INTRODUCTION XI

M. Boutmy adds another analogy from the plastic art, which well brings out the distinctive methods of the two critics. Scherer is the sculptor who has formed in his mind a clear conception of what he intends to produce before he touches his block of marble, and then proceeds with bold strokes of the chisel to carry out his conception. Sainte-Beuve's criticism is in the main impersonal. He identifies himself for the time being with the author or personage he is portraying, and like Browning in his Dramatis Personae, but with far more detachment and objectivity than Browning, extracts a self-confession, and makes his sitter give an account of himself. As Vinet has it, Sainte-Beuve puts his characters into the confessional, Scherer puts his into the witness-box.

But the différence between the two men goes deeper than this. Sainte-Beuve, as is set forth at length in one of the selected essays, is the eclectic, ' holding no form of creed ' (or rather holding ail by turns), ' but contemplating ail,' the connoisseur who has an eye for a picture, collects from ail schools of painting, and can appraise the exact value of each. Scherer is the moralist and philosopher. He, too, has passed through his phases of faith, but he has never lost his hold of the eternal verities, the immutable laws of right and wrong, and in ail his criticisms, tolérant and sympathetic as he is, he himself most appréciâtes, and seeks to make his readers appreciate, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. His character and his writings were of a pièce. From the cradle to the grave he bore 1 the white flower of a blameless life '. That cannot be said of Sainte-Beuve.

Xli ÉTUDES FRANÇAISES ET ANGLAISES

On the other hand, it must not be concealed that Scherer had les défauts de ses qualités. His early writings bore traces of his theological training and of his long résidence in Germany. There is a certain stiffness of style and rigidity of doctrine from which he never entirely shook himself free. What saved him from the charge of pedantry and didacticism was his open-mindedness, his clearness of vision, and his abhorrence of anything that savoured of a set System and preconceived ideas. As the worst that can be said of him, we may quote the disparaging judgement of Professor Saintsbury, who dévotes several pages of his Short History of French Literature to Sainte-Beuve and dismisses Scherer in as many lines. After a few perfunctory compliments he continues : ' His judgement, however, is much limited by préjudice, and some of his studies, such as those on Baudelaire and Diderot, show that he is an untrustworthy judge of what is not commonplace.' Of Scherer's crushing rejoinder we will only quote the sentence concerning Baudelaire. ' Les Fleurs du mal ont leurs admirateurs de l'autre côté de la Manche, et, comme pour les ouvrages de M. Zola, précisément à cause des odeurs qui s'en exhalent. La jeune Angleterre est sujette à prendre les monstruosités pour du talent et la dépravation pour de la force.' As arbiter between thèse somewhat heated antagonists we may cite the impartial judgement of M. Faguet, who sees both sides of the shield. Scherer, he writes, is a philosopher who lived in an atmosphère of ideas and was incapable of appreciating writers devoid of ideas — mère literary artists or slavish depictors of reality, such as were

INTRODUCTION Xlll

Gautier, Zola, Maupassant, and even Victor Hugo, to whose genius he paid, as it were, an enforced homage.

Scherer himself may be allowed to hâve the last word. In concluding his review of Professor Saintsbury's History, he contrasts the methods they respectively pursue, and sets forth what, as he conceives it, is the true historical method.

' Quand donc apprendra-t-on à laisser là les jugements purement subjectifs, l'expression puérile des préférences et des aversions, l'opposition d'un genre à un autre, d'une époque à une autre époque, d'un peuple à un autre peuple ? Quand s'appliquera-t-on à nous montrer, dans les destinées d'une littérature, l'évolution d'une société, à présenter les faits dans leur enchaînement et sous leurs lois, à en rechercher la raison d'être dans l'ensemble d'un développement? C'est merveille comme change tout l'aspect des choses, et quelle liberté acquiert l'esprit du critique, dès qu'il se place à ce point de vue.'

This is the method that Scherer pursued with unflagging industry and unswerving rectitude through a long life devoted to the search for truth — ' to search the man and his milieu, try to understand things rather than to class them, to explain rather than to judge,' and he has left us a gallery of portraits, French, English, and German, sober indeed in colouring, but traced by a master's hand, which hâve stood the test of time and outlived the more popular work of his brilliant contemporaries.

In conclusion, we will attempt to sum up Scherer's final attitude in respect to the ultimate problems of life and conduct after he had shaken off the trammels

of English Evangelicanism and German theology and metaphysics.

In the Introduction to Amiel's Journal Intime there is a notevvorthy passage, too long to be quoted entire, in which he expounds his own philosophy of life. It is, as will be seen, a négative philosophy, an abandonnant of metaphysics. It is, in a word, pragmatism, as H. G. Wells defines the word — ' the abandonment of infinité assumptions, the extension of the expérimental spirit to ail human interests.'

The existence of evil is the riddle of riddles that has exercised ail thinkers since men began to think. The world is good in spite of appearances, the work of a beneficent Creator — that is the optimist solution. Man has fallen from his first estate, but that is the fault of the créature, not of the Creator, and he will be restored to his original perfection — that is Christian optimism. Pessimism is not, as is commonly thought, the enemy, but the twin brother of optimism. They agrée in recognizing an imperfect universe and a suffering humanity. The only différence is that according to the optimist the idéal good is only eclipsed and will triumph in the end ; according to the pessimist, ' elle n'est pas née viable et n'a jamais eu de quoi faire son chemin dans ce monde. L'optimisme est un idéalisme de parti pris, et le pessimisme un idéalisme retourné, l'envers de la foi au bien.' Regarded thus, it is a question of individual tempéraments, and one that can never be determined by argument. Moreover, no one is a consistent optimist or pessimist. His opinion varies with his âge, his health, his fortune. Scherer, in fact, endorses the immortal joke of Punch : ' Is life