ators were Montaigne, Saint-Évremond, Bayle, and Montesquieu. It proceeds upon the evidences of philosophy and history. For its development, there is necessary an epoch of absolute intellectual freedom. It displaces theology, and, if we seek the universal doctor, the St. Thomas Aquinas of the nineteenth century, whom should we have to think of but Sainte-Beuve? He was the canonized saint of criticism; I revere his memory. But, to speak quite frankly, dear Monsieur Hébrard, I think he was wiser when he was planting cabbages than when he was making books.

*

A book, according to Littré, is a bound collection of sheets of paper, written or printed. That definition does not satisfy me. I should define a book as a work of sorcery from which all sorts of images escape to trouble our minds and change our hearts. To put it better: a book is a little magical machine which transports us into the midst of images of the past or among supernatural shadows. Those who read many books are like eaters of hashish. They live in dream. The subtile poison that penetrates their brain makes them insensible to the real world and throws them as prey to terrible or charming phantoms. Books are the occidental opium. They devour us. A day will come when we shall all be keepers of libraries, and that will be the end.

Let us love books as the mistress of the poet loved her pain. Let us love them; they cost us dear enough. Let us love them; we are dying of them. Yes, books kill us. Believe me, who adore them, who have long given myself to them unreservedly. Books kill us. We have too many, and too many kinds of them. Men existed for long ages without reading at all, and that was precisely the time when they did the greatest and most useful deeds, for that was the time when they passed from barbarism to civilization. Though without books, they were not wholly bereft of poetry and morality; they knew by heart songs and little sacred sayings. In their childhood the old women told them of the Ass's Skin and Puss in Boots, of which long afterward editions were made for bibliophiles. The first books were great rocks, covered with inscriptions in official and religious style.

That was very long ago. What frightful progress we have made since then! Books multiplied amazingly in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Today their production has increased a hundredfold. In Paris alone there are published fifty volumes a day, without counting the journals. It is a monstrous orgy. We shall come out of it mad. It is the fate of mankind to fall successively into contrary excesses. In the Middle Ages ignorance gave birth to fear. There reigned then mental maladies that we no longer know. Nowadays we are rushing, through study, into a general paralysis. Would

there not be more of wisdom and good taste in preserving moderation?

Let us be book-lovers and let us read books, but let us not seize them indiscriminately; let us be delicate, let us select, and like the lord in one of Shakespeare's comedies, let us say to our book-seller: "I would that they be well bound, and that they speak of love.”—La Vie Littéraire, Paris, 1888, prefatory letter.

To establish criticism, we talk of tradition and universal agreement. They don't exist. A fairly general opinion, it is true, does favor certain works. But that is because of prejudice, and not at all through choice or by effect of a spontaneous preference. The works that all the world admires are those nobody looks into. We receive them as a precious burden, which we pass on to others without concerning ourselves about them. Do you really believe there is much freedom in the approval we bestow upon the Greek and Latin classics, or even the French? And the taste that leads us toward a certain contemporary work and draws us away from another, is this really free? Isn't it determined by many circumstances alien to the contents of the particular work, the chief of which is the disposition to imitate, so powerful with man and animal? That spirit of imitation is necessary to make us live without going too much astray; we carry it into all our actions, and it controls our aesthetic sense. Without it our opinions in affairs of art would be much more discordant than they are. It is because of this that a work which, for whatsoever reason, gained at the outset certain suffrages receives afterward a vast number. The first alone were free; all the others had only to comply. They have neither spontaneity, nor insight, nor courage, nor individuality. And by their multitude they create glory. It all depends upon a very slight beginning. One sees also that works despised at their birth have little chance of pleasing at another time, and that on the other hand works celebrated from their first appearance long preserve their reputation and are still esteemed after they have become unintelligible. What proves clearly that the agreement is purely the effect of prejudice is that they cease together. We could supply numerous examples.— La Vie Littéraire, quatrième série, Paris, 1892, Preface.

FERDINAND BRUNETIERE ON IMPRESSIONISTIC

CRITICISM

In his essay, La Critique Impressionniste, Brunetière quotes the dictum of Anatole France: "Objective criticism no more exists than does objective art," and then proceeds to examine the principles, the implications, and the actual practice of the impressionists. Certain advantages he can see in the general position. "It allows, or rather, it sanctions, all complacencies and all contraditions. The 'relativity' of changing impressions explains everything and answers every objection. Giving us their opinions not as true, but as 'their own,' the impressionistic critics secure to themselves the means of changing them-and we know that they do not fail to use these. They dispense thus with studying the books about which they talk and the subjects therein treated, which is sometimes a great gain. 'Is it necessary to try to explain to you the impression that I received in reading the second volume of the History of the People of Israel?" M. Anatole France lately asked us. 'Is there need to show you the state of my mind as I dreamed between the pages?' And, without awaiting our reply . . ., M. France tells us that in his childhood there was among his toys 'a Noah's ark, painted red, with all the animals in pairs, and Noah and his children beautifully turned.' If this proceding is ingenious, it appears also highly convenient! Thanks to his 'Noah's ark,' M. Anatole France had no need even to read the History of the People of Israel; he dreamed between the pages of the book; and, as he is M. France, he talked no less agreeably about it.”

The impressionist theory precludes dogmatism and judgment, but Brunetière brushes the sand from our eyes. "The Contemporains of M. Jules Lemaitre is nothing but a collection of judgments-upon men, it is true, rather than upon works-and its 'impressionism', after all, consists only in the malice or the drollery of the considerations that actuate them. But who has been more severe and merciless -on M. George Ohnet, for example, or on M. Émile Zola-than the sceptical, indulgent, and mocking M. France? 'Extravagance,' 'platitude,' 'dulness,' 'wretched rhapsodies,' 'abominable paltriness': M. France on that occasion lost even his Attic-or rather his Alexandrian-manner, on which he usually piques himself. And might I not cite the judgments of M. Desjardins, which are no less decided for being less keen. Heaven preserve me from reproaching them for these. It doesn't distress me that a rhapsody should be called by its name, nor that what one thinks, one should say. In literature as elsewhere everything would be the better if we did such things more often and

more boldly. But what an affectation it is to pretend not to ‘judge' when in fact one does, to give out as 'impressions' judgments that one well means, at the bottom of one's heart, should be taken as such, and, when one does one thing, to pretend to persuade people that one does another."

"Literary judgment," Brunetière observes, "is the complex product of three unequal terms. In a literary work-poem, drama, or novel -we find what we bring to it of ourselves, that which we impart to it of our fundamental nature; and, in that sense, as it is said, we make its beauty. Some of us find peculiar pleasure in Candide, and others enjoy themselves better with Paul et Virginie. In the second place, we find in a literary work what its admirers and its critics have put there, the faults or good qualities which time by itself, in its imperceptible passing, has added, and which did not exist there for its contemporaries. In l'Ecole des femmes or in Tartufe their contemporaries did not see what we see: and for the good reason that Molière did not dream of it. Nor did they find in Cléopâtre or in le Grand Cyrus what we find of prolixity, weakness, and insipidity: they thought less quickly, they read more slowly, and they were more tolerant. But finally, must we not find in Cléopâtre, Tartufe, and Candide something also of what Calprenède, Molière, and Voltaire did put there? Whatever we may be, in order to provoke in us determinate impressions, is it not required that Candide and Tartufe have the provoking or determining qualities? And whatever these qualities be in themselves, is it not true that they do not reveal themselves in a novel of the younger Crebillon or in a comedy of Poisson or of Montfleury?"

"And no more than this is necessary for the establishment of objective criticism. When we have made clear to ourselves the true nature of our impressions, which is not always easy, and is always a prolonged affair; when we have made allowance, which is still more difficult, for what belongs to prejudice, education, the period, example and authority in our impressions, there remains a work, a man, a date. This is enough. We may set ourselves to the exact determination of that date, and through that to state precisely in what time, in what moment of literary history, in what social environment, amid what prepossessions the man lived and the work appeared. We can try to say what the man was, what sort of man-sad or cheerful, base or noble, worthy of hate or admiration. For the generations inherit, more than they believe, from all that has preceded them: Nisard was fond of saying that in all times what is most alive in the present is the past. And finally, we can undertake, after having thus explained it, to classify and judge the work. This is the whole object of criticism. What is to be seen there that is not objective? that is not, or can not be, independent of the personal tastes, the

peculiar sympathies, of him who attempts to explain, classify, or judge? And if this is not seen, or cannot be said, what is left of the insinuating paradoxes of M. Anatole France, the scintilating paradoxes of M. Jules Lemaitre, and the fretful paradoxes of M. Paul Desjardins?"

Moreover, we inevitably compare things and rate them, goes on the objective critic. By virtue of possessing more or less of some common quality, by virtue of better or worse adaptation to a given end, by virtue of ease and effectiveness of functioning, or the lack of these we do as scientists, as critics of art, as members of a competitive society, continually weigh one being or product, one object of desire or of aversion, against another.

As for the classification of literary works, this is as rational and feasible, asserts Brunetière, as the classification of animal species. "One literary genre is, indeed, superior to another, and within the same genre-drama, ode, or novel-one work is nearer to or farther from the perfection of its kind, only for reasons analagous to those which in the hierachy of natural organisms raise vertebrates above molluscs, for example, and among vertebrates, the cat or dog above the ornithorhynchus. Such is the true way of understanding 'the relativity of knowledge'; such is the right way; such is the only way that is not sophistry and word-war. Had we the 'faceted eye of a fly' or the 'rude and simple brain of an orang-utang,' things might change for us their look and meaning, but not their relations, which would continue to unite them to one another, nor that system, always somehow bound together, which these relations have formed. And thence, since laws are nothing else than the expression of these relations, it results finally that to deny the possibility of objective criticism is to deny the possibility of any science whatsoever. If there is no objective criticism, no more is there objective natural history or chemistry or physics. This is not to call criticism a science, but only to say that it is related to science, and having like science a precise object, it may borrow from science methods, processes, and signs."-Essais sur la littérature contemporaine, Paris, 1892.