Nodier.
For those who like Vitae Parallelae, with a spice, or more than a spice, of contrast, Nodier[[255]] makes an excellent pendant to Beyle: and while his influence was much more rapid, it was wider also, if not deeper. Nodier began his romantic and “xenomaniac” excursions with the century, writing on Shakespeare in 1801 and on Goethe in 1802. I have chased in the catalogues, but without bagging, a collection of early reviews of his, published by Barginet of Grenoble in 1822, which ought to be of very considerable interest for our purpose. It is well known how, especially after his appointment to the librarianship of the Arsenal in 1823, his abode became a rallying-place, and he himself a sort of Nestor-Ulysses of Romanticism, while his delightful fantastic, or half-fantastic stories (the best of them to my thinking is Inès de las Sierras), which are Sterne plus Hoffmann plus something else, form no small part of the choicest outcome of the movement. But in criticism proper, Nodier, though a great propelling and inspiring force, has left rather inadequate recorded examples of this force in application. This is partly due to the fact that his intense interest in pure bibliography, and in the “curiosities of literature,” drew him, as similar interests have often drawn others, a little away from that severer altar on which burns the fire of pure literary and critical appreciation. His principal book of this kind, perhaps his principal non-creative work, Mélanges tirés d’une Petite Bibliothèque,[[256]] shows this very clearly: and it may rather be feared that Nodier would have preferred a perfectly worthless book, of which he possessed an unique copy, or an extremely eccentric one, of which hardly anybody had ever heard, to the greatest work which everybody knew and had on their shelves. But still he did like much of the best of what was known, and, fortunately, directed his liking most to that of the best which was not so well known as it ought to be. And so there are few more characteristic names—and few names of more power—than his in the French Transition.
[161]. 20 vols., ed. Assézat and Tourneux: Paris, 1875-76. I had known Diderot before, not merely from Carlyle and Mr Morley, but from Génin’s extraordinarily well-chosen Pensées Choisies in the Didot collection. But I remember very well, after more than a quarter of a century, the delight with which I read this edition as the successive volumes reached me at their appearance. I cannot take them down without that anticipation of sentences at particular places of the page which one only feels in such a case. They are quarrelling with the edition now, of course: but that does not matter.
[162]. Cf. p. 160, vol. vi. ed. cit. “Vous avez péché contre les règles d’Aristote, d’Horace, de Vida, et de Le Bossu.” Even if (as so much else in the book is) this was partly suggested by Sterne, it is none the less a genuine fling of Diderot’s own irony and recalcitrance. And an indignant note of the earlier edition of Brière, shocked in 1821 at the substitution of Le Bossu (then much forgotten) for Boileau, who was, though on the eve of dethronement, in full dictatorship, is a valuable document for us, and for this chapter.
[163]. Œuvres, ed. cit., v. 211-227.
[164]. The éloge dates from 1761: exactly the middle point between the earliest of Hurd’s Dissertations in 1757 and his Letters in 1765 (v. sup.).
[165]. Ibid., 228-239.
[166]. V. sup., ii. p. 303.
[167]. Œuvres, vi. 366, 367.