If Baudelaire had given less attention to the criticism of art[[871]] and more to that of literature, and if he had been permitted more health and longer life,[[872]] it is more than probable—it is nearly certain—that he would have been a very considerable literary critic. As it is, there is hardly a page of the two hundred or so which concern the subject in the volume of his posthumously published or republished works, entitled L’Art Romantique, that does not contain most remarkable things. He had paid beforehand for Gautier’s admirable Preface by the most elaborate of his own individual appreciations: and the shorter notices of Hugo and others, with the few reviews of individual books (including Les Misérables and Madame Bovary), make a worthy company for it. But Baudelaire’s special aptitude is for criticism of a slightly more abstract kind, such as his Conseils aux Jeunes Littérateurs, Les Drames et Les Romans Honnêtes, &c.; while the actual appreciations of particulars just noticed are apt to drift off in this direction. And it was not to be regretted: for these axiomata media are often extremely true and subtle. If people would only study them, the popular idea—as far as there is any popular idea at all—of Baudelaire as a passionate and paradoxical champion of immorality and abnormality of all kinds would be strangely altered.[[873]] Irony is indeed almost always present: but it is yoked with a feeling for art which is extraordinary, and with a sound good sense which, especially in its ironic leaven, often makes one think of Thackeray.

Crépet’s Les Poètes Français

As a combined anthology of poetry and criticism, Crépet’s Poètes Français[[874]] has no superior—it may be doubted whether it has an equal. After its general Introduction by Sainte-Beuve, the mediæval and fifteenth-century poets were committed to the admirably competent hands of Louis Moland, a member of the second Romantic generation mainly represented in this Book, who gave up the bar to devote himself to editing and studying older French literature; Anatole de Montaiglon, a still more learned scholar and palæographer; Charles d’Héricault, the remarkable excellence of whose fifteenth and early sixteenth century studies has been referred to before, and who has hardly a critical fault except a slight over-valuation of his pet subjects. With the sixteenth century—or rather with the Pléiade—recourse was naturally had to writers who were less of specialists and more of men of letters generally. Gautier, Baudelaire, and Banville are contributors; Janin’s article on Lamartine is one of the best specimens of his more serious criticism: while the great mass of minor poets were divided among divers others, of whom the most fully presented and the best known were Charles Asselineau, the bibliographer of Romanticism and a diligent student with a pleasant pen; Hippolyte Babou, the accredited inventor of Baudelaire’s title Fleurs du Mal, and a man of remarkable though (except here) rather wasted talent; Philoxène Boyer (“Dans les salons de Philoxène, Nous étions quatre-vingt rimeurs”); and Edouard Fournier, an inestimable editor, in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne and elsewhere, and the author, among innumerable other things, of the famous collection, L’Esprit des Autres (Paris, 1855).

The whole collection is a real literary and critical monument—independently of the merit of many of the articles—because it is practically the first attempt to deal with the entire poetry of a literature in a catholic and impartial manner, uninfluenced by any prevailing theory exalting or depressing particular periods, or particular writers, at the expense of others. The nineteenth century had its faults, and many of them: but this book could hardly have been written before the nineteenth century.

Flaubert: the “Single Word.”

If Rousseau, who wrote no criticism at all, ought, according to some, to have a large place in a History thereof, how much more Flaubert? For the author of Madame Bovary, though he wrote, or at least published, hardly any, has filled his Letters[[875]] with critical remarks, and is the acknowledged godfather, though by no means the inventor (for we have seen it as far back as La Bruyère, nay, as Longolius, if not as far back as Virgil), of the Doctrine of the Single Word—the notion that there is only one phrase, sometimes only one single and integral combination of letters, which will really express an author’s meaning, and that he must wrestle with Time and the dictionary and his own invention till he finds this. This, we say, will be found passim in Flaubert’s Letters; it will be found, by those who do not wish to read all these (they make a mistake), admirably and forcibly put by his disciple Maupassant in the Introduction thereto. The doctrine,[[876]] though an obvious exaggeration of the true doctrine of the importance of “the word,” is an interesting one, and has been—perhaps still is—an influential, but, on our general principles, I do not think it necessary to give Flaubert much space here on the strength of it. He never chose to embody his opinions on this matter in any regular form; probably, with his very peculiar temperament, it would have been quite impossible for him to do so, while his headlong ways of thought and speech, so oddly contrasted with the enormous patience of his writing, made his critical utterances in relation to others mainly genial and Gargantuan splutters—things gigantesque, to use his own favourite word, but not critical.

“Naturalism.”