To all these three remarkable writers the term “Empire Critics,” which has obtained a certain solid position in critical history from the use made of it by Sainte-Beuve,[[221]] might, as far as chronology goes, be applied. But they are not the writers who are generally denoted by the term, these being rather a group extending from Fontanes through Ginguené, Garat, Geoffroy, Dussault, Feletz, Lemercier, Marie-Joseph Chenier, Hoffman, and others, down to Villemain and Cousin, who belong in part even to the Second Empire, but still represent an older tradition than the men strictly of 1830. They have been of late somewhat forgotten and neglected, despite Sainte-Beuve’s weighty pleas for them;[[222]] and perhaps in hardly a single case (I am not forgetting the once mighty name of Villemain himself) do they supply us with a critic of the highest class. But they are extremely important to history; we cannot really understand the criticism of the last seventy years itself without them. And I do not regret the time that I have myself spent on them, though I do not propose, as Agamemnon would say, to equal my treatment of them to that time itself.

Fontanes.

The novice in these matters who goes from Sainte-Beuve’s repeated and respectful notices of Fontanes to the latter’s Œuvres[[223]] may be a little puzzled, even if he take due heed to the fact that these Works are, as far as the criticism goes at any rate, only “selected.” There is not very much in bulk; and what there is may not seem, according to the severe Arnoldian standard, “chief and principal.” An introduction and some notes to his translation of the Essay on Man, articles on Chateaubriand, on Madame de Staël, on the “emphatic” Thomas, &c.:—“we can do all these for ourselves if we want them, which we mostly do not,” is likely to be the verdict of the impatient.

But it should not be allowed to stand. Fontanes shows us, in a manner made more historically important by the fact that for a long time he was a sort of Minister of Literature to Napoleon, that turning, that transition, which is the subject of this whole chapter. He still, and naturally, has a great deal of the eighteenth century in him; but he can see the vacuity and the frigidity of eighteenth-century “emphasis.” He is responsible[[224]] for teaching Victor Hugo that Voltaire taught us to admire Shakespeare, one of the most remarkable mare’s-nests in critical history. But, his eyes perhaps sharpened a little by personal friendship, he perceived to a very large extent, if not fully, the importance of the Génie du Christianisme. So there may have been mixed motives in his different reception of Madame de Staël’s theories; but there is a singular and satisfactory compound of eighteenth-century good sense and nineteenth-century catholicity in his dealing with her fantasticalities about North and South. He is himself rather rhetorical at times, but seldom to the loss of sobriety; and he is altogether a good sample, a good tell-tale, of the attitude of the inhabitants of a landslip—as we may call it—who see their old marks changing relation and bearing, who do not wholly like it, but who are capable of adapting themselves, at any rate to some extent, to the change.

Geoffroy.

Another interesting and representative person is Geoffroy,[[225]] who incurred the strictures of Joubert, and has had them “passed on” by Mr Arnold. Geoffroy—the pillar for many years of the Année Littéraire and of the Débats, the “Folliculus” of Luce de Lancival—has received from Gosse (M. Etienne, not Mr Edmund) the praise of having “toujours marché dans la même route et à la lueur du flambeau qu’il avait choisi dès le commencement.” In other words immutatus et immutabilis—an attribution magnificent in some relations of life; not, perhaps, as we have before noted, in criticism. Geoffroy’s road and torch might have been better chosen.

He, too, feels his time—if he is by no means a Romantic before or at the birth of Romanticism, he is hardly more of a Voltairian. But he is first of all “against” everything and everybody—a child of Momus.[[226]] He is doubtful about Corneille and Molière; even Racine is not “perfect” for him. But his most characteristic passage is perhaps one which occurs at page 137, vol. ii., of his work cited below. It is a real point de repère, because it is one of the last authoritative expressions of a sentiment—no doubt not yet extinct, but for a long time kept to some extent in check—the French belief in the absolute superiority of French literature and the impossibility of a foreigner being a judge of it—the impertinence even of his attempting to judge it. Geoffroy rates Blair in the most approved pedagogic fashion for expressing the opinion—now probably entertained by the majority of Frenchmen themselves—that Phèdre is a greater play than Iphigénie, and for assigning the reason that Iphigénie is too French. He blames the Edinburgh professor roundly for “meddling with our authors”; the opinions are not disputable opinions merely—they are “errors”; Blair and Edinburgh “ought to be ashamed” of them; they show that the critic “knows nothing about the matter.” Similar things are, of course, said to-day in England as well as in France; but they only show the temper of the particular critic, not the theory of prevailing criticism. Yet Geoffroy, if only from cross-grainedness, helped in the unsettling of the merely traditional view of literature: and so did service.