These specimens will, I hope, for all their scrappiness and want of context, give some idea of the force, weight, acuteness, and intellectual moment of Planche’s criticism. It is not in merely accidental and catalogue fashion that I have put him next to Saint-Marc Girardin. There is a real and a vital contrast. Planche may be right or he may be wrong, but what he says is coherent; it comes from a direct and real examination, intensely interested, of the subject under discussion; it is guided by and supplemented from a body of definite and, to some extent at any rate, reasoned literary preferences and principles. In short, once more, the live contact, the true, fruitful, critical embrace. It is a pity he did not wash!
Magnin.
Of Magnin we need not say so much, but all that is said must be good. A librarian for many, and a professor for a few, years, he was, as we have called him, a pure scholar, but with his erudition mellowed and sweetened by literature. His Origines du Théâtre en Europe,[[634]] written in the early days of historical comparative study of mediæval literature, is a classic still: and his Causeries et Méditations[[635]] contain many things worth reading. He was much interested, as were so many Frenchmen, by the visit of the English company of actors, in which Miss Smithson was leading lady, to Paris: and he was led to study the older English theatre, though he misjudges A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and rather staggers one’s notion of the necessary acquaintance with the language of the literature you are criticising, by talking about an English poem entitled “The Greece” (not “La Grèce,” understand). But probably we all do things as bad or worse. And at any rate, Magnin, with this work, his Origines, the re-introduction of modern readers to Hroswitha,[[636]] and other things, is a protagonist of the historical and the comparative in the study of literature.
Mérimée.
As we separated Beyle in a former chapter, so we may separate Beyle’s “most remarkable production,” Mérimée,[[637]] in this. His temperament, the very opposite in all ways to Hugo’s, was as critical as Hugo’s was uncritical, and his exquisite style—in some respects the most exquisite of the French nineteenth century—should have lent itself to criticism with a sort of pre-established harmony that could never have belonged to the merely plain, or to the mainly “fulgurous.” But, as in other ways, there was something suicidal, or at least self-silencing, in this same temperament, and Mérimée has not left us very much to deal with here. There are numerous strokes of it in the Letters to Panizzi and the Inconnues, some of them not unprecious. We knew that Mérimée (ii. 205, to the Inconnue) would think Hugo “words without ideas,” and recommend a dose of Madame de Sévigné as a remedy (why not enjoy both and turn them to profit?). But it is really interesting to find that he cannot like Baudelaire, and most of all to find his first (though even then rather lukewarm) approval of Renan as a brother in freethought lessening, till we have the famous description—worthy of a Veuillot who should cease to be a swashbuckler and become a gentleman of the sword—of the style of the Vie de Jésus as “the delight of all the servant-girls of France.” But Mérimée, like some others whom we have noticed, was drawn away by his studies, no less than by those contradictions of cynical-sentimental temperament of which we have spoken, from pure literary criticism to things like History and Antiquities, where he had not to “distrust himself.” There may even have been some of the Congrevian affectation, which Voltaire not unjustly rebuked, in the caprice which made him, as M. Blaze de Bury[[638]] says, “causeur, érudit, archéologue, académicien, sénateur, tout ce qu’on voulait, mais homme de lettres! jamais!” which brought it about that “avec lui la littérature ne venait que par surcroît.” In his published things of the kind, Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires,[[639]] Portraits Historiques et Littéraires,[[640]] and the like, the literary side is studiously kept down and away from, though, as we see from the Letters, it was always really present. He imputes to Beyle[[641]] his own assumed detachment from it; the review[[642]] of Ticknor’s Spanish Literature, which he was so admirably qualified to write, is full of traits going in the same direction. One is rather sorry to find Mérimée siding with those who would have mediocre authors kept out of literary histories, pretending that a man may read too much (he was himself almost omnilegent), that you can understand French seventeenth-century theatre (you cannot) “without having read Campistron.” But this is the fanfaronade of a modern Signor Pococurante, with a difference; and in the piece Mérimée cannot help showing his own critical sense (whether consistently or not) in his demand for more on the early literature, in his contempt of symbolic and Germanising explanations of Don Quixote. Of the two papers[[643]] which, with the “Beyle,” are the longest of his literary essays, the “Cervantes” and the “Brantôme,” the latter has a mere coda, the briefest possible, of true literary criticism, and the former not very much of it. Even on his beloved Russians, Gogol,[[644]] Pouchkine, Tourguénieff—though there was bound to be more here in the case of an actual Introduction, so to say, at last by a Grand Master of the Ceremonies of a new language and literature—there is hardly so much, except perhaps on Pouchkine, as we should expect. Like Lockhart, to whom he had a great resemblance, Mérimée hated “your d—d literary man” so much, and feared so much to be mistaken for such a person, that he would not, perhaps at last could not, be what he might have been as a critic. But we could not do without the stories from Charles IX. to Lokis, and we can very well do without criticism from him. So all, once more, is for the best—a reflection which, when made in connection with Mérimée, has unwonted piquancy.
[565]. His Critiques et Études Littéraires (2 vols., Paris, 1857) contain many things upon which I should like to dwell, especially his discussion, in the Globe, of the État de la Poésie Française in 1825. It is as good an expression of the views of the earlier, cooler, and more erudite Eclectic-Romantics as could be wished.
[566]. To be found in his Essais Historiques et Littéraires: Paris, 1862. The Essais Philosophiques et Littéraires (Paris, 1875) may also be consulted: but, as the double titles may warn the wary, there is not much pure literature in either.