his claims:

From all this men must come to the fifteen volumes with high expectations—a little chequered perhaps in the case of the wary by some cautions of Sainte-Beuve’s.[[240]] To describe the result as unmixed disappointment would be unfair. The mere dates and contents of the books taken together establish the fact that the debt owed by literary and critical history to Villemain is great, and one of those which will never be written off the grand livre of the subject. That between 1816, the year of his appointment as Professor, and 1828, that of the first publication of his Cours de la Littérature Française, French students first, and then French readers, had presented to them for the first time a survey of their literature, which included a historical view of its own origins and earlier achievements, and something like a comparative view of the achievements of other nations, is a thing the greatness of which is not likely to be denied or minimised here. Villemain’s style is always correct and agreeable, and he did much to establish, for French criticism in the nineteenth-century, that repute for “honeying the cup,” which has become something of a superstition. Sainte-Beuve, in the passage just referred to, may give him a little too much credit for acuteness and wit in his individual observations, but he has both.

Deductions to be made from them.

Unluckily, however, the entries on the other side of the sheet are numerous and grave. There is not merely the fault, which his great successor justly brings against him—a fault from which, by the way, Sainte-Beuve himself was by no means free—that Villemain is afraid of concluding, that he seldom or never gives you a clear, “grasped,” summed-up view of his whole subject or man. Very few critics do. But in details also his work is too often unsatisfactory. His numerous “Reports” on academic competitions, which give opportunity for excellent criticism, are elegant, but hollow and rhetorical, as is his rather famous Tableau de l’Eloquence Chrétienne au IVème Siècle. His notices of various ancient and modern writers are much boiled down from others, with the result, not usual in physical boiling-down, of being not thick but thin—those of Lucretius, and of the tempting and almost virgin subject of the Greek Romances, especially so. Comparative and liberal as he is, his judgment of Shakespeare will not stand beside Lemercier’s (he says definitely that Shakespeare does not provide, in the same proportion as the Greeks, “universal beauties”), and his estimate of Milton is beggarly beside Chateaubriand’s. With all his reputation for rehabilitating mediæval literature, he seems to have known it little: he is not merely very superficial on Chaucer, which might be pardonable in a Frenchman, but actually sweeps the mighty volume of the Chansons de geste away at one stroke by the words “we had no poetry at once rude and vigorous.” He is sound upon Ossian—that craze was dying and could survive even rudimentary comparative study of literature in no one of talent; and his thirty-ninth and fortieth lectures in the Cours on Criticism itself deserve to be very well spoken of. But on the whole he is disappointing. We must, of course, make allowance—very large allowance—for a pioneer who begins early, who finds others, during the course of his long life, extending his own explorations far beyond his own limits, and who, from other engagements, from routine, or from sheer disenchantment or worse, declines to follow them; we must increase it for his industry in other matters; we must give him his just part and royalty in the accomplishment of those who followed, and not a few of whom he actually taught, while all owed him something indirectly. But intrinsically and absolutely I do not find him a very great or even a very good critic. He is deficient in enthusiasm, in originality, in grasp: nor does he quite make up the deficiency by erudition and method.

Beyle.

Two remarkable persons, one standing apart a little—as he, like his disciple Mérimée, always and in all things did—the other a polyhistoric talent just short of genius, have yet to be mentioned: and these are Henri Beyle and Charles Nodier. Beyle was, in a sense, nothing if not critical; and the spirit of criticism pervades all his work, both the earlier and better known novels and nondescripts, and the posthumous volumes (deserving very much the same alliteration), which have more recently been made known by the devoted labours of M. Stryienski. But the “place” for his literary criticism is, of course, Racine et Shakespeare, published in 1822, ere yet the Romantic party (to which Beyle himself never belonged) was fully formed, but when the principles “atmosphered” by Diderot, and held in various ways and degrees from Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael onward, had already begun to influence Frenchmen at large.