To pass or recur to criticism of a strictly academic character, it is much easier to be impartial in judgment of an enemy than of a friend. And, but for one thing, I fear I might be bribed in favour of M. Gaston Paris by the extraordinary liberality and indulgence which, without any private introduction or intercession, he showed, some twenty years ago, towards an attempt on the subject in which he was the unquestioned authority and master—an attempt which did not follow his own or any other leading, which to his expert eyes must have been full of blunders and shortcomings, and which could have had in those eyes no merit but that of being honest, and based on first-hand study. Even this would not have conciliated everybody. But M. Paris had nothing of the dog who growls when any one approaches his bone, and it was most interesting to watch in Romania, the periodical which he helped to direct for more than thirty years, the difference of his method and that of some of his coadjutors. One could only marvel at his perfect freedom from this lues of the mere scholar.
This equity or urbanity, however, though the most pleasing to persons who experienced it, was not the only nor perhaps the chief, it was certainly not the most purely literary, excellence of M. Paris as a critic. He had another, still rarer in the philologist—the faculty of appreciating literature. His philological and other conscientiousness, indeed, prevented him from reprinting—during long years in which all students of Old French coveted it—the delightful Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne, with which (in 1865-66) he began his literary career: and most of his time was spent on lectures, editions, and miscellaneous work in the periodical just mentioned and others. But many of his Romania Essays (which we may hope will be collected) display the rare union just mentioned, as the work of few other philologists in the older modern tongues has done throughout Europe, though the late Professor Kölbing came an honourable second in Germany. And in 1885 he actually collected, under the title of Poésie du Moyen Age, some of his more popular lectures on the title-subject, on the origins of French Literature, on “La Chanson de Roland et La Nationalité Française” (a fine piece, delivered crânement, as his students might have said, in beleaguered Paris, during the central December of the Année Terrible), on the quaint semi-comic epic of Charlemagne’s Pilgrimage, on the story of Parnell’s Hermit, on his father. Some years later he gave an excellent but too brief Manual of Mediæval French Literature: and in 1896 he published a very noteworthy collection of articles, obituary and other, on modern men of letters, entitled Penseurs et Poètes. The longest and most remarkable of these is on the poet, M. Sully Prudhomme—a lifelong friend—and it shows better than anything else M. Paris’s power of pure literary criticism in subjects far distant in character as in time from those in which his hand usually dealt. I do not agree with him here; I cannot rank his subject’s estimable and faultless, but rather cold and limited, poetic gift so highly as he did. But for careful investigation and grouping of results, for delicate arrangement of merits so that they may produce the best effect, for good taste in enthusiasm, and ingenuity, never unfair, in advocacy, the article will stand comparison with one of Sainte-Beuve’s at his most interested and good-natured, or one of Montégut’s at his least discursive and protracted.
Caro, Taillandier, &c.
The number of learned or academic critics—some older, some younger—who might be grouped round or arranged after M. Paris is of course very large: but I do not know any who combined his special accomplishment with his general literary quality. Long ago, in another place, I was guilty of introducing two of the class as “M. Saint-René Taillandier, a dull man of industry, and M. Caro, a man of industry who is not dull.” Neither, alas! “is” anything now: but a renewed and special study of their work for the purposes of this book does not induce me to tone down the flippancy. Still, it is fair to say that neither seems to have intended what we call here “pure literary criticism.” Caro[[889]] was (and was satirised rather unjustly as such, in a comedy famous in its day) a sort of ladies’ philosopher, a moralist in kid gloves and dress clothes. Taillandier (the “Saint-René” appears to be one of the usual self-embellishments) was in the same way a historian and political student, who, in his capacity as regular contributor to the Deux Mondes, attempted a great deal of literary work, and collected a good deal of it.[[890]] He had little grasp or suppleness: and retained a great deal of the old academic horror of the bizarre. A review by him of Flaubert’s Éducation Sentimentale was, I think, the particular locus which convinced me of his dulness: and I have never read anything which removed the impression.[[891]]
The “Light Horsemen”: Janin.
Of what may be called the light horsemen of French criticism, almost any one, with even the slightest knowledge of the subject, would at once name Jules Janin as the hetman. He was very early singled out by Nisard in his attack on la littérature facile;[[892]] and though he replied with all the wit, style, and facility itself for which he was justly renowned, he probably—or rather certainly—knew as well as anybody else that it was easier to counter-raid the enemy’s country than to defend his own. A “prince of criticism,” as he was called (and is said to have liked to call himself, with the mixture of self-deceit and self-satire which all men of some brains know), he hardly was: a prince of journalism he was most certainly. Of his purely literary exercises in the art practically nothing survives; his early romantic extravagances in novel kind, L’Âne Mort and Barnave, have outlasted them, while themselves possessing no very solid fame. His purely theatrical criticisms are said to be of some value as points de repère. But, on the whole, if the most brilliant of journalists, he was also the most of a journalist among brilliant men of letters. His appreciations were written with all that appetising à peu près—that dash and sparkle and apparent mastery—which, more than any solid qualities, have given French criticism its reputation with those who do not know. But they represent little real knowledge on the writer’s own part: and while destitute of any theory of criticism of the more abstract kind (which they might lack and be no worse for it), they display no standard of personal taste, no test of goodness drawn from comparative experience, to supply the place of such a theory. They had their day; but they have ceased to be.
Pontmartin.