Critic and Academician

—Of the four elections made in 1893 to the French Academy, the latest gave the youngest member but one to that venerable body. This is M. Ferdinand Brunetière, who began his literary career in the Revue des Deux Mondes of which he has at last been made director in chief ; who, with none but a bachelor’s de gree, has become a leading professor of the Ecole Normale, and conférencier in vogue at the Sorbonne ; and who, with all his youth, has given to publication a score or more of serious and noteworthy volumes in what Jules Lemaâtre, that smiling fellow-critic, has named “a series of paradoxes on French literature.” It is only twenty years ago that Bruuetière and Paul Bourget were teaching together in the same private board ing-school in Paris. Both have gone a long distance in a short space of time. Perhaps the new Academician will soon be called to receive the companion of his early struggles in nostro docto corpore. Both, too, in a way, are the disciples of the late philosopher Taine : as such they are clearly marked off from other writers of their age, like Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France, who glory in the inconclusive heritage of Ernest Renan.

M. Brunetière was born at Toulon in 1849. The youngest Academician of all is that romancing child of the Huguenots, Pierre Loti (naval lieutenant Julien Viaud), who was born in 1850. It was in 1891 that a stampede of the elder Immortals, led by Taine before the spectre of his unruly disciple Zola’s candidature, brought Loti into the chair of Octave Feuillet and Racine. The Vicomte de Vogüé, who holds the chair of Fdnelon, was elected in 1888 at the still earlier age of forty. In 1884 Francois Coppee succeeded to the poet’s place of Laprade and Alfred de Musset, at the age of forty-two. But these elections to the Academy are as exceptional on the side of youth as was, at the other extreme, the choice in 1884 of Ferdinand de Lesseps at the age of seventy-nine, and of the historian Duruy at seventy-three. Of the other elections of 1893, M. Thureau-Dangin, the clerical historian of the Monarchy of July who takes the chair of Bossuet, was fifty-six ; the Viconte de Bornier (scarcely immortal as the poet of Luther’s Marriage and Mahomet) was sixty-eight ; and M. ChallemelLacour, who was a red revolutionist and introducer of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to France before he became the present decorous president of the French Senate, and Renan’s successor in the Academy, was near the average at sixty-six.

“Cani sunt sensus hominis and if the sense of M. Brunetiere has not yet made his locks gray, they at least eke out his significant figure as he stands on the lecturer s platform. Brown and flat-lying, with the thin fringe of beard below, they frame in irregularly a worn face of strong, restless, wellnigh morbid vitality, from which keen and defiant eyes look out through glasses. The decent black redingote of the French professor terminates in spindle shanks that stand braced sturdily as if against a storm. It is the figure of a man who has thought in solitude, and expects little but combat from the world when he brings it his message. Years ago, when this man began commanding the world’s attention, Jules Lemaitre, whose own philosophy is cheery and not troubled with deep things that disquiet, said of him, “ It is not enough for M. Brunetiere to be right ; he is right with temper, and he is not sorry to be disagreeable in thinking rightly.” Within the past year, M. Lemaitre has been again to hear the lecturer in his crowded course at the Sorbonne, where he speaks learnedly of Bossuet and that serious, dogmatic seventeenth century, which he knows as no other, to brilliant ladies in search of new ideas, and to thoughtful men anxious for old truth. The impression of the sympathetic fellow-critic has only deepened with time : “ M. Brunetière makes me think, in spite of myself, of a theologian who is damned.”

The new Academician takes the place of John Lemoinne, that English Frenchman who so long led thinking Anglomania in France through his classical Journal des Débats. The chair had before been occupied by Sainte-Beuve, the father of all recent French criticism. But a greater than Sainte-Beuve is here, one whose omnivorous intellectual appetite has led him to graze in English and German pastures nearly as much as at home ; one, too, who has studied all modern science for the due criticism of letters, just as Sainte-Beuve studied literature in the light of natural history. And the communicativeness of M. Brunetière is almost in a line with his receptivity. It would be difficult to sum up briefly the full amount of work which this critic, who is at the same time philosopher, historian, moralist, and, above all, dialectician, has given to the world. It is but slowly that his books have impressed the public imagination, made up as they are of review articles and lectures, which seldom have the air of consecutive and closely bound chapters. Yet there is a triple sequence in all that he has written.

The first is historical, beginning with the seventeenth century, which Matthew Arnold would have agreed with him in ranking as the only modern age of a prose that is classic in the universal sense ; that is, as the prose of the great Greeks and Latins is classic. M. Brunetière’s own style has caught an archaic fragrance from the formal syntax and serious periods of the writers of Louis XIV.’s time. It was objected to his becoming director of the Revue des Deux Mondes that he would recognize no literary spirit later than that golden age of French letters. The objection did not reckon with the other and greater qualities of this philosophic intelligence.

The second sequence is tradition. SainteBeuve investigated the individual author and his surroundings, — as it were, the habitat of the particular literary animal he was studying. Taine took a wider view of environment and race. To Brunetiere, literature and criticism itself are, like life, the result of tradition ; and of any given author he first asks, At what historical moment does he appear ? I suspect that he includes in the question some real reference to the momentum of tradition with which every writer, consciously or not, comes into his literary existence. “At each moment of its duration, humanity is made up of more dead men than living ones,” said Auguste Comte ; and I imagine M. Brunetiere would say the literary consciousness is like humanity.

The last sequence is, naturally, that of evolution. This, by a gradual assimilation of the Darwinism in the air, has resulted in the évolution des genres. In his lectures of the last few years at the Ecole Normale, and, last of all, at the Sorbonne and at the matinées of the Odéon Theatre, M. Brunetière has explained the history of French literature by philosophizing on the development of its types, — on the evolution of criticism since the Renaissance, on the evolution of the French drama and of lyric poetry in the nineteenth century. This smacks, perhaps, too much of the vir systematicus; but it has a well-based dogmatic seeming about it that is reassuring in these skeptical days.

Francois Coppée, who takes care to say that he is not often in agreement with M. Brunetiere, has nothing but compliments for his study of the impersonal poetry and beauty-worship of Théophile Gautier, — and this at no great time after the Baudelaire incident, which, in French fashion, had all but terminated in a duel for the terrible critic. He had lectured the young men — in his usual way, as one having authority — on their somewhat affected veneration for the poet of the Fleurs du Mai, a corrupter of sound speech and sane ideas and morals. Youth loves not to be lectured ; hence songs and sonnets and scurrility. But M. Coppde’s assurance that the philosophy of Brunetiere extends happily to these latter days is not needed by those who have observed his conduct of the great literary Revue des Deux Mondes. It is he who drew from the fin-de-siècle offices of the Echo de Paris such young story-writers as Paul Margueritte and Marcel Schwob ; and he opened the famous review to that latest chronicler of high life, Paul Hervieu, who has a right to entitle his book Peints par Eux-mêmes. Even la jeune critique seems willing to forgive. One of its representatives has written, “ I believe thatM. Brunetière is growing young daily ; his last articles are more modern than his first.”

An entire essay might be devoted to describing accurately the work of Ferdinand Brunetiere in the field of morals. It has been written in a searching volume on the Moral Ideas of the Present Time, by one of the ablest of the younger French writers, Professor Edouard Rod, of the University of Geneva. He has given the critic his proper place in the semicircle of recent thought described by the swinging of the pendulum from the negative Renan to the positive Tolstóy. M. Brunetiere is a positif, in full reaction by his constant turning back to the tradition of morals as of letters. His favorite seventeenth century, with Pascal, to whom he has given a book, was an age of earnest casuistry dividing the soul from the spirit. It is he, also, who, with strange versatility, has shown in the pessimism of Schopenhauer a moral philosophy that ends as consistently in Christian beatitude as in Buddhist Nirvana. His hatred of the Ego and of personal literature, his rehabilitation of “ objective ” criticism, his impatience of the mere observer of life,— the “idle dreamer of an empty day,” — are as much a part of his morals as of his literature. Without belief himself, as he has just rather gratuitously taken it on himself to explain while speaking of Bossuet, he looks with frank sympathy on belief, because it is real and a fact in the evolution of man. And he holds with belief that “ one single affirmation solves all pessimism, — that life is not its own end and aim.”“ From the dialectic marvel of his pages,” adds Professor Rod, “ we come forth with a crazy desire to throw ourselves on the Summa of St. Thomas, and to consecrate to theology the remnant of a penitent life.”

It was long ago evident that a seat was reserved for Brunetiere under the great dome of the Collége Mazarin, unless the French Academy were to belie all its history and traditions. There is but one outward distinction that remains for him to win in the world of letters. So far, he has only a chaire libre at the Sorbonne, which has been the head and centre of the University of Paris and of France for six hundred years. The venerable institution of learning could not receive among its regular professors one who was not a doctor nor even an agrégé in the studies of the university. Perhaps the Academician will be able to climb over the wall of curricula and degrees. At least, he is the intellectual father of the doctors of young France. It is hard to estimate at its real value the influence he has exerted over a nation and a literature, in spite of all reluctance and the opposition of minds forced by his very insistence to heed him. In his first book he gave fair warning to the world (and his words are as true now that he is the author of many volumes) : “ My studies are but the expression, differing according to subjects and to men, of a few fundamental ideas that are always the same.”