Not the most difficult case is that of the attacks on Hugo, which provoked the poet to some of his most undignified Billingsgate in reply. It may seem indeed odd that a person who, though with a difference, was himself a romantique enragé—a man who calls Villemain un eunuque littéraire opéré par le goût—should dislike Hugo. But, first of all, there is the religious and political grudge against Hugo as a deserter: and Barbey never forgets his grudges, though he deplores the effect of other grudges on Chasles. And, secondly, one begins to wonder whether, in the soul of his soul, he cared much for poetry. One of his epigrams on Hugo himself,[[831]] clever as it is, gives more than a hint of this. The poet is un puits artésien de poésie—intarissable, mais de la même eau. This is to a very great extent true; but who ever quarrelled with a fountain of living water because it is a fountain of living water, and does not, like an artificial one on a holiday, alternately play milk, and milk-punch, and raspberry vinegar? Certainly no one who had ever thoroughly realised what the Water of Poetry—the Water of Life for the soul—is. So, too, no one, whatever his political and religious views, who can taste this Water of Life, could possibly dismiss the Contemplations as un livre accablant, un livre qui doit descendre vite dans l’oubli des hommes. And his distaste leads him into puerilities and almost stupidities of verbal criticism, such as the question, when Hugo has written, “O chiens! qu’avez vous donc dans les dents? C’est son nom.” “Comment s’y est on pris pour l’y faire entrer?”

On others.

But his dislike for Hugo does not, in the least, conciliate him to, for instance, Mérimée—the same prejudices working in a different way, and summoning others to their aid. This exquisite master of style and irony, this ice-covered volcano, is at one time[[832]] un morceau de bois (I wish some one would show me the Broceliande where such wood grows!), at another a “wading bird” (échassier) who occasionally fishes up a Carmen! (“O lead us to those ponds where Carmens swarm!”) A writer who is at least as different from Mérimée as from Hugo, George Sand, is le plus grand préjugé contemporain (another example of Barbey’s successes, at least in epigram) la grande routine dans l’admiration de ce siècle, nay, actually commune—which even those who have no mania for the lady or her work may think extravagant.[[833]] One stares as one reads that Southey’s Nelson is bêtement raconté, till one remembers Barbey’s intense, flaming, roaring Byronism, or, perhaps, till one reads the rather tell-tale statement that “stern” [Sterne] veut dire sérieux en Anglais, which certainly does not argue a nice acquaintance with the nuances of the English language. As for the other statement, that “Johnson, l’affreux docteur Johnson, l’hippopotame de la lourde critique Anglaise, fut un de ceux qui se moquèrent le plus de Sterne,” it is sufficient to answer, “Why, no, sir!”

Strong redeeming points in him.

It may seem strange, after my citing these instances of wrong-going, which might be very largely multiplied, that I should have given even partial praise to Barbey d’Aurévilly as a critic. Yet I cannot withdraw it. In the first place, as examples already given will have shown, he was really a great master of the critical epigram—a thing capable of much abuse, and of late specially abused and vulgarised and brought into discredit, but (when well-bred, and well-trained, and well-ridden) a great battle-horse in the critical stable for all that. His own critical axioms, though generally requiring correction and completion, are often most valuable, as when he says[[834]] that the two great critical qualities are Penetration and Weight. Only he should have added (but the addition would have hit himself hard) “Directing Judgment,” without which diamond-point and battering-ram momentum can but waste themselves or do mischief. Indeed, in his own most misguided criticisms, penetration and weight themselves are seldom wanting. His ninth volume, Les Critiques ou les Juges jugés, is often quite admirable, almost always noteworthy, on the most different people—on Joubert as on Villemain, on Nisard as on Sainte-Beuve. And almost everywhere the writing is alive; the liking, if it be only crotchet, the dislike, if it be only prejudice, is, pro tanto and for the moment, real, felt, vécu. He is rather a bad example; he has, I think, like Veuillot, already done harm, not merely in France but in England. But I should be loath to lose him: for he is not as the scribes.

Doudan.

It is impossible to imagine a more curious contrast to the often by no means ignoble hack-work of Chasles, and the restless and somewhat “posing” activity of Barbey, than the fireside and library arm-chair quiet which pervades the writings of Doudan.[[835]] Critically, indeed, that work is chiefly valuable as a placid and agreeable reflection of the workings of such a life on an intellect above the average, but of no gigantic force or “genial” individuality, and a taste for literature which never raised itself to very active or deliberate discharges of the critical function. His two most regular critical exercises, the early article “De la nouvelle école poétique”[[836]] occasioned by Sainte-Beuve’s Tableau, and the later but (unless I mistake) not precisely dated “Les Révolutions du Goût,”[[837]] are more curious than exactly important. They exhibit, as the work of these half-recluses often does, an odd mixture of reflection of the time-movements and reaction against them. His style of opposition (for he does oppose it) to the Romantic movement is double, and in each case rather unexpected. Interest of his general attitude, One horn is pure Chauvinism. “Who are these Germans and English, that we Frenchmen should imitate them?” This he shed later. But he always lifted up the other—a curious form of belief in progress and development, which once more almost persuades us to believe that no believer in Progress can be a critic as such and for the time. In the “De la Nouvelle École” this takes the cruder form, common in the early nineteenth century, of asking why we, with all our glorious gains, should go back to, if not exactly barbarous ages, yet less favoured ones? In the Révolutions it becomes a subtler, but perhaps more dangerous, heresy, which draws to its aid the fashionable fancies about time and climate and the like. According to Doudan, it would seem, a real historical criticism is impossible,—“Les nuances délicates s'évanouissent quand les mœurs, etc., ont changé.” You cannot keep on the tracks of poesy, cette science émue et populaire (note the Montaignesque perfection of the phrase, whatever we may think of the argument), you cannot sound ces magnifiques abîmes. Each generation sees only one side of the Beautiful—and apparently you cannot extract and combine the visions of each from their records. Which is, I think, blasphemy against Criticism and Literature; but some fight might, no doubt, be made for it, and it is admirably and suggestively put.