Delicacy and range of his work.
Among the best examples of Montégut’s critical genius that I can think of is the short essay on Boccaccio[[858]] (where he shows conclusively that great length was not, in the least, an indispensable condition with him), almost all his English papers,[[859]] and the exceedingly agreeable study of Théophile Gautier,[[860]] which remains the best thing ever written on that author—difficult, though himself delightful. If I were an admirer of the Guérins (I am, though no more than reason, an admirer of Eugénie), I think I should prefer his papers on these two extraordinarily overpraised young persons to either Sainte-Beuve’s or Mr Arnold’s. The above-mentioned piece on Saint-René Taillandier is a real triumph of friendly advocacy. On Béranger—a subject, though for different reasons, almost as much a touchstone as Gautier—he is again wonderfully happy.
Indeed it is rather difficult—except when he is Tainising—to discover where Montégut is not happy. To his natural genius for delicate appreciation he united very wide reading, not merely in French, but in English, German, and Italian. In these foreign tongues he has the unconventional main heureuse, which sometimes, though not very often, attends foreigners who are not ignorant and who follow their own judgment. The average superficial critic in England to-day may think that he took Guy Livingstone[[861]] much too seriously; the future Sainte-Beuve of England may not. He could appreciate—as, again, not all our own critics could or can—the unequal, and for a foreigner one might think hopelessly baffling, qualities of Charles Kingsley. I am not sure that this “horizontality”—this faculty of bringing himself in line with German, Italian, English, French subjects and interpreting them, has not done him some harm. It is something so much out of the way, if not out of the reach, of most people that they suspect it. But in the court of International Critical Law—which, had it power as it has authority, would govern the literary world—his case is pretty safe.
Scherer: peculiar moral character of his criticism.
It has been recognised from the first that the obituary epigram of M. Edouard Rod on M. Edmond Scherer, “Il ne jugeait pas les écrits avec son intelligence; il les jugeait avec son caractère”—especially if it be remembered that caractère in French combines the meaning of the two English words “character” and “temper”—is an exposition, as happy as it was meant to be friendly, of the defects of the subject’s criticism. But, like all epigrams, it is scarcely adequate even to the portion of the subject to which it applies: and this subject was by no means one-sided. Fully to understand the dozen or so volumes[[862]] of trenchant and well-informed censorship which Scherer left, it is necessary, for all but persons of unusual powers of intellectual divination, to know much more of the circumstances than is always needful. He was, though French by birth, Swiss by extraction on the father’s side, and English on the mother’s: and he was brought up, in the straitest school of French Protestantism and English dissent, to become a Protestant-pastor. Continental Protestantism has always tended towards freethought, and after many years of progressive “advance” in his opinions, M. Scherer reached something like positive Nihilism in religion, or at least Agnosticism of the extremest kind. He had, though he must have read very widely in French Literature,[[863]] written little or nothing on it during this period: and he did not become a literary critic till he was forty-five. Moreover, in the process of unsettlement of his belief, his temper, which had always been very serious, seems to have acquired, as in the case of Mark Pattison and others, though not all, something like a definite roughening or souring. Further, he had paid much attention to philosophical study, and was peremptory in his requirement of “a philosophy” in all works of art and letters.[[864]] Yet further, his relinquishment of religion had made him only the more strenuous on the score of morality: and against any book or writer showing loose morals, or tolerance of them, he waged truceless war. Its consequent limitations. And to conclude, while he had a somewhat limited sense[[865]] of the comic, and was slow to appreciate irony, litotes, and other things like unto them, his very intelligence, though remarkably strong and in certain senses acute, was distinctly wanting in flexibility, accommodation, and “play.” It was a chisel rather than a watchspring-file, and when it encountered resistance or stoppage of any sort, it was apt rather to try to batter and break than to insinuate itself and so to open a way.
The solid merits accompanying them.
Add to these influences, not always tending for good, others tending powerfully the right way—great learning, the freedom from national prejudice derived from mixed blood, an inflexible honesty of intention, a perfect fearlessness, and a clear and forcible if not exactly attractive style—and the qualities of the resultant are easily anticipated. Such a critic will be weakest in the expression of dislikes. On Molière, Diderot, Carlyle, Baudelaire, especially on the three Frenchmen, M. Scherer is scarcely even interesting or edifying. His imperfect sympathy with the comic in the first case; his porcupine morality, perhaps again in the first, and certainly in the second and fourth; his dislike of the eccentric, the abnormal, the bizarre, in the third and fourth,—make real appreciation impossible for him. “What he says may be used against him,” to play on the famous police caution: but in regard to his subjects it is not so much ineffectual as almost irrelevant.