The historical tendency, proceeding from the eighteenth century, influenced alike the study of philosophy, of politics, and of literature. While Cousin gave an historical interpretation of philosophy, and Guizot applied history to the exposition of politics, a third eminent professor, ABEL-FRANÇOIS VILLEMAIN (1790-1870) was illuminating literature with the light of history. An accomplished classical scholar, a student of English, Italian, and Spanish authors, Villemain, in his Tableau de la Littérature au Moyen Âge, and his more admirable Tableau de la Littérature au XVIIIe Siècle, viewed a wide prospect, and could not apply a narrow rule to the measurement of all that he saw. He did not formulate a method of criticism; but instinctively he directed criticism towards history. He perceived the correspondence between literary products and the other phenomena of the age; he observed the movement in the spirit of a period; he passed from country to country; he made use of biography as an aid in the study of letters. His learning was at times defective; his views often superficial; he suffered from his desire to entertain his audience or to capture them by rhetoric. Yet Villemain served letters well, and, accepted as a master by the young critics of the Globe, he prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve.
While such criticism as that of Villemain was maintained by Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-73), professor of French poetry at the Sorbonne, the dogmatic or doctrinaire school of criticism was represented with rare ability by DÉSIRÉ NISARD (1806-88). His capital work, the Histoire de la Littérature Française, the labour of many years, is distinguished by a magisterial application of ideas to the decision of literary questions. Criticism with Nisard is not a natural history of minds, nor a study of historical developments, so much as the judgment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts each book on which he pronounces judgment with that ideal of its species which he has formed in his own mind: he compares it with the ideal of the genius of France, which attains its highest ends rather through discipline than through freedom; he compares it with the ideal of the French language; finally, he compares it with the ideal of humanity as seen in the best literature of the world. According to the result of the comparison he delivers condemnation or awards the crown. In French literature, at its best, he perceives a marvellous equilibrium of the faculties under the control of reason; it applies general ideas to life; it avoids individual caprice; it dreads the chimeras of imagination; it is eminently rational; it embodies ideas in just and measured form. Such literature Nisard found in the great age of Louis XIV. Certain gains there may have been in the eighteenth century, but these gains were more than counterbalanced by losses. To disprove the saying that there is no disputing about tastes, to establish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulate intellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim; but in attempting to constitute an exact science founded upon general principles, he too often derived those principles from the attractions and repulsions of his individual taste. Criticism retrograded in his hands; yet, in retrograding, it took up a strong position: the influence of such a teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies required the guidance or the check of a director.
The admirable critic of the romantic school, CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE (1804-69), developed, as time went on, into the great critic of the naturalistic method. In his Tableau de la Poésie Française au XVIe Siècle he found ancestors for the romantic poets as much older than the ancestors of classical art in France as Ronsard is older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from author to author in his Portraits Littéraires and Portraits Contemporains, he studied in all its details what we may term the physiology of each. The long research of spirits connected with his most sustained work, Port-Royal, led him to recognise certain types or families under which the various minds of men can be grouped and classified. During a quarter of a century he investigated, distinguished, defined in the vast collection of little monographs which form the Causeries du Lundt and the Nouveaux Lundis. They formed, as it were, a natural history of intellects and temperaments; they established a new method, and illustrated that method by a multitude of examples.
Never was there a more mobile spirit; but he was as exact and sure-footed as he was mobile. When we have allowed for certain personal jealousies or hostilities, and for an excessive attraction towards what may be called the morbid anatomy of minds, we may give our confidence with scarcely a limit to the psychologist critic Sainte-Beuve. Poet, novelist, student of medicine, sceptic, believer, socialist, imperialist—he traversed every region of ideas; as soon as he understood each position he was free to leave it behind. He did not pretend to reduce criticism to a science; he hoped that at length, as the result of numberless observations, something like a science might come into existence. Meanwhile he would cultivate the relative and distrust the absolute. He would study literary products through the persons of their authors; he would examine each detail; he would inquire into the physical characteristics of the subject of his investigation; view him through his ancestry and among his kinsfolk; observe him in the process of education; discover him among his friends and contemporaries; note the moment when his genius first unfolded itself; note the moment when it was first touched with decay; approach him through admirers and disciples; approach him through his antagonists or those whom he repelled; and at last, if that were possible, find some illuminating word which resumes the results of a completed study. There is no "code Sainte-Beuve" by which off-hand to pronounce literary judgments; a method of Sainte-Beuve there is, and it is the method which has best served the study of literature in the nineteenth century.
Here this survey of a wide field finds its limit. The course of French literature since 1850 may be studied in current criticism; it does not yet come within the scope of literary history. The product of these years has been manifold and great; their literary importance is attested by the names—among many others—of Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, in non-dramatic poetry; of Augier and the younger Dumas in the theatre; of Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Daudet, Bourget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, in fiction; of Taine and Renan in historical study and criticism; of Fromentin in the criticism of art; of Scherer, Brunetière, Faguet, Lemaître, in the criticism of literature.
The dominant fact, if we discern it aright, has been the scientific influence, turning poetry from romantic egoism to objective art, directing the novel and the drama to naturalism and to the study of social environments, informing history and criticism with the spirit of curiosity, and prompting research for laws of evolution. Whether the spiritualist tendency observable at the present moment be a symptom of languor and fatigue, or the indication of a new moral energy, future years will determine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following notes are designed as an indication of some books which may be useful to students.
Of the many Histories of French Literature the fullest and most trustworthy is that at present in course of publication under the editorship of M. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature française (A. Colin et Cie.). M. Lanson's Histoire de la Littérature française should be in the hands of every student, and this may be supplemented by M. Lintilhac's Littérature française (2 vols.).