It may be barely worth while to repeat the caution given above—that “successors” in the title of this chapter is not to be taken too literally; though, in fact, “Beware of the Letter” would be the best possible continuous heading for every page of every History of Literature or of Criticism. Construed, however, with some elasticity, the term has more than enough truth in it. Some of Sainte-Beuve’s elders, most of his contemporaries, practically all his juniors, felt the influence of the flood of criticism that welled, gently but irresistibly, from the fountainheads of the Causeries and their companion- or forerunner-volumes. Indeed, Taine—the most influential critic purely of the second half of the century in France—is only Sainte-Beuve methodised and formulated. Before him, we shall deal with three interesting individualities belonging to each of the groups just indicated. Then a sufficiently natural grouping will give us a notable quartette in Renan, Taine himself, Montégut, and Scherer. We may then diverge to another group, who represent the influence of Sainte-Beuve very strongly blended with that of Gautier, the most distinguished of these being Saint-Victor, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. Then we may take the “Naturalists”; then two notable theorists who pushed Taine’s own theory further, one in a less, the other in a more fruitful direction; then a fresh batch of critics of the generally academic or specially erudite kind. After which we may cast back to a kind of “Cossack” division—écheloned over the century,—and finish with at least a salute to certain famous living representatives of French criticism, of whom it is not, according to our plan, lawful to speak further.
The trio first referred to were more or less contemporaries, and present various tendencies of literature and criticism in the nineteenth century strikingly enough. Two of them, Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly and Victor Euphémion Philarète Chasles, were men of letters by profession, and in constant practice and publicity, for the greater part of the period: the third, Ximénès Doudan, published hardly anything in his lifetime, and was suddenly revealed, after his death and within the last quarter of the century, as one of those observers of the λάθε βίωσας who tend to become rarer and rarer in modern life.
Philarète Chasles.
The eldest of the three, Philarète Chasles,[[827]] was at an early period of his life a refugee in England for political reasons, and acquired there a knowledge of our literature and institutions which stood him in good stead for literary purposes ever afterwards. He was, however, at least as well acquainted with the literature of his own country, and in the summer of 1828 he divided the Academy’s prize, for a study of French literature in the sixteenth century, with an Essay[[828]] which is still worth studying, not merely as a foil to Sainte-Beuve’s famous and epoch-making book, but in itself. Some hold that, in one piece or another of a man’s early work, his whole literary development is, so to say, acorned; there is certainly something of the phenomenon in this tractate of Chasles. It has plenty of knowledge; it is well written; it abounds in intelligent aperçus; and it inclines (if with a limitation to be stated immediately) in the Romantic direction not obscurely, in the catholic, comparative, historical direction beyond all question. But there is a certain deficiency in grasp; the style, though often brilliant and forcible in a way, too seldom concentrates itself to light up, or to blast home, an important proposition; and in the principles there is a certain transaction and trimming to catch the favour of the judges. These merits and these defects alike continued to mark Chasles' work for the fifty years during which he unweariedly performed it: but the defects, if they did not exactly get the upper hand, made him more of a journalist than of a representative of literature. He was useful and important to his contemporaries, especially as a populariser of that English literature which was needed as an alterative by French, at least as much as French was by English. But even some special interest[[829]] cannot make me rank him very high as a critic.
Barbey d’Aurévilly.
If Chasles gave some occasion to those who charged him with being a “Swiss of Letters,” a journalist ready to do any journey-work—this was certainly not the case with Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the most considerable eccentrics of recent literature. A dandy and an apostle of Dandyism, a practitioner of the most “precious” style, a transgressor as to forbidden subjects, and at the same time one of the most formidable of those free lances of Catholicism of whom Ourliac, Pontmartin, and Veuillot are the chief others in his time and country, Barbey d’Aurévilly did a good deal to invite the title of charlatan, which was freely bestowed on him by his numerous and recklessly provoked enemies. But I do not think he quite deserved it at any time: and in a very large part of his extensive work[[830]] he did not deserve it at all. Nor are many people likely to follow me in reading this without acknowledging him as a chief example of that steady improvement in critical power with age, which has been so often noted. He never, indeed, became a good critic sans phrase—that is to say, a trustworthy one. In his country the danger-flag is constantly flying; or, rather, there are all sorts of danger-flags, some of which even the tolerably wary may not always recognise as such.
On Hugo.