fact is conclusive evidence of the truth of one of the laws which regulate the development of literary genera. As any one form of literary activity thrives and enlists the services of the finest minds of an age, its flood obliterates its banks for the very reason that it has absorbed so many tributaries. It is in the course of such an exudation that Dante's epic verse impinges upon the fields of theology and scholastic philosophy; that Shakespeare's plays become so complex and so subtle, that we find upon his stage a Hamlet and a Prospero, the metaphysician and the alchemist, two heroes less dramatic than had ever before confronted an audience; that Balzac's fiction seizes and makes part of its argument a theory of politics (in the Curé de Village), of finance (the Maison Nucingen), of mysticism (Louis Lambert Seraphita), of music (Massimilla Doni), of chemistry (the Recherche de l'absolu). Criticism is to-day expanding in the same way, and this shows that it is at the present moment a necessary form of art, fully adapted to the modern man and the exigencies of his culture. We desire, nowadays, to understand; even while we feel and act, even while we dream, and this makes an altogether new scheme of fiction of drama and of poetry which only critics can undertake.

While the Critical Essay, enriched by these three rich talents and by others not less important, became more and more an art, by a transition, which in England made possible the work of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater and Henry James, another movement began, at the head of which we find M. Taine, who tried to impart to criticism all the vigour and precision of science. This second school, as I have already said, was influenced by Stendhal rather than Sainte-Beuve. Time after time, and notably, for instance, in the preface to his Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, Taine laid claim to this paternity. He took from Stendhal some of his favourite ideas, and from him, too, the love of what Beyle called the "trait," the specific and significant detail, the minute but indisputable fact, the anecdote which is in itself an exact and characteristic document. He added, however, his own personal gifts, and the first of these was a constructive power as great as Hegel's or Spinoza's. This faculty of super

imposing ideas, as a builder superimposes the stones of his edifice, the one supporting the other until their resistent unity makes the whole a miracle of cohesion-no one of our contemporaries possesses this as fully as did Taine. The Littérature Anglaise is in fact a theorem in five volumes, his Origines de la France Contemporaine another in six. Such a method is evidently inferior to the undulating contradictions of Sainte-Beuve when the sinuous contours of a living character are to be reproduced. It is, however, admirable, when the writer desires to extract from an epoch, from a man, from a book, the secret of the concealed necessities, the mechanism of antecedent causatives, which underlie the glistening fabric, desires, in short, to put his finger on the link which unites the particular event-the book, the page, the line-to the vast influences of the environment, of the moment, of the race: influences at work both within and without the writer's mind. It must be considered, too, that Taine's erudition was immense, that he had studied, with equal thoroughness, metaphysics and linguistics, history and the various literatures, comparative anatomy and mathematics, physics and æsthetics, geology and painting. All these varieties of learning entered into his critical work, and it was because they were present that he could combine the boldest generalisation with the most scrupulous accuracy of detail. Did he succeed, with so exceptional a wealth of implements at hand, in reaching the good of his lofty ambition, in creating a system of psychology at once artistic and scientific, precise and incontrovertible? He certainly left us literary analyses more penetrating and farther reaching than had been attempted before his day. We are all dominated, to-day, by his views upon the conditions which govern the birth, the efflorescence, and the decay of these mysterious phenomena which we call genius and talent. His theories had enough creative force to evoke novels as valuable as those of M. Emile Zola, at the very base of whose method these theories manifest themselves in their entirety. They reacted upon Taine himself, calling him to larger fields of labour. Just as the Critical Essay, treated from Sainte-Beuve's point of view, extended itself until it was indistinguishable from poetry and fiction and

the drama, Taine's conception of the same literary form induced its expansion from the field of individual psychology to that of psychology at large and sociology; and it is thus that the author of the Littérature Anglaise was led to write the treatise on the Intelligence on the one hand, and on the other to write the study of the Origines de la France Contemporaine, which will perhaps prove to have been the greatest book of the second half of the nineteenth century. In this case, again, a literary form has been enlarged, almost to the point of losing its individuality, by the absorption of other forms to which it has given new life in the process of incorporation.

These brief notes, incomplete as they are, necessarily leave many names unmentioned. It would be unjust, for example, not to recall, in discussing the relations of criticism to art, the prodigious studies of M. de Vogüé in regard to the Orient and Russia; unjust to overlook, in discussing the relations of criticism to science, the labours of M. Brunetière on the evolution of genera, and unjust to forget, in discussing the relations of criticism to sociology, the remarkable studies of M. Faguet. One ought, also, to dwell upon the vitality of the new conceptions of criticism which originated with Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine, and show how even the partisans of the old school of criticism have gradually accepted the chief theories of their great antagonists. It becomes evident, from this point of view, that the best of Gustave Planche's works are those in which he has added the psychology of the passions to his habitual dogmatism-as in the celebrated article on Adolphe, and that, in the same way, the finest writings of Nisard and Saint Marc Girardin are those in which, literary analysis transforms itself into moral analysis. One ought. to show how the Critical Essay has been flexible enough to undergo a change inverse to that which we have indicated, and has become a vehicle for minds habituated to other occupations, and to which these other occupations had ceased to be sufficient. This was the case of Edmond Schérer-whose talent was at once interesting and incomplete. It was the case of Alexandre Dumas, whose famous prefaces are Essays of the most original quality. These diverse

ways of comprehending and of producing the Critical Essay will give future historians of French literature an opportunity to pass in review all the men of genius, and all the men of talent who have appeared during the past century. Has not Balzac given himself to criticism in his Revue Parisienne, Lamartine in his · Cours de Littérature, Hugo in his William Shakespeare, M. Emile Zola in his eloquent polemics? The mere mention of these productions clenches the general proposition upon which these brief reflections originated; the proposition that the development of any one literary form means that it must attract a great number of minds, enrich itself with all that the decadent forms are losing, and become one of the two or three expressions of the most profound tendencies of the epoch. Such has been the lot of the Critical Essay in France during the last hundred years, and the creative fertility of this form, so long regarded as directly opposed to creative work, shows that nature is always herself, and that in the intellectual as in the physical world, an organ is developed as soon as it is needed.

paul Bourg in

THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY

OF

FAMOUS LITERATURE.

PENELOPE GOES TO COURT.1

BY MAUD WILDER GOODWIN.

(From "White Aprons.")

[MAUD WILDER GOODWIN: An American historical novelist; born in New York state in 1856. She has published: "Open Sesame" (3 vols., 1890-1893), edited, with Blanche Wilder Bellamy; "The Colonial Cavalier" (1894), "The Head of a Hundred " (1895), " White Aprons, a Romance of Bacon's Rebellion" (1896), "Dolly Madison," a biography (1896), and "Fort Amsterdam in the Days of the Dutch" (1897).]

IN burst Godfrey Kneller, one morning, bubbling over with joy and well-nigh breathless with excitement.

He had been at Whitehall, so his story ran, for a sitting of Queen Catherine, — the last before the finishing of her portrait, and having with him the sketch of Penelope, had shown it to the Queen as a fancy piece, to be called "Spring"; and she, being mightily taken therewith, had called His Majesty, and bade him say if ever he had seen a face so fair at once and so sad. ""Tis Spring' indeed," quoth she, "and a very pretty conceit, with the sun on the hair and the dew in the eyes and April in the showery smiling o' the lips."

But His Majesty took the picture to the window, and, after studying it close, looked up and said to the artist, while he twirled his mustachios :

"Kneller, this is no fancy piece. 'Tis a portrait, and a close study at that. This eye, with its tiny mole on the under lid, hath the very trick of life in't, and that ripple of red brown hair was never imagined save by him who had seen it. Out

1 Copyright, 1898, by Little, Brown & Co. Used by permission.

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