Dussault.
His contemporary and fellow-worker on the Débats, Dussault, is of a different type.[[227]] He is much more amiable in his judgments—has, indeed, the credit of being a sort of maker of things pleasant all round; but he is in principle much more reactionary—he is perhaps the most so of this group of critics, till they were exacerbated by the Revolters, to whom he himself refers as anarchistes littéraires. He is a staunch Bolæan; and if he has to admit (as with the growth of literary history it was by his time almost impossible for any one not to admit) that the Art Poétique is not complete, c’est du moins bien écrit. But he goes far beyond this elsewhere; and on the 26th of April, 1817—the very year when a certain enfant sublime presented himself as a competitor for an Academic prize—he asks, undoubting of the fact, “Pourquoi la constitution du Parnasse est elle si solide et si durable?” That the disciples of the Greek and Latin Muses should have anything to learn by going to “Runes” and such like things is nullement possible. Fairy tales are “absurd.” Even the avant-courriers of the French classic age meet with no mercy; and Balzac himself is credited merely with “bad taste.”
Hoffman, Garat, &c.
Of another member of the staff of the Débats in its early days, Hoffman, I know less than of these.[[228]] He was, like most of the group, a dramatist, and as might be expected, and as was the case with all of them, the double employments reacted not quite beneficially on each other. Like Geoffroy (with whom, however, he was at variance, and who told him in effect, with characteristic sweetness, to go back to his dramatic gallipots and leave criticism alone) he frowned on the youth of Romanticism, and seems generally to have been of the race and lineage of Rymer. Garat, not very weighty as a politician, possesses little more worth, if any, as a critic, though he had vogue as an éloge-writer. Daunou, who wrote noticeable notices on Ginguené and others, began his career by a critical essay, two years before the Revolution, on the influence of Boileau, and was during all his life more or less concerned with criticism. But he was more of a historian and student of the political sciences than of a literary critic of the pure breed. Etienne, Fiévée, Legouvé the elder, the two Lacretelles, Andrieux,[[229]] and others, we must also pass by, though I have matter for speaking of all of them: but Ginguené, M. J. Chénier, Népomucène Lemercier, and Feletz are not to be thus dismissed.
Ginguené.
The first was an older man than most of the group—in fact, he was over forty at the date of the Revolution, from the tender mercies of which he was only saved by Thermidor. But he ranks in literature, and especially in critical literature, chiefly by his Histoire Littéraire d’Italie,[[230]] which did not begin to appear till the second decade of the nineteenth century had opened, and was one of the earliest of these comprehensive surveys of literature—other than the writer’s own or than that of antiquity—which have had almost more to do than anything else with the formation of modern criticism. He has been accused of relying too much on Tiraboschi for his material; but the vice of looking rather at the commentators than at the texts was an old one, inherited from classical scholarship, and is by no means extinct a hundred years after Ginguené's time; and he is rather less tinged with it than we might expect. His judgments on such—to a Frenchman of the eighteenth century—dangerous writers as Dante and La Casa have considerable merit.
M. J. Chénier.