Her admirers, however,—or the partisans of the school of criticism, which, as has been said, she did so much to “vulgarise”—would no doubt regard this matter as merely, in Luther’s famous epithet of contempt, “stramineous.” It is on her attempt to grasp the principles not merely of kinds but of literatures, to identify or at least connect these with national characteristics, and to extend the definition and comparison beyond even the bounds of nations to national groups—that they would base her claims. Here, perhaps, we may find ourselves in a distressing inability to follow. Certainly, no one will deny that there are some apparent national characteristics in literature; certainly no one will say that it is useless or idle to attempt to separate the national and the generic from the individual. But, in the first place, there was nothing absolutely new in this, though it might be for almost the first time used as a frequent implement, and as a fertile store-cupboard, in literary research. Even the despised Middle Ages had had national tickets for the different states of the European republic—had discovered that the Englishman had a proud look and a high stomach, that he took his pleasure sadly, and so forth. And had it been newer than it was, it might still have been distrusted. After all, the literature of a nation, though we talk of it as if it were something existent per se, is merely the aggregate of the work of individuals. It is the work of those individuals that you have to judge; and it is open to the very gravest doubt whether, in trying the several cases, the general inductive-deductive ready-to-hand estimate of the national quality is not more of a snare than of a help. At any rate, experience proves that those who have been readiest to use it, from Madame de Staël to M. Taine and M. Texte—to name no living examples—have been more snared than helped by it. Your preoccupation with the idea that the Englishman will be insular and rebel to ideas, the German unpractical and “inner-conscious,” the Frenchman logical, witty, tasteful, may very likely, according to the weaknesses of the poor but constant creature Human Nature, rather lead you to dispense with inquiry into the fact whether he, the individual Briton, Teuton, or Gaul, does really exhibit these characteristics. It will tempt you in the same way to exaggerate what tendencies he may have to them—to force them on him if he has them not—or even to leave him out of consideration if he is so impudent as too incontestably not to have them.
And there is also the gravest possibility of doubt whether, even in themselves, they have sufficient truth to make them of more than the slightest value. After all, a man is a man before he is an Englishman or a Frenchman; it is scarcely too paradoxical to say that he is himself before he is even a man. The very greatest men of course carry this disconcerting triumph of individuality furthest; all but the very smallest help to flaunt its banner now and then. And when the hasty generaliser generalises still more hastily, and talks about Literature of the North and Literature of the South, the Rebellion of Fact is more inconvenient still. You lay it down that the literature of the North does not busy itself with frank youthful passion, and you have to settle matters with Romeo and Juliet; that the Italian is a light-hearted being whose only wants are sunshine, an olive or two, a flask of red wine with a wisp of tow in it, and a donna leggiadra, and there rises before you the Divina Commedia.
And actual.
But this argument would tempt ourselves out of the way; and, even in so far as it is legitimate here at all, is rather for the Interchapters. Let it suffice that Madame de Staël is undoubtedly a notable figure in the mere History of Criticism, and that, like nearly all such figures, she has by no means lost her actual critical value; that she is no “shadow”; that she is still, dead as she is, a speaking voice of some of the perpetual forms and phases of criticism itself. That her intellectual ability, if only of the receptive and transmissive kind, was somewhat extraordinary, there can be little question. She frequently claims for herself the invention of the word “vulgarity”: and though she lived to be so unfortunate as to apply it[[191]] to Miss Austen—though it has perhaps been more misused than any other single word of criticism—it was needed. Nor was she herself much the dupe of words, though she often was of supposed ideas. She has somewhere quoted from Rousseau, and expanded, a wise protest against the requirement of a pedantic adherence to definition in terminology. It was unlucky for her, no doubt, that to some extent she came at, and could not but represent, one of those rather unsatisfactory transition periods which are neither quite one thing nor quite another. She has touches of classic “dignity” and of philosophic cant, harlequinned with others of Romantic sehnsucht and “naturalistic” passion. Or rather she is like one of the picture-cleaners’ sign-portraits—half in eighteenth century shadow, half in nineteenth century light—or the other way about, if anybody chooses.
Yet the ill-luck is not total, and may perhaps even seem to be but apparent. For it is precisely this bariolage, this partition, this intermixture, which gives her not merely her historical position, but even, I think, her intrinsic attraction as a critic. She helps us by giving a fresh “triangulation,” a fresh aspect, a midway stage. Her perfectibilism keys on as interestingly from the literary side to the old Ancient-and-Modern dispute as on the political side to the Republican manias of the time. Her struggles to retain some conviction of the supremacy of Racine make more interesting, and are made more interesting by, her admiration for Shakespeare and the Germans. Her assimilations, or her attempts to assimilate, the new aesthetic, the new historical theories, the new wine generally, would have far less interest if she had put away all fancy for the old bottles. And so she figures worthily and interestingly in what we have called the French Transition, with a quaint enough contrast to Diderot, who opens it, and who taught her German teachers. She is a figure of far less originality, strangeness, and charm, but she has a more definite gospel, she is much less diffused and dissipated over the orbis scientiarum, she points more clearly to a clearly marked out path, and so she is much more likely to be followed by the multitude, if not by the elect.
Chateaubriand: his difficulties.
But she does not figure in her place alone: for side by side with her, and with a face looking still more forward, is another figure, not less curious, not less blended in its composition, but to some at least far more interesting and far greater. Chateaubriand is one of those literary personages to whom it is peculiarly difficult to do justice, and to whom accordingly justice has very seldom been done. I admit that it was long before I could myself regard him through glasses sufficiently achromatic, or divest him of his accidents with a satisfactory thoroughness. His personality—that troublesome and disturbing factor from which we are so fortunately free in the case of most ancient writers, and with which we are so teasingly confronted in the case of most modern—is a little enigmatic and more than a little unsympathetic. He trails with him the trumpery of two different times—Classical emphasis, arbitrariness, even to some extent prejudice, Romantic tawdriness, inconsequence, gush. He has curious adulteries of pedantry and foppishness—strange and indecent communions of ignorance and knowledge. And yet he is, in literature, so great a man that one sometimes hardly knows how to construct any definition of greatness which shall keep him out of the highest class. He has, and has by anticipation, all the gifts of Byron except the gift of writing verse: he can write prose which is hardly inferior to Byron’s verse in the qualities where verse and prose touch nearest, and not much below all but Byron’s best in some where they are farther apart. And he has other gifts to which Byron can lay no claim.