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: kpíve-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

incoherent, which is called Romanticism. We recognise in it, to-day, the play of several distinct forces; for example, the sudden awakening of plebeian sensibility in the new democracy, the passionate melancholy and the moral disorder of a period of religious and political crises, the disequilibration produced by the power of Napoleon's prodigious personality; more than all (and this is certainly the most surprising conclusion to which this train of thought leads us, the conclusion which would most have astounded the men of the "Young France," who displayed their red waistcoats at the first night of Hernani) we find, in these turbulent conditions, a first effort the earliest effort of modern criticism toward a higher development and a broader point of view. We find among the men who took part in the revolutionary movement the two writers who are, even now, to our modern appreciation the loftiest exemplars of the critical art: Stendhal, to whose influence we owe Taine, and Sainte-Beuve, to whom we are all more or less directly indebted; Sainte-Beuve, who shares with Balzac the primacy of influence upon the French nineteenth century.

Stendhal is known to-day by his novels. Yet one has only to glance at the catalogue of his works in order to perceive that fiction was only the final blossom of his intellectual antithesis, one particular application of a method of study, a turn of thought, which had at an earlier stage of his florescence, invited him to quite dissimilar paths. A soldier under Napoleon when he was only eighteen years old, then a war commissioner, marching across Europe with the Grande Armée, and, after the fall of the Empire, a cosmopolitan traveller, living in Italy, in Paris, in England; he pursued, throughout his youth and his maturity, the study which he himself declared to have been the supreme interest of his life; 'the analysis of the human passions and the expression of these passions in art and literature." This is his own summary of his life; and it embodies the new conception of criticism which, afterwards formulated by Taine, became a branch of psychology. This formula implies the negation of the old theory of criticism, for if the chief function of the writer, whether he be poet, novelist, or

dramatist, is to give us a true picture of human nature, to make a portrait (as Stendhal said), his work can no longer be judged by comparing it with any one type of excellence, in accordance with the abstract canon of the older criticism. Between the literature of the north and that of the south, for instance, there ought to be lasting differences, since the two are concerned with the representation of two different sorts of human nature, two types refractory to connotation. Both methods are justifiable, because both types of humanity possess the right to exist. The poetry of Shakespeare cannot, and should not, resemble the poetry of Dante, for the one depicts Italian emotion the other English emotion. The one writes for a Latin race, brilliantly insolated, the other for Saxons and Normans, pent by thick mists, shivering even in the springtime. The two forms of art are contradictory, yet both are necessary; and it is not the critic's duty to condemn the one because it differs from the other, or both because they differ from a third. His function is to comprehend, and not to judge, the two methods.

It is this conception of criticism that permeates Stendhal's generous and admirable product; Racine et Shakespeare, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, Mémoires d'un Touriste, les Promenades dans Rome, Vie de Rossini,-I cite these titles at hazard; and all these books retain, to-day, their extraordinary stimulus; they have not lost the magic quality of Stendhal's conversation, the power to arouse the mind, to suggest new thoughts. Yet all these works are sketches, at most. The spirit of modern criticism informs and animates them, but it is not shown in the form which Sainte-Beuve first gave to it in the Portraits, the Port Royal, and the Lundis. This insufficiency of Stendhal's is not altogether due to the fact that he was a precursor, an inventor, and, in that quality, condemned to feel his way. It springs, rather, from the circumstance that his power of analysis was subordinate to his imagination and his ardour. It was because of this complexity of his nature that he gave himself more clearly to his readers in such works as Le Rouge et le Noir, and La Chartreuse de Parme, revealing the remarkable combination of his critical faculty and his other gifts.

From this point of view, he may be said to have given one of the most astounding examples of the reanimation of one branch of art by infusion of the methods of another branch. And yet, considered as critical essays, his studies are no more than sketches.

In the case of Sainte-Beuve, ardour and imagination are certainly not lacking. Joseph Delorme, the Consolations, and Volupté, eloquently attest their presence. But the spirit of the analytical inquiry is always dominant. Sainte-Beuve was, above all, intelligent, and his greatest pleasure was to comprehend; while Stendhal, carried away by the ardour of his indomitable personality, enjoyed nothing so much as his emotions. Apart from this, Sainte-Beuve had, in his youth, studied medicine. He had been a physiologist before he became a poet or a novelist, and had been all three before he devoted himself to the Critical Essay. He not only recognised, as did his friends of the Romantic School, the legitimate variability of the type of literary art, its relation to a specific country, a specific moment of history, a specific climatic and racial condition; but he also saw, with the physician's eye, the physiological foundations of art. The old school of criticism. regarded a book as a completed product, to be judged as it stood, but Sainte-Beuve perceived that in order to understand a book, its processes of creation must be studied, its origin and its development. It was his aim to see, through the printed page, the hand that had the pen, the body to which that hand belonged, the age and the habits of that body, the man himself, in a word, as he breathed and moved, and lived, the man whose action is arrested and depicted in this particular poem, or novel, or drama. In order thus to penetrate the inner being of a man, one must be cognisant of his interior individuality, as well as of his physical and moral individuality, and portray, too, his social environment, his family, the class to which he belongs, the views of life which he obtained in his epoch-and when all this is done, the Critical Essay has become the richest and most significant picture of manners and customs. Here, again, the judicial attitude is excluded. It has often been urged against Sainte-Beuve that his opinions were elastic, and he himself never tried to dogmatise. He would enrich his obser