The wide publicity given to Morley"s book did not, strangely enough, lead to any great revival of the study of Rousseau in Great Britain.
English readers were content to accept the statements and the views of Morley without any special attempt to examine or continue them. There was no outburst of Rousseau study in England in consequence of the volumes of 1873. English translations of his works continued to be few and poor, and over the _Nouvelle Helose_ and the _Confessions_ there still hung a cloud of reproach. They were held to be immoral, and dull in their immorality. During the last decade of the century, however, a certain quickening of interest began to show itself in a variety of ways. A Rousseauiste, who excelled all other disciples in the vehemence of her admiration, was revealed in 1895 by the _Studies in the France of Voltaire and Rousseau_ of Mrs. Frederika Macdonald. These, however, were at first but little noticed, and the labours of this lady, culminating in her violent and excessive, but learned and original _New Criticism of J. J. Rousseau_ (1906) and _The Humane Philosophy_ (1908) belong to the twentieth century. It is to be hoped that the essays of Mrs. Macdonald may stimulate a new body of workers to remove the stigma which has lain on England for a hundred years of being dry with cynical neglect of Rousseau while all the rest of the threshing-floor of Europe was wet with the dews of vivifying criticism.
THE CENTENARY OF LECONTE DE LISLE
Many English lovers of French poetry would have been sorry, though none could have been surprised, if public opinion in France had been too much agitated by the stupendous events of the War to spare a thought for one of the greatest of modern poets on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. But it was not so; on the eighteenth of October, 1918, when the fighting had approached its culminating point, and when all the fortunes of the world seemed hanging in the balance, the serenity of French criticism found room, between the bulletins of battle, for a word of reminder that the author of _Poemes Antiques_ and _Poemes Barbares_ was born a century before in the tropic island of La Reunion. The recognition was not very copious, nor was it universally diffused, but in no circ.u.mstances would it have been either the one or the other.
Leconte de Lisle has never been, and will never be, a "popular" writer.
He appeals to a select group, a limited circle, which neither expands nor contracts. His fame has never been excessive, and it will never disappear. It is modest, reserved, and durable.
He was commonly described as a Creole. His father, an army surgeon--exiled by the service to what used to be called the Ile Bourbon--was a pure Breton. Charles Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle, after several excursions to India, which left strong traces on his poetry, arrived still young in France, and ultimately settled in Paris. Thus he lived for half a century, in great simplicity and uniformity, surrounded by adoring friends, but little known to the public. In middle life he became a librarian at the Luxembourg; as old age was approaching, he found himself elected to succeed Victor Hugo at the French Academy. If he was not exactly poor, his means were strictly moderate; and the most unpleasant event of his whole life was the discovery, at the fall of the Empire, that, although his opinions were republican, he had been receiving a pension from the government of Napoleon III. Nothing could be more ridiculous than the outcry then raised against him; for he was a poet hidden in the light of thought, and no politician. It was an honour to any government, and no shame to the austerest poet, that modest public help should enable a man like Leconte de Lisle to exist without anxiety. There can hardly be said to have been any other event in this dignified and blameless career.
There is a danger--but there is also a fascination--in the instinct which leads us, when we observe literature broadly, to find relations or parallelisms between independent and diverse personalities. In the most striking examples, however, where there has been no actual influence at work, these parallelisms are apt to be very misleading. Where it is impossible not to observe elements of likeness, as between Byron and Musset, we may take them to be actual, and no matters of chance. But the similarity, in certain aspects, between Alfred de Vigny and Thomas Hardy, between Andre Chenier and Keats, between Crabbe and Verhaeren, must be accidental, and is founded on a comparison between very limited portions of the work of each. Nevertheless, for purposes of illumination, it is sometimes useful--on what we may call the Lamarckian system--to see where the orbits of certain eminent writers of distinctive originality approach nearest to one another.
It is admitted that Leconte de Lisle is pre-eminently gifted among the poets of France in certain clearly defined directions. His poems, which are marked by a concinnity of method which sometimes degenerates into monotony, are distinguished above all others by their haughty concentration of effort, by their purity of outline, and by their extreme precision in the use of definite imagery. They aim, with unflinching consistency, at a realization of beauty so abstract that the forms by which it is interpreted to the imagination are almost wholly sculpturesque. Is there an English poet of whom, at his best, the same language might be used? There is one, and only one, and that is Walter Savage Landor. It cannot but be stimulating to the reader to put side by side, let us say, the opening lines of _The Hamadryad_ and of _Khiron_, or the dialogue of _Niobe_ and that of _Thrasymedes and Eunoe_, and to see how closely related is the manner in which the English and the French poet approach their themes. The spirit of pagan beauty broods over _Hypatie et Cyrille_ as it does over the mingled prose and verse of _Pericles and Aspasia_, and with the same religious _desiderium_. We shall not find another revelation of the cupuscular magnificence of the farthermost antiquity so striking as Landor"s _Gebir_, unless we seek it in the _Kan_ of Leconte de Lisle.
But we should not drive this parallel too far. If the breadth and majesty of vision which draw these two poets together are notable, not less so are their divergencies. Landor, who so often appears to be on the point of uttering something magical which never gets past his lips, is one of the most unequal of writers. He ascends and descends, with disconcerting abruptness, from an exquisite inspiration to the darkest level of hardness. Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, is the victim of no vicissitudes of style: he floats in the empyrean, borne up apparently without an effort at a uniform height, like his own Condor:
_Il dort dans l"air glace, les ailes toutes grandes._
Many readers--particularly those on whom the romantic heresy has laid its hands with the greatest violence--resent this Olympian imperturbability; and the charge has been frequently brought, and is still occasionally repeated, that Leconte de Lisle is lacking in sensibility, that he dares to be "impa.s.sible" in an age when every heart is worn, palpitating, on the sleeve of the impulsive lyrist. He was accused, as the idle world always loves to accuse the visionary, of isolating himself from his kind with a muttered _odi profanum vulgus et arceo_. Such an opinion is founded on the aspect of reserve which his vast legendary pictures suggest, and on the impersonal and severely objective att.i.tude which he adopts with regard to history and nature.
His poems breathe a disdain of life and of the resilience of human appet.i.te (_La Mort de Valmiki_), a love of solitude (_Le Desert_), a determination to gaze on spectacles of horror without betraying nervous emotion (_Le Ma.s.sacre de Mona_), which seem superhuman and almost inhuman. He was accused, in his dramas--which were perhaps the most wilful, the least spontaneous part of his work--of affecting a Greek frightfulness which outran the early Greeks themselves. Francisque Sarcey said that Leconte de Lisle, in his tragedy of _Les Erinnyes_, scratched the face of aeschylus, as though he did not find it b.l.o.o.d.y enough already.
The subjects which Leconte de Lisle prefers are never of a sort to promote sentimentality or even sensibility. He writes of Druids moaning along the edge of hyperborean cliffs, of elephants marching in set column across hot brown stretches of sand, of the black panther crouched among the scarlet cactus-blossoms, of the polar bear lamenting among the rocks, of the Syrian sages whose beards drip with myrrh as they sit in council under the fig-tree of Naboth. He writes of humming-birds and of tigers, of Malay pirates and of the sapphire cup of Bhagavat, of immortal Zeus danced round by the young Oceanides, and of Brahma seeking the origin of things in the cascades of the Sacred River. These are not themes which lend themselves to personal effusion, or on which the poet can be expected to embroider any confessions of his egotism. If Leconte de Lisle chooses to be thus remote from common human interests--that is to say, from the emotions of our vulgar life to-day--his is the responsibility, and it is one which he has fully recognized. But that his genius was not wholly marmoreal, nor of an icy impa.s.sibility, the careful study of his works will amply a.s.sure us.
It is strange that even very careful critics have been led to overlook the personal note in the poems of Leconte de Lisle: probably because the wail of self-pity is so piercing in most modern verse that it deadens the ear to the discreet murmur of the stoic poet"s confession. Hence even Anatole France has been led to declare that the author of _Poemes Barbares_ has determined to be as obstinately absent from his work as G.o.d is from creation; and that he has never breathed a word about himself, his secret wishes, or his personal ideals. But what is such a pa.s.sage as the following if not a revelation of the soul of the poet in its innermost veracity?
_O jeunesse sacree, irreparable joie, Felicite perdue, ou l"ame en pleurs se noie!
O lumiere, o fratcheur des monts calmes et bleus, Des coteaux et des bois feuillages onduleux, Aubes d"un jour divin, chants des mers fortunees, Florissante vigueur de mes belles annees...
Vous vivez, vous chantez, vous palpitez encor, Saintes realites, dans vos horizons d"or!
Mais, o nature, o ciel, flois sacres, monts sublimes, Bois dont les vents amis sont murmurer les cimes, Formes de l"ideal, magnifiques aux yeux, Vous avez disparu de mon cur oublieux!
Et voici que, la.s.se de voluptes ameres, Haletant du desir de mes mille chimeres, Helas! j"ai desappris les hymnes d"autrefois, Et que mes dieux trahis n"entendent plus ma voix._
This is a note more often heard, perhaps, in English than in French poetry. It is the lament of Wordsworth for the "visionary gleam" that has fled, for "the glory and the dream" that fade into the light of common day.
Leconte de Lisle is unsparing with the results of his erudition, and this probably confirms the popular notion of his remoteness. Here, however, returning for a moment to Landor, we may observe that he is never so close-packed and never so cryptic as the author of _Chrysaor_ and _Gunlaug_. What Leconte de Lisle has to tell us about mysterious Oriental sages and mythical Scandinavian heroes may be unfamiliar to the reader, but is never rendered obscure by his mode of narration. Nothing could be less within our ordinary range of experience than the adventure of _Le Barde de Temrah_, who arrives at dawn from a palace of the Finns, in a chariot drawn by two white buffaloes; but Leconte de Lisle recounts it voluminously, in clear, loud language which leaves no sense of doubt on the listener"s mind as to what exactly happened.
His Indian studies became less precise in the _Poemes Barbares_ than they had been in the early _Poemes Antiques_; perhaps under the stress of greater knowledge. But he had been from early youth personally acquainted with the Indian landscapes which he describes. With the ancient Sanscrit literature, I suppose he had mainly an acquaintance through translations, of which those by Burnouf may have inspired him most. Whether, if he had lived to read Professor Jacobi"s proof that Valmiki was a historical character, and the author in its original form of the earliest and greatest epic of India, the _Ramayana_, Leconte de Lisle would have been annoyed to remember that he had treated Valmiki as a mythical person, symbolically devoured by white ants, it is impossible to say. Probably not, for he only chose these ancient instances to ill.u.s.trate from the contemplative serenity of Brahmanism his own calm devotion to the eternal principle of beauty.
_Bhagavat! Bhagavat! Essence des Essences,_ _Source de la beaute, fleuve des Renaissances,_ _Lumiere qui fait vivre et mourir a la fois._
Probably no other European poet has interpreted with so much exact.i.tude, because with so intense a sympathy, the cosmogony and mythology of the Puranas, with their mystic genealogies of G.o.ds and kings.
The harmony and sonorous fullness of the verse of Leconte de Lisle were noted from the first, even by those who had least sympathy with the subjects of it. He achieved the extreme--we may almost say the excessive--purity of his language by a tireless study of the Greeks and of the great French poets of the seventeenth century, with whom he had a remarkable sympathy at a time when they were generally in disfavour. His pa.s.sion for the art of Racine may be compared with the close attention which Keats gave to the versification of Dryden. He greatly venerated the genius of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps the only contemporary poet of France who exercised any influence over the style of Leconte de Lisle.
It is difficult to define in what that influence consisted; the two men had essentially as little resemblance as Reims Cathedral has to the Parthenon, Victor Hugo being as extravagantly Gothic as Leconte de Lisle was Attic. But the younger poet was undoubtedly fascinated by the tumultuous cadences of his more various, and, we must admit, more prodigious predecessor. They agreed, moreover, in appealing to the ear rather than to the eye. Verlaine has described Leconte de Lisle"s insistence on the vocal harmonies of verse, and he adds: "When he recited his own poems, a lofty emotion seemed to vibrate through his whole n.o.ble figure, and his auditors were drawn to him by an irresistible sympathy." It must have been a wonderful experience to hear him, for instance, chant the iron _terze rime_ of _Le Jugement de Konor_, or the voluptuous languor of _Nourmahal_.
Much has been said about the sculpturesque character of Leconte de Lisle"s poems. But a comparison of them to friezes of figures carved out of white marble scarcely does justice to their colour, though it may indicate the stability of their form. It would be more accurate to compare them to the shapes covered with thin ivory and ornamented with gold and jewels, in which the Greeks, and even Pheidias himself, delighted. The _Poemes Antiques_ are, in fact, chryselephantine. But Leconte de Lisle was a painter also, and perhaps the chief difference to be observed between the early compositions and the _Poemes Barbares_ consists in the pictorial abundance of the latter. His descriptions have the character of broadly-brushed cartoons of scenes which are usually exotic, as of some Puvis de Chavannes who had made a leisurely voyage in Orient seas. Leconte de Lisle floods his canvas with light, and his favourite colours are white and golden yellow; even his fiercest tragedies are luminous. India he sees not as prosaic travellers have seen it, but in a blaze of dazzling splendour:
_Tes fleuves sont pareils aux pythons lumineux_ _Qui sur les palmiers verts enroulent leurs beaux nuds;_ _Ils glissent au detour de tes belles collines_ _En guirlandes d"argent, d"azur, de perles fines._
It is natural that a nature so eminently in harmony with the visual world, and so pagan in all its instincts, should be indifferent or even hostile to Christianity. His stoic genius, solidly based on the faiths of India and of h.e.l.las, finds the virtues of humility and of tender resignation contemptible. In the very remarkable dialogue, _Hypatie et Cyrille_, Leconte de Lisle defines, with the voice of the Neoplatonist, his own conception of religious truth. It is one in which _Le vil Galileen_ has neither part nor lot. We have to recognize in his temper a complete disdain of all the consolations of the Christian faith, or rather an inability to conceive in what they consist, and no phenomenon in literature is more curious than that, after a single generation, French poetry should have returned to the aggressive piety which strikes an English reader as so incomprehensible in M. Francis Jammes and in M.
Paul Claudel. But poetry has many mansions.
The person of Leconte de Lisle is described to us as characteristic of his work. He was very handsome, with a haughty carriage of the head on a neck "as pure and as solid as a column of marble." A monocle, which never left his right eye, gave a modern touch to an aspect which might else have been too rigorously antique. A droll little pseudo-anecdote, set by Theodore de Banville in his inimitable amalgam of wit and fancy, illuminates the effect which Leconte de Lisle produced upon his contemporaries. I take it from that delicious volume, too little remembered to-day, the _Camees Parisiens_, of 1873:
Leconte de Lisle was walking with aeschylus one day, in the ideal fatherland of tragedy, when, while he was conversing with the old hero of Salamis and of Platea, he suddenly observed that his companion was so bald that a tortoise might easily mistake his skull for a polished rock. Not wishing, therefore, to humiliate the t.i.tanic genius, and yet not able without regret to give up an ornament the indispensable beauty of which was obvious, he made up his mind to be totally bald in front, while retaining on the back of his head the silken and curly wealth of an Apollonian _chevelure_.
It was perhaps in the course of these walks with aeschylus that Leconte de Lisle formed the habit of spelling Clytemnestre "Klytaimnestra." The austerities of his orthography attracted a great deal of attention, and cannot be said to have succeeded in remoulding French or spelling.
People continue to write "Cain," although the poet insisted on "Kan,"
and even, in his sternest moments, on "Qan." He believed that his text gained picturesqueness, and even exact.i.tude of impression, by those curious archaisms. They are, at least, characteristic of the movement of his mind, and the reader who is offended by them must have come to the reading with a determination to be displeased. His vocabulary is more difficult; and sometimes, it must be confessed, more questionable. He uses, without explanation or introduction, the most extraordinary terms.
Ancient Roman emperors are said to have shown their largess by putting real pearls into the dishes which they set before their guests. This was generous; but the guest who broke his tooth upon a gift must have wished that the pearl had been more conventionally bestowed upon him. So the reader of Leconte de Lisle may be excused if he resents the sudden apparition of such strange words as "bobres," "bigaylles," and "pennbaz" in the text of this charming poet.
In spite of these eccentricities, which are in fact quite superficial, and in spite of a suspicion of pedantry which occasionally holds the reader"s attention at arm"s length, there is no French poet of our day more worthy of the attention of a serious English student. Leconte de Lisle cultivated the art of poetry with the most strenuous dignity and impersonality. He had a great reverence for the French language, and not a little of the zeal of the cla.s.sic writers of the seventeenth century who aimed at the technical perfection of literature. He is lucid and direct almost beyond parallel. In England, among those who approach French literature with more enthusiasm than judgment, there is a tendency to plunge at once into what is fashionable for the moment on the Boulevard Saint Michel. We have seen British girls and boys affecting to appreciate Verlaine, and even Mallarme, without having the smallest acquaintance with Racine or Alfred de Vigny. It is pure sn.o.bisme to pretend to admire Prose pour Des Esseintes when you are unable to construe Montaigne. For all such foreign folly, the rigorous versification, the pure and lucid language, and the luminous fancy of Leconte de Lisle may be recommended as a medicine.
TWO FRENCH CRITICS
EMILE f.a.gUET--REMY DE GOURMONT
The importance of literary criticism in the higher education of a race has been recognized in no country in the world except France. Elsewhere there have arisen critics of less, or more, or even of extreme merit, but nowhere else has there been a systematic training in literature which has embraced a whole generation, and has been intimately combined with ethics. The line of action which Matthew Arnold vainly and pathetically urged on the Anglo-Saxon world has been un.o.btrusively but most effectively taken by France for now more than half a century. When the acrid and ridiculous controversy between the Cla.s.sical and the Romantic schools died down, criticism in France became at once more reasonable and more exact. The fatuous formula which has infected all races, and is not yet extirpated in this country--the "I do not like you, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell"--pa.s.sed into desuetude. It was implicitly recognized that it is your duty, if you express a view, to be able to "tell" on what principles it is founded. In fact, if we concentrate our attention on the progress of French professional criticism, we see it becoming steadily more philosophical and less empirical.
But about 1875, after the period of Taine and Renan, and, in a quite other field, after that of Gautier and Paul de Saint Victor, we find criticism in Paris rapidly tending in two important directions, becoming on the one hand more and more exact, almost scientific, on the other daringly personal and impressionist. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who was a man of extraordinary force of character, gave a colour to the whole scheme of literary instruction throughout France. He resisted the idea that literature was merely an entertainment or a pastime. He a.s.serted that it was the crown and apex of a virile education, and he declared its aim to be the maintenance and progress of morality. With Brunetiere everything was a question of morals. He was a strong man, and a fighting man; he enjoyed disputation and snuffed the breath of battle. He advanced the impersonality of literature and stamped on the pride of authors. In the year 1900, an observer glancing round professorial circles had to admit that the influence of Brunetiere had become paramount. His arbitrary theory of the _evolution des genres_, founded on Herbert Spencer and Darwin, and applied to the study of literature, pervaded the schools.
But the vehement tradition of Brunetiere was undermined from the first by his two greatest rivals, Anatole France and Jules Lemaitre, whose character was the exact opposite of his. They were "impressionist"
critics, occupied with their own personal adventures among books, and not actively concerned with ethics. Their influence, especially that of Lemaitre, since Anatole France retired from criticism before the close of the century, tempered what was rigid and insensitive in the too-vehement dogmatism of Brunetiere, but they did not form a camp distinct from his. The sodality of the French Academy kept them together in a certain happy harmony, in spite of their contrast of character.
Brunetiere died in 1906, Lemaitre in 1914; the effect of the one upon education, of the other upon social culture, had been immense, but it had not advanced since 1900. With the new century, new forces had come into prominence, and of the two most important of these we speak to-day.
It was the fate of France to lose, within a few months, the two most prominent critics of the period succeeding that of which I have just spoken. The death of Emile f.a.guet and of Remy de Gourmont marks another stage in the progress of criticism, and closes another chapter in its history. That their methods and modes of life were excessively different; that their efforts, if not hostile, were persistently opposed; that one was the most professorial of professors, the other the freest of free lances; that each, in a word, desired to be what the other was not; adds a piquancy to the task of considering them side by side. The first thing we perceive, in such a parallel, is the superficial contrast; the second is the innate similitude, so developed that these spirits in opposition are found in reality to represent, in a sort of inimical unison, the whole att.i.tude towards literature of the generation in which they flourished. Their almost simultaneous disappearance leaves the field clear for other procedures under their guidance. In the extremely copious published writings of these two eminent men the name of each of them will scarcely be found. They worked, in their intense and fervid spheres, out of sight of one another. But, now both are dead, it is interesting to see how close to each other they were in their essential att.i.tude, and how typical their activity is of the period between 1895 and 1915.
If anyone should rashly engage to write the life of Emile f.a.guet, he would find himself limited to the task of composing what the critic himself, in speaking of Montaigne, calls "the memoirs of a man who never had any occupation but thinking." Through the whole of a life which approached the term of threescore years and ten, f.a.guet was absorbed, more perhaps than any other man of his time, in the contemplation of the printed page. He said of himself, "I have never stopped reading, except to write, nor writing, except to read." In any other country but France, this preoccupation would have led to dreariness and pedantry, if not to a permanent and sterile isolation. But in France purely literary criticism, the examination and constant re-examination of the cla.s.sics of the nation, takes an honoured and a vivid place in the education of the young. The literary teaching of the schools is one of the moral and intellectual forces of the France of to-day, and f.a.guet, who was the very type, and almost the exaggeration, of that tendency in teaching, was preserved from pedantry by the immense sympathy which surrounded him. His capacity for comprehending books, and for making others comprehend them, found response from a grateful and thirsty mult.i.tude of students.
Emile f.a.guet was born, on the 17th of December, 1847, at La Roche-sur-Yon, in Vendee, where his father was professor at the local lycee. M. Victor f.a.guet, who had received a prize for a translation of Sophocles into verse, nourished high academic ambitions for his son.
From the noiseless annals of the future critic"s childhood a single anecdote has been preserved, namely that, when he was a schoolboy, he solemnly promised his father that he would become a member of the French Academy. All his energy was centred towards that aim. He pa.s.sed through the regular course which attends young men who study for the professoriate in France, and at last he became a professor himself at Bordeaux, and then in Paris. But in that career, as Dr. Johnson sententiously observed, "Unnumber"d suppliants croud Preferment"s Gate,"
and at thirty-five Emile f.a.guet was still quite undistinguished. He saw his juniors, and in particular Lemaitre and Brunetiere, speed far in front of him, but he showed neither impatience nor ill-temper. Gradually he became a writer, but it was not until 1885 that his _Les Grands Maitres du XVIe Siecle_ attracted the attention of the public. He began to be famous at the age of forty, when his _Etudes Litteraires sur le XIXe Siecle_, clear, well arranged, amusing and informing, proved to French readers that here was a provider of substantial literature, always intelligent, never tiresome, who was exactly to their taste. From that time forth the remaining thirty years of f.a.guet"s life extended themselves in a ceaseless cheerful industry of lecturing, writing, and interpreting, which bore fruit in a whole library of published books, perhaps surpa.s.sing in bulk what is known as the "output" of any other mortal man.
Though ever more concerned with ideas than with persons, f.a.guet did not disdain, in happy, brief, and salient lines, to sketch the authors who had written the books he a.n.a.lysed. Let us attempt a portrait of himself as he appeared in the later years of his life. No one ever less achieved the conventional type of academician. His person was little known in society, for he scarcely ever dined out. He had so long been a provincial professor that he never threw off a country look. In sober fact, Emile f.a.guet, with his brusque, stiff movements, his rough brush of a black moustache, and his conscientious walk, looked more like a non-commissioned officer in mufti than an ornament of the Inst.i.tut. He was active in the streets, stumping along with an umbrella always pressed under his arm; on his round head there posed for ever a kind of ancient billyc.o.c.k hat. He had a supreme disdain for dress, and for the newspapers which made jokes about his clothing. He lived in a little stuffy apartment in the Rue Monge--on the fifth storey, if I remember right. He was an old bachelor, and the visitor, cordially welcomed to his rooms, was struck by the chaos of books--chairs, tables, the floor itself being covered with volumes, drowned in printed matter. Just s.p.a.ce enough swept out to hold the author"s paper and ink was the only oasis in the desert of books. I remember that, at the height of his fame and prosperity, there was no artificial light in his rooms. That army of his publications was marshalled by the sole aid of a couple of candles.
Everything about him, but especially the frank dark eyes lifted in his ingenuous face, breathed an air of unaffected probity and simplicity, and of a kind of softly hurrying sense that life was so short, and there were so many books to read and to write, that there could be no time left for nonsense.
His image will long recur to the inner vision of his friends, as he went marching to his lecture or to his newspaper-office, nonchalant and easy, with his hands in his pockets, his elbow squeezing that enormous umbrella to his side. In the evening he would go, inelegantly dressed, in the same loosely martial way, to the theatre, for which he had an inordinate affection. He was not a "first-nighter," but dropped in to see a new piece whenever he wanted copy for his _feuilleton_. His lectures, it is reported, were familiar and conversational, with frequent repet.i.tion and copious quotation, the whole poured out as a man tells a story which he intimately knows, with an inexhaustible flow of thoughts and facts. Sometimes he was so vivacious as to be a little paradoxical, and led a laugh against himself. He stood before his students, formidable only in his erudition, easy of approach, austere and gay. His congested rooms in the Rue Monge were open to any young inquirer, but it was observed that f.a.guet never asked what the name of his visitor was, but how old he was. The younger the student, the less dogmatic was the professor, but the more familiar, abundant, sympathetic. It was noticeable in all his relations, with young and old alike, that f.a.guet"s one aim invariably seemed to be honestly to make his interlocutor comprehend the matter in hand.
Some recollections of the outer presence of Emile f.a.guet should not be without value to us in fixing the character of his inner life, the spirit which pervaded his profuse and honest labour. No one in the history of literature has been more distinguished for intellectual probity; and no one has cared less for appearances, or for the glorification of his own character and cleverness. His value as a critic consists primarily in his capacity for thoroughly understanding what each author under consideration meant by this or that expression of his art. f.a.guet does not allow himself to be stung into eloquence by the touch of a master-mind, as Lemaitre does, nor does he fly off from his subject on the wings of an imperative suggestion, like Anatole France, but he sticks close to the matter in hand, so close that he reaches comprehension by becoming absorbed in it. There is no writer on literature who has ever crept so completely into the skin of each old author as f.a.guet has done. He makes the dry bones live; he resuscitates the dead, and revives in them all that was essential in their original life, all that was really vital in them, even if it be ultimately to condemn the taste or the tendency exhibited. The first object with him is to vivify; to a.n.a.lyse and dissect come next.
He was open to all impressions, and he was particularly admirable in his periodical surveys of the four great centuries of French verse and prose, because of his unflagging open-mindedness. He saw the living thread of literary history, running, a pulsating stream, from Rabelais to Flaubert. He had followed it so often, up and down, this way and that, that no curve of it, no backwater was unfamiliar to him. La.s.situde is as unknown to f.a.guet as it was to Sh.e.l.ley"s "Skylark." His curiosity is always awake; no shadow of satiety ever comes near him. He was a t.i.tan in his way, but never a "weary t.i.tan"; he never felt "the orb of his fate," though it embraced so much, to be "too vast." The more elaborate or complex an author was, the more actively and ingeniously f.a.guet penetrated his work, smoothing out the complexities, throwing light into every dark corner. But it is very proper to notice that even where he devotes himself with what seems the most absorbing care to the investigation of a particular mind, he is always essentially detached from it, always ready to quit one tenement of genius and adapt himself with alacrity to another, like a soldier-crab, whose tender extremity will fit itself to any sh.e.l.l-habitation.