“Scientific criticism”: Hennequin.
One of the objections—and not the least forcible—to philosophising too much, in æsthetic matters as in others, is at the “too much” always begets a too much more; it is like the Hybris of Greek dramatics. Some might have thought that Nisard, with his ideal French genius, and still more Taine, with his all-pervading law of place and time and circumstance, would have satisfied every normal craving for “scientific” criticism: some even that the results of their practice were sufficient to warn any reasonable person off such things. But to think this would have been to ignore humanity and history. Towards the end of the penultimate decade of the century a young and energetic critic, M. Émile Hennequin, fluttered the dove-cotes (or hawk’s eyries) of criticism with a still further straitening of the method, by the promulgation of what he was pleased to term esthopsychology. His career was cut prematurely short:[[883]] and, as the experienced had foreseen, “esthopsychology” soon followed—if it did not even accompany—him to the grave. But it made some noise for a time: and the three volumes,[[884]] which he issued in three successive years, will always remain a curiosity of criticism if not much more; while his attempt, foredoomed as it was, is, will be, to failure, is sure to be renewed. It was duly pointed out at the time that when “esthopsychological” criticism proceeded most closely on its own lines it was usually bad criticism, and that when it was good criticism its methods were not distinguishable from those of other kinds. This is true; but there is something more to be said.
Let us do M. Hennequin the justice to admit at once that he separated his new science from strictly literary criticism, and adjusted literature itself in an entirely peculiar and novel attitude and garb, before he subjected it to his own processes of pathological experiment. “Literary work,” according to him,[[885]] is “a collection of written signs intended to produce non-active emotions”: and of course in the country where, and for the people to whom, it is this, all sorts of peculiar phenomena may arise. In that country we can quite understand that they regard individuality as an influence perturbatrice,—a nasty, impudent, interfering baggage that upsets formulas, and brings your sum all wrong just when you have got it symmetrically arranged in the ciphering book. But those who consider individuality as the source and soul of genius, the only begetter of poetry, the incomparable companion, patron, voucher of great Art—what part or lot can they have with the esthopsychologists? A sort of slender snow-bridge across the crevasse may show itself when we come to the doctrine that, in order to understand a book, you must analyse its effect on the reader as well as the evidences it gives of its own originating causes and purposes in the author; but then, as was pointed out in the antithesis above cited, there is nothing new in this:—we are back again with Longinus, nay, with Aristotle. And we speedily discover that the other side of this bridge is a place to which we do not even wish to get, though the proceedings of the inhabitants are sometimes rather funny at a distance.
An enormous tabular scheme of conditioning and distinguishing circumstances, characteristics, means, effects, &c., has first to be arranged. The sea as a place is b: something more complicated is “daxxx,” and so on. You compose your formula for Hugo by the help of thus symbolising his Mystery, his Grandiosity, and a good many other things, including the fact (not a fact by any means) that he had in 1888 only one disciple in England—to wit, Mr Swinburne. You study Dickens, Heine, Tourguénieff, and Poe in this way as Écrivains Francisés, others as Écrivains Français. And what is the result? Dickens has much “sensibility”; Hugo is “antithetic”; the Goncourts rather draw than write; M. Huysmans affects sensational colour; Panurge is an incarnation of the ancient French character. “Après avoir fait l’analyse du vocabulaire, de la syntaxe, de la métrique, de la composition de Flaubert, nous avons examiné ses procédés de description et de psychologie qui se reduisent à ceux—[the reader doubtless expects something new and startling]—du réalisme”! These “secrets of Punch,” these “truths of M. de La Palisse,” simply pullulate in M. Hennequin’s pages. We travel painfully from Dan to Beersheba, and from Beersheba through all the wildernesses to the uttermost parts of the sea; we accumulate the most elaborate implements, provisions, documents of travel that the shops can furnish or our ingenuity invent: we spend months and years in painful prospecting. And we bring home exactly the same conclusions which have been written on the walls of every house in the intellectual Israel for Heaven knows how many years. Much μόχθος περισσὸς has been seen in this story: some (though I should demur) would have it to be a history—and an example—of nothing else. But labour more utterly lost than “esthopsychology” I think we have not found, and shall not find, even here.
“Comparative Literature”: Texte.
About ten years later Fate again cut short the life of an industrious and promising critic in M. Joseph Texte. I received, from personal friends of M. Texte, such golden accounts of his character and abilities, and the purpose to which he devoted his too short life-work—that of the study of “Comparative Literature”—is so much that to which I have devoted my own much more extended if not quite unhampered opportunities,— that I should like to say nothing of him but good. His last title, La Littérature Comparée, sums up the drift of critical and literary-historical thought for the last hundred and fifty years, and especially for the last hundred. As we have seen, from the time of Bodmer and Breitinger in Germany, from that of Gray in England, from that of Diderot, if not even earlier, in France, it has always been this extended and comparative study which has corrected criticism. But it was not till the nineteenth century was pretty far advanced that the practice of Sainte-Beuve, and a little later the formal doctrine of Mr Arnold, recognised and, as it were, canonised the idea; while it is only within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years that it has been largely carried out, and only within the last decade or less that it has received regular academic and other sanction. I have never myself, since I began to study literature seriously almost forty years ago, had the slightest doubt about its being not only the via prima, but the via sola of literary safety.
But literary roads are never quite “royal” in the sense of the proverb: there are always obstacles and breaches in the way, as well as possibilities of mistaking it. Especially, as it seems to me, is the student of Comparative Literature exposed to the old temptation of generalising and abstracting too much. I think that M. Texte’s first, and perhaps best known book, Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitanisme Littéraire,[[886]] is rather an example of this. It will be observed that the very title hurries us a long way to sea—that we are almost out of sight of the firm land of individual example-study. If you have been brought up solely on the drama of Racine and are introduced to that of Shakespeare—nay, even vice versa, though not to the same extent—it is almost impossible that the contrast should not do you good, if only by forcing you to distinguish—to give your reasons, not to “like grossly.” But “Literary Cosmopolitanism”[[887]]? is not this a very distant and very vague City of God? is it not even something of a Nephelococcygia? It has never existed except to some extent during the Middle Ages: there is no present sign of its ever being likely to exist. And the coupling of it with Rousseau excites other apprehensions. Rousseau was a Swiss; he lived in France, Italy, England: his works were popular all over Europe. There is an air—but an almost obviously false air—of cosmopolitanism about this. When we examine the actual book we find that, practically, it consists of a summary of the chief literary rapports between France and England before Rousseau; of an ingenious attempt[[888]] to make Rousseau himself out as a kind of unconscious apostle of universal principles of literary criticism: and then of some remarks on the further rapports of English and French after him. “Rousseau and the Relations of English and French Literature” would be the real title of the book: and a useful enough monograph it is. The Études de Littérature Européenne are better (the studies of Keats and Browne are very good), and the Littérature Comparée interesting. But M. Texte was always too heedless of the guile that lurks in generals—literary more than of any other kind. The “Descendants of the Lakists in France” really means little more than that Wordsworth exercised a considerable influence on Sainte-Beuve: and “The German Influence in France” is either a quite unmanageably large subject, or a mere disproportion of nut and kernel. It is very dangerous to take, as an example of “contemporary” English literature, at the end of the nineteenth century, Aurora Leigh, which merely represents a brief and passing phase between the first Reform Bill and the first Exhibition. But nothing is further from my wishes than to carp and cavil at M. Texte, who in an average lifetime must have made vast and valuable progress, and who, as it is, was a valiant pioneer in a great and effectual way.
Academic Criticism: Gaston Paris.