Some recollections of the outer presence of Emile Faguet should not be without value to us in fixing the character of his inner life, the spirit which pervaded his profuse and honest labour. No one in the history of literature has been more distinguished for intellectual probity; and no one has cared less for appearances, or for the glorification of his own character and cleverness. His value as a critic consists primarily in his capacity for thoroughly understanding what each author under consideration meant by this or that expression of his art. Faguet does not allow himself to be stung into eloquence by the touch of a master-mind, as Lemaître does, nor does he fly off from his subject on the wings of an imperative suggestion, like Anatole France, but he sticks close to the matter in hand, so close that he reaches comprehension by becoming absorbed in it. There is no writer on literature who has ever crept so completely into the skin of each old author as Faguet has done. He makes the dry bones live; he resuscitates the dead, and revives in them all that was essential in their original life, all that was really vital in them, even if it be ultimately to condemn the taste or the tendency exhibited. The first object with him is to vivify; to analyse and dissect come next.
He was open to all impressions, and he was particularly admirable in his periodical surveys of the four great centuries of French verse and prose, because of his unflagging open-mindedness. He saw the living thread of literary history, running, a pulsating stream, from Rabelais to Flaubert. He had followed it so often, up and down, this way and that, that no curve of it, no backwater was unfamiliar to him. Lassitude is as unknown to Faguet as it was to Shelley's "Skylark." His curiosity is always awake; no shadow of satiety ever comes near him. He was a Titan in his way, but never a "weary Titan"; he never felt "the orb of his fate," though it embraced so much, to be "too vast." The more elaborate or complex an author was, the more actively and ingeniously Faguet penetrated his work, smoothing out the complexities, throwing light into every dark corner. But it is very proper to notice that even where he devotes himself with what seems the most absorbing care to the investigation of a particular mind, he is always essentially detached from it, always ready to quit one tenement of genius and adapt himself with alacrity to another, like a soldier-crab, whose tender extremity will fit itself to any shell-habitation.
In one of his criticisms of Montesquieu—and on no French classic has he been more constantly felicitous—Faguet speaks of the faculty possessed by that prince of intelligence of wandering among souls, and of studying their spiritual experience "comme un anatomiste étudie le jeu des organes." The author of the Esprit des Lois took wide views and surveyed a vast expanse of society, but he was equally apt to map out a square inch of mossy rock at his feet. "Il a du reste beaucoup écrit, comme en marge de ses grands livres." These words remind us of a section of Emile Faguet's writings which is peculiarly stimulating and useful. It is illustrated to great perfection in what is perhaps the most fascinating specimen of his vast and various production, the volume called En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres, which he published so lately as 1911. This was followed by En lisant Corneille in 1913 and En lisant Molière in 1914. If the war had not intervened and if his own health had not failed him, it is probable that Faguet would have extended and developed this section of his work, which exhibited the ripest fruit of his subtle and vigorous criticism.
The method which he adopted in these treatises was to take a portion of a well-known book or a short poem, and read it with his imaginary audience exactly as though they, and he, had never met with it before. In En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres he takes a score of such passages, and analyses them without pedantry, eagerly, curiously, cordially. He explains what the author meant, shows how he has succeeded in expressing his meaning, points out the ingenuities of thought and the felicities of language, and in short exhibits the piece of hackneyed prose or verse as though it had just been discovered. The process may sound perfunctory and pedagogic, but, conducted as Faguet conducts them, these little excursions are not less delightful than original. He takes things that everybody knows—such as Montaigne on Friendship, or Bossuet on the Romans, or a couple of La Bruyère's portraits; he takes a long poem, like Alfred de Vigny's La Maison du Berger, or a short lyric, like Victor Hugo's Le Semeur; he takes the character of Sévère in Polyeucte or a landscape out of the memoirs of Chateaubriand, and he illuminates these familiar things until the reader not merely sees in them what he never saw before, but has gained a method of reading by which he will in future extract infinite new pleasures from re-reading old familiar books.
In this system of analysis by conversation consists the chief originality of Faguet's criticism. The idea of it was not entirely new; so long ago as the seventeenth century Descartes said that "la lecture est une conversation continue avec les plus honnêtes gens des siècles passés." But it had not been planned on a practical basis until Faguet sketched out these enchanting books of his, in which we seem to see him seated, smiling, at a table, the volume open before him, expounding it to an eager circle of intelligent young people. In these conversations, Faguet had not the weight of Brunetière or the sparkle of Lemaître; he was simpler than the one and soberer than the other. He achieved the dream of the teacher when he discovered how to write books which please and are useful at the same time. He avoided, by a whole continent, the vapid dreariness of the usual English manual, which looks upon the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley as fit only to be pressed between sheets of blotting-paper in a hortus siccus. Faguet is always in earnest, although he sometimes indulges in immense humour and vivacity, not of the Parisian variety, but highly exhilarating. When he suddenly confesses to us that Balzac had "the temperament of an artist and the soul of a commercial traveller," or when he sums up an entirely grave summary of Pindare-Le Brun by telling us that "c'était un homme de beaucoup d'esprit, d'un caractère très méprisable, et excellent ouvrier de vers," it is no schoolmaster that speaks to pupils, but a friend who takes his intimates into his confidence.
It has been the habit to depreciate the style of Faguet, which indeed does not set out to be exquisite, and cannot compare with those of several of his great predecessors. He has been charged, in his zeal for the matter of literature, with a neglect of its form. It is true that his phrases are apt to be curt; he gives little attention to the conduct of a sentence, further than to define in it his precise intention. But his criticism has a great purity of design, which is in itself an element of style. It sets forth to accomplish a certain purpose and it carries out this aim with the utmost economy of means. No writer less than Faguet, to use a vulgar expression, "slops about all over the shop." He has at least this negative beauty of writing, and he adds to it another, the gift of discussing great authors in a tone that is in sympathy with their peculiarities. An instance of this, among a hundred, may be cited from his Dix-huitième Siècle; summing up what he has to impress upon us about Marivaux, he defines that author in these terms; "C'est un précieux qui est assez rare et qu'on s'interdit de condamner au moment même qu'on le désapprouve, parce qu'on n'est pas sans en jouir dans le moment même qu'on en souffre." It would hardly be possible to put more of critical value into so few words, but moreover it is said as Marivaux himself might say it.
Faguet had his prejudices, as every honest man may have. He adored the seventeenth and he loved the nineteenth centuries, but he had almost an aversion from the eighteenth. He put Buffon first among the writers of that age, and Montesquieu next; so loyal a spirit as Faguet's could not but be cordially attracted by Vauvenargues. But the lack of poetry, and, as he asserted, the lack of philosophy of the Encyclopædists annoyed him, and for their greatest name, for Voltaire, he had a positive hatred. Faguet found it difficult to be just to Diderot, and difficult to tolerate Rousseau, but to love Voltaire he made no effort whatever; he acknowledged that feat to be impossible. He did not fear to contradict himself, and about Rousseau his opinion grew steadily more favourable, until, in 1913, he positively published five independent volumes on this one writer alone. But Faguet could never persuade himself to approach Voltaire with any face but a wry one. Yet, even here, his antipathy is scarcely to be perceived on the surface. Faguet always leaves the judgment of his reader independent. He puts the facts before him; his own irony marks the line of thought which he suggests; but he is careful never to attempt to bully the reader into acceptance. Brunetière is apt to be vociferous in persuasion; Faguet never raises his voice.
In 1899, being called upon to sum up the qualities of the leading French critics from 1850 onwards, Faguet found himself confronted with his own name and work. It was characteristic of his candour and simplicity that he did not shrink from the task of describing himself, and that he undertook it without false modesty or affectation. When he comes to describe Emile Faguet he is as detached, as calmly analytic, as he is when he speaks of Théophile Gautier or M. René Doumic. He defines the qualities, acknowledges the limitations, and hints at the faults of his subject. I do not know a case in all literary history where a writer has spoken of himself in terms more severely judicial. He closes this remarkable little study with words which we may quote here for their curious personal interest no less than as an example of Faguet's style:
Laborieux, du reste, assez méthodique, consciencieux, en poussant la conscience jusqu'à être peu bienveillant, ou en ne sachant pas pousser le scrupule consciencieux jusqu'à la bienveillance, il a pu rendre et il a rendu des services appréciables aux étudiants en littérature, qui étaient le public qu'il a toujours visé. Sans abandonner la critique, qu'il est à croire qu'il aimera toujours, il s'est un peu tourné depuis quelques années du côté des études sociologiques, où c'est à d'autres qu'à nous qu'il appartient d'apprécier ses efforts.
In this connexion a phrase of the great critic may be recalled. When the war broke out in 1914, someone who knew Faguet's absorbing love of books sympathized with him on the blow to literature. He responded, in a tone of reproof, "L'avenir national est une chose autrement importante que l'avenir littéraire."