Moreover, his method of dealing with Literature, and especially with that dramatic literature which chiefly interested him, is of the kind from which, as it seems to me, there come few good things—“De l’Amour Conjugal chez Shakespeare,” “Le Mariage au Théâtre dans Molière,” “La Jalousie” in this, that, and the other. It may be because of that “barrenness in the philosophic” with which I have been charged; but these things seem to me to be learning’s labour lost. Study Othello, study Leontes, study Posthumus as much as you like; but to see the life, the poetry, the passion in these live, poetic, passionate men and plays, not to extract a dead essence in a bottle and label it “Jealousy in Shakespeare”—or rather in vacuo. Still, there are others who have other tastes, and Saint-Marc Girardin’s half score of editions prove it, and perhaps justify them.

Planche.

Gustave Planche, on the other hand—a critic probably much less known now, except vaguely and anecdotically, than Girardin—appears to me to have been a real critic, and to have missed, so narrowly that I do not quite know how he missed it, being a very great critic. Probably it was quia non multum amabat: because he succumbed to that fatalest temptation of our kind to scratch and scoff and snarl instead of embracing. Anecdotically, as I have said, he is probably well enough known—his passion for George Sand, and his odd ways, and especially that most unlucky indifference to clean linen, and cleanliness generally, which he shared with the authors of the Song to David and the Rambler, turn up in all the books. He appears in the Comédie Humaine,[[627]] and the more extreme Hugolaters shudder or storm at him as a blasphemer of Hugo. But I rather doubt whether many people read his criticism now.[[628]]

Weight of his criticism.

Yet it deserves reading thoroughly: and it is only a pity that there is not more of it easily accessible. That Planche entirely avoids the quest of the mare’s-nest cannot be said; but some varieties of that curious structure are very tempting even to good critics. He may be thought to have found or built a famous one in the discovery that the three egregious books of the excellent Henry Mackenzie, instead of being Sterne plus Rousseau, watered down with quant. suff. of artificial tears, are “a sorrowful and unique hymn on the insufficiency and obscurity of actual life,” the “confession of an immaculate soul.” One thinks of the entire pressgang lifting up its voice and weeping at the noble conduct of old Edwards, and the like, and one marvels—but not, in my case at least, contemptuously. It is perhaps not wonderful, after this, that Planche, though he admires Fielding, cannot tolerate Jonathan Wild. Yet in close context he gives us taste of his quality by a really admirable inquiry—one of the best I know—into the difference of Drama and Novel, and the light which is thrown by and on this difference, in regard to the inferiority of Fielding as a dramatist, and his greatness in prose fiction. No one who has been so kind as to interest himself in my views will think that I agree with Planche when he holds that “literary quality does not matter,” when he bids us seek “the will before the inspiration, the fatal irresistible idea.” He would certainly have anathematised, and does, I think, somewhere very nearly anathematise in terms, my favourite doctrine of the Poetic Moment. But what do such differences of opinion matter? You blaze away at the enemy, but, if he and you be of the right stamp, you salute the soldier.

And Planche (for all his most unfortunate objection to soap and water) is, I think, a “gentleman of the French Guard,” a Black Mousquetaire of the doughtiest. His objection to Hugo[[629]] is not in the least fossil or stupid. He has a right to it: it is a legitimate and inevitable deduction from his general poetic creed and likings. No poet gives more “poetic moments” than Hugo: and Planche, as we have seen, does not hold with them. No poet has more of poésie visible than Hugo: and Planche objects to this poetry nominatim, directly, again and again, and wants to go back to that poésie intelligible, in which, it must be admitted, Victor would not be quite so victorious. He argues—and I do not know that one can so easily deny it off-hand as point out that it is a dangerous suggestion of false issues—that beauty of form does sometimes “appeal to the very lowest passions”: while, on the other hand, a poet doit toujours avoir une idée philosophique, which (again we must confess) Hugo very seldom, if ever, had. Yet for all this he can say plumply, pour le maniement de la langue, M. Hugo n’a pas de rival, and he admires, little as he can have agreed with much of it, that remarkable Preface to Littérature et Philosophie Mélées on which we have commented above.

He is nothing if not a daring critic. Some of us, who have studied French Literature very long, would hesitate to tell a Frenchman, as Planche unhesitatingly tells Bulwer,[[630]] not merely that he ought to be plus serré, plus précis, et moins vague, which is true and within any one’s competence, but moins incorrect, which from a foreigner seems going far. This verbality of Planche’s is in fact one of his main notes. Lamartine,[[631]] one might think, was made for him as a poet: and he does indeed think that Lamartine’s position is magnifique et incontesté. But he does not scruple to say that la grammaire est souvent offensée by the poet of the Méditations; that l’indicatif se croise avec l’imparfait (think of the horror of this crime!) à trois lignes de distance; that the ambitious Jocelyn is un beau poème sans composition et sans style. It may be more surprising that he is not cordial to Alfred de Vigny, and cannot in the least grasp Dolorida: but it must be remembered that Vigny’s earlier work (the posthumous Poems might have pleased Planche better, had he lived to see them) is distinctly inclined to that poésie visible, which the critic did not like because, I think, he could not himself “see” it. It must be admitted that he “gets home” on Leconte de Lisle’s Wardour Street Greek—though I do not know that his sharp correction is more fatal than “Théo’s” mild one.[[632]]

Lastly, we may mention the extremely remarkable paper[[633]] on Les Royautés Littéraires, with its notable classification of critics into those who gauge works of literature (1) by comparing them with the past, (2) as present things merely, (3) by looking to the future and the end that the author proposes to himself. Here it is enough to point out to the intelligent the curious difference between this classification and some others. For Planche, near as his terms may seem to come to it, does not mean, by the criticism of his first class, what we mean by the Historic-Comparative method.