THE CRITICAL ESSAY IN FRANCE TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF PAUL BOURGET AMONG the distinct forms of production which the old school of rhetoric felicitously described as "the literary genera," there seems to be a struggle for life quite analogous to the war between the various orders of animals. Certain of these literary forms, after having monopolised the field of contemporary thought, and shown their energy in the production of a great number of works, become anæmic and impoverished, vegetate and die. In France this has been the fate of epic poetry, and to-day it is the position, in France, of tragedy, and in England, of the drama as a whole. During the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, Rotrou, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, time after time, and with them a legion of imitators, attest the vitality of a form of literature, which, even in the nineteenth century, produces, infrequently, remarkable specimens, so rarely, indeed, as to seem almost archaic. Compare, in the same way, the English drama of our day with that of the Elizabethan period. On the other hand, some literary forms, of which the creative power seemed slender and attenuated during earlier epochs, develop, in our time, a new vigour and richness. This was, during the first half of the century, the case with lyric poetry, and is to-day the case with the novel and with what I will call, for want of a more exact term, the Critical Essay. The resemblance between the evolution of literary species and that of animal species, seems to show that nature employs the same processes in the moral and in the physical world. It is also, by the way, a further proof of the grand principle of unity of com XXV position so strongly defended by Goethe, in which is summarised the whole of our modern system of natural philosophy. I propose to make this mention of the Critical Essay, and of its history in France for the past hundred years, the pretext for indicating some of the characteristics which mark an evolution of the sort described; characteristics which are perhaps all the more perceptible because the evolution has in this case been so rapid. The distance which separates an eighteenth-century novel, such as Gil-Blas or Manon Lescaut, from a novel of our time, like Madame Bovary or L'Assommoir, is, no doubt, enormous. Yet it is less than the disparity between a page of La Harpe or of Geoffrey, of Villemain even, and a page of Taine or of M. Jules Lemaître. In the former apposition you detect no more than a development. But in the latter, the underlying principle of the literary form has itself changed. For the writers of a hundred years ago, criticism consisted essentially of the act of judging with discernment (as the derivation indicates: Kpive-to separate, to judge). They held that there was an absolute code of literature, a body of strict rules, an infallible canon. To criticise was, they thought, to compare a literary work with this canon, to observe in what respects the work conformed to the canon, and in what respects it transgressed, and then to conclude, in virtue of an immutable code, by a pronouncement setting forth the grounds for their decision. If they no longer invoked, as in the Middle Ages, the final authority of Aristotle, they at any rate believed that it was possible to formulate a fixed law of the Beautiful. Above all, they were sure that the masterpieces of antiquity and of the classic age represented finished types, by comparison with which the value of all new work was to be judged. They perceived, too—and here they were in the right that the habit of such comparisons develops a special sense, a literary taste; and this faculty of discriminating between good work and bad was, in their belief, the highest form of critical power. The Abbé Morellet's essay on Chateaubriand's Atala (to be found in most of the editions in which the little romance is separately printed), may be regarded as a finished example of this sort of criticism-a sort not to be despised. It was judicious, deliberate, and often efficacious. The influence of Boileau, one of the most earnest critics of this type, is an evidence of the merit of the school. The revolution of 1789 broke out, and then came the Empire. The great wars of these twenty-five years had the unexpected effect of bringing the nations into closer contact one with another. Limiting our observations to France, the social upheavals of this period cast forth from their country Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Paul-Louis-Courier, Benjamin Constant, and many others, teaching them all that there was a Europe beyond the frontiers of France. They did not merely read Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe in the originals, as a young Frenchman of inquiring mind, who was familiar with the three languages, might have done in 1780. They did more, for they read these authors in the countries, as well as in the languages, to which their varied product belonged; and they became sensible of the intimate connection between these masterpieces and the customs, the skies, the national spirit, of England, of Italy, and of Germany. They apprehended, some more, and some less, clearly, two truths which their predecessors had not approached: first, that there is in every work of art something more than an æsthetic effort, that each creation is inevitably and almost unconsciously a manifestation of all the elements which make the national character; the specific moment of history, the specific racial and climatic condition; and second, that there are many types of the Beautiful, diverse, if not indeed contradictory, and that taste has none of the fixity which the poets and rhetoricians of the classic period had made their dogma. Such discoveries as these, summarised in this fashion, seem obvious enough. Yet they entailed a shifting of the point of view which, in the domain of intellect, is equivalent to a complete change of atmosphere in the physical world. They are radical modifications of the element in which organisms live, involving radical changes in the organisms themselves. The transition just described is a case in point. The immediate consequence of this enlargement of the French imagination was the movement, so confused as to be almost |