Vinet.
Alexandra Vinet was not a long-lived man, scarcely completing his half-century. But from a very early age he was a teacher of literature, and though he devoted part of his energies to theology and other subjects, he was always, in a manner, a critic in his heart. His Chrestomathie Française,[[1084]] arranged when he was little past thirty, was one of the earliest books of the kind, and is still one of the best, as far as its time would let it be: and his History of Eighteenth Century French Literature[[1085]] is, and will remain, a minor Classic. But perhaps no book of his affords better occasion for criticising his criticism than the posthumous collection of his Études sur la Littérature Française au Xixème Siècle.[[1086]]
Sainte-Beuve on him.
Vinet was (to give a choice of metaphors) dubbed Knight-Critic, or admitted of the Academy of Universal Criticism, at the hands of Sainte-Beuve himself—the Grandmaster of Order and Academy alike—in an article written in 1837, and at present contained in the first thirty pages or so of the Portraits Contemporains, vol. iii. It is written in a more patronising tone, with more meticulousness of detail, and with less easy mastery of method, than it would have been as a Causerie, a dozen or two dozen years later; but it is very flattering on the whole, and well enough deserved. The Master’s sword, however, as usual, in the process of dubbing, finds out, lightly but unerringly, the joints of the neophyte’s harness. “Les idées morales, religieuses, chrétiennes, eurent toujours le pas dans son esprit sur les opinions purement littéraires.” This is the same peculiarity which, with a difference, afterwards distinguished Vinet’s compatriot, M. Scherer: and it is very noticeable in the book which we have selected for comment. His criticism of Chateaubriand and Hugo. The gown and bands of the Protestant pastor are perpetually hampering the critic’s step and gesture, and flopping up into his eyes. He admires Chateaubriand,[[1087]] but he is constantly stopping to tell him how sad it is that he should confuse Popish superstition with Christian verity. He admires Victor Hugo[[1088]]—he does him indeed much more justice than one might have expected, and than remarks on Vinet himself would sometimes lead the second-hand reader to think. But he is made unhappy as a man by Hugo’s art-for-art’s-sake attitude, by his early royalism, by his later anti-Christianity or non-Christianity: while as a professor he is shocked by single-syllable lines, by audacious metaphors (yet he himself finely says somewhere that “only one poet has a greater range of metaphor than Hugo, and that is Humanity itself”), by some real enormities and more escapades of bravado. One is sometimes tempted to laugh at such things as his review of Les Burgraves,[[1089]] with its tone of half-puzzled seriousness, till one comes again to such excellent points as the remark that “Hugo is sometimes mistakable for a parody of Hugo.”
His general quality.
On the whole, however, I confess that I find Vinet rather estimable than enjoyable. He is distinctly lourd: though it would be unjust and inaccurate to call him by the dictionary equivalent of that term in English. He carries his Chair too much with him,[[1090]] and seems to think it necessary to set it down with an effort, and formally establish himself in it, before he makes any deliverance. I do not—I think I may at this eleventh hour ask my readers if I have not justified this claim to impartiality—object to him because he is what he calls a spiritualist in art, or because, against my own views, he pronounces[[1091]] that there can be no such thing as “pure” literature. I could produce from him a very large number of acute and true critical aperçus, like those above cited. He is never merely trivial or negligible: I do not think that he was in the least indifferent about literature. But he seems to me to leave his reader indifferent. His critical method has none of that maestria which carries one away, and only sets one down again when it chooses to relax its grip. There is no stimulus in Vinet, such as we find after widely different fashions in Sainte-Beuve himself and in Planche, in Saint-Victor and in Taine—nay, even in M. Scherer. There is neither persuasion nor provocation in him: he disposes you neither to follow nor to fight.
Amiel: great interest of his critical impressions.