The Masters of Modern French Criticism

Front Cover
Houghton 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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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 168 - As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour.
Page 345 - Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent.
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 349 - He looked at me with a benignant indulgence ; but took occasion to give me wise and salutary caution. " Do not, Sir, accustom yourself to trust to impressions. There is a middle state of mind between conviction and hypocrisy, of which many are unconscious.
Page 345 - If the special modes of sensibility that impressionism exhibits go back to Rousseau, its philosophical theory may best be considered as a reappearance in modern thought of the ancient maxim that man is the measure of all things. This celebrated dictum became current at a decisive moment in Greek life and would indeed seem to sum up almost necessarily the point of view of any age that has cast off traditional standards. The all-important question is whether one interprets the maxim in the spirit of...
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.

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