The memories of a reviewer, however hard he may have tried to do his duty, are apt to lodge in a tomb from which there grow more briers than roses. It is not the most unpleasant of the thoughts of the present writer on his own reviewing period that the Ægri Somnia[[617]] of M. Désiré Nisard enabled him, not quite too late, to revise, in the right direction, his opinion of their author. There needed, and there needs, no grovelling palinode—Nisard still seemed, and still seems to me, to have taken on the whole the wrong side in criticism. And I am not quite certain that the reproach (which was brought against him and which he endeavoured to refute, almost as late as the publication of Ægri Somnia itself, by boldly and wisely reprinting his early articles) of having “burnt what he had adored” was quite unjust. But in these last utterances there was a singular dignity, justice, and good taste, contrasting rather fortunately or unfortunately, according to the side on which one looked, with the insolences which Hugo had permitted himself during the senile apotheosis of his fifteen years’ restoration after the Année Terrible. And one saw—as indeed one always had seen more or less—that whatever had been faulty in M. Nisard’s earlier, but not earliest judgments, had been the result of an undue, an exclusive, a not quite intelligently catholic devotion to justice, dignity, good taste. There have been greater men who had worse gods.
His Essais sur le Romantisme.
If one did not know how very differently personal matters strike the person and the not-person, it might be surprising to a reader of the reprinted Essais sur le Romantisme[[618]] that M. Nisard should have in any way complained of the charge of burning what he had adored. The first half of the book is occupied with articles dating from 1829 to 1831—on Hugo, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and even Musset. They are very good articles; they are, I think, better criticism than Sainte-Beuve’s own was at this time: but, though they are not wildly ultra-Romantic, they in each and every case—even in that of Musset himself—take the side and the defence of the innovators. It is true that there is, towards the last, a momentous and germinal doubt whether there is not something excessive in Hugo—whether there is not de trop.
And in the Preface to the second part, written in 1838, the critic announces his conversion in terms which admit of no dispute. He speaks of his retour aux doctrines classiques, he says that he has “ranged himself,” that he “climbs back, with discouraged and dragging step, the road that he had run down in his intoxication.” Metaphor for metaphor, has this much change to give or to receive from that of “burning the adored”? And the substance of the remainder bears this out. Much in the manifesto Contre la Littérature Facile is quite true—not merely of 1830: and the subsequent controversy with Jules Janin is not idle or one-sided. But as for the articles on Hugo himself which follow, an innocent person might suppose them to have been written by quite another M. Nisard than the author of those above referred to. The Chants du Crépuscule, we are told, “ont achevé de désespérer les amis de M. V. H.” (They contain, let it be remembered, Napoleon II.) There is a caractère de décadence in them. His prose has a better chance than his verse. His mort littéraire is prochaine (so near, in fact, that he wrote the Légende des Siècles twenty, and published the Quatre Vents de l’Esprit more than forty years later).
Yes! M. Nisard was burning what he had adored; but it is fair to admit that for the rest of his long life he adored what he had certainly never burned. His most famous work, the Histoire de la Littérature Française,[[619]] is written in rigid confinement to the Classical house, with fresh windows opened, indeed, so that the critic could see the glory of Shakespeare and others outside, but with a strict regulation that nothing shall be changed in the furniture and regulations within. The capital studies of Latin Poets, the miscellaneous literary work—professorial and other—are all the consistent utterances of a man who has pulled himself up on the edge (or a little over the edge) of a precipice, and has resolved, for the rest of his life, to walk steadily in the other direction. No article of Sainte-Beuve’s is at once juster and more acute than that on M. Nisard’s History, with its exposition of the way in which the critic-historian has constructed an a priori theory of the French literary genius, and has written his history accordingly—accepting and eulogising those writers who illustrate his conception, neglecting or denouncing those who run counter to it. And the conception itself is formed altogether according to the second manner of viewing—the view according to which Les Chants du Crépuscule is, in another sense, a song of approaching night. M. Nisard tells us that his conversion was effected during a visit to England, and under the influence of Homer and La Fontaine. Surely never was there such a singular instance of similia similibus in literature; nor has the country of Shakespeare—where, by the way, Tennyson and Browning had just brought out their first books—ever exercised a more remarkable influence upon a studious visitor.
By whatever process, M. Nisard had become a confirmed anti-Romantic, and such he remained to the end. He is one of the best of the breed: learned, consistent, courageous, courteous withal, as the critic who is or wishes to be considered “scholarly” too seldom is. But he has given himself up to an idol: he will not take the Work as the Work presents itself, and judge whether it is good or bad. And the result is inevitable.
Their culpa maxima.
The conclusion of the reprinted Essais, with great temper and in excellent taste, practically confesses M. Nisard’s weakness as a critic. It is the weakness of the old “faults-and-beauties” method, joined to the moral heresy. Victor Hugo, he says, was a man with very grave moral faults. He was: and what is more, these moral faults were of a singularly disenchanting kind. Further, Victor Hugo’s works are full of faults not merely moral. They are: and sometimes these faults are almost inconceivable. But what M. Nisard forgot is that the critic, like the miner, is finally concerned with the quantity and quality of poetic gold which a poet—or, for the matter of that, with the quantity and quality of literary gold which any man of letters—will yield. No matter that it lies in a pestilential neighbourhood; no matter that you have to smelt out quartz, and far worse and uglier things than quartz, to get it. Is the gold there? That, and nothing else, is the question. Now, in Hugo the gold is there; it is there not by pennyweights, not by ounces, not by pounds, but by hundredweights to the ton. And the critical process, if only it be perfected, is after all not so laborious as the process of stamps and cyanide; the critic himself is not susceptible to wild beasts and malaria. Gold or no gold? much gold or little? these are his true questions. M. Nisard could not see them. The gold must be ready smelted to a certain orthodox French standard; it must be even brought in ingots, or ready worked into jewellery, according to pattern. Otherwise he would not have it. And of the many critics that have been, are, will be, like unto him, he was after all one of the best.