THE ADVENTURES OF THE SOUL

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?...