The conclusion of this matter.
Why more? Indeed, save to observe the proportion and method of the book (which are of the first importance), and to pay proper respect to a prince in the critical Israel (which is hardly of less), why so much? Except for the vast bulk of his work, and for the fact that it is not collected into definite “Works,” but exists under a large number of separate headings, some of which may be overlooked, Sainte-Beuve’s criticism offers itself with almost every advantage and facility to the reader. It has to the full those superficial attractions of “readableness” which have given to French criticism its popular position; and it lacks those superficialities in the other sense, which detract from the value of French criticism so often. The immense variety not merely provides something specially interesting for almost everybody who has any literary, historical, or, one might almost say, intellectual interests at all, but prevents tedium or satiety in those whose interests are wider. The style, though neither coruscating, nor treacly, nor enigmatic, is—in its perfection and when it has outgrown some early defects—“the model of the middle style” in criticism, suitable for the purpose and the writer’s temperament. It can say anything that the author wishes to say, and does not try to say what he cannot.
But we must examine the results which he gives a little more closely before concluding, and, according to the good old plan, take the deficiencies, or the want of supremacies, first. As has been put, with examples, above, Sainte-Beuve is not entirely to be trusted with the out-of-the-way, the eccentric, even the abnormally great. The very ethos of the critic exposes him to this, and the opposite fault—the engouement for everything that is out of the way, that is eccentric, that is abnormal, whether great or not—is not merely an excess of a critical virtue, but a serious, an almost disqualifying critical defect. Still, to be able to admire and recognise the “earth-born and absolute fire”[[608]] is, if not a critical sine qua non—for without it the critic may do good work—yet his rarest and noblest gift. Sainte-Beuve had it not quite.
There is room for more difference of competent opinion as to his abstinence from the most definite posing and placing—from the final arrangement of his portraits exactly as he wished to have them seen by his readers, and to stand in relation to each other. There is, of course, its own merit in that abstinence, which is (as it was in the earlier case of Villemain) something of a reaction from the fondness of his “Empire” predecessors for the trenchant, the peremptory, the official distinction and ticket. There had been very much too much of this during the Neo-classic period; and there has been, to put it mildly, quite enough and to spare of it since. Nevertheless, one may think that Sainte-Beuve, though he never, as his countrymen too often do, leaves you uninformed, does too often leave you floating—undecided even as to what his own definite view of the man’s or work’s value, relation, position, may be. Now this surely is a slight defect. When one wants a picture, one does not want merely a sheet of drawing-paper, with the most accurate and “genial” studies of eye, nose, chin, mouth, hair, scattered anyhow about it, but the complete, or at any rate the outlined, face made up from these studies.
I can think of no general fault save these two, and we are not now to hark back to particulars. The tale of general and particular excellences is more agreeable to construct, but more difficult to put in little. The head and front of Sainte-Beuve’s critical welldoing he has himself put excellently and more than once. To read; to understand; to love:—and then to facilitate reading, understanding, and loving on the part of others—these are the first and second great commandments of the critic. And few, surely, have obeyed them better. He may be a little cumbered about much serving—we do not (that is those of us who want criticism) always want such Persic apparatus of biography and history and gossip. But the Persic apparatus is very agreeable in itself, and sometimes even not useless. And there is plenty of the plain leg of critical mutton—well fed, well killed, well kept, and well dressed. Only perhaps a certain degree of expertness can fully appreciate, but ordinary sense and taste must surely not fail to perceive, the range of reading which is—be it again and again repeated—in all but the most extraordinary cases the necessarium, if not the unum necessarium, of the critic. Common-sense and taste are perhaps at least equally well prepared with the expertest expertise to recognise, if they are given their way, the sanity and the equity, the patience and the thoroughness, the freedom from crotchet and caprice, from the merely parochial and the merely particularist, which distinguish Sainte-Beuve from almost all other critics. He was, as we have seen, very lucky; few have had at once his gifts, and his opportunities of exercising them, and that rarest and happiest gift of “the Hour,” without which Gift, and even in some sense Opportunity, will fail to estate a man in his proper place. But the Hour has seldom found the Man so ready: and the Man has in no single instance in our department, and in few throughout all, requited the Hour by leaving such fruits of it for all time to come.
The general discussion of the Classic-Romantic quarrel—so far as we can deal with it—will be for the Interchapters; and it is not even very easy here to make a methodic distinction between the names who will best appear in this chronicle side by side with Sainte-Beuve, and those who should figure in the corresponding chapter of the next Book as his successors. But applying something of the same method which has helped us before, we may perhaps most conveniently group beside him Victor Hugo as a matter of course, with, of the rest, five representative figures—Gautier for the Romantic farthest, the out-and-out partisans of “art-for-art”; Nisard for the Classical reaction; Saint-Marc Girardin as an example of that Academic criticism which has always been so important in France, and which with and after Villemain took a new colour; Planche, as the most noteworthy champion of the other school (yet not so “other” but that the two interpenetrate and overlap) of the critics who are purely men of letters, and almost purely journalists; and Magnin for the pure scholars. The rest, with one or two exceptions, but not excepting so famous a man as Janin, will bear postponement, can even be postponed with advantage. The chief exception is Mérimée; here, as always, by the joint efforts of Fate and himself, alone. But the great twin names of Michelet and Quinet may require a little mention here, and before proceeding even to Hugo.
Michelet and Quinet.
These two inseparables—more inseparable even than the other pair, Cousin and Villemain—must, I fear, be also among those whom I shall seem to some readers to slight. Both, but especially Quinet,[[609]] were of course saturated with literature. From his first translation of Herder to his posthumous work on the Greek genius, Quinet was always dealing with the subject, often nominatim, seldom in very remote fashion. Michelet no doubt directed himself more to the purely historical side of that historical study of humanity which he learnt from Vico, and Quinet probably from Herder himself. Literary citations, literary parallels, literary suggestions swarm in Michelet; even the ’45 seems to him (the origin of the notion is obvious enough, but thinking it out will be found uncommonly difficult) “a Canto of Ossian.” But for our purposes the pair are almost disqualified—Michelet more than Quinet, but Quinet very mainly—by two things. The first is that confusion—whither derived from Vico or from the Germans does not matter—of literature with history, sociology, politics, psychology, and the like, which has seemed orthodox to the two last generations, but which to me appears a dangerous delusion and confusion. The other is the peculiar voyant thought and style of both, which precludes them from taking anything like a clear and achromatic view of any literary matter, even if they had endeavoured to do so. Not that the prophet cannot be a critic, for we have been able to disentangle some extremely clear, trenchant, and (however disputable) orderly and logical dicta of criticism from Blake: and Carlyle’s deficiencies, where he is deficient as a critic, do not at all come from this cause. But maresnesting, and night-maresnesting in special, is the very worst possible—perhaps one might say the very most impossible—occupation for a critic; and while Quinet was often, Michelet was almost always, in quest of the variety and the sub-variety of nest.