Je meurs,—et sur la tombe où lentement j'arrive
Nul ne viendra verser de pleurs.
"Adieu, champs que j'amais, adieu, douce verdure,
Adieu, riant exil des hois;
Ciel, pavilion de l'homme, admirable nature,
Adieu pour la derniere fois!"
The effect of this absence of all that was calculated to stimulate the higher faculties of the mind, appeared in the form which literature, so far as it existed at all, now assumed. Henceforward, it became almost entirely critical; instead of adding to the stock of independent creations, it was content with analysing, comparing, commenting upon what had been already written, or with translating and imitating the literature of other nations. Such is generally the direction which literature takes in periods of decline. The tendency, indeed, towards criticism, had become apparent even in the time of Diderot and Voltaire, and many of the happiest productions of the latter are of a purely analytical character; but after his death the critical spirit in French literature became universal.
Before we advert, however, to particular productions in this department, let us bestow a few words on the general character of the criticism which arose under such circumstances; as contrasted with what criticism ought to be.
"Pour avoir du goût, il faut avoir de l'ame," is another of those just remarks of Vauvenargues which make us regret his early death. Without heart and imagination, there can be no elevated nor even useful criticism. The soaring inventive imagination of the poet is not indeed necessary to the critic; but that lower degree of imagination is essential, which enables him to step beyond the narrow circle of individual or even national habits and tastes—to follow the poet with a firm step, as Dante follows Virgil over the "vast abrupt," and through the regions where he marshals the way—to acknowledge the divinity of genius, though presented to him under unaccustomed forms, and to interpret its revelations with whatever novelty of language they may be uttered.
And to the gift of this imagination is necessarily allied the possession of pure and natural sensibility—the ready sympathy with human nature and its generous feelings; for, as the imagination teaches us to apprehend the great, the heart enables us to appreciate the true. The full beauty of those reflections, which, being based in the everlasting nature of man, are felt at the present day as they were in the days of Homer—those strokes of feeling which, like an electric chain, make the world kin, can only be thoroughly perceived by those who, in an age of outworn civilisation, have yet preserved something of their youthfulness of spirit and simplicity of feeling.
The highest criticism, too, at least when applied to the productions of high art, must be reverential. The critic must not forget the infinite distance which separates the great creative artist from him who only judges of the creations of genius—the interpreter from him whose oracles he expounds. It is the poet after all that makes the critic; it is from the genius of the former that the torch of the latter is kindled. He will approach his task, then, in the spirit of reverence—his praise will be warm and sympathetic—his censure respectful; where he fails to apprehend completely the purpose of the artist, he will yet believe that the deficiency may be not in the poet but in himself. No spectacle can be more ridiculous than that of a self-satisfied critic reading a lecture ex cathedra to Homer or Shakspeare, on the barbarisms of their epic or dramatic poetry; perhaps bestowing on them a "Euge puer!" at the conclusion; or dismissing them, as the Archbishop of Granada dismissed his secretary, wishing them "all manner of good fortune, with a little more taste."
To such requisites criticism must add, of course, learning to correct her estimates—that logic and good sense which constitutes the balance of imagination—that delicacy of taste which exposes the ridiculous, as well as detects the beautiful in composition and that spirit of conscientiousness, and absence of self-interest and self-display, without which all criticism, however adorned by wit or ingenuity, is valueless. The foundations of all sound criticism must be laid in truth, and its superstructure must be reared, not merely by a logical head, but by a lively imagination and a loving heart.
