At any rate, what has to be said on them by way of comment belongs rather to Interchapter and Conclusion than to this place, where we are busy with Gautier’s application of his doctrines. The next considerable document to the Preface just noticed is the Grotesques of 1844, a delightful book. After all that has been written since on Villon, one comes back to it about him. Scalion de Virbluneau and some others are mere hors-d'œuvre, agreeable enough, but no more. The pièce de résistance of the book is the long, ardent, but at the same time humorous (Théo was one of the few indubitable humourists that France can boast) vindication of the critic’s namesake, Théophile de Viaud, one of the most luckless of the many luckless poets of genius. But Saint-Amant, Chapelain, Scudéry, Scarron, supply him with occasions for work scarcely inferior to the “Théophile.” The criticism is of course, on the whole, avowedly criticism of the lighter kind, gossip-criticism, criticism intended not to disgust those who do not take literature very seriously. But it is also intended to please those who do: and it does.
Histoire du Romantisme, &c.
The various documents included under the general head of Histoire du Romantisme and Portraits Contemporains are of very different dates, covering nearly the whole of Gautier’s forty years of literary life. Being ranged rather by subject than by date,[[623]] they enable us to judge the singular evenness and continuity of his critical spirit, which (as Maxime Du Camp, I think, has urged, and as I myself have always held) was systematic by tendency and nature, though haphazard on the surface. The Histoire itself was actually interrupted by the critic-poet’s death: and the masterly Essay on the French Poetry of the middle of the Century (which should be compared with Sainte-Beuve’s) is only five years before it: but some of its companions go back twenty years, and many of the Portraits Contemporains recede to the legendary decade of the ’Thirties themselves.
Ubiquity of felicity in his criticism.
In all, the same critical qualities are apparent—a central motive and directing power of belief in the two doctrines stated above, but at the same time a system of gearing, flexible enough to accommodate itself to the most widely different subjects, an unwearied and rejoicing faculty of appreciation proper, an unrivalled science of verse and of descriptive and decorative prose, an ever-present charm, and, over all and through all, the atmosphere of the sweet and sunny temper which it is so specially delightful and so rare to find in a competent critic. But for those who want sufficient yet not too copious examples, three long pieces—the article on French Poetry above mentioned, the “Balzac” of 1858 (which M. Montégut, I think, has justly called magnifique), and the Introduction to the posthumous edition of Baudelaire in 1867—will do excellently. Between them they would fill a not so very small volume, and there would be hardly a page in that volume destitute of the merits just enumerated, and others to boot. The first is perhaps the greatest example extant of reviewing, brought sub specie æternitatis, and made really higher criticism. From the Légende des Siècles (and remember what Gautier writing on Hugo meant under the Second Empire!) to the Odes Funambulesques, from Poèmes Evangéliques to Fleurs du Mal, on scores of poets and books of poetry besides, he finds always the suitable, and, at the same time, always the admirable word to say. On Balzac and Baudelaire alike—great as is the alteration of palette, and viewing-glass, and style of handling that the two require—he shows alike that “impeccability,” that “perfect magic in letters,” which the younger of his subjects had ascribed to him. I do not know any critic who deserves the older and now strangely altered epithet of “candid” (i.e., “amiably just”) better than Gautier: but his amiability is never indulged at the expense of his justice. And perhaps it needs nothing more than the statement of this fact to express, συνετοῖσι, the infinite resources of his skill in thought and phrase.
Saint-Marc Giradin.
Saint-Marc Girardin[[624]] (who was three or four years older than Sainte-Beuve, and outlived him by four or five) has, in a reference above, been coupled with Villemain, and the resemblance both of career and of critical quality is rather strong. Both were politicians, both professors, and both played their double part after a fashion to which there are few parallels in English history, and those few not very encouraging. But Saint-Marc Girardin was a really considerable person in politics—not least in the very last days of his life, when, in the National Assembly, charged with the reconstitution of France after the Prussian War, he was a strong monarchical and Orleanist partisan. Of his numerous works, our chief texts are his Cours de Littérature Dramatique and his Essais de Littérature et de Morale which appeared in succession[[625]] about the middle of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. It may be well to say frankly and plumply that he is one of our (or perhaps it were better not to avoid the moi haïssable, and say “my”) disappointments. I did not read him very early, and had a very fair conceit of him when I began: but I find little to recommend in him.[[626]] He is emphatically “clever”; must have been a stimulating and effectual professor; writes very well; has a real (and not, as is rather common, a painfully simulated) combination of the man of letters and the man of the world. But he does not give me the idea of having had any spontaneous, individual, love for literature, or any original personal views about it. He has everywhere the juste milieu, the opportunism of his time, and his party, and his profession. He is neither a perruque nor an échevelé: he is, in fact, an accomplished Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. And Time is terribly of the Divine mind as to Laodicea and its angels.