It made him, to begin with, an incorrigible stay-at-home. In this, as in so many other things, he was a typical Frenchman. We English, born roamers as we are, take for granted the educative influence of travel. Places and people, we know by elementary experience, are only to be realized by being seen on the spot. Lemaître thought otherwise. Why, he asked, need I go to England? I can get all England out of Dickens and George Eliot and my friend Bourget’s “Impressions de Voyage.” And then he drew a picture of England, as he confidently believed it to be, that is about as “like it” as, say, the average untravelled Englishman’s notion of Tavers. He was never tired of quoting a passage of the “Imitation” about the variety of changing sky and scene. But a cloistered monk is not exactly an authority on this subject.
Again, the fact that Lemaître was “l’homme de sa terre” is of vital literary importance; it affected not only the spirit, but the actual direction of his criticism. It inclined him to ignore or to misapprehend those features in a foreign author that precisely marked how he also, in his turn, was the man of his countryside, and that very different from the banks of the Loire. Some of his comments on Shakespeare, for instance, are of a Gallicism almost Voltairean. And it fostered illusions like that which possessed him about the “Northern literatures”—Ibsen, Hauptmann, Strindberg, and so forth—that they were mere belated imitators of the French romantics. The fact that Lemaître was essentially a man of his province involved the fact that his criticism now and then was also provincial.
Indeed, his very provincialism heightened his enjoyment of Paris and sharpened his sense of Parisianism. Things which the born Parisian takes for granted were delightful novelties for him, challenging observation and analysis. “Il est,” said Degas, “toujours bien content d’être à Paris.” He was “bien content” because he was “the young man from the country,” the man from Tavers. The phenomenon is familiar all the world over.
Further, the fact that Lemaître remained “l’homme de sa terre,” still getting his clothes from the village tailor, never so much at home as among the farmers, country schoolmasters, and peasants he had known from his infancy, gives a quite peculiar savour to his remarks on “le monde”—the great fashionable scene, which he describes and analyses, to be sure, as a philosopher, but as a philosopher who is, consciously and indeed defiantly, an “outsider.”
These are all integral parts of Lemaître’s critical individuality. Without them he would have been another man altogether—a point so obvious to all lovers of Lemaître that it would never have occurred to me to mention it, had it not been for our reviewer’s weariness of being reminded that he was “l’homme de sa terre.” Evidently the reviewer cannot forgive Lemaître for his treatment of the “décadents” and the “symbolistes,” and other cranks. “Think of the people Lemaître missed.” The people include, it seems, Moréas, Laforgue, Samain, and Rimbaud. Well, after thinking of these people, many of us will be resigned to “missing” them with Lemaître.
It is odd that the reviewer, while hunting for objections to Lemaître’s criticism, as criticism, should have “missed” the really valid one—that it is often not so much critical as “high fantastical.” Lemaître was apt to be carried away by his imagination, and to run through a varied assortment of comparisons, associations, and parallels that coloured rather than cleared the issue. The rigorist Croce has, in passing, laid his finger upon this. He quotes Lemaître on Corneille. Polyeucte, says the critic, recalls at once “St. Paul, Huss, Calvin, and Prince Kropotkine,” and awakes “the same curiosity as a Russian Nihilist, of the kind to be seen in Paris in bygone years, in some brasserie ... of whom the whisper went round that at St. Petersburg he had killed a general or a prefect of police.” Croce dismisses this sort of thing as ricami di fantasia, and certainly, from the point of view of strict criticism, it is a weakness of Lemaître’s.
After all, however (as the counsel in “Pickwick” pleaded about something else), it is an amiable weakness; it makes him such incomparably good reading! Heaven forbid that I should reopen the old stupid, stale controversy about “impressionist” and “judicial” criticism; but it is obvious that the one sort does explicitly acknowledge and glory in what is implicit in the other—the individual temperament and talent of the critic himself. If the “impressionist” who gives free play to his temperament is apt sometimes to get out of bounds—to be substituting ricami di fantasia for strict analysis—he may be all the more stimulating to the reader. He may be giving the reader not scrupulous criticism, but something better. It all depends, of course, on the temperament and the talent. Lemaître’s ricami di fantasia are part, if not the best part, of his charm.