As I understand criticism it is, like philosophy and history, a kind
of novel for the use of discreet and curious minds. And every novel,
rightly understood, is an autobiography. The good critic is he who
relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
There is no such thing as objective criticism any more than there is
objective art, and all who flatter themselves that they put aught but
themselves into their work are dupes of the most fallacious illusion.
The truth is that one never gets out of oneself. That is one of our
greatest miseries. What would we not give to see, if but for a minute,
the sky and the earth with the many-faceted eye of a fly, or to
understand nature with the rude and simple brain of an ape? But just
that is forbidden us. We cannot, like Tiresias, be men and remember
having been women. We are locked into our persons as into a lasting
prison. The best we can do, it seems to me, is gracefully to recognize
this terrible situation and to admit that we speak of ourselves every
time that we have not the strength to be silent.
To be quite frank, the critic ought to say:
"Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of
Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe subjects that offer me a
beautiful opportunity."
I had the honor of knowing M. Cuvillier-Fleury, who was a very
earnest old critic. One day when I had come to see him in his little
house in the Avenue Raphael, he showed me the modest library of which he
was proud.
"Sir," he said to me, "oratory, pure literature, philosophy, history,
all the kinds are represented here, without counting criticism which
embraces them all. Yes, the critic is by turn orator, philosopher,
historian."
M. Cuvillier-Fleury was right. The critic is all that or, at least,
he ought to be. He has occasion to show the rarest, most diverse, most
varied faculties of the intellect. And when he is a Sainte-Beuve, a
Taine, a Jules Lemaître, a Ferdinand Brunetière, he does not fail to do
so. Remaining definitely within himself he creates the intellectual
history of man. Criticism is the youngest of all the literary forms: it
will perhaps end by absorbing all the others. It is admirably suited to a
very civilized society with rich memories and long traditions. It is
particularly appropriate to a curious, learned and polite humanity. For
its prosperity it demands more culture than any of the other literary
forms. Its creators were Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, Bayle, Montesquieu.
It proceeds simultaneously from philosophy and history. It has required,
for its development, an epoch of absolute intellectual liberty. It has
replaced theology and, if one were to seek the universal doctor, the
Saint Thomas Aquinas of the nineteenth century, of whom would one be
forced to think but of Sainte-Beuve?...
