SAINTE-BEUVE 595 fluence on later writers was to be appraised; hence it follows that any study by Sainte-Beuve, down to the smallest, is an historic inquiry, a portrait, a lesson in æsthetics, a second historical inquiry which concludes, generalises, and completes the setting of the picture. On the other hand inclining in his quality of moralist to trace a natural history of humanity he liked, not only to place an author in his proper surroundings, but to find out with what other authors of widely separated. times and places he had points of similarity or analogy, so as to recognise, throughout the human race, "families of minds,' and thus to contribute to a possible general classification of humanity. In this task, or rather in these different tasks, Sainte-Beuve was dominated by a sentiment rare in criticism, by distrust, that was almost horror, of system and universal ideas. The taste for detail, for the individual, the conviction or intuition that Nature never repeats herself, that each individual is different from all others, that relatively to others he has more differences than resemblances, and never exact similarity, was the thought at the back of his mind. Thence arose his great excellence, the passion for truth of detail, the care he took always to dig deep down, to carry his analysis down to the very depths of what may be called the irreducible individuality; thence arose his infinite toil, his incessant research, the tentative judgments from which so much may be learnt, his indefatigable returns to his subject, and what Renan, thinking of himself, called that "unrest of mind which, even when truth is found, sends us forth on a fresh search for it." Thence also arose his faults-overminuteness, the abuse of anecdote, indiscretion becoming a gossiping habit, a belittling of great subjects and excessive aggrandisement of small ones, a tendency to see every quality in any author, since each represented a period, characteristics of a family of minds, and of, moreover, a very curious individuality : "L'insecte vaut un monde: ils ont autant couté." But the interest with which he endowed every subject excused all faults; and, moreover, his interest in detail never vitiated his taste, although that fatal result might have been feared. His taste must have been excellent, not to have been spoiled by the influence of his time, which was bad enough, nor stifled by his erudition. He never lost his judgment in the clash of romantic, neo-classic, demi-romantic, ultraromantic elements, where others lost their way at each step. His most serious error was, in an early volume, to express the belief that the ancestors of the romantics were the sixteenthcentury poets. Still the book was written rather to direct the romantics into sixteenth-century channels than to prove that they already followed them. Generally speaking, all SainteBeuve's dicta, even those that appeared strangest in his own time, have been fully ratified by posterity, which must deliver the final judgment. To sum up-it will be long before we meet with another scholar with as much taste, a man who would have succeeded without erudition, whose passion for knowledge was so highly developed, a literary historian who should be so truly an historian of morals, or even a critic who should be so fine a craftsman of style. CHAPTER VIII ORATORS AND CONTROVERSIALISTS BEFORE leaving this first half of the nineteenth century, so rich in great men, something must be said of the orators and controversialists, of the men who, although they took part in politics, were men of letters. It will be recollected that among those whom we have just named, men such as Benjamin Constant, Guizot, Thiers, Royer-Collard, Cousin, Villemain, Lamartine, occupied very high rank in the political assemblies of 1815 to 1850; we shall now speak of those who were only known by their writings in newspapers and pamphlets. Under the Restoration these were represented by Camille Jordan, General Foy, and Manuel under the government of Louis Philippe by Laffitte, Casimir Perier, Odilon Barrot, Berryer, Montalembert, Molé, and Dufaure, all powerful or clever speakers, who created in France a parliamentary oratory less vehement or less pompous than the eloquence of the period of the Revolution, but more adroit and practical, while retaining its elevation of tone, a literary form in which Frenchmen have proved that they are not inferior to those of Anglo-Saxon race. Among journalists the greatest, leaving out of account Béranger, whose songs were the most violent and formidable of pamphlets, was Paul-Louis Courier, a scholar and a good Hellenist, who wrote an admirable translation of "Daphnis and Chloé." He attacked the Government of his day with much wit in his "Simple Discours de Paul-Louis, Vine-dresser,' "Pétition pour les Villageois qu'on empêche de danser," "Pamphlet des Pamphlets," "Lettres au Censeur,'" &c. He was an excellent stylist, deliberately archaic; he thought that no one had written French since 1700, and contributed much to the enrichment of the language by this archaism, as we indicated earlier in the book; he wrote in a lively fashion, in rapid and unexpected phrases, with an irony powerful, but sometimes abused, with continuous, cruel, biting, and persistent malice, which, if it reflects badly on his character, which was detestable, was incontestably a high literary quality. About the same period Armand Carrel, who was of a very different type, a great rhetorician of the pen, a man of lofty, broad, and fervid eloquence, contributed considerably to the overthrow of the Government of 1815, and then to the organisation and establishment of the Republican party which was destined to be successful, or at least to seize the reins of power, in 1848. De Cormenin, who wrote under the name of "Timon," was a learned jurist, and incomparably bitter in satire; he launched against the government of Louis Philippe "Les Trois Philippiques," "Les très humbles Remonstrances de Timon," &c. He published a work which is little more than a pamphlet, "Le Livre des Orateurs." It consisted chiefly of descriptions of celebrated orators from 1815 to 1848, of Manuel, Foy, Royer-Collard, Berryer, Thiers, Guizot, Dupin, Lamartine, &c. This book forms very interesting reading, as its malice does not exclude taste, and its style is excellent. Émile de Girardin also enjoyed great success as a journalist under the government of Louis Philippe, and again under the Empire, and even imposed on some intelligent persons by his indiscreet but inexhaustible fervour, the abundance of his contradictory ideas, and the merely apparent but nevertheless impressive correctness of his dialectic. Finally, Veuillot, the "Père Duchesne" of Catholicism, was about to enter on his career. Passionate, violent, and abusive, he had, nevertheless, the grand style; he employed strong and powerful language; he was a master of rough, vigorous, and powerful satire, sometimes of real eloquence; he was an obstinate fighter, who combated his enemies and even those whom he thought lukewarm among his friends, with indomitable tenacity, during half a century. CHAPTER IX THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHIC LITERATURE THE chief literary glory of the second half of the nineteenth century was derived from philosophy and the drama. It is dominated by the names of Renan, Taine, Émile Augier, and the younger Dumas, not forgetting that Victor Hugo, to whose work we shall not return, lived and continued to write until 1885, and even produced his finest works in the first ten years of the Second Empire. Ernest Renan was the greatest genius who had arisen in France since Chateaubriand, and perhaps since Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thoroughly alive to contemporary ideas, although he had received a clerical education, he had served the completest possible intellectual apprenticeship. Well acquainted with German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he was early attracted to philosophy, the science of religion, and philology. After having abandoned the religious convictions of his infancy, he became a firm adherent of science, to the service of which he attached all his hopes and devoted his whole life. The extent of his expectations from science may be gathered from his "Avenir de la Science," which he did not publish until he was sixty-nine years old, although it was written at twenty This book is essential to a thorough knowledge of Renan's fundamental convictions, which persisted through all his diversions and escapades. From that time onward he prepared to make the fullest possible use of his life, dividing it into two parts. On the one hand he contemplated writing a complete history of |