may not transgress certain rules, or lose itself in chaotic miscellanies and wandering mazes and passages that lead to nothing; it must not reveal a mere voluble chatterbox; it must not evaporate in the thin air of purposeless gossip, or become a disorganised mass of "bald disjointed chat." The critic reverences and magnifies his office. He is a veteran in his labour, and it is a labour of love. His reviews prove him
Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;
Though learn'd, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and humanly severe:
Blest with a taste exact, yet unconfin'd;
A knowledge both of books and human kind.
To him we may apply the words of Madame du Deffand, forgetting the original object: "Il a beaucoup d'esprit, très-cultivé, le gout très-juste, beaucoup de discernement sur les hommes et sur les ouvrages, raisonne très-consequemment, le style excellent, sans tortillage, sans pretentìon. …. Tous ses Portraits sont très-ressemblants et bien frappés." His criticisms are excellent in moderation, clear-sightedness, and good sense. Not very profound or subtle, perhaps; yet searching and thoughtful, and with a singular and thrice-blessed freedom from the cant vices of the craft. He is not one of your hyper-panegyrists, nor of your savage Ishmaelites; he neither sides with those who descry a microcosm of meaning in a prosy quoi qu'on die,[1] nor with those whom genius turns against and rends as "cut-throat bandits" who "mangle to expose,"[2] and do their best to snuff out fiery souls by an extinguishing article. He is not one of the ready-made critics, after Byron's recipe,[3]
Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote.
With just enough of learning to misquote,
A mind well skill'd to find or forge a fault,
A turn for punning—call it Attic salt, &c.
M. Sainte-Beuve brings to his work a lofty sense of its moral as well as of its intellectual requirements; he has scanned its responsibilities, and evidently seeks to employ the conscience of a careful, as well as the pen of a ready, writer. He strives to do justice to his author, his reader, and himself. As for his author, he labours to realise, in his behalf, what he calls "cette faculté de demi-métamorphose," or quasi-identification with that author, with his point of view, which is (and Coleridge would nod assent) "le triomphe de la critique," consisting as it does in the critic's putting himself "à la place de l'auteur, et au point de vue du sujet qu'on examine, à lire tout écrit selon l'esprit que l'a dicté." How far the Causeur would succeed in reducing his principle to practice, if engaged on English literature—in criticising Wordsworth, for instance, or Charles Lamb, or our Elizabethan worthies —is a question we will
- ↑
… "Ce quoi qu'on die en dit beaucoup plus qu'il ne semble.
Je ne sais pas, poor moi, ai chacun me ressemble;
Mais j'entends, la-dessous, un million de mots."
Les Femmee Savantes, iii., 2. - ↑ According to Burns' wrathful invective, in his Lines to Robert Graham:
"Critics—appall'd I venture on the name,
Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame:
Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Munroes;
He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose." - ↑ His lordship's tenet, at one time, being, that
"A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure—critics all are ready made."
