Edward Dowden

“ The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand found deep within herself; she had read the external circumstances and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documents with the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw; her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature. ”

“ To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France is to say too little; the claim that he was the greatest lyric poet of all literature might be urged. The power and magnitude of his song result from the fact that in it what is personal and what is impersonal are fused in one; his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature and of humanity—
And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own ideas, it becomes great as a reverberation of the sensations, the passions, and the thoughts of the world. ”

“ In all, gaiety and good sense interpenetrate each other. Kindly natured and generous, Molière, a great observer, who looked through the deeds of men, was often taciturn—le contemplateur of Boileau—and seemingly self-absorbed. Like many persons of artistic temperament, he loved splendour of life; but he was liberal in his largess to those who claimed his help. He brought comedy to nature, and made it a study of human life. His warfare was against all that is unreal and unnatural. He preached the worth of human happiness, good sense, moderation, humorous tolerance. ”

“ Can any virtue surpass the old Roman virtue? We believe in God, although we know little about His nature or His operations; and why should we disbelieve in Christianity, which happens to be part of the system of things under which we are born? But why, also, should we pay such a compliment to opinions different from our own as to burn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva to the Pope of Rome? Let each of us ask himself, "Que sais-je?"—"What do I really know?" and the answer will serve to temper our zeal. ”

“ The passion for the marvellous is everywhere present: St. Maurice, St. George, and a shining company, mounted on white steeds, will of a sudden bear down the hordes of the infidel; an angel stands glorious behind the throne of Charlemagne; or in narrative of Celtic origin angels may be mingled with fays. God, the great suzerain, to whom even kings owe homage, rules over all; Jesus and Mary are watchful of the soldiers of the cross; Paradise receives the souls of the faithful. As for earth, there is no land so gay or so dear as la douce France. ”

“ JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824) , the friend of Fontanes and of Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lacked the strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. He read everything; he published nothing; but the Pensées, which were collected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his letters reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmed by literary grace, a writer tormented by the passion to put a volume in a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. ”

“ While he flings out his scorn and indignation against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, or cries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his miserable past, he yet is a passionate lover of life; and shadowing beauty and youth and love and life, he is constantly aware of the imminent and inexorable tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are few and simple—ideas common to all men; but they take a special colour from his own feelings and experiences, and he renders them with a poignancy which is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate imaginative sincerity. ”

“ Arranging facts and dates so that he might superbly figure in the drama designed for future generations, he falsifies the literal truth of things; but he lays bare the inner truth of politics, of life, of character, with incomparable mastery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in early years with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde are expounded in pages of profound sagacity. His narrative has all the impetuosity, all the warmth and hues of life, all the tumult and rumour of action; he paints, but in painting he explains; he touches the hidden springs of passion ”

“ Its value as an argumentative defence of Christianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religion to art, it contained or implied a new system of æsthetics, it was a glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism, it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to Chénier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, while imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let us seek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. ”

“ Without his impetuosity, his violence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more often inspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth of style, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the large style of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkle and gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensity of his imagination. ”

“ When the time for study comes, that study should be simple and sound—no Babel of words, but a wholesome knowledge of things; he may have learnt little, but he will know that little aright; a sunrise will be his first lesson in cosmography; he may watch the workman in his workshop; he may practise the carpenter's trade; he may read Robinson Crusoe, and learn the lesson of self-help. Let him ask at every moment, "What is the good of this?" Unpuzzled by questions of morals, metaphysics, history, he will have grown up laborious, temperate, patient, firm, courageous. ”

“ It is an idyll of the tropics, written with the moral purpose of contrasting the beneficent influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils of civilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up side by side in radiant innocence and purest companionship; then passion makes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and the faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardours of first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close. ”

“ At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. In Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, Jacques, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. These novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man, the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the soul—superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in descriptive power. ”

“ Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet; they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconstitution of history their value is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the hands of Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of Les Trois Mousquetaires and its high-spirited fellows. There were times when no company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. ”

“ Criticism with Nisard is not a natural history of minds, nor a study of historical developments, so much as the judgment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts each book on which he pronounces judgment with that ideal of its species which he has formed in his own mind: he compares it with the ideal of the genius of France, which attains its highest ends rather through discipline than through freedom; he compares it with the ideal of the French language; finally, he compares it with the ideal of humanity as seen in the best literature of the world. ”

“ Morals, which have their foundation in the human understanding, remain, though all theologies may be in doubt. If the idea of Providence be a superstition, why should not man guide his life by good sense and moderation? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs with the battering-ram: he quietly removed a stone here and a stone there from the foundations. If he is aggressive, it is by means of a tranquil irony. The errors of human-kind are full of curious interest; the disputes of theologians are both curious and amusing; the moral licences of men and women are singular and often diverting. ”

“ To commence philosophising we should despise the philosophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre devotes a special study, is the most dangerous; Locke is the most contemptible. The eighteenth century spoke of nature; Maistre speaks of God, the Grand Monarch who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority; the great Justiciary avenges Himself on the whole offending race of men; there is no government without an executioner. But God is pitiful, and allows us the refuge of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no society ”

“ In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast force of will operated amid inferior faculties. His character was less eminent than his genius. If it is vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for one's self and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, never was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied than his. He was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, and did not perceive when the sublime became the ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him, charitable to universal humanity, he was capable of passionate vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem ”

“ While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the conclusions of the intellect, when they pass beyond a narrow bound, he pays a homage to the force of will; his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarch is ardent. An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through his imagination; but for us and for himself, who are no heroes, the appropriate form of Stoical virtue is moderation within our sphere, and a wise indifference, or at most a disinterested curiosity, in matters which lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life, such as it is; let us resign ourselves to death ”

“ The object of religious reverence is not God, but the "Great Being"—Humanity, the society of the noble living and the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity, of all those who contribute to the better life of man. To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our gratitude, we render our homage, we direct our aspirations; for Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination of egoistic desire. Women—the mother, the wife, the daughter—purifying through affection the energies of man, act, under the Great Being, as angelic guardians, accomplishing a moral providence. ”

“ Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, esprit, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse—these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la vérité," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. ”

“ Chateaubriand was himself an extraordinary literary artist. The style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, a brilliant and incessant converser; that of the other is at its best a miracle of studied invention, a harmony of colour and of sound. The genius of the one was quickened in brilliant social gatherings; a Parisian salon was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other was nursed in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on the wild and melancholy moors. ”

“ From the birth of Eve to the trumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and events unrolls before us; gracious episodes relieve the gloom; beauty and sublimity go hand in hand; in the shadow the great criminals are pursued by the great avengers. The spirit of Les Châtiments is conveyed into a view of universal history; if kings are tyrants and priests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. ”

“ They include some of the most beautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages. Appearing first about the opening of the twelfth century, later in date than the early chansons de geste, and contemporary with the courtly lyric poetry of love, they exhibit the chivalric spirit in a refined and graceful aspect; their marvels are not gross wonders, but often surprises of beauty; they are bright in colour, and varied in the play of life; the passions which they interpret, and especially the passion of love, are felt with an exquisite delicacy and a knowledge of the workings of the heart. ”

“ Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble ideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; and laughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of this abounding life. After the mediæval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man. ”

“ He would enjoy the world to the full, and yet at the same time there is something of stoicism in his philosophy of life; while gaily accepting the good things of the earth, he would hold himself detached from the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous sanity. Let us return—such is his teaching—to nature, honouring the body, but giving higher honour to the intellect and to the moral feeling; let us take life seriously, and therefore gaily; let us face death cheerfully, knowing that we do not wholly die ”

“ The intellect of Pascal, so powerful in its grasp of scientific truth, could find by its own researches no certitude in the sphere of philosophy and religion. He had been deeply influenced by the sceptical mind of Montaigne. He found within him a passionate craving for certitude; man is so constituted that he can never be at rest until he rests in knowledge of the truth; but man, as he now exists, is incapable of ascertaining truth; he is weak and miserable, and yet the very consciousness of his misery is evidence of his greatness; "Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the dogmatist;" ”

“ In the Art Poétique Boileau is constructive; he exhibits the true doctrine of literature, as he conceived it. Granted genius, fire, imagination—the gifts of heaven—what should be the self-imposed discipline of a poet? Above all, the cultivation of that power which distinguishes false from true, and aids every other faculty—the reason. "Nothing," declares Boileau, "is beautiful save what is true;" nature is the model, the aim and end of art; reason and good sense discern reality; they test the fidelity of the artistic imitation of nature ”

“ The rose is plucked by the lover in the end; but lover and rose are almost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting forth his views of life, and in forming an encyclopædia of the knowledge of his time. Reason discourses on the dangers of passion, commends friendship or universal philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against the instability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets charity high above justice; if love be commendable, it is as the device of nature for the continuation of the species. The way to win woman and to keep her loyalty is now the unhappy way of squandered largess ”

“ A group of poems, sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which beauty and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling faith in humanity, in nature, and in God. The concluding pieces are in a greater manner. The visionary Hugo lives and moves amid a drama of darkness and of light; gloom is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom; and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in song.
But a further development lay before him. The great lyric poet was to carry all his lyric passion into an epic presentation, in detached scenes, of the life of humanity. ”