At various times remarkable addresses have been delivered by him on public occasions, in which he has often represented the French Academy since his election to that illustrious body. Unfortunately his productive literary activity has slackened of late. In 1895 he was called to the editorship of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and since his assumption of this responsible editorial position he has published only two or three articles, bearing upon moral and educational questions.
To pass final judgment upon a man whose development is far from completed is an almost impossible task. Still it may be said that with the exception of Sainte-Beuve's (Causeries du Lundi) and (Nouveaux Lundis,) nothing exists that can teach the reader so much about the history of French literature as Brunetière's works. The doctrinal side, to which the author himself undoubtedly attaches the greatest importance, will strike the reader as often very questionable. Too often Brunetière seems in his judgments to be quite unconsciously actuated by a dislike of the accepted opinion of the present day. His love of the past bears a look of defiance of the present, not calculated to win the reader's assent. But even this does not go without its good side. It gives to Brunetière's judgments a unity which is seldom if ever found in the works of those whose chief labors have been spent in the often ungrateful task of making a hurried public acquainted with the uninterrupted stream of literary production.
TAINE AND PRINCE NAPOLEON
For the last five or six months, since it has been known that a prince, nephew, cousin, and son of emperors or kings formerly very powerful, had proposed to answer the libel, as he calls it, written by M. Taine about Napoleon, we have been awaiting this reply with an impatience, a curiosity which were equally justified,--although for very different reasons,--by M. Taine's reputation, by the glorious name of his antagonist, by the greatness, and finally the national interest of the subject.
The book has just appeared; and if we can say without flattery that it has revealed to us in the Prince a writer whose existence we had not suspected, it is because we must at once add that neither in its manner nor in its matter is the book itself what it might have been. Prince Napoleon did not wish to write a 'Life of Napoleon,' and nobody expected that of him,--for after all, and for twenty different reasons, even had he wished it he could not have done it. But to M. Taine's Napoleon, since he did not find in him the true Napoleon, since he declared him to be as much against nature as against history, he could, and we expected that he would, have opposed his own Napoleon. By the side of the "inventions of a writer whose judgment had been misled and whose conscience had been obscured by passion,"--these are his own words,--he could have restored, as he promised in his 'Introduction,' "the man and his work in their living reality." And in our imaginations, on which M. Taine's harsh and morose workmanship had engraven the features of a modern Malatesta or modern Sforza, he could at last substitute for them, as the inheritor of the name and the dynastic claims, the image of the founder of contemporary France, of the god of war. Unfortunately, instead of doing so, it is M. Taine himself, it is his analytical method, it is the witnesses whom M. Taine chose as his authorities, that Prince Napoleon preferred to assail, as a scholar in an Academy who descants upon the importance of the genuineness of a text, and moreover with a freedom of utterance and a pertness of expression which on any occasion I should venture to pronounce decidedly insulting.
For it is a misfortune of princes, when they do us the honor of discussing with us, that they must observe a moderation, a reserve, a courtesy greater even than our own. It will therefore be unanimously thought that it ill became Prince Napoleon to address M. Taine in a tone which M. Taine would decline to use in his answer, out of respect for the very name which he is accused of slandering. It will be thought also that it ill became him, when speaking of Miot de Melito, for instance, or of many other servants of the imperial government, to seem to ignore that princes also are under an obligation to those who have served them well. Perhaps even it may be thought that it poorly became him, when discussing or contradicting the 'Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat,' to forget under what auspices the remains of his uncle, the Emperor, were years ago carried in his city of Paris. But what will be thought especially is, that he had something else to do than to split hairs in discussion of evidences; that he had something far better to say, more peremptory and to the point, and more literary besides, than to call M. Taine names, to hurl at him the epithets of "Entomologist, Materialist, Pessimist, Destroyer of Reputations, Iconoclast," and to class him as a "déboulonneur" among those who, in 1871, pulled down the Colonne Vendôme.
Not, undoubtedly, that M. Taine--and we said so ourselves more than once with perfect freedom--if spending much patience and conscientiousness in his search for documents, has always displayed as much critical spirit and discrimination in the use he made of them. We cannot understand why in his 'Napoleon' he accepted the testimony of Bourrienne, for instance, any more than recently, in his 'Revolution,' that of George Duval, or again, in his 'Ancien Régime,' that of the notorious Soulavic. M. Taine's documents as a rule are not used by him as a foundation for his argument; no, he first takes his position, and then he consults his library, or he goes to the original records, with the hope of finding those documents that will support his reasoning. But granting that, we must own that though different from M. Taine's, Prince Napoleon's historical method is not much better; that though in a different manner and in a different direction, it is neither less partial nor less passionate: and here is a proof of it.