Its shortcomings.
It is unnecessary to add much to what Sainte-Beuve and Scherer,[[851]] both his personal friends, both practically Frenchmen, both acquainted as few Frenchmen have been with English literature itself, one of supreme and the other of high critical competency, said in deprecation of this proceeding. But an Englishman, especially if he knows something of other literatures as well as his own, enjoys a parrhesia which they did not enjoy. And the only adequate verdict that can be pronounced on Taine’s History of English Literature is that, great as a book and as a creation, it is as criticism not faulty, not unequal, but positively and utterly worthless. It does not even supply the native with useful independent checks and views “as others see,” for the views are the views of a theory, not a man. It supplies the foreigner with a false and dangerous travesty.
Instances of them.
But in reference to so famous, and in a way so engaging, a book, it might seem impertinent not to descend a little more to particulars. Let anybody contrast the handlings of Dryden and of Swift. The former is one, I do not hesitate to say, of the worst criticisms ever written by a great writer, the latter one of the best. And why? Because Swift—great, arch-great as he is—is very much of a piece: and Taine can adjust him to his theory. Dryden is not of a piece at all, except in regard to that purely literary craftsmanship which a foreigner can judge least well. He is scattered, eclectic, contradictory: and if you make any general theory about him, or even bring any general theory in contact with him, you get into difficulties at once. About Keats—a great person surely, and in casting shadows before him immense—Taine is null; about Shelley, ludicrous; I am not sure that he so much as mentions Browning, most of the best of whose work was done when he wrote. To take examples all over the history, on Piers Plowman, on the Caroline Poets, on Gray and Collins, he is at the mercy of any cub in criticism, and a thing to look at and pass for the more gracious and benign animals therein. Sometimes, as we have said above, he tempts the horrid reflection, “Had he really read the authors of whom he speaks?” And always his neglect (which may have endeared him to Mérimée)[[852]] of the minor figures throws his sketches of the major out of drawing, out of composition, out of proportion. That he started from Sainte-Beuve is certain; but he comes round to a point absolutely opposed to Sainte-Beuve’s serene observatory. He speaks of what he has not seen.
Montégut: his peculiarities.
It is strange, though perhaps not inexplicable, that the critical renown of Émile Montégut is not greater with us than it is. He was one of the best and most popular writers of the Revue des Deux Mondes at a time when it still held the position of the chief critical periodical in Europe. He dealt largely with subjects of special interest to Englishmen. Yet, with us, he has nothing like the reputation, not merely of Sainte-Beuve, but of Scherer and Taine. The reasons for this lie partly in the fact that Montégut was, I believe, at all times a man who wrote for his bread, and so not only had to do translation,[[853]] biography on commission, and other hack-work, but even in his proper sphere could not pick and choose his tasks. Another cause may probably be found in his fondness—I will not say for prolixity, but for handling on the very great scale. I have said elsewhere that I believe part of the success of Sainte-Beuve to be due to the fact that in his very best days he very rarely dealt, at any one time, with any one subject at more than single (or at most double) causerie length. Montégut’s treatment of George Eliot runs to 160 pages, that of Charlotte Bronté to very little less, those of Musset and (more remarkably still) of Nodier to 120 each. Now, though people will sometimes read critical estimates of great length, they will rarely re-read them. And they do not show the qualities of the critic, especially to the running reader, with as much clearness, crispness, and variety of effect as do shorter, but not too short, pieces.
Yet these qualities in Montégut were rare and admirable. I do not know that I have found any work, short of the Aristotelian-Longinian-Coleridgian level, stand the process of re-reading, among the thousand applications of it which this book has necessitated, better than his. His critical appeal is not tapageur and peremptory like that of Taine; nor has it quite the clear, vigorous, masculine, common-sense judgment, when prejudice does not interfere, of Scherer; but it is extraordinarily enveloping, penetrating, intimate. With Taine you get soon tired, if not of his opes, which are indeed considerable, yet of his fumum strepitumque: with Scherer you think that he has said what he ought to have said, but you are not very anxious to hear him say it again,[[854]] and there is rarely any “second intention,” any suggested but not obvious thought, for you to hear. Montégut’s delicate, intricate reflection and sympathy, especially at the length at which they are given, can hardly, by the most attentive and sensitive of readers, be taken in all at once; there are always gleanings of the grapes, always second mowings of the grass to be made.
Further, Montégut was, in this group, the only one who did not commit himself to the absolute and inseparable identification of critical inquiry with the construction and application of a general theory of national character and history. He was not, indeed, always free from this besetting delusion of nineteenth-century criticism, a delusion which has done nearly as much harm as all the idols of Neo-classicism put together.[[855]] On the contrary, he has whole essays tending in this direction.[[856]] But his best work is done in quite a different one, and, in a late and remarkable study of Saint-René Taillandier,[[857]] he expressly draws a contrast between critique littéraire and critique qui se propose un but social, and lays down that in the former “les œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur beauté et leur perfection.” And so, unenslaved by non-literary theory, and only “servant,” in the good old sense of lover, to the Muses, he is able to discern the interest of work in both directions, while the pure national-character critics are hampered in one by the theory they take to help them along in the other, and not much helped by it even there.