 It loves to be excited more than to reflect. 
 It wishes to enjoy everything without mak- 
 ing a virile effort at reconciliation. It rocks 
 itself in music as in a swing, now high, now 
 low, without ever advancing, or ever exercis- 
 ing volition. Renan, too, with his sweet, 
 dreamy, insinuating style winding around 
 questions without pressing them hard, after 
 the manner of tiny snakes, gives to his read- 
 ers the intoxication of the swing. His music 
 is a boudoir music like that which Plato con- 
 demned in the education of youth. It is to 
 the sound of such music that we resign our- 
 selves to being entertained by everything, 
 that we support despotism while dream- 
 ing of liberty, that we forget to row, giv- 
 ing ourselves up to the insensible currents 
 of the water, while pleasantly dreaming of 
 those energetic souls who in an earlier day 
 so transformed and improved the world, 
 saying in our insolent pride: 'These souls 
 were narrow, and did not understand the 
 world's complexity.'' 
 
 Doudan loved the ideal, but he loved it in 
 due proportion, animated by reality, which
 
 212 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 he called the seedling on which the ideal is 
 to be grafted, lest it quickly decay. " I am 
 in a rage," he writes, "with those well-made 
 intellects that have no taste but for the real. 
 Let men once grow insensible to the roman- 
 tic pleasures of the imagination within the 
 reach of all, and nothing is left them to do 
 but to seek after riches, because riches give 
 conventional pleasures that are within the 
 reach of the lowest imaginations. He who 
 cannot people a cell with the luxury of his 
 dreams will inhabit a palace in vain. He 
 will be as stupid there as the dazzling up- 
 holstery that surrounds him. I am aston- 
 ished that the English poet who wrote the 
 'Pleasures of the Imagination,' did not see 
 that he might have made a useful book, and 
 reconciled almost everybody to the medioc- 
 rity of his situation by showing him the 
 poetic side of everything. I mean by that 
 the point by which the particular order is 
 attached to the universal order. He who is 
 accustomed to live in this contemplation, 
 which is not difficult, will not only be suffi- 
 ciently happy because his wants will be few, 
 but he will also be wise and lovable. It is 
 in this sense that M. Ampere, the geometri- 
 cian, said : ' I believe that the exterior world
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 213 
 
 was created to give us an opportunity to 
 think,' that is to say, to dream and to try 
 to transform what is about us into the image 
 of the truly beautiful as it exists in the ideal. 
 If I were a clergyman, I should preach on 
 this theme, and the peasants would find hap- 
 piness in the sunshine that streams through 
 their windows. ... It is very possible that 
 in our day the devil inhabits the world in 
 the form of utility. He has maliciously 
 thought that this is the worst trick that can 
 be played on the beautiful. . . . The wish 
 to be well fed, well clothed, well and rapidly 
 transported makes us lead a very fatiguing 
 life, leaving neither repose to the body nor 
 development to the mind. The world moves, 
 but it is not God that moves it for the quar- 
 ter of an hour. It moves, but it moves like 
 dogs that turn round and round in order to 
 lie down more comfortably." 
 
 The invasion of uncompromising reality 
 into the realm of letters was as distasteful 
 to him as its absorption of life, and in vari- 
 ous letters from which the following extracts 
 are taken, he expresses that distaste, now in 
 the form of a protest against the character of 
 the material chosen, the rejection of what is 
 fine and noble in human nature for what is
 
 214 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 coarse and low, and again, protesting against 
 the excessive use of description in the de- 
 tails of material objects. 
 
 " Cicero, who was not more romantic than 
 his age, says somewhere : ' The tree which 
 the poet plants lives longer than that which 
 the laborer planted on the edge of his field.' 
 It might be said that the poets and the nov- 
 elists of the present age are no longer famil- 
 iar with these words. The beings created 
 by modern imagination have as transitory a 
 life as that of the Parisian bourgeois. They 
 are true enough, but they are the bourgeois 
 of the imaginative world. They lack for 
 their preservation the aromatic spice of the 
 ideal mingled in a certain proportion with 
 the real. But the ideal is the grain of salt 
 on the bird's tail; if we put on too much, 
 we make poor Academicians; and if we don't 
 put on enough, we have but a mortal creature 
 who dies in the course of a generation. . , . 
 
 " When you have finished Lord Byron will 
 you read ce cJdcn dc livre that is called 
 'Mmc. Bovary ' ? It is not of the same spe- 
 cies of literature. I don't see how young 
 people nowadays can have the taste to think 
 that beautiful. I do not know whether or 
 not the police-courts ought to condemn it,
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 215 
 
 but it would have made Racine and Voltaire 
 sick at their stomach. The reflection of 
 filth in the stagnant foulness of a street- 
 gutter cannot make a fine picture. Voltaire 
 drolly remarked that although everything 
 that is natural was to be found in him, too, 
 he thought it unseemly to exhibit it all. I 
 do not believe that we are in decadence, as it 
 is said, for the human intellect has made 
 some new and very valuable acquisitions 
 during the past fifty years. But we are in 
 that disagreeable, wilful age of growth in 
 which children behave like monkeys. . . . 
 
 " Half of our modern aesthetics is an affair 
 of sympathy with the opinion of others, 
 and the pliant characters are those that are 
 thought to have the best taste. Aren't 
 there a great many people who think and 
 admire as others do out of fear of displeas- 
 ing them? We do not venture to have our 
 own opinions except when we are either sure 
 of pleasing by them or are indifferent about 
 displeasing. . . . 
 
 " To the ancient writer, a table and half a 
 dozen chairs were all the necessary expendi- 
 tures for their heroes. Nowadays we go to 
 a frightful expense of flowers, trees, arms, 
 parks, farms, clogs, and forests where the
 
 ai6 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 sage botanist is always ready to be of ser- 
 vice to the reveries of each character. . . . 
 Not that I blame all this necessity for paint- 
 ing exteriors, only these fine descriptions 
 ought not to environ a dry mummy, cold, 
 immovable except when made to dance awk- 
 wardly by means of a string. ... At pres- 
 ent we like detailed descriptions; we like 
 to see the places that are inhabited by those 
 whose adventures are recounted, the fur- 
 niture of their apartments, their gardens, 
 their servants; in a word, all the externals 
 of their life. Such descriptions feed the 
 curiosity of languid souls and the passions 
 of our age, which is avid of exterior pleasures 
 simply because there is no strength in its 
 feelings and no pronounced inclinations in 
 its understanding. We seek indomitable 
 passion because our languor can be shaken 
 by nothing less than exaggerated pictures. 
 To this love of exaggerated effects must be 
 added that of sanguinary analyses in which 
 the most delicate and secret fibres are 
 nakedly exhibited; very likely because we 
 love to find the good in evil and the evil in 
 good, and this singular combination is prob- 
 ably to be seen at the bottom of all human 
 dissection.
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 217 
 
 " If a young buffalo in the Pontine marshes 
 were to write his memoirs, the details of his 
 loves, his jealousies, disorders, and despairs, 
 he would doubtless put into them the same 
 delicacy and the same moral sentiment of 
 good and evil to be found among the buffa- 
 loes of his acquaintance; but in proportion 
 as he was a buffalo with a good and culti- 
 vated mind, he would not push the descrip- 
 tive genre to these ridiculous excesses. The 
 very sincerity of his passions would prevent 
 him from seeing a multitude of things that 
 did not concern them. While pointing his 
 horns for the combat, he wouldn't describe 
 to us the little wild flower that he would not 
 notice at all, nor the village curate's wig 
 which is nothing to him. But this feeble 
 yet numerous school that calls itself real- 
 istic has, in my opinion, so little life and 
 truth in its feelings and passions that it 
 resembles the mathematician who was writ- 
 ing at his mother's death-bed: 'I lost my 
 mother to-day at twenty-two and a half min- 
 utes past eight (mean time). ' The passions 
 are not so exact, and do not see so many 
 things. 
 
 " In one of Tieck's comedies, a cat watch- 
 ing a nightingale says: 'This divine singer
 
 2i 8 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 ought to be deliciously savory. ' That is a 
 cat that knows his business, and really has 
 some feeling, and more art than the realistic 
 school." 
 
 Doudan had that sensitiveness to unassum- 
 ing merit that is only felt by warm, delicate, 
 and generous souls. Such a soul is touched 
 by the humble virtues, gentleness, modesty, 
 patience, resignation, exquisite refinement of 
 thought and feeling. An ignorant or a mean 
 soul cannot feel these virtues, but must be 
 startled into admiration by some remarkable 
 feat of heroism, just as it must be dazzled by 
 color or stunned by sound in order to feel 
 pleasure in art or music. 
 
 Doudan feels all the merit, even though 
 his wider range of thought makes him also 
 feel the limitations of such a mind as that of 
 Eugenie de Guerin, a mind, clean, trans- 
 parent, spiritual, not made for crowds but 
 for green pastures and running brooks. 
 
 "She is provincial," he writes, "but she 
 has a poetical soul. She possesses the magic 
 wand which beautifies everything around her. 
 Although she is superstitious, the natural 
 elevation of her mind gives to her supersti- 
 tion a touching and amiable character. The 
 little things of life become to her a subject
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 219 
 
 of meditation that transports her into the 
 most beautiful regions. On the contrary, 
 there are so many that set out with grand 
 ideas only to end in wretchedness; as wit- 
 ness the crowd of religious devotees. I am 
 surprised that you do not think her lot a 
 sufficiently unhappy one. She is poor, iso- 
 lated; she has lost all her people; she sees 
 slowly dying the brother who alone is left 
 to her. She is of those families of poor 
 country squires whose daughters, either from 
 poverty or pride, cannot marry their equals. 
 She is ill; nothing is sadder than her writ- 
 ing to her brother when she wants to read a 
 pious book: 'Is the book dear? I should 
 like to read it. ' A great many cages con- 
 fine birds that were made for the loftiest 
 flights. ... I hope you will have more 
 kindly sentiments for Miss Bronte, who is 
 not at all like Mdlle. de Guerin; never com- 
 plains, works unceasingly, ignoring discour- 
 agement and earning her fame by the sweat 
 of her brow, without for a single moment 
 losing sight of the small as well as the great 
 duties of the family. . . . 
 
 " I am sorry ' Cranford ' does not please 
 M. Marc Vernet. It seems strange to me 
 that he is so insensible to all the detail of
 
 220 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 feelings, scruples, and anxieties that are con- 
 cealed in these simple and good souls, espe- 
 cially since he has studied these various 
 sentiments in order to regulate them in 
 others. But to express myself quite fully, 
 as I am accustomed to do in my letters I 
 have always thought that theological habits 
 make us lose sight of the true foundations 
 of human nature. A physician who had a 
 little box containing a remedy for all the 
 ills, would not trouble himself much about 
 clinics nor the study of physiology. That is 
 why we see the profound and delicate mean- 
 ing of human nature diminish in proportion 
 as religious doctrines are restricted to a 
 small number of dogmas, and we apply them 
 everywhere and to everybody with a certain 
 confident monotony. The too habitual idea 
 of miracle makes us neglect and soon con- 
 temn all the shades of human nature." 
 
 No one has better expressed than Doudan 
 the existence of distinct national tastes in 
 literature, and the reason why that which 
 appeals to the warmest sympathies of one 
 nation shall fall dead and cold on the ears 
 of another. Writing of Goethe's "Elective 
 Affinities," he says: "There must be great 
 merit in the style of Goethe's language, for
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 221 
 
 those of his ideas that do not relate directly 
 to morality are either dull or puerile. But 
 very likely I do not understand him. A 
 man who listened impassively to a sermon 
 that made his fellow-auditors shed torrents 
 of tears, said coldly, ' I am not of this par- 
 ish, ' and perhaps he was right. Each 
 nation has its chords of sensibility that are 
 utterly incomprehensible to another. It 
 would not surprise you if, on returning to 
 France after a long absence, the English- 
 man or Pole who accompanied you were less 
 touched than you by the indefinable charm 
 you felt in these walls, woods, and fields. 
 Every nation recognizes this indefinable 
 charm in its writers. We have less of it 
 than other nations, and that is one reason of 
 our universality. For a long time we have 
 been charged with saying generalities to all 
 the world. We manufacture the household 
 furnishings and fashionable articles, but the 
 thousand nothings that touch the secret 
 fibres of a family or a province are wanting 
 in our literature. The ringlet of the woman 
 you have loved cannot touch everybody. I 
 am very insensible to the merits of the 
 'Elective Affinities,' but I am not stupid 
 enough to deny talent to Goethe. But why
 
 222 A Group of French. Critics. 
 
 did 'Werther* move all the world and all 
 the parishes of his day?" 
 
 The following is Doudan's judgment of 
 Longfellow. He has been calling Diderot 
 a lion, and continues: "As for Longfellow, 
 he is not that at all. He is a bird of the 
 tropics, a little too blue and red, a little too 
 sweet a singer. He has more elevation than 
 force. He has great thoughts that come 
 from the heart, as Vauvenargues says, but 
 he lacks the energy of mind that gives them 
 beak and claws." 
 
 Douclan is an admirer of Macaulay, and 
 thinks that he has not the reputation in 
 France to which he is entitled by virtue of 
 the "extent of his knowledge, the delicate 
 and profound culture of his mind, the bril- 
 liancy of his imagination, the abundance of 
 just ideas and the good sense that rule his 
 political sentiments; the intimate knowl- 
 edge of men and the singular mixture of im- 
 partiality and passion that is found scarcely 
 anywhere but in him." 
 
 Douclan has for Sainte-Beuvc the warm 
 admiration of a critic who knows the range 
 of culture, the coolness of judgment, and 
 warmth of feeling required by true criticism. 
 Writing at the time of Sainte-Beuve's death,
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 223 
 
 he says: "When Cousin died, it seemed to 
 me that there was now wanting to all the 
 noteworthy events of the world a passion- 
 ate, eloquent spectator, inexhaustible in 
 original and unexpected commentaries. It 
 is the same with Sainte-Beuve. No book 
 worthy of attention will appear, but we shall 
 turn towards the judge who is gone. . . . 
 His was a species of criticism very rare in 
 our day, at the same time wise and lively, 
 full of an enthusiasm that removes nothing 
 from sagacity. ... In the criticism of great 
 writers, he united the labors of a Benedic- 
 tine monk with the penetrating imagination 
 of a nervous woman; the courage to say 
 everything while preserving all the shades 
 of justice; the taste for exactness and pas- 
 sion for truth of a Courbet with the senti- 
 ment of the ideal of Ingres himself. He 
 had a prodigious knowledge of all depart- 
 ments of literature, and at times the easy 
 flight of a bird over the surface of things. 
 ... I find his ' Causeries du Lundi ' very 
 much inferior to the ' Nouveaux Lundis. ' 
 In the first he has not yet decided to tell 
 people the truth and all the truth. He is 
 still full of cajoleries towards Cousin, whom 
 he detested, and towards M. Villemain,
 
 224 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 against whom he nursed a mute wrath. At 
 that time he was a civilized cat with velvet 
 paws. In the ' Nouveaux Lundis ' he said, 
 with a very few exceptions, all that he had 
 in his heart, and, doubtless, from his little 
 cottage at the foot of Mt. Parnassus he took 
 pleasure in noting the effects of his judg- 
 ments, regardless of the amours -propres, which 
 are naturally unlimited." 
 
 In one of his later letters Doudan sums 
 up the causes of his distaste for the popular 
 literature of his time. 
 
 " My dear Friend, I fear that we are 
 growing a little old by the way in which we 
 are disgusted with our era. I sometimes 
 make an effort to conquer my own impres- 
 sions, and to see whether the disgust I feel 
 does not proceed from the fact that my hab- 
 its of thought have grown too imperious with 
 time to understand the habits of this new 
 intelligence, if intelligence it be. But in 
 looking well into the matter, I cannot fail to 
 recognize that I am right in being irritated 
 with this empty and declamatory tone; these 
 fanfaronades of ideas that recoil before noth- 
 ing ; this contempt of distinction between 
 good and evil; these impossible emotions 
 that are feigned to be felt; these contradic-
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 225 
 
 tory passions supposed to exist in the same 
 creature; this pedantic, outrageous language; 
 these vivid colors and images to reproduce 
 such cold thoughts ; the want of moderation, 
 harmony, good sense, and seemliness of all 
 kind which is spreading in literature, all 
 these accusations are founded on irresistible 
 evidence; and if hanging were the penalty of 
 such guilt, many a writer ought to be mak- 
 ing preparations for death. 
 
 "But perhaps in this devil's caldron where 
 the witches make their frightful broth, there 
 is one straw which is not solely noxious. A 
 single point of view to be caught sight of in 
 this labyrinth, merits arresting the eye. All 
 the literatures that we admire are simple and 
 harmonious; all the features are distinct, 
 clear, and brilliant. But such literatures are 
 romantic in this sense that they isolate, in an 
 ideal and luminous region, the object which 
 they wish to depict, and that in this exces- 
 sive contemplation they forget all the rela- 
 tions that the object sustains to what remains 
 outside of the frame. To-day, on the con- 
 trary, we seem possessed with the rage of 
 demonstrating that everything acts upon 
 everything else, that a continuous chain 
 unites all creatures to all things. Not a
 
 226 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 line is written that does not try to include 
 the history of the world. Have you ever 
 seen the ocean in a fury? Each wave on 
 this agitated surface takes its form of move- 
 ment from all the waves that surround it 
 from the shores of Brittany to the glaciers 
 of the pole. It is an effort to express this 
 rebound of every part upon the whole, which 
 at present makes the grimaces of literature. 
 Hence these strained forms in which each 
 word plays a role; hence all these prismatic 
 colors lavished at every turn, this claim of 
 each sentence to be an echo of all the noises 
 in the world." 
 
 The extracts given above are a sufficiently 
 clear demonstration of the trend of Doudan's 
 thought and the style of his criticism. 
 Essentially, he is neither a teacher nor a 
 preacher; he is the scholar and the gentle- 
 man, the man of taste and judgment, the 
 friend of learning and of learners ; and as 
 such, he stands for morality and good taste, 
 and will admit of no separation between 
 them. He believes in the humanizing and 
 elevating influence of the ideal; but by the 
 ideal he does not mean romantic extrava- 
 gance, such as led Don Quixote to battle 
 with windmills. He has no sympathy what-
 
 Ximenes Doudan. 227 
 
 ever with those characters in purely romantic 
 novels whom he calls the "descendants of 
 chimeras, begotten like tiny insects between 
 the leaves of books, moving by the agency 
 of mechanical springs instead of blood and 
 nerves." By the ideal he means those lova- 
 ble and admirable transformations of a fine, 
 clean imagination that gilds its tasks and 
 its surroundings with generous thoughts of 
 them, that prefers beauty to ugliness, and 
 dwells by preference on whatsoever things 
 are pure, true, just, lovely, and of good 
 report.
 
 VI. 
 
 GUSTAVE PLANCHE. 
 
 IT is easy enough to follow a beaten track 
 through a wilderness. It is the man 
 who first breaks it, whose face is scratched, 
 whose hands are torn in its thickets, and 
 whose arm knows the resisting strength of 
 its interlaced branches, it is he who knows 
 all the weariness and difficulty of the accom- 
 plished task, and it is to him that our grati- 
 tude is due when we walk with easy and 
 unembarrassed strides where he fought his 
 way inch by inch. 
 
 Wherever you find the pioneer, and no 
 matter what the character of his work, you 
 will find the same qualities. He is the 
 pioneer by the very nature of that adventur- 
 ous, independent, fearless spirit in him. 
 He is a man for whom there are no lions in 
 the way, the man whom you cannot make 
 poorer though you strip him to the skin, for 
 he carries his wealth in himself and not in
 
 Gustave Planche. 229 
 
 his purse. His is the eye that sees, the ear 
 that hears, and the hand whose cunning 
 never fails him. His is the brain that feeds 
 his heart with generous, courageous thoughts 
 which are light and warmth to him in the 
 darkness and cold of solitude and hard- 
 ship. 
 
 The man, Gustave Planche, to whom our 
 attention turns at present was of this pioneer 
 type. He was born at Paris on the i6th of 
 February, 1808, and he died in one of the 
 charitable hospitals of his native city on the 
 1 8th of September, 1857. His death was 
 the result of an abscess on his foot. 
 
 Emile Montegut has chosen Planche for 
 one of the subjects of his volume entitled 
 "Literary Sketches," and closes his article 
 on this eminent critic with the following 
 eulogy : 
 
 "Even though coming generations, more 
 and more distracted and busy, should find no 
 time to read his works, he will not be for- 
 gotten. His name will not perish. In 
 future he makes part of contemporaneous 
 history, and that history cannot be written 
 without taking his influence into account, 
 and narrating the vigorous reaction that he 
 opposed to the excesses of the romantic
 
 230 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 school. He struggled much, suffered much 
 to affirm his independence and make known 
 the rights of his liberty, and his efforts were 
 not in vain. We are gathering the fruits of 
 his labors to-day, for he made a precious 
 conquest for us. He completely emancipated 
 criticism; he freed it from servitude; he 
 withdrew it from the patronage of literary 
 patricians. To speak the truth when he did 
 to his misfortune, to have that boldness, 
 was an act of moral courage which, like all 
 legitimate resistance, was treated at first as 
 rebellion and revolt. At that time poets and 
 artists were about to transform the republic 
 of letters into an exclusive and despotic oli- 
 garchy. A new theory of divine rights was 
 invented for the poet. The abuses that 
 characterize all unlimited aristocracies were 
 already manifest. The right of remon- 
 strance or petition was regarded as inso- 
 lence. Freedom of opinion was considered 
 revolt, and the critic likened to the pam- 
 phleteer or libeller. 
 
 " Gustave Planche rose alone in the face 
 of this aggressive and violent tyranny, and 
 organized a vigorous democratic resistance. 
 More than once he felt his strength give 
 way, but he never grew discouraged, and
 
 Gustave Planche. 231 
 
 counted on right and time for the triumph 
 of his cause. 
 
 "To tell the truth is no longer so danger- 
 ous a thing as it was, and the poet or artist 
 who should now think himself exempt from 
 the common law, would quickly find his posi- 
 tion an absurd one. He might assemble 
 his clouds and hurl his poetic thunderbolts, 
 but it would be all in vain. The ridiculous 
 Jupiter would soon fall before a storm of 
 jeers and hisses. To-day we can frankly 
 say what we think without too great fear of 
 haughty insolence or insidious underhand 
 dealing. But in the quiet and peaceful ex- 
 ercise of critical rights exempt from fears 
 and persecutions, let us not forget that we 
 owe the free exercise of these rights to Gus- 
 tave Planche." 
 
 In Gustave Planche we have the pure 
 critic, the man born to his calling, and early 
 recognizing that this calling alone has any 
 real claim upon his constant attention. It 
 is a common experience that fathers are dis- 
 posed to ignore the aptitudes and self-chosen 
 occupations of their children in favor either 
 of their own calling or one which seems to 
 them to promise better worldly success. 
 
 Gustave Planche' s father was a wealthy
 
 232 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Parisian druggist, who had acquired not only 
 riches but some celebrity in his calling. He 
 was one of the founders and contributors of 
 the "Journal of Pharmacy." He had set his 
 heart on his son's succeeding him in his 
 work, and for this purpose sent him to a 
 school of pharmacy ; but instead of attending 
 school, our young hero with the artist eye, 
 and brain on fire with literary ambition, was 
 visiting the National Museum, passionately 
 studying antiques and the masterpieces of 
 art, reading enormously, and laying the foun- 
 dation of that erudition and austere taste 
 which were to make him the most formida- 
 ble critic of his time. Four years of such 
 fruitful but secret study passed, and the 
 father, impatient at his son's progress, be- 
 gan to make inquiries as to whether or not 
 he was ready to receive his diploma. When 
 he learned of the manner in which his son 
 had been employing his time, his rage and 
 disappointment knew no bounds. A terrible 
 scene followed, and the boy, driven from 
 home with his father's curse on his head, 
 entered upon that long, painful struggle and 
 isolation which ended only with his death. 
 Even when fame came to him and justified 
 the course he had taken in following: his in-
 
 Gustave Planche. 233 
 
 stincts, the father never forgave him nor con- 
 sented to see him, though the son wrote him 
 many touching letters full of contrition and 
 entreaties for pardon. 
 
 To the pain of these broken home-ties, 
 which he felt with the keen anguish that 
 belongs to a sensitive, loving heart, were 
 added the humiliations and pains of grind- 
 ing poverty. He had gone out penniless 
 from the elegances of his father's house. 
 He lived in a wretched garret. For a long 
 time he munched his scrap of bread and 
 cheese, and drank his beer at a miserable 
 tavern, where the honesty of the patrons was 
 startlingly questioned by the fact that the 
 pewter spoons, knives, forks, and brass gob- 
 lets were chained to the table. 
 
 His trousers were frayed, his coat greasy, 
 his boots worn into holes, and his old, soft 
 felt hat torn at the creases; but he wore his 
 old clothes, if not with royal dignity, at 
 least with the fine indifference of a powerful 
 mind wholly absorbed in the things that be- 
 long to itself and not to its " house of clay. " 
 He had not imposed an easy task on himself. 
 He had come to tell the truth to a world 
 that does not want to hear the truth unless 
 it appears in a seductive form, and he had no
 
 234 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 such forms to give it. As a natural conse- 
 quence, he made many enemies; and as they 
 could not attack his brain, they jeered at his 
 body. They made his poverty a crime in 
 him. They laughed at his huge belly; they 
 professed disgust for his dirty shirt, his 
 boot-heels worn off at one side, his ink- 
 spotted hands; but with a drop of that ink 
 and a stroke of his pen he was master of 
 them all. 
 
 Eugene de Mirecourt, who sometimes tells 
 the truth by accident or when it happens to 
 be more piquant than scandal, is responsible 
 for the following anecdotes, which serve, at 
 any rate, to show the popular ideas of Planche 
 during his lifetime. 
 
 "He concealed his address from all his 
 acquaintances, less from shame than from 
 love of isolation. If he were forced to ac- 
 cept an arm on returning home in the even- 
 ing, he always bade his guide adieu before 
 coming to the street where he lived. If he 
 saw anybody following him, he turned and 
 took an opposite direction. A facetious 
 artist once amused himself by keeping him 
 walking the streets until three o'clock in the 
 morning. Planche walked on heroically, 
 and it was the indiscreet pursuer who wca-
 
 Gustave Planche. 235 
 
 ried first, and Gustave was able to go home 
 without being seen. For a long time it was 
 thought that he slept in the open air on the 
 pavements of the public streets, and he him- 
 self took pleasure in giving credit to this 
 report. 
 
 "'Where are you lodging?' some one 
 asked him. 
 
 " ' I don't lodge, ' he replied, ' I perch. ' 
 
 " 'And where? ' 
 
 " ' Champs-Elyse'es, third tree to the right. ' 
 
 " When he changed lodgings, all his ward- 
 robe could be carried in his hat, a fact that 
 enabled him to dispense with hack-drivers, 
 who are great revealers of addresses. One 
 of the porters at a hotel was greatly surprised 
 to see Planche take possession of his room 
 with three false collars for all his linen. 
 
 " 'But, sir, where are your shirts? ' asked 
 the porter, nai'vely. 
 
 " ' Do me the favor, ' replied Planche, ' of 
 explaining to me why you put on shirts. 
 Isn't it to show your collars? Very well, 
 there are three collars and all of them per- 
 fectly clean.' ' 
 
 Gustave Planche had the openness and 
 sincerity of the man who touches realities 
 every hour of his life. "All who knew him
 
 236 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 intimately," says Montegut, "loved and es- 
 teemed him. His faults were those that 
 harm nobody, and his qualities were such as 
 interest every one. Certain sides of his 
 character were singularly elevated, and made 
 him worthy the respect due to his freedom 
 and candor. His enemies might revenge 
 themselves for his contempt of them by pu- 
 erile jokes on the exterior accidents of his 
 toilet, but in the presence of his character 
 every well-educated man took off his hat. 
 . . . Unlike men whom we do not learn to 
 know but after many years' acquaintance, he 
 could be wholly understood at the end of an 
 hour's conversation. There were no obscure 
 corners in this character. He allowed him- 
 self to be seen at once, like a man who has 
 nothing to conceal." 
 
 He was capable of ardent attachments, and 
 perhaps the warmest friendship of his life 
 was that which he felt for George Sand. 
 He was only four years her senior. He wit- 
 nessed the literary debut of this remarkable 
 woman, and at once recognized the power of 
 her genius. He aided her with his fine crit- 
 ical judgment and advice; he defended her 
 with his pen, and he fought a duel for her. 
 It is to be wished tnat the gratitude she
 
 Gustave Planche. 237 
 
 owed him could have expressed itself dur- 
 ing his lifetime, rather than in the tardy 
 acknowledgment of his merits in her auto- 
 biography. 
 
 "I owe," she says, "particular gratitude 
 as an artist to M. Gustave Planche, a mind 
 purely critical but of great elevation. He 
 was very useful to me, not only because his 
 frank jeers forced me to give some attention 
 to my language, which I was writing with too 
 much negligence, but because his conversa- 
 tion, little varied, but very substantial and 
 of remarkable clearness, taught me a great 
 number of things. After a few months of 
 friendly intercourse which were very agree- 
 able and very interesting to me, I ceased to 
 see him, for reasons that ought not to create 
 any prejudice against his character, which, 
 for my part, I have never had any reason but 
 to praise. 
 
 " But an intimacy with him was seriously 
 embarrassing to me. It brought me into 
 collision with other friends. All those 
 whom Planche had offended by his writings 
 or his speech considered it a crime in me to 
 admit him to my house in their presence, 
 and I was threatened with complete isolation 
 by the abandonment of my oldest friends,
 
 238 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 who, they said, ought not to be sacrificed 
 to a new-comer. I hesitated a good deal. 
 Planche was unhappy by nature, and he 
 seemed to have an attachment and devotion 
 for me quite unusual in him. I should have 
 considered it cowardly to dismiss him in 
 view of the literary hatreds his eulogies had 
 drawn down upon me, but I felt that associ- 
 ation with him was really hurtful to me in- 
 wardly. His melancholy humor, his theory 
 of universal disgust, his aversion for the in- 
 dulgent spirit in things easy and agreeable 
 in art, and the analytical tension it was nec- 
 essary to keep up when conversing with him, 
 threw me, in my turn, into a sort of spleen, to 
 which I was but too much disposed when I 
 first knew him. I saw in him an eminent 
 intelligence which generously exerted itself 
 to share its conquests with me, but which 
 had amassed them at the expense of its hap- 
 piness, and I was still at that age when I had 
 more need of happiness than of knowledge." 
 And Planche, with his great, hungry heart 
 and its need of happiness, repulsed from his 
 home, now repulsed by his friend, hated by 
 the world at large for his candor, his quick, 
 penetrating eye that pierced all surfaces and 
 went straight to the heart beneath them,
 
 Gustave Planche. 239 
 
 what of him? He had ceased to be useful to 
 her, ceased to be amusing, that is all, and 
 when he calls again he shall find the door 
 shut in his face. In a volume entitled 
 "Literary Portraits," Planche has given us a 
 touching article on "Literary Friendships," 
 which this experience with George Sand 
 doubtless inspired ; but it is written without 
 any insidious allusion or any ill-natured bit- 
 terness. Under the soiled shirt and thread- 
 bare waistcoat there beat the heart of a 
 gentleman, and Planche continued to use 
 his pen loyally for the woman who had shut 
 her door on him. And yet it was the sharp- 
 est of pens, a pen that could drop gall and 
 wormwood when it chose, a pen that earned 
 for its writer the name of "Cruel Gustave." 
 
 Balzac, who had winced under its strokes, 
 revenged himself by depicting Planche as 
 Claude Vignon in his novel "Beatrix." 
 George Sand, in the same novel, is depicted 
 under the name of Felicite des Touches, 
 "that amphibious being who is neither man 
 nor woman, who smokes like an hussar, 
 writes like a journalist, and at this moment 
 lodges with her the most venomous of all 
 writers." 
 
 Even in the most extravagant caricature,
 
 240 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 some recognizable features must be pre- 
 served, or the caricaturist misses his aim, 
 which is, first of all, instantaneous recogni- 
 tion. Therefore, even in Balzac's spiteful 
 caricature, we may find some interesting ex- 
 terior traits of our "cruel Gustave," the 
 "most venomous writer of his time," whose 
 cruelty is, after all, the greatest kindness, 
 being like that of the surgeon who removes 
 a gangrened limb to save a life. Happy the 
 age that can boast such a literary surgeon ! 
 
 Claude Vignon, as Balzac chooses to call 
 Gustave Planche, is a "proud and scornful 
 writer, who, while producing nothing but 
 criticism, has been able to give to the pub- 
 lic and to literature the idea of a certain 
 superiority. . . . This young man, bald at 
 thirty-seven, has an immense forehead, broad 
 and high, and seemingly shadowed by clouds. 
 His resolute, discreet mouth expresses cold 
 irony. Claude Vignon is imposing in spite 
 of the precocious degradation of a face once 
 magnificent, now grown livid. Between the 
 ages of eighteen and twenty-five, he has al- 
 most resembled the divine Raphael ; but his 
 nose, that feature of the human face that 
 changes must, has sharpened, while, his 
 physiognomy having sunk, so to speak, under
 
 Gustave Planche. 241 
 
 mysterious depressions, the contours have 
 filled up with bad color. Leaden hues pre- 
 dominate in this complexion. . . . The eyes, 
 light blue, once brilliant, have been veiled 
 by unknown sorrows, or dulled by gloomy 
 dejection. Intemperance has left its trace 
 in the dark circles under his eyes. The 
 chin of incomparable distinction has grossly 
 doubled. His voice, never sonorous, has 
 weakened ; without being either extinguished 
 or hoarsened, it is between extinction and 
 hoarseness. The impassibility of this fine 
 head, the fixity of this glance, conceal irreso- 
 lution and weakness which are betrayed in 
 the sarcastic and intelligent smile. This 
 weakness is one of action, not of thought. 
 There are traces of an encyclopedic compre- 
 hension in this forehead and in the expres- 
 sion of this face, which is at once childlike 
 and haughty. There is a single detail which 
 can explain the eccentricities of his charac- 
 ter. The man is very tall, slightly stooped 
 already, like those who carry a world of 
 ideas. These tall, large bodies are never 
 remarkable for continued energy or creative 
 activity. Charlemagne, Narses, Belisarius, 
 and Constantine are very uncommon excep- 
 tions to this rule. Claude Vignon certainly 
 16
 
 242 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 offers mysteries to be divined. He is very 
 simple and very ingenious. Although he 
 easily falls into excesses, his thought re- 
 mains unalterable. This intelligence which 
 can criticise the arts, science, literature, 
 politics, is unskilful at controlling the exi- 
 gencies of exterior life. Claude contem- 
 plates himself in the extent of his intellectual 
 kingdom, and abandons his body with the in- 
 difference of Diogenes. Satisfied with un- 
 derstanding and penetrating everything, he 
 despises material things. But attacked by 
 doubt, as soon as it is a question of creating, 
 he sees obstacles without being ravished by 
 beauties, and in the discussion of means his 
 hands are idle and nothing is done. He is 
 the intellectual Turk whom meditation has 
 put to sleep. Criticism is his opium, and 
 his harem of books disgusts him with work. 
 Indifferent to the least as to the greatest 
 things, he is obliged by the very weight of 
 his brain to fall into excesses in order to be 
 released for some moments from the power 
 of his omnipotent analysis." 
 
 Beneath all this jumble of contradictory 
 words and ideas, this semblance of explana- 
 tion without explaining, it is not difficult to 
 disentangle the real man, nor to see that the
 
 Gustave Planche. 243 
 
 caricaturist is conscious that he has a man to 
 deal with and not a charlatan, a man of 
 learning and searching analytical power, and 
 not a mere journalist. In his description of 
 this man, Balzac cannot wholly lay aside the 
 favorite epithets of the romantic school, 
 "divine," "magnificent," " imposing," "mys- 
 terious," "omnipotent;" and extravagant as 
 they are, even in this connection, perhaps 
 Balzac never made a less improper use of 
 them, for if human nature can afford a 
 " magnificent, divine, and imposing " spec- 
 tacle, it is most assuredly that of a strong 
 and fine intelligence setting itself the task 
 of rescuing truth and stemming the tide of 
 error at the expense of all its happiness and 
 all its worldly advancement. Surely we can 
 pardon to such a man, in the heat of the 
 struggle, the disorder of his dress and the 
 roughness of his hands. We cannot lose his 
 work for the sake of a dress-coat and a pair 
 of kid gloves. This man gave all he had, 
 his time, his youth, the vigor of his man- 
 hood. There is certainly an autobiographi- 
 cal touch in the following paragraph taken 
 from one of his articles, that may help us to 
 draw a little nearer this original, self-iso- 
 lated mind that has so many mysteries for
 
 244 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Balzac : " I have known some singular char- 
 acters of an austere and permanent peace, 
 who, while scarcely on the threshold of their 
 years, disdaining the youth that flutter 
 around them, were eager to grow old before 
 their time. They were ambitious to feel 
 under their yellow tresses the thoughts that 
 ordinarily mature only under bald and wrin- 
 kled foreheads. These characters take sen- 
 sual pleasure by its pitiless and terrible side. 
 They kill their senses to disengage their 
 souls. They lacerate the body to open to 
 the intelligence larger horizons and more 
 distant perspectives. Beyond the pleasures 
 they prescribe for themselves and enjoy to 
 the full, they perceive the serene atmosphere 
 of thought." 
 
 It was in this atmosphere alone that Gus- 
 tave Planche could breathe fully and freely. 
 He carried it about with him, and it made 
 him independent of material surroundings. 
 He realized almost literally the poet's boasted 
 satisfaction with "a hollow tree, a crust of 
 bread, and liberty." Poverty pinched him 
 the sorest where it laid restrictions upon his 
 mental development. He knew a hunger 
 fiercer than that which attacks thejbody, the 
 hunger of the mind. To him completion
 
 Gustave Planche. 245 
 
 of life meant complete mental develop- 
 ment. 
 
 "Count the men," he writes in an article 
 on Sainte-Beuve, "whose life is complete, 
 I do not say in the most absolute sense, 
 but the men who, without losing any of their 
 faculties, choose one of them to carry it to 
 the ultimate limits of its development; count 
 the men who know how to love to renuncia- 
 tion, who know how to understand and sound 
 truth without any other care than for truth 
 herself, without any underlying thought of 
 profit or renown, who know how to will and 
 how to pursue the accomplishment of their 
 will to the contempt of danger, who give to 
 their resolution the proportions of an heroic 
 struggle, count them and you will under- 
 stand that human life, severely interrogated, 
 is, for the most part, but a succession of 
 abortive feelings, ideas and resolutions. 
 Transient emotions, confused perceptions, 
 ephemeral desires, that is the ordinary tis- 
 sue of our days. The passions which bringi 
 forth devotions, the ideas which are trans- 
 formed into glorious works and fertile dis-i 
 coveries, the desires which in persistence\ 
 become resolves and inspire heroic actions, \ 
 are the possessions of a few rare souls. The
 
 246 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 rest make a feint at living, and do not live 
 at all. 
 
 " What role does sensual pleasure play in 
 this impoverishment of our faculties ? Noth- 
 ing is easier to determine. The pursuit of 
 pleasure every hour and on every occasion 
 leaves no time for the development of feel- 
 ing, intellect, or will. Egotism and idleness 
 soon destroy all conceptions of right and 
 duty. Accustomed to regard pleasure as the 
 supreme and constant aim of life, we listen 
 with a smile to the history of actions that 
 are inspired by generous sacrifice. We feel 
 contempt and pity for those intellects that, 
 amorous of truth, consume their nights in 
 laborious watches in order to enlarge the 
 domains of science. We treat as madmen 
 those who stake their life to take their rank 
 among the heroes. Satisfied with the pleas- 
 ures of the senses, we despise those who rise 
 above them, and when we realize the depth 
 of the abyss into which we have fallen, and 
 make a desperate effort to remount to moral- 
 ity, when we try again to grasp love, intel- 
 lect, will, we too often fail in the tardy 
 effort. We have grown enervated in the long 
 sleep of the nobler faculties, for we. have 
 sought the intoxication of the senses only
 
 Gustave Planche. 247 
 
 to obtain sleep for the soul, and the strug- 
 gle instead of re-establishing our strength 
 quickly exhausts us and we return to dark- 
 ness and nullity. Our eyes can no longer 
 endure the light, and life that is truly worthy 
 of the name has become a punishment for 
 us." 
 
 The history of effort, of persistent will, of 
 difficulty met and overcome, touched Planche 
 more nearly than anything else, because it 
 spoke to his own experience: "History is 
 full of salutary lessons to me," he says. 
 " We are comforted and calmed by the spec- 
 tacle of sorrows that have preceded ours. 
 And so I never read without being deeply 
 touched one of the wisest books of England, 
 Samuel Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.' 
 I very readily pardon the author's grave ped- 
 antry, the affected emphasis of his doctrines, 
 and the Puritanism of his taste in favor of 
 the anecdotes and traditions that he has 
 gathered with such religious labor. Milton 
 a schoolmaster! Savage writing in the 
 street or in a smoky tavern on a borrowed 
 piece of paper the disordered scraps of his 
 poems ! Do you know many novels so rich 
 in touching emotions ? " 
 
 In 1840 a small fortune reverted to Planche,
 
 248 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 and released him for a time from the cease- 
 less grind to which he had been subjected. 
 He had nearly burnt his eyes out with study. 
 He was young, and could still profit by the 
 stimulus of fresh environments. He was in 
 sore need of rest, and he took it. Poverty 
 and struggle had nothing new to teach him, 
 and no experiences so bitter that he could 
 not endure them or could fear meeting them 
 again. There was one experience he had 
 not tasted, that of spending his francs as 
 if they were grains of sand, and he the 
 owner of Sahara's desert. That experience 
 was possible to him, for a limited period, 
 at any rate. He set out for Italy, and for 
 five years nothing was heard of him at Paris. 
 In Italy he gave himself up to the study 
 of art and music, to which he had always 
 been as much devoted as to literature. The 
 result of his labors was a volume entitled 
 "Etudes stir les Arts." Raphael, Rubens, 
 Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, and Meyer- 
 beer are the principal themes of this vol- 
 ume, which abounds in acute judgments on 
 music and painting. "Many among us," 
 writes Montegut, "who would not like to 
 confess it, owe to Planche our knowledge of 
 the difference between a good painting and
 
 Gustave Planche. 249 
 
 a seductive painting, between an original 
 school and an imitative school, and the fact 
 that French art is not above Italian art, nor 
 the Spanish superior to the Flemish school." 
 We have a number of apocryphal stories 
 about Planche' s extravagances in Italy, but 
 one thing is certain. At the expiration of 
 five years he was back in Paris with no in- 
 crease in his wardrobe and nothing in his 
 pocket. The grind recommenced. His crit- 
 icisms on music and art brought him fame if 
 not wealth, and won him the esteem of the 
 Emperor, Napoleon III., who offered him 
 the direction of the Academy of Fine Arts. 
 He refused the directorship to escape any 
 temptations that might assail his independ- 
 ence as a critic. This independence was the 
 birthright that no humiliation, no suffering, 
 no bribe could tempt him to sell. He had, 
 to use his own language, one of those " in- 
 flexible minds which pursue truth under all 
 its forms, which will not pardon in favor of 
 popularity if it be unjust, nor of talent if it 
 be a liar, nor of science if it lead astray; 
 which in the appreciation of a work put the 
 idea above the man, and never consult any- 
 thing but their conscience in pronouncing a 
 judgment."
 
 250 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 In his particular interest in a man's work 
 independent of the man himself, Planche 
 differs notably from Scherer, to whom the 
 man was always more interesting than his 
 productions. Scherer values the tree more 
 highly than its fruit. To Planche, on the 
 contrary, the tree exists for the sake of its 
 fruit, and it is the quality of the latter that 
 absorbs his attention. In his critiques he 
 merely sketches the biographical and anec- 
 dotical part, and hurries on to a discussion of 
 the author's works. To this discussion he 
 not only brings what Balzac styles an "en- 
 cyclopedic comprehension," but a rare sense 
 of his duty as a critic, which is, according to 
 his conception, to cultivate the public taste 
 and act indirectly upon the mass of creative 
 minds. He wishes to substitute, in public 
 taste, the enjoyment of the beautiful for the 
 tawdry, reality for affectation. " Grandeur 
 in simplicity, chastity in grace, ideality in 
 harmony, such," he says, "are the constant 
 elements of beauty." He feels that the 
 " contempt of sincere, pure, and disinterested 
 passion leads inevitably to the contempt of 
 thought itself and all the works of thought; 
 that pleasure, taking the place of love, di- 
 minishes the sympathies for poetry, paint-
 
 Gustave Planche. 251 
 
 ing, sculpture, and that, in its turn, contempt 
 for art impels the multitude to seek brutal 
 pleasures." 
 
 With all his austerity, there is nothing of 
 the prude in him. He believes that truth 
 has no side that may not become a glorious 
 theme for the imagination, but he believes 
 in modesty of expression for freedom of 
 thought. He would have a writer say all 
 that he wishes to say, without restriction, 
 without cowardice, but he would have him 
 find grave, chaste words for his boldest 
 thoughts. Ever behind the saying, he 
 wishes to see purity, not averting her eyes 
 from vice, but pointing to it for its amelio- 
 ration, in clear, white daylight, and not in 
 the factitious light of a morbid imagination 
 that lends to it a false brilliancy and fatally 
 seductive charms. 
 
 The severest of Planche' s criticisms are 
 now accepted by all men of the finest taste 
 and judgment. But at the time they were 
 written, they excited the greatest indig- 
 nation. We have already learned from 
 Montegut something of the servile, fulsome, 
 and shallow character of the criticism of 
 Planche's day; but we shall get a better in- 
 sight into its character by Planche's own
 
 252 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 arraignment of it, and we shall learn, too, 
 something of Planche's critical ideal. 
 
 "Where will you find frank and loyal crit- 
 icism to-day? Count on your fingers those 
 who make themselves hoarse in shouting 
 what they truly think. Count them, and tell 
 me if ever language has been more scanda- 
 lously prostituted? There is a kind of criti- 
 cism which is very much in vogue at present. 
 Its business is not to study long in order to 
 have a just opinion; to pass its nights in 
 reflection in order to discern the true mean- 
 ing of a book and to search afterwards the 
 clearest and purest form for its thought. It 
 pities such childishness. What it wants is 
 not a just opinion, but an opinion to put on 
 sale. It keeps a shop in a public place, 
 mud for those who despise it, incense for 
 those who pay. The loungers know nothing 
 about literature, and are very glad to have a 
 ready-made opinion. . . . Yes; nowadays 
 language is a commodity, like the youth and 
 beauty of starving women. . . . Another 
 plague of criticism a plague which, though 
 it has nothing disgraceful in it, is not, how- 
 ever, without its seriousness is indiffer- 
 ence. . . . Peaceful in the midst of his 
 knowledge, the indifferent critic compares
 
 Gustave Planche. 253 
 
 the present and the past without coming to 
 any decision. He sees in the literary gym- 
 nasium only a distraction for his leisure. 
 He amuses himself with the poetical names 
 of all ages, and looks upon the glories that 
 come and go without being saddened or in- 
 spired. He permits himself the spectacle of 
 the production, but he does not allow himself 
 to sympathize with the author. He fears to 
 trouble the serenity of his thought. . . . 
 One thing absorbs him beyond anything 
 else, and that is the preservation of his 
 peace of mind. Whenever he takes up his 
 pen he considers his own comfort and not 
 the truth. He never asks himself: Is it 
 useless to blame, is it wise to approve what 
 is before me? Would it not be just to en- 
 courage this voice which has not yet found a 
 hearing, to encircle with glory this young 
 brow ? Are n't there some profound thoughts 
 in this poem, unperceived as yet by the vul- 
 gar eye, thoughts that have found no ap- 
 plause, and need to be interpreted in order 
 to be valued ? No ; instead of that, without 
 troubling himself in the least about the value 
 of the book, he says to himself: Whom shall 
 I meet to-night ? The family and the friends 
 of the author. Let us treat him with con-
 
 254 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 sideration, for we must quarrel with no- 
 body. 
 
 "The indifferent critic knows that to speak 
 frankly is to condemn himself to live alone. 
 He would not like to meet in a salon a face 
 embarrassed at his approach; and therefore 
 he will be careful to give an inoffensive 
 expression to his thought. Consequently, 
 what power there is in his remarks ! . . . 
 He sits down to his task without ardor or 
 indignation; he spares the reader neither 
 exposition nor episodes. He never hazards 
 thinking for himself. He limits himself to 
 the role of a reporter. But he fills his role 
 completely and without reserve. . . . Only, 
 don't ask him whether he approves or con- 
 demns. He has no answer for such questions. 
 Prudence requires him to be silent. . . . 
 
 "There is another kind of criticism, se- 
 vere, vigilant, impartial, that recognizes no 
 other law than its own conscience, no other 
 aim than truth. ... Of what use is sin- 
 cere, alert, disinterested criticism? Can it 
 aid the progress of literature? Can it influ- 
 ence the author and the public? Doubtless 
 the creative imagination \vill voluntarily ab- 
 stain from consulting criticism. ... It will 
 be satisfied with itself, and having finished its
 
 Gustave Planche. 255 
 
 work will resolutely say, ' I am right. ' Let 
 it do so. I do not blame such a course. 
 But after this self-satisfaction has lost its 
 edge, the author needs fame. After the tes- 
 timony of his consciousness, he wishes pop- 
 ularity. Here the critic rightfully comes to 
 his aid. Take the finest novel, ' Ivanhoe, ' 
 the finest tragedy, 'Romeo and Juliet,' 
 and call the crowd. Do you think it will 
 yield itself naively to its admiration? Do 
 you think it will dare to be moved, and that 
 it will not blush for its tears? Yes, if you 
 mean the ignorant and vulgar crowd, the 
 laboring and illiterate who have not time 
 to forget their nature; but, no, if you mean 
 the crowd that flutters in drawing-rooms 
 and the counting-houses, the crowd de- 
 praved by morbid curiosity. For this half- 
 educated multitude that fill the boxes of your 
 theatres and concert-halls, there is needed a 
 vigilant authority to cry hourly to them in 
 the presence of the finest creations of the 
 human mind : ' Applaud without fear ! You 
 will not be compromised by tears and ap- 
 plause. Emotion is your right. Be happy; 
 admire; you will not be obliged to retract 
 to-morrow an imprudent suffrage given to- 
 day. I am watching without relaxation in
 
 256 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 the interests of your vanity. Like a faithful 
 cup-bearer, I taste the wines that are served 
 at your table. Drink and intoxicate your- 
 selves. The joy is harmless, and the awak- 
 ening without dishonor. For such service, 
 independent criticism justly merits a little 
 gratitude. ... If patient reflection could 
 not perceive and signalize any but superfi- 
 cial merits, if study and comparison could 
 not surprise by analysis any but the beau- 
 ties that are revealed to every one, criti- 
 cism would no longer exist. It would have 
 neither value nor individual force; it would 
 be confounded with the conversation of draw- 
 ing-rooms, the indecisive reveries of the 
 promenade; it would write and cry in vain; 
 opinion would remain deaf to its author- 
 ity." 
 
 In Sainte-Beuve, Planche sees a critic 
 whom he can heartily approve : " Sainte- 
 Beuve tells the truth for the pleasure of 
 telling it. He popularizes the names dis- 
 dained by ignorance or frivolity. . . . He 
 walks along his chosen road and acquires 
 fame for himself in giving fame to others. 
 When he meets a poet whose voice is scarcely 
 heard, he applies himself unceasingly to en- 
 lanrinec its audience. He constructs a the-
 
 Gustave Planche. 257 
 
 atre with his own hands; he himself arranges 
 the acoustic tubes which are to magnify and 
 convey the sound to the most distant and 
 inattentive ears. Then, when the audience 
 is seated to listen, he watches the astonished 
 faces with a vigilant eye, to spy out inatten- 
 tion or want of understanding, and, like the 
 choir of the ancient tragedies, he moralizes 
 the crowd, and unfolds to them the mysteries 
 of the symbols at which they ignorantly 
 wonder. ... He has lent a brotherly hand 
 to many a shipwrecked person who, on 
 touching shore, has forgotten the name of 
 his savior, He has covered many an ob- 
 scure soldier with the imperial purple. . . . 
 " Before his time French criticism was 
 neither learned nor severe; it was scarcely 
 anything more than a vulgar enough sifting 
 of precepts and formulas whose meanings 
 were lost. To Sainte-Beuve belongs the 
 honor of putting poetry into criticism. It 
 was he who first made of the analysis of lit- 
 erary works something living and sparkling, 
 capable of exciting interest by its own 
 merits irrespective of the work which served 
 as its point of departure. . . . Each of his 
 studies is a veritable voyage. He returns 
 to us from his adventurous journeys as from
 
 258 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 a distant country. He shakes from his feet 
 the sand of unknown shores ; he carries in 
 his hands the stems of unfamiliar plants 
 which he has gathered on his road. Nor 
 need we be surprised, if, like all travellers, 
 he is somewhat impregnated with the cus- 
 toms and the passions of the people among 
 whom he has been visiting, and in his turn 
 boasts of the temples of Bombay, Memphis, 
 and Athens, and confesses so many religions 
 that we might take him for an infidel. No, 
 this perpetual mobility is but constant good 
 faith. In each of his initiations Sainte- 
 Beuve never loses sight of Francis Bacon's 
 saying: 'The disciple must believe.' He 
 believes in Saint-Martin and Lamartine, in 
 Chateaubriand and Lamennais, in Diderot 
 and the Abbe" Prevost; but for him, to be- 
 lieve is only a manner of understanding. 
 He believes in order to know; he studies 
 with the heart as women do, and like them 
 he yields himself in order to obtain. The 
 new faith which he accepts has nothing arti- 
 ficial or irresolute in it. By dint of contem- 
 plating his new friend, he is transformed 
 into his image ; he begins to live his friend's 
 life; he evokes the shades of a society that 
 no longer exists; he awakens extinct pas-
 
 Gustave Planche. 259 
 
 sions ; he reconstructs characters and resolu- 
 tions that are impossible in our day; and 
 all that with such good grace, with such per- 
 fect naturalness, that we yield to the illusion 
 with him. Each of the models that he poses 
 before us, gains our affection by revealing 
 some unexpected merits. It may be that 
 more severe and less expansive intellects re- 
 pudiate some of Sainte-Beuve's admirations. 
 There are serious souls full of candor and 
 sincerity that do not so easily yield to sym- 
 pathy as he does; but he disarms reproach 
 by the sincerity of his opinions. He is 
 happy to admire as others are happy to 
 understand." 
 
 Planche himself belongs to these "serious 
 souls full of candor and sincerity." He 
 says that truth in literary discussions is 
 worth something more than elegant sen- 
 tences, and that he would willingly give a 
 dozen well-dressed, coquettish phrases for 
 three just, reasonable words. "Let artisans 
 become artists, rhymers poets, and we shall 
 be the first to clap our hands. Until these 
 marvels are realized, let us patiently resign 
 ourselves to rare and sincere admirations. 
 Let us not prostitute our eulogies to all 
 rhymes drawn up in line; for our voice in
 
 160 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 degrading itself will lose the right to salute 
 serious glories." 
 
 The idea of preparation for both literary 
 and artistic work is one that often recurs in 
 Planche. He is no believer in improvisa- 
 tions. He believes that the development of 
 elevated sentiments requires a patient educa- 
 tion; that before painting or modelling, the 
 artist must first learn to think, must first 
 sound the problems that excite intelligent 
 curiosity; that before writing, the author 
 must slowly and patiently accumulate and 
 select with the severest care the thoughts 
 that he offers to the public. 
 
 When he hears that Chateaubriand trans- 
 lated "Paradise Lost," and summed up the 
 history of English literature in eighteen 
 months, he says : " Unless the author, in the 
 midst of his political life, has found means of 
 reading and re-reading the historians, phi- 
 losophers, and poets of Great Britain, which 
 appears doubtful, it is evident that he was 
 not prepared for the task he had undertaken. 
 It is not in a few months alone that he 
 could have made himself able I shall not 
 say to study, but simply to perceive, the in- 
 numerable questions with which the history 
 of English literature is filled. I grant that
 
 Gustave Planche. 261 
 
 if he knew English he might have translated 
 ' Paradise Lost ' in eight months. But I 
 shall never admit that a year was sufficient 
 for him to read, compare, and judge all the 
 literary monuments from the time of the 
 Norman Conquest down to our day, that 
 is to say, all the thoughts expressed by a 
 great nation in the space of seven hundred 
 and seventy years. The very announcement 
 of the problem is an affirmation that M. 
 Chateaubriand has not solved it. Had he 
 been laborious as Leibnitz, he could not have 
 accomplished, in the space of a year, a work 
 which embraces so many subjects, and of 
 which the very materials could not have been 
 collected by the most active and penetrating 
 intelligence in so short a time. . . . We do 
 not like trials of skill, and we do not think 
 that they profit anybody. " 
 
 Planche accuses Eugene Sue of a superfi- 
 cial acquaintance with historical facts; tells 
 him that in his works farce, buffoonery, and 
 caricature are wedded to melodrama, and 
 form a medley that no serious critic can 
 treat as literature without forgetting his 
 duties and mission. He concludes his cen- 
 sure by warning him that it is to study and 
 to labor that renown legitimately belongs.
 
 262 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 He criticises the French Academy severely 
 for opening its doors to Eugene Scribe, who, 
 he says, is incapable of a great work, and has 
 always treated good sense and grammar with 
 the most absolute contempt. He wishes the 
 Academy to admit only those candidates who 
 are truly literary. He wishes it to precede 
 and not to wait for popularity; to dominate 
 public opinion instead of servilely following 
 it. In literature as in the army, he would 
 have honorary degrees won by the sweat of 
 the brow. 
 
 He explains Scribe's success by saying 
 that "The crowd likes to hail its old jokes 
 again and again. It likes to applaud itself 
 for a clairvoyance that is no expense to its 
 attention. It likes to proclaim itself intel- 
 ligent and ingenious, and hails with grati- 
 tude the bans mots to which it has listened a 
 hundred times. The more a thought seems 
 worn-out, the greater are its chances of suc- 
 cess with the crowd. M. Scribe owes the 
 best part of his success to his perfect knowl- 
 edge of this fact. . . . He has taken for his 
 gospel this incomparable maxim : ( The rich 
 are right in being rich, and the poor are 
 wrong in being poor. ' Sifted clown to their 
 fundamental expression, Scribe's comedies
 
 Gustave Planche. 263 
 
 have no other conclusion than this : Get rich, 
 no matter how, and the esteem of the world 
 will not fail you; but if you are fool enough 
 to get entangled in a sincere passion, you 
 will be the laughing-stock of honest folks, 
 that is to say, the laughing-stock of people 
 who are well-born or have become rich." 
 
 No critic ever had a keener eye than 
 Planche for the detection of veneering. No 
 matter how high the polish, how skilful the 
 imitation of color and grain, he is too famil- 
 iar with the solid wood to be deceived an 
 instant. When Chateaubriand's name was 
 still a name to conjure by, and his "Genius 
 of Christianity" could still find popularity 
 and applause, Planche wrote of it : " It is a 
 book written for idle women and for young 
 people whose life is spent in gaming, fenc- 
 ing, and horsemanship. For serious minds 
 that make reading something else than a 
 distraction, it is poor nutriment, a fruit 
 without savor, an exhausted plant, useless 
 dust. But this dust is brilliant and gilded; 
 it shines in the sun and pleases the eye. 
 The book means nothing, but the author 
 gives proof of rare skill. He never has phil- 
 osophical clearness or Christian fervor, but 
 he has, everywhere and always, abundance
 
 264 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 and poetic beauty. He is a speaker who 
 rarely thinks, but who talks very well, and 
 his audience, in listening to him, forget that 
 the imagery is egotistical and envelops but 
 a frail, scarcely apprehensible idea. . . . 
 Chateaubriand is a writer who sacrificed 
 being to appearing. His name will live 
 longer than his books. He is the author of 
 several hundred admirable pages, but he has 
 not written a single fine book." 
 
 But with all his strenuous insistence on 
 thought, Planche is by no means indifferent 
 to the merits of style, nor does he wish 
 erudition to take the place of poetry. He 
 demands the graces of art as well as the so- 
 lidity of substance. He praises Guizot for 
 his industry and sagacity in collecting and 
 arranging facts ; but he does not find in the 
 expression of his ideas, the least trace of 
 composition, and terms his " Essais sur 
 1'histoire de France," simply a mass of ma- 
 terial, valuable to be sure, but wanting in 
 literary form. 
 
 In an article upon the state of dramatic 
 literature in France, Planche has given us 
 an admirable exposition of his theory of art 
 which will help us to understand the point 
 of view on which his criticism rests.
 
 Gustave Planche. 265 
 
 "M. Dumas," he writes, "has all serious 
 artists against him. Music and architecture 
 have evidently nothing to do with the ques- 
 tion; and painting and sculpture, which, by 
 the methods they employ, seem at first sight 
 to be more rigorously allied than poetry to 
 imitation of nature, have always, in the 
 hands of eminent men, been an interpreta- 
 tion, and never a literal copy of the model. 
 Take painting and sculpture in the most 
 splendid epochs of their history, and you 
 will never find them separated from inter- 
 pretation, that is, from the ideal. Now, 
 what is true of the plastic arts is no less 
 true of poetry. If form and color, in their 
 interpretation of the human model, are 
 obliged, in order to render it intelligible, 
 not to reproduce it slavishly, but to efface 
 here and exaggerate there ; language, in pro- 
 posing to itself a similar task, ought not to 
 be exempt from the conditions we are about 
 to set forth. If marble and canvas, in imi- 
 tating the model, cannot dispense with in- 
 vention, neither has language the privilege 
 of attaining to poetry by literal imitation. 
 I know very well that the multitude persist 
 in seeing in M. Dumas' servile reproduction 
 of nature the ultimate dictum of human art.
 
 266 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 But in the face of a gross error or an obsti- 
 nate ignorance, we must not fear attacking 
 the opinion of the majority. If nature, ser- 
 vilely copied, is the last word of human art, 
 then the works of Phidias and Raphael are 
 very much inferior to the figures of Curtius. 
 If the genius of the artist is directly propor- 
 tional to illusion, then colored wax, clothed 
 in serge, is very superior to the sculptured 
 figures on the frieze of the Parthenon, or to 
 the frescos of the Vatican. To profess in 
 good faith that nature, servilely copied, is 
 the highest expression of art in painting, 
 sculpture, and poetry, is never to have stud- 
 ied, never to have caught a glimpse of the 
 laws of the imagination either in the domain 
 of consciousness or in the domain of works 
 that are proclaimed beautiful by the unani- 
 mous consent of all cultivated minds. To 
 sustain the doctrine of realism in art, is to 
 misunderstand the very cause of the admira- 
 tion won by the master-pieces of art and 
 literature. It is to be blind to beauty; it \ 
 is a confession of incapacity in all ques- ' 
 tions of aesthetics. 
 
 " But even were nature the supreme aim of 
 human art, even if interpretation were to be 
 erased from the list of poetic duties, still M.
 
 Gustave Planche. 267 
 
 Dumas would be very far from right in his 
 calculation, for he has reproduced in his 
 works only the grosser part of nature. He 
 has resolved on copying man as he is, and 
 he copies only the physiological element in 
 him. He wishes to depict passion restored 
 to its primitive laws, and, to be frank, he 
 has not even divined passion; he has not 
 depicted sentiments, he has depicted appe- 
 tites. He has adorned with the name of 
 love, the purely physical attraction of one 
 sex for the other, and has never put on the 
 stage true, pure, poetic love. Always and 
 everywhere, he has substituted the animal 
 for the hero, heat of blood for exalted hope. 
 Far from idealizing the reality which he has 
 before him, he does not even represent com- 
 plete reality. Had he portrayed without 
 omission the model which he wished to 
 copy, he would not have ranked among the 
 poets, but at least the poets would have un- 
 derstood him, even if they did not accord 
 him the honor of fraternal sympathy. Had 
 he wholly accomplished the task which he 
 assigned himself, he would not have given 
 proof of poetic power, but in displaying to 
 the multitude, not only the element that 
 poetry disengages and idealizes, but also the
 
 268 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 useless and importunate element that it 
 neglects but does not misunderstand, the 
 crowd, unconscious of the useless element, 
 would have been indebted to him for emo- 
 tions of an elevated order. 
 
 " In confining the drama within physiolog- 
 ical limits, he has condemned himself to 
 perpetual repetition of a scene which never 
 varies, and of which the only actors are, and 
 always will be, the strength that desires 
 and the weakness that cannot defend itself. 
 There were yesterday, and there will be to- 
 morrow, spectators and applause for this in- 
 variable scene; but in literary discussion, 
 such a fact is an objection that has no 
 weight. . . . Popularity I do not say 
 fame does not come to works slowly con- 
 ceived, composed in long watches, written 
 without haste and meditated at leisure. It 
 caresses and applauds works conceived with- 
 out reflection, composed without discern- 
 ment, written by the ream for money, and 
 the ignorant count the pages which they 
 cannot judge." 
 
 The vigorous critical war that Planche 
 waged, and in which he made so many ene- 
 mies, while winning victories for sound crit- 
 icism, was directed against Hugo, Balzac,
 
 Gustave Planche. 269 
 
 and their followers. In 1838, when Victor 
 Hugo was thirty-six years old, and the most 
 popular poet of his day, Planche wrote a 
 critique in which he complained that Hugo 
 is wholly absorbed in the musical and pict- 
 uresque features of his verses to the exclu- 
 sion of their sense and feeling. "Hugo says 
 all that he wishes to say, but I must add 
 that he has nothing to say. Wholly ab- 
 sorbed in the evolutions of his strophes, 
 occupied in disciplining them, in making 
 them march by twos and threes, and in 
 dividing them into columns, he has not time 
 to ask whether these gilded ranks that glit- 
 ter in the sun are as ready for war as for 
 parade. Proud of their docility, he regards 
 them with a fond and joyous eye, and in this 
 childish pleasure forgets the most imperious 
 of all the laws that govern poetry. He sings 
 for the mere sake of singing. He vocalizes; 
 he lavishes high notes and low notes; he 
 runs an octave in a minute, and does not 
 understand the very essence of poetry. He 
 forgets to feel and to think. With him, this 
 forgetfulness is voluntary and is formulated 
 into a system. Astonished at the ductility 
 he has been able to give to his words, he 
 soon comes to believe that poetry can do
 
 270 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 without ideas and feelings; and I am forced 
 to acknowledge that this singular belief has 
 become contagious. The collection of poems 
 known as ' Les Orientales ' has, for a great 
 while, appeared to the disciples of M. Hugo 
 the greatest triumph that poetry can obtain. 
 Without misunderstanding the richness and 
 brilliancy of this collection, we believe that 
 true poetry plays no part in the ' Orientales ; ' 
 because that poetry which is addressed 
 neither to the heart nor to the intellect, 
 which excites no sympathy, awakens no med- 
 itation, does not merit the name of poetry; 
 it is only child's play. There is not a page 
 in the ' Orientales ' that either moves or in- 
 structs ; not a page that bears witness that 
 the author has felt or thought, that he has 
 been one of a family, of a state, or that he is 
 capable of joy or sorrow, that he has wept in 
 isolation and abandonment, or that he knows 
 the happiness of loving intimacy. The 
 strophes glitter and unroll with marvellous 
 agility; but the pleasure from the reading is 
 sterile, and leaves no trace in the memory. In 
 admiring the versifier, we search for the poet. 
 " Had M. Hugo, taught by experience, 
 dissatisfied with being misunderstood, pro- 
 posed to himself suppleness of the strophe
 
 Gustave Planche. 271 
 
 as a means, not an end, had he multiplied 
 poetical forms with the intention of giving 
 more grace and lightness to his thought, we 
 should be the first to congratulate him on 
 this resolution. But it is evident that, in 
 the ' Orientales, ' the strophe is everything 
 and the thought nothing. The author man- 
 ufactures his innumerable moulds, and, when 
 they are finished, he pours the hot metal into 
 them for the sole pleasure of seeing it run. 
 What happens? The metal cools and be- 
 comes rigid; but the bronze, in becoming 
 solid, does not become a statue." . . . 
 
 After as severe an analysis of Hugo's 
 other poetical works, Planche continues with 
 a consideration of the poet's novels. 
 
 "Although the three novels which have 
 preceded ' Notre Dame de Paris ' are very far 
 from having the same literary importance as 
 this last work, a serious study of them is in- 
 dispensable to an understanding and an ex- 
 planation of the successive changes which 
 M. Hugo's talent has undergone. I know 
 that these changes are rather apparent than 
 real, rather superficial than profound. Iden- 
 tity is concealed under diversity. It is easy 
 to retrace in ' Notre Dame ' the exploits of 
 ' Han d'Islande, ' and to conclude ' Han d'ls-
 
 272 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 lande ' with 'Notre Dame de Paris.' How- 
 ever, it is not out of place to analyze the first 
 three attempts that signalized M. Hugo's 
 entrance into the domain of romance, for 
 this analysis is not less rich in instruction 
 than that of his lyrics. If the author of 
 'Notre Dame de Paris' were to publish 
 'Han d'Islande' to-day, such a book would 
 certainly obtain no success, would not even 
 raise a disdainful opposition. In fact, this 
 novel is but a melodrama of the third class, 
 and doubtless it would have been forgotten 
 long ago, had it not been for the curiosity 
 that attaches to the first stammerings of 
 a celebrated writer. Han d'Islande and 
 Spiagudry are hideous monsters and in- 
 spire nothing but disgust. ... At the most, 
 the book is worthy of taking a place by the 
 side of ' Bluebeard. ' Therefore, it would be 
 unjust to insist upon its nullity; but it is 
 worthy of notice that M. Hugo's predilec- 
 tion for monsters is for the first time signal- 
 ized in 'Han d'Islande.' 
 
 "In 'Bug Jargal, ' we find this predilec- 
 tion betrayed under a less hideous form, but 
 with a perseverance that indicates an arrested 
 system. . . . 'Le Dernier Jour d'un Con- 
 damne ' unfortunately sums up the defects
 
 Gustave Planche. 273 
 
 and qualities of the lyrical collection. . . . 
 The subject seemed to promise a psycholog- 
 ical study. . . . There was reason to hope 
 that little by little the author would forget 
 his love of noise and color; that he would 
 unlearn his devotion to words and return to 
 thought and emotion by patient study and 
 diligent analysis of the theme he had chosen. 
 . . . We hoped to witness the tortures of 
 conscience, and we had before us only the 
 tremblings of the flesh. 
 
 "In 'Notre Dame de Paris,' we find in 
 full maturity all the literary qualities that 
 exist but in germ in the three preceding 
 works. . . . 
 
 " Do the characters in this book belong to 
 the human family? We do not believe it. 
 Is M. Hugo's literary talent richer, more 
 varied in this than in his earlier novels? 
 Yes, assuredly. The style of 'Notre Dame' 
 is incontestably superior to that of ' Han 
 d'lslande, ' ' Bug Jargal, ' or of 'Dernier Jour 
 d'un Condamne; ' but this style, I regret to 
 say, is enriched at the expense of thought. 
 . . . The writer has become more skilful, 
 but the poet has strayed farther and farther 
 from human truth, without which there is no 
 poetry possible. . . . 
 
 18
 
 274 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 "It is the spectacular that dominates the 
 book and makes its success. ' Notre Dame 
 de Paris ' has succeeded, and yet it is far 
 from being a good book. The problem is 
 not to dispute an accomplished fact, but to 
 explain it. In our opinion, the puerility of 
 the author's work has found a powerful assis- 
 tant in the puerility of the public taste. In 
 writing 'Notre Dame,' M. Hugo has con- 
 sulted the instincts of his time, and has suc- 
 ceeded because he consulted them. It is 
 very true that seven years ago, France loved 
 the spectacular in the drama, and preferred 
 the poetry that speaks to the eyes to that 
 which speaks to the intellect. No doubt, it 
 was a depraved taste, a taste that enlight- 
 ened men combated with all their power; 
 but it was the taste of the majority, and the 
 majority was to applaud 'Notre Dame.' To- 
 day, public taste has changed. It asks of 
 poetry something else than delight for the 
 eyes; and therefore the poetical merit of 
 'Notre Dame' is questioned. 
 
 "But we must not allow the reaction to 
 carry us too far. If ' Notre Dame ' is not a 
 fine book in the highest sense of the word, 
 it is distinguished by brilliant qualities 
 which must not be overlooked. It would be
 
 Gustave Planche. 275 
 
 unjust to refuse to recognize that. To speak 
 frankly, the stone and the timber are the 
 chief, I ought to say, the only, actors in the 
 work. But never have stone and timber 
 been put on the scene with more splendor, 
 with more magnificence. Never has lan- 
 guage found resources more abundant and 
 varied for their description. If stone and 
 timber cannot fill the frame-work of a novel, 
 that is no reason for denying M. Hugo's 
 picturesque merit. In painting, as in po- 
 etry, in all the great schools from the Flor- 
 entine to the Flemish, man plays the first 
 r61e; for Raphael, Titian, and Rubens, stone 
 and timber are only the secondary parts of 
 the picture. Yes, doubtless, but it is jus- 
 tice to say that M. Hugo has painted this 
 secondary part with the skill of an artist of 
 the first order. 
 
 "The importance given to stone and tim- 
 ber inevitably encroaches upon, if not effaces 
 the importance of the human being, and, in 
 fact, man in ' Notre Dame ' is but a point 
 on the stone. He fills out the timber and 
 serves to show it off. It is evident that the 
 author could get on better with the cathedral 
 and without the deacon and sexton, than he 
 could with the deacon and sexton and with-
 
 276 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 out the cathedral. Quasimodo and Claude 
 Frollo are very effective under the arches of 
 the church, on the gallery which unites the 
 two towers, and on the fretted work that 
 crowns them, and the author draws them to 
 complete the picture. But don't ask him to 
 bring nearer to you these two points that he 
 has baptized with the name of man ; for, in 
 doing so, he would diminish the picturesque 
 effect of his church. The stone and timber 
 would then be restored to the rank to which 
 they belong, and the pleasure of the eyes, 
 the only one he has in view, would no longer 
 be exclusively sovereign. 
 
 "There, if I am not mistaken, is the real 
 merit and the real vice of ' Notre Dame. ' In 
 this work so singular, so monstrous, man 
 and stone are confounded, and no longer form 
 but one and the same body. Man under 
 the pointed arch is no more than the moss on 
 the wall, or the lichen on the oak. Under the 
 pen of M. Hugo, the stone is animated and 
 seems to obey all the human passions. The 
 imagination, dazzled for a time, thinks that 
 it witnesses the enlargement of the domains 
 of thought, invasion of matter by intelli- 
 gent life. But quickly disabused, it per- 
 ceives that matter has remained what it was,
 
 Gustave Planche. 277 
 
 and man has petrified. The sculptured sal- 
 amanders on the flank of the cathedral have 
 remained immobile, and the blood that flows 
 in the veins of man has frozen; breathing is 
 arrested; the eye sees no longer; the be- 
 numbed soul has forgotten how to think. 
 Doubtless, in order to produce this singular 
 illusion, in order to aggrandize, even for a 
 moment, the domain of intelligent life, great 
 skill is required. We are far from disput- 
 ing M. Hugo's skill; but this illusion, how- 
 ever transitory, is fatal to poetry; it turns 
 the multitude from serious pleasures, from 
 the pleasures of intelligence, and accustoms 
 them to puerile relaxations." 
 
 The article concludes with an analysis of 
 Hugo's dramas, which Planche thinks the 
 feeblest part of his works, because "of all 
 literary forms the drama is that which most 
 imperiously demands a knowledge of men, 
 and we have reason to think that M. Hugo 
 has never studied them." Planche also ac- 
 cuses Hugo of ignorance of history, warns 
 him not to trust to his genius alone, because 
 no knowledge is possible without study, and 
 concludes by promising that if Hugo re- 
 nounces his puerility, grows greater in re- 
 generating himself, that he, the critic,
 
 278 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 will forget his defects and applaud his 
 victory. 
 
 Bulwer was at the height of his transient 
 glory when Planche was writing, and the 
 keen eye that pierced Hugo's rhetorical trap- 
 pings was not to be deceived by Bulwer's 
 superficial glitter. In a critical review of 
 "Ernest Maltravers," Planche pronounces 
 the book a very common novel with very lit- 
 tle philosophy and very little literature in it. 
 "In this book, as in the majority of his pre- 
 ceding works, the author gives proof of great 
 ingenuity and very little imagination. It is 
 true that M. Bulwer did not pretend to write 
 a novel, and that he attaches a very great 
 importance to the numerous digressions that 
 fill a third of the book: but these digres- 
 sions, far from concerning the characters of 
 the book, amount to nothing more than a 
 continual complaint. M. Bulwer, whose 
 celebrity might appear exaggerated, not only 
 to backbiting England, volatile and frivolous 
 France, but even, I fear, to sage Germany, 
 that nation of critics and thinkers, M. 
 Bulwer, whom the reviews of Great Britain 
 proclaim the successor of Walter Scott, and 
 the whole of whose works is not worth a sin- 
 gle chapter in ' Ivanhoe, ' speaks of literary
 
 Gustave Planche. 279 
 
 life as one might speak of the galleys, the 
 pillory, or of hell. According to him, as 
 soon as an author becomes celebrated, the 
 salons and journals slander him every day: 
 the walls of his house fall before the insult- 
 ing glance of hatred and envy; his private 
 life is open to the most injurious comments; 
 he cannot take a step, change his cravat or 
 his manner of wearing his hair, or of show- 
 ing his waistcoat without having these most 
 innocent actions construed by the press as 
 the most guilty intentions. Fame is a Cal- 
 vary, and the author is crucified. In fact, 
 if M. Bulwer were not by profession a ro- 
 mancer, accustomed to confound invention 
 and reality, we should be filled with compas- 
 sion for the tortures of life on the other side 
 of the channel. But it is very probable that 
 fame in London, like fame in Paris, is a very 
 mild cross to bear. At London, as at Paris, 
 pride is condemned to cruel tortures, and 
 that is doubtless what M. Bulwer calls the 
 poetic Calvary. At present, the exaggerated 
 flatteries of the press have everywhere so 
 monstrously developed the pride of men who 
 strive for fame in publishing their thoughts, 
 that a eulogy accompanied with restrictions 
 very easily passes for calumny. To criti-
 
 28o A Group of French Critics. 
 
 cise a barbarism is calumny ; to censure the 
 vulgarity of incidents, a calumny ! The 
 critic has but one way of showing his loyalty 
 and probity, or, in a word, of meriting the 
 esteem and sympathy of the author, and that 
 is by boldly assigning to each of his works a 
 rank between Homer and Dante, Shake- 
 speare and Goethe. And still, it would be 
 necessary to sound him prudently before 
 commencing any parallel, for poetic sensi- 
 bility is at such a stage of delicacy at pres- 
 ent, that it would be very easy to wound it 
 by a maladroit comparison. To attribute 
 something of Homer to him who prefers 
 Milton, or of Shakespeare to him who pre- 
 fers Sophocles, is to be wanting in respect, 
 in comprehension, very likely it is to calum- 
 niate him. 
 
 " The style of ' Ernest Maltravers ' is easy, 
 abundant, and at times even distinguished 
 by a certain elegance, but it almost con- 
 stantly lacks precision and simplicity. The 
 best sentences are scarcely more than con- 
 versational sentences. Instead of choosing 
 for his thought a determined expression, to 
 the exclusion of synonyms which may pre- 
 sent themselves, or near comparisons which 
 occur to the memory, the author sketches
 
 Gustave Planche. 281 
 
 several expressions and gives them to the 
 reader without caring to accept the respon- 
 sibility of an irrevocable preference. Such 
 a procedure indicates in the writer a familiar 
 acquaintance with the vocabulary, but, to 
 speak frankly, it is the very negation of style. 
 It is a system which dazzles for a time, but 
 ends by making the reader impatient. 
 
 " I regret that M. Bulwer feels himself 
 obliged to sow the conversation of his char- 
 acters with several French phrases that are 
 sometimes vulgar and not always correct. 
 Well educated people who accost each other 
 among us, do not say, ' Comment ga va? ' and 
 if they said it, they would not write it. No- 
 body in France addresses his interlocutor 
 with ' dcs belles paroles.' When a woman 
 goes out riding alone with a gentleman, she 
 does not say that she risks 'le cavalier seul,' 
 for this expression, used in calling a quad- 
 rille, would have no application in her 
 case. Certainly, it would have been better 
 not to prefix to the different chapters of 
 ' Ernest Maltravers, ' epigraphs taken from 
 /Eschylus, Euripides, and Simonides, and to 
 transcribe correctly the French and Italian 
 words pronounced by the characters. Eru- 
 dition is not necessary, but modesty is al- 
 ways in 2;ood taste."
 
 282 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 Michelet, the historian, is another writer 
 in whom Planche wants a more rigorous, 
 more logical, and clearer method, a renunci- 
 ation of fancy and ecstasy, for an adherence 
 to the demonstration of truth, fewer feat- 
 ures that belong properly to romance, and 
 more sobriety of treatment. " He is resolved 
 on touching or exciting the reader at any 
 price, and that emotion which is not born of 
 the very expression of truth, which needs all 
 the artifices of the imagination in order to 
 take possession of the reader, ought to be 
 severely banished from history. . . . He 
 mistakes a figure of speech for an idea. . . . 
 Little by little, he has become accustomed 
 to the ecstasy of the mind dazzled by study, 
 as the Orientals to the hallucinations pro- 
 duced by opium. This state, so contrary to 
 the development and exercise of the histori- 
 cal sense, has become his normal condition. 
 That is the reason that if I wished to char- 
 acterize his 'History of the Revolution ' in a 
 sentence, I should compare it to the recital 
 of the ' Passion ' written by sister Emmerich ; 
 it is not a history, it is a vision." 
 
 In an article entitled " La Poesie et la 
 Critique en 1852," Planche proposes to ques- 
 tion successively fiction, poetry, and litera-
 
 Gustave Planche. 283 
 
 ture, in order to know what they signify at 
 that date; and having exhausted this inquiry, 
 he proposes to compare the popular works in 
 each of these departments of literature with 
 the demands of public intelligence. The 
 conclusions he reaches are singularly appli- 
 cable to the state of literature to-day, and it 
 is almost impossible to realize that a lapse 
 of nearly half a century intervenes between 
 our date and that of his inquiry. But the 
 fact is that popular literary judgments are al- 
 ways of the same essential character. They 
 proceed from a childish taste, which is inva- 
 riably pleased with what strikes the senses, 
 and a childish superstition, which invariably 
 sees the supernatural in what it cannot ex- 
 plain. An appeal to its senses, or to its 
 love of the marvellous, will always catch its 
 suffrage and insure popularity, because, as 
 Planche somewhere remarks, "exquisite and 
 cultivated natures will never be a majority." 
 Planche begins his inquiry by asking what 
 the novel is to-day; for he recognizes that 
 " novel-making has become an industry that 
 can compete in importance with that of Shef- 
 field, Birmingham, or Manchester. Form- 
 erly," he continues, "the novelist naively 
 proposed the analysis of passions and char-
 
 284 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 acter. In the movement of ordinary life, he 
 selected an action of a very simple char- 
 acter, often apparently insignificant, and 
 counted on the study of the human heart to 
 interest cultivated minds. That was the 
 golden age of the novel. . . . The capital 
 merit of these little compositions is sobriety. 
 The author never thinks himself obliged to 
 talk when he has nothing to say. As soon 
 as he has exhibited all the phases of his 
 thought, and exhausted the analysis of the 
 passions which he has chosen to depict, he 
 stops, sure of having accomplished his task. 
 He does not exhaust himself in piling up 
 sonorous words to fill the place of absent 
 ideas. This merit, so commonplace that it 
 brings a smile to the lips of industrious 
 writers, is nevertheless the key to renown. 
 To endure, to mean something, is not merely 
 a question of offering thought of some value 
 under a precise form to the public; it is also 
 necessary to stop talking, when one has noth- 
 ing more to say. It is impossible to calcu- 
 late the blessings of silence. The public 
 not only takes into account the sensible 
 words you have written, but also the empty 
 words you have not written. 
 
 ''To-day, all is changed, if not in the
 
 Gustave Planche. 285 
 
 opinion, at least in the practice of the trade, 
 for I cannot give the name of art to the fab- 
 rication of the novels which have deluged 
 the journals during the last twenty years. 
 Empty and useless words are no longer re- 
 garded as foolishness; it is sobriety alone 
 that passes for silliness. To speak when 
 you have something to say? A fine merit, 
 truly! But to speak when you have nothing 
 to say that is what reveals true genius! 
 The triumph of the trade is to build twenty 
 volumes thirty if necessary on a sub- 
 ject that our modest ancestors would have at- 
 tempted to treat in some hundreds of pages. 
 
 " To substitute the trade for the art, it is 
 necessary to change the fundamental and 
 elementary conditions of the novel. And, 
 in fact, those who like, or pretend to like, 
 this form of literature to-day, do not hesitate 
 to change the aim, in quitting the beaten 
 road. It is no longer a question of the 
 analysis of passions, vulgar task worthy of 
 the narrow minds which preceded us, the 
 question, now, is to excite, to amuse, at all 
 hazards. Provided the reader turns the page 
 with curiosity, with fear, the most exacting 
 mind can demand nothing more. Probabil-
 
 286 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 ity, simplicity, interest founded on the study 
 of the heart, are relegated to the rank of 
 banalities and confounded with old fashions. 
 To recall these vulgar precepts is as effect- 
 ual as preaching the wearing of paniers, 
 patches on the face, or red heels. . . . 
 
 "To have in view an aim to be reached, 
 to foresee and trace the route to be followed 
 is not that to distrust one's genius ? Fore- 
 sight is a leading-string. There is but one 
 god for purely fertile imaginations, and his 
 name is chance. What is the use of know- 
 ing what you are going to say? Men de- 
 voted to the trade of authorship, animated 
 with a legitimate confidence in their powers 
 and a confidence no less legitimate in the 
 sympathy, and especially, in the idleness of 
 the reader, ought to walk without anxiety 
 towards an unknown goal, ought they not? 
 Whatever this aim may be, they are sure of 
 attaining it. They are going nowhere, and 
 yet their deliberate gait seems to indicate a 
 well-defined project. It is enough if the 
 reader follow them. For those who find 
 their dearest pleasure in idleness, such sto- 
 ries are really a means of deceiving ennui, if 
 not of getting rid of it, and it is not this 
 class of minds that I am addressing, for the
 
 Gustave Planche. 287 
 
 soundest arguments are impotent in the pres- 
 ence of sluggishness and idleness. But for 
 those who know the charm of study and med- 
 itation, such work is an insipid dish, a 
 tasteless fruit that they reject with disgust. 
 As well bite into dust and ashes. 
 
 " The sceptics reply : Why censure what 
 amuses ? Why judge, in the name of a liter- 
 ary theory, works that are conceived in con- 
 tempt of all theories? Why waste your 
 words in air? This objection does not re- 
 duce me to silence. This rage for amuse- 
 ment which has taken possession of readers 
 leads straight to enervation of mind. In 
 substituting curiosity for sensibility, in de- 
 manding every day incidents true or false, 
 but new at any price, the multitude un- 
 consciously loses its most precious faculties; 
 it can no longer distinguish nobleness from 
 triviality, heat of blood from generosity of 
 feeling. Little by little, it grows incapable 
 of poetic emotion. Its soul becomes dull 
 and depraved like the palate of a man who 
 abuses the use of spices and liquors. The 
 most wholesome, most excellent food seems 
 without savor to him. 
 
 " Let them tell me in all manner of ways 
 that I am preaching in the desert, I persist
 
 288 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 in believing that I am right in putting my 
 finger on this literary plague of the century 
 in order to probe the wound and to predict 
 its approaching ravages. After enervating 
 the intelligence of the multitude, this novel- 
 writing trade will end by destroying the last 
 vestiges of aesthetic sense. Sated with this 
 gross food, the multitude will soon lose the 
 idea of the beautiful and the ugly, as it loses, 
 in drunkenness, the idea of justice and in- 
 justice, unless a voice is raised to warn it 
 from the mud into which it is about to fall." 
 
 From the novel, Planche proceeds with a 
 consideration of the drama, upon which he 
 passes an equally severe judgment, reproach- 
 ing it for putting costumes and stage-fur- 
 nishings above characters philosophically 
 studied, and history properly speaking, 
 and for preferring accuracy of rhyme to ac- 
 curacy of thought. 
 
 "The thought of great writers is devel- 
 oped like the oak, from the centre to the 
 circumference ; it takes its logical form in 
 expanding. The thought of second-rate 
 writers is developed in the manner of the 
 palm, from circumference to centre. It is 
 born of an assemblage of words, as the trunk 
 of the palm is increased by the buds that
 
 Gustave Planche. 289 
 
 grow on its circumference. ... I esteem 
 very highly the musical feature of poetry. I 
 want the ear to be satisfied. But I will not 
 consent to put language on the same level 
 with the violin and the flute. Speak melo- 
 diously, very well ; but, before speaking, 
 have something to say. If you count on the 
 mere jingle of words to reveal a thought, 
 you expose your imagination to singular 
 miscalculations. " 
 
 Planche continues his article by counsel- 
 ling the new generation to study the inner 
 world, to explore the depths of conscious- 
 ness, in place of enumerating the colors of a 
 toga or a surcot, a tabard or a tunic, and to 
 listen to the beatings of the human heart, in- 
 stead of putting the hand on the studs of an 
 armor. Poetry receives a reprimand similar 
 to that given to the drama, and the author 
 concludes by saying that literature is cor- 
 rupted by materialism, and that spirituality 
 alone can give it back its youth and brill- 
 iancy. " In proportion as poetry attributes 
 a great importance to the exterior world, man 
 will be degraded. Let matter redescend to 
 the lower rank to which it belongs ; let the 
 spirit remount to the rank which it never 
 ought to have quitted, and art, renewed, will 
 19
 
 290 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 find again the authority it has lost. It is my 
 prayer. It is my hope. It is the prayer 
 and hope of all sensible men." 
 
 In addition to his "Etudes sur les arts," 
 and "Portraits d'artistes," Planche's pub- 
 lished works consist of volumes made up 
 from his contributions to the " Revue des 
 deux Mondes," and other French journals. 
 These volumes appear under the titles of 
 "Eludes litteraires," "Portraits litteraires," 
 "Nouveaux Portraits," and "Etudes sur 
 1' I^cole Franchise. " 
 
 The extracts we have given are a sufficient 
 guarantee of the vigorous spirit that ani- 
 mates all he has written. His word was all 
 he had ; but it was pure gold, and he refused 
 to debase it by any alloy, for the sake of 
 making a profitable and convenient currency 
 of it. When his publisher refused to accept 
 an article on account of the effect its can- 
 dor might give, he would destroy the arti- 
 cle, but he would neither alter its judgment 
 nor temper its severity. He took his work 
 too seriously to be a witty critic, in the sense 
 of criticism searching for subjects of raillery 
 to amuse the crowd ; but he abounds in that 
 wit which proceeds from good sense and a 
 keen perception of incongruities. lie made
 
 Gustave Planche. 291 
 
 no demands upon others that he did not 
 doubly exact from himself. He spoke from 
 a fulness of just and reasonable ideas. As 
 for his character, one thing is certain: a\ 
 spring of cool, pure, refreshing water issues/ 
 from no foul ooze; it comes from rock andj 
 crystal, where foulness cannot lurk. What-' 
 ever offence the outside of the platter might 
 give to the Pharisaical world, the inside was 
 unstained and white. 
 
 There were depths of tenderness in him 
 never opened to the sunlight, for life was 
 unkind to him; but there were living, not 
 stagnant, waters in those depths, and they 
 preserved him from that aridity of soul and 
 fatal coldness which so often follow the too 
 exclusive culture of the mind at the expense 
 of the heart. The sharpness of his pen came 
 from no love of cruelty, but from passionate 
 love of beauty and truth, which he saw 
 neglected for tricked-out ugliness and var- 
 nished falseness. He had tasted the deep, 
 pure pleasures of the intellect, and he burned 
 with a generous ardor to share them with 
 others. He tore down, in order to build up 
 something better; he took away what was 
 worthless, to give what was precious. He 
 received hatred and insult, instead of grati-
 
 292 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tude and reward; but he was neither si- 
 lenced nor transformed into a cynic. He 
 was a brave, honest, resolute man, large- 
 brained and deep-hearted, to whose memory 
 posterity willingly pays the gratitude with- 
 held from him in life.
 
 VII. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 THE men whose works we have been 
 studying offer us interesting contrasts 
 in temperament and character. Scherer and 
 Planche are purely men of letters. In each, 
 the critical faculty is especially strong, but 
 there the likeness ends. Scherer had not 
 yet begun his critical work at an age when 
 Planche had nearly completed his. Scher- 
 er' s mental development embraces a wider 
 field of experiences, and gives him a certain 
 breadth, poise, and moderation wanting in 
 Planche. He praises more willingly than he 
 censures; he does not, like Planche, seek a 
 cause to defend or an abuse to attack. If 
 they come in his way, he will fight man- 
 fully, and with all the skill of an experienced 
 swordsman; but he does not like fighting, 
 lie likes best to enjoy the undisputed realms 
 of art. Planche, on the contrary, prefers the 
 skirmishing on the borderlands. He dreads 
 an invasion; he jealously guards the iron-
 
 294 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 tiers. He fears nothing, and will face can- 
 non and muskets alone, if need be. One is 
 the born soldier; the other, the man of 
 peace, and each is needed in his place. 
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin and Bersot are both 
 professional men. Both are intrusted with 
 the education of the young; both bring to 
 this work ardor, interest, capacity. But 
 here, too, the likeness ceases. Girardin is a 
 realist, and Bersot an idealist in the best 
 sense of these terms. Girardin is keenly 
 alive to the dangers that beset youth on the 
 side of the imagination, the abuses of rev- 
 erie and the errors of judgment. He wishes 
 to arouse to action and to destroy illusions, 
 Bersot, with his poetical temperament, which 
 is the source of his purest joys, is more alive 
 to the dangers that beset youth on the side 
 of sterile materialism. He wishes to render 
 the soul invulnerable to harsh and coarse 
 realities. He would give it wings to soar 
 above its trials. Girardin would give it a 
 pair of good, stout legs to carry it through 
 them. Both are right. Each complements 
 the other. There is poetic invulnerability, 
 and the invulnerability that belongs to rare 
 good sense; and the soul that is not capable 
 of the one may hope to possess the other.
 
 Conclusion. 295 
 
 Doudan belongs to quite another order of 
 men. He is pre-eminently the connoisseur. 
 He enjoys literature solely and simply for 
 its own sake. He belongs to no school and 
 has no system to defend. His judgments 
 are purely the result of his taste. He utters 
 them as an epicure would express his prefer- 
 ence for certain meats and wines, and he 
 attaches little more importance to them as 
 regards others. But his taste is exquisite 
 and his utterances have a value that belongs 
 to such taste. 
 
 But however much these critics differ in 
 temperament, character, and form of expres- 
 sion, there is a remarkable unanimity in 
 their literary judgments. Their whole crit- 
 icism is based upon identical principles; 
 and if we disengage these principles from 
 the particular subjects under discussion, we 
 shall find that they may be briefly stated as 
 follows : 
 
 (1) Art cannot free itself from the obli- 
 gation to be moral, because it has to do with 
 the beautiful and the normal. The beautiful 
 and the normal are moral, because they exist 
 in obedience to the general law; and moral- 
 ity is obedience to law. 
 
 (2) Art in its highest manifestations
 
 296 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 addresses the intelligence, not the senses; 
 it is less concerned with manner than with 
 matter. It satisfies thought and not pru- 
 rient curiosity and idle wonder. Its aim is 
 not to amuse, but to delight the mind by an 
 appeal to its noblest faculties, its sense of 
 justice, order, harmony, beauty, and purity. 
 
 (3) Art reacts upon human life. What 
 we admire, in a great measure, determines 
 what we are; hence, the necessity of right 
 admiration, and the importance of morality 
 in art. 
 
 (4) The soul finds its healthiest activity 
 in mild enthusiasm, in elevated repose; and 
 this repose and enthusiasm are not to be 
 found in the vulgar atmosphere of crime 
 and degradation, but in the contemplation of 
 what is higher and better than ourselves. 
 
 There is nothing new in these principles. 
 Long ago, the great German critic, Lessing, 
 in "Laokoon," called the attention of the 
 world to the fact that, among the ancients, 
 beauty was the highest law of the imagina- 
 tive arts. The masterpieces of the world 
 have taught the same thing in every century ; 
 but it is necessary to repeat old truths again 
 and again, just as it is necessary to teach the 
 multiplication table to every new generation.
 
 Conclusion. 297 
 
 No one who has ever visited a museum in 
 which the artistic productions of different 
 nations are exhibited, can fail to have been 
 struck with the progress from the ugly to the 
 beautiful, as he passes from the works of the 
 lower to those of the higher civilization. In 
 the infancy of art, it is the grotesque, the 
 repulsive, the monstrous that strikes the eye 
 and is reproduced. To pass from the hide- 
 ous masks of the Japanese to the perfect mar- 
 bles of the Greeks, is to pass from barbarity 
 to civilization, from ignorance to the highest 
 culture. In the same manner, it is the gaudy 
 and the tawdry that delight the ignorant, 
 childish eye ; it is not the soft melody, but 
 the shriek of the penny whistle and the noise 
 of the rattle that please his ear. 
 
 " I want something awfully startling" said 
 a woman, standing near me, of a book-lender 
 in one of our great city libraries. It wasn't 
 difficult to please her. The manufacturers 
 of the "awfully startling" are doing a good 
 trade at present ; but art ? Is there such a 
 thing as going backward in art ? There is, 
 and it is against such retrogression that en- 
 lightened criticism is directed, and it is fit- 
 ting that in France, where, more than in any 
 other country, art has so far forgotten her
 
 298 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 duty and aim as to deserve the severest re- 
 proaches and denunciations, criticism should 
 have reached a degree of perfection un- 
 equalled elsewhere. It is based, as we have 
 said before, on settled principles. It levies 
 contributions on all forms of human knowl- 
 edge. It studies man and nature. It searches 
 the law beneath the action. It compares, 
 before it selects and judges. It knows the 
 value of the old observation that the truth 
 lies between extremes. It has discovered 
 what was wanting in the old idealists to 
 make them true seers, and what is wanting 
 in the new ultra-realism to make it fact. 
 The old idealists were constantly at war 
 with reality. The imagination played the 
 most important role in life. They searched 
 constantly to see that which is hidden, to 
 hear silence, to taste unknown joys. They 
 spurned the reality within reach, and spent 
 their lives in searching for the pot of gold 
 at the end of the rainbow, over hills, over 
 valleys, not stooping to drink from the 
 brooks, when they were thirsty, for fear of 
 losing time; not wishing to gather the roses 
 by the wayside, for they knew that their 
 petals would quickly fall : and so they went 
 thirsty when they might have drunk, hungry
 
 Conclusion. 299 
 
 when they might have feasted, naked when 
 they might have been clothed, weary when 
 they might have rested, and still the pot 
 of gold waited waited as it always will 
 wait. The one bugbear of these chimera- 
 haunted creatures was materialism. The 
 flesh was but grass; the spirit was God. 
 
 Then came the reaction. Flesh became 
 God, and the spirit ? What am I ? cried the 
 sceptic. Only an instrument upon which 
 external forces play? What is it that I can 
 call myself? The vibrating air brings me 
 sound. The vibrating ether gives me the 
 conception of light. Contact with matter 
 brings me ideas of a non-ego, wonderful and 
 varied. Am I, after all, but a bundle of 
 registered impressions? And are these im- 
 pressions registered in a perishable organ, 
 my brain? Is life but a conscious point in 
 an eternity of unconsciousness? If so, let 
 me widen and deepen its consciousness by as 
 many sensations as I can crowd into it. But, 
 alas! no quickening but rather deadening of 
 consciousness follows the lawless satisfaction 
 of the desires of the flesh. " It hardens all 
 within and petrifies the feeling." Man is 
 neither pure spirit nor pure matter. He is 
 soul and body, and each part of this dual
 
 300 A Group of French Critics. 
 
 being properly claims recognition. Be his 
 life but a point in time, or an eternity, he 
 cannot taste the fulness of it here, without 
 obedience to the laws of his nature, the laws 
 of self-preservation, morality. 
 
 It is the duty of criticism to assert this 
 dual nature of man ; to allay, on the one hand, 
 our unreasonable fears of materialism, and, 
 on the other, to set the bounds to asceticism. 
 No criticism has done this so ably as French 
 criticism. It stands neither for the ideal- 
 ism which is inaccessible, the mysterious 
 "blue flower" that cannot be plucked, nor 
 for the reality that is pure animalism. It 
 is not sympathetic on the side of license 
 and emotionalism, nor on that of arbitrary 
 law and stoicism. It stands for the free, 
 natural, healthy development of the normal 
 nature of man. It stands for sunlight, 
 beauty, health, goodness, as opposed to dark- 
 ness, ugliness, disease, and vice. It believes 
 that art and literature have a duty to fulfil, 
 the duty of being a refuge and consolation 
 to the soul, and an inspiration to its noblest 
 development.
 
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