The Masters of Modern French CriticismHoughton Mifflin, 1912 - 427 pages This volume does not criticize criticism, but criticizes critics. The critics examined are among the most vital and significant personalities of their time. To study Sainte-Beuve and the other leading French critics is to get very close to the intellectual center of the century. Readers my thus follow the main movement of this thought through this period, and build up the necessary background for understanding the ideas of the present day, whether they continue this earlier thought or react from it. The so-called anti-intellectualist movement can only be understood with reference to such a background; it is a reaction from the dogmatic naturalism that reached its height in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the end, the judgment of the keen-sighted few in the present will be ratified by the verdict of posterity. |
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æsthetic Avenir Balzac become Bergson Beuve Boileau Brunetière Brunetière's Causeries Chateaubriand Christian classic Collège de France contemporaine criticism critique d'histoire Dialogues phil Discours doctrine Emerson epicurean especially Essais Etudes everything example fact feel formulæ France French Génie du Christianisme genius German Goethe Hugo human nature humanistic Ibid ideal ideas illusion imagination individual instinct intellectual intuition Joubert judgment lack Lemaître less literary literature litt littéraires living livre logic Lundis Madame de Staël master faculty Mélanges ment merely modern Molière Montaigne moral naturalistic nineteenth century Nisard Nouveaux Pascal passion Pensées perhaps philosophy phrase Plato poésie poetry point of view Port-Royal Portraits reality religion religious Renan romantic romanticism romanticists Rousseau Rousseauistic Sainte Sainte-Beuve says Scherer scientific sense Sorbonne soul Souvenirs spirit standards sympathy Taine Taine's taste temper things thought tion tradition true truth virtue vols Voltaire word writers XIXe siècle
Popular passages
Page 168 - And time and place are lost: where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchy, amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand. For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce Strive here for mastery...
Page 247 - Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth. or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.
Page 388 - I am rather asking what must be the face-to-face antagonist, by which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries?
Page 169 - The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Page 391 - There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned,...
Page 264 - OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face ; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Page 356 - The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.
Page 391 - ... and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone with him...
Page 157 - For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.
Page ix - Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.